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Bongo Joe records is pleased to present La Contra Ola, a compilation recording dedicated to the early 80’s Spanish Synth Wave and Post Punk scene. First to be published outside Spain, this anthology explores the electronic music side of the independent music produced in the days in the Iberian Peninsula: Synthetic pop music with industrial sounds including futurist Art Rock, dance-floor productions and low-fi experiments on cassettes. Classics or true hidden treasures, this selection of nineteen songs is symbolic of the musical dawn that Spain experienced during the decade marked by the return of democracy and by the creative freedom initiated by Punk music.
Call Super revives the endangered art of the mix CD with a fluid, technicolour hour of elegantly advanced club music featuring a striking assembly of emergent artists.
Since their first releases in the early 2010s, Joseph Seaton has been a many-sided artist balancing expressive electronics with organic instrumentation. Their background in jazz has informed ambient and experimental albums, but they've proven to be just as comfortable tackling all shapes and speeds of impactful club music. This extends to their practice as a DJ, regularly surfing the slipstream of the club and festival circuit with a sensitive, seductive instinct for the movement of a dancefloor.
Seaton set out to make ARPO — an acronym for A Rhythm Protects One — to honour the meaning of mix CDs in a world drowning in online DJ streams. Part of the generation raised on seminal series like the metal-tinned fabric and fabriclive (which Seaton themselves contributed to), they cast back to the lasting impression of landmark sessions like Coldcut's 1995 opus Journeys By DJ: 70 Minutes Of Madness. These were mixes to absorb over and over again, where every deeply considered track and transition became lodged in your psyche.
As a DJ, producer and composer with a reputation for distinctive, head-turning musicality, Seaton puzzled out a selection for ARPO that bristles with invention. Every track feels like a moment, loaded with motifs and loops that gently impose their presence across an ever-shifting, intricately woven tapestry of dancefloor psychedelia (not to be confused with any genres with 'psy' in the name).
As well as exclusive new material under their Call Super and Ondo Fudd aliases, Seaton seeks out uncanny talent from breakthrough artists in tune with their creative vision. In terms of slinky 4/4 groove and mid tempo pace, you might locate the likes of Conny Slipp, Scarletina and Clam1 on the wilder fringes of minimal tech house, but their productions teem with textural depth and melodic subtlety that reach past that scene's typically functional tendencies. Curveballs abound, and Seaton relishes in the chance to divert into dramatic workouts like their own 'Limelight' and 'mothertime' or strip everything down for the striking, swooning poetry of Malgo & KVS' 'The Argosy'.
Way beyond neatly boxed-off club styles, the individual tracks have their own unique qualities that hold space within the mix as a whole — memorable hooks that burrow in deep, sequenced as a complete and immersive whole to carry with you through life. As Seaton puts it themselves:
"There is a line in the Malgo & KVS track that goes, 'I must be the place where the storm catches breath.' The line captures that feeling of the best of times in a club, where everything slips away in terms of time and you feel like you’ve reached a place beyond the outside world, a place of your own that is somehow communal with those around you. The mix was meant to be an honest reflection of those moments for me as a DJ. The zones that somehow encapsulate the physical and mental harmony you feel in that place. This is a mix for that zone."
Of course, the importance of a mix CD is also rooted in its physicality. Seaton thought back to some of their favourite CD packaging, landing on the iconic pill box that housed Spiritualized's 1997 space rock opus Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. The original designer and manufacturer of that packaging, Daniel Mason, was sought out and enlisted to collaborated with Dekmantel's Jan Tomson. They created a triple-gatefold digipak that centres on figures and a typeface created from dance notation, and a volvelle — a rotating circle dating back to the middle ages originally used to calculate the phases of the sun and the moon. In ARPO's packaging, it acts as a key to detail the artists and track names that feature on the mix. It's a lovingly thought-out, unique piece that further cements Seaton's offering as a memorable entry into the mix CD canon.
You Never End is the third album from Moin (Valentina Magaletti, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews) out via AD 93 on the 25th October.
This record marks Moin’s shift into a new phase with vocal collaborations across the album from Olan Monk, james K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria.
