NEW ARRIVALS

Bahraini-British performer, Yazz Ahmed, is transforming what jazz means in 2017. This trumpet and flugelhorn-playing artist has worked with Radiohead and These New Puritans, experiments with electronic effects, and combines sounds from her shared heritage to author a new narrative for the genre. Part of the new wave of artists credited with stirring up the sound, including Kamasi Washington, Yussef Kamaal, Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming, Yazz Ahmed is thrilled by the possibilities of making something new. “I feel like I’m a part of modernising jazz and connecting it with audiences today,” Yazz says. “It’s exciting.”

Her new album ‘La Saboteuse’ is a deep exploration of both her British and Bahraini roots. Ably assisted by musicians including Lewis Wright on vibraphone, MOBO-winning new jazz kingpin Shabaka Hutchings on bass clarinet and Naadia Sherriff on Fender Rhodes keyboard, it’s composed of undulating rhythms, Middle Eastern melody and Yazz’s sonorous trumpet lines. The record sounds like the passage of a desert caravan, bathed in moonlight. The theme of ‘La Saboteuse’ is the sense of self-doubt that Yazz feels when she is creating, personified in a female saboteur, an anti-muse that spurs her into action. “Giving ‘her’ a name has really helped me to identify those negative voices we all get,” she says. “I know what it is and I know how to combat it.”

‘La Saboteuse’ will be released in four chapters incrementally, unravelling the story, before the full version is available. Each chapter has its own cover, with beautiful illustrations by Bristol artist Sophie Bass. “I feel really touched, nobody’s created art from my music before, it’s really special,” Yazz says.

Yazz spent her early childhood in Bahrain, her paternal homeland, before moving to London with her English mother at the age of nine. There, she became fascinated by her grandfather’s trumpet playing, and vowed to learn the instrument herself. “My grandfather, my mum’s dad, was a trumpet player, and I was quite taken by him, inspired. I wanted to learn the trumpet at school.” Jazz became her chosen form of expression, because “I loved the spirit of the music, the freedom. There’s a lot of joy, mystery. I connected with it”. Yazz’s sound is unique. Her take on jazz weaves in Arabic melodies to evocative, cinematic effect. “I love the sounds of Arabic music. The traditional folk singing is so heartfelt, elemental and passionate. I absorbed it as a child, but only in the past few years has it come to the surface in my playing and writing. I want to embrace my culture and my British jazz heritage, the music my grandfather played to me.”

Jazz has traditionally been a male-dominated sphere, though Yazz is challenging that notion. To start with she found it a hindrance, but has been empowered by a new wave of women musicians. “There are more female jazz musicians and attitudes are changing,” she says. “People see that women can play just as well as the men. But there are still areas that haven’t caught up with the rest of society. It’s getting better, but we can do more.”

Future-facing and fascinating, Yazz Ahmed is part of a glimmering new constellation in the jazz firmament. And her next project is destined to take her further into the stars. “I’m planning to write a piece inspired by the ever-changing structures of the universe,” she concludes.

“This album is a celebration of female courage, determination and creativity. In 2015, the Tomorrow’s Warriors commissioned me to write an extended work, to be performed by members of their Nu Civilisation Orchestra, for a concert at the Women of the World Festival, in London’s Southbank Centre, on International Women’s Day.

Whilst gathering ideas for my composition, I came across the character of Polyhymnia, the ancient Greek Muse of music, poetry and dance: a Goddess for the arts. Perhaps inspired by her, I conceived the form of a suite of movements, each dedicated to women of outstanding qualities, role models, with whom I felt a strong connection. Whereas La Saboteuse, the embodiment of my inner-destroyer and the catalyst for the creation of my last album, could be viewed as my anti-muse, maybe Polyhymnia herself became my Muse, inspiring an intense period of creativity, which resulted in the six pieces on this album.

Since its conception, composed and arranged over the six weeks leading up to the first rehearsal for the premiere, the music has evolved and expanded. During the recording process I began incorporating new elements and drawing on a wider pool of artists, including members of my own Hafla band, alongside some of my favourite musicians working on the London scene.

By sharing my musical response to the stories and achievements of these exceptional women, and celebrating the creativity and talents of my co-contributors, I hope to inspire others, in the words of Malala, “to be brave, to embrace the strength within themselves and realise their full potential” - Yazz Ahmed

Finding My Way Home is the debut release from British-Bahraini trumpet player, Yazz Ahmed.

The album is a collection of original compositions and improvisations, exploring the sounds and rhythms of Yasmeen’s Arabic heritage, revisiting memories from her early childhood in Bahrain. These are contrasted with pieces reflecting the classic British jazz from the 1950s and 60s, which was the soundtrack to her teenage years and was her gateway into improvised music.

Yazz’s Grandfather, Terry Brown, was a jazz trumpeter who played alongside Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and as a member of the original John Dankworth Seven. He went on to become a successful record producer for Pye and Philips Records. Yazz picked up the trumpet inspired by the music and the stories that Terry shared with her.

Finding My Way Home also features the sublime talents of bass guitar virtuoso, Janek Gwizdala. Now widely regarded as one of the finest players in the world, Janek was actually a nineteen-year-old beginner on the trumpet when he and Yazz first met in the brass ensemble at the Merton Music Foundation. After a ten-year gap, their friendship was renewed, thanks to the power of Facebook. Noticing he would be visiting London during November 2008, Yazz asked Janek if he would be interested in recording a session of duets. Janek was delighted to accept, even though they had last played together when Yazz was just fourteen years old.

