NEW ARRIVALS

“Anonymously operating under the name 8004, this 12-inch release is built from material recorded in Chicago, weaving abstract dub rhythms with stripped-down minimal sound design to create a stark yet immersive sonic landscape.

In late 2024, Oakland-based artist Jerod S. Rivera released his second full-length project, Dot-Dash, featuring a collaboration with Cat Lauigan on the track “Seamstress Clock,” which fuses Rivera’s Buchla experimentations with Lauigan’s vocals and spoken word. From there, Rivera and CST reached out to friends across different scenes and cities, shaping those connections into a carefully curated remix 12”.

The mysterious dub/techno/leftfield mastermind behind False Aralia dives further into territory explored on iri.gram, uptempo and dancefloor-ready in a more maximal Perlon-ish way while still embracing a half-time dub feel. Philipp Otterbach (Music from Memory, Offen, RIO) goes deeper into the guitar zone he’s been exploring, channeling Earth 2, Boris, and the like for some heavy drone. Oakland duo DJ ML and Wonja adopt their Motoko & Myers moniker (Future Times, Soda Gong), zeroing in on some choice vocal snippets that mesh perfectly with a live drum break and bassline for a Seefeel-esque version that could have come from a 90’s UK studio. Slowfoam embraces the more experimental elements of the original with a remix that starts sparse and minimal but builds into a glitchy rhythmic climax. The release is rounded out with a bonus remix from Jon Carr, unleashing heavy, industrial-sludge rhythms.

Romeo’s Fall is an original score for voice by artist and composer EXLRUTH, a new work traversing romance and romanticism in a post-industrial North East England. Performed by countertenor Nik Rawlings with accompanying double bass from Caius Williams.

Informed by congregation, community and euphoria, exploring the meeting points of contemporary dance music cultures, traditional hymnal form, and the sonic appropriation and influence of regional industry, influenced by the legacy of the New Monkey. Addressing alternative trajectories of communion; on dancefloors (Makina) versus the nuclear act of togetherness within an industrial Northern landscape (classical/hymnal form).

This book features images taken from recently developed family super8, taken in and around Sunderland - 1960's onwards.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.

“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”

The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.

Where will the improvisation take place?

How will that space shape the sounds being made?

How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?

How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?

Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?

For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.

Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.

Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.

Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”

On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.

That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.

In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.

The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.

Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.

And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

Reissued for the very first time on vinyl here's Prince Alla's (aka Keith Blake) debut album, under the Ras Allah pseudonym, originally released on Tappa Zukie's Stars Records in 1978. Featuring a who's who of the roots reggae community with top notch contributions from the likes of Sly & Robbie, Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith, Don Drummond Jr., Bingy Bunny (Roots Radics) and more. Recorded at the almighty Black Ark and mixed at Tubby's. Produced and Arranged by Tappa Zukie.

Rare and obscure dub roots reggae compilation, produced by Clement Bushay in 1975 and released on Chalwa Records in 1978. Arranged by Alton Ellis and mixed by King Tubby. Recorded at King Tubby Studio, Kingston, JA and Chalk Farm, TMC, SWM Studios, UK...Featuring King Tubby, The Cimarons, Dennis Alcapone, Dave Barker, I. Pablo. A must for every reggae fan!

Re-issued for the very first time on vinyl – in more than 40 years ! – here’s the third album by the cultish Jamaican band. Backed by such reggae luminaries as Sly & Robbie, Errol “Flabba” Holt, Tommy McCook, Ansel Collins, Earl “Chinna” Smith and others, this is a true gem meant to last !

Art Into Life released a 5CD Anne Gillis archival box in 2015, and to celebrate its 10th anniversary we have created a second edition with newly redesigned packaging. This new edition is limited to 300 copies and comes in a black box featuring a photo from her 1994 installation, Tultim, and an accompanying portrait card.

French artist Manon Anne Gillis began creating everyday yet theatrical sound works and performances in the early 1980s. This is the first archival collection of her work, covering her earliest pieces from 1983 under the name Devil’s Picnic up to her installation and exhibition recordings from 2005. This five-CD box set includes all the LP and CD albums released on (CRI)2, DMA2, and Rangehen; her only collaboration with another artist—a 7-inch single with her close associate G.X. Jupitter-Larsen; her compilation contributions up to 1999 (excluding a few whose original masters have been lost); and eleven previously unreleased pieces appearing here for the first time. A dense compilation filled with the imagery of beautiful isolation.

All tracks newly remastered by Colin Potter in 2015. Boxset including disk sleeves with the original artwork and a 20-page booklet.

