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It"s been six years since LA DISPUTE released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band-made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass-dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on NO ONE WAS DRIVING THE CAR. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: "I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it," Dreyer says. Partly inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, NO ONE WAS DRIVING THE CAR reckons with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. In fourteen dynamic tracks, the band grapples with the existential topic and the human need to find comfort and a sense of security in an existence where we"re often thrust into chaos without permission.

"After two EPs and an illuminating start to his career, Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Venna releases his debut album, Malik. Not wanting to be rooted in jazz alone, Malik embodies the melting pot of sounds that
reflects Venna’s environment. Bossa Nova influences can be heard across the album, as well as a deep love for Soul, R&B, and Rap. Venna’s broad range shines bright in his choice of collaborators, including vocalists Jorja Smith, Leon Thomas, MIKE, and Smino, as well as instrumentalists such as Yussef Dayes and Marco Bernardis.
It’s a beautiful rarity when an artist sees themselves as a vessel of the music, and though Malik is a manifestation of his experiences and how he sees the world and years of craft, Venna wants Malik to be an invitation. An invitation to let go, be present and submit to sensory experiences."

Ken Jacobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, developed the »Nervous Magic Lantern« in the 1960s — a self-made apparatus containing a spinning shutter, a light source, and lenses set in a wooden frame. Hand-painted circular slides, gently moved by hand, produce flickering imagery: geometric patterns, Rorschach-like inkblots, and three-dimensional forms that seem to float beyond the screen. These hallucinatory visions challenge perception and suggest what Jacobs once called »a whole new play of appearances«.

Unlike Jacobs’ politically charged works, the »Nervous Magic Lantern« is patently abstract, examining how the brain regulates perception. For these performances, Jacobs requested »sounds of daily life« — environmental recordings that anchor the phantasmagoria in reality. Field tapes of Chinatown streets, conversations, and other uncategorisable sounds became the material for Aki Onda’s sonic compositions, adding narrative resonance to the abstract visuals and creating an almost documentary dimension.

This album documents a performance of »Nervous Magic Lantern« at Spiral Hall, organised by Sound Live Tokyo on November 3, 2015. Jacobs’ selection and sequencing of slides offered improvisatory space, mirrored by Onda’s flexible arrangement of cassette recordings. The result is a work where life and art dissolve into one another — a soundtrack for life in the depth of illusion.

Music by Aki Onda Cassette field recordings by Ken Jacobs

Editions Mego presents Bosko, landing exactly 30 years after the initial General Magic flights into the fantastic; the legendary first Mego release, a collaboration with Pita whereby all sounds were harnessed from the buzzing, drinking, humming sounds of fridges MEGO 001 General Magic & Pita and a 12” with Elin called Die Mondlandung (The Moon Landing) MEGO 002 which embarked on a minimal techno template so austere and strange it was one of the historic progenitors of austere and wonky rhythms alongside Sakho and other European explorers.

The initial return of the playful and mystical Austrian outfit General Magic came with the 20th year anniversary vinyl reissue of their classic debut Frantz eMEGO 010. A record so audacious and playful it still baffles as much as it entertains. At some point whilst working on this reissue GM’s Ramon Bauer and Andi Pieper were spurred on to rummage around with ideas and tools once more and after more than two decades of inactivity sonic sorcery was conjured once again. Live shows in honour of Peter Rehberg were performed in Vienna and London. Softbop, a limited risograph collaboration with Tina Frank came with the first new recordings as a digital download came out discreetly online. The first full length album following Rechenkönig in 2000 MEGO 032 “Nein Aber Ja” released in 2023 on Finlay Shakespeare’s GOTO Records on CD and cassette. An ongoing series of mix tapes online further highlights their interests encapsulating a new found angle on electronic mayhem. All of these elements retain the wildly eclectic and ecstatic glow that only they can harness and hand out to an unprepared world.

