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Lost Soul Super Rarity “Here I Am Baby” by Lady Jane reissued by Athens of the North Rare 1980 Detroit funk-soul LP finally surfaces after 45 years, revealing a powerful story of survival and artistic resilience Edinburgh based label Athens of the North is pleased to announce the reissue of Here I Am Baby, the only studio album by soul and funk vocalist Lady Jane (Jane Brice), originally recorded at Studio A, in Dearborn Heights and privately released in 1980. Lady Jane recorded these sessions during a turbulent period in Detroit in the late 1970s, working with respected engineer Eric Morgeson and a studio band on material largely written by her then-husband. The album remained virtually unknown for decades, with copies destroyed in a flood and masters held by her ex-husband. A chance discovery by Friends of Sound Records founder David Haffner in 2022 set the reissue in motion. Remarkably, before his death, Jane’s ex-husband returned the original master tapes to her—yielding not only the complete multitracks for Here I Am Baby, but an entire album’s worth of unreleased material, also coming soon on AOTN. Here I Am Baby showcases Jane’s extraordinary voice across a compelling blend of soul, funk, and disco, from the opening ballad through heavy funk excursions like “Never Lived In The Ghetto” and “Space Flight.” The album’s final track, “She’s A Star” - the only song Janewrote herself - carries profound personal significance. Recorded without her husband’s knowledge, the song directly addresses her survival of childhood sexual abuse and stands as a moving testament to resilience and self-belief. Now an ordained minister, Jane Brice has spent decades away from the spotlight. But her voice—at once forceful, delicate, and vulnerable—deserves to be heard. Newly mastered from the recovered tapes, Here I Am Baby and the forthcoming Miss Disco present not merely a rare funk-soul artifact, but a powerful document of a woman’s courage in reclaiming her own story.

maya ongaku has always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date. Written in the aftermath of several years of international touring, the album emerged from a growing desire to reconnect with silence. As stages became larger and the world around them moved faster, the band found themselves drawn toward the quieter spaces beneath it all. What began as a reflection on stillness & silence eventually expanded into the idea of "Nothing Space". To realise the album, maya ongaku created an entirely new environment for themselves. Near a seaside shrine in their hometown, the trio transformed a large soundproof building into Nothing Space Studio, a space built specifically around the needs of this record. Nothing Space Music: a meditation on presence, perception, and the possibility of rediscovering the world through attentive listening.

Hailing from the seaside communities surrounding Enoshima, a small island located 50 km southwest of Tokyo, maya ongaku is a ragtag collective of local musicians whose brand of earthy psychedelia transcends widely beyond the roots of their inner souls. The name derives not from any kind of ancient civilization, but rather a neologism defined as the imagined view outside one’s field of vision. The band—currently a trio of Tsutomu Sonoda, Ryota Takano, and Shoei Ikeda—finds sanctuary at the Ace General Store, a beachy vintage shop and salon-like space just hidden from sight from the bustling, touristy riverside Subana Street. Between discussions on music and art, curating the vinyl section and manning the register, and chatting up with locals young and old, the members find time to jam and record their spontaneous ideas in the studio tucked away in the back. It’s in this unlikely setting where maya ongaku finds its origins, the culmination of what Sonoda describes as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), meaning spontaneous generation, or the supposed production of living organisms from nonliving matter.


Approach to Anima, the group’s debut album released on Guruguru Brain, finds maya ongaku building a foundational groove while tapping into their innermost psyche. Sonoda’s malleable guitar and vocals, Takano’s sinuous bass lines, Ikeda’s floating woodwinds, and a sprinkling of delicate percussion—all coalesce into an aural experience that’s assertive yet abstract, calm but unsettling. The slow building, sax-laden “Approach” serves as an introduction to maya ongaku’s world, while the appropriately-named “Water Dream” floats its way toward the gentle finale of “Pillow Song.” It’s a concise distillation of their many interests and influences, from Neo-Dada and Fluxus, to where contemporary art intersects with the development of modern recording technology in the ‘60s and ‘70s.


As the title suggests, Approach to Anima is not intended to be a terminus; it’s merely the beginning of an exploration. The three childhood friends that comprise maya ongaku are always looking beyond the confines of the idyllic but rapidly gentrifying enclave of their beloved Enoshima. Feeding off of the energy that still radiates from the triumphant, decade-long journey of their label bosses’ band Kikagaku Moyo, who rose to global prominence from scrappy beginnings busking on the streets of Takadanobaba, they hope to go wherever inspiration takes them, to anywhere around the globe where their music can find a home.


