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NYC's Sweater on Polo follows up his acclaimed L.I.E.S. 12 inch from 2023 with debut full length double LP, "Almighty Grand Essence" This is pure to form 1985-1988 Chicago House worship, and while many have attempted to recreate this sound, most fail to deliver with correct reverence. Names like Saunders, Mixx, Virgo Four, undoubtedly appear in this conversation with Sweater on Polo taking cues and transforming the vintage sound into re-imagined dancefloor classics. Raw but clean, psychedelic but functional...this nine track record can move the crowd in all the right ways, with the lush deepness of "The Creation" to the nu-wave-house hybrid of "Proto Wave" or BMX beat track closer Psychotic Seance, its rare to find a young producer tapping into the vaults in such a focused, effective manner. Highly recommended to house heads worldwide.

KAKUHAN haven't released much, but what's out there is some of the most astonishing hybrid electroacoustic music that's emerged in the last few years. Owing as much to Autechre as it does to Arthur Russell, it's dizzyingly psychedelic music that flits between wild free improvisation and obsessive, micro-edited precision, unclassifiable rhythmic and tonal experimentation that nods to the renaissance era and the contemporary dancefloor sometimes in the same breath. And in 2023, not long after the release of their now-classic debut album "Metal Zone", KAKUHAN were invited to perform live at Unsound in Kraków. The duo were offered the opportunity to collaborate with a local artist, so after serious consideration decided on percussionist and musicologist Adam Gołębiewski, a veteran improviser who's performed and recorded with everyone from Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore to Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark.

Hino and Nakagawa were struck by Gołębiewski's unique tone and his very specific, immediately recognizable approach to drumming, realizing immediately that the collaboration would stretch their concept even further. "Personally, I was looking forward to hearing how Hino's rhythmic sequences and Adam's percussion would interact," says Nakagawa. But it's Gołębiewski's interaction with his cymbals particularly that bridges a gap in KAKUHAN's sound, existing in the space between Nakagawa's cello and Hino's stuttering samples. In fact, the performance was so successful that the trio headed to Kraków's KPD Studio shortly afterwards, dubbing an exclusive session with engineer Rafał Drewniany that would become "Repercussions". The session's vision is captured perfectly by the album cover, a painting from Polish artist Alicja Pakosz that shows a knife edge splitting a jet of water. It's the relative sharpness of Gołębiewski's sound that defines this project, cutting through Nakagawa and Hino's musical rituals and creating something new in the process.

Using a bow to extract eerie metallic resonances from his kit, Gołębiewski often sounds like another string player, punctuating Hino's exacting rolls and Nakagawa's blood-curdling pizzicato echoes with knife-edge squeals on opening track II. And when the flurries of beats vanish completely on VII, Gołębiewski and Nakagawa are left to create xenharmonic ambience with their scraped, atmospheric drones, letting Hino's low-end rumbles and boiled textures suggest a rhythm from the periphery. Nakagawa's cello practically sings on 'IV', sounding more like woodwind or bird calls than strings, and Gołębiewski acts as a cracked mirror, replying with uneasy scrapes and acrobatic rhythmic bursts that neatly augment Hino's complex electroid sequences. Not jazz exactly, it's hallucinatory expressionism that straddles the line between harmony and dissonance, control and chaos or human and computer.

*100 copies limited edition* "Music, like love, surprises you, makes your heart race, gives you new eyes with which to look at yourself in the mirror..." - Gigi Masin With an exclusive presentation by Gigi Masin, Up To 23 release their second album, now with an expanded three-member lineup following the permanent addition of Enrico Coniglio alongside founder members Marco Buffetti and Francesco Fincato. The album draws inspiration from the 1980s, evoking atmospheres reminiscent of sci-fi soundtracks. Partly romantic, partly doom ambient, the work unfolds as a requiem for our planet. Liquid and enveloping atmospheres drift between ambient territories with a distinctly melodic character - explored through treated guitars and synthesizers - and subtly electronic paths traced to the rhythm of patterns built through sequencers and programmed structures. Dramatic and evocative moments emerge throughout this succession of varied yet perfectly integrated and fluid soundscapes, where sounds and progressions combine with ever-shifting solutions, following a descriptive thread that remains consistent as it continuously unravels through encompassing and emotionally engaging textures. "Gigi Masin Presents: An Apple A Day You Die Anyway" is the perfect soundtrack to these dark times that Up To 23 want to color in order to continue to hope, to live without having to survive.

