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Brilliant Experimental album by the Merzbow co-founder, recorded in 1989 - with sticker and insert
The clear vinyl version is only available in the limited 99 copies boxset "artefAKTs from the Early Japanese Experimental Noise Music Scene"
New material from the cult label Tone Dropout. Featuring four of the label's highly respected box jammers. Opening up proceedings we have a perfectly poised slice of red lit warehouse acid, simmering away nicely as the unlicensed premises fills up with a collective energy of rebellion.
Capturing this newly found spirit is Dawl and "Night Of The Living Bass Drum", the anthem-not-anthem for modern warehouse dwellers. The spirit of hardcore runs deep in this one!
Onto side B and He-Men return with a fiery slice of bass, breaks and rumble with their track, "Battle Cat". Finally Ascot hits the turbo injection for a 4/4 propelled but equally destructive hybrid of hardcore, bleep and acid house - ended the ep with a no fucks given, up all nite ethos that's perfectly in tune with now.
Super limited copies - only 100 pressed! Cop now or you'll crying into your cornflakes come Tuesday. Hardcore will never die!
Multidisciplinary Brussels-based artist Sagat steps up with a new mini album on the Basic Moves side label, Gems Under The Horizon, featuring a remix by Slovenian ambient bird e/tape. A few years ago, Wiet Lengeler, aka Sagat was invited by Basic Moves to create a live visual show using an analogue video synth setup to accompany a 5-hour dj set by e/tape at Face B in Brussels. From that moment on, the synchronicity between the two artists was clear - and this EP is the result.
Besides his visual work, Wiet Lengeler is also known for his contemporary techno music, primarily released on Brussels’ cult label Vlek Recordings. For this mini-album, Gems Under The Horizon 003, he presents four grainy ambient and textured electro-acoustic explorations. The tracks unfold organically — like ivy — gradually revealing layers of sound and hidden textures beneath babbling streams of electronics. e/tape’s remix feels like a natural continuation of Sagat’s sonic universe, together forming a mesmerising whole that explores the fringes of ambient music. In addition to the release, a limited run of the release + 30 x 3 riso printed posters from the visual show at Face B, made by Sagat and hand numbered are made available.
Mastering and lacquer cut was done by Frederic Alstadt at Angstrom Mastering. Artwork & inserts are designed by renowned Ghent-based visual artist Dieter Durinck.
Sit back and enjoy the wonderful aural world of Sagat and e/tape.
Sincerely,
The Basic Moves team.
Demdike Stare & Cherrystones unveil a long-in-the-making darkside fantasy weaving atmospheric and loose-limbed cuts recorded at labs in London and Manchester, brilliantly shaking a bush of ghostly trig points ranging from the Mars rehearsal tapes to Minimal Man, Randy Greif’s cut-ups, Conrad Schnitzler’s industrial prototypes and ‘70s ECM sides - with vocal contributions from Ssabae’s mesmerising Laura Lippie.
In dazed pursuit of styles heard on Cherrystones’ DDS tape ‘Peregrinations in SHQ (Super High Quality)’, the renowned London digger properly hexes sonic leylines with his label bosses on 10 wickedly grubby and hazed sound experiments. They tumble down the rabbit hole like some sixth sense-guided call-and-response, resulting in an exquisite unfolding of psychoacoustic spaces familiar to their mutually spirited sounds.
Honestly it's some of the dirtiest and most esoteric gear we've heard from Demdike; you can sense a lifetime of incessant digging drip through every loop and crack; grotty no-wave, industrial noise, DIY psych, proto-techno and gnarled concrète, further bolstered by Cherrystones’ perpendicular, equally insatiable and fathoms-deep areas of interest. With a focus on scrappy, feral cuts and hastily recorded edits, the trio roughly re-draw wordless chants and hyper-compressed knocks over a vortex of found sounds that curdle in rhythmic heat. Never staying sill for long, the trio get drowned by watery ambience, then shredded loops, Technoid shrapnel and electric bass prangs dancing into the aether.
