PRE-ORDERS

Pugilist percussionists Valentina Magaletti (Moin, Holy Tongue) & João Pais Filipe (HHY & The Macumbas) aka CZN, switching between tumbling flight and collapse on a new EP for Orator. The first release on Orator appears to slice off half an hour of tape from an endless session oscillating between polymetric clatter and tonal pauses for breath, as roughly relating to the title; referencing a rotary electrical motor that periodically reverses the direction of drive. In the first half, ‘That’s Magic!’ they juxtapose a hell-for-leather discipline hinting at Central African and Haitian traditions, with a slower arc of harmonic overtones that temper the flow to a quiet stillness halfway, and at the end. That approach comes on more aggressive, almost like Cut Hands, on the first section of B-side ‘There’s a Clown In My History’, before inverting the pressure to a vaporous, pregnant tension that finally breaks to cantankerous crescendo.

Properly mesmerising, deep, minimal and dubby techno-house mutations by Brian Leeds (Huerco S., Pendant) in Loidis mode, shuffling a custom production palette to dead sexy effect across nearly 2 hours of prime material tipped FFO Villalobos, Anthony Naples, Marc Leclair, Shinichi Atobe, Wolfgang Voigt . A reliable font of modern ambient and dance musics since the early 2010s, Brian Leeds continues to come into his own as Loidis with his most personal love note to the ‘floor. ‘From The Toolkit Of Lovers’ spans a dozen tracks that take their sweet time to stretch out and absorb heads within fine-lathered, hands-on arrangements of robust subs gelled with writhing textures and hypnagogic hooks. Offered as his “meditation on life, love and dub”, it works a damn treat for minds in lucid or altered states and bodies in motion, working from the toes to the nose with the same sort of sensuality and grooving impetus that gained cult acclaim to his RA.965 mix and preceding album ‘One Day’, also for Anthony Naples & Jenny Slattery’s Incienso. Call it micro-house, dub techno, or just plain old hypnotic dance music, the results see all Leeds’ circles bleed into a definitive album statement slanted to off-peak hours when mind and body are still whirring. It plays out with loose sequencing primed for sinking into, or equally well as a bevy of aces for discerning DJs. The lip-biting micro-funk of ‘TT Stunt’ follows the clipped strut and 3D-dubbing of ‘Towlift’, a filtered, discoid house zinger in ‘Possession Centre’, and exquisite vocoder processing in ‘Horse on Wheels’, next to the restless bassline of’ Running Rich’, and Villalobos levels of detail in the corkscrewing drums and fruity pucker of ’Shopgirl Keepsake’. The final one-to of subaquatic dub house ‘The Lowest Word’ and compressed pulses to ‘I Would Be Glad To Be On It’ see off an immaculate 2 hours in Leeds’ presence - no doubt a hard act to follow for whoever has the aux cord at the afters.

Kitto Records presents Gree, the debut album from Belfast artist ffolliott. Written and recorded over 5 years in a home studio, Gree came together slowly, through a near-daily writing process. ffolliott set out to make an album at the start of 2020, working through batches of songs each week until something began to take shape. “Life was to-ing and fro-ing around me at that time and the big long staircase of making an album felt like a comforting bottomless pit I could crawl into and escape.” Early on, the sessions were open-ended, producing what he describes as “wacky, bad ffolliott music”. The turning point came with the track 'cappy', which set the tone for the rest of the record. From there, the album began to draw from a very specific set of memories from his life – pulling in fragments of childhood, family dynamics, and moments spanning from the 90s through to the present day, shaped through a DIY approach to songwriting and sample-led production. The record moves between these timelines without settling into a single narrative. Some songs sit firmly in childhood memory, others jump forward to later years, and some hold more than one thread at once. Across it all, there’s a focus on what happens behind closed doors – the things that are heard through walls, left unsaid, or overheard. Running through the album is a reflection on witnessing someone deteriorate over time, and how experiences of addiction and excess within a family environment are first absorbed as a child, then re-examined later in life. “I generally found that the more I leaned into anything I didn’t like about my music, the more I would end up writing songs that meant a lot to me.” The warm and textured sound of Gree was shaped by both the equipment and the process used to make it. Vocals and guitars were recorded through a single microphone, drums were built from samples taken from ffolliott'S own vinyl collection and sequenced on an MPC, and much of the sound comes from ageing analogue gear – tape delays and instruments collected over time. The result is a record full of life and texture: hiss, crackle and instability left in place rather than cleaned up. The world of Gree is further developed through the extensive artwork archive of the artist's late father - a prolific self-taught artist and microbiologist whose work has never been shared publicly before. The front cover features an etching from The Dream Machine, a series of 32 black-and-white works created in the midsts of 1980s Northern Ireland, while the back cover brings together unfinished doodles, sketches and drawings recovered from his notebooks and diaries, some dating back to his childhood. “A big part of the ffolliott project has always been to get my dad’s artwork seen alongside my music. I’d always admired it – it felt like something that shouldn’t just live in the house.” Throughout the album, these personal elements sit alongside smaller details – including childhood cassette recordings of Jamie and his sister staging their own improvised radio shows, recorded on a boombox in the 90s. ffolliott takes its name from the artist's middle name, passed down through one side of his family and traditionally given to the first-born son. It remains deliberately uncapitalised, retaining a spelling rooted in older family history.