The first resonant space Zosha Warpeha played in was the Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Oslo, Norway. Built as a mausoleum, its walls reach up into a gradual archway, creating an environment where sound expands and reverberates for twelve seconds before decaying into silence. Warpeha was greeted only by dim lights when she entered, and it wasn’t until she had spent several minutes listening that she was able to make out the frescoes that covered every inch of the room: graphic depictions of the cycle of life from conception through death. As the sound of her Hardanger d’amore encountered the walls and these slowly emerging scenes, they obscured its point of origin in both time and space, augmenting its own life cycle. The experience sat in the back of her mind over the next several years as she developed her own patient style of composition and performance, one that comes into full bloom on her new album I grow accustomed to the dark. When Warpeha was selected as an artist in residence at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room in 2025, she saw it as an opportunity to more intentionally explore how her music might fill a room with ample natural reverb. I grow accustomed to the dark documents two single-take solo performances for Hardanger d’amore and voice at IPR, with both pieces composed in a unique tuning system developed to interact with the space itself. Listeners can trace resonance from the contact of the bow on gut strings into the body of the instrument, its five sympathetic strings offering another layer of refraction, before the sound is thrown about the cavity of the room. The echoes emerge like a photographic double exposure, or wisps of smoke that linger in the air, creating ghostly harmonic convergences that blur the line between what is there and not-there. Sound begins to act like light, a synesthetic alchemy that transforms drones into beams and ornamental trills into flickers. Both side-long compositions, “filament” and “visual purple,” exemplify a duality that animates Warpeha’s music: an expressive, individualistic style that draws on extensive knowledge of her instrument’s history in folk traditions, and an austere, devotional quality maintained by focus and precision. Though very different in character and structure, both pieces evolve slowly through numerous repetitive phrases, passages of stillness, and bursts of intensity. “filament” opens with a cycle of delicate melodic fragments played and sung around a drone before blossoming into an outpouring of swooping arpeggios, harmonics flying from the strings like sparks off a bonfire. The disorienting pulsation of harmonic beating forms the core of “visual purple,” the close-tone dissonance building to a swarm of open strings ringing boldly throughout the space. After the knotty tones reach their climax, the piece collapses into studied quietude, hushed, but without any drop in intensity. When Warpeha first visited the Vigeland Museum in 2019, she was in Oslo to deepen her relationship to the Hardanger fiddle through the study of Norwegian traditional music, which is primarily passed down aurally. The experience of learning songs by ear, not only internalizing the tune but also absorbing the techniques and tonalities by listening, was a crucial step in her development as a composer. The years since have seen her sharpen those skills as a prolific member of the New York avant-garde and improvised music communities. Warpeha’s music encourages listeners to join her in this journey, to listen closely with each repeated phrase and through each dramatic shift. Like the frescoes on Vigeland’s walls, with time and intention, the depth of I grow accustomed to the dark comes on like a revelation.

With roots in Sierra Leone and Guinea and now based in New York, experimental sound artist Lamin Fofana has released a string of acclaimed works on forward-thinking labels such as Hundebiss, Avian, Peak Oil, and The Trilogy Tapes. His latest and essential release arrives via Honest Jon’s. Forging sharp-edged treatments and molten sonics, the album resonates like liquid metal, constantly shifting form. Organized in pairs, the tracks collide between cutting blades and softened resonances, weaving in poetry, text, and field recordings to enact a relentless cycle of decomposition and recomposition. Inspired by the words of Suzanne Césaire, this is an otherworldly kosmische statement—an aural manifesto of transformation.

Roman Hiele (1991) is a Brussels-based musician and composer whose work explores the boundaries between improvisation and electronic composition. His music unfolds as a living system of shifting harmonies, fractured rhythms, and unexpected turns.

At the core of Hiele’s practice lies a deep fascination for contrast, where his soundscapes act as both anchor and disruption, sharpening the emotional depth of images and spaces, a sensibility that extends into his collaborations with filmmakers, visual artists, and designers.

His new album, Emo Inhaler, on Stroom is an emulsifying force, blending these threads into a single, fluid whole. The record condenses compositions born from improvisatory explorations and electro-acoustic experimentation. Recorded and concluded across various studios and train coupés, Emo Inhaler is expansive, yet tightly woven, creating a singular sonic identity that explores Hiele’s own world of musical off-key vignettes, balancing between light and sinister. With Emo Inhaler, Hiele reaffirms his place as one of Belgium’s most adventurous and distinctive contemporary voices.

