Search:15 years of body

"No Warranty Dubs" is made by a logic powerhouse combination, Jimi Tenor & Kabukabu meets DJ Sotofett, with most of what you can expect from all parts involved. You're served Afro Dub & Jazz in a bold and classic sonic execution. Through all 15 cuts the echoes are real and rhythms upfront, with proper extended Disco Dubs and versions of Afrobeat and Free Jazz contrasting body and soul. The album is tuneful and rugged, some cuts have vocals & synth swimming alone, while others glue the drummers groove to slick piano from beginning till end.

Followers of Jimi Tenor's life in music will be able to dive into his trademark song writing, signature flute breathing and indistinguishable style of saxophone playing, as well as his tender and electrifuingly psychedelic vocals known from early days of Puu/Sähkö and Warp releases. Kabukabu's heavyweight instrumental performance trancends regular studio recordings with joy and precision as a core element. Kabukabu's Ekow Alabi Savage aka Ekowmania (from last years "Dr.Afrodub" album) embeds deep rhythm knowledge throughout the entire musical landscape. Last in the chain is DJ Sotofett, producing and mixing his probably most classically crafted output to date. With silky gloves and clanking wrenches every element has been tweaked, re-mixed & dubbed excessively to justify a fully musical, psychedelic, warm and rhythmically rich experience.

"No Warranty Dubs" is as warm as the chords of "Money Palaver (Extra Warm Mix)", and as bombastic as opening track "Fujitronic (Flute Mix)". The album reaches it's most tender moments with the sweet "Musical Message (Disco Dub)" and dives straight into obscurity when guest drummer Ilmari Heikinheimo contributes to "Otto Part 4", a rare freejazz cut with TR-909 tickering from start til end. The simplicity of "Tronic Rhythms (Flute Dub)" is worthy a tear in an eye, while brittle souls can scatter to the thunderous horns and drenched rhythms of "Kabu Anthem (Cosmic Dub)".

Aunes is a rare solo album from peripatetic Australian cellist-composer-performer Judith Hamann, presenting six pieces recorded across several years and countries. Developing the collage techniques and expanded sound palettes heard on their previous releases, Aunes makes use of synthesizers, organ, voice and location recordings alongside the dazzlingly pure, enveloping tones of Hamann's cello. The record takes its name from an old French unit of measurement for fabric, varying around the country and from material to material. Unlike the platinum metre bar deposited in the National Archives after the Revolution as an immovable standard, an aune of silk differed from an aune of linen: the measure could not be separated from the material. In much the same way, in these six pieces_which Hamann thinks of as `songs'_formal aspects such as tuning, pacing, melodic shape and timbre are not abstractions applied universally to musical material but are inextricable from the instruments and sounds used, even from the places and communities in which the music was made. Audible location sound embeds the music in its place of making, as in the delicate duet for church organ and wordless singing `schloss, night', where shuffles and cluttering in the reverberant church space form a phantom accompaniment, gradually displaced by a uneasy shimmer of wavering tones from half-opened organ stops. `Casa Di Riposo, Gesu' Redentore' documents a walk up a hill to an outdoor mass in Chiusure, layering voices near and far with footsteps, insects and other incidental sounds. Like in the work of Moniek Darge or Luc Ferrari, location recordings are folded on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect. On other pieces, it is the emphatic presence of the performing body that grounds the music, whether in the intimate fragility of Hamann's softly sung and hummed vocal tones or the clothing that rustles across a microphone on the opening `by the line'. The idea of a music inextricable from its material conditions is perhaps most strikingly communicated on the album's briefest piece `bruststärke (lung song)', composed from layered whistling recorded while Hamann suffered through an asthma flare up, the results halfway between field recordings of an imaginary aviary and the audiopoems of Henri Chopin. More than any of Hamann's previous solo works, a strong melodic sensibility runs through Aunes, even when, like on `seventeen fabrics of measure', the music hangs together by the merest thread. At other points, Hamann's love of pop music is more obvious: the rich synth harmonies of `by the line' could almost be a melting fragment of a backing track from Hounds of Love. The expansive closing piece `neither from nor toward' exemplifies the highly personal musical language that Hamann has developed in recent years through constant solo performance (and a rigorous discipline of instrumental practice), pairing two overdubbed voices with the boundless depth and harmonic richness of just-intoned cello notes, calling up Ockegham or Linda Caitlin Smith in its elegiac slow motion arcs. Hamann's most personal work yet, Aunes arrives in a striking sleeve reproducing a section of a painting made from sewn pieces of dyed wool by Wilder Alison, a friend and fellow resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude, one of the temporary homes where much of this music was recorded.

Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer's uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. "I make music to help myself get through things," she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it's a journey that's still ongoing. "If I'm going to leave anything behind, it's going to be getting people back to themselves," she says. "As I get back to myself, it's a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be." You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose's upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic "Fight Club." Over the track's simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, "I don't need no one else to show me the way." She describes the song as a "breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks." Therein lies Baby Rose's strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. "I'm not just a singer with a unique voice," she says. "I'm somebody that has something to say." In the years since releasing her last album, To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It's a subtle merging of new sounds_stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads_, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It's also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover_and love_who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She's nowhere near done writing her story. "I think as long as I'm being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding," she says. "I don't want to be the type that doesn't take risks because I'm afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."

It’s abundantly clear from the first bars of their 5th studio album Through Other Reflection, that this is, and could only ever be, The Soundcarriers. From the enchanting vocal duets of folk-bidden Chanteuses Leonore Wheatley and Dorian Conway; to the precise bass lines of Paul Isherwood and the limber, jazz-cool, Hal Blaine-esque drums of his his co-songwriter Adam Cann; from the fairy-like flutes, 60s-garage guitars and organ sounds pilfered from the archives of exotica - listening to the Soundcarriers resembles a rediscovery of all the most prized, esoteric corners of the 1960s, all bundled up, warped and refracted through the quartet’s astutely modern cultural lens. Channelling Tropicalia, Middle Eastern psychedelic Jazz/Funk, The French Library sounds of Nino Nardini, and a whole host of lavish obscurites beside, Through Other Reflection delivers another sonic adventure from one of the most unique and distinctive voices of British Psychedelia. After an 8 year wait for their album 4 - 2022’s Wilds - it thankfully didn’t take so long for the follow-up this time round. In many ways, this feels like a companion to Wilds; recording again at their Nottingham warehouse studio, Through Other Reflection retains that same organic glow, all the passions and imperfections of a tightly clipped unit jamming out these living, breathing pop-art nuggets as if straight onto the acetate.”We wanted to keep an air of spontaneity with this album and not get too bogged with the recording process”, explains Cann, “It was more a case of getting the songs as tightly written and arranged as possible first so we could get them down quickly in the studio. It always takes longer than you think” Less packed with strident pop hooks as its predecessor however, the music of Through… has been given extra licence to breathe, stretch out, and wander more uncharted terrains. While gleaming psych-pop of tracks like ‘The City Was’, or ‘Already Over’ confidently carry on from where they left off, from the album’s 2nd track ‘Always’, the trip becomes a little less predictable. Starting out as a smoky Procol Harum-meets-French-Psych organ ballad, the music drifts, as if of its own accord into an eerie, garage trance that lingers, cycles, and hypnotises, growing ever stranger, reaching ever-further away from its point of conception. And almost every track on Through Other Reflections holds that outer-body moment, where the band fix themselves on a limber, lysergic groove, lose all grip on time and reality, and melt themselves away into a liquid state of blind euphoria. There are sequences on this record that feel more like rituals than songs, built upon a single hypnotic rhythm which, like the centre of a vortex, pulling everything under its beatific command. Take the finale to ‘What We Found’ for instance, sounding like a ghostly march across the psychedelic moors, or ‘Feel The Way’, where a single athletic drum-loop rises and rises, growing ever more urgent and suspenseful underneath its frantic harpsichords and rasping flutes. Full of such rich stylisms as these, The Soundcarriers showcase themselves as abstract storytellers par excellence by virtue of their textures and arrangements alone. Resembling Romantic composer Maurice Ravel, but if he had just a four-piece rock band at his disposal, Through Other Reflects is rich with detail; there’s shakers, rattles, clarinets, booming drums; there’s synthesiser swarms, chiming xylophones, vintage organs and experimental Cluster & Eno-esque ambiences. Within all this nuance the music flows like some undisclosed narrative swathed in a magnetic secrecy. “It almost comes across like a story in some ways”, says Cann of the album, “the music is quite sectional with elements of exotica and cinematic type layers, it's a good balance of grooves, tunes and weirdness”. No more is this “epic cinematic feel” heard more proudly than on short instrumental ‘Sonya’s Lament” - its innate, hauntological atmospheres befitting a Peter Strickland soundtrack, or the classics of Lex Baxter, the so-called ‘Founder of Exotica’ himself. On the other hand, providing a greasier undercurrent to all these bucolic sounds is a leaning towards a more “direct” lyricism referencing more “external concerns. Laying down the first tracks for the album in the wintry gloom of pre-lockdown 2020, and drawing inspiration from time spent in Berlin, Through Other Reflections returns to some of the post-apocalyptic futurism explored in 2014’s Entropicalia - a loose concept album inspired by J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World. “The songs explore a disillusionment with the way things are going particularly after 40 years of neoliberalism”, says Cann, “They follow that folk-song tradition of wanting to escape to an imagined time, but here it’s more urban than pastoral. The first couple of ideas I came up with when doing some music in Berlin and had some time to wander aimlessly. And think the atmosphere seeped in, particularly on The City Was and Already Over. He continues, “One aspect of the title, ‘Through Other Reflections’ is about synthesis and layers of influence. How things can be filtered through other things and change the perspective. This is something you get in cities as well.” Though, as with everything The Soundcarriers make, “It can mean anything. It also just sounds kind of cool.”

The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 compiles an unheard, previously unreleased body of recordings by Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, dissidents from diametric backgrounds who met during the heady days of Downtown New York in the 1980s. This collection reveals the creative and life partners’ radical shared vision of avant-garde pop in all of its boundary pushing freedom, combining Deyhim’s singular approach to vocalization, Horowitz’s invention of new musical languages, and touchstones of traditional music from around the world, creating a new music that ultimately retains a voice entirely its own. Despite their difference in backgrounds and respective journeys, at the time of their meeting in the early 1980s in New York City, Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz were both products of the search for freedom and understanding (and resultant awakenings) that swept the globe and helped culturally define the late 1960s and 70s. Deyhim, born and raised in Tehran, spent her teens dancing with Iran’s Pars National Ballet company, performing weekly on Iranian national television, and travelling her home country studying with master folk musicians and dancers, before relocating to Belgium and joining Maurice Béjart’s prestigious Béjart Ballet of the 20th Century. Horowitz, born and raised in Buffalo, New York, had spent much of the decade before abroad, first departing for Paris under the shadows of the Vietnam War, where he studied piano, Eastern philosophy, and became entrenched the city’s free jazz scene, playing with the likes of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and Alan Silva, before embarking south to Morocco where his friendship with Paul Bowles helped cultivate a deep passion for the country’s musical traditions and a shift in his musical practice.



The pair met by chance sometime in 1981 at Noise New York, a small studio on West 34th Street founded by the musician and recording engineer, Frank Eaton, as a utopian creative laboratory that beckoned artists and bands like Arthur Russell, Christian Marclay, Liquid Liquid and Butthole Surfers into its orbit. Both artists had recently relocated to the city, Horowitz having recently released his debut album, Oblique Sequences (Solo Nai Improvisations), on the legendary Paris based imprint Shandar, and fallen in with members of New York avant-garde like La Monte Young, Jon Hassell, David Byrne, and Brian Eno, and Deyhim having begun to more actively incorporate singing into her practice, notably recording a vocal score for choreography she was doing at La MaMa Experimental Theatre.