Japanese composer Ken-ichiro Isoda brings together environmental recordings, electronics and acoustic instrumentation on Epilogue. Older compositions are reconstructed with fresh contributions from Dogen Kinowaki, Tsutomu Sonoda, Tatsuro Murakami and Aiko Takahashi, while recordings of birds, forests and water connect the music to Isoda’s home on Hachijō-jima. Pieces including ‘TANEKOMA’, ‘STEPS’, ‘WATERWAYS’ and ‘A Flowering Tree’ move between ambient electronics, contemporary classical composition and delicate instrumentation, drawing past work into Isoda’s present-day musical world.

Portugal-based percussionist Gabriel Ferrandini spent years honing his skills in various free jazz ensembles, where he demonstrated his absorption of the styles of pioneering rhythm liberators like Sunny Murray and Milford Graves while forging his own energetic and agile sound. During this time, Ferrandini performed with everyone from Evan Parker and Alexander von Schlippenbach to Thurston Moore and Dirty Beaches' Alex Zhang Hungtai. At some point, the percussionist grew restless and began taking a more compositional approach, using his drums as primary sources from which to produce spectral tones and timbres via electronic manipulation. In Ferrandini's hands, cymbals become generative instruments with endless reverb tails and choir samples are distilled into vapor. With its subtle evocations of light and color and meticulous editing, Romance suggests an almost cinematic scale. The strings and grainy synthesizer of "Crying Game" lend an air of giallo dread to the deep sub-bass rumbles; "Afters Lisboa" processes cymbal crashes through a Leslie speaker to create a siren-like Doppler effect; "Fallen Angels," one of the few tracks to feature Ferrandini's mostly untreated percussion work, stacks layers of reverb effects of varying lengths (an old Autechre trick) to add friction and give the spatialized sounds a dissociative quality. Album highlight "Cova da Vaporwave" utilizes creative sidechaining, warbly VHS-like tones and drums amplified through a Fender Twin to gather apocalyptic momentum. Romance is a formidable artistic statement, establishing Ferrandini as one of the most vital composers on the contemporary avant-garde music scene. He is influenced by Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, whose passionate yet dissonant chromatic approach can be detected throughout the album's seven uncanny tracks.

After cutting his teeth in the late '70s No Wave scene with bands Theoretical Girls and The Static, Glenn Branca made his first solo statement, Lesson No. 1, in 1980. The inaugural release on legendary post-punk / dance label 99 Records, Lesson No. 1 unveils Branca's visionary guitar concepts with two monstrous, side-long compositions that helped forge NYC's downtown art-punk sound and acted as a massive influence on countless young groups, including Sonic Youth and Swans.

The title track is easily Branca's most-accessible moment; its driving beat and interlocking patterns resemble German pioneers Neu! playing Philip Glass. Never before (or since) has minimalism sounded so euphoric. "Dissonance" is the A-side's polar opposite. Dark, skittish and unhinged, Branca leads his band (guitar, keyboard, bass, drums and sledgehammer) through block after block of industrial terror, leaving listeners drained in the process.

An album by a little-known guitar duo released in 1999. Their songs—composed solely of guitars and making heavy use of harmonics—are beautiful pieces that evoke an ambient-like tranquility; during their live performances at the time, they even collaborated with 8mm film projections. However, while the album received high praise from a select few, the overall response was very limited. At the time, the indie scene had not yet re-evaluated ambient sounds, and there were virtually no other groups performing such simple instrumental music live. I believe this made the music extremely difficult to categorize and left it in a precarious position. However, once Japanese ambient music began to be re-evaluated globally in the 2010s, this album was rediscovered, and the remaining stock of CDs sold out instantly. Amid calls for a reissue, we’d like to unleash this music anew with this first-ever vinyl release. KENKEN—now known as URBAN VOLCANO SOUNDS—also makes a guest appearance. Whether you want to take your time exploring this little-known hidden gem or use it as everyday background music, this acoustic guitar instrumental album creates beautiful moments that seep into the very air around you.

