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Debut Short Span LP from Miles ov Demdike Stare, Pendle Coven and Suum Cuique fame, co-founder of the DDS label, longtime pal, and in recent years mastering engineer to countless releases you’ll find strewn accross these pages. It documents 30 years of "warm up" jams, spanning many modes and eras in inimitably deep and fractious style... "The practice of dub techno and its tendrils is a fundamental for me, both aesthetically and from an engineering perspective. I start every recording session with a dub inspired jam, the first piece I ever recorded in 1996 was an effort to recreate Phylyps Trak with only a Korg X3 and an Ibanez PUE5 (borrowed from Gary Howell). It was an awesome introduction to jamming, and the footing stones of noise, delay and saturation were explored with my foot hard on the enthusiasm pedal. These practice jams are in some sense cathartic, the first step taken again & again, which helps me move forwards each session and additionally helps to 'warm the circuits' both of myself and the machines. After realising the genius of Basic Channel is akin to the genius of peasant food, using every ingredient with nothing left to waste, (up to and including the oft maligned working noise of the machines themselves), this was a watershed moment for my own subjective progression. No longer tied to just emulation of something inspiring, but taking these learned tools into other areas of music helped to break free from a strong current of influence and also to progress into other areas with the new toolbox. Dub: The importance of the dub pioneers should never be understated, in modern music and my own practice. Yet with my initial inspiration being two german dudes issuing extreme techno variants with obscured label designs, who then signposted their listeners to their own inspirations (via their Wackies re-issues or nodded to on their Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix sub-labels), meant that I started late and travelled backwards. Learning to notice the live mixing of Mikey Dread or Lee Perry when the faders are bleeding through even when turned down, (echoed in BC's Quadrant Dub), or the brash send effects literally thrown into the mix also taught me that 'rough' mixing can inject a recording with life, uniqueness and the most right wrongness. Looking back Basic Channels very few elements helped me realise that the rules to be understood, are also the best ones to be broken. Push the mixer into the red. Amp that noise up from the tape delay cos it sounds sick. Pseudo side-chain effects cos the kicks are way too loud and the mixer can't sum it nicely. Spam the send knob into the delay units now, now and now. Carelessness. Noise: Once I wrapped my head around the intrinsic 'noise' element that set those records apart, this became a torchlight into the alt noise movements which I was tentatively exploring at the time, and also is evidently a connection or thread into them. Whether the Industrial/Post Punk UK scene (This Heat, TG, A Tent, F.E.) or the prolific output of the US Noise scene (Wolf Eyes, Live & Shave in LA, and subsequently following the lineage all the way back to Chrome's Alien Soundtracks), I had finally discovered a connection from techno to this 'free for all' corner of music. This input from the Noise arena of sound is, in my experience, an all important step for a sonic artist, taking it's roots and extending out from Stockhausen/Pierre Henry and utilised/warped/mangled by thousands of adventurous pioneers ever since, I now see the line separating the high brow and the low brow is actually an artery carrying information from the head to the heart. Vault is a selection of these jams that precede each of my solo recording sessions, for 30 years I've recorded hundreds of these 'workouts'. They are never intended as serious statements, just moments of naive enjoyment, yet most importantly they are time & space captured as practice. The objective is always a warm up exercise, but sometimes those exercises turn a different corner, with a certain focus or direction dependent on what random samples are left in my machines from the previous session, instead of conscious choices, these unconscious elements can facilitate those 'positive mistakes' that make a piece of sound retain a different feel or colour and thus become special, or at least special to the creator. I am quite conscious that the 'record everything' aspect of my ethos has been invaluable in cataloguing and saving these jams, while the attitude of carelessness during this process (after all, it's only a warm up jam) invites more enjoyment than seriousness ever could. Even if you don't feel the piece at the time, record it, because some years later it may well fit, or become relevant in a way you never intended." -Miles

