PRE-ORDERS

If it's extreme, leave it to us. Challenging the sound, playing with the sound, laughing at the sound. A docking of debut recordings from the most talked-about street artists and "sound collages & sound gags" by pro musicians with eccentric ideas. An exciting, bold, and humorous "bright" New Wave omnibus album. Featuring artists like: Kaoru Sato (EP-4), Masumi Hara & BANANA, Shingo Tomoda, Chinju, Mammy, MUZEUM, and more.

A multifaceted artist between meta-theatre, music, and poetry. Toji Tojima builds "visible music" from voices, traditional instruments, and everyday objects. Modern folk infused with art wave and the apocalypses of the everyday.

"kopopo... was inspired by the sensation of being surrounded by countless bubbles underwater—slowly sinking deeper and deeper, until finally drifting along the bottom." - Nekomachi The album also includes a self-remix, “unseen worlds kopopo mix,” which further explores the imagery of 'Koko Doko' originally released by Mystery Circles in 2024: mysterycircles.bandcamp.com/album/koko-doko Our friend Nekomachi out of Tokyo, JP has a prolific history making music with his trusty 1998 classic, the YAMAHA QY100 sequencer. Using no PC / DAW, he utilizes old sequences he's stored on there over the past 2 decades, running them through various effects and adding samples. His unique blend of experimental ambient has been featured on many tapes from a variety of excellent labels such as Shimmering Moods, Mabui Music, Ume Records, Eating Music + more.

Composed for Werner Herzog's documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner, 1974), this previously unreleased score by the German musical collective Popol Vuh accompanies the extraordinary flights of Swiss ski flyer and woodcarver Walter Steiner. Internationally celebrated for his record-breaking ski flying in the 1970s, Steiner (born 1951) became a two-time world champion and earned the nickname "the bird man." Popol Vuh's ethereal score elevates Steiner's flights beyond the realm of sporting achievement, giving musical form to what Herzog would later call "ecstatic truth": a poetic reality that reaches beyond objective fact toward a deeper emotional and spiritual experience. Herzog saw Steiner not simply as a medal-winning athlete, but as someone pursuing "dreams of flight," whose ski flying and work as a woodcarver were driven by the same desire to escape gravity. Together, Popol Vuh's transcendent score and Herzog's use of slow motion stretch each flight beyond its physical limits until it becomes almost sculptural - a suspended moment where human aspiration meets physical vulnerability and the fear of death. Rather than following the trajectory of the jump itself, Popol Vuh's music reaches its crescendo only after the decisive moment has passed. It is a crescendo not of triumph, but of suspension and profound solitude. Founded by Florian Fricke in Munich in 1969, Popol Vuh are considered one of the most influential German avant-garde groups to emerge from the progressive rock movement of the 1970s. After pioneering the use of the Moog synthesizer on their earliest recordings, the group gradually moved towards a more acoustic and spiritual sound, drawing on piano, guitars, percussion, and musical traditions from India, Africa, and South America. Fricke resisted labels such as "krautrock" and "new age," preferring terms like "magic music" or "cosmic space rock" when a description was needed. Beginning with Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Werner Herzog and Florian Fricke developed one of cinema's most distinctive artistic collaborations. Across more than a decade of films - including Heart of Glass, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde - Popol Vuh's scores became an essential part of Herzog's cinematic language, shaping the immersive atmosphere and emotional intensity that define his films. The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is one of Werner Herzog's most important films and marks an early expression of the themes that would come to define his cinema. Time and again, Herzog is drawn to individuals who push beyond fear and the physical limits of the body, pursuing visions and ambitions that exist at the very edge of possibility. To accompany this release, three contemporary artists - james K, ML Buch, and Lorenzo Senni - revisit Popol Vuh's original soundtrack. Their reinterpretations create a dialogue across five decades, revealing the enduring resonance of Popol Vuh's music and its remarkable capacity to continue evoking wonder, contemplation, and transcendence.