These intimate tracks, specially arranged for flugelhorn and bass guitar, recorded at the Cowshed in London, form the main body of the album. In addition to Yazz’s Affirmation, Stan Sulzmann’s Birthdays, Birthdays and the Miles Davis classic So What, the pair also recorded four spontaneous compositions, utilizing Arabic scales. These evocative and mysterious pieces, Embarkation, Al Muharraq, Birth of the Fool and Finding My Way Home, bind the album together but also become the vehicles for a musical journey of self-discovery.

Whist at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Yazz began writing for her first quintet. Two of her original compositions for this band, the poignant ballad, Conciliation and the Joe Henderson inspired Flip Flop, are performed here by Alam Nathoo tenor sax, John Bailey piano, Jay Darwish double bass and George Hart on drums.

Yazz also met Shabaka Hutchings while at the Guildhall. His bass clarinet playing is featured on Wah-Wah Sowahwah, the first of Yazz’s Arabic flavoured compositions, inspired by the session with Janek. The other musicians on this track are Simon Hale, playing Fender Rhodes, cellist, Chris Fish, Corrina Silvester - an expert in North African and Arabic hand drumming - and bass guitarist, Laurence Cottle.

The album closes with Finding My Way Home, which draws elements from the various recordings together to frame the most expansive of the improvised duets. The arc of this title track is a miniature version of the whole album. From the opening notes of the lone trumpet, crying out in the wilderness, it conjures images of a vast desert landscape and takes the listener on a sensuous journey. The caravan finally comes to rest at an oasis of cool calmness with Noel Langley’s orchestration, for the large ensemble, of Janek’s improvised coda, taken from the very first recording day.

Working on Finding My Way Home has inspired Yazz to form two new ensembles to reflect these recordings and the new compositions that have blossomed from this album. Ahmed’s new quintet had the pleasure of making their debut performance when opening the 2010 Brit Jazz Fest at Ronnie Scotts Jazz Club, London.

Subsequently the band received an array of positive reviews with Jazzwise Magazine highlighting Yazz’s flugelhorn playing and tipping her as a star of the future. Gary Crosby OBE includes Finding My Way Home in his top five releases of 2011. 

Yazz Ahmed, hailed as one of the most influential trumpet players of her generation. An Ivor Novello award winning composer who makes sweeping epics that are rich with storytelling, depicting evocative ancient worlds and mythological muses. With her fourth studio album, A Paradise in the Hold, the British-Bahrani musician dives even deeper into her dual heritage and has come up with a treasure trove that draws on traditional music and stories from her childhood home. Ahmed writes for the voice for the first time, with lyrics inspired by Bahraini wedding poems and the yearning songs of the pearl divers. Deeply textural, expansive and full of potent performances, the album charts the heroic voyages of the jewel-hunters of yore, who sailed home through rough seas with precious cargo, and Ahmed’s own voyage of self-discovery over the past decade.

“A thread in my work has been searching for, establishing and, now, finally embracing and celebrating my cultural identity,” she says. Whereas she explored Arabian music more generally with her earlier material, this release is more explicitly linked to her homeland. “If my first album, 2011’s Finding My Way Home, represents the first steps on this path then with A Paradise In The Hold, I’ve arrived at a deeper understanding of how my British and Bahraini heritage can co-exist, in personal as well as musical terms.”

Ahmed began A Paradise in the Hold’s journey back in 2014, on a research trip in Bahrain, during her Jazzlines Fellowship. She’d trawl local bookshops looking for poems and lyrical inspiration. Many came from wedding songs, which were “a lot about beauty and connecting beauty with nature,” she says. Deepening her connection to the tradition, her grandfather even sang her some songs from his own wedding day. At the same time, she became fascinated by the celebratory music of women’s drumming circles and how they contrasted the work songs of the pearl divers. The latter dangerous pursuit has since ceased, though the divers’ sorrowful music – sung and clapped in a polyrhythmic style known as fijiri – lives on.

“They were songs that encouraged the fishermen to stay in good spirits, or songs about missing your loved ones,” says Ahmed. Some of the former pearl divers have formed choirs that tour around the Gulf and she caught a performance by the Pearl Divers of Muharraq, the name of her former hometown. “It gave me an opportunity to connect on a deeper level with the music that I grew up with as a child, but didn’t really embrace at the time.”

Ahmed grew up in Bahrain until the age of nine and lived there during the Gulf War in the early 90s. While she has happy memories of her childhood, many were overshadowed by conflict, like “having a gas mask and not being able to go to school. We went to school in people’s garages,” she says. “I remember the sirens going off when there was a bomb threat, and closing the curtains, turning off all the lights, and covering the plughole in the bathtub so no poisonous gases could get in.”

She moved to London with her mother and sisters in 1992 but says, “I felt like I didn’t quite belong and I didn’t know why that was. For a long time, I would lie about my heritage because of how Arab and Muslim people were represented in American films and British dramas. When I was at school, I never said that I was half Bahraini.” Music, however, helped to strengthen her sense of identity. She saw links between the jazz she studied at university and Arabian classical music, and started to learn Arabic. “I started to rediscover my mixed heritage,” she adds. “And that’s when I started to remember all this music that I grew up hearing but never fully engaged with.”

The fruits of Ahmed’s 2014 research trip became a 90-minute suite, Alhaan Al Siduri, which she performed the following year in both the UK and Bahrain. It’s named for the character Siduri from folk tale the Epic of Gilgamesh: “a wise woman who lives on an island of absolute beauty, which some scholars have suggested may be Bahrain,” Ahmed explains.

She has reworked the suite’s main theme into album opener ‘She Stands On The Shore’, which sets the tone for an inky odyssey through mermaids, goddesses, sirens and, on ‘Dancing Barefoot’, a runaway bride; and love, loss, new beginnings and a newfound freedom.