Initially bonding over a cassette tape of field recordings made by Paul Bowles that had been given to mutual friend and writer Brian Cullman (seeking answers for Ornette Coleman’s question “what is the sound of sound”), their earliest collaboration was documented on Horowitz’s 1981 album, Eros In Arabia, with Deyhim contributing vocals to the track “Queen Of Saba.” Over the coming years, their deep connection would routinely gravitate them into the studio, culminating in the body of recordings that would appear on their 1986 album for Crammed Discs, Desert Equations: Azax Attra. Unknown to nearly all but the artists, laying in wait over the decades on numerous multi-track and stereo reels, DAT tapes, and reference cassettes, were a vast array of recordings made by Deyhim and Horowitz bookending Desert Equations. The 13 pieces represented on The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 were recorded largely between Noise New York and Daylight Studio in Brussels, during a period that Deyhim describes the partnership between herself and Horowitz’s as seeking a music “free of any specific cultural reference, with a personal musical signature,” blossoming into a body of sonority that embraced the energy of contemporary boundary pushing pop and the avant garde, filtered through their mutual love and study of various musical traditions from across the globe and deep engagement with the ideas and tactics of experimental music.



Undeniably rooted in Horowitz’s study of the North Africa ney and the music of the Berber and Gnawa cultures during his time in Morocco, Deyhim’s deep engagement with the folk traditions of Iran, and the couple’s immersion in the interconnected Downtown underground music scenes, each piece on The Invisible Road offers its own vision creative and cultural hybridity. Deyhim sings in both English and Farsi, as well as a composite tongue that she developed by drawing upon numerous indigenous vocal techniques from around the world, intuitively responding to Horowitz’s simultaneous sound syntax forming and combining a wide range synthetic and acoustic instrumentation, and experimental tape techniques, within a visionary series of free-standing expressions.

“Music is my forever cove,” writes Portland, Oregon’s Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer’s line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and repetitions (“I’m forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse,” Wyland says), shaped into richly emotive arcs, and informed by his experience as a person who stutters, it is also an album about identity, self-expression, and the energies that sluice through and across what we perceive as linear time—like floodwaters seeking an exit, like streams running into the sea.

Artist’s Statement:
I made this record while spending significant time in the woods by the Sandy River in Corbett, Oregon,
where I've had my studio for the last five years. It is a diary of spontaneous live recordings edited to highlight the moments of clarity that emerge from long-form improvisations. These compositions express a slowing internal rhythm. An unwinding. A somatic recalibration as I enter middle age. A newly empowered vulnerability.

Here are the internalized cadences of my stutter, flowing freely from my fingers. The musicality of my disfluency is revealed in its frictions, elongations, and foreshortenings. Disruptions in linear time, where the bubbling cadences of my stutter find unexpected pathways, reveal the elasticity of the present moment. This is my idiosyncratic language, shaped and inspired by my disability. Subliminally mirroring internal processes, neural firings, cognitive entanglements...

The title, Kuma Cove, refers to a beloved cove on the coast of Oregon my wife and I return to yearly. There has always been something so magnetic about coves. The way they cradle one from the overwhelming enormity of the ocean beyond, muting a primordial fear. I experience these improvisations as ecosystems I'm able to inhabit for stretches of time, embodying the particular rhythms and sensorial textures within each. Music is my forever cove. Everything you hear is created live in Ableton on a setup I've been honing for 15 years. I celebrate MIDI and computer music as an extension of self and strive to make it as expressive as any analog instrument. I was a visual artist for the first half of my life and quickly adapted those skills to composing and producing on a computer. The transition felt natural within the landscape of DAW's interfaces, especially as a synesthete. Ableton and its community of Max creators continue to surprise me with its expansiveness.

I'm forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse. I envision sonic loops as tangled masses of time, three-dimensional knots spinning on tilted axes, or overlapping wreaths refracting out a myriad of colors. My practice is continually refocusing my ear to what is revealed in the repetitions, searching for the fingerprint of each. I find it incredible how technology lets us manipulate time like this. Nothing on this record is quantized or locked to a universal bpm. Experiencing numerous tempos at once feels important. Recordings as mirrors. Freedom from expected (conversational) flow as we hold time for each other.
-Luke Wyland, August 2024

Artist Bio:
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR (USA). Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. He’s also the co-creator of the “It’s A Fucking Miracle” dance class with Tahni Holt.
Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.

San Francisco native Eric Luttrell announces his highly anticipated studio album ‘Life at Full Speed’, released on October 11 on Anjunadeep. First breaking into electronic music as part of the OWSLA-affiliated trio The M Machine, Eric embarked on his solo journey in 2016 with the acclaimed 'Need You' EP. This was followed by Anjunadeep favourites such as the 'Generate' EP and 'Intergalactic Plastic', championed by Annie Mac as the Hottest Record In The World. His musical progression continued with the launch of two studio albums, 'Intro Clouds' and 'Lucky Ones', as well as the captivating trilogy EP series 'Music For My Memories'. Luttrell's body of work has amassed over 100 million streams to date. Written over the past two years, ‘Life at Full Speed’ represents a new chapter for Eric. Becoming a father last year profoundly shifted his perspective on life and its purpose; and the album represents the ethos of embracing life to its fullest and seizing every moment. Featuring thirteen meticulously crafted tracks, "Life at Full Speed" embodies Luttrell's signature blend of indie-laced house music, characterised by uplifting melodies, intricately woven synths, and infectious grooves. A standout feature of the album is Eric’s integration of his own vocals on some of the tracks such as “When I First Met You” and “Go”. Additionally, Canadian artist Molly Moonwater joins forces with Eric on the single 'Something Right', enhancing its euphoric tone. Lead single ‘Make U Happy’ comprises a playful piano, signature Luttrell synths and a catchy top line culminating in an irresistible, feel-good summer anthem. This track sets the tone for the album, offering a glimpse into its uplifting vibe. Among the album's tracks are previously released singles ‘Sunshine’, ‘Space’, and ‘Sunrise Song’, which have collectively amassed over 3.5 million streams and received acclaim from BBC Radio 1 and SiriusXM Chill.

The ever-evolving beat maker and jazz aficionado Shatter Hands audibly took space to grow for his 5th album, amounting to his most versatile body of work yet. His all new approach of recording and sampling musicians around him results in a wild yet super coherent ride through ambient jazz, afro-influenced drum work and stinky basslines that will make you want to get sum. "A Show Of Hands Vol. 1" is packed with knowledge from years of digging and beat making, yet super open and fresh towards the future side of sound.

Ten bad boy digi riddims from the myspace era by Copenhagen’s Maffi crew, dubbed out into 3D space by disrupt in 2024. Raw, minimalist CyberDancehall at its best, nostalgic and oddly futuristic at the same time, this album is quickly becoming RoboCop’s favorite playlist when going to work.
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Maffi Promotions a.k.a. Maffi Boys come straight outta 1773 Kbh V, Copenhagen, Denmark. Originally founded in 1990 by the two homeboys, lazy body Moog and Junior the Rat, Maffi Promotions have been a steady producer of simple digital riddims for years. Hanging out in the streets of Hummel City Junior & Moog used to entertain their friends with the primitve riddims of the Maffi sound. Not knowing that they would do the exact same thing fifteen years later, they continued to believe that one day they would move up the ladder, break out of the underground and reach for the stars.

Now, after finally adopting a little sense of realism, the two homeboys have realised that stardom is nothing compared to spamming people on myspace. So the two stoners decided to get a couple of friends together and turn up the bass online. Together with their sound crew FIREHOUSE, Maffi deal nuff weed and gyals!

Maffi Boys are very dedicated to the art of playing Sensible World of Soccer, rolling weed joints with Manitou tobacco and keeping it real in a Vesterbro-style. So watch out! And don’t test! We’ll be putting up new riddims on a weekly basis. We have nuff things brewing – including a delicious chicken!
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Growing up in the streets of Hummel City, Vesterbro, MOOG learned the pleasures of sleeping late, playing Sensible World Of Soccer and picking up hot gyals at an early age. He has spent most of his life trying to master these crucial skills. Taking a break from the dog race, Moog is currently focused on reaching a higher understanding of reggae-science and weedology.

JUNIOR experienced the necessity of rolling well-made spliffs at an early age. Incorporating the aestethic heritage of Scandinavian design, he has spent most of his life perfectionizing this old and traditional art form. Junior is currently taking his ph.d. in digital reggae by buying crates of 80’s 7″ and selecting for his sound system Firehouse.

BANGER MAKE MY BODY SHAKE MAKE THE SPEAKERS SHAKE

It was two and a half years ago when a conversation took place between Sal Carmona and Dj Producer Jovonn Armstrong; talks of which planted a seed in Sal Carmona's ear, which years later would manifest what was once a dream into a reality. No stranger, nor a newcomer in the world of dance music, Sal's experience in the club scene goes way back to the days when his sisters, to whom he credits for helping shape the person he is today, took him to Dave Mancuso's The Loft. An experience that he recalls being nothing short of magical. It was a spiritual encounter that immediately took over thus steering him towards the direction of clubs such as The Paradise Garage, Bentley's, Underground, Red Parrot, Latin Quarters, Roseland, Studio 54, just to name a few. Years later, Sal decided to take on the role, of which he became quite successful at, of promoting his own events in New York City; throwing regular parties at venues such as Park Circle & USA roller skating rinks, Red Parrot, The Palladium, The Copacabana and many others, soon becoming one of the premier go to promoters in NYC. Taking a long and well-deserved hiatus from the club scene, in 2012 Sal decided to make his return back to what he loves. It was around this time that he began thinking what it would be like to venture into creating his very own record label. Envisioning his first release being a bona fide House Music Album, one that would include some of his favorite producers. Not one to let dreams drift into the ether, while recollecting on that conversation with Jovan way back, Sal set out to make that vision manifest into a reality and thus emerged this dope compilation titled Banger "Make My Body Shake" "Make the Speakers Shake"

A great idea which brings together an interesting mix that includes highly sought out and respected veteran producers in the scene, such as Timmy Regisford, Ron Trent, Dj Jovonn, and Joe Claussell. Alongside with up and coming DJ producers who are garnering their own adulation of fans, in the likes of Vick Lavender, Mark Francis, Conway Kasey, and DJ Punch. With valuable directional contributions from friend Joe Claussell, this, to say the least, has become far more than just a seriously dope compilation that consists of a unique coming together of serious dance music. More than the aforementioned, Sal Carmona has manifested a dream into a game changing music scripture that is one of a kind, especially in this day and age where it seems where things are thrown together hoping for something to stick. On the contrary, this is well planned and thought out dopeness at A higher level consisting of all new house music that hasn't been brought together like this in a very long time and probably not for a while afterwards.

Here In, Absence" ("Here, In Absence" for the book) is the result of the dialogue between the Finnish photographer Mikael Siirilä and the music artists The Humble Bee & Offthesky initiated by IIKKI, between March 2023 and January 2024.

After a first release in 2019 on IIKKI ("All Other Voices Gone, Only Yours Remains"), a second one in 2020 on LAAPS ("We Were The Hum Of Dreams"), Craig Tattersall (The Humble Bee) and Jason Corder (Offthesky) come back with a third stunning out-of-time beauty, paired with the Mikael Siirilä photography works.

Craig Tattersall is a former member of The Remote Viewer and Famous Boyfriend bandmate Andrew Johnson. Tattersall's music can be found these days more often under his alias The Humble Bee; as a founder member of The Boats; and in his collaborative works with the likes of Bill Seaman in The Seaman And The Tattered Sail. He has run the wonderful label Cotton Goods from 2008 to 2015 and since 2009 he has recorded 16 solo albums on his moniker The Humble Bee and almost the same under his name on some collaborations.

Jason Corder is experimental-ambient multimedia artist based in Denver, CO. He has been producing music, video art, audio software, and the occasional interactive sound sculpture, for over 20 years. He teaches private courses on generative music and occasionally lectures on various sound design topics at Denver University. He currently is the Audio Director at the Denver based videogame studio Dire Wolf. Over the years, he has worked with labels such as Home Normal, 12k's term, Facture, LAAPS and more. Over the years he has performed at Mutek, Decibel, Communikey and other festivals, sharing the bill with likeminded artists Pole, Matmos, William Basinski, and more.