Robert Stillman didn’t set out to make a concept album about Steve Jobs. But as a composer and improviser whose music asks questions about his relationship with reality, a curiosity about the promises and follies of technology took him there. Following an intuitive path from James Bridle’s acclaimed book on non-human intelligence Ways of Being to the seminal 1995 essay “The California Ideology”, Stillman arrived at Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs – and what would become the catalyst for his new album. “10,000 Rivers points to an alternative narrative about a man who is tormented by the instability of his reality, so tries to invent his way out of it,” Stillman explains. “Ultimately, his tech designs become expressions of his will to replace the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world with something that strives to be barely physical: streamlined, symmetrical, uncomplicated, and deathless.” Highly original, wholly unclassifiable, 10,000 Rivers is part cultural critique, part sonic biography and takes the form of a series of songs, instrumentals and abstract soundscapes that respond directly to moments or paradigms from Jobs’ life. Stylistically, it leans on Stillman’s relationship with the smooth music of Billy Ocean, Gloria Estefan and 10cc from the ‘80s and early ‘90s, made at what he calls “the knife’s edge between the human and the digital.” “A lot of this music, coincidentally, was contemporary with Jobs’ heyday and the mainstream adoption of his first personal computers,” Stillman continues, revelling in the playful deconstruction of their aspirational and anodyne qualities. Twinkling, synthetic arpeggios sit alongside tumbledown acoustic improvisation – think Mort Garson meets Moondog – fragments of ambient sound collapse into queasy auto-tuned lullabies, the melancholy paradise of Brian Wilson-esque California dreaming dismantled into uncanny free jazz freakouts. Recorded to ½-inch 8 track tape and mixed down in real-time to give it a live, performative quality, the result is a speculative, genreless soundtrack to a man’s life and the wider societal values it came to define. Drawing on his recent collaborations with Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner as touring support and live band-member for The Smile, Stillman’s work has long resisted categorisation, and been presented in a range of media, including installations, performance lectures and 12 solo albums, the most recent of which What Does It Mean to Be American? takes a similarly conceptual scalpel to complex notions of US identity. One of Stillman’s most ambitious and idiosyncratic projects to date, 10,000 Rivers is an elegy for the hubris of a humankind trying to design its way to immortality as it falls apart at the seams.

APORIAMOR noun 1. The death of love’s contradiction. | “Embody APORIAMOR” Etymology aporia-: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. from Greek aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’ -amor: love. Sentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y unión con otro ser. Del latín amor. -mor: latin for death. APORIAMOR explores the affective ontological and organic processes of love and lust in the turmoil of an urban existence, through the female lens. It expresses the process of strengthening through heartbreak in its various forms. With her debut EP The Art of the Concrete, elsas knew that by giving that name to a record which was ironically expansive and experimental, she would be calling for a distilled and clearer path further down the line. This is what she’s been incorporating into the sonic world of this new EP, APORIAMOR, signifying the birth of a more matured and distilled version of herself as an artist. With APORIAMOR (“the death of love’s contradiction”) elsas conveys a personal process of healing in the romantic space. Through different experiences of heartbreak, elsas builds a language - a coping mechanism attached to its subsequent artistic expression – that isn’t founded on hardness or a closing-off, but instead, on a playful but profound reckoning, and learning of self-worth. APORIAMOR embraces the complexities of being a lover-girl: of moving through life with an open heart. It celebrates the clarity, sweet hindsight, and detachment that come from processing emotion. APORIAMOR is both an affirmation and a release. elsas makes canonical blends with a forward boundary-bending vision. Her sound in this record is naturally referential of both her Mediterranean heritage and UK alternative music — intrinsic parts of her lived experience. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with artists she deeply admires, each exchange enriching her creative world. The experience of working hand-in-hand with Sampha for the last 3 years and ongoingly has been a core of her evolution as an artist. She has also collaborated in many forms with artists like Florence + the Machine, Little Simz, Jordan Rakei, Jockstrap, Obongjayar, Black Country New Road, Genevieve Artadi (KNOWER) and Duval Timothy. Additionally, her ongoing work with the Idrîsî Ensemble, of which she is a core member, continues to inform her artistic depth. The making of this largely self-produced record unfolded over four years — “it’s a well-kneaded dough,” she says. These songs evolved through exposure to multiple environments: from early writing sessions in her childhood home in the Spanish countryside, to stages across the U.S. while on tour supporting Sampha. Experimentation and modulation are an intrinsic part of elsas’ method, conceiving songs as organisms that respond to their surroundings. Collaborators on this collection of songs include Shrink, Will Lister, Gabriel Gifford, Ethan P. Flynn and more. The record was mixed by David Wrench (a long-time supporter of elsas’) and Nathan Boddy, and mastered by Matt Colton. With APORIAMOR, elsas creates a visual world from the fabulation of the past, as an act of playful historical revisionism in which she embeds herself as both subject and storyteller. The songs function like an archive of her experiences across various years, each one unearthed and presented as some sort of archaeological artifact. Through this body of work, elsas begins to conceptualize herself as a legacy artist: one who honors the archive of her own becoming while emerging as a distinct and resonant voice in today’s musical landscape.