Now, we have General Magic’s second official full length comeback recording, Bosko. The new album is initially notable prior to the needle hitting the wax or the cursor identifying a track due to the artwork. Made by long term collaborator Tina Frank, this is Frank’s first analogue artwork, with a painting of a happy/nervous machine thing hovering in a landscape of no discernible identity. It’s quasi science fiction hovering amongst the potential for fun. Suited to the music? Natürlich.

Bosko sees Bauer and Pieper update and reframe their original investigations with a fresh supply of head scratching, heart racing tunes that hit the inexplicable with a wild mesh of drums, pianos, synthetic voices and all manner of immaterial sonic play. Startling sonics shock the ears on Club Duchamp which sounds like a conversation between synthetic adult ants in an environment still in development. Elfer features vocals supplied by a female-ish voice who, whilst grappling melody, has trouble executing a firm identity. Noorenhalt catapults along a mainframe of syncopation so unwieldy it feels like the voice, which is utterly alien, provides the only comfort. Seite 5 inhabits a fuzzy zone where a synthetic Horn of Jericho type ambience competes with rhythms never quite sure of who they are. Rise of the Ombré raises the spectral dread. Is this Science Fact? Absolutely nothing within Bosko is predictable.

The amount of change in the miasma of existence and the things we touch in order to make things has shifted so exponentially we are at the point where minds are starting to glaze over. All of this makes the return of the always original, always surprising, always fresh and exciting General Magic totally in tune with the artificial intelligent apocalyptic age we currently inhabit. The tools may have changed but the wonderfully warped gaze of Bosko offers a fresh new vision of perplexing funk and robotic punk.

Influenced by the vibrant Caribbean community and the reggae sounds that permeated his environment, Danny Red was drawn to music at a young age. His journey began in the 1980s, but it was in the early 1990s that Danny Red truly started to make his mark in the reggae scene. Rise to prominence was marked by his unique voice and his commitment to the Rastafari movement, which heavily influenced his music. In the 1990s, as dancehall began to dominate the reggae scene, Danny Red stayed true to his roots reggae origins, focusing on socially conscious themes and spiritual messages.

Known for his powerful vocal delivery and a profound lyrical approach, Danny Red’s music often explores themes of cultural identity, social justice, and spiritual awareness. Here teamed up with south Italian collective Mystical Powa to bring lyrically rich and musically vibrant single. Exploring Rasta believe in holy place called Mount Zion that awaits for each good person. Backed with highly popular anthem horn piece entitled Kunta Kinte played by Eddie T-Bone. Both tunes comes with tuff dub versions ready to mash up all dances worldwide.

hook releases a new LP “RPG” composed with one hand and Influenced by Retro Video Game and Japanese Ambient Music.

“RPG” is composed entirely with one hand. Despite breaking his other arm and being unable to play his synthesizers, Wijnands did not give up and created the EP, showcasing his determination and passion for music.

Wijnands says: “I have been listening to Nintendo soundtracks nonstop while creating this LP, and it really cheered me up when I just broke my arm.”

Besides Retro Video Game Music, “RPG” draws heavily from Japanese environmental, ambient and new age music from the 1980s.

“RPG” showcases Wijnands’ skill as a composer and his ability to create evocative and immersive musical landscapes. The songs have a similar minimalistic aesthetic, where less is more, and the focus is on creating a serene and meditative atmosphere through the use of delicate piano melodies, subtle electronic textures, and synthesizer sound recordings to mimic the sounds of nature.

Despite the challenges Wijnands’ faced during the creation of “RPG,” the LP proves that he is still pushing the boundaries of electronic music.

"Reflection Code" is an EP that delves into the multifaceted aspects of human reflection through a collection of immersive musical compositions, each inviting the listener on a unique sonic journey.

The Practice of Desire — A deep techno track featuring enveloping pads and modulating metallic cosmic sounds, reminiscent of heavy matter from outer space. Accompanied by a lecture from Gangaji, this track adds an extra layer of depth and meaning to the musical experience.

Port Del Compte — Inspired by memories of Spain's stunning landscapes and a performance at the Parallel festival, this track transports the listener to picturesque settings, filling their heart with joy and harmony.