Jakarta x NYC’s charming Asa Tone trio chase their Ariel Kalma jams with a beatific bouquet of electronica-meets-gamelan delicacies, surely recalling their near namesake Asa-Chang & Junray’s Y2K classic ‘Hana’ as much as Visible Cloaks in their play of feathered rhythmelody, hyaline synths and lathered vox, benefitting from Tristan Arp’s filigree production. “Music From Memory presents ‘Mutualkind’, by Asa Tone, the collaborative project of Melati ESP, Tristan Arp and Kaazi. Written between Indonesia, Mexico City, Berlin and New York, the record unfolds through a process of continual exchange, where distance itself becomes part of the group’s music formation. At the centre of the album is the idea of a shared language, formed across differences in geography, experience and musical approach. One such process explores Tristan’s electronic hand percussion triggering fragments of Melati’s voice in real time, while a library of spoken words and phonemes are reshaped through chance-based rhythmic processes. Voice becomes percussion, rhythm becomes melody, and the lines between individual contributions begin to dissolve. Some pieces, including ‘Water Talk’ and ‘Second Language’, were recorded live in a single take, while others were assembled gradually through remote exchange. During the final sessions in Indonesia, Balinese percussionist Putu Septa contributed kendang to two tracks, bringing the instrument into dialogue with modular synthesis, FM textures, electronic drums, MIDI wind instruments and Melati’s shifting vocal forms. Sounds are slowed, stuttered and reorganised, reflecting a world shaped by illusory borders, vanishing landscapes and glitching ecosystems. Yet the album remains rooted in the act of tending to something shared: a musical field built through listening, improvisation and repeated moments of reunion. ‘Mutualkind’ seeks to blur boundaries without erasing the identities that meet across them, providing a space in which voice and instrument, self and other, separation and togetherness can briefly exist at once.”

Loving You To Death is very much about being with someone who is hurting you by hurting themself, knowing you should leave but that you can’t live without them. It’s mostly about one night, or one period of time? I don’t really know anymore, but maybe you can relate. Before writing this I was obsessed with stretching out my little moody riffs into long drawn out ambient pieces, throwing them through the morphagene and seeing what happens. But there is just way too much sound design around me, everything is so slick and impressive and boring and unmemorable. So I tried to keep everything bare, to accept the recordings as they are and to do it without a band. Long live mid-fi, dramatic relationships, obsessiveness, sing-song melodies and unprofessionalism, and huge thanks to Ariana, Matt, Adam, Yas, Nik, Victor, Ouri, Ziggy, my mom, Alan, and everyone else I drove crazy while making this.

Topu Lyo’s debut solo album quiet scenes from tokyo collects sixteen miniatures recorded in his Tokyo apartment using little more than cello and a Roland Space Echo. Extended techniques mimic electronic effects, moving between bowed drones, rhythmic pizzicato and strange, granular-sounding passages. The nearby freeway also became part of the music: traffic seeps naturally into the recordings alongside passing announcements and the city’s daily sunset melody. Sparse and exploratory, the album finds unexpected connections between acoustic cello, environmental sound and electronic production.

Telemakus' "Eight Ring Revival" via Good Problem Studios. "The upcoming album from Telemakus, featuring an all-star supporting cast of musicians: Flying Lotus, Karriem Riggins, Mndsgn, Liv.e, Sparklmami, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Swarvy, Chino Corvalán, Nicole McCabe and more. Pressed via Good Neighbor on a Cosmic Black record made from eco-conscious, 100% recyclable PET plastic. All songs written, performed, engineered & arranged by Telemakus, except where noted “Five Hands Pt. 1” written and co-produced by Swarvy, “Revival” co-produced by Mndsgn, Karriem Riggins “By Any Feet Necessary” co-produced by Karriem Riggins “2054” co-produced by Karriem Riggins"