The album’s collaborators all have voices that are alluring in their own right whilst hard to pin down: from james K’s ethereal, reverb drenched vocals, Coby Sey’s words that bounce and echo across London’s concrete streets and Olan Monk’s emotive songwriting, while artist Sophie Al-Maria’s voice and thoughts are known to stretch across her multidisciplinary practice as an artist, filmmaker and writer. The unique mystique of each collaborator is maintained throughout the record while simultaneously opening Moin up to new possibilities, in a gentle shifting alchemy.
Continuing their enigmatic re-configuring of the traditional band, Moin use a mix of conventional and unique production and compositional techniques. Subtly re-framing the current conversation about what band in 2024 needs to be, Moin walk the line between what's reassuringly familiar and what's unsettling and inquisitive. You Never End is a more sensitive record in sentiment, it re-contextualises grunge, shoegaze and indie rock with a weirdly comforting melancholy while still sounding direct and alive.
The vocal collaborations bring the most articulate moments and lucid emotion while still remaining uniquely within Moin's established world. Alongside this, the record fine tunes the elements of electronic production that have always been a feature of the band's unique sound in a deeply subtle way. Elements are simpler and more direct, offering robust functional support as well as textural and emotional resonance. Together they show the potential for both practices to intertwine.
Over the past decade, Chaos In The CBD, the brotherly production duo of Louis and Ben Helliker-Hales, have captivated global audiences with their spectral, jazz-inflected deep house sound. With over 100 million streams worldwide, the New Zealand-born, London-based artists are set to release their highly anticipated debut album, A Deeper Life on May 9, 2025 via the label head’s very own In Dust We Trust imprint.
To celebrate the announcement, Chaos In The CBD have shared the atmospheric lead single ‘Love Language’, featuring fellow New Zealander Nathan Haines on Saxophone. It’s an undeniable standout moment on the album—moody, ethereal, and naturally soothing. Speaking on the track, Chaos In The CBD explains: “‘Love Language’ is a track that suits almost any setting, evoking the laid-back, easygoing rhythm of life in New Zealand. Perfect for a road trip to the beach or those magical moments at an after party when the sun reappears. Love Language feels like a reflection of the journey that brought it to life and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”
The 14 track LP marks a significant evolution in Chaos In The CBD’s artistic journey. Known for their signature sound epitomised by their breakout EP Midnight In Peckham on Rhythm Section, the duo’s debut album unites live instrumentation and vocal collaborations for the first time, fusing together key musical influences such as Ambient, Soulful house, R&B, Jazz & Balearic into a melting pot of an epic journey that will surely become a future classic. If Midnight In Peckham was the duo’s coming of age; then their debut album is Chaos In The CBD coming full circle. It features contributions from legendary figures such as Josh Milan of Blaze, Lee Pearson Jr., Stephanie Cooke and UK grime MC Novelist, among others.
Though they’ve been based in London for over a decade, Louis and Ben (aka Beans) have never stopped feeling at one with their homeland. A Deeper Life is nostalgic for their nature-filled youth, exploring the magical coastline and lush rainforest of New Zealand. “The title refers to our childhood, which was idyllic,” says Ben. “It was just the sun, the sand, the sea, waterfalls, birds and fish...” The result is an international dance sound that feels unmistakably like Chaos and ebbs and flows from the beach party to the club to the afterhours. “It’s laid-back but still driving at the same time; it’s club ready, but still deep,” Ben explains. It’s also distinctly Balearic: The brothers found a particular affinity with 90s Ibiza chillout music, being from such a “chill place” themselves. “In its own way, New Zealand is incredibly Balearic, but without the party side” says Ben.
The brothers hope that their debut evidences their deep appreciation of 90s house music, from David Morales’s Red Zone mixes and Kerri Chandler to DJ Sprinkles, Larry Heard and beyond. “We didn’t go to the school of hard knocks, we went to the school of Carl Cox,” they wrote in one of their typically hilarious posts on Instagram. But while they’ve built a meme-driven online personality for their social media accounts, their album shows a deeper side to them too. “We joke around but we want this album to be taken seriously,” says Louis. “It’s music from all around the globe, and there’s a deep meaning to how it flows and sticks together”.