Mikael Siirilä: "I am a darkroom artist (b. 1978) based in Helsinki, Finland. My small individual photographs examine the themes of absence, presence and outsiderhood. My characters appear immersed in their inner worlds and moments of being: simultaneously absent and intensely present. The pictures also reveal the outsider’s gaze, lost in observation and reflection. My pictures are true observations captured with minimal interaction with the subjects. Their origin is in the act of looking, and they feel causally connected to the world. The craft of printmaking is inseparable from my artistic expression. I work solely with black & white film and the darkroom. The slow, contemplative process lends the pictures a calmness. I make physical pictures I want to stare at, feel and become lost in. Again and again."

Fine Art Book, Ltd. to 500 copies:
Hardcover book printed on Munken Lynx 150g/m2 // 80 pages, 18cm x 24cm, 51 photos // Logo and slot embossed // Selective UV varnish // Visible seam and cutting cover pages // Hand-numbered, hand-stamped.

New Jackson marks his long awaited follow-up to 2017’s From Night To Night with its successor OOPS!... POP for long-time collaborators Permanent Vacation. A concise triumph in techno pop, its 9 tracks elevate his signature electronic sounds into anthemic new heights.
David Kitt is a prolific sonic polymath who’s enjoyed a colourful career making whatever he likes.
While releasing music under a vast array of aliases and collaborations for close to two and a half decades, New Jackson has remained his irregular home since 2011 for when ‘at one with the machines’. It offers a kaleidoscopic window into his love of dance music, and on his debut album under the alias From Night To Night (released in 2017 on Dublin’s All City label) he unfurled his singular vision; a dilated suite of nocturnal soul coaxed from his beloved electronic equipment with songwriter’s nous, sonically etched as blunted whispers coalesced from the dusky billows of Dublin bay. Further EPs and singles followed, alongside a beloved live show he toured globally, plus detours with his critically-lauded Garies duo (with Lumigraph) and a David Kitt solo album.
In the time since his New Jackson debut, he’s slowly distilled his studio methodology to help mine the true core of his musical self. Within this experimentation, he has stumbled upon the bounty that is OOPS!... POP, his most direct and euphoric body of work to date. Recorded across the span of five years and three different countries, Kitt has managed to transform his beloved alias into a leaner beast, tightening the screws around arrangements and songwriting to inspire an album sonically effortless in demeanour and spontaneously playful in structure and form. Aided by a stacked cast of collaborators including Rita Lynn, Donnacha Costello, Riche “Jape” Egan, Yenkee, Kean Kavanagh, Margie Jean Lewis, Meg Cronin and Fehdah, it bears the hallmarks of the studio albums of yesteryear in its dynamism and gratification while drawing on his rich bouquet of influences across a century of recorded music.
Opener SI SI SI lulls you in with its smothered vocoder’d croons and patient groove, BURNT DEEP next yields a surprising deep house turn, lit gently with casual hedonism. LIKE rewires the playbook entirely, shuffling along its minimal 80’s boogie groove with a cheeky grin, before lead single OUT OF REACH further mines the golden pastures with its glorious stuttering techno power-pop fit with that anthemic chorus. DAY IN SHOCK digi-dubs around the wonderful vocal turn of Fehdah in purest heads-down manner, then THE OK HOLE and STROBE both descend the psychedelic wormhole of anaesthetised breaks and electro with its entranced dancefloor gaze. I WANNA BE ADORED, the Madchester anthem from The Stone Roses, is then surprisingly reimagined as a lost kraut-pop robo sung classic while WITH THE NIGHT AT OUR FEET is our climactic conclusion, a mechanised symphony of dual proportions; a humane core of angelic harmonies chugging along in electro rhythm before soaring strings take us on our way.
New Jackson’s oeuvre, indeed David Kitt’s musical world, is vast; OOPS!... POP then might just be his opus across it all, a towering achievement of soaring catharsis in melody and song that soundtracks the most direct transmissions from his heart to yours

The Trip is the first solo album by N'Zeng, better known as Sébastien Blanchon. It has to be said that he hid behind his (hollow) nose to sniff out the right projects (ex Le Peuple de l'Herbe, member of Entourloop). His nose is hollow, but not for the trumpet, and yet it's with this instrument that he started out. And he reinvents it, giving it a subtle place on this musical road trip we call The Trip.
A journey open to all, with no tolls and no filters, apart from the cinematic filter of this lover of original soundtracks and trip hop. Beautiful images flash before our eyes, and in our ears, the smooth voice of Charlotte Savary (Wax Tailor). An album, a very good trip for lovers of Portishead, Gorillaz, and well-felt scratches in the form of controlled skids.
He's making a name for himself as N'Zeng, with his smooth arrangements.

N'Zeng's father played trumpet with his grandfather in the Feurs brass band in the Loire department. When he arrived in Saint Etienne, young Sébastien started out with a cornet à pistons at the Conservatoire. His teacher at the time, Marcel Heyte, had won a prize in Paris at the same time as a certain Maurice André.

His father took lessons in orchestral conducting, accompanying the offspring's budding musical career, which included a course at the Festival de Cuivre in Monastier-sur-Gazeille, where he met the soloists of the Radio France orchestra. A new awareness, a new confidence: off to Lyon, not for a soccer derby, but to "beef up his game". In 1997, he was awarded a gold medal for trumpet by a unanimous jury at the Conservatoire National de Lyon.

Lyon, capital of the Gauls, was the starting point for N'Zeng, who went on to become a member of the group Le Peuple de l'Herbe. 15 years later, with several successful records to his credit, a concert in 2003 at the Transmusicales with Beth Gibbons (Portishead), and a Victoire de la Musique award, it was time for N'Zeng to move on to other things.

Arrival in the City of Light, the place where dreams come true. Nzeng's dreams are not only sonic, but also visual, for Sébastien is not only a friendly presence and a talented musician, but also a cinephile. His knowledge of music theory, acquired during his years at the conservatory, enables him to tackle music for pictures.

He created a soundtrack for the cult film Alien - The 8th Passenger, and worked with musician Rone (collaborating with Baxter Dury) and his bandmates from Le Peuple de l'Herbe, composing 2 tracks for the soundtrack of Virginie Despentes's hard-hitting film "Baise-moi". On the album "Hollywood Hustlers", with the group "Mustang Force", he pays tribute to the soundtracks of Lalo Shiffrin, Ennio Morricone... The album is also well received by the critics. He conducts the arrangements and orchestrations for the Degiheuga Orchestra, and composes the original music for the Hôtel Bellevue dance show, another success!

2019 sees the birth of "The Trip" project. On this record, no masks, but a female voice, that of Charlotte Savary (Wax Taylor), laid on a carpet of strings. With this musical voyage, trip hop takes pride of place, with a balance between the body of the instruments and the mechanics of beatmaking.

There's no getting off track on this well-balanced record, with its silky orchestrations. N'Zeng accompanies us elegantly, with his trusty trumpet as GPS, here used subtly. The album cover is a photograph taken by Sébastien Blanchon's mother, in 1973, a year when Saint Etienne was about to become French champion for the 7th time.

A discreet but essential figure in the field of musical creation, Horacio Vaggione has been crafting an ambitious, precise and highly significant body of work for over the last fifty years, coupled with a demanding research activity. This disc offers four purely electroacoustic pieces which illustrate, each in their own way, this singular and fascinating grammar developed by Horacio Vaggione, a complex but fertile grammar which establishes a very special relationship between structure and texture, between matter and formula, to create a fascinating musical space, made up of polyphonies and metamorphoses. (François Bonnet, Paris, 2022)

--

«Schall» (1994), 07’30

Schall exclusively uses piano sounds sampled and processed with various digital techniques. The sound palette focuses on several shapes of various sizes which reiterate, altered to varying degrees, throughout the process. The granular paradigm is clearly assumed here, as is also that of the interactions between various temporal scales. Basically, there is a concern for the articulation of micro-events. The piece essentially plays with low-intensity frames, composed of various planes and punctuated by stronger objects, in a kind of polyphonic dialogue between proximity and distance. (H. V.)

«Rechant» (1995), 15’51

Initially, a few brief sounds of instrumental origin — percussions, flutes, strings. Processed by means of various digital techniques, projected on various temporal scales, analyzed and re-synthesized, worked in their parts (in their saliences), articulated in their edges as well as in their interactions, these sounds show, as Bachelard would say, «pluralism under identity». I thus tried to compose morphologies by targeting properties contained in the material and by projecting them on temporal perspectives of all sizes. The title, an allusion to the old polyphonic technique, refers to the iterative content of these morphologies as well as to the modalities of their interweaving. (H. V.)

«24 Variations» (2001), 09’50

The word «variations» applies here to the morphological transformations of the material, as well as to the various contexts in which these transformations appear. The result can be heard as a continuous interaction between sound particles of different sizes, composed of several layers, reflecting a preoccupation with detailed articulation spanning different time scales. (H. V.)

«Gymel» (2002), 09’25

In Gymel I tried to compose a space-trajectory using layered sounds, produced by morphological operations (splits, clusterings) that spread out from location to location in variously dense objects. The space was treated through phase-decorrelation, a technique which I use extensively, both to create spaces and to locate sounds and movements within a polyphonic (stratified) context. (H. V.)

Jake Muir's latest set of soft-focus, sensual electro-concrète, dissolves X-rated gay sleaze flick soundtracks into a shimmering suite of subdued orchestral flourishes and surreal cosmic psychedelia.

Back in 2020, Muir put together a 90-minute mix for Honey Soundsystem, blending tracks from Kelman Duran, DJ Olive, Daniel Lanois and Terre Thaemlitz with obliquely camp dialog samples from vintage gay porn. The idea was to represent queer sexuality in a looser, more experimental manner, grazing the super-sensory pleasure of the bathhouse experience and the illicit joy of cruising without getting too self-serious while doing it. The mix was so popular that Muir followed it up with a weightless sequel two years later, and began developing the concept into a proper album, using more samples of music and dialogue, eventually performing the piece at the esteemed GRM as part of their FOCUS #4 concerts alongside work by Eliane Radigue, Folke Rabe and Chris Watson.

Bathhouse Blues is split into two side-long pieces that wash and ripple with nervous tension and discreet salaciousness. Opening with a familiar theatre sting, there are echoes here of kosmische and experimental electronics on 'Cruisin’ 87', fashioned into puddles of syrupy, back-room ambience. Occasionally we hear lascivious words thru the fog, men mumbling to each other before sex. "That's beautiful," a voice mutters over a dusky cricket chirp on 'Pipe Dream'. "It is," another replies.

Muir's sonic treatment is suitably explicit, like a 1950s Hollywood jump-cut to a train going into a tunnel; he takes the whole-body, mutual release of queer sex and interprets it with heady gestures, peppering jazzy rhythmic frostings into basins of skewered drone and gurgling synths. His sound is coloured by the pleasure of physical touch, a mussy flux of high frequency scrapes and caresses juxtaposed with woozy, dubbed-out fondles and thrusts. Who said the GRM was buttoned up?

After a quarter-century hiatus, the legendary jungle artist M-Beat has resurfaced with Mekatune, his newly established label. Mekatune serves as a platform for unveiling not only his extensive back catalog but also fresh, innovative material from himself and other luminaries of the jungle music scene.

This is the limited edition yellow vinyl release of this record, capped at 150 units. Both the white sleeve and the vinyl have been handstamped to give the release an early 90’s recordshop feel.

‘Body’ is an unreleased track that only made it to dubplate back in 1994. A very sought after tune that has gained mythical status over the past 30 years. The flipside is the Tim Reaper remix of the classic M-Beat track ‘Peeni Porni’ and it could be argued that this is one of the best remixes Tim has done.

These will go quick!