The crankiest spirit perfuses the whole thing, evoking states of unravel and psychic distress as they pit a near-peerless collective knowledge into the void. Laura Lippie acts as human ligature to sanity, a fleeting constant found smudged into the hip hop chops of ‘Familiar Unfamiliarity’, spectral incantations of ‘Prophet in View’, or a channelling of Ozzy in ‘Thee Oath’, among more deranged tongues on ‘Observing the Crux’.
It’s the missing link between ECM, Earth and Dilloway we didn’t know we needed - up there with some of the most satisfyingly deep and frazzled gear this century.
One of contemporary Ambient’s preeminent figures lands on its leading label, enacting a transition into a new phase of rhythmic noise and tonal shadowplay laced with peculiar sensitivities, wrangling Dilloway-influenced tape noise thru ASMR ambience, fritzed Dub Techno, layered vocal drone and ritualistic mantras - big tip IYI Grouper, Porter Ricks, Pharmakon, Civilistjävel!
Perila steps up solo with a heavily satisfying debut for West Mineral, investigating negative space and states of subconsciousness. The shift in tone feeds forward into arcane realms of resonant dark ambient and dream-pop, harnessed in amorphous structures using dub-as-method. It’s wholly immersive stuff in a way that’s long been Perlia’s calling card, but here more careful in its command of personalised, atmospheric physics from the Coil-esque ‘cheerleader’, thru the deeply smudged and sexy trip hop of ‘lava’, and the oozing, sloshing OOBE-like spectres of ‘give it all’.
The title of the album is a reference to Carl Jung’s phrase "all haste is of the devil” which informs Perila’s writing process here; she slows down in an attempt to feel more and tap into her shadow self. Album opener 'cheerbleeder' is a doomed, tremolo-heavy mass of ghost notes, while the rattling chains and strangulated voices on ‘metal snax' sounds like they belong on a Wolf Eyes tape. 'grain levy tep dusk' strikes closer to recently unearthed industrial plates from Tolerance and Mentocome, with rusted clangs threaded into deflated, half-speed pulses. The album keeps growing from there, shifting and expanding as Perila exhales and absorbs her cognitive blind spots. She credits "trance states" for helping her let go, and we broadly get to experience that on the mantra-like 'thunder me' and the blurry all-vocal highlight 'hold my leg', which sounds like it could have been snatched from Grouper's 'Way Their Crept' sessions.
As with all of Alexandra Zakharenko’s work under various aliases - Aseptic Stir, Baby Bong, Wedontneedwords, Perila - her allure is self-evident to lovers of textured, diffuse electronics, and never more so than on this lip-bitingly potent suite of delicacies and primordial urges, perfectly balancing ancient and techngnostic aspects with an x-amount of seductive strangeness left in the margins.
Glimmers of a missing link in the connective tissue between the hardcore continuum and Dub-Spectrum arts. A tome all its own, as if one is sifting through an archeological dig in aural form, hearing layers of the past, present, and future.
At night, things shift. In shadow, the world operates strangely, ecosystems transform, and boundaries between seen and unseen dissolve. Often viewed solely as a place where fear and odious forces gather, these are also the ‘small hours,’ and a parallel realm where people, places, and things appear and act differently. The world sits in a different harmony in the dark, dream and fantasy pulling closer to our fingertips; it’s when the intricate flowers of the Japanese snake gourd, which only blooms at night, reveal themselves to the moon, as if they belong to another realm entirely. “I see it when I work the night shift, this otherworld,” says Dania, who splits her time between life in Barcelona and night shifts as an emergency doctor in remote corners of Australia.
All composed after midnight, Listless is a reflection of that liminality, communicating from that nocturnal space. Buoyed by layers of transcendent vocals, it embraces the quietly potent power of everything that only comes to life in the dark and blooms out of sight. Her first time deploying drums into her songs, Dania’s production draws from a deep well of oneiric musics, ultimately forging a fresh and emotionally psychedelic syntax. “It’s not a pop record,” she says, “but it’s the closest thing I’ve ever made to one.”