Smerz remixed by ML Buch, Clairo, Astrid Sonne, Molina, Erika de Casier, MIKE + Zack Sekoff feat. Elias Rønnenfelt & Fousheé, Clarissa Connelly, Toxe and more... Smerz use 'Big City Life EDITS' to temper the foundations of what's developing into a bonafide movement, linking early vanguards like Clairo and Toxe with modish scroll-pop exponents ML Buch, NEW YORK, Astrid Sonne and Erika de Casier. Smart, extant biz - and a good way to take the temperature on a scene that's rapidly finding its feet. When they debuted (on SoundCloud, of course) in the mid 2010s, Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt sounded as if they were out on their own, meshing subtle club deconstructions with a kind of listless, languid half-pop that sounded familiar but fitting in an era when the millennial obsession with arduous performance was about to topple from the edge of a cliff. For a new generation who'd been forced to acclimatize at an early age to their terminally online reality, their older cousins' preoccupation with bells and whistles was beginning to wear thin - a listless, twee and dreamy alternative was beginning to materialize. Simultaneously inspired by the experimental pop fringe (think Jessy Lanza), the free mixtape-fueled R&B/rap mainstream and their state sponsored Scandi musical education, Smerz characterized this new wave; indeed, when they released their latest album 'Big City Life', they were basically veterans, having spent the last few years engineering a sound that propelled them from Copenhagen to all the way to Seoul, co-producing K-pop group NewJeans' 'Get Up' EP with fellow Scandinavian Erika de Casier. Now they were part of a sui generis movement, alongside Pitchfork faves like ML Buch, Clarissa Connelly and Astrid Sonne. 'Big City Life EDITS' presents 14 remixes of the album, one for each track provided by crooked web of their friends and contemporaries - with an extra cut tacked on from Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt themselves. And they do a good job of using their stems to goad their loose scene into showing its scope. In typically irreverent fashion, they launch the record with a mix from Danish duo Yrdloop, one of the set's least starry inclusions. Still, founded by Rhythmic Music Conservatory alumni, Yrdloop immediately lay out the contextual landscape, transforming the piano-led 'Big dreams' into an iridescent mesh of instrumental vamps, Oneohtrix-inspired FM exhalations and shimmering acoustic strums. Sonne meanwhile replies to Smerz's killer edit of 'Say you love me' with her dusty, casually reflective cover of 'Easy', and NEW YORK add some essential Stateside absurdity to 'Imagine This', showing that there's DNA outside of Scandinavia. The majority of the reworks might cluster around Copenhagen - tracks from Fine, Molina, Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Haploplus+ and Clarissa Connelly - but this only allows the sound to harden around its core elements. Danish-Chilean singer-songwriter Molina adds a dubby, South American lilt to 'Roll the dice', and ML Buch provides radio-friendly, cybernetic soft-rock glam to 'But I do', while Fine backs up the homespun 'Rocky Top Ballads' with a suitably Mazzy Star-inspired cover of 'A thousand lies'. There's no real genre present, but there's a tangible vibe - an omnivorous appetite for music that culminates in restraint and nonchalance, not hyperactive DAW-powered extravagance. The inclusion of Clairo, who features on Smerz and VVTZJ's edit of 'You got time and I got money', is a canny acknowledgement of the American lo-fi pioneer's enduring influence and even Toxe, who helped blur the lines between experimental club music and pop with her STAYCORE collective, turns up to extend the sleepy 'Street style' beyond its original frame. If you're interested in studying the evolution of pop and the avant-garde, 'Big City Life EDITS' gives you a surprisingly clear, succinct overview.

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

This is the first album by the improvisation group FuzzyToyShip.

The group was formed by Tomonao Koshikawa, a member of the legendary improvisation group Marginal Consort and a former member of East Bionic Symphonia.

Koshikawa has released two excellent works with ato.archives, and this time he presents his long-standing core practice of free improvisation. The work was created with musicians who had never played free improvisation before. Guided by Koshikawa, the musicians play with vigor, as the music flows from chaos to calm, presenting a fresh acoustic voyage.

Excerpt from the tape sleeve:

Beginning in 2022, I started conducting improvisation sessions in a workshop format, in which members of the audience would join the performance during the latter half. Over time, several people among the audience began to demonstrate an understanding of free improvisation, and I gradually developed the desire to form a group with them. Perhaps, in a sense, I was looking for a way to recreate East Bionic Symphonia, a group that I had not actively engaged with fifty years ago.

The final installment in the Cairo Records soul series. A double LP with a gold foil cover and a 24 page 12 X12 full color liner note booklet. It's all classic soul and R&B! It's got rockers and deep ballads (mostly deep ballads). It's a winner....