Mandatory re-issue for this 1979 roots reggae smash

One of the Hidden Gems out of the Rockers Int Label released in 1995 this LP features so many classic Far East melodies from Pablo mixing the digital and analog formats to perfection with vocals by Pablo on the title track as well as Majestic Niyabinghi Drums and the finest musicians

Recorded in 1966, Os Afro-Sambas is a groundbreaking album that fuses traditional samba with Afro-Brazilian spiritual rhythms from candomblé and umbanda. The collaboration between virtuoso guitarist Baden Powell and poet Vinícius de Moraes creates a deeply evocative soundscape, blending haunting melodies, rich harmonies, and intricate arrangements. Featuring the vocal harmonies of Quarteto em Cy, the album honors Bahia’s cultural roots while expanding the expressive possibilities of Brazilian music.

Ken Boothe and Lloyd Charmers come together on a landmark release that bridges soulful vocals with the stripped-down power of drum and bass. Each song is followed by a raw version, offering a bold, unfiltered statement that points directly to the future of reggae. No filler here—just foundation music at its purest.

"Ikue Mori, PHEW and YoshimiO are three legends of the Japanese Avant Garde music scene: Ikue was an original member of DNA and is a vital member of the NYC Downtown Scene, Phew founded Aunt Sally in 1978 and has performed in countless folk/rock solo projects and collaborations and YoshimiO is a core member of the Boredoms, Saicobab and OOIOO. Here they come together for their first ever trio project. Recorded at Club U.F.O. in Tokyo, the music was edited and mixed during the shelter-in-place months of early 2020. Surprising and powerful, this is a fabulous and essential meeting of three new music superstars!"

I.P.Y is a dense and striking collaboration that brings together three legends of the Japanese avant‑garde — each with a distinct voice and an unrelenting experimental spirit.

Shintaro Sakamoto's new album ‘Yoo-hoo’, his first release in about three and a half years, reflects his overseas live experiences over the past few years while showcasing a diverse sound incorporating blues, mood songs, 60s soul, surf instrumentals, funk, and more. Furthermore, the lyrics, captured through his unique perspective, are truly one-of-a-kind. The new album, containing ten tracks including the October digital single “To Grandpa” and the November digital single “Is There a Place for You?”, is now complete.

Like the previous work, this album was recorded primarily with members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA on bass & backing vocals, and Toru Nishinai on saxophone & flute. Guest player Mami Kakudo participates on marimba for two tracks. Recording engineer/mastering: Soichiro Nakamura. Artwork: Shintaro Sakamoto.

Alga Marghen presents two previously unpublished seminal works by Bill Fontana, "Suite For Toy Tape Recorder" from 1968, and "Wave Spiral" from the early '70s. These recordings come directly from the archives of Philip Corner who also curated this LP edition and contributed the liner notes. 1968: In the basement Music Room of the New School For Social Research, Philip Corner was teaching "Analysis of New Music," a class he inherited from Malcolm Goldstein and before him Richard Maxfield and of course all the way back to the famous founder John Cage, present in the spirit of living history. The "Suite For Toy Tape Recorder" was a series of little reels of 1 7/8" tapes, unique experiments by means of "working-with" and so "transcend" by "making use-of" those little cheap tape-recorders. A sensitive ear that listened to hum and hiss and all the other characteristic distortions; and recorded these materials via a kind of physical phonogène of musique-concrete perspective, his thumb's friction as the reel was running fast-forward in order to create tape loops in contrapuntual collision. Side B presents "Wave Spiral, for 5 Rin Gongs," a 21-minute blissful piece recorded in the early-'70s and first presented in Australia in 1977. This work shows how Bill Fontana's research evolved toward working with the distinct physical dimension of different frequencies. An exploration of how sound becomes simultaneously its own material and the force acting upon it. The piece unfolds as an investigation of how frequency itself becomes sculptural. Across its 21-minute duration, the rin gongs generate sustained waves that spiral outward and inward simultaneously, their overtones interacting with the listening space that Fontana would describe as a "definition of motion interacting with a particular acoustic environment." The spiral manifests itself here not through cycles within cycles of tape loop manipulations like on Side A, but through the acoustic behavior of metallic resonance in space. This sound is rendered as tangible phenomenon, frequency made visible through its physical impact on the listening environment. These recordings have remained unheard for decades, only existing in Philip Corner's archive. Their publication allows the world to trace the development of an artist discovering that to work with sound was to investigate its physical dimensions, to understand that frequency and space are inseparable, that sound sculpure begins not with installation but with the fundamental recognition that all sounds exist as waves interacting with architecture itself. Edition of 232.