Ahmed has always been drawn to stories of women in mythology – her last album, 2019’s Polyhymnia, was based on the Greek goddess of poetry and dance – but this time she has wider intentions. “I want to change the narrative about Arab women,” says Ahmed. “A lot of people think that Arab women are just oppressed. But in Bahrain there are plenty of creative women trying to do something different in the world.” Ahmed notes how Arabic music has been stereotypically used in western entertainment and she wanted to challenge that perception. “We hear it a lot in movies to represent the desert, or poor villagers,” she says, “but you rarely see it representing strong women, for example.”

Alhaan Al Siduri formed the basis of Ahmed’s album but it has evolved ambitiously over the following decade, during performances both solo and with orchestras. She expanded tracks with intricate sound design and added multiple trumpet parts. “I learned to think of them as antiphonal, so you can hear them from different angles,” she says. “And so it feels like you’re surrounded by this very majestic instrument.” The album’s texture, meanwhile, also stems from the field recordings she used to form loops and patterns, a technique Ahmed expanded upon with the track she made for US TV network Adult Swim’s jazz compilation New Jazz Century. On A Paradise in the Hold, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ is particularly exquisite, where vibraphonist Ralph Wyld played milk bottle tops and used cello bows made from coat hangers, “to conjure the feeling of a mind spiralling into a dream,” says Ahmed. Equally visceral, on ‘To The Lonely Sea’ collaborator Jason Singh created a “vocal sculpture” to echo the wind and waves.

Notably, Ahmed hadn’t written for the voice until now. For A Paradise In The Hold, she penned lyrics in English, which she then translated to Arabic, or, on ‘Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You’, adapted the words from a pearl divers’ standard. She worked with a range of impressive singers to bring her vision to life: Brigitte Beraha, Natacha Atlas, Randolph Matthews and Alba Nacinovich. The voice of her father, meanwhile, can be heard on standout track ‘Into The Night’, which lands you in the centre of a percussive hubbub and which Ahmed intended as a celebration of female independence. “He was trying to conduct the recording session in the family house,” she says of her dad. “Everyone was gathered in the sitting room and I recorded some of the ululations and clapping that you can hear in the track. I’m so glad I got to have my family on the album.”

The collaborators on the album in particular, percussionist Corrina Silvester and the greatly missed giant of the jazz world and Yazz’s dear friend, drummer, Martin France, helped Ahmed to strengthen the connection between the two worlds; A Paradise In The Hold is a bold fusion that reveals its riches more with each rewarding listen. “It’s another step in my evolution of making music,” says Ahmed. “There’s so much beauty in Bahraini music. I hope this album gives people a flavour of how vibrant its culture is.” 

Sick session of heavyweight soundsystem killers x dreampop dub doozies mixed up by Marcus Burrowes of Rockers NYC for Aussie downbeat stalwarts Good Morning Tapes, drawing lines and parallels from shoegaze outliers to vintage roots and digital fancies over an hour and 11 mins of the gloriously sunny but heavy stuff.

A product of NYC’s deeply rooted links with Jamaica, Marcus Burrowes runs clothing and lifestyle brand RockersNYC, whose aesthetics clearly reference classic soundsystem futures, and beyond. His entry to GMT’s immaculate catalogue is an authentically skooled and perfectly blended session of divine digs that join dots from Maximum Joy and A.R. Kane-type dub-gaze delights and roots reggae, to the sweetest lovers delicacies, Brenda Rey-esque reveries and digi-dubbed steppers pressure. 

Usually heard alongside Queen Majesty on their Lot Radio show of the same name, burrowes here toggles the gauge to keep bodies in motion with a judicious hand on the effects and controls, often deploying 45 killers at a chopped & screwed pace, on a rinse and repeat special request for summer 2025 and beyond.

Paris-born electronic music pioneer and 1970s GRM alumni Ariel Kalma joins with multinational New York trio Asa Tone (Kaazi, Melati ESP, Tristan Arp) for a series of intergenerational, electro-acoustic studio conversations, exploring elasticity within rhythm and winds… or as one early listener observed “space and time.”

Following a chance encounter at Ariel’s studio in the Australian rainforest during the pandemic, Melati & Kaazi began recording long live takes with Kalma, weaving in bioluminescent synth improvisations from Tristan Arp remotely. Revisited a few years later between the members of Asa Tone’s respective homes in New York & Indonesia, “○” is the document of a significant moment in the lives of all the album’s players; an ode to memory and connection in an era of crisis, illuminated via flickering fragments of steel flute, kantilan, modular synthesizer, xaphoon, tenor sax, EWI, field recordings of the surrounding rainforest, and the human voice.

Recorded, written and produced by Asa Tone & Ariel Kalma.
Ariel Kalma: Western Concert Flute, Xaphoon, Tenor Saxophone, Voice
Melati ESP: EWI, Kantilan, Voice
Kaazi: Hydrasynth, Opsix, Percussion
Tristan Arp: Modular Synthesizer, Moog Sub37, Percussion
Additional percussion on *3 by Miles Myjavec

Mixed by Tristan Arp, Kaazi and Ariel Kalma.
Mastered by Jose Arentes at GRAMA, Porto.
Art Direction & Layout : Melati ESP, Kaazi, Biscuit.
 

Nazar’s second album, Demilitarize follows his remarkable 2020 debut Guerrilla, which was released just as Covid started to lock down the world. That first album reprocessed kuduro music from Angola with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, re-telling Nazar's personal story of the civil war that exiled his family in Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home.