For Chaos In The CBD, A Deeper Life is more than an album—it’s a celebration of their roots, their community, and their enduring bond as brothers. “This is a love letter to home and the feeling of being within nature,” says Louis. “It’s also an ode to a slower pace of life.” The album is an invitation to journey through their world: from the beaches of New Zealand to the heart of London’s dancefloors, and everywhere in between. A Deeper Life is set to be both a club-ready triumph and a reflective escape for listeners worldwide.
Originally out as a free Net-7inch on Jahtari in 2008 to pay respects at the shrine of arcade machine fighting games, these undying hiphop-infused martial arts Dubs by disrupt are finally reaching their intended destination: white blood-splattered 7inch vinyl (attention: not actual blood!).
"Samurai Showdown" (which eventually became Solo Banton's classic "Kung Fu Master", from his Music Addict EP in 2010) is taking place at sunrise, of course, when two master swordsmen are matching blades in a battle to the death. Can the wave-cutting technique of the Jahtari-school prevail?
The B-side is the meditation after the battle, mentally re-creating the epic struggle move by move and in slow motion...
So draw your Katana and prepare for beats as sharp as a battle sword, deadly moves of Ninja swiftness and basslines coming straight from the six paths of hell.
Strictly one-time pressing, 300 copies only!
Illuminated with breathtaking vocals and uncanny poetics, ‘Goodness’ is an open, impressionistic assemblage of drone, ambient, experimental electronics, improvisational music and minimalist dance music.
Across protean forms and voices, feeo explores an ever-evolving counterpoint between connection and isolation, the city and the natural world, the external and the internal. Contrasting beauty with volatility, communion with disintegration, feeo creates an album of absorbing tension between distinct contrasts.
With eleven interconnected pieces of music, each engaged in symbiotic dialogue, ‘Goodness’ represents a sinuous yet uniform work. Each track is like a link in a chain, with each piece revealing its lustre when held up to the light.
feeo describes the album as “an exploration of simultaneous yet opposing states of being; darkness and lightness, obscurity and visibility and most fundamentally, solitude and togetherness. Each song is an adumbration; a partial sketch of one aspect of the LP - each finding its complete meaning when read in the context of the whole.”
Mirroring the push and pull of perception and contemporary experience, ‘Goodness’ oscillates between disparate moods and intensities, reflecting moments of interiority, intimacy, seclusion, collective experience and exterior turbulence.
‘Goodness’ marks an evolution in feeo’s artistic practice, both as her first full-length release, and as a product of wider collaboration after several years working independently. Welcoming close collaborators and select affiliates into the fold, the process of making ‘Goodness’ was very much like the record itself; a deeply personal, special convergence of expression and artistry.
When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.
That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.
The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.
When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.
That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.
The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.
One of the most expansive instrumental Hip Hop series to date, MF DOOM’s lauded Special Herbs collection assembles a mountainous collection of his beats, ranging from series exclusives to slightly reworked favorites he produced for himself and others. Released under the alias Metal Fingers, Special Herbs succeeds at capturing DOOM’s highly influential sound which continually breaks and reinterprets the rules of the game in favor of The Super-Villain. The world is a treasure trove of sounds, and the Metal-Fingered DOOM accepts no limits; ’70s Soul/Funk classic, ’80s R&B hits, rap nostalgia, and even soundbites from children’s records & TV all find their place in the ingredients needed to perfect his recipes.
Punk Slime Recordings are proud to present the debut album from Gothenburg quintet Hollow Ship, the follow-up to the acclaimed debut 7” We Were Kings from late 2019. Due on April 3, Future Remains is a massive introduction from the band, showcasing their unique take on psychedelic rock which sounds like nothing else around, expertly produced by Hollow Ship together with Mattias Glavå (Dungen etc) on the majority of the album and working with Daniel Johansson on opening track “Take Off”.