The inimitable Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with this third full-length for the label, Hidden. Like CXXI and Modern Sorrow, Hidden unfolds across two side-long pieces at once eminently listenable and possessed of the ‘bloody-minded’ dedication to ‘having an idea and sticking with it’ that Youngs himself has identified as one of the key qualities of his work.

At the core of both pieces are rapid, randomised arpeggios generated with a Moog Grandmother, hypnotic patterns that wouldn’t be out of place on a Berlin School classic. Alongside these arpeggios, across the seventeen minutes of the first side-long piece Youngs builds an airy structure of shakers, synthetic handclaps and a brief, repeated sample, impossible to identify but sounding like a glitched foghorn. Over the top we hear his unmistakable voice, repeating single syllables—Ha, Ho—with a slow delay, something like a lonely one-man-band take on Anthony Moore’s Pieces from the Cloudland Ballroom or a more musical elaboration of the hypnotically overlapping delayed phonemes of Anton Bruhin’s Rotomotor. Like much of Youngs' work, the arrangement of sounds is sparse, each layer punctuated by spaces that allow others to shine through, in a way that seems to have more to do with dub or early hip-hop than high-brow models of musical reductionism.

On the flipside, the arpeggios return, now accompanied by ringing, filtered guitar chords and long flute tones. The use of a similar ground layer across the two pieces with strikingly different overdubs calls up Youngs' first solo record, the classic Advent, reminding us of how consistent ‘theme and variations’ is as an approach in his enormous body of work. Joined by handclaps and a chiming sound, the piece almost feels like it is about to achieve dance-floor lift-off at times, only for the percussion to disappear and leave the listener once again floating among the guitar and flute, now joined by occasional cut-off vocal snippets, like a radio turned quickly on and off. The suspension of these disparate elements over the steady foundation of the Moog arpeggios might remind some listeners of the free-form studio explorations of Moebius & Plank and Holger Czukay or even give a nod to Youngs’ formative encounter with Cabaret Voltaire.

Like some of Youngs’ much-loved work with Simon Wickham-Smith, Hidden approaches relatively familiar sounds and instruments from skewed angles, delighting in loose structures of interaction that border on gleeful incoherence while remaining outwardly beautiful. Coming up to almost four decades of persistent activity, like little else in contemporary music Youngs’ work beams with the simple joys of exploration and experiment.



Despite their Michigan roots, but with their hearts anchored in the golden age of 1970s German Krautrock, Fling ii celebrate the sound of that sensational season of experimentation. In the chords of the band dwell the typical motorik style of Neu, the percussive obsessions of Can, as much as the pulsing, hypnotic electronic textures of Cluster and Kraftwerk. The absolute protagonist of this adventure back in time is the legendary Boss Super Phaser PH-2, the dual-circuit modulation pedal that shines through the entire development of all the tracks; it's the main demiurge of deep resonances, of impulsive intergalactic excursions, of dust and mists in perpetual motion. The sound is as dreamy and cosmic as ever, revealing such instrumental rigour in which the strongly emotional blend of the original sources of inspiration finds a perfect balance between rhythm and dynamics.

Originally from Sicily but living in Basel, electronic composer Marco Papiro confirms his eccentric and multifaceted personality. The sound articulation of his analog synthesizers flows into in an artificial hyperrealism of great thematic and expressive variation. The tracks unfold between ascending cosmic moments, more ecstatic meditative tones, symphonic planetary floods, exotic afrodelic and psycho-andean drifts. Papiro synthesises and converts echoes of acoustic wind instruments (oboe, recorders, bamboo flute), while the percussion lives on its own pulsating reality. The influence of certain folk traditions, as well as contemporary music, also suggests the more acoustic flavor of an ethereal minimalism (for voice and psaltery), making his music a continuous open sea of visions. Cover painting by Anton Bruhin printed on two different colored papers. Co-released with Les Giants.

At the end of the 1980s, Mariolina Zitta approached the world of natural sounds, studying musicology and developing a passion for speleology. Her encounter with Walter Maioli was fundamental, guiding and influencing her definitive research into sound archaeology and the primitive sources of musical acoustic phenomena. In these recordings Mariolina conducts a magical ritual as a cave priestess, celebrating the icons par excellence of the mysteries of the night: bats. The specific frequencies of the calls of these fascinating creatures are recorded with special detectors used by ecologists, the result is an organic synthesizer. The fusion with the sounds of natural objects (stones, stalactites, logs, bone whistles, Tibetan bells, mouth bows, trumpet shells) and the vocal modulations of harmonic singing allow us to travel into a still unexplored sound dimension, through an evocative experience of total sensory listening. It is an arcane landscape filled with pure vibrations, magnetic resonances and aquatic sounds; an ancestral enchantment on the border between consciousness and dreams, a symbolic liturgy of primordial reverberations, echoes and whistles. Edition of 200 copies.