“Everything Is Being Recorded All The Time” is the debut album of Troubadours, a tentacular collective composed of Laura Lippie, Kim Khan, Dr. Winzo, Vahan Soghomonian, Diane Barbé and many others. Shaped over the course of three years between Lyon, Abbecourt, Berlin and Denpasar, the Troubadours wove together orphic sounds from both ancient and high tech instruments – machines cold to the touch which warm as electrical and sonic currents awaken them,. What the Troubadours create is not just music, each track is in itself a world where aural narratives roil with tribulation, stillness remembers chaos and fleeting emotion finds enduring form. These moments pulse with singularity – they are the nights we try to hold onto, the feelings we’re afraid we won’t feel again, triggers, honesty, freedom – and are the things that the Troubadours capture through their improvised riffs and hours-long studio jams, synthesizing purity. “Everything Is Being Recorded All The Time” is but one chapter in their story, where they have documented their recent past and the multiplicity of selves they house within. Though each track is profoundly personal, the themes explored speak to what it means to be alive today. Troubadours are happy to welcome you on board for their journey : whether you find it nerve-racking or soul-soothing is no longer their responsibility. Expect the unexpected.

From False Aralia—the cutting-edge dance imprint that branched out from leftfield powerhouse Peak Oil and has recently become a quiet obsession among core techno heads—comes the fourth entry in their series, a 4-track release by the mysterious electronic sound artist Iri.gram. Evoking the chaos of traffic in noise and grounded in glacial minimal electronics, the record interweaves staccato rhythms with subtle fluctuations. Traversing deep techno, dub ambient, and rhythmic noise, this is a striking experimental soundscape work not to be missed.

Jordanian producer Taymour teams up with Palestinian rapper/singer Bareetlblad on a killer mini-album of skewed gothic pop, like some auto-tuned, arabic-language re-imagining of Faith-era The Cure via Dean Blunt, Cocteau Twins x Future. Trust, it’s exceptional stuff, curving melancholy, PNL-style biomechanical rhymes around heartfelt new wave/post-punk loops, like little else.

'NOS INSAN (نص إنسان)' is such a potent fusion of ideas that you wonder why no one tried it sooner. Billed as a break-up record, it's dripping with intensity, finding fragile harmony between Future's slow-burning emo-rap milestone 'HNDRXX' and Martin Hannett's moody canon. If that sounds odd, just imagine a pulverised version of Dean Blunt's catalog: 'Black Metal'-era songwriting, Hype Williams-era beatmaking and Babyfather's plasticky rap commentary.

Haifa-based vocalist Bareetlblad is captivating on 'Sort Akrhek, Ad Ma Ba7ebek (صرت أكرهك ! قد ما بحبك)', singing and rapping over Taymour's beatless, chorus-heavy guitar loops. It's a flawless opener, isolating a mood that's potent and fully unique. There are no beats, just rain-soaked Vini Reilly-style shimmers over Bareetlblad's soaring AutoTuned vox. The album title means "half a man”, a reference to a hollowed-out stretch following a breakup, referencing vintage grunge and shoegaze while at the same time scraping life-or-death imagery from traditional Arabic poetry and the region's melancholy folk music.

Peep 'T2ddamet (تقدمت)', a track that pulls on the interplay between Taymour's '80s Cure-style drum machine splashes and Bareetlblad's melodramatic love-drunk rhymes, or the all-too-brief 'Bdounik (بدونك)', a minute and a half of washy industrial-cum-dreampop guitars over robotic, overdriven sweet nothings that sound as if they're being broadcast through an empty mall on a busted tannoy. Best of all, 'Msafreh (مسافرة)' rounds things out with a euphoric gust of strums and a half-heard vocal that you'd more likely expect to find on one of Cocteau Twins' late-period fantasies.

One of the best rap/R&B mutations we've heard in ages, a small, perfectly formed cult classic in the making.

VOLUMES: ONE, the first non-studio release from Bon Iver, captures 10 distinctive live performances, recorded between 2019 and 2023, showcasing Justin Vernon and his band at their most whole. There’s a warmth and exuberance across the album, as well as the sort of muscular sound you can really only get at a live show. For the uninitiated and die-hards alike, these recordings could well be the defining versions of the tracks, no doubt made possible through the essential live engineering of Xandy Whitesel and performances from bandmates Jenn Wasner, Sean Carey, Michael Lewis, Matthew McCaughan, and Andrew Fitzpatrick. Vernon began working on VOLUMES: ONE in 2020, and he spent a considerable amount of time combing through concerts to pull out the right songs to define Bon Iver. “This is what we became,” Vernon comments. “This is really us at our best. This is it.” VOLUMES: ONE, as a result, is something greater than a compilation or live album. It’s entirely new but still familiar, offering a prismatic look at an old friend, seeing them for who they were and who they are, all the goodness of which they’re capable but maybe too shy to show at times. With VOLUMES: ONE, Vernon begins a new Bon Iver archival series that he’s modeled after Bob Dylan’s iconic Bootleg Series and the ever-delivering Neil Young Archives. The series will present the many eras and facets of Bon Iver, spanning live shows, demos, unreleased recordings, and more. “This particular 10 songs is like, here, if you’ve never heard Bon Iver, or you have and you didn’t like it, this might be for you,” he says.

