PRE-ORDERS

Four decades after Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo, Francesco Messina returns to his hundred-year-old Schimmel piano for seven pieces of hazy drone and ambient minimalism, written with no deadlines after playing that 1979 album live in Milan. Limited LP version. Francesco Messina is perhaps best known for his split album with fellow composer Raul Lovisoni, Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo, originally released on the seminal Italian label Cramps in 1979. Along with contemporaries Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Giusto Pio, Messina helped reshape the world of modern composition with an organic rawness and haunting beauty. In November 2023, Messina performed Prati Bagnati live for the first time in Milan, Italy, along with pianist Michele Fedrigotti, who appeared on the original LP. The concert was a tremendous success and led the composer to further reflect upon the music he made over 40 years ago. From his home piano, a hundred-year-old Schimmel with magnificent resonance, new pieces began to emerge out of these meditative sessions. As Messina says in the liner notes, “The idea of making a new album wasn’t the driving force at all; what mattered was trying to reconnect with the ‘freedom’ I had experienced back then while creating that music. I started over without haste or deadlines, simply trying to find a deeper, inner connection.” W.25TH / Superior Viaduct is honored to present Le api dell’invisibile. From the hazy drone of For Florian and the title track to the gentle swells of Letter for an Absent Friend, the album is a lush amalgam of new age and ambient minimalism that is vividly reminiscent of Messina’s earlier work. The title draws inspiration from a famous reflection by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” It is a phrase that has long shaped the way Messina looks at his music, transforming lived experience into sound, making audible what normally eludes the eye. • New album for the Italian composer, producer and collaborator of Franco Battiato • His 1979 Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo is a heavenly minimal masterpiece • Recommended for fans of Harold Budd, Floating Points and Music For Airports • Liner notes by Francesco Messina

My encounter with the Hoh Rain Forest, located inside Olympic National Park across the water from Seattle, felt like seeing a whole new world for the first time in my life. Long green fronds draped along the branches, like a scene in which fairies could be heard whispering to one another. But when you try to listen, no sound can be heard. Amidst the mysterious silence, in which no birds or insects make a sound, every living thing seemed to have stopped in its place, only to start dancing when some kind of spell is cast over them. -Hiroshi Yoshimura Originally issued on compact disc in 1996, Quiet Forest was Hiroshi Yoshimura’s last album-length work to be released before his passing in 2003. Largely inspired by his trip to the vast forests of the North American Pacific Northwest, the album is an aural reflection of the fantastical, surreal beauty he experienced as he walked through the otherworldly wilderness for the first time. The basic tracks were recorded in the fall of 1993. After numerous revisions to the song titles and a scrapped idea to overlay the tracks with nature field recordings, Hiroshi ultimately produced a latter-day masterwork that feels like the spiritual follow-up to Green, one of his defining works from a decade earlier.

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.

Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with Late Loop, his first album in five years. Two voices sit at the centre of the record: Alison Skidmore, Stott's vocal partner for more than a decade, and Elaine Howley, working with him for the first time. They were given songs in various states of completion, some close to finished, others fragments or loops, often pitched down and slowed. The vocals were layered up, then carved back until only what was needed remained, carrying a set of songs mostly concerned with a separation. Stott began with no plan and a small set of constraints: no basslines, no reverb, no effects except a single delay unit. The album passed through several near-complete versions before settling - a drone record, something close to brass band concrète, a piece that might have ended up as an installation. Each was set aside because texture alone was not the point. He wanted songs. The methods stayed loose and primitive throughout. A drum machine was played through speakers and recorded back into the room, then pitched down until the rhythm sagged under its own weight. A pump organ was recorded through a microphone placed on the floor. Valves warming up and a mixing desk worn in over the years leave their mark on the sound. With no reverb or low end to lean on, the arrangements are left exposed, with an unusual clarity and fragility, every stitch on show. Downbeat, electronica and leftfield song sit side by side across the record, which gives up its detail gradually over repeated listening. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Cover photograph by Myriam Boulos.

Echoes of Impermanence sees David Granström’s previously established strict hermetic minimalist musical topography undergo a major shift with the introduction of the electric guitar, which instigates a breaking of the sealed crystal walls of the composer’s previous work within music of long duration and precise digital synthesis, bringing forth a riff-laden spirit previously lingering below the surface. The album was recorded at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion EMS as well as in the composer’s own studio with the help of Mats Erlandsson and features a guest appearance by long-time collaborator and XKatedral co-founder Maria W Horn performing on the Hurdy-Gurdy on the title track. David Granström is a composer and musician from Umeå in the northern part of Sweden. His hometown is a stronghold of extreme musical expression and consequently Granström grew up playing guitar in a metal band and started to compose music within that context which eventually evolved into solo projects, having access to studio facilities adjacent to the rehearsal space. Granström initially found his personal musical voice within the context of electroacoustic composition utilizing his advanced programming ability to manifest a sound and formal structure governed by algorithmic processes. The resulting musical work is characterized by harmonic simplicity and spatiotextural complexity, employing sounds of synthetic and acoustic origin in combination with strict digital synthesis techniques.

Japanese edition BOX UHQCD, *Drukqs*, released in 2001 by Richard D. James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin), is being reissued in special packaging to commemorate the album’s 25th anniversary! A Japan-exclusive, strictly limited-production 2-CD box set (in high-quality UHQCD format)—a miniature recreation of the original 4-LP box set—will also be released. Featuring 30 tracks spanning approximately 100 minutes, this album interweaves the ferocious sounds of drill’n’bass and noise electronics with delicate piano pieces reminiscent of Erik Satie. It continues to be highly acclaimed as a landmark of 21st-century electronic music, where an experimental spirit coexists with overwhelming beauty. Featuring the iconic track “Avril 14th”—later sampled by Kanye West—the album showcases a collection of pieces where intensely experimental electronic music coexists with serene melodies. As the boldest manifestation of Aphex Twin’s creativity, its innovative spirit remains undimmed even a quarter-century after its release./p>