Budabeats Records turned 15 this year, to celebrate the occasion label bosses Dj Gandharva and Von Yodi hand picked 14 songs from artists belonging to the extended Budabeats family. If you are familiar with the the label you may alraedy know that they really do not care about genre limits, and as you would expect, Waves of Budabeats is a prime example of this attitude. The double LP includes mellow but tight dowmtempo tunes by WaTa and Kobza Vajk (remixed by BéTé), midtempo weirdness by Mytron, mature hip-hop by Son of Sam, vintage Japanese pop sounds by Erik Sumo and the Fox Fairies, dreamy and straighter dancefloor material by Oneeyedman, M.W.D and the Chillum Trio, weird electronics by Kovacs The Hun, and, of course, the obligatory jazz and funk delivered by Dokkerman and The Turkeying Fellaz and The Premecz Organ Trio. The vinyl compilation is limited to 300 copies, most of the songs have not been released before on any format, but all of them are pressed on vinyl for the first time.

Jorja Smith is officially back. Further to making a recent return to the musical sphere with her singles ‘Try Me’ and ‘Little Things’, today she has confirmed the details of her highly anticipated second album,
‘falling or flying’, set for release globally on September 29th 2023 via FAMM and available to pre-order now - here.
Alongside the announcement, Jorja has also unveiled the album's poignant artwork; a stunning portrait of her, shot on film by the prestigious British photographer, Liz Johnson Artur. In addition, Jorja has also announced a series of UK live shows in September, commemorating the release of the album. Further details below.
Through her new record, Jorja has delivered an undeniable modern classic, effortlessly condensing any number of disparate styles and genres into music which thrillingly broaches any gap between Jazz, Soul, R&B and Funky House. A bold, brave nd courageous leap forward from her critically acclaimed debut album ‘Lost and Found’ -
‘falling or flying’ is an album that speaks to the musical and emotional era where Jorja is now, and how she got here. It isn’t so much an exploration of how she’s found herself but more a statement that she has arrived, and that her understanding of her life, her relationships, and her feelings, have deepened, matured and crystallised as she
enters her twenty six year. ‘And despite it all,’ she says, ‘it's definitely a journey I've just started. That's what's crazy. It's only just begun.’
Sonically, this album, a no-skips body of work, isn’t like anything you’ve heard before. It sits masterfully in this same space of excitement, self-exploration and self-assertion that Jorja does. Compromised of deep, thumping drums, racing basslines, irresistible hooks and distinctive beats, ‘falling or flying’ runs at the same pace that Jorja’s mind does. ‘I don't slow down enough’ she says. ‘This album is like my brain. There’s always so much going on but each
song is definitely a standstill moment.’
Much of the creative energy that shaped the album emerged from studio sessions with the producer duo DAMEDAME* back in her hometown of Walsall, where, to Jorja, the heart is. The album is both a sonic and an emotional tour of where she’s been, and what she’s been about, in the two years since she dropped her latest offering, ‘Be Right Back’. ‘It touches on breakups, relationships with my friends, relationships with old friends,
relationships with myself.’ She says. ‘It's definitely about a lot of relationships, but every song I write I can sing it to myself.’
Of the many British voices in music today, Jorja is among the most commanding, writing at a pitch of intensity and urgency that few can match. Over the past five and half years, since the release of her debut album ‘Lost & Found’, she has been celebrated unanimously across the world for her evocative song-writing, powerful delivery, pure emotion and unbridled talent as a young woman navigating her way through life and in 2021 was the year Jorja’s hiatus from music was broken. Enter ‘Be Right Back’, the holding space between the sensation that was ‘Lost & Found’, and ‘falling or flying’. ‘Be Right Back’ was born from playing, jamming, freestyling, and sounding out what Jorja had been on the edge of expressing all her life. It was a project entirely for her fans. “Be Right Back did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was a little waiting room so people knew I was coming back.”
And come back she has - entering a chapter of her return to music that’s certain to draw in and intoxicate Jorja’s fans and new listeners alike. And what has changed for her, in the five years since ‘Lost & Found’ dominated the charts and the soundscape? “I like this world that I've just come into. And I’m still figuring things out. Always
figuring things out.” Jorja says. “This is the first time I’m putting stuff out there that I can connect with right now.” Over the last few years, it’s been a reflective and transformative step into her mid twenties for her. She’s been able to step into herself and evolve as a songwriter and a woman despite an ever-changing musical landscape.
While she recognises that the global pandemic has been completely devastating, she acknowledges that it allowed her to stay still, to come more into herself, and to be more in control of the person she is, and of her musical output. Like some of the legendary musicians that came before her, Jorja is looking at the chaos and disorder in the
world right now with resourceful, refined eyes, and she sees the glorious opportunity and enormous responsibility that affords. The net result is that while ‘falling or flying' sounds very much like Jorja Smith, it sounds like no Jorja Smith album you have ever heard before. ‘falling or flying’- released on September 29th

Jorja Smith is officially back. Further to making a recent return to the musical sphere with her singles ‘Try Me’ and ‘Little Things’, today she has confirmed the details of her highly anticipated second album, ‘falling or flying’, set for release globally on September 29th 2023 via FAMM and available to pre-order now - here.

Alongside the announcement, Jorja has also unveiled the album's poignant artwork; a stunning portrait of her, shot on film by the prestigious British photographer, Liz Johnson Artur. In addition, Jorja has also announced a series of UK live shows in September, commemorating the release of the album. Further details below.

Through her new record, Jorja has delivered an undeniable modern classic, effortlessly condensing any number of disparate styles and genres into music which thrillingly broaches any gap between Jazz, Soul, R&B and Funky House. A bold, brave and courageous leap forward from her critically acclaimed debut album ‘Lost and Found’ - ‘falling or flying’ is an album that speaks to the musical and emotional era where Jorja is now, and how she got here. It isn’t so much an exploration of how she’s found herself but more a statement that she has arrived, and that her understanding of her life, her relationships, and her feelings, have deepened, matured and crystallised as she enters her twenty six year. ‘And despite it all,’ she says, ‘it's definitely a journey I've just started. That's what's crazy.

It's only just begun.’ Sonically, this album, a no-skips body of work, isn’t like anything you’ve heard before. It sits masterfully in this same space of excitement, self-exploration and self-assertion that Jorja does. Compromised of deep, thumping drums, racing basslines, irresistible hooks and distinctive beats, ‘falling or flying’ runs at the same pace that Jorja’s mind does. ‘I don't slow down enough’ she says. ‘This album is like my brain. There’s always so much going on but each song is definitely a standstill moment.’

Much of the creative energy that shaped the album emerged from studio sessions with the producer duo DAMEDAME* back in her hometown of Walsall, where, to Jorja, the heart is. The album is both a sonic and an emotional tour of where she’s been, and what she’s been about, in the two years since she dropped her latest offering, ‘Be Right Back’. ‘It touches on breakups, relationships with my friends, relationships with old friends, relationships with myself.’ She says. ‘It's definitely about a lot of relationships, but every song I write I can sing it to myself.’

Of the many British voices in music today, Jorja is among the most commanding, writing at a pitch of intensity and urgency that few can match. Over the past five and half years, since the release of her debut album ‘Lost & Found’, she has been celebrated unanimously across the world for her evocative song-writing, powerful delivery, pure emotion and unbridled talent as a young woman navigating her way through life and in 2021 was the year Jorja’s hiatus from music was broken. Enter ‘Be Right Back’, the holding space between the sensation that was ‘Lost & Found’, and ‘falling or flying’. ‘Be Right Back’ was born from playing, jamming, freestyling, and sounding out what Jorja had been on the edge of expressing all her life. It was a project entirely for her fans. “Be Right Back did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was a little waiting room so people knew I was coming back.”

And come back she has - entering a chapter of her return to music that’s certain to draw in and intoxicate Jorja’s fans and new listeners alike. And what has changed for her, in the five years since ‘Lost & Found’ dominated the charts and the soundscape? “I like this world that I've just come into. And I’m still figuring things out. Always figuring things out.” Jorja says. “This is the first time I’m putting stuff out there that I can connect with right now.” Over the last few years, it’s been a reflective and transformative step into her mid twenties for her.

She’s been able to step into herself and evolve as a songwriter and a woman despite an ever-changing musical landscape.

While she recognises that the global pandemic has been completely devastating, she acknowledges that it allowed her to stay still, to come more into herself, and to be more in control of the person she is, and of her musical output. Like some of the legendary musicians that came before her, Jorja is looking at the chaos and disorder in the world right now with resourceful, refined eyes, and she sees the glorious opportunity and enormous responsibility that affords. The net result is that while ‘falling or flying' sounds very much like Jorja Smith, it sounds like no Jorja Smith album you have ever heard before.

‘falling or flying’- released on September 29th

A.R. Kive collates the three most astonishing works from that most miraculous of duos - A.R. Kane - comprising the ‘Up Home’ EP from 1988 that signified the band’s dawning realisation of their own powers and possibilities, their legendary debut LP ‘sixty nine’ (1988) and its kaleidoscopic, prophetic double-LP follow up ‘i’ (1989).

In founder-member Rudy Tambala’s new remastering, the music on these pivotal transmissions from the birth of dream pop, have been reinvigorated and re-infused with a new power, a new depth and intimacy, a new height and immensity. Vivid, timeless and yet always timely whenever they’re recalled, these records still force any listener to realise that despite the habits of retrospective myth-making and the
safe neutering effects of ‘genre’, thirty years have in no way dimmed how resistant and dissident to critical habits of categorisation A.R. Kane always were. Never quite ‘avant-pop’ or ‘shoegaze’ or ‘post-rock’ or any of those sobriquets designed to file and categorise, A.R. Kive is a reminder that those genres had to be coined, had to be invented precisely to contain the astonishing sound of A.R. Kane, because
previous formulations couldn’t come close to their sui generis sound and suggestiveness. This is music that pointed towards futures which a whole generation of artists and sonic explorers would map out. Now beautifully repackaged, remastered and fleshed out with extensive sleeve notes and accompanying materials, ‘A.R. Kive’ reveals that 35 years on it’s still a struggle to defuse the revolutionary and inspirational possibility of A.R. Kane’s music.

A.R. Kane were formed in 1986 by Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli, two second-generation immigrants who grew up together in Stratford, East London. From the off the pair were outsiders in the culturally mixed (cockney/Irish/West Indian/Asian) milieu of the East End, with Alex and Rudy’s folks first generation immigrants from Nigeria and Malawi, respectively. The two of them quickly developed and fostered an innate and near-telepathic mutual understanding forged in musical, literary and artistic exploration. Like a lot of second-generation immigrants, they were ferocious autodidacts in all kinds of areas, especially around music and literature. Diving deep into the music of afro-futurist luminaries such as Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Lee Perry and
Hendrix, as well as devouring the explorations of lysergic noise and feedback from contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers, they also thoroughly immersed themselves in the alternate literary realities of sci-fi and ancient history (the fascination with the arcane that gave the band their name), all to feed their voracious cultural thirsts and intellectual curiosity.

It was seeing the Cocteau Twins performing on Channel 4 show the Tube that spurred A.R. Kane into being - “They had no drummer. They used tapes and technology and Liz Fraser looked completely otherworldly with those big eyes. And the noise coming out of Robin’s guitar! That was the ‘Fuck! We could do that! We could express ourselves like that!’ moment”, recalls Tambala - and through a mix of
confidence, chutzpah, ad hoc almost-mythical live shows and sheer innocent will the duo debuted with the astonishing ‘When You’re Sad’ single for One Little Indian in 1986. Immediately dubbed a ‘black Jesus & Mary Chain’ by a press unsure of WHERE to put a black band clearly immersed in feedback and noise, what was immediately apparent for listeners was just how much more was going on here - a
tapping of dub’s stealth and guile, a resonant umbilicus back to fusion and jazz, the music less a conjuration of past highs than a re-summoning of lost spirits.
The run of singles and EPs that followed picked up increasingly rapt reviews in the press, but it was the ‘Up Home EP’ released in 1988 on their new home, Rough Trade that really suggested something immense was about to break. Simon Reynolds noted the EP was: Their most concentrated slab of iridescent awesomeness and a true pinnacle of an era that abounded with astounding landmarks of guitar-reinvention, A.R. Kane at their most elixir-like.