Following a series of highly conceptual works exploring the topography of identity, colonialism, and how the two interleave, Dania set out to tap into something more emotive and instinctive, drawing inspiration from this strange energy of the night. Listless sketches a portrait of this time and place not easily seen or described, reskinning reality to reveal something new. At one point, she even intones to a subject, “your face is coloured differently in the sun.”
On “Heart Shaped Burn”, Rupert Clervaux’s visceral percussion ignites a drone-and-drums ritual inspired by an experience working the night shift in Australia. “It’s named after a heart shaped burn of a patient,” says Dania. “Her partner had poured scalding water on her chest. She was initially timid and closed off, but when I pointed out the perfectly heart shaped burn we laughed together, both realising the dark irony.” Elsewhere, downtempo beats and chants spiral on “Car Crash Premonition,” a song written in the aftermath of a harrowing taxi ride to the studio at 3am. “He was a reckless taxi driver, and I thought ‘this is it,’ and then a second later my life flashed before my eyes and we narrowly avoided a crash.”
Dania created Listless’ landscape of dark irony, deep introspection, and liberation from the daylight world. These tracks are future hymns for liminal spaces – and an invitation to drift to the otherworld waiting after midnight.
Long Gone Are The Old Traditions delivers another sonic message from West-London based producer, singer and songwriter Tutu Ta.
Following on from 2024's "The Shrine" and "Clay Birds Are Grey" from earlier this year - the artist continues to blur the lines between dub, spoken word, beats and post-punk using this to further collect a sound that is unique and powerful. "Violence Or Violets" leans into more personal and haunted sounds with the EP bringing ethereal vocals to the forefront while still maintaining a punchy nod to the soundsystems well recognised in the artist home-town. A driven heart provoking siren that is pushing the artist into new lengths and heart-aching sonics.
Valby Vokalgruppe returns with SOLIDS FOR VOICES — a new album landing on 7th November 2025 via Hands in the Dark.
Initiated in 2008 by Anja Jacobsen, the Danish collective’s current line-cup is completed by Lil Lacy, Sonja LaBianca, Cæcilie Trier and Laura Marie Madsen. The group has written and performed a large number of cross-aesthetic pieces over the years, including an album Bah New Era released in 2012 on Eget Værelse.
Sharpened to its core, the group dives deep into rhythmical architectures built almost solely from the voice - think Platonic solids reimagined as sound objects. Think trance without electronics. These new compositions are compressed, sparkling forms — vocal geometries that spin, collide, and dissolve through repetition. From inside the circle: radical precision, soft dissonance, and playful intuition guide the way. The group explores the voice not as melody alone, but as material — vibrating, modulating, refracting.
SOLIDS FOR VOICES transcends into deep concentration calling for a clear state of mind, in recognition of an increasingly fragmented and incoherent reality. Valby Vokalgruppe endeavours a total absorption into the voice, the rhythm and the trance.
Artist, composer and producer James William Blades’ score Pare De Sufrir will be released via AD 93 on the 4th of October.
Pare De Sufrir (translating to ‘End of Suffering’) is the official soundtrack to A.G Rojas’ film of the same title.
Spanish-born, Southern California-raised filmmaker AG Rojas is known for creating videos and working with the likes of Jamie xx, Gil Scott-Heron, Kamasi Washington, Spiritualized and Mitski. Rojas’ sensitive eye and subjectivity has brought him from the world of music videos to creating his first independent film: a 48-minute featurette following three people as they navigate the liminal space between life and the afterlife in an attempt to heal themselves and each other. Rojas’ film is a fragile, wordless meditation on grief and how it can transform and baptise the body and spirit.
The almost silent film is a testament to Rojas’ trust in Blades’ composition to express the director’s voice and emotions. Rojas reached out to Blades after coming across his score for Keeping Time (dir. Darol Olu Kae). An intimate and unusual process unfolded. Rojas explained to Blades the personal narrative of the film, the two sharing unfurling conversations on the nature of loss and the human spirit. But Blades did not watch the film and instead worked on instinct to build out a concept of how the score would unfold, shaping its operatic, textural and granular tone. Blades went on to record the score in full, with orchestra and choir, without going back to Rojas for feedback, aware that he was taking a complete risk. “It was definitely something I felt had a gravitational pull,” says Blades of the decision. The score’s pull is reflective of the process of grief itself, how its moods and memories oscillate up and down into the past and lost futures, Blades hitting all those spaces with diverse and stretching notes.