A lot of new bands take their time in finding their feet; working their way slowly to the sound they want to project, and figuring out what it is they want to say gradually, as they go along. Not this one, though - both sonically and thematically, Future Remains sees them storm out of the gate with a crystal-clear mission statement. Somewhere in the space behind a well-worn eight-track recorder and the polish of present-day production, Hollow Ship have lift off.
Soundtrack to Cyprien Gaillard’s new stereoscopic film, Retinal Rivalry (2024), is an entrancing journey through Germany’s urban landscape and its layers of historical and social significance.
Geckøs is the collective spirit of acclaimed songwriter M. Ward, Giant Sand visionary Howe Gelb, and Irish multi-instrumentalist McKowski. Born out of an impromptu recording session that was sparked by an encounter at the wedding of a mutual friend, the project blends the rich flavors of the Southwest with indie folk, Spanish influences, and a touch of Irish mysticism. While initial recordings took place in Tucson, it became a true transatlantic project when the members returned to their hometowns and continued trading ideas. The trio eventually regrouped in studios across Ireland, London, and Bristol, where renowned English producer John Parish mixed multiple tracks. Geckøs’ self-titled debut is steeped in story, spontaneity, and surreal charm, channeling the spirit of three singular voices discovering a new, shared musical language.
Bad Brains is the self-titled debut studio album recorded by American hardcore punk/reggae band Bad Brains. Recorded in 1981 and released on (then) cassette-only label ROIR on February 5, 1982, many fans refer to it as "The Yellow Tape" because of it's yellow packaging. Though Bad Brains had recorded the 16 song Black Dots album in 1979 and the 5-song Omega Sessions EP in 1980, the ROIR cassette was the band's first release of anything longer than a single. The release includes the original liner notes by Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. This reissue marks the second release in the remaster campaign on the band's own Bad Brains Records imprint with Org Music. In coordination with the band, Org Music has overseen the restoration and remastering of the iconic Bad Brains' recordings. The audio was mastered by Dave Gardner at Infrasonic Mastering.
Amid the early 2000s Scottish music scene that birthed Camera Obscura, Arab Strap and Belle and Sebastian, Tacoma Radar were the quiet achievers. Their sole album, No One Waved Goodbye – a mesmerising collection of hushed melancholy, is now hailed as a cult classic. Reissued for the first time, this deluxe double album features No One Waved Goodbye, both seven-inch singles, and the previously unreleased Live From the 13th Note.
In the late 1980s, singer Bizimungu Diudonne, his wife Agnes Umbibizi, and a backing band of family and friends self-released a visionary cassette, featuring stuttering electric guitars, loping bass lines, and call and response vocals. Their combo of 80s studio wizardry rooted in traditional Rwandan praise songs resulted in hypnotic, extended jams unlike anything else released in East Africa at the time. The lyrics praised the beauty of the countryside and the exploits of the ancient gods. On plaintive acoustic tracks squeezed between the electric bangers, Bizimungu and Agnes called for unity in the divided nation. Their message was an eerie presaging of the coming Rwandan Genocide, which tragically tooke the lives of all members of the group. Bizimungu and Agnes were both killed by Hutu militias in 1994. Their music, popular across the region, was largely forgotten in the ensuing decades. We first heard this album through music scholar Matthew Lavoie in 2018, and spent years looking for any surviving members of the band. Last year, co-producer and Voice of America host Jackson Mvunganyi tracked down Bizimungu and Agnes’ daughter, Noella, in Kigali. Only 8 years old at the time of her parents’ death, she had taken on the task of reintroducing their work to a new generation in Rwanda. Though her family lost almost everything in the genocide, Noella miraculously was left with a CD containing the master recordings of Inzovu Y’imirindi. It is stunning to finally hear this music in its fullness and immediacy, beautifully remastered at Osiris Studios and pressed on the highest quality vinyl at David Rawlings’ Paramount Press. We’re grateful to Noella and our collaborators for helping us share Bizimungu and Agnes’ vital music and message with the world.
New album of peaceful explorations by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. This, their second record, maintains the space and long tones that made their debut, "All Is Sound" a successful anecdote to the loud and fast times we live in. It also expands their musical palate with powerful rhythmic elements.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio have been breaking new ground with healing / meditation music that also honors their roots in Gospel and Blues...and hints at forward looking Spiritual Jazz. Through their Cello, Saxophone, Piano and Flute playing they bring a new sound to the table. Ancient to the future.