Bad Trigger — This track offers a profound reflection on life events, utilizing an expressive electronic soundscape with a compelling bass line at 144 bpm. It creates an atmosphere conducive to introspection and self-discovery.

Green Frequency — A shamanic sequence infused with forest vibes and the calls of an electronic bird. This composition immerses the listener in nature, evoking a sense of unity with the surrounding environment and the inner self.

"Reflection Code" invites listeners to explore their inner reflections and connect with each composition on a profound level, creating a unique auditory landscape that lingers long after the music ends.

Toki Fuko music can be described as mechanical signals are structured in a hypnotic substance. Their constant musical experimentation actor perceives as an analysis of the surrounding world.

Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit’s trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements.

Primarily known for a site-responsive approach to sound, often realized in the moment of performance, Ankersmit’s turn toward the studio in the last few years has opened up a new dimension within his practice. It is in this quiet rupture that The Dip emerged, a study in internality and suspended states, rich with cinematic undercurrents and ghostly spatial suggestion. Here, electricity itself feels transfigured – becoming supple, even organic – within an environment shaped entirely by analog signals.

Over the past two decades, Ankersmit has established himself as one of the foremost practitioners of the Serge, the notoriously idiosyncratic and expressive instrument that has remained central to his work. On The Dip, he harnesses its potential not for brute force or disorientation, but for spaciousness, resonance, and lyrical abstraction. Without resorting to additional processing or effects, he draws out tones that feel simultaneously raw and refined, articulated and blurred – intricate structures that seem to breathe and evolve of their own volition.

The result is a kind of auditory hallucination, a “cinema for the ears,” wherein impressions, emotional arcs, and imagined topographies unfold. Each side of The Dip plays like a single gesture unfolding in time – a spatial narrative constructed through vibration, density, and the movement of air.

The Dip follows acclaimed works on PAN, Touch, and Shelter Press, and reaffirms Thomas Ankersmit’s position as one of the most focused and probing voices in contemporary experimental music. Quietly radical and meticulously constructed, it is less a departure than a deepening – a descent into a more private sonic world, where the boundaries between perception, memory, and pure signal dissolve.

After a two-year hiatus from recording, the OC based band reconvened in 2023, returning to where it all started: drummer Lucas Ovalle"s garage. It was in this familiar environment that Ovalle, guitarist lead singer Josiah, guitarist Corbin Jacques,and bassist Seth Thomson learned how to be friends again and shared all the anxieties and revelations they"d endured on hiatus through crafting songs. The 13 songs that make up Big Smile are the band"s emotional champions that track the tumultuous period between the start of their break and the peace they found on their way back to each other. In the studio with fellow California legends Rob Schnapf (The Vines, Beck) and Matt Schuessler (Kurt Vile, Cat Power), GREER grew up again, taking more ownership over their sound and learning to speak producer-ese. Big Smile is the sound of a band exorcising their demons, learning to trust themselves, and asserting themselves with newfound earnestness and maturity. It"s the sound of a band that"s fallen in love with rocking out again. It"s the sound of friends rediscovering each other and the magic that they can create together when they embrace each other"s vulnerable side. With Big Smile, GREER has arrived as a serious, and seriously fun, alt rock band with diversity of sound and unity of vision.

Lard’s Pure Chewing Satisfaction is the second landmark album of the industrial-hardcore collision between vocals of Jello Biafra with the patented wall of noise assault and studio wizardry of Ministry founders Paul Barker and Al Jourgensen!
Originally released in 1997, Pure Chewing Satisfaction is a dark, frightening look at everything wrong in America, and it rings as true now as it ever has. Lyrically its pessimistic and apocalyptic, tackling topics like looking for work, the legacy of the Me Generation and their failures, to environmental disasters. Sonically, the album is an avalanche of both real and electronic drums, menacing effects galore, and layers of machine gun guitars. Not quite punk rock, nor completely industrial—this is Lardcore for the people!