The piano holds the memories of Blades and Rojas’ grandmothers, who both had out-of-tune pianos sitting in an empty room. The Silogo-De-Oro choir sing throughout, reminiscent of the broken phonetics of grief, the build up and release of tension and the inability to articulate complete sound or words. The harmony stabilises and then becomes distant, taking the griever away from the lushness of life and into the realms of loss, death and dream-like realities, as mirrored in Rojas’ layered vignettes. As the score closes, the harmonies become richer and fuller, marking a return to life. Understanding the power of sound to both respond to and drive narrative, Blades’ score weaves together field recordings, half-remembered conversations, choral movements, string arrangements and electronic fragments into a nuanced and evocative whole.
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James William Blades is a British composer and producer based in New York, whose work dissolves the boundaries between scores, sound design and music. Rooted in a meticulous sensitivity to melody and structure, he creates sonic landscapes that have the potential to refract meaning and tell new stories in the process.
It is through his multidisciplinary experience working with visual artists, directors, musicians and fashion designers that Blades has developed the unique musical aesthetic he is now bringing to the world of cinema. Blades began by collaborating with fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, artist Theaster Gates, and film-maker Kahlil Joseph. Exploring the expressive possibilities of composition, his atmospheric sound collages for Joseph’s 2017 film Fly Paper and short film Process for the British music artist Sampha, subsequently led Blades to work with Beyoncé on Black is King for Disney in 2020, and more recently Renaissance, Beyonce’s self-directed documentary concert film.
Learning from visual artists, themselves reframing the relationship between music, sound and image, Blades has created a singular sonic language he describes in terms of landscape painting. “I like conveying a non-linear sense of sonics, playing around with combinations, depths, tempos, and making it feel like you’re in a moment surrounded. It’s visceral,” he explains. In each case, his approach involves periods of contextual and multi- instrumental research, working closely with directors to understand how best to support the specific emotions, moods and textures of the project at hand. “Thinking about the painting of a score is something that I'm trying to translate over a longer scale.”
This capacity to work on a variety of long-form projects is evident, whether in the scores he has had exhibited in a gallery context (Venice Biennale, Serpentine Gallery, 180 The Strand, Palais De Tokyo), or in the debut solo productions he is readying for release.
Other composer credits include Tendaberry, Hayley Elizabeth Anderson’s critically lauded debut feature film which premiered at Sundance 2024, the Showtime documentary NYC Point Gods produced by Coodie and Chike and Kevin Durant and Kiin a three part companion film directed by Fenn O’Meally and written by Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance.
A storyteller in the broadest sense of the word, Blades’ extensive inter-disciplinary experience marks him out as an artist in his own right, bringing an exciting and fresh approach to feature film composition.
Roomer is the meeting point of four distinct creative forces in the European music scene, united through long-standing friendships and years of collaboration across projects ranging from avant-garde free improv to ethereal folk and ambient electronica. Inevitably—if surprisingly late—the question arose: why not start a band? In their hands, the rock band format became a canvas for their many musical worlds to collide.
Ronja Schößler, a fixture in Berlin’s experimental singer-songwriter scene, pens compositions of crystalline vulnerability that cut through the band’s guitar architectures with diaristic directness. Ludwig Wandinger, polymath producer and visual artist—recently featured on Caterina Barbieri’s light-years label—injects his drumming with an energy grounded in sharp sound-design instincts. A wizard of the 8-string guitar, Arne Braun lays down layered foundations that evoke the presence of multiple players at once, while minimalist composer and synthesist Luka Aron contributes electro-acoustic textures that shimmer with the weight of distant memories.