Ultimately, maya ongaku’s uninhibited world-building will make it possible for us to see the unseen, expand the possibilities of the naked eye—all through the unbridled vibrancy of their music. 

One of the finest vocal groups of the rocksteady and early reggae periods of Jamaican music, the Heptones first drew attention for the singles and albums they cut for Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One label during the late '60s. Poised on the cusp of a cultural shift, Leroy Sibbles (also a bass-wielding session man for Dodd) and partners Barry Llewellyn and Earl Morgan tackled a combination of the sort of pained love songs then in vogue and fresher "reality" material, a mix arguably heard best on On Top.

Originally released in 1977 and expanded for a 1995 edition by Musica Elettronica Viva founder member Allan Bryant, 'Space Guitars' uses no electronics, Bryant instead prepares and plays his modified instruments to remodel the sound into unclassifiable waves, clusters of bleeps and insectoid chirps. Bryant wasn't averse to electronic music - he started an influential electronic improv act with Alvin Curran, after all - but he didn't want to rely on synths to make "fascinating new and completely different sounds." And 'Space Guitars' collects studies he made specifically for guitar, whether it immediately sounds like it or not. The title track alone is mindbogglingly unique, making Derek Bailey and Fred Frith's prepared jammers sound almost pedestrian in comparison. We're not completely sure what Bryant is doing, but using only amplification and his arsenal of instruments, he creates sounds with as much variance and texture as a room filled with synthesizers, constantly modifying the pitch and any identifying sonic markers to prevent us from hearing anything that might be too straightforward. It's hard to believe 'Bouncing People Planet' isn't firing from a rack of modules; the way Bryant stacks his ping-ponging string sounds is undoubtedly inspired by synth methodologies and the sound itself is confounding, dense and rhythmic in ways you struggle to comprehend. Best of all though is 'Space Train', where Bryant makes his guitar sound like one of Alan Lamb's legendary aeolian harps, stretching its strings to make it mimic train wheels moving across miles of track.

Sa Pa explores the murkier edges of dub techno and deep house on Rhythm From Ambient, the second release on his Dub Techno For Life label.The title track rolls through heavy dub pressure and gravelly percussion, while ‘Rhythm’ reworks an industrial techno piece originally intended for Sa Pa’s 2015 MDR EP. ‘Last Dance’ stretches into deep house territory with a slow-burning, dubbed-out pulse, before ‘Bo Riddim’ closes things down with deep sub-bass, heavy drums, loose percussion and fragmented melodies. Another experimental outing from Sa Pa, moving between dub techno, house and stranger electronic terrain.

The UK’s Afro-club Queen, Shannen SP chases her ‘Amapiano Now’ comp for NTS with a cherry-picked survey of Mzansi Bass, including one of her own, locked to the emergent South African hybrid of Bacardi energy and amapiano log drum grooves currently catching fire beyond SA. Spotlighting the freshest iteration of a lineage that runs from ‘80s bubblegum to ‘90s and ‘00s kwaito, thru gqom, amapiano, bacardi and 3-step in recent decades, Shannen SP’s curatorial chops are deadly on-point yet again with this lot for Colombia’s TraTraTrax. Anyone keeping up with contemporary South African styles and patterns will recognise certain hallmarks of prevailing sounds tessellated into the more layered, sticky and even psycho-sexual thrust of Mzansi Bass, which clearly favours an added lash of raving trance synths and simmering energy bound to connect with proper dancers everywhere. Perhaps most notably, it opens with Shannen SP’s debut production credit (after vocal on Nazar’s ‘Airstrike’ in 2020), in duo with Hennybelit on the transition from tense techno hunch to gluts-twang bass in ‘Mzansi Bass’, smartly cued up next to DJ Lag’s nagging trance vamps on ’NOPS’, for the strongest introduction to this new permutation. The pressure holds tight for the rest, firing zippy Kaito-style electro motifs on State Offf’s ‘Alarm’, and full wingspan glyder ‘Favelas’ ft. Lyzza. Jay Music rams the energy with a romantic keen in the finely yoked trot of ‘Midnight Session’, and Deep Narratives plumb proper subbass levels on the quaking ace ‘Ghetto Gong’, next to the martial pomp of ‘Stjwetla Revisit’ by Audio Addicts, and a surprise left turn to Barbie SZN’s cunty rap on blown-out bass in ‘GTI.’