Originally released in 2004 by the American label Plan-DX17, Tamago is one of the distinctive works from Masami Akita’s prolific early-2000s laptop period. Recorded and mixed at Bedroom, Tokyo between April and May 2003, the album collects six pieces that explore repetition, digital processing, distorted textures and constantly shifting frequencies. Rather than relying solely on the overwhelming density often associated with Merzbow, Tamago develops its tension through loops, gradual transformations and recurring rhythmic fragments, creating a strangely controlled and hypnotic form of noise. The original edition was limited to 350 hand-numbered copies and came in a remarkable egg-shaped cardboard sleeve — an object whose physical form directly echoes the album’s title, Tamago, the Japanese word for “egg.”
 The album opens with “Bronzo Part.1”, a comparatively clean and sharply defined piece in which abrasive frequencies, electronic textures and almost melodic structures emerge from a tightly controlled loop. “Bronzo Part.2” extends this approach over fourteen minutes, gradually altering the density and character of its repeating materials. The sound becomes less a linear composition than a constantly shifting surface, with filters and processing slowly reshaping the same underlying elements. “Kangaroo Tracks Part.2” introduces a more pronounced rhythmic presence, its repetitive figures suggesting a mechanical pulse without ever settling into a conventional beat.
 “Bronzo Part.3” continues the series with another long-form study in repetition and transformation, balancing harsh electronic tones with passages of sparse, stripped-back electronics. Then comes the album’s title track, “Tamago,” a seven-minute piece built around one of the record’s most unusual sonic sources. Bird vocalizations are sampled and electronically manipulated, stretched and transformed until their original character becomes increasingly ambiguous. The sound comes from Yoshino, Akita’s pet bantam chicken, who is credited in the original release simply as “Chorus by Yoshino.” An everyday animal sound is pushed through Akita’s processing until it becomes something entirely new — an unexpected, vivid and unmistakable voice within the album’s electronic landscape.
 The closing “Kangaroo Tracks Part.1” returns to the rhythmic and repetitive language heard earlier in the album, bringing the record to a close without a conventional climax. Tamago reveals a different side of Merzbow’s noise practice: less concerned with simply overwhelming the listener than with repetition, microscopic variation and the gradual transformation of recognizable sounds into something alien. This digital edition also includes two bonus tracks from the same period as the original recording sessions, offering a further glimpse into Akita’s work around the time Tamago was created and expanding the original album with previously uncollected material from this particularly fertile period.

Bo Harwood (1946–2022) was one of those behind-the-scenes figures of American independent cinema: a self-taught musician, composer, sound editor, sound mixer and songwriter. Harwood started out as the lead singer and guitarist of a Southern California rock band before a chance meeting with John Cassavetes changed the course of his career. He scored his first feature, The Bach Train, in 1969, and later joined Husbands as an inexperienced assistant in the editing room. He gradually became Cassavetes’s sound editor, music supervisor, composer and sound mixer, eventually working across six of his films, from Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence through The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and Love Streams. Harwood’s music is inseparable from the peculiar emotional universe of those films: strange, romantic, funny and often devastating. Harwood and Cassavetes worked closely and instinctively together, developing music in the process of making the films. The surviving master tapes reveal something of this exchange: alongside finished pieces are improvisations, experiments and conversations, capturing the two of them working through ideas in real time. Harwood’s compositions were often recorded as rough “scratch tracks”, with Cassavetes preferring their immediacy and vulnerability to more polished arrangements. This nine-track LP brings together some of that work. There is something wonderfully intimate about hearing these recordings outside the films: the songs stand on their own, while retaining the rawness and emotional charge that made Harwood’s collaboration with Cassavetes so distinctive. A small document of a remarkable and largely overlooked body of work.

“Origen: Una Exploración por el Jazz Modal de los Trópicos” is a celebration of the human bonds that transcend cultural differences to create a shared language beneath the same sky. Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas are the protagonists of this sonic diaspora, where Modal Jazz, Spiritual Jazz, Egyptian Jazz, Ethiopian Jazz, Cape Verdean Kriolu, Brazilian Jazz, Latin Jazz, Caribbean Rhythms, and Flamenco Jazz come together, among many other influences, to shape a journey toward healing and a reconnection with our shared origin.