If anything, the remastered ‘Up Home’ that forms the first part of ‘A.R. Kive’ is even more dazzling, even more startling than it was when it first emerged, and listening now you again wonder not just about how many bands christened ‘shoegaze’ tried to emulate it, but how all of them fell so far short of its lambent, pellucid wonder. This remains intrinsically experimental music but with none of the frowning orthodoxy those words imply. A.R. Kane, thanks to that second generation auto-didacticism were always supremely aware about the interstices of music and magic, but at the same time gloriously free in the way they explored that connection within their own sound, fascinated always with the creation of ‘perfect mistakes’ and the possibilities inherent in informed play.

‘sixty nine’ the group’s debut LP that emerged in 1988 had
critics and listeners struggling to fit language around A.R. Kane’s sound. As a title it was telling - the year of ‘Bitches Brew’, the year of ‘In A Silent Way’, the erotic möbius between two lovers - and as originally coined by the band themselves, ‘dream pop’ (before it became a free-floating signifier of vague import) was entirely apposite for the music A.R. Kane were making. Crafted in a dark small basement studio in which Tambala recalls the duo had “complete freedom - We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music”. There was an irresistibly dreamy, somnambulant, sensual and almost surreal flow to ‘sixty nine’s sound, but also real darkness/dankness, the ruptures of the primordial and the reverberations of the subconscious, within the grooves of remarkable songs like ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Crazy Blue’. Alex’s plangent vocals floated and surged amidst exquisite peals of refracted feedback but crucially there was BASS here, lugubrious and funky and full of dread, sonic pleasure and sonic disturbance crushed together to make music with a center so deep it felt subcutaneous, music constructed from both the accidental and the deliberate, generous enough to dance with both serendipity and chaos. ‘sixty nine’ remains - especially in this remastered iteration - ravishing, revolutionary.

The final part of this ‘A.R. Kive’ contains 1989’s astonishing double-LP ‘i’ which followed up on ‘sixty nine’s promise and saw the duo fully unleash their experimental pop sensibilities over 26 tracks, plunging the A.R. Kane sound into a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision of pop experiment and play. Suffused with new digital technologies and combining searingly sweet and danceable pop with perhaps the duo’s strangest and boundary-pushing compositions, the album did exactly what a great double-set should do - indulge the artists sprawling pursuit of their own imaginations but always with a concision and an ear for those moments where pop both transcends and toys with the listeners expectations. Jason Ankeny has noted that “In retrospect, ‘i’ now seems like a crystal ball prophesying virtually every major musical development of the 1990s; from the shimmering techno of ‘A Love from Outer Space’ to the liquid dub of ‘What’s All This Then?’, from the alien drone-pop of ‘Conundrum’ to the sinister shoegazer miasma of ‘Supervixens’ — it’s all here, an underground road map for countless bands to follow.” Perhaps the most overwhelmingly all-encompassing transmission from A.R. Kane, ‘i’ bookended a three year period in which the duo had made some of the most prophetic and revelatory music of the entire decade.

After ‘i’ the duo’s output became more sporadic with Tambala and Ayuli moving in different directions both geographically and musically, with only 1994’s ‘New Clear Child’ a crystalline re-fraction of future and past echoes of jazz, folk and soul, before the duo went their separate ways. Since then, A.R. Kane’s music has endured, not thanks to the usual sepia’d false memories that seem to maintain interest in so much of the musical past, but because those who hear A.R. Kane music and are changed irrevocably, have to share that universe which A.R. Kane opened up, with anyone else who will listen. Far more than other lauded documents of the late 80s it still sounds astonishingly fresh, astonishingly livid and vivid and necessary and NOW.

Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. “Here, let me show you my idea,” he says, as he places a quarter on the kid’s hand. The magician performs some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: “Cool.” The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. “When I look at it now,” he says, “I relate to the kid, who’s obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm.” “I’ve watched it probably a hundred times,” he says. “It cracked me up but also blew my mind open the feeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what’s both real and magical.” Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts released on Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego’s tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allowing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices that felt communal and restorative. “As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue my new songs with this sense of playfulness and wonder I felt while exploring these other interests.” He says. Feeling unlocked from the pressures of perfection that he often felt in his earlier work, creating Disappearing Coin felt buoyant and healing. “The album feels like an integration of all of my past musical selves zeroing in on the present,” Steinbrink explains, “I felt free to explore new ways of writing, through different perspectives, experimenting with fictional songwriting, visual archetypal language, and total collaboration.” This “total collaboration” was a joyous new venture after years of solo performing and recording. The album can be seen as a 42 minute session of show and tell, the manifestation of Steinbrink repeating the mantra of “Here, let me show you my idea” to himself over and over. Disappearing Coin is at once a welcome return for the veteran Steinbrink and the debut of a totally new artist, one who has found a new path to himself with new goals of openness, curiosity, and self-acceptance. “Recalls the magic pop purity of Arthur Russell...its minimalism manages to feel enlightened and transformative.” PITCHFORK // “Melodic and self-assured. Steinbrink delivers his knotted lyricism with a smooth lilt.

Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen of Tanlines are indie-rock lifers turned reasonable, happy middle-aged fathers of two, figuring out their place in a chaotic culture and industry that can no longer command their full attention. They are emblematic of a particular time and place that doesn't really exist anymore, yet here they are existing, and thriving, in 2023. The Big Mess came together when Emm and his family moved from Brooklyn to rural Connecticut, while Cohen launched a marketing career and a successful podcast and stayed in the city. Emm continued writing songs_hundreds of them _ through all the weirdness of the past few years, but he wasn't exactly sure who he was writing them for. "I spent years figuring out in my mind, `What is my musical life going to look like?'" he says. "I just kept writing." Cohen gave Emm his blessing to continue Tanlines, even if his own contributions would be limited due to his own non-musical obligations. "I'm like, `Whatever you can do to keep this thing going, do it,'" Cohen says. And with that, Tanlines was reborn. By January 2022 Emm felt he had a body of work that made sense as a Tanlines album. Cohen spent ten days with Emm at his Connecticut studio, along with unofficial third Tanline Patrick Ford (!!!). This was tied together with a sleek final mix from Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his famed Tarquin Studios, resulting in a clear vision of what Emm's musical life was going to look like: The Big Mess. The first sounds on The Big Mess are the title track's coiled guitars and thumping drums, building into the kind of outsize, choral rock anthem artists like Tanlines were almost a reaction to. It is warm and nostalgic, and Cohen likens a lot of the prevailing mood to "a sepia filter on a digital photo." He continues, "we were pretty intentional about making this the first song on the album, underlining the way that this is a new phase of the band." Cohen says. The moody, scintillating "Burns Effect" serves as one of the biggest pushes forward for the Tanlines sound, and for Emm as a lyricist. He says that the song is "deep and dark and dangerous, but in a fun way. It's one of the more personal tracks on the album where this ungrounded part of my personality surfaces, but with an over-the-top machismo, almost an ironic character." Other tracks like "New Reality" and closer "The Age of Innocence" are also demonstrably guitar-forward in ways that wouldn't seem obvious for Tanlines (despite Emm's pedigree in austere avant-garde math-rock outfits Storm & Stress and Don Caballero), but Emm is less sure The Big Mess is a total departure. "I'm trying to make these absolutely simple things," he says. "I think of these songs as Rothko paintings: They're big and they're bold and they're seemingly straightforward, but they have a lot of depth and they engage with you and make you feel something."

Like the winged half-man/half-bull that dominates its outrageous cover, Cleveland Eaton's Half And Half is a mutant bass-heavy monster that absolutely slays. Incredible jazz-funk from 1973, it's been largely overlooked for decades, and unfairly so. This is just sensational music - a crate digger's delight. It's super funky throughout, with lots of layers, jazz breaks for days, dripping with style and gritty class. This is the first reissue of what has been a hard to find record for many years; it's long overdue. Joyous music for mind, soul and body.

Cleveland Eaton was a revered bassist who played an active role in the backing of Count Basie, the Donald Byrd Quintet, The Ramsey Lewis Trio, Terry Callier and Minnie Riperton; amongst many, many others. Half And Half was the first album released under his own name, initially released as a private press record on his - awkwardly named - Cle An Thair Records. It was then picked up by Gamble & Huff for Gamble Records. Varied, string-adorned and with stupid funky grooves, it's just exceptionally good.

Whilst Half And Half is treasured for its famously brilliant interpretations of gold funk-soul standards, Eaton proves an imaginative composer in his own right. Indeed, the album opens with a striking original; the earthy, laconic jazz-guitar-funk fusion of "Keep It Funky". Cleveland and co. do exactly that. Up next is a properly moving cover of Aretha Franklin's eternal "Day Dreaming". The flute and guitar combo truly achieve celestial greatness here. "Here Comes Funky Lou" rides a bassline from the Gods and a driving soul-jazz groove allows the track to go off in all sorts of directions. Serene guitar soul of the breezy variety one moment, crazy hectic violin-driven wig outs the next, courtesy of Ed Green who played with Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane.

His blistering two track salvo of Stylistics covers to close out this A-Side of A-Sides will leave your jaw dropped, and they're likely the reason you're here for this. And why not? "Betcha By Golly Wow", which uses a bed of acidy synths and harmonica to create a unique atmosphere, is on some next level business. Melancholic, wistful, beautiful. "People Make the World Go Round" is so good, dripping in wonderful horns and ace percussive breaks, it could even be regarded as the definitive version. Seriously!

Opening Side B, War's gigantic "Slipping Into Darkness" is tightly tailored to Eaton's funky flute fusion arrangement whilst the insistent "Missing You" is a swaggering horn-heavy version of Luther Ingram's track from the Dilla/Ghostface-linked LP, I've Been Here All The Time. The creeping, screeching guitar-drenched original "John's Groove" features more fantastic horn lines and neck-snapping percussion whilst "The Love Gangster", written by Bill Wyman and Stephen Stills for his seminal Manassas LP, contains a heavy break with slick drums high in the mix and fuzzy guitars.

The album closes with two more Eaton originals. Written with Johnny Guitar Watson, "Lie" is one hell of a funky string and guitar-driven gem whilst the wild, celebratory "Ah Movin' On" cleverly quotes "Wade In The Water" (which he'd recorded with Ramsey Lewis in 1966) folding it into his new free-jazz composition. A message to his old boss, perhaps, as a sign-off?

We've worked on this reissue for 3.5 years, spending the whole time making it sound super sharp and looking as perfect as it possibly can. An absolute must-have for fans of soulful jazz-funk, Half And Half was mastered for vinyl by Simon Francis and cut by Pete Norman at Final Tweak. The bizarre artwork, mutant beast and all, was restored at Be With HQ over many painstaking months! Hopefully, this new edition, a real labour of love, should bring Cleveland Eaton into the homes and record boxes of many more people.

Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer's uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. "I make music to help myself get through things," she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it's a journey that's still ongoing. "If I'm going to leave anything behind, it's going to be getting people back to themselves," she says. "As I get back to myself, it's a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be." You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose's upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic "Fight Club." Over the track's simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, "I don't need no one else to show me the way." She describes the song as a "breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks." Therein lies Baby Rose's strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. "I'm not just a singer with a unique voice," she says. "I'm somebody that has something to say." In the years since releasing her last album, To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It's a subtle merging of new sounds_stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads_, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It's also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover_and love_who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She's nowhere near done writing her story. "I think as long as I'm being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding," she says. "I don't want to be the type that doesn't take risks because I'm afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."

Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen of Tanlines are indie-rock lifers turned reasonable, happy middle-aged fathers of two, figuring out their place in a chaotic culture and industry that can no longer command their full attention. They are emblematic of a particular time and place that doesn't really exist anymore, yet here they are existing, and thriving, in 2023. The Big Mess came together when Emm and his family moved from Brooklyn to rural Connecticut, while Cohen launched a marketing career and a successful podcast and stayed in the city. Emm continued writing songs_hundreds of them _ through all the weirdness of the past few years, but he wasn't exactly sure who he was writing them for. "I spent years figuring out in my mind, `What is my musical life going to look like?'" he says. "I just kept writing." Cohen gave Emm his blessing to continue Tanlines, even if his own contributions would be limited due to his own non-musical obligations. "I'm like, `Whatever you can do to keep this thing going, do it,'" Cohen says. And with that, Tanlines was reborn. By January 2022 Emm felt he had a body of work that made sense as a Tanlines album. Cohen spent ten days with Emm at his Connecticut studio, along with unofficial third Tanline Patrick Ford (!!!). This was tied together with a sleek final mix from Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his famed Tarquin Studios, resulting in a clear vision of what Emm's musical life was going to look like: The Big Mess. The first sounds on The Big Mess are the title track's coiled guitars and thumping drums, building into the kind of outsize, choral rock anthem artists like Tanlines were almost a reaction to. It is warm and nostalgic, and Cohen likens a lot of the prevailing mood to "a sepia filter on a digital photo." He continues, "we were pretty intentional about making this the first song on the album, underlining the way that this is a new phase of the band." Cohen says. The moody, scintillating "Burns Effect" serves as one of the biggest pushes forward for the Tanlines sound, and for Emm as a lyricist. He says that the song is "deep and dark and dangerous, but in a fun way. It's one of the more personal tracks on the album where this ungrounded part of my personality surfaces, but with an over-the-top machismo, almost an ironic character." Other tracks like "New Reality" and closer "The Age of Innocence" are also demonstrably guitar-forward in ways that wouldn't seem obvious for Tanlines (despite Emm's pedigree in austere avant-garde math-rock outfits Storm & Stress and Don Caballero), but Emm is less sure The Big Mess is a total departure. "I'm trying to make these absolutely simple things," he says. "I think of these songs as Rothko paintings: They're big and they're bold and they're seemingly straightforward, but they have a lot of depth and they engage with you and make you feel something."

Roadburn festival is arguably the world's most cutting edge boutique music festival out there, and has been a fertile breeding ground for innovative acts from a broad spectrum of musical genres for many years. Last year saw the unique collaboration of Danish electro-industrial duo John Cxnnor and Hungarian doom-folk artist The Devil's Trade take the stage to deliver a sonic journey into the void of deep space. Today, we are ex- cited to release this iconic set on vinyl to immortalise this one-time convergence of three akin artistic minds. John Cxnnor is made up of one half of Danish sci-fi-sludge metal juggernaut LLNN and sees the brothers Rasmus G. and Ketil G. Sejersen collaborating with numerous fellow artists to explore the synth side of their main project. Inspired by the Terminator-franchise and the scores of other sci-fi movies, the Sejersen brothers have been creating menacing industrial electronic opuses, the frst of which a crushing rendition of a The Devil's Trade track. "We've been enjoying the music from The Devil's Trade for quite some time now," commented the duo on the release of «Dead Sister Merope», describing it as "an interesting match of musical expressions formed by the same DNA." Indeed, the haunting atmospheric folk compositions of The Devil's Trade mastermind Da'vid Mako' carry a similarly cavernous quality which, when taken to the stage of Roadburn, is only reinforced by the sonic violence of John Cxnnor. Unlike many other live records, this set is captured and excellently produced down to the finest level of detail. On centrepiece «Lullaby», the trio seem to have perfected their definition of heaviness, with heavy bass blasts beyond anything you've heard before booming from the speakers. Together John Cxnnor and The Devil's Trade reach new heights in their respective trades capturing both the pressing darkness that gathers `round a bonfire at night as well as the void darkness of deep space. FOR FANS OF Author & Punisher, Godfesh, Lustmord, LLNN, The Devil's Trade, The Body, Uniform Ltd Gold (single colour) edition!

As soon as the pilots of the Space Oddities endeavour decided to tackle Yan Tregger's oeuvre, a major problem surfaced: where to begin? And where to end? Upon which side should one launch into the ascension of this body of work? It will have taken Alexis Le-Tan and Jess years to put up this selection, capturing the profusion and eclecticism of Tregger who, at 81 years old, has yet to lay down the arms and still defines himself as a "jack of all trades". Symphonies, library music, movie soundtracks, TV credits, advertisement, French variété, pop, disco, electronic, experimental or relaxation music, Yan Tregger (born Edouard Scotto di Suoccio) took up all genres, styles and formats through a career spanning from the end of the 50s to this day. How the Stakhanovist successfully went down so many different routes can be explained by his innate talent for composing melodies; they are the very basis on which his iconoclastic production was built. Ten years ago already, Yan Tregger had welcomed us in the studio of his Parisian suburb pavilion. There, sat in front of his machines and albums framed on the wall, he had delved into the midst of a life writing itself like would a rather unusual musical score.

Hailing from Queens, NY, the original members of Onyx were discovered by the legendary Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C Onyx released their ninth studio album, Onyx Versus Everybody. Almost 30 years since their debut, Onyx still have raw energy, undeniable boldness and their pulse on the culture. The 10-track LP is a cohesive body of work that is full of street tales featuring appearances by Big Twin, Ricky Bats, Harrd Luck and Termanology. If you're a diehard fan of Onyx, this is one of the group's best projects in their legendary career. According to Sticky Fingaz, the album was completed in just two weeks thanks, in part, to the group's new songwriting process. "We didn't really write anything," he recalls. "We wrote a little bit but you know, we got a new technique where we just vibe and get on it. We recorded everything in the Batcave. That's Fredro's studio." Fredro says their classic "Last Dayz" from their sophomore album, was the inspiration behind the production on their new album. "'Last Dayz' is a Hip Hop classic beat you know? It was in 8 Mile and that made it even more legendary so I wanted to get the vibe on the album," he says. "I know what I know when it comes to making beats and my style never changed. That's why it sounds like 1996 because I didn't change the way I make my beats. When it comes to producing, Fredro claims to have the hardest tracks in the game and he brought that same energy to the new album. "I don't get nothing from a beat machine," he added. "I don't even use a hi-hat. I got my own drums. I play my own drums. My shit is dirty. I need it to be dirty. My shit is filthy. I got the nastiest, grimest, beats in Hip Hop." With their signature hardcore lyricism and gritty production, Onyx Vs Everybody makes a strong case for being named among the best albums of 2022 so far, but that isn't the recognition they seek. "Onyx Vs Everybody is the hottest, grimmest, dirtiest album of the year," Sticky Fingaz boasts. "I don't want the best album of the year. They can have that. This is the grimmest album of the year." Coming off a Versuz beating Cypress Hill at the forum in LA and now on a international tour, for fans of Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, Run DMC

Debut album by Dutch producer w1b0, who passed away in August, to be released in November on U-TRAX.

Wibo Lammerts' sudden death on August 15thshocked the worldwide electro community, and also left the record label, that had been working on the debut album with the artist known as w1b0 for the past two years, dumbfounded and in grief.

Wibo had jokingly always called his upcoming debut album 'his legacy', which now sadly has become a painful truth. With the support of Wibo's family, U-TRAX is now doing the only thing that doesn't feel totally wrong: proceed as planned, and release 'When Humans Ruled The Earth' on November 11.

W1b0 made quite a name for himself with heavy electro tracks that he released on labels like Bass Agenda, Hilltown Disco and Discos Antónicos. Standing at 202 meters, and combined with a cheerful character, most people remember him as the gentle giant of electro.
For this album, Wibo wanted to steer away from the dark and heavy electro he mostly made until then. The idea of having a platform to create delicate electronic music in different styles, and make it a showcase of his versatility, was very appealing to him. And that is where he and U-TRAX found each other.

The full-length album (over 75 minutes on cd and digital) comes after 'The Pilex Program EP', released in October, that featured a remix by Detroit's Ectomorph of 'Pilex Driver' and saw 'Program Yourself To Feel' remixed by a well-known Dutch producer that recently created the new 'techno alias' Human Form.
As usual with U-TRAX, the album comes in three different editions, with the 11-track double vinyl version containing the Ectomorph and Human Form remixes. The CD and digital version boast original versions only, plus four additional tracks: 'Alternate Reality Interface', 'Mixed Matter Fluctator', 'Synthetic', and 'In There'. The cassette version more or less has the same track list as the CD/digi version, but has both aforementioned remixes and a bonus track in the incredibly hypnotizing 'I Wanted You', a track that unfortunately couldn't be on the CD and vinyl versions.

Buyers of the physical releases get treated on superior quality products, another trademark of U-TRAX. The vinyl edition boasts over one hour of music, on two 180 grams, green vinyl discs, in a black & white & neon green gatefold sleeve. The eye-catching artwork is created by Utrecht artist Leffe Goldstein, known amongst others for his psychedelic beer can designs for Utrecht brewery Maximus. Wibo, being the beer lover he was, had zero doubts about having Leffe Goldstein do the cover for his album. The CD has a total playing time of 75 minutes and comes in a beautiful 6-panel digipack, while the cassette will have full-color on-body print and comes in a plastic-free Maltese cross fold-up sleeve.

Buyers of the physical releases get treated on superior quality products, another trademark of U-TRAX. The vinyl edition boasts over one hour of music, on two 180 grams, green vinyl discs, in a black & white & neon green gatefold sleeve. The eye-catching artwork is created by Utrecht artist Leffe Goldstein, known amongst others for his psychedelic beer can designs for Utrecht brewery Maximus. Wibo, being the beer lover he was, had zero doubts about having Leffe Goldstein do the cover for his album. The CD has a total playing time of 75 minutes and comes in a beautiful 6-panel digipack, while the cassette will have full-color on-body print and comes in a plastic-free Maltese cross fold-up sleeve.

Opener 'Acid Whip' is one of the oldest compositions on this album, in which a dark 303 bassline hums over layers of spacey strings. Wibo named it after the legendary Whip It party in Amsterdam's De Melkweg. 'Alternate Reality Interface' then presents bouncy rhythms toying around with all sorts of analog (bass) synthesizers, before we go really deep with the epic ambient techno track 'Wandering Souls'.
Then things get a little lighter spirited: 'Mixed Matter Fluctator' is an electro track that builds on sounds created by Matt Buggins. It has very strong Detroit influences, the city Wibo loved so much and that he made a pilgrimage to with a group of friends that called themselves 'The Techno Tourists'. The tempo goes up a notch in 'Program Yourself To Feel', that halfway opens up in wide science fiction strings that evoke memories of Star Wars, the movie series that Wibo was a great fan of, and that was the source of many of his tracks' names. The Human Form remix opens the vinyl edition of this album and is a downright belter of a track.

Next is a somewhat experimental intermezzo named 'Synthetic'. Erratic beats and pounding bassdrums get accompanied by very subtle eerie-sounding strings, before melancholic synthesizers and piano chords take over. This is an excellent prelude to the epic 'Hologram Computing', a track that is one of our favorites. It slowly and softly builds and builds, before a pounding bassdrum breaks loose and a hypnotic arpeggio takes you to higher planes.
Not ready to letting the listener relax, w1bo then serves 'Beilstein Reference', which again presents his trademark cocktail of down-to-earth electro rhythms and catchy melodies, covered in all sort of little sounds and noises, giving the song a lot of energy. What follows is 'Hit me', a track loosely based on a song by Dutch indie rock band Mr. Joe Abe. Wibo met the band's singer on a camping site while being on holidays and the two decided Wibo should do a remix of one of their songs. Nothing was left of the original except the vocals, and the result is a remarkable cheerful, poppy electro song.

'Anticipated Input' is one of the more recent tracks Wibo made for this album, combining electro, acid and, yes: epic strings. But not all is peace and quiet on this album, as 'Pilex Driver' shows. This is w1b0 going experimental in a danceable fashion: Industrial sounds make the track sound like we're passing a construction site that is playing loud electro music. On the vinyl version of this album, Ectomorph totally decomposed the original and made it into a mysterious, almost subdued, and totally brilliant electro track that sees a main role for the retro Roland CR drum machines sounds.