Editions Mego presents GETGETGET by Thomas Brinkmann, which serves as an inquiry into silence, code, and the limits of perception. "The title GETGETGET references the trilogy of ‘Get’ lp’s made by Rehberg under his PITA moniker; Get Out, Get In and Get On. The music is based on material by Rehberg and Brinkmann morphing these two identities into a third colour, a disappearing colour. Emerging from a live performance at the label’s 30th anniversary in Berlin, the work unfolds as both sonic artifact and conceptual system: a study in what remains when sound is reduced, extracted, and reconstituted. Taking inspiration from Günther Anders’ notion of “negative music”—composition through absence—Brinkmann’s approach aligns with Heinrich Böll’s idea of “collected silence”: silence not as void, but as a material framed against the constant pressure of noise. In GETGETGET, pauses are not gaps but structural elements, cut from a continuum and reinserted as signals. The two side long tracks weave a dark abstract and ‘twisted’ presence where the ghosts of the machines and their operators fuse into a fantastical whole. One can hear traces of both Brinkmann and Rehberg logic which seems to fuse in a hallucinatory manner. Brinkmann’s work reflects a broader condition: the translation of material processes into informational ones. As images detach from bodies and code separates from matter, sound too loses its fixed resonance. What remains is circulation—of signals, of data, of meaning—within systems that increasingly define perception itself. GETGETGET is an album where absence is equal to presence, a metaphor with suggestive tones of the influence Rehberg had and continues to have in the world of the radical experimental electronic avant garde. The “zero” is not empty; it is what makes everything else work."

Released in 2001, *Drawn From Life* is a rare ambient instrumental project by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm.

Mekong Shellac is an extremely rare collection of classical and popular styles of Khmer music from the 1930s to the 1950s. Restored from the few original remaining copies, this compilation reveals a remarkable world of early 20th-century Cambodian folk music previously lost in time through war, cultural shifts, and modernization. These recordings were selected for their distinctive musical qualities, the physical condition of the 78 rpm records from which they were sourced, and the circumstances of their survival. The selections span a range of Khmer musical forms, including Chapey, Romvong, Lakon Basak, Pleng Khmer, Ayai, and Ayai Reung, as well as classical and court-derived traditions such as Pinpeat and Mahori, alongside popular and regional styles including Lamleav and Pleng Ka. It's a miracle these discs have survived at all throughout the past century. Restoration of these 78-rpm artifacts was a challenge, but considering that, of most songs appearing on the album, less than 5 copies are known to exist worldwide today - with only two known copies of three tracks presented here, the songs survive magnificently. Produced by Adam Fargason with the critical assistance of Sam Touch and Mai Viết Cường, this limited-edition vinyl pressing comes with a deluxe 16-page booklet insert including highly detailed liner notes, essays and historical information about the recordings, and a selection of vintage photographs.

This is raw, unfiltered ceremonial gong ensemble music recorded on location by Laurent Jeanneau in Ratanakiri, Cambodia’s northeastern province, bordering Laos and Vietnam. Along with Mondolkiri to the south, it was once home to many of the country’s ethnic minority communities. During the colonial period, the French failed to establish full control over the region. After independence, the Khmer state also struggled to govern it, while Khmer Rouge rebels hid in its forests in the 1960s amid the wider conflict between communist Vietnam and the United States. The Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975 and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, which lasted until 1991, could have devastated the traditions of northeastern Cambodia’s ethnic minorities. Yet during the 1980s and 1990s, Indigenous communities revived swidden agriculture, also known as slash-and-burn farming, and resumed gong playing, preserving their animist ceremonies and beliefs. Only in the 21st century have rubber plantations and corporate development, driven largely by dominant Khmer, Vietnamese, and Chinese interests, become a serious threat to the ways of life of these marginalized communities. This album features various gong ensembles being played during animist rituals and for drinking the fermented rice alcohol called Tavei. Instrumentation includes Nipple and flat gongs, bamboo tubes, male and female vocals, and drums. (Limited edition of 500 vinyl copies with a 2-page insert featuring detailed liner notes by Laurent Jeanneau and additional photos of the musicians).