Luv, pain, the profound, the mundane: nyxy nyx is for the dreamers and true believers. Down the rabbit hole, caught in a snare, the project’s cyclical riffs and self-references blur the lines of time and reality, backing listeners into a deja vu box-trap of uncanny melodies and foggy-eyed double takes.
Known for their temporality, the Philly-based outfit have spent years manipulating their degenerative discography. Tracklistings shift, masters are swapped, and songs re-recorded. In many cases, a release is solely accessible by those with a download or physical copy. For the first time ever, nyxy nyx will commit to contract-backed perpetuity. Cult Classics Vol. 1 is out via Julia’s War records on September 12th, 2025.
Brian Reichert, Tim Jordan (Sun Organ), Benjamin Schurr (Luna Honey), and Alex Ha (ex-Knifeplay) are joined by Madeline Johnston (Midwife) and Josh Meakim (A Sunny Day in Glasgow) for nyxy nyx’s first full-band studio record. Recorded by Dan Angel, Cult Classics Vol. 1 represents the heaviest iteration of nyxy nyx, capturing their sludgy and transcendent live energy–the ideal (re)introduction for heads and new initiates alike.
nyxy nyx began in 2014 as a performance art project between Brian Riechert and Drew Saracco. The duo played noise and underground punk shows, collaborating with countless friends and guest musicians. Home recordings, tapes, and CDs of “nyxy nyx” music have been distributed by labels, but most are DIY: handmade, shared with friends, and found in little libraries. By 2020, nyxy nyx assembled a live band and played consistently, toured the east coast, and then recorded Cult Classics Vol. 1. Every song on this album was performed live, but none played the same twice.
Fire of God’s Love is the legendary 1973 album by Australian nun Sister Irene O’Connor—a sincere, soulful, and unconsciously psychedelic song sequence devoted to self-reflection and awakening the spirit within. A collection of original folk spirituals written by and channelled through O’Connor with guitar, electric organ, drum machine and her angelic voice, the album was recorded and mixed in an astonishingly futuristic fashion by fellow nun and recording engineer Sister Marimil Lobregat. This edition from Freedom To Spend is the first authorized reissue of this holy grail since 1976; the album restored and remastered with love from the best available sources by Jessica Thompson.
If you head north on 1-85 from Hillsborough, NC, and take the exit for 58 East, in fifteen minutes you'll reach Diamond Grove, a small unincorporated area in Brunswick County, Virginia on the Meherrin River. To most eyes, there's not much there—you'll have to drive to Lawrenceville for groceries or to South Hill for hardware. But hidden in this patch of Virginia piedmont are the remnants of a dairy farm established in the 1740s, its main house an old two up, two down beauty still outfitted with rope beds and all. Go there today and you'll hear distant sounds of someone working soybeans and cotton in the leased-out outbuildings, farm-use tires grinding gravel roads, frogs peeping, and chickadees singing out: chick-a-dee, chick-a-dee. But if you happened to pass through in September of 2023, you might've heard fiddle tunes ricocheting off the pines, BBS rattling-to-rest inside empties, and the sounds of Weirs recording their second LP and Dear Life Records debut: Diamond Grove. Weirs is an experimental collective grown out of central North Carolina's music scene—one that is equal parts oldtime and DIY noise. Non-hierarchical in form, past Weirs performances have included anywhere from two to twelve people. In September 2023, nine traveled up US-58 to pack into the living and dining rooms of the dairy farm main house, still in the family of band member and organizer Oliver Child-Lanning, whose relatives have been there for centuries. This Weirs lineup—neither definitive nor precious—includes Child-Lanning; Justin Morris and Libby Rodenbough (his collaborators in Sluice); Evan Morgan, Courtney Werner, and Mike DeVito of Magic Tuber Stringband; and stalwarts Andy McLeod, Alli Rogers, and Oriana Messer who played deep into those late-summer evenings. What resulted are the nine tracks of Diamond Grove, recorded with an ad hoc signal chain assembled from a greater-communitys worth of borrowed gear. The Weirs project began as tape experiments on traditional tunes Child-Lanning made under the name Pluviöse in winter 2019. This evolved into the first Weirs record, Prepare to Meet God, which was self-released in July 2020 and was a collaboration between Child-Lanning