„Öd“ marks the long-awaited return of Institut für Feinmotorik - the Black Forest collective known for using eight prepared turntables to investigate acoustic micro-phenomena generated by everyday objects - with a new album and their first full-length release on Faitiche. It is also the return of their almost comical understatement as personal artistic principle: „making almost nothing out of almost nothing,“ compressed into the dots on an umlaut. The Öd-nis, the wasteland, is a field that the collective has been ploughing in sound since their first release in 1997. Eight prepared turntables, four mixers, no records, six hands (give or take) merge into what they call the „Octogrammoticum“. A rotating organism of surfaces in friction, fed with the clutter from a drawer: rubber bands or tin foil, CDs, a discarded socket board. Under IFF's scrutinizing stylus, mundane almost-nothings get scratched open to reveal the acoustic density of negative space itself. Last year’s „Adhesive Tape“ drew IFF closer together after an almost ten-year hiatus. An eponymous event series at Berlin's silent green set in motion what would become their most twistedly funky release since „Penetrans“ on Staubgold in 2002. The only thing öd about „Öd" (meaning „barren" or „boring“ in German) may well be its title: layers of improvised play and randomized loops convolve around porous, dubby groove locks, tugging at each other in a call-and-response with howling static that cuts through bulbous ambient techno into a scrap-metal Dixieland phantasm. Stratified yet spacious, these sonic double exposures always hover on the verge of collapsing. What you think you hear might not be what you actually hear. The album’s track titles resemble Conceptual Poetry, extending this psycho-phenomenological gesture into the realm of spoken language. Conceived by renowned poet Dagmara Kraus, they become word molecules - „stern,” „dies,” „lose“ - tilting delicately between German and English, constantly changing depending on the ear’s perspective and pointing back to the deeply unstable fabric connecting meaning and sound. Which also makes „Öd“ an unusual cross-disciplinary collaboration - at least in the field of electronic music. PS: Since its beginnings in Bad Säckingen, IFF has always been more than the sum of its rotating parts, moving tirelessly between multimedia art, theory, solo projects and collaborations. With IFF Expanded, the collective now opens its eight-doored apparatus, inviting artists working with CDJs or samplers to join - an ambitious live format that loosens its former purity law while carrying forward a long-standing curatorial practice. The same thread also runs into the related event series Acephalic Headspace. (Text: Sonja Matuszczyk)

Fukuoka, early '80s. In the backstreets of Hakata, between neon lights and moonlight, three figures shaped darkness and grey shades from the Far East. The "Moonlight" EP and all the Neo Museum rarities finally collected in one vinyl release: the most ritualistic and lunar side of Japanese new wave shines again.

Klara Lewis' Opening is a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers. "Klara Lewis’ distinctive talent for disfiguring sound into forms that remain recognisably song-like reaches a new peak here. Lewis, creator of worlds, treats music as a mirror that reflects a perspective misaligned with the real image. Her music moves in unusual and often startling ways. Acoustic instruments such as ukulele and piano are subjected to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, their original forms continually reshaped. The tracks within Opening offer an array of disorientating tactics; damaged field recordings are suddenly sliced into ominous rhythmical patterns whilst deceptively simple tactics provide foreboding dread. Often alien on entry, the progression of a piece can land in a surprising tenderness, or the other way around. The momentum grows as a physical state but also one which is questioning, desiring, encapsulating a feeling, to explore a further way of expression and ultimately connecting: A new closeness, a new perspective. Opening is an album in which the protagonist’s manipulation of sonic matter seems to extend beyond the music itself, resulting in a corresponding manipulation of the active listener. Sounds shift, dissolve, and re-emerge in altered forms, creating an experience that feels both intimate and disorienting. Lewis maintains a delicate balance between abstraction and emotional immediacy, drawing the listener into a world where familiar musical gestures are constantly reconfigured in surprising ways. The works on Opening are refracted through an exploratory and transformative lens, suggesting an artist continuing to redefine the possibilities of musical language as a space where the instantaneous and the eternal come together."