With Arne Braun stepping away from the band to focus on other projects—including Make-Up, the DIY recording studio where much of Leaving It All to Chance was brought to life—Roomer now continues as a trio for their upcoming live shows. Expect the occasional special guest or multidisciplinary collaboration, though, as Roomer moves through the gamut of Berlin’s artists, performers, and poets.
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Leaving It All to Chance opens with '2003', where overlapping planes of distorted flute and shimmering guitar create a temporal fold through which memory keeps seeping. Ronja’s confessional voice recounts a moment of disclarity: “I accidentally stepped into 2003,” she admits, reflecting on holding on too long and the realisation that starting over might be futile.
'Nothing Makes Me Feel' performs a decoy, opening with acoustic guitar patterns that suggest singer-songwriter fare before high-pitched distortion tears through the fabric of the song. The chorus arrives like a scene from some imaginary American teen drama finale, yet its pull is complicated by layers of wailing harmonics that hint at something darker.
Perhaps the album’s centrepiece, 'Windows' combines minimal music’s interlacing patterns with sudden eruptions of power chord catharsis. The track’s opaque lyrics (“you ask for purity / I have this melody”) float above guitar work that draws as much from Steve Reich’s phasing techniques as it does from My Bloody Valentine’s tremolo manipulations.
The album’s eponymous single 'Chance', accompanied by a gloomy video steeped in veiled imagery and opaque symbolism, sees Ronja holding light and shadow in her hands. Flame shards flicker through a prismatic lens as the song gradually shifts from straightforwardness into spectral webs of saturated echoes.
Reappearing from Roomer’s previous EP, Skice, albeit in a slower, moodier form, 'Much Too Loud' commences with acoustic guitar and a looming drone that set the stage for the slightly irked vocal delivery, lamenting undertones of power and control, softened by an almost disarming tenderness. Then, without warning, the chorus alters one’s sense of gravity with breathy vocals, countrified plucks, and angelic harmonics that render its central command (“put your head low and shut your mouth please”) both intimate and threatening.
'Stolen Kisses', the album’s penultimate track, reinterprets Psychic TV’s 1982 original—a sly nod to Roomer’s blend of experimental depth and pop immediacy. The British industrial post-punk pioneers blurred the lines between avant-garde provocation and melodic allure, and Roomer channels that spirit, turning the track into an anthem of their own. Distorted guitar downstrokes merge with swirling, feedback-laden slides, all underscored by the band’s undeniable knack for hooks.
Closing the album, 'Your Arms Are My Home' shifts into more pastoral territory. Wide-open, flanged acoustic guitars trace a thin line between comfort and doubt, offering a fragile sense of refuge. Each pause in the music weighs a tension, as if caught between holding on and letting go, its hushed conclusion lingering like a half-remembered promise.
Long, long overdue reissue of this gem from the depths of The Skaters dreamweaving dimension, released as a limited tape through Spencer Clark's Pacific City imprint back in 2008. Comprising a period of extreme and vital activity for both Clark as Monopoly Child Star Searchers and Black Joker and his kindred spirit James Ferraro under his own name - 'Marble Surf' or 'Discovery' - and a myriad of identities like Liquid Metal or Edward Flex, this split finds these intrepid explorers on each side of a scrying mirror.
Conjuring the Angel Snake entity as a vessel for unlocking the unconscious, Ferraro takes up the A-side with hypnotic wooden percussion sustaining queasy tape processed keyboard lines that intertwine amidst a growing haze of hiss. About halfway through the digression an announcer boombox voice cuts up the scenery for a serpentine dance around the discarded remnants of civilisations past and future. Clark's Monopoly Child rides a beaming synth and muffled percussion accents on his trademarked keyboard thrills, all ascending and descending runs brimming on the horizon, not quite here, not quite out of reach, fading out to a galloping murk smeared by hallucinatory flute-like sounds and portamento accents that float in harmonic suspension.
Truly visionary and arresting stuff from these true purveyors of the netherworld, due to be rediscovered in these times of poor half-reassessments of the given past. It was never a dream, it was always a dream.