and Morris during COVID. The strange conditions of that debut—a communal tradition of live songs recorded apart in isolation—are undone by Diamond Grove, a record rooted in the unrepeatable convergence of people, place, and time. On the new record, Weirs continue their search for how best to forward, uphold, and unshackle so-called "traditional" music. They are songcatchers, gathering tunes on the verge of obscure death. Their wild, centuries-spanning repertoire plays like an avant-call-the-tune session—a kind of Real Book for a scene fluent in porch jams, Big Blood, Amps for Christ, and Jean Ritchie. Weirs catch songs whose interpretive canon still feels ajar—open enough to stand next to but never above those who've sung them before. These aren't attempts at definitive versions. The recordings on Diamond Grove feel like visitations rather than revisions. And the question Weirs asks on this record is not how to simply continue the tradition of their forebears, but how traditional music could sound today. For Weirs, the history of this tradition could be taken less from the folk revival than from musique concréte; less from pristine old master recordings than something like The Shadow Ring if theyd come from the evangelical South. One listen to "(A Still, Small Voice)" and you'll hear the power of the hymn give way to its equal: the floorboards, fire crackle, dinners made and eaten. This tension between preservation and degradation is the inner light of Diamond Grove. Take "Doxology l": the melody of "Old Hundred", a hymn from the Sacred Harp tradition, is converted to MIDI, played through iPhone speakers, and re-recorded in the September air. To some revivalists, this hymn sung with all the glory of fake auto-tuned voices might sound sacreligious. But ears attuned, say, to the hyperpop production of the last few decades will immediately understand the tense beauty of hearing digitallyartifacted shape-note singing. This same tension animates "l Want to Die Easy." Weirs' version draws from A Golden Ring of Gospel's recording, monumentalized in the Folkways collection Sharon Mountain Harmony. The melodies, words, structure are largely unchanged. But the "'pure" clarity of voice in the early recording is gone. In its place, we hear the distancing sound of the dairy farm silo where Weirs recorded their version, its natural two-second reverb replacing pristine proximity. In this way, the sound of the recording site itself becomes equal to the traditional performance. The beating heart of Diamond Grove is Weirs's take on "Lord Bateman," a tune Jean Ritchie called a "big ballad:" played when the chores were done and the night's dancing had stopped. It is an 18th-century song—as old as the Diamond Grove farm—about a captured adventurer, described by Nic Jones as embodying the spirit of an Errol Flynn film. Like many great and often a cappella renditions, this "'Lord Bateman" is voice-forward, foregrounding the gather-round-children importance of yarn spinning. What's new here is the immense drone that transubstantiates the narrative into a ceaseless body of elemental forces. It's an eye-blurring murmur of collective strings that adds to the canon of Ritchie and June Tabor as much as to Pelt's Ayahuasca or Henry Flynt's Hillbilly Tape Music. While Diamond Grove isn't explicitly about the old dairy farm where it was recorded, it can't help but resemble it. Old English ballads like "'Lord Bateman" and "'Lord Randall" spill into fields once 'granted' by the British Crown. Tragic songs like "'Edward" stagger across Tuscarora trails and postbellum cotton rows. Hymns like "'Everlasting l" and "Everlasting Il" catch a moonlight that's been falling through double-hung windows since Lord Bacon's Rebellion. And the nocturnals still trill and plows still till a music uncomposed, waiting for any and all ears to chance upon it. Diamond Grove, in these ways, is history. It is a place. It is time. It is songcatching, liveness, tape manipulation. Like the low-head dam that the word weir implies, it is a defense against the current. It is a defense of regional lexicons against mass-produced vernaculars; a defense against the belief that we can simply return to a simpler time; a defense against the idea that folk music must remain "pure"; a defense against the claim that a dream of the future latent in lost histories is irretrievably lost. Against all that, Diamond Grove defends traditional music by making it sound like the complexity of today—because it knows that such music, and all the histories caught up in it, has a role to play in the days to come.