Kalita presents the fourth and final instalment of their groundbreaking ‘Borga Revolution!’ series, uncovering another selection of essential recordings from the rich and far-reaching world of Ghanaian highlife. Spanning deep, hypnotic highlife through to the vibrant electronic productions of 1980s Burger Highlife, Volume 4 captures a period of extraordinary musical change, as Ghanaian artists absorbed influences from funk, disco, boogie, and new synthesizer technology. With previous volumes championed by tastemakers including Gilles Peterson, Antal, Tom Ravenscroft, and Hunee, this final chapter turns its attention once again to the music of the Ghanaian diaspora. Volume 4 brings together rare recordings from artists such as Rex Omar, Nat Fredua, and CST Amankwah, alongside the elusive, deeply hypnotic and beautiful sounds of the Abibifo Dance Band of Ghana (led by the legendary bassist Ralph Karikari) and Baffour Kyei. Unearthing recordings that have languished in obscurity for over forty years, the compilation moves between deep highlife, rhythmic dancefloor cuts, and pioneering digital productions, revealing yet more musical ingenuity of Ghanaian artists both home and abroad. The final instalment in the ‘Borga Revolution!’ series, it offers another vital collection of forgotten favourites and hidden treasures for DJs, collectors, and anyone drawn to the endlessly inventive sounds of Ghanaian music. The 1970s and 80s saw Ghanaian musicians begin to incorporate Western sounds like funk and disco into their music, reflecting the changing global musical landscape. However, the country's political instability and economic hardships, marked by military regimes and curfews, forced many artists to leave Ghana in search of better opportunities abroad. In Europe and the U.S., these musicians fused their traditional highlife roots with emerging digital sounds, using cutting-edge technology like the DX7 synthesizer and drum machines to create the genre now known as Burger Highlife. With ‘Borga Revolution!’ Kalita offers a vivid exposition of this musical transformation, using rare interviews, archival photos, and detailed liner notes to bring to life the pioneering spirit of both well-known icons and unsung innovators of Ghanaian Highlife, one of West Africa’s most exciting musical movements. · The final installment in Kalita's 'Borga Revolution!' series, examining the development of Ghanaian dance music in the 1970/80s, and focussing on the phenomenon of Burger highlife (a blend of Ghanaian highlife with disco, boogie and synths). · 2xLP in gatefold sleeve, with printed inner sleeves examining the stories of the artists featured on the volume. · Includes 10 highly sought-after and under-the-radar recordings, including those by the phenomenal Rex Omar, Nat Fredua, CST Amankwah, Baffour Kyei, Chief Kofi Sammy, and the Abibifo Dance Band of Ghana