A must have for fans of Jello Biafra’s work and of Ministry, the result remains another classic release from this legendary collaboration. This long awaited repress now features in addition to the wide release on black vinyl, a limited solid-pink vinyl edition!
Praise The Lard!

A“This album is about what it means to be human, and its creation is my offering. I attempt to tell a tale of the human experience in the reflection of my own.”

‘In the Andean mythology, condors are believed to be immortal. It is said that once they feel old, without energy, and useless, they climb to the highest peak and let themselves fall to death.’

The Allegorist is a visionary, enigmatic, transmedia, and boundary-pushing artist known for crafting deep, immersive dark sonic tales. Embracing a wide array of influences, weaving together the mysteries, art and spirituality, the art project defies categorisation, resonating with those who seek the unconventional.

From Birth Until Death is an introspective and immersive concept album that reflects on the essence of the human experience. Crafted over six years by The Allegorist (aka Anna Jordan), the album traces the arc of life—from its fragile beginnings to its inevitable end—using sound art to explore existential and philosophical terrain. Inspired by the Andean mythology of the condor – a symbol of immortality – the album blends electronic soundscapes with raw field recordings, evoking a deep sense of connection between the natural world and human existence.

The album’s progression mirrors the stages of life, starting with the birth of new beginnings and culminating in death, with each track offering a unique reflection on the moments in between. From the dynamic energy of Momentum, to the ethereal, illusionary world of Fata Morgana, the tracks guide the listener through emotions, perceptions, and experiences that shape the human condition.

A distinctive feature of From Birth Until Death is its intricate production. The album incorporates field recordings from Grunewald Forest, a distant roar of a jet, barking dogs, blending the sounds of nature – footsteps in the snow, birdsong, ocean waves – with layered synthesisers and electronic beats. The bass and ambient textures are crafted using an array of analog hardware, while all vocals, both lead and backing, are performed and recorded by Jordan. Some of the vocal takes were intentionally left raw, capturing the spontaneous energy of early recordings, while others were re-recorded to balance the album’s organic yet polished feel. Each element is meticulously crafted, revealing its deeper meaning as the album unfolds like a multidimensional, living sculpture.

At its core, From Birth Until Death is a meditation on the full spectrum of life. The album’s title track, From Birth Until Death, encapsulates this journey, reflecting on the passage of time and the unique experience of being human. The final track, Death, offers a melancholic yet beautiful exploration of endings, not as finalities, but as moments in the grand cycle of life. With its combination of evocative sound design and deeply personal themes, From Birth Until Death invites listeners to contemplate their own lives, offering a moving experience of reflection, growth, and transformation.

About From Birth Until Death
Words By Robin Rimbaud (Scanner)

From Birth Until Death is a deeply personal and reflective album and beautifully crafted. A detailed listen reveals that Jordan was in search of a profoundly human and authentic expression. In an era when so much around us seems defined by speed, Anna Jordan, aka The Allegorist, stands apart – aware that skimming the surface of life is neither sufficient nor rewarding. She reminds us of the value of deep, authentic listening.

The track Andean Condor seductively draws us into a smoky, blurred rhythmic soundscape, capturing the essence of the darkest Berlin nightclub, while Birth pulses with an almost shamanic transformation of sound, moving from the organic to the musical. It features a recording of Jordan’s footsteps in the snow in Grunewald Forest, Germany.

At times, the music feels almost sculptural in shape and tone – lifting, pushing, lilting, opening, and closing – where each piece is given room to fully develop. Many of the works blend synthetic sound with the natural, incorporating the human voice alongside environmental recordings: the wild waves of the ocean, a jet flying overhead, and barking dogs.

With From Birth Until Death, Jordan, like an alchemical architect revealing in the process of getting lost and relinquishing control, leaves us with a taut, immersive soundtrack in which to lose ourselves.