Unfolding is Jessica Moss’s most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montréal violinist/composer’s decade-spanning discography that could properly be called ambient. The ex-Silver Mt Zion member and Black Ox Orkestar co-founder draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways: this is not abstract ambient music. Layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, yield deeply emotive genre-defying compositions, guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfolds in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint. Working closely with producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), Moss notes "Unfolding was made slowly, over the last 12 months, the second full year of genocide in Palestine, in direct response to our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark." The inseparability of the personal and political has wrung ever tighter for Moss these past two years, as for so many. She’s co-organized and played several benefit shows as a core member of the Montréal chapter of Musicians For Palestine, and she released the solo album For UNRWA in spring 2024 (garnering over 800 supporters and raising thousands of dollars). Moss’s music was already moving towards heightened fragility and deep listening, becoming increasingly durational and ceremonial. Despite the plummeting financial viability of touring, her devotion to holding space, conjuring entanglement, and connecting with intimate live audiences has become her creative lodestar, especially following lockdown. With her solo praxis shaped by committing to and communing in these rooms, recent political and personal upheavals have only intensified her ritualistic, reparative musical processes. The two longform tracks on Side One of Unfolding embody this sensibility. "Washing Machine" weaves layers of string drone and filigree, gently noised by distortion pedals and amplification, with indecipherably blown-out spoken voice intermittently enveloping the mix as fragmentary palimpsests of shrouded recitation and ineffable feeling. The piece traces its origins to a phone recording of a European laundry machine, captured by Moss as she sat next to it, heartbroken on the bathroom floor, finding solace by humming a melody along to the mechanical harmonics of the washer working through its cycles. Album centerpiece "One, Now" begins as a delicate invocation, with bass pulse, chimes and bells, plucked strings, and doleful lead violin lines influenced by Jewish and Arabic modes. Ambient noise, field recordings, and wordless vocals are added to the brew, as violin melodies layer and coalesce towards a mesmerizing dronescape: a semi-improvised living composition further vitalized by Tony Buck’s paintbrush drumming throughout, and Moumneh’s "yell into the void" at the end.. Side Two is a work in four parts titled "no one / no where / no one is free / until all are free" that moves through ambient noise, elegiac post-classical strings, and distorted harmonic drones, towards a denouement of liturgical organ, ritual bell, and shimmering electronic tracers that set the stage for the album’s closing song: the devastating choral composition "until all are free", a secular hymn comprised of Jessica’s multi-tracked vocals (but which she looks forward to singing with others in concert). Unfolding is dedicated to "a free Palestine in our lifetime." Thanks for listening.
Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in.
A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.
And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.
Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.
There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.
A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.
Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty
Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025
"Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to “I Heard A Voice”. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.
The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerizing intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range.
Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam."
The visionary Walter Maioli (Futuro Antico, Aktuala) and the eccentric electronic musician John Zandijik first met in 1984 when they both gravitated toward the experimental Sound Reporters collective, participating in the release of Ethnoelectronics (1986). Shortly afterward, the two met at Zandijik's studio in Rotterdam, where they completed their journey of exploration to the edge of the Universe in just three nights. The recordings were made only after 3 a.m., when psychic energy is at its peak, and inspiration belongs solely to the realm of dreams. It was a ritual of long galactic fluctuation, where the mystical sound of the flute was filtered and expanded by the Aureal system, a device capable of breaking it down into cascades of aureal harmonies. Through its extemporaneous approach, the music transforms perceptions of ancient pyramids or tropical forests into phosphorescent nebulae, luminous fountain openings, and unprecedented planetary interstices—interstellar portals leading to new archetypal-ancestral visions. It feels like sailing through colored orbits in the red gases of Jupiter and Mars, lost and dissolved forever in the engines and gears of the most secret cosmos. Between Pink Floyd-esque psychedelic flashes and Tangerine Dream-inspired sidereal architectures, Maioli and Zandijik reveal the most phantasmagoric and unknown side of Sound Reporters.