The second release from Ojas Music, Elyria Sound is a solo guitar album from Michael A. Muller, recorded to analog tape during a winter storm in Brooklyn in January 2026. Where Muller's previous work operated in darker, atmospheric territories, and 2024's Mirror Music wove together 11 collaborators, Elyria Sound strips everything back to a single voice: one instrument, one room, one take. Each piece was captured live in single passes to a one-inch tape machine, the most direct path from fingertip to magnetic oxide. The album title traces to 2018, when Muller began writing solo music while housesitting for a friend in Elyria Canyon in the East Los Angeles hills. The address became the name of his studio, and when he moved to LA shortly after, it became a way of life for the next six years. Elyria Sound is an intimate homage to his sensorial world of that time: the quality of light through a kitchen window. The lull of helicopters and sirens, the blurred glimmer of city lights stretching to the night horizon. Gravel, dust, lizards, birds. Clacking bamboo, white rose, jade, fig, and lemon. A dwelling. A resting place. The comfort of an exhale, and the looming awareness that nothing stays. To create the record, Muller developed entirely new guitar tunings, forcing himself to relearn the instrument's language from scratch. The result moves between lullaby and lament: spare, cyclical compositions where motifs recur at differing angles and tempos, variations on a central thread. One piece, "Arundel," pays tribute to David Pajo (Papa M, Slint, Tortoise), a nod to the lineage of guitar music that values texture and patience over drama. The cover artwork by Dennis Foster serves as a visual counterbalance to the music's intended simplicity.

An album by a little-known guitar duo released in 1999. Their songs—composed solely of guitars and making heavy use of harmonics—are beautiful pieces that evoke an ambient-like tranquility; during their live performances at the time, they even collaborated with 8mm film projections. However, while the album received high praise from a select few, the overall response was very limited. At the time, the indie scene had not yet re-evaluated ambient sounds, and there were virtually no other groups performing such simple instrumental music live. I believe this made the music extremely difficult to categorize and left it in a precarious position. However, once Japanese ambient music began to be re-evaluated globally in the 2010s, this album was rediscovered, and the remaining stock of CDs sold out instantly. Amid calls for a reissue, we’d like to unleash this music anew with this first-ever vinyl release. KENKEN—now known as URBAN VOLCANO SOUNDS—also makes a guest appearance. Whether you want to take your time exploring this little-known hidden gem or use it as everyday background music, this acoustic guitar instrumental album creates beautiful moments that seep into the very air around you.

A new LP by JJ Whitefield (Poets of Rhythm, Whitefield Brothers etc) and Gonçalo Mortágua. file under: spiritual jazz

In 2009, the label Art Yard sent a probe into the outer regions of contemporary electronic music, releasing Berliner Ring's "Orbital" album, a dub techno hymnal for Berlin’s orbital ring road. Drawing together the disparate elements of invented instruments, modified keyboards, customized rhythm and string machines, it was built around moods and themes drawn from the Berlin landscape. One member of the Ring, Alexander Christou, also a part of the Berlin electro rock group Elecdrones, recording for Katzensonne. The band were “not interested in the crafting of chunks of music ready to be consumed”. Christou has since been recording under the moniker Al Chem, crossing analogue and digital realms, synthesizing a kind of philosopher’s stone. As Al Chem, he released on Tummy Touch Records, and now follows with a collection of foggy electronic dub meditations recorded between 2000 and 2005 in a full album. In the battle to harness the elements, ancient mists permeated Chem’s music. A murky, mercurial humidity saturates the project. A distinctly north European descendant of dub, a kind of Seventh Seal that Bergman could have made, if provided enough hydroponic infusions. No Hopper is a rework of the Ras Michael song No Hoppers, from his legendary album, Rastafari Dub, Chem's version shuffles the pack of electronic percussion with organic, Moondog-like rhythms and hazy atmospheric chords; The Prophet pinpoints Chem's GPS firmly in Berlin, just as The Red Tower blurs that kick-drum parallel between reggae and house music; Baudelaire sputters digital delay, piling on the pressure, a clatter of surgical implements performing an operation out of Dead Ringers, the patient storming out of the theatre with loosely fitted mechanical body parts; the instrumental No Hopper only serves to highlight the distant gathering storm. Ladder of Perfection rounds off the set with a drone, creaking with bubbling digital mud pools.