FELT enters 2026 with a newly established sub label for reissues, retrospectives and oddball adjacent non-FELT material under the anagram catch-all LEFT. First on the agenda is a vinyl issue of a modern classical tape by Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, founding member of the band Iceage. Initially released on a limited cassette edition and plucked from the vast catalogue of the Copenhagen label Posh Isolation, the solo project Health & Safety can be read as composers meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned things they entangle. Wieth moves across the spectrum with dour, deliberate keys, mangled drone fx, barely-there violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles and with a knowing pace that feels akin to a guiding hand. We’re unsure if the form of each piece is meant to directly correlate to the drug so referenced but the quiet fever dream atmosphere of the 25 minutes also blurs each piece into a whole. This quote from Wieth certainly rings true for the highly introspective nature of Health & Safety - “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit”

Alto saxophonist and flutist Alan Braufman first emerged as a singular voice in New York’s 1970s loft-jazz scene with his 1975 debut Valley of Search, a record that would later be recognized as a landmark of spiritual and free jazz. After decades outside the spotlight, Braufman returned with a new wave of acclaim, releasing two highly regarded albums in 2020 and 2024 that reestablished him as both an essential elder and a vital contemporary presence—long described as “a legend in free music” (Gilles Peterson / BBC). Recorded in a single day in the fall of 2025, Anthem for Peace is a fully new studio album that captures Braufman in the present tense. Leading a quartet with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Chad Taylor, he delivers concise, hook-forward compositions that move fluidly between spiritual anthems, buoyant post-bop, and hypnotic, eastern-influenced themes. Brennan’s vibraphone—shimmering acoustically and occasionally treated electronically—adds depth and color, while Stewart and Taylor form a deeply locked, responsive rhythm section. The result is music that is “playful and light, yet texturally dense” (NPR): optimistic, focused, and driven by a clear sense of forward motion.

On Ola Tunji, Ola Tunji channel a luminous strain of spiritual and free jazz: collective meditations where Ornella Noulet’s fierce, tender saxophone rides a young quintet’s searching interplay toward something like secular devotion. Ola Tunji introduces a young French quintet, now rooted in Brussels, who treat spiritual and free jazz not as museum pieces but as living, breathing practices. Performing under the same name as their debut, Ola Tunji draw explicitly on lineages traced by John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, yet their music feels less like homage than continuation. At the centre stands 24‑year‑old Ornella Noulet on saxophones, whose sound can sear or soothe, splitting the air with grainy cries one moment and tracing supple, hymn‑like lines the next. Her phrasing carries the authority of a much older player, but the group’s dynamic makes clear that this is a collective endeavour: each piece is a conversation, not a vehicle for solo display. The ensemble around her amplifies and complicates that vision. Roman Raynaud’s guitar moves between haloed chords, wiry single‑note patterns and restrained distortion, shading the music from prayerful to urgent in a few strokes. At the piano, Loïc Lengagne supplies both harmonic ground and splintered commentary, alternating spacious, modal voicings with clustered runs that tug the improvisations into new shapes. Anthony Jouravsky’s bass acts as the music’s deep spine, sometimes walking or vamping with earthy swing, sometimes holding long tones that turn the band’s meditations into slow‑moving tides. Behind them, Egon Wolfson’s drums pivot fluidly from incantatory rolls and cymbal washes to fractured, free‑time exhortations, keeping the energy in constant, breathing motion. The band describe their pieces as “collective meditations,” and that ethos runs through the EP. Themes tend to emerge slowly, as if discovered rather than imposed, before opening into broad fields of improvisation where love, compassion, joy and serenity are less stated than enacted in sound. The quintet search together for a deeper sense of humanity, trusting that sustained listening and risk in the moment can summon something larger than any individual. Even at their most turbulent, there is a core of warmth and intention that anchors the music, a sense that the goal is not virtuoso display but shared elevation. Originally issued as a self‑released digital EP on Bandcamp, Ola Tunji quickly travelled far beyond its modest origins. International listeners tuned in to the group’s intensity and sincerity, with platforms such as All About Jazz praising the recording for its freshness and emotional clarity, while Bandcamp itself spotlighted it as a jazz highlight. What might have remained a local calling card instead became an underground word‑of‑mouth success, signalling the arrival of a band ready to step onto a larger stage. As the quintet prepare their first full‑length album, W.E.R.F. records now grants this remarkable debut its first vinyl pressing, giving these collective meditations the tangible weight they deserve and inviting a wider audience into their circle of sound.