About the album ‘From Birth Until Death’
words by The Allegorist

“The album From Birth Until Death did not come easily to me. I started working on it in 2019, and it underwent many alterations over the years. I produced multiple versions of the tracks each year, but the album name, the track titles, and the album cover art stayed the same for 6 years. Not everything I did fit into the album’s final form, but I hope the heavy selection just made it better. I played this piece live in my techno live set between 2019 and 2020, and in the years after, I performed different art, ambient, and vocal versions of it, most notably the one at the church St. Marienkirche in Berlin in 2022. It just wanted to live and didn’t want to be finished. As I aged, this album aged with me. And now I’m ready to let it go.”

Old-time and traditional music stay exciting for their contrasts. Exacting instrumentation honed through mentorships and late-night jams at fiddler's conventions tangles with a community-sourced inventiveness that influences variants and new sounds. Joseph Decosimo is a master of this genre for this very reason, blending deep technique with an openness and curiosity that keep his music crackling with life. A "marvelous fiddler" (No Depression) and banjo player who braids "exultation and veneration" (INDY Week) into his music, on his third solo album Fiery Gizzard Decosimo gathers a close-knit ensemble of friends from his musical career to infuse his interpretations of fiddle and banjo pieces with a contagious communal joy. As an artist working with traditional music from the South and Appalachia, Decosimo chooses songs based not only on historical significance and lineage but also his own sensory approach. For Fiery Gizzard, his ear was tuned to otherworldly tones and mystery, sourcing from field recordings such as Virginia fiddler Luther Davis' hypnotic version of "Shady Grove" while amping up the music's psychedelic potential. On the middle Tennessee banjo composition "Flowery Girls," a VHS of bluesman Abner Jay inspired Decosimo to rig up a pickup inside a fretless banjo and play it thr ough a tube amp to capture some of Jay's edge and funkiness. But to round out the sound and keep it kinetic meant galvanizing a genre-eschewing crew to jam out - and not in a "spaced-out drooly" kind of way, he laughs, but as a sort of "responsive conversation." Decosimo has always been a community-minded artist. He began playing as a seventh graderin Tennessee, fostering relationships with older players at jams and in homes, a learning mode natural to his inquisitive nature and desire for musical connection. A folklorist by intuition, he later became one by profession, studying with old-time legend Clyde Davenport, teaching in East Tennessee State University's renowned bluegrass program, and receiving his PhD at the University of North Carolina with a dissertation titled "Catching the `Wild Note': Listening, Learning, and Connoisseurship in Old-Time Music." In North Carolina, Decosimo kicked about in the verdant environment of Durham and Chapel Hill's folk and indie scenes, collaborating with artists including Alice Gerrard, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. This community has influenced his own music, including his "sublime and strangely heartening" (Bandcamp Daily) 2022 release While You Were Slumbering and Beehive Cathedral, Decosimo's 2024 "Appalachian mountain music treasury" (New Commute) trio album with Luke Richardson and Cleek Schrey for Dear Life Records. Continuing on this path, Fiery Gizzard is home base for a loose outfit of mostly Tarheel-based musicians from within and beyond traditional music. Inspired by a tour with fiddler Stephanie Coleman (Nora Brown), guitarist Jay Hammond, and synth builder and multi-instrumentalist Matthew O'Connell, Decosimo assembled studiomates based on close friendships and comfort. Coleman, O'Connell, and Hammond contribute to Fiery Gizzard, along with bassist and producer Andy Stack (Helado Negro, Wye Oak), horn player Kelly Pratt (Beirut, David Byrne), Mipso and Fust's Libby Rodenbough, Joseph O'Connell (Elephant Micah), andtrad/experimental artist Cleek Schrey. Decosimo's fiddle and banjo work is virtuosic, intricate and simple simultaneously, a testament to his many years of study. On some tracks, his playing or lovely, plain-hearted singing is the centerpiece, such as on his interpretations of Texan street preacher Washington Phillips' 1929 recording "I Had a Good Father and Mother" or the Eastern Kentucky fiddle barn-burner "Glory in the Meetinghouse," famously played by Luther Strong for Alan Lomax. But there's also a trusting open-door policy, like where Southern Appalachian tune "Ida Red" relaxes into Coleman's sweet, confident fiddling and Hammond's loping guitar. As a bandleader, Decosimo's confidence and enthusiasm for the music reveal the heart of traditional music and how it can come to life through community. Fiery Gizzard is Joseph Decosimo as a powerful champion of traditional music - a sponge who soaks up as much as he squeezes out, a responsive artist who makes his genre accessible, and a magnet who can bring musicians of all sorts into his orbit with his same passion.