Without turning anything upside down, the trio has released their second album, gracefully deepening the unique path they have carved out for themselves. It is an album that already stands in stark contrast to the attention-deficit culture of our times. Indeed, whilst music sometimes seeks to concentrate the intensity of its references and artefacts, the trio takes a step back, deploying an intensity that is subtly distributed. Thanks to their progressive instrumental tracks blending elements inherited from dub, jazz, folk and even musique concrète, the trio has never allowed the quality of their music to suffer from their experimentation; at the same time, they have never been afraid to venture off the beaten track to achieve the sound they desire. Every single track of this album cast like fragile bridges over various landscapes that explore cycles and the natural rhythm within. It is up to the listener to tread carefully and not lose their footing and embrace the cinematic movement of this music. The three artists have indeed achieved a musical expression so free that it possesses the power of illusion. We are suddenly swept up in all these illusions, to the point where our memories are in flux. Both haunting and in motion, this trio’s music offers an impregnable mental retreat and an invitation to dance. This album conveys a dreamlike conviction that time, in its relentless flight, might—if only for a moment—be brought to a halt. A halt that awaits you.

Andreas Tilliander released »Ljud« in 2001 as the first full-length album under his real name. The year before, the Swedish producer’s »Cliphop« album under his Mokira moniker had established him in the world of adventurous electronic music and the clicks’n’cuts scene. »Ljud« was just as minimalistic, warm, and playful as its predecessor while also notably inspired by house music. It is a timeless record based on happy accidents, playful loops, and lively spontaneity. For its 25th anniversary, Keplar presents a vinyl reissue with adjusted artwork by graphic designer Marc Hohmann and updated mastering by the artist himself. Tilliander laid the foundation for his two first albums when he got rid of most of his music gear in 1998 after meeting Joel Brindefalk, who was already releasing music on the legendary Börft label. Brindefalk was using a computer as his main instrument and introduced Tilliander to the audio editing suite Sonic Foundry Sound Forge. »What he did with that software is what made me sell most of the hardware except my Nord Modular and a Korg MS-20.« The former synthesizer played an integral role while Tilliander made the tracks for »Ljud,« working primarily in the modular studio environment Jeskola Buzz. »Ljud« came together in an intuitive process. »It’s still how I work 25 years later: I first make loops, create bits and pieces, and build up my own sound library as a foundation,« Tilliander explains. The Nord Modular and Buzz, which allowed him to swap samples and produce new sounds out of pre-existing ones, provided him with material for loops that formed the basis of the ten tracks. »I would start with a few elements, add more into the mix, then take them out again—arranging the pieces in real time while recording.« The casualness and vivacity of this improvisational approach becomes tangible throughout »Ljud.« »Ljud« was released on Achim Szepanski’s Mille Plateaux, which had published the seminal »Clicks_+_Cuts« compilation in 2000. »I was part of that scene and I liked the digital aesthetic of the label,« says Tilliander »Coming from a very analogue setup, working with computer music and this kind of minimalism was very inspiring.« When preparing »Ljud« for the Keplar reissue, he ran the music through an analogue outboard and noticed he was still happy with the way it sounded. »It brought back fond memories. I hope the same is true for people who heard it back then, and that everyone who discovers it now will enjoy it, too!«

"Tara Cunningham’s guitar glitch miniatures draw patterns in negative space on new mini-album Warm Ground. Operating predominantly within improvisational and experimental music, guitarist Tara Cunningham has developed a discrete sonic language that reveals the full textural and timbral range of her instrument. Marking a new chapter for Cunningham that builds on her solo debut, Almost – Not Exactly, released on Non Classical in 2025, Warm Ground unfolds across seven compelling instrumental dialogues - each a conversation of rhythms and found sounds, syncopated and juxtaposed, open to encounter. Implied by the title of first single ‘Following a Thought’, Cunningham weaves an exploratory melody into the spaces between field recordings. At once introspective and highly relational, each track ushers the listener into a world of different scales, seeking beauty and meaning in the everyday, from the discrete mechanisms of ‘Fridgelight’ to the delicately unhinged organism of ‘Flying Ant Day’. "Cunningham finds a natural home on Odda’s roster of artists sensitive to the details of their materials and surroundings, finding kinship alongside the intimate songcraft of Kirk Barley and Fohn in the gaps between composition and improvisation."