アルバムについて Following the international praise for their 2024 debut album Where Did You Go?, Sandman Project return with Hearts Forever, the first album entirely composed, arranged and produced by guitarist, composer and bandleader Tal Sandman. Rooted in psychedelic groove, Middle Eastern musicality, funk, jazz and desert rock, it is a record driven above all by a wider spiritual belief in music as a force for connection. If Where Did You Go? introduced Sandman Project as a borderless, brass-heavy outfit with a cinematic sound, Hearts Forever takes that vision somewhere more intimate and self-assured. Written following Tal's move from Jaffa to Leipzig, the album reflects a period of personal and creative transformation. Arriving in Germany without knowing whether she would find the right collaborators, she gradually assembled a new band through recommendations from fellow musicians, discovering a group capable of bringing her musical vision to life. For Tal, the music is not about drawing neat lines between styles or traditions. It is about taking inspiration from wherever it appears and reshaping it into something honest and alive. "If music touches my heart, it inspires me", she says. "So much music already exists, but what we are doing is creating something new out of inspiration. You take the ingredients and make a new thing". That philosophy runs through Hearts Forever. The album travels effortlessly between Middle Eastern melody, desert rock, Ethiopian modes, Afrobeat, funk, soul, jazz and psychedelia, never treating influences as destinations but as starting points for something entirely its own. Instead, the songs emerge as emotional landscapes, each growing from a melodic idea. "A melody comes into my heart or mind and I try to dig deeper into it", Tal explains. "I give attention to the ideas that come". That growing confidence also shaped the making of the album itself. After years of doubting whether she was ready to take full creative control, Hearts Forever became the first Sandman Project record entirely composed, arranged and produced by Tal herself, with long-time collaborator Tomer Baruch returning as mixing engineer. Opening track "Katara" neatly illustrates the writing process behind much of Hearts Forever. Built from a melody that arrived in Tal's mind, the piece grew into a hypnotic groove led by classical oud and Middle Eastern rhythm. As with much of the album, Tal recorded the original demo almost entirely herself, playing much of the arrangement and even singing the trumpet parts before bringing the music to the band, leaving space for the musicians to shape and expand the compositions together. "Questions Answers" shifts the momentum up a gear, driven by Afrobeat-inspired drumming and an infectious call-and-response between Tal's desert-rock guitar lines and punchy brass responses. Layered vocals from Tal appear for the first time, while synth textures and a keyboard solo inspired by the atmosphere of an Arabic wedding celebration add to the track's celebratory feel, before it erupts into a loose surf-punk finale that has already become a live highlight. Elsewhere, "So Said The Stone" reflects some of the restless energy of Jaffa through 70s funk, Afrobeat and Middle Eastern guitar lines, while "Abandawe" folds Moroccan guimbri-inspired guitar, Ethiopian melodic ideas and funky brass into one of the album's most intricate arrangements. "Kishuf" slows the pace, drifting through languid funk towards Tal's vision of a desert Woodstock, complete with Tal’s "magic flute", transformed through reverb and delay into one of the album's most distinctive voices. At the centre of the record sits the title track, "Hearts Forever". More direct, soulful and emotionally open than much of Sandman Project's earlier material, it carries the album's central feeling: bittersweet, hopeful and innocent without being naïve. For Tal, the title speaks of memory, compassion and the possibility of connection across every divide. "The title offers hope”, she says. "It is about the hearts of people. I would love every person in the world to feel something". That hope is never presented as an easy answer. Closing piece "Feelings Of Hope" was written as a response to the anger, division and violence Tal sees around her. Ending with the entire band singing together as a choir before Tal's searching one-take guitar solo, it becomes less a protest than a quiet act of belief. "Choosing hate is easy," Tal explains. "To go with hope takes more work”. This is the quiet force behind Hearts Forever. Almost entirely instrumental, the album deliberately leaves space for listeners to find their own stories within it. Without lyrics, the music is never confined to one language, nationality or identity. Following support for Where Did You Go? from All About Jazz, DJ Magazine, Bayern Radio, Greedy For Best, Pipelines Magazine, Ban Ban Ton Ton and Laurent Garnier, Hearts Forever finds Sandman Project entering a new chapter: more confident, broader in vision and more deeply rooted in Tal Sandman's own creative voice. Rich, restless and full of feeling, Hearts Forever is music for uncertain times; a record about holding on to innocence, choosing compassion and believing, however quietly, that connection is still possible. FFO: Khruangbin, Kutiman, Mulatu Astatke, Tinariwen, Altın Gün, Waaju.

Health and Efficiency’s opening lyrics promise something more conventionally joyous than would be expected of This Heat, but this long form track quickly switches to a relentless and muscular instrumental that feels more like a paean to the sun’s power at an atomic level.

Health and Efficiency was recorded and released in 1980 on a 45 rpm maxi single. The contrasting minimalism of B side track Graphic/Varispeed’s manipulated held organ tones were intended for playing at all turntable speeds. Alongside the 45 rpm version of this release there are now alternative versions available equivalent to 16 rpm, 33 rpm and 78 rpm.

One of the foundational records of the post-punk era Deceit is This Heat’s second and final studio album. With greater emphasis on drive and song structure than their debut and guided by their certainty that humanity was on a nuclear collision course with itself, Deceit is dense, damaged, furious and inspiring (technically, musically, perhaps even politically). This Heat developed new strange and volatile strains of avant-garde music that time has proved to be hugely influential, a blueprint for much that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, experimental electronica …..

One of the foundational records of the post-punk era Deceit is This Heat’s second and final studio album. With greater emphasis on drive and song structure than their debut and guided by their certainty that humanity was on a nuclear collision course with itself, Deceit is dense, damaged, furious and inspiring (technically, musically, perhaps even politically). This Heat developed new strange and volatile strains of avant-garde music that time has proved to be hugely influential, a blueprint for much that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, experimental electronica …..

Singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey was 20 years old when he became the third signing to Leon Russell and Denny Cordell's Shelter Records – after Russell himself and the legendary J.J. Cale. The result was Ramsey's 1972 eponymous debut, a masterpiece of laid-back Texas country-rock, blues-inflected folk and outlaw ballads. As a child, Ramsey was an obsessive radio listener – from Elvis and the Beatles to Delta blues, country and even classical music. By middle school, he had formed his first garage band and started writing songs. After a brief stint at the University of Texas, he took to the burgeoning coffeehouse circuit where he toured alongside folks like Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker and Keith Sykes. It was during these shows that Ramsey developed much of the material for his LP, a diverse yet coherent mix that revealed his varied influences. Recorded in Memphis, Nashville and at Russell's home studio in the Hollywood Hills, the album features some of the era's greatest session musicians: Eddie Hinton on guitar, Red Rhodes on pedal steel and the rhythm section of Leland Sklar and Jim Keltner. A true songwriter's songwriter album, its tunes have been covered by Waylon Jennings ("Satin Sheets"), Jimmy Buffett ("The Ballad of Spider John") and, most famously, Captain & Tennille ("Muskrat Love"), but no cover can beat the originals from the wise-beyond-his-years Ramsey. Though Willis Alan Ramsey has continued to perform regularly and write new songs, a second album is yet to be released. For years, whenever someone asked about it, Ramsey was known to answer "What's wrong with the first one?" The answer is, of course, absolutely nothing. In fact, it's perfect. This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original lyric sheet. Includes new interview with Ramsey and liner notes by author Richie Unterberger.

OR (AKA John Talabot) is a Catalan producer, electronic musician & DJ residing in Barcelona. his 2012 debut album ƒIN received critical acclaim from The Guardian (5*), Anthony Fantano, Pitchfork (8.5 BNM) & DJ Mag. Highly anticipated, Talabot's first album in over a decade. A more left-field side of Talabot, with tangle of cartwheeling synth hooks, bursting with colour & looping electronics. RIYL Floating Points,Leon Vynehall,The Field

Carmen Villain ponders the significance of reflection in all its forms on 'Memoria', overdubbing flutes, strings and trumpet (supplied by Johanna Orellana, André Bratten, Ole Henrik Moe and Eivind Lønning) with vanishing, effervescent rhythms and spiritual dissonances. It's her weightiest transmission to date, a properly focused fusion of deep listening, dub techno and fourth world jazz that's essential listening FFO Actress, Pole, Jon Hassell, Laurel Halo. There's a scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Memoria' where Tilda Swinton's character is sitting with a sound engineer, trying to describe a mysterious booming sound she heard during the night. He scrolls through samples - a meme-able moment that'll be familiar to even the most casual producer - until her memory is triggered and she can make a connection. Carmen Hillestad assumes that role on her fifth album, considering the cultural significance of memory but neatly avoiding nostalgia, something she discerningly refers to as solipsistic introspection. Hillestad posits that deep listening is a way for us to relate more profoundly with our surroundings, using sonic triggers to provoke a cosmic level of contemplation that should be familiar to anyone who stuck around long enough with Weerasethakul's film to catch the blink-and-you'll-miss-it finale. We get a brief taster of what that might mean with opener 'Labour of Imagination', when Orellana's flutes and Hillestad's own clarinet are reshaped into cloudy atmospherics, one part sublime ambiance, one part hallucinogenic free jazz. The album's aesthetic backbone is revealed on 'Entre Nosotros', a slithering, decelerated monster of a track that fogs its Andy Stott-style chug with circuitous piano improvisations that only become properly visible after a few plays. The crucial moment comes when the beat disappears completely and what's left isn't silence, but tape hiss, echo trails and dissonances from Hillestad's processes. As the track draws to a close, the piano dissolves completely; listen in the background and you won't catch it, zoom in a little and you'll be hypnotised, we promise. And on the title track, we're served with an expansion of the themes Hillestad introduced us to on that genius 'Holding a Shape' 12” a few weeks back. Referencing Pole, Torsten Pröfrock, Rhythm & Sound and Mille Plateaux's 'Clicks & Cuts' anthologies, she uses our associations with dub and the glitch aesthetic to guide us to a false conclusion. The beat never really comes, instead a loose rhythm forms from vibrating subs and vertiginous, whooshing echoes. Hillestad buries her concept in the details: the ghost rhythms that manifest and vanish like electrical interferences and the weightless drone that flickers unsteadily in the backdrop until the track's final, profound moments. In a way, it's the antithesis of the "power ambient" sound - just when you think it’ll all get steamrolled by distortion, Hillestad pulls back and reveals a different emotional layer instead. Honestly, we hear more jazz in this than what gets passed off as ambient these days. Like its predecessors, 'Memoria' is still shepherded by the influence of Jon Hassell's fourth world - just check the shimmering 'Hope Synapses', for example - but at this stage in her career, Hillestad has made it entirely her own. Her music isn't reducible to a single element or single inspiration, it's a deeply personal alloy of philosophies and ideas that she's considered and refined over the course of five albums and a handful of EPs and singles. And the more attention you give it, the more you’ll discover.