The second instalment of the Curio Cabinet gourmet-dub series, Bonnefoï Dub / Tolosan Dub straight from the southern city of Toulouse.

"Both are made by Stefan Dubs under the guiding light of his live project, Sòn Du Maquis. This project has deep roots in the free rave, micro-festival, and dub & sound system culture of his country. It’s also the name of his own label, home to his dub-infested productions; ranging from slo-mo jungle to droney steppers and blown-out trip-hop on a slightly medieval tip.

Staying true to classic sound system tradition, each side pairs the original cut with its own version.

First there is Tolosan Dub, a trancey bass meditation colossus with deep synth work moving around in the trees. Some early nineties UK digidub vibes are surely mashing up the dance here. The version workout slows things down a bit, taking you even deeper into the riddim... strictly warrior style !

On the B-side we've got Bonnefoï Dub, which is pure bass-bin filth with a rootsy harmonica touch and a raw clubby feel. This tune just screams to be played out loud on a proper sound system. The version is certified dance-floor gold, yet there are enough dubbed-out flavours going on for intimate headphone sessions or some mad home skanking."

Sounding like a lost Nu Groove record dug up in Detroit basement and played at the clubs of Ibiza in '93, Nicky Benedek and Tom Carruthers team up for a dream collaboration with the six track "Process 9" lp. These are detailed and anthemic tracks to be played at the night club, the perfect balance of rough drum programming and deep, lush synthwork, everything has fallen into place when these two hit the studio together. Absolute essential gear for lovers of the late nites and endless mornings!

A Colourful Storm proudly presents remastered first-time vinyl and digital editions of Lone Capture Library’s modern-day DIY environmental masterpiece, All Natures Most Mundane Materials.

“Environmental”, you say? Well, this certainly wasn’t recorded for dinner party ambience nor was it commissioned by Harrods. But it does document a haphazard wander through the English countryside, feeling the air and the earth, detaching oneself from confinement while attempting to make sense of it all.

Its protagonist is Rory Salter, London's restless improvisor extraordinaire, who has contributed to dozens of solo and collaborative releases in an ecosystem centred around his Infant Tree private press, as well as recordings for Bison, Alter and MAL. Under his Malvern Brume alias, he is responsible for some of the most enchanting sides of contemporary concrète that has graced our ears, each record a dérive, revealing beauty and curiosity within London’s urban banality. And while we’d argue that Lone Capture Library applies this approach but instead seeks the peculiar within the pastoral, there, too, lies a certain hermetic recklessness, with its unique disruptive details and discarded sonic bric-a-brac permeating the air.

“I'd walked from Swindon to Avebury and back, which is about a 21-mile round trip. I'd been a muppet and did the whole thing down the A4361, which is not a road suitable for walking on - there was a lot of jumping into the hedges to avoid lorries. Turned out, there was a really nice walk across the fields I could have done instead. But maybe that sums it up quite well. Instinctive and very impulsive. The day following, I was at home and recorded it in single takes, improvised and straight to the tape. There was a good deal of significance for me in walking to the stones, passing the Hackpen Horse, being in the landscape and dealing with some brain rot after being stuck in a house, anxious and depressed. There was a sense of freedom and detachment. It was all about the materials of the earth and the body and fucking the brain off for a bit - just wanting to move between places. I dunno, it's all very cliché.”