Maggot Mass, the fifth full-length album by Pharmakon on Sacred Bones Records, marks the project's return after a five-year hiatus. This album signifies a departure from the original rules and structures established by Margaret Chardiet for Pharmakon, evolving into a new form. It retains the project's experimental roots in power electronics and noise while incorporating industrial and punk influences. The album stems from a profound disgust with humanity's dysfunctional relationship with the environment and other life forms. It explores the loneliness resulting from this broken bond and challenges us to acknowledge our personal and systemic responsibility. What peace can we make with privilege when the true cost of our comfort is not measured in dollars but in death? How can we reconcile with death when we impose the same hierarchical structures on it that we do in life? Is life worth living in the isolation of this self-imposed species loneliness? Humans often measure worth by accumulation _ money, assets, objects _ mistaking this for power and influence. Western heritage dictates a hierarchy, placing humans at the top, separate from the natural world. This delusion turns bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools. If our value were instead determined by our contribution to the ecosystem, who could claim that a human is more valuable than a maggot? Maggots recycle death into life, breaking down matter and nourishing new growth. They transform into flies, pollinating plants and sustaining the Earth's flora. In contrast, humans pollute rather than pollinate, with a select few profiting from exploitation at the expense of biodiversity and the well-being of many. In grappling with grief and loss on both personal and global scales, Margaret sought solace in the idea of rebirth through death, celebrating the beauty of regeneration through decay. However, she had to confront the stark reality of the disconnection from the earth under oppressive systems. Pharmakon is here imagining a path where the final act is to give back what was received from creation, offering our lives and deaths to sustain existence. once I slough off this human skin I will find my home and ancestral kin_ in the coffin-birth of my cadaver's ecosystem

The Vestige is the first fruit of a new intergenerational collaboration between Giuseppe Ielasi, a quietly prolific key contributor to the European experimental music scene for over twenty years, and Jack Sheen, a young composer-conductor-sound artist from Manchester whose recent projects have seen him moving seamlessly from enigmatic chamber music composition and installations to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Their materials and working methods differ significantly, with Ielasi having focussed for many years on electro-acoustic techniques alongside his ongoing commitment to the guitar, and Sheen primarily composing for traditional instruments. More important, though, is what they share: a fascination with what Sheen calls “mysterious, liminal musical material,” using irregular repetition and cyclical forms to create structures at once alive with activity and almost static, as well as a rigorous exploration of spatial diffusion and the interaction of sound event and environment. Working individually with a library of acoustic instrument sounds from Sheen’s recent projects and Ielasi’s guitar, the pair eventually met for several days at Ielasi’s home studio in Monza, sculpting the fourteen pieces that make up The Vestige. Like Ielasi and Sheen’s solo works, the record shows an exquisite attention to details of sequencing and pacing, the sound palette and compositional approach consistent throughout while each piece asserts its own identity. The twenty-five seconds of the opening piece serve as an entrée into the record’s distinctive world of sound: repeated chirps fluctuate in volume as they move across the stereo spectrum, woven between strangled snatches of string glissando against a backdrop of percussive ticks, long tones, and white noise. Across the remaining thirteen pieces, Ielasi and Sheen sketch further dimensions of the ambiguous space, where distinctions between pitch and noise, repetition and irregularity, electronic and acoustic remain pointedly unclear. As the record’s title suggests, the origins of the sounds we hear have become remote: while at moments we get flashes of timbres and attacks that could come from wind instruments, bowed strings, or prepared guitar, these remain vestigial traces, glimpsed through a veil of shifting white noise textures. These textures are themselves difficult to trace, suggesting artefacts of the recording process, electronic synthesis, amplified room sound, rubbed instruments or objects. The Vestige shows an unusual degree of attention to frequency range as a compositional tool, something it shares with the hyper-subtle variations of Ielasi’s electroacoustic works and the deliberately ‘unbalanced’ midrange-heavy ensemble of Sheen’s Sub. Here, movement between episodes is as much about adding or removing a frequency band as it is about changes in density, harmonic content, or instrumental texture. Tracks are marked by the sudden appearance of subbass or exaggeration of high frequencies in otherwise similar material, contributing to our sense that these fourteen pieces are like different views on a scene that we can never quite see clearly. While calling up a range of past music, from the early works of Rolf Julius to Simha Arom’s recordings of layered polyrhythms embedded in the background sounds of central African villages to the temporal distortions and layered hiss of DJ Screw, the alluring and disconcerting world of The Vestige is entirely its own.