3TWI (عتوي) the name of Fatima Al Qadiri’s new EP, is Kuwaiti Arabic femme slang for dirty old man, literally meaning “male alley cat.” Over four regional club tracks, Al Qadiri explores the gaze of this sleazy yet pitiful background character with long-time friends and vocal collaborators Bobo Secret, Lama3an and Gumar. Conceptually, the EP follows Al Qadiri’s long-term pre-occupation with dance music, gender identity and performance in West Asia. Musically, the release is a homage and love letter to West Asian folk dance music. 3twi celebrates the ethnic diversity of the region and the shared love of musical traditions across borders, through a coy queer lens. Lyrically, the record is split between suggestive spoken word (ft Lama3an and Bobo Secret) and yearning anthems (ft Gumar), all queer in intention and meaning and largely improvised. The final track, ta3alay, samples acapella taken from the theme song of a Japanese cartoon, Tokimeki Tonight, translated for Arab audiences as Ranzy Almudhisha, originally sung by Lebanese singer Ihsan Sadek, and re-sung by Gumar to create a double vocal. All the songs are in Kuwaiti Arabic except ta3alay, sung in Classical Arabic, and zan kardeh yaw nah, which is in 3eemi (عيمي), a regional dialect of Farsi reflecting the Iranian heritage of Gumar and Al Qadiri. 7ilween loosely translates as “pretty young things”. The lyrics play out a shady encounter between the 3twi and his potential clients that fit the description. Zan kardeh ya nah is 3eemi for “did you get married or not?” and the answer is inferred as No – a defacto West Asian queer anthem. Zilim means “macho man” and is an ode to the region's butch femmes. The hook translates as “She, She’s the macho man, Her!” Ta3alay is a love song which means “Come here.” The lyrics profess, “Oh tone in the mind, and in the realm of imagination, oh beautiful picture, do not stay imaginary, come here.”

As Eerie Enterprise, upsammy and Piezo have funnelled their singular styles into a classic-feeling but ultra-modern album of elegant, angular electronica. With a strong melodic sensibility and a highly developed palette of playful sound design in their toolkit, the unexpected pairing grew spontaneous jams into a considered collaboration, and Places Remember Events is the end result. Individually, Thessa Torsing and Luca Mucci have carved out strong identities within contemporary electronic music. As upsammy, Torsing has applied a delicate precision to ambient and uptempo approaches alike, building up a striking catalogue of releases including her 2020 LP for Dekmantel, Zoom. Meanwhile, Mucci has taken a wayward path through contemporary bass music and techno that matches edgy sound design with playful unpredictability. As Eerie Enterprise, both artists tap into their respective creative instincts while arriving at a unique sound with a nurturing quality they were both missing from modern dance music. Having appreciated each other's work for some years, in July 2024 Torsing and Mucci seized an opportunity to carve out two days in the studio. There was no expectation of an end product, but the sketches conceived during those open-ended, hardware-oriented sessions felt worthy of a deeper exploration developed and finalised over the following year-and-a-half. Places Remember Events has an unapologetically nostalgic streak, calling to mind the warm glow of melodically-charged, golden-era electronica. The twitchy rhythmic make-up of tracks like 'Decay + Collapse' and 'Folding Origin' speak to the duo's shared affinity for ravey energy, but even within faster frameworks they lean into half-time space to maintain a light-footed agility that allows the relatively busy arrangements to feel grounded and patient rather than frantic. There's an appreciation for mystery in the emotional make-up of many of the tracks, not least in the slithering textural exploration and spatial tension of 'Capsule', but elsewhere fragile melancholia guides the melody direction of 'Superradiance' and 'Things Fall Upwards'. The final impression is crisp and modern while delivering an accessible experience that seeks to soothe rather than shock when so much contemporary club music tips towards uneasy intensity. Finding malleable approaches to their chosen sonics and applying them to intentional song structures, Eerie Enterprise collectively land on a sound that promises a lasting reward for the repeat voyager — satisfying headphone gear in the grand tradition of introspective electronic music, but also with a physical immediacy that will manifest in the live set upsammy and Piezo have put together to perform later in the year.