TFHats, Wibo's fellow member of the Transhumanism collective, added lyrics to 'Cartesian Coordinates'. His vocals add a pleasant New Wave flavor to this song, that has breaks that remarkably reminds one of Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. What follows is the most personal track on this album. 'Fornan' is a song that Wibo made for his wife Nanette, and was added as the last piece of the puzzle that creating an album is. The warm Detroit techno atmosphere in this electro song couldn't be a more beautiful tribute to his love, and mother of their two young boys.
The album then takes a surprising detour through a 1980s landscape with 'In There', that features the Joy Division-esque vocals of another one of Wibo's friends, indicated only as Vincent. The super slow and gloomy track is a treat for anyone that loved the darker side of New Wave. The album has a worthy closer in the sensitive, yet playful 'Schlegel Diagram'.








h 08: Hit Me (w1b0's Slugfest Assault Dub) feat. Mr Joe Abe

First trained in his church choir, Print played in R&B bands in high school and later developed a reputation as a standout rapper. On Adventures in Counter-Culture, he experiments with the synths, keyboards, and drum machines that connected the musical dots of those early days.

Print began pursuing his career as a musician in 2001, working on several hip hop projects including his collaborative project Soul Position with DJ/Producer RJD2. Releasing The Unlimited EP & 8,000,000 Stories on Rhymesayers Entertainment with RJ, Blueprint began work in 2004 on what would become his first solo album, 1988. The success of that album allowed him to tour extensively
throughout North America and Europe, before returning home to focus on writing and recording his next album. When he sat down to work on this sophomore effort, Print began with the dark, soulful and sample heavy hip hop of the early 90's, but soon found himself

hitting a creative wall. What shook him loose was a new mission: to create an album that encompassed every facet of music he knew, blurring genre lines and bringing it back home as one cohesive listening experience. The more he worked to pair new found interest in rock & electronic music with his love of hip hop, the more he was able to break down that creative barrier.

Thus began his Adventures in Counter-Culture, a monumental undertaking that would involve reinventing himself as a musician and person. His growing cynicism with the world, his disdain for pop culture, the state of politics, and an apathetic, uninspired society, all worked as fuel to inspire this sophomore album. Moved by the impact that sampling lawsuits were having on the music community, Blueprint also decided to return to his roots and began writing and producing his own original content.

Blue Vinyl

Throughout his productive career, Carl Oesterhelt has proven to be an artist who finds it easy to move between musical genres and concepts. Much of his work has been within classical and chamber music, but he has also scored museum exhibitions and he is sometimes part of The Notwist crew as an angular figure on the Munich scene.

In Umor Rex we have been lucky enough to publish an array of Oesterhelt's universes. In Eleven Pieces for Synthesizer (Umor Rex 2019) we heard his kosmische side, where the connections with Harmonia or Klaus Schulze were amalgamated with ecclesiastical organ pieces and intense semi-automatic rhythms. A deeply melodic, fresh album. Pure syntax of the modern synthesizer. Further, in The Aporias of Futurism (Umor Rex 2021), in collaboration with Andreas Gerth (Driftmachine, Tied & Tickled Trio), Oesterhelt showed what is perhaps his darkest side —a work full of nuances within concrete music and midnight atmospheres. As deep and cerebral an album as it is surprising and catatonic.

Yet it seems that Carl Oesterhelt has another ace up his sleeve. Now he surprises us with The Dualistic Principle, a fantastic album full of weird but charming electronic melodies, rhythms that push the body to movement, sometimes syncopated and abstract, others permanent and fluid. In this work, Oesterhelt invited Johan Simons to give voice to the lyrics. The Dualistic Principle is a sort of rendition of a philosophical review or a nostalgic memory of the glamorous years. There is also underlying humor in the Post / Space-pop / Munich-disc assortment. The Dualistic Principle is the score to an imaginary film of contemporary hedonism.

All music & lyrics by Carl Oesterhelt. Voice by Johan Simons. Additional strings played by the Ensemble für synkretische Musik. Recorded in Munich & Bochum, Germany. Mastered by John Tejada in Sherman Oaks, USA. Artwork by Daniel Castrejón in Mexico City.

AM006 is by Berlin's ML, titled 'Life always breaks your heart'. Two 30-minute pieces were written, constructed, collaged and fixed together by himself. It's an important story, so there's a copy from ML below and also ours was written by Bokeh Version Industrial to do it justice.

Hallucinated Brazilian poetry read by text to voice engines, supernatural thrillers ripped from Youtube, the clang of cutlery and distant canteen conversation, that noise wire fencing makes when you rake it with a stick, crickets chirping over odd dance emotions, a sample you think your recognise but can’t name…..

The trivial is cosmically important, the cosmically important is trivial. ‘It’s about the product’ - all of life’s a sample. You contain universes.

Alice in Wonderland, late night sessions with kosmische guitar legends, ethnographic chants from an unknown land, “There’s no monopoly of knowledge / there’s no monopoly of power”: forecasts from global political trends, China will be important they say, someone’s whistling a tune that doesn’t exist, I’m thinking of times long before I was born . . .

Growing naturally like a beautiful montage from his field recordings (a rich library of personal psychoacoustic details) and his 150 Session on NTS, ML's Life Always Breaks Your Heart is mixtape-concrète:

Gamelan of the soul, Bio-Curry-Wurst in Kreuzberg, zither overlays the booms of the squatter’s homegrade grenades…

Mark Leckey vs. Alvin Curran, Gustav Flaubert vs Cabaret Voltaire, free association flashbacks with the timestamps mixed up, with added bass guitar, OP-1, Ableton, distinguishing the ‘real’ instruments becomes unimportant….they’re absorbed by memory foam….

No country, no flag – outernational without a cause!

There is no purpose, there is only reverie.

ML -

"A useless ruin, things are falling apart, even in our deepest, we long for harmony. A hypothetical path, for obscure reasons, fades into transparency. The mediocrity of Western culture, sicken by P.R., life offers a chance, a place for enthusiasm. The texture of the world, them can read it in your eyes. In the heart of schizo-culture, distance, suddenly shortened, forms characters as symbols. Deafen by mass media, embittered by unsettled chemistry, the willing body, forever in transition. The pre-invented existence, owned by language, creates a passage towards chaos. Paragraphs of currents, amplify the feelings, while silence leaks into the new luxury of time. Gentrification of sentiments, beneath our palms, all these memoirs. A modern consciousness, stretching over years in narcissistic differentiation. In touch with another human spirit, blowing backwards, beneath dark waters. We put our hands on your body, onto a new landscape, employed by metaphysical mutations. At the edge of the cosmos, prairies and mountains hide the truth in tactical silence. Apparently so, a number of months ago, above our head, a landscape of journals. Mystical content, statistically insignificant. A new patio, them crawled through the walls."

An iconic landmark album within Death Metal. “Testinomy of the Ancients” gets the well-deserved reissue! Two years after releasing one of the best death metal albums ever to surface from The Netherlands, Pestilence hit jackpot again with their 1991 album “Testimony Of The Ancients”. The biggest differences with their previous effort “Consuming Impulse” are simple: The production is more clean, short intermezzos between all the songs, the average pace is lower and Patrick Mameli has taken over lead vocals. Pestilence has had a well-deserved place in the first wave death metal elite, mentioned in one breath with the likes of Death, Sepultura, Cynic, Atheist and the likes. Rightly so, because their progression up untill this album is comparable to, say, Carcass. With every album they developed their sound so no release sounds alike but still stays Pestilence undeniably. Their previous album “Consuming Impulse” was unprecedented in brutality and morbidness. ‘Testimony of the Ancients” is less relentless, but it makes up for that with an onimous dose of morbid melodies, great lyrics and an all out Lovecraftian atmosphere. The highlight of this album is definately the guitars. Patrick Mameli and Patrick Uterwijk are a great tandem, combining melodic (twin) soloing with screeches and crashes of tremolo filled chaos. Take for example the song “Land Of Tears”. The guitar solo starts out very emotional, almost ballad like and then switches into high gear, so that all listeners who were dreaming away immediately abbandon all hope for solution of the saddening first guitar part. Noteworthy also are the supportive keyboard samples, never obnoxious, always morbid. Other album highlights are the title track (with truly frightening and insane lyrics), ‘Twisted Truth’ with its catchy dynamics, ‘Profetic Revelations’ (excellent chorus) and basically the whole album is perfect. Special attention to the final track (the album sticks together with samples, which are all great by the way) ‘Stigmatized’. This is death metal perfection, combining Slayer, Death and even Iron Maiden to create a masterpiece of metal.

Opening with the buzz of a smartphone on vibrate, First Hate’s sophomore album Cotton Candy launches to life with “Someone New,” a synth-driven statement of intent. The Danish duo’s charged songs are rooted in a recognizable universe, but traverse a wide array of genre experiments and pop detours. Cotton Candy follows the quest of its protagonist stumbling through a crumbling world, winning and losing lovers, swinging from extreme highs to hopeless lows. The title alludes to transience and ecstasy, the surge of a sugar rush before nausea sets in, the way cotton candy dissolves into nothingness leaving only sticky fingers. Throughout, the productions glitter with synthetic detail and hypermodern finesse, effervescent but elusive. “Life is a rollercoaster and we’ve ridden the ups and downs.” During the recording sessions, a collage of Copenhagen musicians flowed through the studio. First Hate is a fixture of the city’s creative community, but ultimately exists in their own sphere, carving a niche as parallel universe pop stars, embracing sweet and bitter, risk and reward: “Sometimes the ones who love you most are the ones who hold you back.” Anton and Joakim grew up in Copenhagen and met when they were 15 through common friends on the street where they lived. “I didn’t enjoy being home so I used to stay at my friend Jakob's basement in an old church on Willemoesgade street,” says Wei. “His mom was the priest. She baptized Anton at age eight during his Jesus phase when he demanded a late baptism from his atheist parents. Jakob was friends with Elias who lived up in Anton’s end and they introduced us to each other. One summer my parents finally married after 20 years of dating. Joakim moved in for two weeks and we accidentally trashed the apartment while they were on their honeymoon. Later on Jakob, Elias, and two other friends, Dan and Johan, formed the band Iceage. Watching our friends’ growing success was a catalyst in creating our own project. At that point everybody in our friend group was making punk music, so the most punk thing we could think to do was start a pop duo.” The First Hate catalog comprises more than nine years of work, including their 2017 cult classic, A Prayer For The Unemployed, a collaborative album Dittes Bog, two EPs and several singles. All of the recordings are self-produced, until they are ready to be finished in the studio. “We have sort of a twin alliance. Like couples finishing each other’s spaghetti at restaurants, we finish each other’s music. Having people enter this sacred mix has been such a pleasure.” On stage Anton and Joakim embody the contrasting yet complimentary energies of yin and yang: Joakim pushing buttons, steering the ship, working synths and samplers with harmonious calm, while Anton’s body bullets around the stage, pounding out his kinetic dance moves. The name Anton means fragile flower, an apt metaphor for his stage presence. A fragile flower shooting through concrete. To behold a performer who consistently delivers such intense live performances is a rare pleasure. “Live means love. When everything is right. When we meet the audience heart to heart. Then the planet spins even faster.” First Hate has performed over a hundred shows across Europe, Asia, the U.S., and Russia, both as headliners and alongside fellow Copenhagen acts Iceage, Lust For Youth, Communions, Soho Rezanejad, Trentemøller and Grand Prix. “We are on a quest of love, yes it’s as cheesy as that.”

The music on this long-awaited solo vinyl album by legendary tape artist Jérôme Noetinger was recorded live in the studio with no overdubs. Signals were sent through tube broadcast monitors and picked up with room microphones. Produced by Tobias Levin. Cover by Meeuw.

Long-time touchstone of international experimental music presents his monolithic (and first) solo vinyl »Sur Quelques Mondes Étranges« on Felix Kubin’s Gagarin Records. Jérôme Noetinger is known to most for the audio-visual trio Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine, alongside his countless recorded & live collaborations, compositions for radio & stage, and breathtaking multi-channel diffusions in the acousmatic tradition.

Discovering the ReVox B77 tape machine as his tool for live electro-acoustic music in 1987, Noetinger has doggedly investigated his instrument over 35 years, establishing him as a vital contemporary composer/performer of the medium. His work is radical and interrogatory, using a pan-historical array of analogue devices to construct soundworlds which sidestep digital monochrome, landing in a galaxy of simmering malfunction, dynamic physicality & rhythmic debris. Programming Le 102 in Grenoble for over a decade, as well as directing Metamkine distribution for over three, his encyclopaedic knowledge of manifold sonic traditions is on display here; unified by a staunch discipline, impressive dedication and flat rejection of empty trends.