This hour-long ensemble piece from 2024, recorded in Stockholm, marks the twelfth album by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg on Another Timbre. Granberg, born in Umeå in 1974, studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York, but is self-taught as a composer. He formed his ensemble Skogen in 2005 to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Apart from his ongoing work with Skogen and other ensembles, he has increasingly been writing music on commission for musicians like Nate Wooley, andPlay, Apartment House, Ordinary Affects, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Insub Meta Orchestra and Dramaten, and has collaborated regularly with Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies and Jürg Frey.

The Willow Bends and So Do I was written in spring 2024 and consists of four large pools of materials ordered into ten cycles of approximately six minutes each. As Granberg explains: "Each pool consists of individual sounds, a number of short phrases (each containing two to seven different sounds) as well as an eighteen bar melody in slightly shifting meters from which the performers can choose what and when to play in accordance with a set of guidelines which accompany the individual parts." The phrases are derived from tiny rhythmic modules in simple note values and their augmentations and diminutions, while "the tonal materials all are derived from a few bars from a song by American jazz and film music composer Johnny Mandel called 'A Time for Love', from which the piece also borrows its title."

Granberg first heard the song in his mid-teens on Alone, a solo piano album by jazz pianist Bill Evans recorded in the late 1960s, which was one of the very first CDs he bought in the late eighties. True to his compositional method, Granberg uses other music as inspiration for his own without copying other composers' work—the sources of inspiration are not at all obvious in the finished piece. There is actually more raw material that he wrote at the time but didn't use for this piece, intending it for what might eventually become a small family of pieces for various settings and ensembles.

This particular version of Skogen is all Swedish, featuring longtime members alongside relative newcomers. The nonet includes Anna Lindal (violin), Eva Lindal (violin—Anna's sister), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Finn Loxbo (acoustic steel string guitar), Stina Hellberg Agback (harp), Magnus Granberg (prepared piano), Erik Carlsson (percussion), Henrik Olsson (objects, contact microphones, thumb piano), and Petter Wästberg (contact microphone, mixing board, loudspeaker).

As Granberg notes: "I think the main reason for writing for this comparatively large ensemble was quite simply that I wanted to gather all the Swedish friends and members of the ensemble, including those players who started to play with Skogen during the pandemic... with the addition of guitarist Finn Loxbo whom we and I also had worked with on a couple of different occasions lately. But it's of course also a question of really enjoying writing for and playing with a relatively large ensemble of this kind, of being part of a musical environment consisting of so many different voices, movements, timbres and temperaments and the particular sense of fulfilment which it brings."

Eva Lindal and Stina Hellberg Agback have been playing with Skogen since the pandemic—both appeared on How Lonely Sits the City? (2021)—and are "such great and versatile musicians with experiences from so many different fields of music, including early and new music as well as improvised and experimental musics of various kinds." Guitarist Finn Loxbo first worked with Granberg on the double album Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (Thanatosis, 2022), and also joined Skogen for the music Granberg wrote for director Karl Dunér's production of The Persians and The Women of Troy at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 2023. As Granberg says: "Finn is a wonderful and very exciting musician (for example with his brilliant ensemble Kommun) whose playing I have admired for a number of years, so I'm very happy to have him with us."

As one reviewer notes, with Granberg's compositions "no further information is necessary to know that this album will provide many hours of listening pleasure."

Malmo, Sweden’s Sternpost returns to Concentric Circles with “unworld.afterpop.” Following on the heels of the much loved “Ulrika,” the new album from Sternpost (AKA multi-instrumentalist Petter Herbertsson) shimmers with immersive, cinematic arrangements that sound like they could have only come from a dream.

Taking inspiration from Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout’s “I Trawl the Megahertz” and “A Breath of Life” by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, with some bits of Van Dyke Parks and Art Bears thrown in for good measure, it is apparent from the start that “unworld.afterpop” is no scrappy DIY affair. The songs are alive with an unbelievably lush and warm production quality, belying their home-recorded origins. Not content to simply rest on his laurels and repeat himself from release to release, “unworld.afterpop” sits at the meeting point between Herbertsson’s more overtly pop structured group Testbild! (four of whose members appear here), and Sternpost’s explorations into harmonic texture and countermelody.