Spring Back, Ball Forward is the Soda Gong debut from Jung dj, nom de plume of shapeshifting multi-instrumentalist Randy Riback. Following a series of uniformly great self-releases and cassettes on the dearly missed Lillerne Tapes, this collection observes the spacious and angular dynamics of 1990s Midwestern post-rock through the lens of the bedroom electronic music producer. Perhaps surprisingly, amp worship lies at the center of the album: a fascination with the grain, pressure, and emotional charge of amplification and gain, refracted through the strange remove of digital amp modeling. Tubes, speakers, sag, and in-the-red textures are a critical part of the album’s expressive vocabulary, imparting density and colorful saturation while lending even its most weightless passages a vital sense of physical presence. Over the course of twelve tracks, wistful ambience gives way to blunt heaviness and roiling catharsis, underpinned by a palpable sense of loss and grief. The album’s auspicious cast of collaborators further complicates its emotional terrain. Spoken contributions from Natalia Panzer and Angelina Nonaj occupy strikingly different registers: Panzer’s diffuse and oblique, drifting in and out of the music’s contours; Nonaj’s a vivid travelogue, grounding the record in place and lived experience. Elsewhere, Soda Gong veteran Mister Water Wet joins a small constellation of guests whose playing folds naturally into Riback’s arrangements, blurring the boundaries between computer and ensemble music. For all of its attention to texture, process, and the material qualities of sound, Spring Back, Ball Forward is first and foremost an emotionally potent work, possessed of a directness that can feel rare within experimental electronic music. Riback draws from a rich and idiosyncratic musical vernacular, arriving at something deeply felt and difficult to place: a singular statement whose pathos exceeds the sum of its references.

Moments after debuting on Shelter Press with the excellent 'All Things Might Spill', Chantal Michelle returns with two weighty side-long compositions (featuring poet Funto Omojola and saxophone ace Patrick Shiroishi) that each showcase her scrupulous minimalism in different ways. Michelle takes things slow on 'Sudden Oceans', to the point where it's not clear exactly what's happening at first. Shiroishi's flute and sax playing is at the dead center of the piece and Michelle works to transform the phrases into lapping waves, directly mimicking the nature of water. When you lock in, it's surprisingly effective; Shiroishi doesn't play melodies in the usual sense, his sounds (the tones of the instruments and his actual breaths) are instead used by Michelle to represent the totality of the sea's movements. You can hear the wind across the water, pebbles washing on the beach and waves crashing into cliffs in the distance if you listen carefully enough. And somehow, none of this acoustic wizardry requires any extraneous processing. Clune works with movement only, not morphing the instruments' acoustics, shifting their expected motion instead. On the flip, 'Unit of Heart' is very different, sonically at least. It opens with a poem and a lullaby-like vocal melody from Omojola. "This is where we buy fish," she states blankly. "I mean, this is where our mouth turns saliva into spears only a throat can recognize. In fold into fold into folk into fold." Her words, careful, vivid and quietly intense, serve as a prelude; her lullaby gets louder and Michelle follows with breathy, droning synthesized pads that seem to wallow in their uneasiness. On the surface, it's placid, almost ambient sound but there's discordance beneath the surface that Michelle brings out in time, before Omojola's voice returns. Watery environmental sounds wash into the stereo field and Shiroishi's sax appears as an elaborate foil to the peaceable, disconcerting synths and outdoor ambiance. And here's where Michelle gets really smart: treating a familiar forest recording with distortion, she drowns out the horn, reaching sheet noise levels of density and volume before Omojola bookends the piece with another verse.

o celebrate 30 years since its original release, Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores returns in a new edition on Warp Records. Originally released on Skam Records in 1996, Hi Scores was Boards of Canada’s first widely available release. The six-track release features some of the duo’s most enduring pieces, including “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” and “Everything You Do Is A Balloon”. For its 30th anniversary, Hi Scores is being reissued by Warp, marking the first time their whole catalogue has been widely available on vinyl at the same time. Hi Scores has not been available on vinyl since 2014 and is newly packaged in a gatefold 12" sleeve, with four 12"×12" prints.