Soft Echoes presents the first physical edition of In a Few Places Along the River by Abul Mogard as a limited run of 500 vinyl copies. Originally released digitally in 2022, the album now appears in its intended form, marking the label’s second release. Three long pieces, composed between 2019 and 2022, emerged from Mogard’s meticulous experimentation with analogue and digital instruments. Slowly evolving harmonic fields of layered drones and spectral textures drift across the record. They are enhanced by reverb from Scotland’s Inchindown oil tanks, which hold the longest reverberation of any man-made structure, giving the music a haunting resonance and a sense of suspended space. Against a White Cloud and In True Contemplation open the album with their nocturnal tones that gradually intensify into dense, immersive waves of sound. Side B is devoted to the 21-minute elegiacal piece Along the River, which flows between weight and silence, unfolding with reflective depth and moments of subtle transcendence. As one listener observed, “His music doesn’t break the wilful suspension of disbelief: you stay in its trance.” “Recording for this album began in 2019, when I was still living in London,” Mogard explains. “The first version of Along the River was created at my studio near Brick Lane. It started with experimenting around a chord progression inspired by a classical piece I had once been recommended, though, strangely enough, I no longer recall what it was. Early in 2022, I revealed the identity behind Abul Mogard and wanted to mark this new period, so I decided to release it quickly, by myself, as digital-only.” After returning to Rome, Mogard created the other two pieces, working with new digital instruments alongside his modular synthesiser, and integrated recordings from the London sessions. The music reveals a patient attention to texture and space, defining his usual restraint. Mogard adds, “I was trying to explore very subtle changes in the spectral characteristics of the music using extremely slow, intertwined tones.” Described by critics as one of Mogard’s most melancholic and absorbing releases, the album maintains an austere beauty and contemplative weight, leaving a lingering impression that lasts far beyond the final note. The music has extended beyond the album itself, with tracks appearing in films and contemporary artworks. Most notably, Swedish artist Peder Bjurman’s Slow Walker audiovisual installation and French filmmaker Fleuryfontaine’s politically charged animated film Soixante-sept millisecondes. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri and cut to vinyl by Lupo, the record emphasises the clarity and depth of Mogard’s frequencies, with each layer precisely balanced. The cover artwork and design are by Marja de Sanctis, who has collaborated with Abul since his first cassette release in 2012.

Beirut-via-Berlin polymath Raed Yassin summons the supernatural thru a modular synth and spectra of strategies derived from Terry Riley’s minimalism, Suicide’s no wave rock freedom, and synth-pop structures. A strong follow-up to his ambitious ‘Phantom Orchestra’ side with Rabih Beaini - one side panoramic melodrama, to one side turbulent helical spiral.

Issued to coincide with Yassin’s debut London exhibition of the same name, ‘Eternal Ghost’ is the latest iteration of his decades-long artistic thrust toward consolidating improvised and composed musics. Concrète yet ephemeral, minimal yet majestic, the results diverge and contrast in their outlooks and formations with a guile that has served Yassin well thus far, from a memorable 2009 solo debut of illbient collage for Annihaya Records, to jams with Alan Bishop & AMM as part of “A” Trio, and in Praed/Praed Orchestra!, and most the centre of a complex maelstrom for Morphine Records.

Perhaps unusually ‘Eternal Ghost’ frames Yassin mostly solo and left to his own devices for one of their most intimate, if widescreen, expressions of self. ‘A Spectre of a Stranger’ creeps crepuscular with modular synth evoking onset of night before his synth leads tear at the sky in Riley-esque ribbons layered with wholehearted wail in a compelling forward tilt. The B-side ‘Eternal Ghost’ also charges the metaphysical thru synthetic means with its initial lift of saccading arps knotting into panel-beaten industrial pulse and epic pop vox vamps that switch from fourth world optimism to more ragged no wave dystopia, or the other side of the same wave?

In a daring, hypnotic tribute to Detroit’s primal avant-rock roots, drummer Larry Mullins (aka Toby Dammit) and legendary bassist Mike Watt stretch The Stooges’ haunting mantra “We Will Fall” into a sprawling near 40-minute ritual of repetition, restraint, and raw atmosphere. Mullins and Watt channel the eerie pulse and narcotic drone of the original 1969 track, pushing its trance-inducing core into uncharted territory. Mullins, known for his work with Iggy Pop, Swans, and Nick Cave, builds a minimalist landscape with his shruti box, Moog electronics, tabla, and gongs. Watt’s signature low-end thrum mutates from subtle heartbeat to full-body hallucination. What emerges is not a cover but an extended invocation. Part séance, part dirge, part free-form exploration of mood and mind. It’s a slow burn of sonic devotion, honoring the spirit of The Stooges while opening the door to something entirely new: a deep-listening descent into the sacred and strange. This meditative and menacing piece is split into two full sides for a 12” vinyl pressing, available exclusively for RSD Black Friday 2025. Half of the pressing comes on gold vinyl and half on black, selected at random.

The Demise of Planet X is Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson’s most expansive and ambitious release to date as Sleaford Mods. Boasting the duo’s most varied and expressive musical approach so far, it charts, critiques and satirises our times, while offering a universal cry of anger and release of energy that pushes against the encroaching cultural darkness.

Contemplating the world coming to an end not with a big bang but in slowly rising tide of irritating mundanity, The Demise Of Planet X strikes back with vivid sonics, acerbic words, enveloping atmospheres and a engaging wit across 13 tracks that will move hearts, minds and feet.