The results synthesise his tireless timbral research into 11 striking sonic investigations which combine modern studio possibilities with years of performance experience worldwide. An ominous malaise hovers over proceedings; yet it never feels nihilistic, presenting solutions which electrify the listener with ecstatic discovery. The perceptual orchestration therein - from throwing our ears right against the body of the tape machine to flinging them into cavernous space alive with the aurally strange - is both delirious & calming. Noetinger is all too aware things are bad, but his drive for discovery and joyous belief in music somehow coruscates brilliantly through contemporary gloom.

Meticulously recorded & produced with Tobias Levin in Hamburg, Sur quelques mondes étranges presents a detailed & rich vocabulary both real & unreal: gesture & repetition, structure & collapse, familiar & uncanny all dance with each in the most pumping discothèque concrète in this universe. This is a powerful and exacting statement from an elegant composer & extraordinary musician who has humbly dedicated his life to his practice.

– Anthony Pateras

Jackie Mittoo, organ and piano maestro, was not only a founding member of the legendary Jamaican Ska group The Skatalites, but through the course of Jamaican music’s long history has produced a body of work under his own name and of that with his various group incarnations, The Soul Brothers, Soul Vendors and the Sound Dimension. His distinctive organ and piano sound and musical arrangements have all played a major part in Jamaica's musical history.

Jackie Mittoo (born 1948, Kingston, Jamaica) began playing musical instruments at a very early age. Taught piano by his grandmother he was performing live by the age of 10 and recording by the age of 15. Two Kingston bands that he played with the Rivals and the Sheiks brought him to the attention of Studio 1's founder Coxsone Dodd. Who at the time was putting a group of musicians together to be his studio band. Impressed by his skills on both the organ and the piano, Jackie was asked to join in what would become Jamaica's foremost band The Skatalites. The fellow band members were Lloyd Brevett (bass), Lloyd Knibbs (drums), Don Drummond (trombone), Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso and Lester Sterling (Sax), Johnny Moore (trumpet), Jah Jerry(guitar) and Mr Mittoo (piano). This line up ruled the Jamaican scene between 1964 - 1965 as well as inventing the Ska sound, they also performed the backing duties for the other top labels of the time including Duke Reid's Treasure Isle and Justin Yap's Top Deck label.

1965 saw The Skatalites disband, and Jackie Mittoo move on to his next musical project The Soul Brothers. Formed with fellow Skatalite Roland Alphonso,this band would back all the hits coming out of Studio 1 for the next three years with Jackie Mittoo working as band leader and musical arranger. Around this time Jackie also had his own single released, a Ska underground classic called 'Got My Bugaloo'. Rare, as it also features Jackie in the unusual role for him, as lead singer!!!!. 1966 saw the Ska sound evolve into Rocksteady, again with Jackie's band at the helm, and his first hit single the Rocksteady cut 'Ram Jam'. The success of which would lead to a solo career and album releases under his own name such as 'Now', 'Macka Fat', 'Evening Time', 'In London' and 'Keep on Dancing', to name but a few. In 1967 the hits at Studio 1 were still flowing when The Soul Brothers morphed into The Soul Venders and began backing such luminaries as Ken Boothe, Alton Ellis, Delroy Wilson, The Heptones, The Cables, The Wailers and many other of the label’s solo artists.

By 1968 Jamaican music was ready for another change and Rocksteady rolled into a slower groove soon to be called Reggae. Jackie Mittoo would be at the forefront with his latest band The Sound Dimension. A line-up that included Leroy Sibbles (bass),Roland Alphonso and Cedric Brooks (saxophone),Eric Frater and Ernest Ranglin (guitar) and Bunny Williams (drums). Being the house band at Studio 1 they backed all the leading names of the time, John Holt, Horace Andy and Alton Ellis, all of Studio 1's output carried his sound. Jackie Mittoo emigrated in the late 60's to Canada but travelled to Jamaica and London to record with many of the big new names, who were trying to redress Studio 1's supremacy and needed his magic touch. Such producers as Bunny Lee used Jackie Mittoo on many of his sessions,Sugar Minott among others were always glad of his services.

For this release we have put together a selection of some of his finest recordings done with legendary reggae producer Bunny Lee. 1970’s cuts that feature Jackie’s numerous talents, showing his ability to embellish tracks with a feel few could better. Musical arranger, band leader and all around studio ace.

We hope you enjoy this great set with Jackie Mittoo in fine style and his organ super powered indeed…

Spun Out Agency is honoured to present ‘More of that Frightful Oompty Boompty Music’, a compilation dedicated to the Guv’nor himself Mr Andrew Weatherall who should need no introduction on these pages. Released on vinyl in two beautiful parts, the first drops on April 15th with the second following two weeks after.

‘More of that Frightful Oompty Boompty Music’ (yes we are going to write that out every time we talk about it in this communique) showcases a selection of the shining greatness from the agency’s roster. Paranoid London, Fantastic Twins, Mehmet Aslan, Autarkic, Ruf Dug, Sean Johnston, and Manfredas gift exclusive tracks which highlight the sublime acid, techno and house sound that Weatherall would have described as “oopmty-boompty” music.

Spun Out is a London-based artist booking agency which has been run by Caroline Hayes for over 20 splendid years, that looked after the life and times of Andrew Weatherall alongside his partnership with Sean Johnston under their A Love From Outer Space moniker, and the likes of Optimo (Espacio), Ivan Smagghe, Josh Caffe, Man Power, Body Hammer, Kiara Scuro and many more artists, doing it differently.

Kicking off the A-side of the first record is Hardway Bros’ (aka Sean Johnston) previously unreleased remix of We Are The Axis by The Asphodells, the duo consisting of the Andrew Weatherall and former Battant member and Spun Out talent Timothy J. Fairplay. An energetic techno stomper with percussive rhythms, this exclusive remix offers the ideal tantalising dose to tease any dancefloor. The vocals and synth layers give it a punk rock approach, referencing the multi-genre essence of Weatherall’s taste in music.

Tel-Aviv-based Autarkic’s Sleepover closes the A-side with a chuggy lullaby, one that is certainly unsuitable for putting a baby to bed, given its intricate acid lines of total hypnosis. Following on the B-side is Manctalo Banger, a house bop by the Manchester-via-Ibiza computer game nerd and vinyl digger Ruf Dug, and Shizowaves, Turkish-born Basel-based Mehmet Aslan’s soulful touch to the compilation, bringing Middle-Eastern percussive melodies and catchy basslines.

The second record is introduced by Paranoid London, with a Spun Out dedicated acid techno banger appropriately titled Spinning Out and Fantastic Twins’ EBM track Kali’s Tongue Was A Weapon. On the B-side is Lithuanian chug legend Manfredas’ Hfuhruhurr, and Naum Gabo, who closes the compilation with the chaotic analogue-synth frenzy, Cold Sold. The name Naum Gabo may evoke the pioneer of Russian constructivism, who rose to fame thanks to his crazy kinetic sculptures. However, here it manifests as one half of Spun Out’s Optimo duo Jonnie Wilkes (JG Wikes) and James Savage. The duo’s impeccable manipulation of electronic hardware couldn’t give a better homage to him.

Some highlights for Spun Out artists this summer include 9 acts from the roster playing at Houghton Festival, Paranoid London’s show at Sonar Festival, Love International Festival and Ransom Note’s festival with Optimo Watching Trees.

Spun Out Agency is honoured to present ‘More of that Frightful Oompty Boompty Music’, a compilation dedicated to the Guv’nor himself Mr Andrew Weatherall who should need no introduction on these pages. Released on vinyl in two beautiful parts, the first drops on April 15th with the second following two weeks after.

‘More of that Frightful Oompty Boompty Music’ (yes we are going to write that out every time we talk about it in this communique) showcases a selection of the shining greatness from the agency’s roster. Paranoid London, Fantastic Twins, Mehmet Aslan, Autarkic, Ruf Dug, Sean Johnston, and Manfredas gift exclusive tracks which highlight the sublime acid, techno and house sound that Weatherall would have described as “oopmty-boompty” music.

Spun Out is a London-based artist booking agency which has been run by Caroline Hayes for over 20 splendid years, that looked after the life and times of Andrew Weatherall alongside his partnership with Sean Johnston under their A Love From Outer Space moniker, and the likes of Optimo (Espacio), Ivan Smagghe, Josh Caffe, Man Power, Body Hammer, Kiara Scuro and many more artists, doing it differently.

Kicking off the A-side of the first record is Hardway Bros’ (aka Sean Johnston) previously unreleased remix of We Are The Axis by The Asphodells, the duo consisting of the Andrew Weatherall and former Battant member and Spun Out talent Timothy J. Fairplay. An energetic techno stomper with percussive rhythms, this exclusive remix offers the ideal tantalising dose to tease any dancefloor. The vocals and synth layers give it a punk rock approach, referencing the multi-genre essence of Weatherall’s taste in music.

Tel-Aviv-based Autarkic’s Sleepover closes the A-side with a chuggy lullaby, one that is certainly unsuitable for putting a baby to bed, given its intricate acid lines of total hypnosis. Following on the B-side is Manctalo Banger, a house bop by the Manchester-via-Ibiza computer game nerd and vinyl digger Ruf Dug, and Shizowaves, Turkish-born Basel-based Mehmet Aslan’s soulful touch to the compilation, bringing Middle-Eastern percussive melodies and catchy basslines.

The second record is introduced by Paranoid London, with a Spun Out dedicated acid techno banger appropriately titled Spinning Out and Fantastic Twins’ EBM track Kali’s Tongue Was A Weapon. On the B-side is Lithuanian chug legend Manfredas’ Hfuhruhurr, and Naum Gabo, who closes the compilation with the chaotic analogue-synth frenzy, Cold Sold. The name Naum Gabo may evoke the pioneer of Russian constructivism, who rose to fame thanks to his crazy kinetic sculptures. However, here it manifests as one half of Spun Out’s Optimo duo Jonnie Wilkes (JG Wikes) and James Savage. The duo’s impeccable manipulation of electronic hardware couldn’t give a better homage to him.

Some highlights for Spun Out artists this summer include 9 acts from the roster playing at Houghton Festival, Paranoid London’s show at Sonar Festival, Love International Festival and Ransom Note’s festival with Optimo Watching Trees.

On June 17, 2020, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the City of Los Angeles, announced that the iconic multi-million selling
soul/R&B band, THE CHI-LITES, would be honoured in their Class of 2021, by receiving a star on Hollywood Boulevard on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.
• On 30th September 2021, with family friends and other soul legends in attendance, including their legendary label mate, Gene
Chandler, Marshall Thompson, co-Founder and last surviving member of THE CHI-LITES, accepted the honour on behalf of the Band.
• Although they had formed nine years earlier, it was when the Band met record producer Carl Davis in 1968 that they signed a
contract with Brunswick Records. They began to achieve commercial recognition and success, with songs predominantly written and
composed by band member Eugene Record, who was also their lead singer, although their first charting song, ‘Give It Away’ (US
R&B Chart #10) was co-written by Record, with producer Carl Davis.
• THE CHI-LITES released more than 15 studio albums and registered on the UK chart on nine occasions, with five Top 10 entries, one
of them being the Double-A sided reissue ‘Have You Seen Her’/’Oh Girl’.
• In 1976, THE CHI-LITES switched labels from Brunswick to Mercury and recorded two albums ‘Happy Being Lonely’ (1976) and ‘The
Fantastic Chi-Lites’ (1977), before teaming-up again with Carl Davis on his own Chi-Sound records label, to record 1980’s ‘Heavenly
Body’ and 1981’s ‘Me And You’.
• This 12-track vinyl LP set focuses on their Brunswick Records period and includes all of their UK hits, opening with their barnstorming ‘Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)’, the intro from which, being famously and expertly sampled by Beyoncé (and featuring
Jay-Z), for her worldwide 2003 hit and Transatlantic #1,‘Crazy In Love’.