After Guerrilla, and in the early throes of a new and important romance, Nazar was hit by Covid and with a weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he'd incubated while living in Angola, took over his body and left him seriously ill for a year. Reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love are the two things that motivated this album, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out.

Like his debut, this is a deep sound world, but in contrast to its grit and realness, Demilitarize is genuinely dreamy. The arc of the album describes shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of Demilitarize is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response.

Nazar says - 'With the album being introspective, I didn't seek to capture sounds from real places to enhance it’s universe like on Guerilla. I wanted to make it almost metaphysical like creating sci-fi, with classic cyberpunk anime ‘Ghost In The Shell’ being a core inspiration.' The rhythms of kuduro are still here, but move around his voice like fish around a swimmer. The precise sound design on Demilitarize illuminates from different angles. Chords spiral, ripple and shoot through the beats giving tracks the loosest of settings. Songs disassemble and vocals float off-centre.

Demilitarize insists you zoom in, listen closely, tune into Nazar's rare vibration. Let it overwhelm you, while paying close attention. 

Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet & electronics) and Lester St. Louis (cello & electronics) work together as HxH (H by H). Their skills have seen them move smoothly across various situations, constantly carving out new terrain and working in new configurations of musicians at a rapid pace. While worth reading, their biographies capture only a part of their complex rhizome.

HxH started about three years ago. The project is a direct response to all their activity with others and more importantly all their future leaning sonic desires. Their debut album STARK PHENOMENA is both their first studio recording and their first physical release. The album is appropriately set to be released by KMRU on his growing label OFNOT. It’s an ideal introduction to their sound world and their approach.

HxH describe their music as “electroacoustic,” but until recently the presence of Black musicians in this field has been greatly overlooked and largely ignored, making this phrase only partially appropriate. What HxH do really is to always be unpredictable. Every gig is a new soundscape. Sometimes you might hear echoes of Autechre or Robert Hood but then the sound-field will open up into a new terrain all their own. Chris and Lester bring together techniques from across the sound spectrum of electronic music and also draw on their deep backgrounds in Jazz, Improvisation, Classical and Noise scenes to create a sound that is true to them. After all, these two have worked with the likes of Bennie Maupin and the music of Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Their rhizome is deep.

One of the ways that their unique approach manifests is in their merging of both acoustic instruments and electronic instruments in real time. This is something few have managed to do – but their spontaneous leanings work in both complex and accessible ways because of their deep understanding of landscape crafting. You can hear this clearly on the track “Pyrex Vision.” Their approach makes it tempting to compare their music to Sun Ra jamming with Laurel Halo – a comparison that would be only partly accurate.

Chris and Lester note that the sounds on STARK PHENOMENA are “imbued with such hopeful, gracious care; one that is far flung from obsessive carefulness or fuck the world carelessness, but more a caring embrace without the fuzziness of nostalgia.”

They note that when they began working together, they would “always come back to speaking on our concepts of an architecture of the expanse,” noting that their live sets often take on the joyfully noisy task of “dreaming big.” For HxH it was essential that STARK PHENOMENA have a quality that is “almost sculptural.” They consider the album “an object to be viewed from all sides.” This kind of thinking has resulted in them directly engaging with numerous sculptors and artists including Torkwase Dyson. Shape wise HxH’s sound fields work in a parallel to Dyson’s black architectural works.

They also note that the opening cut “BEACH” (the opening and longest track from the album) was “written weeks after our first gig in a studio session donated to us by our dear friend jaimie branch.” And that Pyrex Vision “was continually being edited months after sending our ‘final mixes’ to KMRU.” Their sound sources and samples come from studio sessions, live gigs, durational installations, 3am improvised downloads and more.

KMRU notes: "I think there is an in-between layer on this record. I was first caught by the Pyrex Vision track which organically flows between monologue, subtle field recording, and instrumentation. It's such a beautiful track, evoking deep emotion through simplicity. STARK PHENOMENA effortlessly glides in between imaginative mosaics of sounds—free yet complex— unlocking memories within its layers "

Another foggy day in Yorkshire. A steel grey sky. Raindrops tracing one another down the windowpane. Kirk Barley sits in his studio and assembles compositions from scraps of found sound and live instrumentation. Melodies swell, withdraw and repeat like waves. Time slows. Accelerates. Slows again. The light bends, tweaked at the edges. Twisted by rhythms that never quite resolve.

Written, recorded and produced by Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes.

And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognisable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley’s skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilising a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks ‘Vita’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Descendent’, these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

Channeling the Euro-pop sensibilities of Crepuscule and the ethereal goth of 4AD, Vazz arrived in Glasgow just as the Sound of Young Scotland was taking off. Armed with a drum machine, guitar, bass, and Anna Howson’s icy cooing, the duo offered a darker take to a scene dominated by poptimists Orange Juice, Josef K, and Aztec Camera. This 40th anniversary edition of their 1986 mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues compiles their complete Cathexis recordings and adds a handful of unissued minimal wave pearls. Colder than Dalwhinnie on the solstice—better bring a parka.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VahXG1J3AE0?si=QoQJcsuiv7F3611W" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

London bassbin mutator Brassfoot twists up his first EP since a killer 2022 album; five tracks of trippy electronics and rudely strident, locked-in steppers grooves for TTT’s weirdo club sanctuary

Since debuting on Funkineven’s Apron in 2015, Brassfoot has built a solid rep for his psyched-out bent on soundsytem conventions across a slew of 12”s and tapes for likes of DBA and beside J M S Khosah for London/Tokyo co-op NCA. ‘Search History’ checks in with the perennial club screwball for the first time in years, clocking in with the detuned synth excursion ‘Double Speak’ and tripping from the sodden stepper ‘Kinda Vicarious’ to spiralling, iridescent arps in the dreamier motion of ‘Cat Riddles & Gunnels Juice’, spurting a class bit of breakcore-type pressure with the chopped breaks and pinging cowbells of ‘Earthtopia’ recalling NPLGNN and Ossia, and seeing it off with the dank zinger ‘A Nation, No Flag’.