Ricky V runs wild on Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s Persian tombak hand drum actions, expanding a 4 min kernel of inspiration into 24 minutes of mesmerising polyrhythmic traction. From an original 'Swamp' piece that practically recalls Ricardo’s style of slinky minimal techno sorcery to begin with, the Chilean-German maverick derives a more driving tract of rough hewn rhythmic grit bound to hypnotise dancefloors for the duration. Accentuating the undulating bass and dialling up the volume whilst retaining the frictional grind of the original, Villalobos gets right inside the groove with typically obsessive tekkerz, plucking out additional string motifs and tempering the flow with signature, taut but sinuous, loosey goosey flex that cross-pollinates cultures and gets right under the skin of the thing. Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (b. 1979, Iran) is a virtuoso percussionist known for his groundbreaking work with the tombak and daf, traditional Persian drums that he has radically redefined through new playing techniques and extended vocabulary. Mortazavi began playing the tombak at the age of six. By nine, he had already outpaced his teacher and won Iran’s national tombak competition — a distinction he would earn six more times. By his early twenties, he was widely regarded as one of the foremost players of the instruments. Since then, his music has continued to evolve, embracing new forms and vocabularies beyond tradition. Ricardo Villalobos (b. 1970, Chile) is a pioneering figure in minimal techno, celebrated for his hypnotic approach to rhythm. Raised in Germany after his family fled Pinochet’s regime, Villalobos was drawn early to percussion — he began playing congas and bongos at eleven, developing a tactile relationship to rhythm that would later inform his distinctive production style. Immersed in both Latin American folk traditions and the emerging house and techno scenes of late-80s Europe, he began DJing and producing in the early 1990s, quickly achieving cult status within global club culture. Swamp originally appears on the album Nexus, released in 2025 via Latency.

“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.

Pugilist percussionists Valentina Magaletti (Moin, Holy Tongue) & João Pais Filipe (HHY & The Macumbas) aka CZN, switching between tumbling flight and collapse on a new EP for Orator. The first release on Orator appears to slice off half an hour of tape from an endless session oscillating between polymetric clatter and tonal pauses for breath, as roughly relating to the title; referencing a rotary electrical motor that periodically reverses the direction of drive. In the first half, ‘That’s Magic!’ they juxtapose a hell-for-leather discipline hinting at Central African and Haitian traditions, with a slower arc of harmonic overtones that temper the flow to a quiet stillness halfway, and at the end. That approach comes on more aggressive, almost like Cut Hands, on the first section of B-side ‘There’s a Clown In My History’, before inverting the pressure to a vaporous, pregnant tension that finally breaks to cantankerous crescendo.

YHWH Nailgun, a New York-based four-piece band that, despite being virtually unknown, left a strong impression on Japanese audiences with their performance at Fuji Rock Festival 2025, has released *Magazine*, their debut album on the prestigious 4AD label.

YHWH Nailgun formed in 2020 around Zach Bolzon (vocals) and Sam Picard (drums). Sagiv Rosenstock (guitar) and Jack Tobias (keyboards) later joined, completing the current four-piece lineup.

Their music is often described using terms like noise, punk, free jazz, industrial, and experimental. However, they do not fully belong to any of these genres. Their sound features violently clashing rhythms, searing guitars, synthesizers that exude an eerie presence, and Zack Bolzon’s vocals, which sound like both a beast’s roar and a prayer. Rather than being a genre-spanning band, YHWH Nailgun has garnered attention as an entity that rejects any attempt to define music itself.

Their debut album, *45 Pounds*, released in 2025, earned high praise from media outlets worldwide for its overwhelming tension and destructive power. It established them as one of the most important new acts in the New York underground scene. Now, with their signing to 4AD—the label home to Cocteau Twins, the Pixies, Bon Iver, and Big Thief—their career is entering a new phase.

*Magazine* is an unusual work: though it contains 10 tracks, its total running time is a mere 11 minutes. However, this 11-minute duration is not merely an experimental idea. The album begins with a fade-in on the opening track, “Ghost of Love,” creating the sensation of having accidentally captured a fragment of sound that seems to be playing continuously somewhere. The band views this work not as a conventional album with a beginning and an end, but rather as a part of an endless musical world.