The album features a rare guest appearance from former Life Without Buildings frontwoman Sue Tompkins, plus collaborations with Aldous Harding, soul singer Liam Bailey and grime MC Snowy, the latter two both hailing from band’s hometown Nottingham. In her first foray into music, actress Gwendoline Christie (Wednesday/ Severance/ Game Of Thrones) also joins Midlands band Big Special on Sleaford Mods new single The Good Life, which is released today accompanied by a video directed by Ben Wheatley (The Kill List/A Field In England/Bulk).

‘“The Demise Of Planet X’ represents a life lived under immense uncertainty, shaped by mass trauma,” declares frontman Jason Williamson. “When we wrote the last album, it was about stagnation, a country that felt like a lifeless corpse. Three years later, that corpse has been split open by war, genocide, and the lingering psychological fallout of Covid whilst social media has mutated into a grotesque, twisted form of digital engineering. It feels like we’re living among the ruins. A multi-layered abomination etched into our collective psyche.”

At a recent DREAM_MEGA performance, Joel Kyack stood alone on stage, directing a lava flow of sound at the audience. Overwhelmed by the haunted-house frequencies, the invasive rhythms, the untethered, untuned vocals, one attendee bent against another to whisper, “I think this guy’s channeling demons.” Whether spoken in terror or esteem, this accusation is useful in the face of DREAM_MEGA’s second LP, ‘Control / You Are Not the Center.’ The record is laced with menace. You hear it in the mutant war marches, in the dancehall reflux, in the tolling bass. You hear it in the crystalline melodies and the yearning ascensions. You even hear it in the Guided by Voices cover. Joel’s relationship with unsettling sound—demon channeling—is now decades long. His long-standing service in Landed, the band he co-founded in 1997, runs parallel to Joel's contributions to Six Finger Satellite, Men’s Recovery Project, Megafuckers, Dos Mega, and Street Buddy. This relentless dedication points a straight line to the feverish decay of his present day work, but Dream Mega stands distinct. Borne out of Joel’s near-death experience in 2020—a debilitated week spent isolated in Thailand, coughing blood and drenching bedsheets—DREAM_MEGA commandeers a unique space at the overlap of confrontation and abandon. Drawing on his own experiences at both hardcore shows and at street performances, Joel pushes DREAM_MEGA into an antipodal state where hyper-awareness and liberatory transcendence coexist. The songs on ‘Control / You Are Not the Center’ stare unblinking at our dumb, dangerous world the same way a Dropdead song might, but they simultaneously lift the burden of this disaster, pushing toward airy respite. Some of this is Joel’s compositional approach, setting ancient woodwinds against digital synthesizers, crossing unnatural circuitry with human breath. But the heart of it is Joel’s dire, middle-of-the-night need to address his fear and sadness and glimmers of hope and twist it into something that might keep his heart beating, despite. It is an act of clarity and self-preservation so skillfully wrought that every listener is able to feel the demons at work on their own heart. ‘Control / You are Not The Center’ features sonic contributions from Ryan Weinstein (Coffin Prick), Cordey Lopez, and Lisa Anne Auerbach. It is recommended for fans of Hassell & Eno’s ‘Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics’, Houston’s chopped and screwed scene, and Captain Beefheart.

FUMU christens the promising new label Return To Zero (RTZ) with Funeral Rites on Planet Saturn, the surrendering sophomore album from Nigerian artist, self-described “negro-producer”, hedonist, and iconoclast LINTD. With production collaboration from Porter Brook and features from Samrai (Swing Ting), Porter Brook, Sam Scott Francis (GOMID), Rizmi, and Imani Jendai. LINTD’s work emerges as a call and response between the tender, dynamic sounds of Black music across history and the surreal reality of contemporary, vulnerable Black life – a haunting dialogue. These themes are catalysed in the Black Impossible LP Trilogy, reclaiming Black utopia through sound technologies via ‘Smooch Soundsystem [Live at The White Hotel]’ for Second Born (Kop-Z, Porter Brook), and ‘DOGTOOTH. And Other Such Tales of the Macabre’ on The White Hotel’s HEAD II outlet. While earlier works engaged with the mania, joy, and paranoia of this impossible experience, Funeral Rites on Planet Saturn arrives at a soulful conclusion, allowing grief to tell a truer story. In the vein of Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, and Octavia Butler, LINTD introduces the speculative planet Saturn as a site where impossible Black being across the world can come and rest: a site for liberation and emancipation. “This one is an act of care towards myself, and hopefully others like me. I have proven everything I want to prove this year; this one is my elixir from all the lonely grief, a place of rest.” — LINTD “The results serve to consistently fuck with presumptions of Black music within a contemporary context that’s been prised open, upended by likes of Klein & Space Afrika in the modern field, and also tie back to historic, progressive Black music of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, and their shared extra-musical themes in the work of sci-fi writer Octavia Butler.” — Conor Thomas, Boomkat