No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler. After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie. His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives.And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear (and, for what it’s worth, all of his records) stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions (as heard on last year’s staggering “Darkness, Darkness” single, with more to come), Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked longtime friend and producer Jake Davis to help stitch them together and perhaps clean up those imperfections. (Eventually, back in Los Angeles, Alex Somers stepped in to provide the finishing touches.) Davis and Tyler opted to go the other way: embrace the hiss and wobble and, in the end, unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.From the start, Tyler’s music has pulled from the past, drawing old notions and conventions into the revealing light of now. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, Miss., to clean out his late grandfather’s downtown office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, back to Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.Time Indefinite begins with a sampled shard from that antique, as harsh as Merzbow processing the sound of a washing machine. It is a lurid, worrying signal flare: I am here, and things are hard, but I am trying. The piece unfurls like a haunted house still inhabited by real, living people, trying to make do when the world around them seems to be saying don’t. Not 10 minutes later, at the start of “Concern,” Tyler slips into a melody as gorgeous as anything he’s ever found, strings and steel rising like the sun beneath his simple folk waltz. It is a hand on a shoulder, a radiant bit of music that answers: I am here, and things are hard, but we are trying.This seesaw of struggle and survival defines these nine songs and 50 minutes, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “Electric Lake” is an ecstatic drone that summons La Monte Young to this century, but there is pain beneath its glow. “Howling” is an absolute wonder, its gentle guitar lope and choir of echoing horns and keys recalling the glory days of Windham Hill. But the background actually does howl, latent worry simply waiting to roar back to life. It doesn’t during the supple “Anima Hotel,” but you know it won’t be long now, because it never is—on this album as in real life. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t, however, need to tell you that; you can feel it, probably even recognize it from your own experience.Too, Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical references and influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes and legends of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. (The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it.) It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler, like McElwee, wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united at least in having them. Time Indefinite is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.“Held,” the ninth and final track, seems to sigh through a grin as it begins, a welcome reprieve from the plangent drone of its predecessor. It is the benediction at the close of all these goddamned chaotic blues. For what it’s worth, that is Tyler in a nutshell, someone will who smile sheepishly and offer a perfectly silly joke even as he tells you the hardest things about himself. But by the end, that grin blooms into a full smile, Tyler beaming through an acoustic waltz that is a perfect bit of unadulterated beauty. Yes, the machines and strings still whirr in the background, a true-to-life reminder of omnipresent menace. Not right now, Tyler seems to be saying. Instead, the message is clear: I am here, and things are hard and wonderful, and I am still here.

As Warped Tour pop-punk and American Apparel indie rock dominated the strange post-Y2K guitar-band milieu, Boston’s Karate delivered an engrossing shot of rock that constantly shifted between several shades of subterranean sounds. The quiet moments on Karate’s millennium busting fourth album carry much of that old, unbridled intensity, braided into subdued jazz melodies and slowcore restraint. This 25th anniversary edition of Unsolved replicates the original 2000 pressing’s side D, and includes the Death Kit 7” and split with Crown Hate Ruin. God forgive us.

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Whatever sense of unity bound a hodgepodge of underground American punk sounds in the 1990s like a Duct-tape wallet began to come unglued by the end of the decade. A couple years into the new millennium and the emo scene that once had enough space for a band as brazen in their fusion of slowcore, jazz, and post-hardcore as Boston’s Karate would barely be reflected in a cookie-cutter style commercialized by major labels and mid-level indies that acted like the majors. The part of punk that overlapped with indie rock would begin a slow ascent from its comfortable home on college radio charts to the soundtrack of American Apparel shops and eventually the Billboard charts. In this strange, stratifying milieu, Karate, a band that seemed to thrive by cleaving to a nether-zone between several sounds that otherwise never touched, delivered an engrossing constantly shifting shot of rock that covered three sides of 12-inch vinyl: Unsolved arrived in 2000.

Karate spent much of the ’ 90s wrestling punk aggression and volume into svelte shapes and often condensed what felt like a generation of scuffed-up intensity into whispers. The quiet moments carried much of that unbridled intensity throughout Unsolved —the fuzzy guitar squawk and snatchet of machine-gun drumming on “Sever” aside, things hit a little more sharply the moment the trio pivoted into their subdued jazz melodic interplay on that song. Karate’s transition into indie-rock maturity had become so complete by the time they dropped Unsolved that you could play the coffeehouse soul of “Halo of the Strange” and sultry jazz of “Lived-But-Yet-Named” to an unsuspecting punk and spend an entire evening trying to convince them that, yes, this band had made their bones playing the same DIY circuit made of bands that sounded like they wanted to harm their audience. But few bands other than Karate played like they understood the musical lingua franca of scene godheads such as Fugazi and Unwound, and knew how to make that language evolve, and nearly every song on Unsolved made that clear. If you didn’t get the memo by the end of the elegiac 11-minute closer “This Day Next Year,” which gained an irrepressible power from a plaintive guitar melody cycling through the song’s back half like a yearnsome cry for the divine, you might’ve been better off buying a ticket for Warped Tour and waiting a decade or two to figure it out. 