Their sound is even more refined than on their previous work. Sam Picard’s stripped-down drumming, Sagiv Rosenstock’s raw production, and Jack Tobias’s synthesizers, reminiscent of air raid sirens. And most striking of all is that Zach Bolzon’s vocals—previously hidden behind layers of reverb and delay—are now pushed to the forefront with unprecedented clarity.

The lyrics, filled with religious and symbolic imagery—blood, snakes, gods, and demons—exude a more vivid presence than ever before. The band name YHWH itself derives from the proper name for God in Hebrew, and this mystical worldview is explored even more deeply in *Magazine*.

YHWH Nailgun does not view their music as a reaction against or a counter to anything. Neither pandering to nor rejecting trends, they simply pursue the fleeting flashes of inspiration born of intuition and improvisation. What they are building is not a genre, but an autonomous world in and of itself. *Magazine* is a work that further sharpens this unique creative world and is sure to leave a lasting impression on many listeners.

Japanese edition with Obi. The third part in Jon Hassell’s Pentimento trilogy captures the much-missed artist performing as part of a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern in London in 2015, in what would turn out to be his final ever concert. Carefully edited and mixed by Jeff Rona into something much more than a traditional ‘live album’; themes, motifs and riffs from his critically adored albums Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound occur throughout these unique, semi-improvised mutations, making this a fitting final volume in the late career renaissance of the Pentimento series.

LP and CD edition contains a liner note essay by Jon Hassell that inspired the title, whilst the cover utilises Leh C’est Beau, a classic painting by Jon’s close friend Mati Klarwein, familiar to music fans through his striking 1970s album sleeves for the likes of Miles Davis and Santana.

‘Pentimento’ is defined as “the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over”, a methodology that Jon applied in a musical sense throughout his career, refining and developing his approach over time. Alongside the release of Music Is Invisible, Ndeya have also put together a triple disc anthology of all three albums in the series.

In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states. Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s impulsive, textural excess, that friction here appears to dissolve in favour of a more homogeneous mass. Noise, far from its most abrasive edge, is reconfigured as a continuous field — dense yet permeable. Within this flow, melodic structures emerge without assertion, surfacing almost incidentally as by-products of the accumulation of frequencies itself. The result is less a reconciliation of languages than a blurring of their boundaries: a space in which intensity is internalised and the radical gesture folds into a more sustained, contemplative mode of listening.

'Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku Vol. 3', a Cosmocities compilation put together by label owner Matt Soulie which continues the journey through Japan’s diverse sonic landscape. "Since its inception, the Denshi Ongaku No Bigaku project has paid tribute to a musical culture that has profoundly influenced the Cosmocities vision. Where the first volume explored dreamy ambient textures and deep electronic moods, and the second shifted focus towards boogie-laden rhythms and jazz-fuelled dancefloor excursions, Volume 3 finds a natural balance between introspection and movement. The compilation opens with Yosi Horikawa’s sublime “Bubbles”, an ambient masterpiece whose delicate organic textures gently set the tone. Chari Chari’s “Luna de Ritmos” follows with deep, ethereal house atmospherics before Force Of Nature’s hypnotic “Skyy High” guides listeners further into immersive territory. The journey continues through the experimental electronics of XTAL’s “Skygazer” and the analogue warmth of Takuya Matsumoto’s “Jump Rope Music”, while regular Cosmocities contributor Yuu Udagawa delivers the sophisticated high-tech jazz house groove of “Little Secrets”. On the second half of the collection, Kuniyuki’s remix of Slow Didi’s “Follow Me” brings rich jazz-inflected elegance, leading seamlessly into the futuristic techno-swing fusion of DJ Eiji Takehana featuring Yusuke Nakamura’s “Deep Track Jazz”. Tominori Hosoya’s “Summer Dreamers” adds a deeply emotional and dreamlike house moment before Azzurro’s “Just A Touch Of Love” shifts the focus firmly towards the dancefloor with a hypnotic late-night thumper. Closing the compilation is AcidGelge’s “Fatality 4”, a beautifully spacey and atmospheric finale that leaves the listener suspended somewhere between the club, the cosmos and the imagination."

There are a dozen nice sultry instrumentals on this LP, released in the early '70s, though as always with vintage reggae albums, that doesn't necessarily indicate that all of the material was recorded then. Certainly it has the sound of the best rocksteady music, some of its trancier grooves hinting at the dub era.