Albums this richly ambitious, detailed and dare we say “mature” feel almost out of step with modern music, having more in common with grand late 60s or early 70s productions, when producers working in a “pop” context were more likely to stack layers in the studio, creating mini orchestras of sound. Most importantly, nothing here feels superfluous or unnecessary, with every detail and instrument simply being exactly where it should be.

Concentric Circles is incredibly honored to present new recordings from Sternpost, with a release that reminds you that sometimes a really good, fully formed album is the best way to experience music. Immersive and transportive yet also inherently catchy, “unworld.afterpop” is ample evidence that we are in the graces of a thoroughly gifted songwriter at the top of his craft.

Following up last year's acclaimed 'Heavy Glory' and collabs with Dean Blunt and Yung Lean, Iceage's Elias Rønnenfelt maxes on Yves Tumor-indebted hyper-sexual '90s indie-isms, trading sniffs 'n sneers with Erika de Casier, Fine and The Congos. RIYL Happy Mondays, Primal Scream or Bar Italia.

Rønnenfelt's always been good at predicting tidal shifts. Even when he was a teen fronting hardcore punk heroes Iceage he repeatedly bucked expectations, choosing to tour with fringe noise operatives like Helm and evolve the band's sound into something more like Spiritualized, augmenting chugging Britpop references with a full gospel choir on 2021's 'Seek Shelter'. So when his solo debut arrived last year, its peculiarity was almost a given; why wouldn't it be a set of country-tinted folk-rock jammers backed up with covers of Spacemen 3 and Townes Van Zandt? 'Speak Daggers', though, is a different beast altogether. Made in his bedroom between tours, it's a thicker, more confidently obstinate album than its predecessor that plays more like a continuation or evolution of 'Seek Shelter'. So after a smirking fake-out with the Nyman-esque 'Intro', 'Crush the Devil's Head' busses us to Manchester via Oxford, juxtaposing its cheeky melodica moans with Rønnenfelt's best Thom Yorke impression.

'Love How It Feels' sounds like Primal Scream reimagined by Yves Tumor, all thick sampled breaks, bolshy doomsaying and clammy glam undertones. There's an era-appropriate jaunt to Jamaica on 'Not Gonna Follow' that repurposes material Rønnenfelt recorded with The Congos and I-Jahbar when he was out in Jamaica a few years ago and sounds as if it could have fallen off the notorious '...Yes Please' sessions. And on 'Mona Lisa', he uses the Bobby Byrd 'Hot Pants' break that The Stone Roses famously twinned with Mani's enduring bassline on 'Fools Gold' - Rønnenfelt's tale of heartbreak isn't quite as toothsome, but it's a good indicator of where his head's at. A duet with Erika de Casier helps bolster highlight 'Blunt Force Trauma', and Rønnenfelt's Escho bandmate Fine - whose voice graces Two Shell's 'Home' - pitches in on 'Kill Your Neighbor', tapping into the seam between Denise Johnson and Hope Sandoval.

A lifelong admirer of DAF, Fixmer has been playing El Que in his DJ sets for years, considering it one of the band’s most enduring and powerful pieces. His connection to the track and to DAF’s groundbreaking legacy is the core inspiration behind these two new remixes, created with both reverence and bold creative vision.

On the “El Que (Terence Fixmer Leather Remix)”, Fixmer remains close to the original’s raw, muscular pulse while injecting a sharp, modern club sensibility. The remix builds on DAF’s unmistakable rhythmics but adds a contemporary momentum that feels like a natural extension of the band’s DNA. “It was like imagining what I would do if I were a member of DAF today,” Fixmer says.

The second version, “El Que (Terence Fixmer Drive Remix)”, ventures deeper into Fixmer’s own territory: darker, hypnotic, and peak-time focused. Tension and release are crafted with surgical precision, taking the original’s spirit into a harder-edged, suspense-driven sound world. It’s a version built for late-night floors without ever losing the soul of El Que.

Fixmer explains:

“I’ve been playing DAF’s El Que in many of my DJ sets for years. It’s a track I deeply loved from the first listen. I’m super proud to have remixed DAF — one of my cult bands and a major influence on my sound and electronic universe.

For the "Leather Remix", I wanted to stay close to the original while bringing modernity and club momentum. For the "Drive Remix", I pushed the track toward darker, peak-time and hypnotic techno, keeping the soul of the original intact.

I wanted to make versions that make you think: ‘I know this track… but wait — what is this version? I want it!’ When I tested them, that’s exactly what happened.”

DAF remains one of the most influential bands in electronic music history. These new remixes by Terence Fixmer reinforce the timeless power of El Que while offering two striking, club-ready perspectives for a new generation of listeners.