First-time reissue of a coveted 1982 album from sound artist, percussionist and composer Kjell Samkopf, offering a heady exploration of natural sound and rhythm made from environmental recordings, vibraphone, marimba and dreamy synths - essential listening FFO Midori Takada, Craig Leon, Visible Cloaks. A towering figure in Norway's contemporary music scene, Kjell Samkopf studied jazz vibraphone at Berklee in 1979 before attending a World Music seminar at Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1981, broadening his horizons sufficiently that when he arrived back in Norway, he was ready to work on his first solo album. Recorded in 1981 at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 'Music for Solo Percussion and Electronics' showcases the influences that were circling around the young composer at the time, with its centrepiece, 'Invention No. 5', commissioned by Swedish Radio. Samkopf would go on to become Norway's first professor of percussion at the Norwegian Academy of Music, as well as writing a litany of acclaimed works over the course of his career. ‘Music for Solo Percussion and Electronics’ is a hard record to accurately define, which might explain why it's remained the preserve of connoisseurs for so long. Undoubtedly influenced by jazz and free improvisation, it’s not a jazz record exactly, nor does it easily slot into the avant-classical canon. To approach its multi-faceted charms, it's best to start at the deep end, via the side-long epic, 'Oppfinnelse Nr 5 - Invention No 5'. Over a span of almost 25 minutes, Samkopf’s controlled, idiosyncratic expressions highlight his inventiveness, focusing on percussion but, above all, incredible attention to microscopic detail in the mix. Cricket chirps and distant birds create a tangible, natural backdrop as Samkopf follows their lead, layering bells and chimes as a response to the environment itself. It's the final act that has us fully ruined, though. Here, Samkopf cracks the biodome, losing the background soundscape for a moment to introduce analogue bass with a crash of cymbals. Threading through bells and woody clacks, he slowly re-builds his sonic ecosystem, following the metered, industrial-strength synth as if making a wry comment about technology itself. 'Music for Solo Percussion and Electronics' is one of those endlessly rewarding finds that fills a rare slot in the timeline; somewhere between Midori Takada's legendary 'Through the Looking Glass' (which emerged around the same period on the other side of the world) and Visible Cloaks' Fourth World-adjacent 'Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo', which arrived decades later and triggered so much of the contemporary obsession with percussive music from the margins.

Tofu is one of the world’s most misunderstood foods. Outside East and Southeast Asia it is often dismissed as weird and flavourless, yet across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and beyond it has played a lead role in everyday life for centuries. It’s a food of remarkable versatility, capable of endless transformation while remaining instantly recognisable. That paradox lies at the heart of Tofu: Original Soundtrack. Conceived alongside research for a book exploring the history of tofu (Tofu: A Culinary History), the compilation invites artists from around the world to respond not simply to an ingredient, but to its mythology, materiality, history and cultural resonance. The result is a soundtrack to bean curd in all its forms: humble and profound, domestic and cosmic, ancient yet continually reinvented.

Like tofu itself, the compilation constantly changes shape. Tokyo producer aus (Flau Records) opens the album with luminous ambient electronics that explore tofu's uncanny physicality, before Rebecca Burden ventures into brooding electroacoustic territory inspired by ancient Chinese mythology and the destructive power of music itself. twenty eyes drifts through the supernatural world of Japanese fox folklore, while Yumi Iwaki and Tonia Ko transform the chemistry of tofu-making into shimmering modular synthesis and tactile sound art, tracing the mysterious moment at which liquid becomes curd. Yetsuby turns her attention to tofu as comfort food through warm, delicately textured electronics, Stella Chin-Ting Yang blends synthesis with field recordings captured in Thailand and Taipei to celebrate tofu’s endlessly varied textures, and Louie Zong, under his Lookfar moniker, descends into rich dungeon synth inspired by the dank, microbial world of fermented tofu. The journey then returns to reality through Nick Luscombe’s intimate field recording of a working tofu shop in Tokyo, before VGM maestro bo en closes proceedings with an exuberant roll-credits celebration reminiscent of folk festivities.

Featuring an ensemble roster of artists from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK and US, the Tofu OST embraces the same adaptability that has allowed bean curd to travel across cultures while remaining deeply rooted in local traditions. Each contribution offering a distinct perspective, yet together forming a coherent whole: a celebration of one of humanity’s most enduring foods, and of the communities, histories and creative practices that surround it. Whether meditative, playful, uncanny or joyful, these pieces reveal tofu as far more than an ingredient—it becomes a vessel for storytelling, experimentation and shared cultural memory.

Private Mexican lounge that still burns long after the cruise ship disembarks. Armed with a single nylon string guitar, a toy chest of rudimentary percussion, and the emotional microtones of the Spanish tongue, Alejandro Bravo's lone LP blends bossanova, samba, and the Brill Building into a horny margarita for the tourist class. Recorded at home in Acapulco in 1971, Bravo's self-released LP slaps and thrills with its taps and trills. Pair with a pregnancy test for best results.

Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history. The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail. Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood. Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.

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

electronic music. Jules Négrier's An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids unfolds in two movements, moving from raw emotion and shifting harmonics into tangled rhythms and strange electronic sounds. Maria W Horn's All Solids Melt Into Aether pits computer-generated tones against an organ pushed to its limits, creating a compelling struggle between precision and instability. Both works find beauty in tension, with sounds constantly changing, collapsing and finding unexpected forms. Artwork comes courtesy of Stephen O'Malley.