Bristol-based, London-born auteur ThisisDA has spent over a decade at this point furrowing out his own niche in the experimental rap landscape. Across a slew of under-the-radar solo releases and eclectic collaborations, he’s routinely peered beyond the boundaries of traditional hip-hop, taking a refreshingly open-minded, eclectic approach to his art. Working alongside jazz collective Sumo Chief, playing throughout Europe with Klein and breaking bread with bedroom pop viral superstar Eyedress, ThisisDA has always refused to stay in the same spot for too long, and his latest full-length offering is a testament to that spirit.
Dizzyingly inventive, ‘Fast Life’ crackles from idea to idea, gesturing to drill, grime, electro and trap but refusing to adhere to any conventional template. Featuring collaborations with Hakuna Kulala’s master beatmaker Debmaster – who’s racked up production credits on records from MC Yallah, Aunty Razor, Ratigan Era and more – and Welsh-born vocalist Mimi Jones, the album’s bound together by ThisisDA’s boisterous personality and lightheaded wordplay. “Elevate you like the rapture, it’s an independent matter,” he quips on the euphoric intro to ‘Breakout’ before handing the mic to Jones, whose seductive coos foreshadow a barrage of DA’s most tongue-twisting rhymes.
On ‘Tell Him’, Debmaster spaces out weightless synth stabs and skeletal, grimey kicks, leaving ThisisDA to grandstand for a moment. “Dat boy there is a pussy, flip the coin if you push me,” he spits, molding his voice into an android croon. But it’s not all bravado; there’s a more solemn flex to the ‘808s & Heartbreak’-inspired ‘End Up’ as ThisisDA recalls the trappings of the lifestyle, underpinning his words with soulful AutoTuned cries. Elsewhere, on ‘Captain’, neon-flecked Southern rap excesses rumble through DA’s squelchy, haunted soundscape, and its this wide-eyed, boundless fusion that sets him way out on his own.
“I wanna brush my hands between the clouds and claim that sky,” he exclaims on the album’s lulling closer ‘Change That’. With ‘Fast Life’, ThisisDA aims high and leaves the rest of the scene in the dust.
Drag City and Yoga Records are delighted to return to the music of Matthew Young. Following Recurring Dreams (1981, reissued 2014) and Traveler's Advisory (1986, reissued 2010), Undercurrents (2025) collects eight oddly dissimilar pieces that somehow fit together perfectly. Although unique enough to be called outsider, Young’s new album occupies a musical world accessible to fans of many genres. Composed and recorded over the span of several decades, Undercurrents displays the wide range of Young’s various sonic pallets: similar to Recurring Dreams, the electronic landscapes meander coherently, and much like Traveler's Advisory, the album skews from the nearly algorithmic computer music of side one to the moving pastoral folk of the second.
On the opener “Reflexion,” a quartet of marimbas twist and turn over each other, while in “One and All,” a harp melody is overtaken by various electronic effects. The 12-minute title track is an abstract weaving of piano and synthesis, with the six sections named after oceanic currents. “A Game of Chess, a Game of Chance” consists of sparse electronic tones created on the Princeton University IBM mainframe during his studies in 1976. This all makes way for the second half of Undercurrents, where settings of Marion Lineaweaver's poems, “The Summer Girls” and "Her Key is Minor," showcase Young's honest, fragile vocal approach, conveying a deep sense of soulful longing, and the latter even sweetly approaching something akin to synthpop. The piano on "Inflexion" calls back to the end of “Reflexion," and in the album closer, “Into the Woods,” Young plays the hammered dulcimer with the disciplined reverence of an alchemist.
Simply put, Undercurrents is a triumph across many musical realms... this is Matthew Young’s world.
Majestic Fantasies, debut album from the duo Space Ghost & Teddy Bryant, is the second release on Space Ghost’s new record label, Peace World Records. Produced by Space Ghost, with Teddy Bryant’s powerful vocals at the forefront, this new album sees the two artists effortlessly blend their shared influences from the late '80s and early '90s.
Over three years in the making, in Majestic Fantasies Space Ghost & Teddy Bryant look to the past for inspiration as they explore genres, techniques, and moods. Across the record, Bryant’s vocals shine as he demonstrates a strong ability to create memorable nostalgic hooks and catchy backing harmonies. Similarly, Ghost displays his knack for dissecting vintage production tropes and breathing life into them in a modern context.