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

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

Forty years of cassette releases, pressed for the first time on vinyl First of two instalments exploring the previously unreleased sonic archives of one of Poland’s most enigmatic living artists - with its first volume focused on his deep listening practice and spiritual reverie (recorded 1990–2013) The last time Andrzej Dudek-Dürer took a banknote bearing the face of the Polish anarchist Jarosław Dąbrowski from his pocket to trade it for a pair of shoes was in 1969. He bought them for 120zł - the equivalent of 100€ today - and never replaced them since then. Only rebuilt them, year after year, drawing a needle and thread through the leather each time it split, closing one wound before the next one opened. It became a ritual of precision, stitching a record of another year into their soles. That same year, in Wrocław, he arrived at a conclusion that would recalibrate everything that followed. Convinced he was the reincarnation of Albrecht Dürer, he adopted the surname Dudek-Dürer, stopped cutting his hair and began wearing the same garments every day. It was the first ritual of many, though he wouldn't have called it that yet. Look closely enough, over the decades, and it is always the same gesture, returning in different material: hair growing in a single unbroken strand, a needle drawing thread through leather, sitar strings pulled taut across a neck he built with his own hands and magnetic tape spooling forward inside the cassette boxes stacked against his walls. None of this began in a vacuum. Dudek-Dürer emerged from the Wrocław neo-avant-garde, in a Polish art world where an exhibition could be cancelled overnight by the stroke of a censor's pen. In 1973, his exhibition Auto-crucifixion was shut down by the state, and for a time he found himself blocked from exhibiting his own art at all - the one force in his life that ever came close to cutting the thread. He seemed to experience it differently. In 1974, after long, patient research into sitar craftsmanship, he built his first prototype with his brother, a knowledgeable luthier. In 1978, in a smoked-out jazz club, he took his first steps into sound recording with the unreleased album Jazz From Underground with his first band. By 1979, recognition started to travel further than he could. Turning toward Far-Eastern philosophy, meditation and the idea of reincarnation was another language of freedom for him. It was a way of claiming an inner territory the state could not reach, a border it could not close. Mail Art served a parallel function, reaching further out: in a country that restricted travel and expression, sending and receiving art through the postal system became an act of quiet rebellion. The body, in his understanding, is only an envelope readied for constant transformation. From this came Metaphysical Telepathy: during the years he could not leave Poland, he treated that confinement as a rehearsal room, sending his mind out ahead on the same thread his body would later follow. Living Sculpture grew from the same root with performances of stillness beside static art objects, until the boundary between the object and the man beside it simply dissolved. Camera Meditation extended the same instinct into photography: a shutter click flattening three dimensions into two so that a single instant could be held forever. Inspired by the pioneers of self-portrait photography like Robert Cornelius, he used it to document time itself, and kept explaining to me: "You know. This is not about vanity. This is about observing time passing.” The isolation did not end suddenly. It ended the way his own philosophy had already predicted it would, from the inside first. Mail Art quietly solved the problem politics couldn't. Correspondence built during years of confinement slowly worked its way through doors the state itself had kept locked. Contacts made through folded paper and stamps became invitations. Ultimately, invitations became passports. In 1983 he made his first trip outside Poland, to Germany, in search of the audio technology he couldn’t get his hands on before. In 1985, he was invited by the Indian embassy in Poland to give a sitar concert on an instrument he had spent a decade patiently stringing together - half sitar, half tanpura, built from patience and determination. After the collapse of the People's Republic of Poland, the travels kept unspooling: South Korea, then Mexico, then Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and the United States - each stop leaving behind its own small knot of tape, tied off and carried home. In the decades since, recognition arrived at the same unhurried pace: he