WRWTFWW Records is very excited to announce its third release from visionary Japanese ambient/experimental/environmental composer/producer Yutaka Hirose, this time with brand new album Voices, available on limited edition heavyweight-sleeved double LP as well as double CD, both with liner notes from the artist.

Voices finds Yutaka Hirose expanding his signature spatial layering into a three-dimensional videography of sound, blending field recordings, electronic manipulations, and abstract narratives. The 12-track album is a journey through a crumbling library where books whisper, history collides, and sonic textures weave new realities. Chaos, memory, and transformation – Hirose’s voices echo throughout the space, creating a fully immersive sonic experience.

The pioneering experimental and abstract electronic piece with deep hints of ambient and IDM is beautifully represented by the original artwork by Koji Shiroshita and Mifuku gracing the double LP and double digipack CD sleeves.

Voices marks Yutaka Hirose’s third full-length release on WRWTFWW Records, following his kankyõ ongaku classics Nova + 4 (an expanded version of his genre defining Soundscape 2: Nova album) and archival compilation TRACE: Sound Design Works 1986-1989, both available in vinyl, CD, and digital formats.

Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP Set Plays with Authoritative Tonality, Airiness, and Clarity:
Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl and Strictly Limited to
3,000 Numbered Copies
1/4” / 15 IPS Dolby A analogue master to DSD 256 to analogue console to lathe

Joni Mitchell is the only artist who could’ve made Hejira. The legendary singer-songwriter said as much when discussing the album decades after its release. Yet that fact seemed obvious from the moment the gold-certified effort streeted in fall 1976. An adventurous travelogue, probing narrative, and offbeat homage to freedom, Hejira remains an inimitable entry in the catalog of recorded music — a spare, gorgeous, meditative series of sonic vignettes comprised of floating harmonic pop, cool jazz, soft rock, and sensitive vocal elements that beckon feelings of motion, discovery, and self-examination.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing on MoFi SuperVinyl, and strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP set presents the record ranked the 133rd Greatest of All Time by Rolling Stone with definitive detail, richness, accuracy, and directness. Marking the first time the revered LP has received audiophile treatment, it's one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on vinyl and SACD.

Playing with a virtually nonexistent noise floor, dead-quiet surfaces, and superior groove definition, this collectible reissue reproduces in enveloping fashion the tones, textures, and craftsmanship that help Hejira function as the equivalent of a liberating trip down an open road with nothing but blue sky, natural landscape, and fresh air in the immediate vicinity. Passages bloom, carry, decay as they do amid an acoustically optimized environment. Soundstages extend far, wide, and deep, with black backgrounds and pinpoint images adding to the realism.

The reference-grade immediacy, airiness, and presence put in transparent perspective Mitchell’s dense strings of words, stream-of-conscious-like phrasing, and unhurried albeit forward momentum. Likewise, the instrumental contributions of her A-list support musicians — a cast that includes L.A. Express members John Guerin, Max Bennett and Tom Scott, plus Neil Young, Victor Feldman, and Abe Most — emerges with breathtaking clarity and dimensionality.