Filled with underground, soulful gems, Majestic Fantasies draws deeply from the duo's passion for R&B, UK Street Soul, New Jack Swing, House, and G-Funk. Their 10-track LP freely blends these genres, paying homage to song writers like Teddy Riley, Jam & Lewis, Carl McIntosh, and DeVante Swing. On the album you’ll find tracks like “Some Things Last Forever” which explore New Jack Swing drum patterns and vocal hooks. Additionally the record holds dancefloor-ready House tracks including “Majestic Fantasies”’ and “Unconditional” which sit side by side with heartfelt ballads such as “Cheer Me Up,” and “Ultimate Love.”
Although the two have never met in person, Space Ghost and Teddy Bryant still find a way to connect through their music. Throughout the album, they demonstrate a mutual understanding of the sound they like to produce together: tasteful and playful love songs that feel positive and optimistic, bringing classic songwriting styles from the past into the modern music landscape.
Iranian-Irish co-op Saint Abdullah & Eomac dissect and reshape reams of Persian pop in gritty, hip hop and deco-club leaning electronica frameworks, speckled with live drums and original vocals
“In ‘Of No Fixed Abode,’ Saint Abdullah and Eomac extend their experimentation with genre dissolution to press upon the tensions that exist between culture, place, and migration. This fourth collaborative LP addresses the inherent fluidity of cultural memory, accepting our inability to remain fixed in the past, and explores how best to carry its spirit forward into an ambiguous future.
Through extensive research into 50 years of Persian pop, they meticulously reinterpret the legacies of artists like Andy, Hayedeh, and Fereydoun Farrokhzad, refracting samples by way of gritty beat work-outs akin to more contemporary musicians like Rezzett and Madlib. Through extensive archival research and sampling, they recontextualise these iconic melodies, placing reverie and frenetic drum programming in conversation with one another in a fashion that seeks to express a sense of two disparate tendencies cohabiting together, all while refusing homogenization. This reimagining extends beyond mere homage, serving as a conduit for exploring the narratives of migrant experiences, both in the UK and globally.
Sonically ‘Of No Fixed Abode’ plays with new sampling techniques, utilising the quick-fire intensity of the Roland SP404 with the cool precision of digital DAWs, and features collaborations with drummer Jason Nazary, sound artist Aria Rostami (both New York based), New Zealand-based mHz, and a vocal collaboration with London-based artist and musician Raheel Khan.”
On her moonlit second solo album, Hungarian Transylvanian vocalist, composer and performer Réka Csiszér composes an uncanny and chilling soundtrack that muddles the physical and spiritual realms, balancing crumbling realities with confident self-actualization. 'Danse des Larmes' is based on sketches commissioned for a theater production, and Csiszér widens the original concept of "Eastern European melancholy" by painting dreamlike memories from her childhood - of alienation, unconscious trauma and distress - into a hypnotic sequence of soundscapes that hum with tension, mystery and transcendence. She pulls from industrial music, dark ambient, Eastern European folk music and vintage horror soundtracks, smudging sludgy drones, dense electro-acoustic textures and her own breathtaking choral vocals until the roots vanish almost completely, leaving only ghostly traces behind.
The album follows Csiszér's acclaimed VÍZ debut 'Veils', a bold seven part audiovisual "body horror soundtrack" that spiraled out from her long-held interests in theater, cinema and opera. Those elements are still present on 'Danse des Larmes', but by examining her past, Csiszér is able to reach into the future, amalgamating gothic horror and speculative science-fiction. This is never more evident than on the album's eerie opening track 'Eden X', that juxtaposes wheezing synthesizer textures with soul-stirring choral echoes that liquefy into Csiszér's oily ambience. As the track washes to a close, Csiszér suspends her sounds in the silence, letting the obscured harmonies and rusted noise peer beyond the veil, setting the scene perfectly for the vastly different title track. Here, the influence of folk music bubbles to the surface, with distorted, eerily familiar vocal rotations that crack over woody environmental sounds. "I dreamt a dream tonight, that dreamers often lie," a processed voice speaks into the phantasmal forest. "In lovers arms they fade and die, I talk of dreams, I talk of lies, I dream of you, I dream of I."
