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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.
Prolific Geordie acid and braindance producer Daniel Pringle aka The Jaffa Kid showcases a spectrum of mutating styles shared with Mike Paradinas, RDJ, Jega, Luke Slater or Plaid
Behind 100s of releases since he really got going in the 2020s, The Jaffa Kid’s prodigious output is here parsed for a carousel of flavours that prove his strength in diversity and a restless work rate generating quality results. Like the best braindancers he balances club needs and tropes with something tripper, headier in his melodic and harmonic arrangements, which favour piquant, microtonal tunings and psychoacoustic space over straightforward conventions.
Like the touchstones of µ-Ziq or AFX and their ilk, TJK expresses a certain strangeness of coming from this island in his reading of electronica as contemporary folk, and braindance as its wyrdest facet, modally fusing and acknowledging the input of successive waves of influence on these shores. There’s a wickedly eyrie electronic soul at play across the LP from the likes of his Gescom or BoC-esque pads and whirring breaks on ‘IOAM’, and hits of Plaid’s syncopated intricacies on ‘Colobia’, with fast-fwd Rephlex/Planet Mu rave in ‘241’ and jega-esque ‘Infinite Chasers’, saving highlights to the sounds of a ticklish robot in ‘Night Unfolding’ and a smart braindance update on modern D&B frameworks in ‘Extol II.’
Second volume of unreleased solo material by Tim Barnes, Noumena explores the thresholds of perception with long-form compositions built from minimal gestures, field recordings, and ambient textures. A durational and meditative counterpart to Lost Words.
Big Tip! Released shortly after its companion Lost Words, Noumena is the second chapter in a stunning return to solo work by Tim Barnes - percussionist, composer, and sound artist whose influence across avant-garde and improvised music is immeasurable. A study in durational drift and perception, Noumena eschews conventional structure in favor of immersive textures, soft frictions, and the subtle emergence of acoustic detail.
Recorded between 2016 and 2019, the album presents three long-form pieces (Note, Difference, Noumenon) that unfold slowly, often hovering at the threshold of silence. Through field recordings, incidental sounds, and sparse percussive interventions, Barnes offers a deeply immersive sound: field recordings, found objects, analog manipulations, and barely-processed percussion dissolve into each other, creating three long-form pieces—Note, Difference, and Noumenon—that meditate on the porous edge between perception and abstraction. In 2021, Tim was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 54, and he and his family went public with this immediately. The response from Tim’s network of friends and musical peers was overwhelming, but the lingering shutdown meant only remote and long-distance interactions were possible. Beginning in late 2021, a large body of recordings coordinated and assembled by Tim’s longtime friend Ken (Bundy) Brown, with whom Tim had worked in the past as a member of the group Pullman, early pioneers of the new Americana movement in the indie scene of the late 90s.
Rather than a showcase of virtuosity, Noumena reveals Barnes's acute sensitivity to space and resonance - his ability to draw musicality from what might otherwise remain unnoticed. Presented on LP in a limited edition via Quakebasket, and distributed by Drag City, this is a vital document from one of experimental music’s most quietly important figures.
Efficient Space honours the memory of producer and MC Ali Omar with Hashish Hits, a posthumous selection from the dub rebel’s self-released discography.
One of ten children in working-class Liverpool, Omar drew deep influence from his father's Arabic heritage - a thread central to his identity and sample origins. After art school and a spell clubbing during Manchester's halcyon days, he relocated to Sydney, where he co-founded the blunted downbeat duo Atone with fellow British expatriate Andy Fitzgerald. As an MC, he infiltrated the city’s house, dub, jungle, and bass circuits, becoming a regular fixture at the Bentley Bar, where he commanded the mic with his versatile, rumbling baritone and charisma.
Freakishly talented in the studio, Omar was a pioneer of the Akai sampler and Atari, deftly recording live sessions straight to DAT. Drawing on industry insights from his sister, Merseybeat firebrand Beryl Marsden - who supported The Beatles on their final UK tour and was signed to Decca and Columbia - the non-conformist sought to build a self-sufficient business model. Between 1998 and 2004, he independently issued four albums on CD through his Hashish Studios imprint, hustling copies directly to local record stores and live shows for instant returns, even hand-sewing screen-printed hessian sleeves for his final release.
Uncompromising in his principles and refusing to suffer fools or charlatans, Omar relished the opportunity to collaborate with those who embodied the same spirit. Hashish Hits offers a snapshot of his inner sanctum - Fitzgerald on the opening track's billowing smoke stacks, the serpentine vocals of Gina Mitchell and the magic hands of mixer Louis Mitchell on 'On Release,' and Wicked Beat Sound System’s Kye on 'Poor Man Beggar Man Thief'. Meanwhile, 'Suicide Bomber' smoulders with the tension of a lost Muslimgauze relic, as the instructional 'Roll Up' and 'The Last Straw' spiral deeper into Omar’s signature production vortex - where space stretches in slow motion and walls reverberate with ricocheting delay.
A true icon of Sydney’s underground scene, the larger-than-life Omar passed away on 23 June 2009 after a valiant battle with cancer. He is remembered for his assertive spirit, larrikin humour, wild anarchic personality, and enduring mantra: “Love and live your life”.
Karate’s first five years, boxed in classic Numero fashion and annotated by frontman Geoff Farina. Collaging DC posthardcore, De Stijl, and Django Reinhardt, this five LP set includes their self-titled debut, In Place of Real Insight, The Bed Is In The Ocean, period 7”s, and previously unissued 1993 demo. 41 late millennium accounts of 2AM bike rides, punk house floors, skinny dipping, regrettable tattoos, and Interstate 95 commuting, all remastered from the original tapes and housed in sturdy tip-on sleeves for the discerning Karate enthusiast. Don’t drown.
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.
In their short time together, Albert Ayler and Don Cherry created a body of music that genuinely exists in the moment. Oblivious to rules and aesthetic boundaries, they played what they felt on their nerve-ends, embracing mistake and wrong turns as part of the experience of making art in the moment. Now over sixty years old, these recordings breathe as strongly and sound as vividly as they did when they were made. This 4xLP box set contains four sets of recordings from the fall of 1964, including live sets at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre and a VARA Radio session in The Netherlands. The audio has been remastered and compiled together for the first time on vinyl. Albert Ayler's vital free jazz quartet featured Don Cherry on cornet, Gary Peacock on double bass and Sunny Murray on drums. The release includes a fold-out insert with extensive liner notes from Brian Morton.
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.
INDEX:Records is enamoured to present the accomplished debut record by New York City resident, Beau Mahadev – 8-parts of dreamy vocals and wet-textured IDM-pop.
To some extent, this album arriving at INDEX:Records has been over 3 years in the making: we were first introduced to Beau’s work at GLOB in Denver (during our USA tour in 2023), at an event hosted by a dear friend, filled with lovely peeps. We were totally blown away by Beau’s performance and knew within a few minutes of their set starting that we wanted to release an album with them someday. Now, here it is: Subterra. Featuring tasty collaborations with {iii}, Uza A'amo and Yau Hei ASJ.
Vinyl limited to 200 copies. Front sleeve by Chiu. Design by Conna Haraway
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.
Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.
The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.
Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.
While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.
AS Over and FT Over (Active noise canceling script) is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.
On AS Amygdala anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”
The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.
On AS U, Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.
AS Back staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence” FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say.
FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin.
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”
You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having is the fourth studio album by Minneapolis hip‑hop duo Atmosphere, released in 2005 on Rhymesayers Entertainment.
When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold is the fifth studio album by Minneapolis hip‑hop duo Atmosphere, released in 2008 on Rhymesayers Entertainment.
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.