conducted workshops at UC Berkeley, served as vice-president for artistic affairs of the Union of Polish Art Photographers and the Union of Polish Visual Artists between 2010 and 2014 and received the Bronze Medal for Merit to Culture - Gloria Artis. His visual work gradually entered collections including the National Museums of Warsaw, the Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, MoMA and the Venice Biennale. His musical practice, by contrast, never found that kind of room - left to circulate quietly, sharing his cassette tapes directly, waiting for someone willing to follow it further. It took months before I could find a way to reach Andrzej Dudek-Dürer - his presence online is very close to nonexistent. Surprisingly, LinkedIn turned out to be the only door still open, a faintly absurd irony given everything else about him. I packed the strict minimum for a three-day trip and an empty notebook and made my way to Wrocław. His headquarters sits in the neighbourhood of Grabyszyn: a two-storey pre-war house that has belonged to his family for generations. The man who opened the door was long-haired, long-bearded, in his trademark leather shoes and patched jeans. We sat in his living room, in front of a computer where decades of recordings sat organised in cryptically named files, surrounded by books and objects that had arrived one layer at a time, leaving room for only two chairs in the middle. His shoes sat by the door, rebuilt so many times they had become their own quiet sculpture. Cassette tapes filled boxes against the walls, almost unlabelled, each one a spool of thread holding decades of sound that had never once been asked for, until now. I listened for hours: meditating in front of strangers on the porch of a Seoul temple until the tourists stopped taking photos and simply waited with him; a stand-off with border guards at the US–Mexico crossing over an instrument they couldn't identify and didn't trust; a session with the Stockhausen family that he still, decades later, describes like it happened last week. All of it interrupted, occasionally, by the smell of soup boiling and fresh bread warming on the ceramic stove. After two days, it felt like being handed the end of a very long thread and asked, gently, to keep following it. I left with a USB drive holding his full discography, signed with his unmistakable signature. Astral Meditations From A Living Statue is a length of that thread, drawn out from the boxes stacked against his walls - recordings gathered from different rooms, different countries, different decades. This first record breathes slowly: incense-thick, meditative, built for stillness. A cutting-edge séance in outer space where machines learn how to dream. It begins with the neo-classical improvisations of Andrzej, space-delayed, recorded at Klub Muzyki i Literatury in Wrocław in 2002. 'When..So' opens the curtains with a deep-rooted meditation accompanied by slow-decaying piano figures illuminated by a candle-lit spirit gathering. Los Angeles, 1990: a dormant villa, a grand piano, the voice of Bonnie Barnett. 'Exception' is captured in a single room, in a single afternoon - voice and keys circling each other, neither one leading, until the silence between the notes starts to feel like the instrument. 'The Meta...' and 'Tired Of...', recorded at Studio Morandi in Ponte Nossa, Italy, in 1992, settle into a sitar drone built entirely from patience - overtones stacking and beating against each other, strung by a man who never once set foot in India. 'Mastery Of...' follows, recorded the same year at Studio Suski in Łomianki, pushing that same hum further still, until pitch dissolves into a spectral reverie. 'Transcendental Sound', from 2000, closes the first record in a slow bath of celestial frequency - better heard beside the shores of the Odra river. More than fifty years after deciding that a life could become an artwork, Andrzej Dudek-Dürer continues to inhabit that decision. His shoes keep wearing thin against the earth's crust. His hair keeps growing, one strand at a time. His cassette tapes keep spooling in the dark of their boxes. Now the thread finds its last shape: a single unbroken groove, spiralling inward from the outer edge to the label at the centre. Never cut - the way nothing else in his life ever was. Drop the needle and it will find that groove and follow it, the same way a needle once followed leather, once followed a border it couldn't cross, once followed string into an instrument that didn't exist until he built it. This record is the other end of a thread that has been travelling for fifty years. For the length of both sides, it rests here, in your hands. This is a timeless proof that the Lord of the New Age was never lost."