After some years of (non)hiatus, Contagious are back with a new album that furthers the evolution of their uncompromising sound. The album features the high caliber talents of guests: Valentina Magaletti, Sofia Jernberg and Andrea Belfi. “Being” is conceived around the different activities pursued by the band since the release of their first (self-titled) album. Members: Sabine Erklenz, Andrea Neumann and Mieko Suzuki have been concentrating on performing, composing and organizing their own event series “Partners in Crime” at Morphine Raum, Berlin. This series is an ongoing process of inviting musicians to collaborate, share and record new material - unrestricted by genre or anything else. It was during these sessions, “Being" was conceived and recorded. Inspired by the wide range of lifeforms found in nature, the track titles are once again dedicated to species that challenge binary notions of sex. The album conveys the band’s brutal approach to improvised processing - tense buildups, powerful grooves and delicate release. Contagious’ signature sound very much suits the wild vocal extensions by Sofia Jernberg, obsessive drum patterns by Valentina Magaletti and the Moondog-esque, hypnotic percussion of Andrea Belfi, all of whom offer powerful contributions to a tracks on the LP. The overall result is a blissful and loving punch in the stomach

[Meditations Japan Edition] Grey Marble Vinyl LP+Japanese Obi. LIMITED 98 copies.

Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation in spaces defined by the aesthetics of transcendence, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of reflection and unwavering tenderness. Still, the creation of that music, Malone’s own experience of it in performance, has been one defined by focus and rigor, by adherence to structures that dictate cyclical returns and the detailed work of exploring microtonal harmony. For all its grandeur, her music is elemental at its core: born of sweat, concentration, the physicality of pipes vibrating as air rushes through them, the desire to share the emotional intensity ignited with each tonal shift. Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. Feeling supersedes matrices, and each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. The album was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. Recording took place over the course of two late nights in August 2025, with the engineer Francesco Donadello placing over 20 microphones throughout the room and closely upon the instruments, allowing the listener to locate themselves within the music as it fills the historic sanctum. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before. Even with the presence of one of the most canonized and dissected composers of all time just underfoot, Malone felt the pressure of tradition lifting, an ease of being dictating the flow of the music. She is careful to never extend the narratives of any individual piece beyond what feels conclusive, resulting in a relatively compact cycle of compositions. The first half of Burning Song was commissioned for the 2023 Venice Music Biennale and presented at the remarkably ornate San Pietro di Castello. Initial seeds of these pieces were developed on a piano backstage at Bozar in Brussels following a solo electronic performance, long after the audience and staff had departed. It was the first time Malone had used the piano as a compositional tool since her childhood, offering a portal to a younger self. The album’s final three pieces were composed swiftly in the month preceding the recording session in 2025, their stately progressions emerging within her mind’s ear with a sense of ease and inevitability, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. The album’s final piece, “My Eve My Dawn,” represents a clear vision of this process; foregrounding the cohesion between endings and beginnings, it moves through passages of sadness and joy, the linking tones offering a sense of continuity, and thus of acceptance. The metaphor of burning holds two meanings. Fire moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment, and relentlessly insistent. Here, Malone moves from harnessing the fractaline beauty of mathematics to reveling in the impact of feelings, of foresight, of something more undefined and from within. But burning is a process of change in which transformation spreads from a nexus point to rapidly consume whatever it encounters. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.

「Shima DUB」is the first CD album released by Harikuyamaku in 2013. Harikuyamaku dubs Okinawa'n roots songs sampled mainly from 60~70s vinyls. Dubeffects were reorded through the analogue mixer and some old effectors (space echo,roland halfracks...) in live. This is super addictive Okinawa'n DUB album will make you awarer.

Mike Ladd never stopped making music; over the years he's popped up on all sorts of unexpected collaborations, soundtracked a Netflix series, and worked with visual artists in settings like the Pantheon in Paris. Still, Ladd's last solo album was more than ten years ago, and his magnum opus Welcome to the Afterfuture dropped in early 2000. Nonechosen is a granite testament to the fact that the artist has evolved and grown, but maintains the same gravitas that made his name what it is. Nonechosen is a solo album, but Ladd worked with old friends: No Surrender and Tom Degeeter collaborated on respective tracks. Once Mike got the record 95% there with his own production, he passed it on to Preservation, who, with a few well-placed tweaks, elevated the project to new heights. Backwoodz Studioz is honored to be part of Ladd's comet-like return, introducing this seminal artist to a new generation of hip-hop fans.