Csiszér's voice is clearer still on the giallo-influenced 'Hyperálom', calling confidently across hymnal rhythms and woozy analog throbs, and on 'Angel's Throat', it's thrust into a parallel universe, reverberating wordlessly before Csiszér dexterously sculpts it into terrifying ferric shrieks and gaseous vapors. Elsewhere, she pays tribute to iconic Hungarian composer Mihály Víg on 'Vali 2.0', offering her own interpretation of 'Kész az egész', a piece featured in Béla Tarr’s 1987 film 'Kárhozat'. In Csiszér's hands, Víg's sardonic original is lifted into the clouds, obscured by celestial pads that drape around Csiszér's sensual, Julee Cruise-like vocals. It's a cunning way for Csiszér to trigger a memory and immediately obfuscate it, leaving a sense compelling disorientation in its wake. And that sense of terror and awe swirls throughout the album, questioning the horror of childhood trauma and the confusing echoes of the past and replacing it with something beautiful, and something new.
After the conceptual depth of "Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice" (2021), dj sniff returns to Discrepant with a more direct and visceral document: Turntable Solos.
Composed from live recordings made during the latter half of 2024, Turntable Solos captures dj sniff’s improvised performances in their rawest form. At the core of his setup is Cut ’n’ Play, a software sampler he originally built in Max / MSP in 2007. Since then, he has continued developing custom tools and instruments that extend what Derek Bailey called the “instrumental impulse” — the tactile, responsive relationship between musician and machine that defines improvisation.
Following a summer 2024 tour of Japan with Gonçalo Cardoso, sniff was encouraged to document and release a selection of his live sets. Not long after, a performance at 20α (Alpha) in Hong Kong would become the emotional and conceptual anchor for the project. In the liner notes, sniff reflects on the eerie parallels between recent footage of protestors in Los Angeles — assaulted by police using so-called “less-lethal” weapons, and civilians being abducted into detention centers — and the 2019 Hong Kong protests. A place once filled with personal nostalgia began to feel like a grim foreshadowing of what might unfold in Western societies.
In this turbulent context, 20α stands out as a space of resistance and renewal — a beacon for a new generation of experimental musicians, growing in defiance of increasing censorship and surveillance. "Turntable Solos" is both a personal statement and a public act of sonic resilience.
Spacious, vibrant free jazz ecosystems sprout from London duo Exotic Sin’s debut studio jams with Swiss drummer Sartorius, uncoiling along vectors akin an unbuckled TLF Trio or The Necks and Don Cherry’s quieter communal jams.
‘In Session’ pairs the the duo of Kenichi Iwasa (known for work with Beatrice Dillon and more recently Ziúr on The Tapeworm) & Naima Karlsson (daughter of Neneh Cherry, half-sister of popstar Mabel) with the prolific Swiss percussionist regarded for work with everyone from Herbert to Valentina Magaletti and for ECM. Those credits should coordinate heads to the fine-tuned sensitivities and digits at work here, who take all the time needed to unravel keys and woodwind on slowly shifting, asymmetric beds of wooden drums and tickled metal with an unhurried quality and sublime tension.
The six pieces shimmer mirage-like with loose structures emerging that suggest the listener act on pareidolia-type senses to fill in the gaps, make sense of it in the imagination’s playground. With preternatural effortlessness they limn breezily open space in the opening path, and draw in closer with the tactile strikes and pings of of path 2, reserving the right to switch up into glorious free jazz clatter and scree on the 3rd path, and seemingly enact an impossible physics of melting and puckered pulses in path 4, before introducing a fizzing line of range-finding electronics that just about holds together a parting piece of elegant collapse and diffusion.
In the wrong hands this stuff could have been a difficult mess, but cool, quizzical heads and hands prevail on this one with exemplary results.