Four electroacoustic works by Ivo Malec composed between 1961 and 1982, from the early Dahovi to Week-end, gathered by Recollection GRM and reissued on vinyl for the very first time. LP version. Composed over a period of twenty years, these four electroacoustic pieces by Ivo Malec reflect the richness of his sonic universe and reveal the unique power of his musical writing. His strength lies in an ability to harness emerging sounds and techniques (ranging from complex editing to early computer music and electronic synthesis) and develop them through an exploratory approach, giving rise to musical ideas of rare clarity. This sense of determination, not only in terms of the future of sounds but also of musical forms, is what makes Ivo Malec an essential composer on the contemporary music scene and a key figure in the GRM's repertoire. (François Bonnet, Paris, 2025) A collection of seminal works of musique concrète composed between 1961 and 1982, reissued for the very first time, in a debossed printed sleeve. Side A: Luminétudes (1968), Recitativo (1980). Side B: Dahovi (1961), Week-end (1982).

Music From Memory presents ‘Sleep Machines’, a new collaborative album from UK ambient pioneers O Yuki Conjugate and German producer and DJ Philipp Otterbach. Formed in Nottingham in 1982, O Yuki Conjugate have spent more than four decades developing a singular approach to what they now describe as ‘dirty ambient’. Emerging from the post-punk DIY scene and drawing early inspiration from artists including Cabaret Voltaire, The Durutti Column and Jon Hassell, the group gradually carved out a space between post-industrial electronics, ambient music and Fourth World experimentation. Centred today around founding members Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme, their work has retained an outsider sensibility throughout its many periods of activity and hibernation. Philipp Otterbach approaches music from an equally open-ended perspective. As a producer, collector and DJ, his work moves freely between drone, dub, techno, house and electronics. His sets and productions share a fascination with unexpected connections, allowing disparate sounds to drift into one another through intuition rather than fixed genre boundaries. ‘Sleep Machines’ began with a chance meeting at The Gun on Well St. in London. Otterbach asked, “Would you be interested in doing a collaboration?” “A collaboration? Sorry, we don't do collaborations,” came the reply. “But wouldn’t it be fun?” “We don't do fun either.” Despite themselves, O Yuki Conjugate tentatively sent over an initial track. An avalanche of ideas quickly came back, and what began as an unlikely proposal developed into 18 months of recording, file-swapping, mixing and repeated reworking between the UK and Germany. Produced by Otterbach, the resulting ten tracks bring together recognisable elements of both sides while gradually dissolving the lines between them. O Yuki Conjugate’s hazy atmospheres, dubwise spaces and tactile rhythms meet Otterbach’s instinct for strange detail, low-slung electronics and shifting forms. Rather than functioning as a collection of separate pieces, the album moves without gaps, unfolding as a single continuous work in which one environment slowly slips into the next. ‘Sleep Machines’ is both O Yuki Conjugate’s first collaborative album and an unlikely meeting point between two generations of musicians whose work has consistently existed at the edges of established forms.

“Little” Ann Bridgeforth left this plane in 2003, several years before the song that would become her most revered, found its audience. “Deep Shadows” is a soul boulder of epic proportions, a stark depiction of longing and claustrophobic isolation if there ever was one.The song was recorded along with a bunch of other soul gems by Dave Hamilton and Darrell Goolsby in late 1960s Detroit just to be buried unreleased in a box for decades to come. It wasn’t until 1998, when Ace released it for the first time on CD and its reputation has grown exponentially since, the tune’s snappy drums, vibes and wailing vocals getting sampled for example by Madlib, Grand Puba, Loyle Carner and dozens of other beat heads.Back in 2009, Timmion compiled all of Ann’s canned output on an album and now releases the song on a 7” backed with a new version “Deeper Shadows”. The treatment flips Ann’s vocals to hit a different beat from the original, pasting them over an unreleased backing track from UK session group The Third Degree. Miraculously, this potion works delivering a fresh interpretation of Ann’s masterpiece. The two vastly different renditions of deep soul heaven are now available on vinyl for you to spin.

PROUD OF ME is a deeply personal new album nearly a decade in the making from ALA.NI, the enigmatic British singer, songwriter and musician whose voice seems to exist outside of time, and composer Adrian Younge. The record captures a diaristic snapshot of ALA.Ni's life across several years, tracing love, longing, grief and self-discovery against the backdrop of Los Angeles. Across Proud of Me, ALA.NI writes plainly about desire, grief, intimacy and self-possession, often leaving the emotional edges exposed. From the hushed intimacy of "Face in the Evening" to the hazy romance of "Middle of Nowhere", the album traces the story of a woman learning to trust her own voice and experience.

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.

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.

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.