Wherever people are, they dream of escape. Sometimes that means dramatic flights—jailbreaks, perilous voyages, disappearing acts—but more often it takes the shape of something deceptively ordinary. Trouble Mountain, the new album from Aesop Rock and Blockhead, explores that uneasy terrain through the lens of a fictional resort inspired by the Poconos getaway commercials that saturated their New York childhoods. Promising reinvention, the mountain instead becomes a surreal psychological landscape where everyday anxieties twist into something stranger, revealing that the places we flee to can be just as disorienting as the lives we’re trying to leave behind. Arriving as Aesop Rock’s 13th studio album and his sixth full-length release since 2020, Trouble Mountain finds one of hip-hop’s most inventive writers continuing to expand his craft. His flows are increasingly elastic, his observations sharper than ever, turning unlikely subjects into vivid meditations on identity, family, labor, memory, and the quiet absurdity of modern life. Whether imagining alternate paths for loved ones, finding profound emotional weight in unexpected places, or examining the invisible systems that shape our daily existence, Aes transforms the mundane into something surreal without ever losing sight of its humanity. Behind him, Blockhead delivers production that reconnects with the chemistry the pair have refined over nearly three decades while pushing it into new territory—lean, kinetic, and constantly evolving. Together, they revisit themes that have defined their collaborations since Labor Days: work, survival, alienation, and the persistent desire to outrun them. Yet Trouble Mountain never offers easy escape. Instead, it asks why we’re always searching for one in the first place, emerging as a poignant and imaginative portrait of life in a world where the ordinary has become increasingly impossible to navigate.

Alan Vega's Live at Max's Kansas City captures one of music's most fearless innovators and visionaries at full creative force, transforming this punk clubhouse, one of New York City's most iconic cultural landmarks into a theater of raw performance, sonic experimentation, and uncompromising artistic expression.  Recorded on July 18, 1980, just weeks before the release of his landmark self-titled solo debut, the performance finds Vega at a pivotal moment in his career, forging a singular artistic language where rockabilly, blues, electronic noise, and performance art converge with electrifying intensity. Across seven tracks, Vega is joined by young Texan guitarist Phil Hawk, whose razor-wire guitar work intertwines with Vega’s tape manipulation and experimental sound to amplify his uncompromising sonic vision. Driven by instinct rather than convention, the album captures the collision of rockabilly and blues with electronic experimentation, unrelenting energy, and the radical artistic freedom that defined Vega's career. Live at Max's Kansas City serves as a vivid document of Alan Vega standing on the precipice of his solo career with the vital commitment of his creative powers. Every scream, whistle, and eruption from the audience becomes part of the performance itself, preserving the volatile exchange between artist and crowd that defined Vega's singular presence on stage. Discovered by Liz Lamere and Jared Artaud in the Alan Vega archives, the Vega Vault, Live at Max's Kansas City was remastered by Josh Bonati from the original live recordings, with the tapes transferred by Ted Young. Revealing another previously unheard chapter from the Vega Vault, this historic performance is available on streaming platforms and vinyl for the first time.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce a second volume of unheard concert performances from legendary Pakistani kyhal singer Salamat Ali Khan, recorded at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie as part of the MetaMusik festival in 1974. Like the first volume, the immaculate recording by Michael Hönig (of krautrock legends Agitation Free) captures Khan performing a single extended raag in the company of Shaukat Hussein Khan on tabla and Hussein Bux Khan on harmonium. In addition to his stunningly inventive and moving vocal performance, Khan is heard accompanying himself on a specially tuned alpine zither (in place of the traditional swarmandal, an Indian style of zither). The lack of an underlying tanpura drone gives the music its characteristic floating quality, with the three instruments and voice masterfully dancing around one another as they sketch the outlines of this grand, 40-minute Raag Chandrakauns. If anything, this epic performance of the late-night Raag Chandrakauns is even more seductively spacious and psychedelic than the music heard on the first volume. Obeying the traditional shape of Hindustani classical vocal music performance, a gradual rise in both pitch and rhythmic activity, the music hovers for twenty minutes in a reflective calm, the pulse only gently stated by the tabla while harmonium ornamentation and zither strums float by. In this meditative space, Khan gradually orients us to the contours of the raag, beginning with long notes at the bottom of his register. His improvisation at once builds with a stunningly firm sense of internal logic and seems liberated to explore every melodic and ornamental byway that comes up along the way. By the time we turn to the record’s second side, the music has grown into something far more frenetic, with virtuoso tabla passages at times occupying centre stage between Khan’s increasingly rhythmic melodic variations. Concluding with a sequence of unison tabla and voice passages of breathtaking complexity, the performance is met with rapturous applause. Arriving in a blue-toned variant of the first volume’s sleeve, with acclaimed musicologist Peter Pannke’s liner notes in the original German, Metamusik Festival Berlin ’74 Volume II is not to be missed. Essential listening not just for Hidustanti classic aficionados, but for anyone who needs reminding of the magic of collective music making in the moment.