An overflowing chalice of funky gospel gems from the Forest City. You could start a church with this thing. PULPIT NOT INCLUDED. </p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gY8kHiS3-SM?si=YmcIoXsiViov2LFb" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J61aMfKyik0?si=Xy0yDGMecKsLuzw3" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Embark on a funky synth-drenched journey as the cosmic count Jimi Tenor reunites with Timmion Records' soul architects Cold Diamond & Mink for yet another album. When placed side by side with the fellows' recent effort "Is There Love In Outer Space? "July Blue Skies" glides on a slightly more raw and mystical plane. Crafted over fiery sessions between Tenor and Cold Diamond & Mink, this vinyl release offers six soul-grasping tracks ranging from mellow groove to soundtrack funk. The album's opening title song kicks off with an extended analog synth intro which eventually develops into a sweet romantic invocation, painting a sonic canvas reminiscent of a boundless summer sky. The most vocal tune of this quite instrumental set of songs "Sky Train Baby" propels the listener on a locomotive ride through the star systems while "Venus of Barsoon" with its drum breaks and fuzz sounds blast you straight into sci fi movie funk territory. The album's B-side opens with "Ikuchi," where Tenor's always trusted flute and tenor sax take the spotlight over the slinky library beats. Closing the album we discover two single releases, the sublime "Summer Of Synesthesia" and the demonic "Tsicroxe" both completely worthy to hear sequenced inside this album as well. This album might be just the Spring jam that you needed in your life.

“I’ve been partying since 1984,” says Jamal Moss, the living Chicago legend known by his dedicated cult following as the one, the only, Hieroglyphic Being. “40 years later, it’s drastically different - everybody’s angry!” So sets the stage for Dance Music 4 Bad People, the artist’s first album for Smalltown Supersound. Tapping back into the same cosmic frequencies responsible for the prolific house virtuoso’s most vital work, the album sees Moss coaxing nine anthems for those up to no good from out of the ether. With driving drum machine workouts and low-slung synth sexuality, Hieroglyphic Being pays homage to human fallibility, drawing focus on the revolutionary potential of house music and club culture that is so often lost to the chaos of the present. “I have yet to walk into a club and see everybody hug and say: Let’s forgive each other, let’s move forward and make the world a better place,” he levels. “With all these conversations about sexuality, ethnicity, politics, whatever, when you walk into an environment with the music, you are supposed to celebrate all of that. Let it be and come together.” As the tongue-in-check title suggests, Moss looks to the eternal quality of his art to throw moral compasses into disarray, speaking truth to the evil energies that have permeated the club industrial complex of today while challenging black and white notions of good and bad that are so easily instrumentalized for the persecution of those at the fringes. For Moss, this is a tension he has observed since he started hearing the sound pioneered by Ron Hardy at the legendary Muzic Box, back when Chicago house music was born. “Back then, especially during the Reagan era and the police brutality of the so-called crime and crack epidemic, the one thing I noticed in my community was that house music actually helped us escape from all that negative stuff and make everybody in the environment support each other more.” Experiencing house as a great leveling force, the origins of the cosmic dance prophet the Hieroglyphic Being would become can be traced back to the club as an essential site of acceptance. “If there was anybody of a certain walk of life, politically, sexually, ethically, financially, we didn’t care,” he asserts. “We were just there to be free of all that shit.” It’s this loose vitality that Moss understands to be in severely short supply in the dance music scene today. “Festivals and clubs profess to propagate safe spaces, but you’ve probably seen it firsthand: you look around and a good percent of people in the club are not happy.” Taking aim at the entire ecosystem, from the malaise and malcontentedness of modern audiences to the false solidarity and commodification of minority positions within the commercial entity of dance music, Moss offers up the raw, unrefined power of the tracks collected on Dance Music For Bad People as an antidote to these evil forces. You can hear this negativity fleeing in fear from the surging drums of ‘U R Not Dying Ur Just Waking Up’ and ‘Dispatches From The B4 Life,’ or teased into submission by the sensual low end gurgle of ‘The Secret teachings Of The Ages’ and the ambling bassline of ‘Reality Is Not What It May Seem.’ On the dense cacophony of ‘The Art Of Living A Meaningless Existence,’ Moss sounds ready for spiritual war, armed with restless sequencing and bursts of high voltage static. But it’s Moss’s ability to capture fleeting moments of transience that provide us insight into the esoteric knowledge hinted at by his track titles. The lysergic tempo change of ‘I Am In A Strange Loop’ stretches out its rippling organ to revel in its celestial detail, while the nervous, metallic twangs of ‘Awakening From the Daydreams’ are gradually tempered by soft, crystalline flourishes. This same shimmer shines through the blown out wall of sound of ‘The Map Of Salt & Stars,’ illuminating the shade with stark clarity. These are glimpses of a master at work, constantly tweaking his sound towards a purer feeling and his thought to a higher understanding. As the American empire crumbles, the Hieroglyphic Being strides forward with a clear vision to broadcast a sage warning. “If you let other people dictate to you how you are supposed to feel about someone else, it goes into a dark space, especially when there’s nothing good you can say about them,” he says. “Get out of your comfort zone and reach out to people so you can learn more about them.” Though this temptation to judge can be irresistible, Moss believes in the primordial power of the Chicago house sound. Rather than condemn some as bad and others as good, Dance Music 4 Bad People helps us all to recognise each other through the smoke and strobe light. The Hieroglyphic Being speaks through the sound with a message of optimism and hope. “Everybody should be loved, adored, respected, no matter the path you take.”

Cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu’s key 1980’s works are collected and reissued for the first time on new career retrospective Fossil Cocoon, binding ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform. Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery. Conversely, label boss Tadashi Kamada is no longer in the public eye, and not even known to have any personal online presence. He is, writes one observer, “unlikely even aware of his cult following”. Only extensive retroactive cataloguing (ardently fuelled by the cratedigging detective work of German collector Jörg Optiz) can offer any remaining memorial to his extraordinary achievements with DD. Records. Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, Yoshimatsu was introduced to the Japanese communications magazine PUMP by his classmate and future bandmate F. [Fumie] Yasumura. In the classified ads he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. From their correspondence bloomed an intensely symbiotic new friendship, initially trading homespun cassettes by mail and eventually co-forming a cassette-sharing postal society named The Recycle Circle. The Recycle Circle also included the idiosyncratic saxophonist T. [Takafumi] Isotani, a member of the university’s Light Music Club, with whom Yoshimatsu (now singing, and playing guitar, bass guitar, and synthesisers, as well as programming drum machines) went on to form the unique experimental band Juma. With fluctuating line-ups, Juma managed to compose, record, and release six albums (all via DD. Records) in a single year - 1981 - before disbanding. Yoshimatsu then graduated from Yamaguchi University and relocated to Hiroshima to pursue his passion for filmmaking, all the while continuing to release his own solo music on Kamada’s now-burgeoning label. Yoshimatsu’s first solo record was the mysteriously titled pʌls, released in 1981 while still a member of Juma, and receiving the distinction of being the third entry to DD. Records’ cassette catalogue numbers. It was not until the seventeenth that we see Yoshimatsu credited again as a solo artist, this time with the strange and delicate collage album Mirror Inside. Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in “Violet” and “Escape”) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Deeper still, “Pastel Nostalgia”, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials. Elsewhere, Yoshimatsu floats between ambient, rock guitar, new wave, industrial, musique concréte, abstract punk, vocal music, instrumental music and pure songwriting, all bound into a single, unified experience by his distinctive compositional voice. Compiling Fossil Cocoon was a task. Not only to pare down Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue into a neat collection, but also to compress these enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, guiding us through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy. Koshiro continues to reside in Hiroshima, and continues to work in film. James Vella Phantom Limb February 2024, Brighton, UK

Japan’s cult, half-forgotten goldmine DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time, they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their social and creative circles. Each of their cassette releases came with abstract, xerographic artwork, often created by the musician themselves, while the label’s recorded output encompassed avant-punk, Cubist ambient music, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and anything else their roster cared to throw at them. Housed in sleeves of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more, these records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Two facets of DD. Records shine through even this unique story: firstly, they were friends. Founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada formed the label alone, but it wasn’t long before he was joined by like-minded allies T. [Teruo] Nakamura, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu, K. [Keiichi] Usami, and T. [Takafumi] Isotani, among a few others. All were contributors to Kamada’s tape-trading network The Recycle Circle, formed at the University of Yamanashi, most of its members at the time around 20 years old. Their bond was a love of exploratory sounds and a hunger for deeper excavations into the tunnels and caves of experimental music. “An independent, private circle where members who owned expensive records or rare imported vinyl with limited distribution could send a cassette tape and a return postage stamp to dub the record back to each other for free,” Usami explains, in interview with Jon Dale for Bandcamp Daily. Secondly, the aforementioned cassettes remained almost entirely unavailable to the world outside Japan, with only a single US retailer engaged to carry the releases. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.” A German archivist, Jorg Öpitz, is primarily (and almost exclusively) responsible for the entire English-language directory of the label’s output, cataloguing online surviving and lost cassettes with completist dedication. Largely autodidactic, and almost always hermetic, this company of hobbyist and amateur (and in many cases, totally untrained) musicians rarely performed live. Many of them collaborated remotely, sending home-recorded tapes and collaged artwork in the post. “[We were] isolated from the rest of the [Japanese] indie movement,” Usami remembers. Strangely, and sadly for many, Tadashi Kamada has completely retired from public view. According to one-time collaborators, it is likely he is unaware of the cult following his label has garnered over the decades. Some sources point to a successful career in consumer electronics, a family, and a contented indifference to his early experiments in record label curation. But no-one seems certain about these details, none of which has harmed the image of a label that revels in mythmaking. An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl was rare. Only a handful of Kamada titles - presumably self-funded - were released on vinyl, right at the start of the label’s life, and it is not until 1985 and Disk Musik that the format reemerges. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices. There are endless and curious gems within. Opening with the fried psych-folk, dreamy vocals, and toybox percussion of trio サーカディアンリズム [Circadian Rhythm], Disk Musik’s stall is set out as much to bewilder as it is to beguile. Following, comes musician and painter Kumio Kurachi’s project Kum, with its homespun, acoustic glam-stomp always on the verge of falling to pieces, but revealing genuine songwriting chops and earworming melodic detail beneath the knowingly applied layers of hauntology, noise, and humour. Later, Tomomichi Nishiyama sends intergalactic plates spinning into black holes of solarstorm feedback with 10T track “Israel”, while T. Isotani’s “½ Orange” provides a welcome return to earth, an edenic utopia of plantasic blossoms and blooms. Across an extended duration (over fifty minutes on a single disc!), Disk Musik is relentless in its invention, wildly varied in its expression, and entrancing in its telling of a story truly unique in the world of independent and alternative music. Where else could Tadashi Tsukimoto’s rambling outsider folksong marry Yip/Jump primitivism to the scorched Casiotone ambience of “In and Out” by Takahiro Kuramoto’s Mask? While extensive efforts were made to contact every musician featured on Disk Musik, some are no longer within reach of known DD. Records associates. Keiichi Usami, Kumio Kurachi, and Teruo Nakamura all gladly approved the reissue of this compilation in the absence of their peers, and were vitally helpful throughout the curation process, offering insights into the history and significance of each artist and track featured here. We could not have done it without them. Usami-san, Kumio-san, Teruo-san: thank you. “Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” Tadashi Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.