Amina Hocine and Espen Sommer Eide contribute two extended compositions created for the GRM acousmonium. Hocine’s ‘X3’ combines sine waves, field recordings and her self-built foghorn organ in a slowly evolving piece inspired by Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen. Eide’s ‘Until The Fish Eyes Shine’ draws on his work as Phonophani, bringing elements of late-1990s Tromsø ambient techno into an experimental electronic setting. Both pieces explore the relationship between sound, space and time, moving from delicate electronic details to expansive, otherworldly passages. Artwork by Stephen O’Malley.

Grounded in The Broad’s collection of multiples by Joseph Beuys (1921–86), In Defense of Nature centers the German artist’s commitment to environmental justice. The project traces Beuys’ long history of activism, from founding alternative organizations such as the Organization for Direct Democracy to his involvement in Germany’s Green Party. These efforts culminated in Beuys’ last major project, 7,000 Oaks, which involved planting 7,000 trees accompanied by stones throughout the city of Kassel, Germany, from 1982 to 1987. Beuys’ concept inspired Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, a reforestation project in Los Angeles inaugurated as part of the PST ART initiative. With programs that address overlapping issues of environmental justice, reconciliation, and restoration, Social Forest highlights the continued impact of 7,000 Oaks and brings new meaning to Beuys' legacy four decades later, in a vastly different landscape that equally demands repair.

‘I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label I wanted to be on. That was the label that put out all the great records.' Bob Dylan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "At Folkways Records, the art on an album cover was a portal and an invitation, hinting at the audio to be found inside, a tradition we continue today at Smithsonian Folkways. It is a true honor to be treated to Soul Jazz Redords's deep and thoughtful exploration of the iconic album art from one of America's most consequential record labels” Maureen Loughran, Director and Curator Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Smithsonian Institution ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soul Jazz Records new book 'Folkways Records: A Visual History of Folkways Records Cover Art' is out on Oct 19. Deluxe new large-format hardback book featuring 100s of striking and beautiful record sleeve designs from Folkways Records, one of the most important and iconic record labels in the world. Featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, John Cage, Pete Seeger, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Mary Lou Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Ives and many more. 208 Pages, 12"x12", Hardback includes extensive introduction and accompanying text. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Folkways Records and Service Corporation was founded in 1948 by Moses Asch after Albert Einstein first encouraged him to document the ‘sounds of the world’. From 1949-1987, Folkways released over 2,000 recordings of jazz, folk, avant-garde, world, sounds of nature, spoken word, electronic modernism, civil rights speeches and more. Folkways stands head and shoulders above all ‘world music’ record labels in its depth of representation of cultural diversity and its understanding of the nature of sound itself . Asch’s vision of presenting ‘other music’ in all its myriad forms alongside the homegrown indigenous music of the United States of America (jazz, blues, folk and more) showed an unparalleled vision of modern cultural representation. Much of the success in bringing together such diverse subjects into one cohesive unique and visual identity for Folkways Records is down to the 100s of stunning artwork designs of Ronald Clyne, the primary designer at the record label. Through typeface, colour and design Clyne gave Folkways record covers both an incredibly stylish and unique look and an underlying seriousness of intent and vision, the perfect match to that of founder Moses Asch. The book focusses on the numerous stunning and striking record designs that feature across Folkways’ vast and idiosyncratic musical landscape – from The Music of Equatorial New Guinea to The Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, from The Songs and Dances of The Flathead Indians to The Sounds of The Tropical Rain Forest in America. Other diverse music you will find here include: Outer Space Music, Chinese Classical Music, Sea Shanties and Loggers Songs, Drums of the Yoruba of Nigeria, Street Games and Songs of The Children of New York City, Experiments in Computer Music and more. Folkways recorded some of the greatest names in American music across the fields of jazz, folk, poetry, blues and classical music, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Nikki Giovanni, Pete Seeger, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, John Cage, and Charles Ives, all of whom are featured here. As a wholly independent record label with a focus purely on music outside of the mainstream, Asch found unique and innovative solutions to keeping his record company alive for almost 40 years, maintaining the vast catalogue of 2,000 recordings always in print. Smithsonian Folkways when the entire catalogue became part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.