A comprehensive overview of soul music from the great state of Illinois, this 732-page, two volume set chronicles over 3200 artists, 1200 record companies, and 10,000 individual releases between the years of 1960 and 1990. From Chicago to Cairo, East St. Louis to Kankakee, from The Accents to Ze-Majestiks, Soul Music Of Illinois serves as discography, field manual, atlas, telephone directory, and coffee table book, all presented in glorious full-color and wrapped in woven linen. Meticulously researched and compiled by Dante Carfagna, this is the 2nd state to receive the Soul Music deep dive after 2022's Soul Music Of Ohio.

Recorded circa 1995/96, mostly in John Fahey’s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs and Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey’s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat, making confoundingly delightful demands upon your listening (and thinking) ears.

<<RECORD STORE DAY 2025 Limited Edition>>

−About “Primal Dub 2”−

MaL's second solo album, “Primal Dub 2,” continues the vein of his previous album, “Primal Dub,” which featured mellow and gentle dub, but also takes his more sophisticated dub to new heights, evolving in a way that will attract more music lovers.

MaL's first solo album, “Primal Dub,” was released in 2022 on Hoodish Recordings, and was produced during MaL's hospitalization due to an accident. Although it is an instrumental album, it reached No. 1 on the iTunes reggae chart and received positive reviews from all quarters.

The long-awaited sequel, “Primal Dub 2,” will finally be available on vinyl! One of the highlights of MaL's second solo album is the participation of his second daughter on alto sax and voice. The concept of incorporating elements of reggae, lovers rock, and dancehall into the soundtrack of everyday life through the dub technique is carried over from his previous album, but the sound has evolved even further. As with the previous album, the cover art is by Best Match Corner, who continues to light up the Tokyo underground scene.

In Latin, the word Gemini denotes “two together” or “twins”. In astrological terms, Geminis are noted for, amongst other things, being curious and versatile. For San Diego’s 9-piece (mostly) instrumental combo The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble, Jazz and Funk have always been the two genres that they’ve consistently and effectively melded together, forming the bedrock of their sound. Exercising their stylistic curiosity and versatility, they’ve expanded upon this foundation on their new 11-song long player for Colemine Records.

Recorded between late 2021 and early 2024 at The Kitchen II in their homebase of Lemon Grove, California, SFSE steer their “introspective party music” into fresh sonic realms. While their breakbeat-heavy brand of funk-soul-jazz is still the cornerstone of their sound, as displayed in tunes such as “Makin’ Moves”, “The Grifter” & “Don’t Trip”, they’ve begun to take more and more cues from library music labels such as KPM Music, spiritually-leaning jazz labels such as Tribe & Black Jazz Records and exotica-adjacent jazz artists such as Cal Tjader and Dorothy Ashby. Now leaning more into the “introspective” part of their sound, particularly on “Mother Earth”, “Freddie” and the title track, they evoke the spirits of Freddie Hubbard, Phil Ranelin, Wendell Harrison, Bubbha Thomas, Chester Thompson and even Cannonball Adderley at his headiest & most cosmic (listen to Adderley’s “Soul Zodiac” & “Soul of The Bible” albums for reference). “Corporatocracy” takes it a step further with an extended tabla solo, which floats in and rides the percussive wave before kicking into its funk-driven, modal vibe.

With their current lineup of Tim Felten on keys, Jake Najor on drums, Omar Lopez on bass, Kiko Cornejo Jr on conga/percussion, Aquiles “Lito” Magana on guitar, Wili Fleming on trombone, Sheryll Felten on percussion, and both Jesse Audelo & Travis Klein on saxophone & flute, SFSE maintains their commitment to keeping it funky, but dares to go where they haven’t gone before and, as a result, breaks intriguing new ground in their overall sound. 

“BLADE N” is the long-awaited new album from Japanese rapper Karavi Roushi, who appeared on the Japanese hip-hop scene with his debut solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. This, his second solo album, is a collaborative release with Aquadab, the Japanese track maker/sound designer who co-produced “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. The album showcases the preternatural mind-meld between rapper and track maker.Karavi Roushi came before the public as a member of Nagoya hip-hop collective Hydro Brain Gang on Nero Imai's album “Return Of Acid King” (2017). He then launched the label Super Lights with Aquadab and released his first solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa” in 2019 with graphic design by Takara Ohashi. Although an unknown newcomer, the album reached #15 on the iTunes Hip Hop Japan album chart and received plaudits not only for its music but also for the artwork by Ohashi. After the album, Karavi Roushi dropped his first collaboration tune with Aquadab on “S.D.S =Zero=” (2020), a compilation of Generation Z Japanese underground artists produced during the Covid pandemic. That tune, “Tokyoite”, became a favorite of the participating artists."BLADE N” was created by the three-person team of Karavi Roushi, Aquadab & Ohashi. Consciously developing their musical methodology, they intentionally use instrumental tracks to interrupt the rappers' voices and flows, something which has traditionally been avoided, and explore the possibility of creating a style that puts the rapper and track maker on equal footing in complex, woven tracks. On the album, Karavi Roushi's paranormal voice, which sometimes sounds like a mutant synthesizer, adds incisiveness, and in the artwork Ohashi visually extracts the story world hidden in “BLADE N”, giving the cover art the same impact as that of “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”.