While Mitchell, whose intimate vocals and abstract guitar parts center everything, Mobile Fidelity's restoration of Hejira further reveals the visionary breadth of guitarist Larry Carlton and bassist Jaco Pastorius. Though heard on only four tracks, Pastorius' fretless bass epitomizes the fluid, subtle, flexible, roomy, and shape-shifting characteristics of songs that often appear to transpire out of nowhere akin to the formation of a puffy cumulus cloud overhead. In sync with Mitchell’s voice, Pastorius’ fusion hovers and floats, suspended in a fog you want to deeply inhale. The "grace notes" Mitchell desired on Hejira can now be heard in full. Ditto the luxurious tapestries of alinear lines, fills, and supplements unreeled on Carlton’s six-string.

Visually, the packaging of this UD1S set complements its identity as the copy to own. Housed in a deluxe slipcase, the LPs come in foil-stamped jackets with faithful-to-the-original graphics. This version is for listeners who desire to become immersed in everything about Hejira, including the unforgettable album cover — a pastiche of 14 different photos Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to assemble into one image that’s anchored by a portrait of her in a stoic pose — and the interior shots of Mitchell skating on a frozen Wisconsin lake wearing a pair of black skates, black shirt, and fur cape.

The notion of skating, feeling an awakening wind whipping against your face, and losing yourself to the surroundings are extremely apt for Hejira, which Mitchell wrote after a sequence of trips and relationships prompted her to reflect on the complicated conflicts between independence and marriage, success and satisfaction, duty and desire — and, more specifically, “the cost of being a woman.” The Canadian native delved into such themes before. But never as she does on Hejira, whose liberating, running-away aura doubles as another of Mitchell’s rejections of tradition as well as a suggestion of a better alternative.

At once observational and personal, expansive and insular, cheerful and poignant, Hejira spans a sea of human conditions, emotions, and circumstances. It addresses drifting, isolation, pleasure, place, time, and surroundings with strikingly poetic discourse matched with music that, save for the crooned ballad “Blue Motel Room,” forgoes conventional structures and choruses.

The jazz-based arrangements, marked by scaled-down percussion and all manner of bent, rounded, and unsettled notes, hint that Mitchell has no exact destination in mind. Excursions such as the moody “Furry Sings the Blues,” funky “Coyote” and edgy “Black Crow” throw open previously locked doors to possibility and journey. They signal it’s time for a welcome departure from norms and the past, one that leads to a heightened sense of clarity and perspective. Or, as Mitchell said upon choosing the album title, it’s time for “leaving the dream, no blame.”

After impressions of Unguja and Borneo islands, Discrepant's chieftain Gonçalo F. Cardoso continues his sonic travelogue on insularity with 'Impressões de Várias Ilhas’.

Literally translated as "impressions from various islands", this third tome dwells on recordings and inspirations from three archipelagos of Macaronésia. Soaking in the sounds and recollections from Azores, Cape Verde and Canary Islands these diaristic endeavours spread throughout a number of real environments, from water caves and black stone beaches and lagoons to small harbours and everyday life scenarios, to project them into this not quite imaginary but not quite real memory haze that goes from a deeply personal impression to a resonating one.

Melding raw field recordings with processed ones and synthesized landscapes, Cardoso never falters into sonic tourism, conjuring small-ish takes both vivid and dreamy, infused with a sense of wonder that feels both bewildering, comforting and escapist. The breaking waves of 'Bufadeiros de São Vicente' soothing in their irregular pattern, mingling with the lone echoing tones not completely removed from Black Dice's 'Beaches & Canyon's most pensive passages, flow into the underwater ambience and suspended pads of 'La Cueva Scuba Livre', as reflections of the same sea crashing in on different lands, nature’s psychogeography. Further on, the queasy warm chord and scraping murmurs of 'Noite em Rabo de Peixe' mirror their nighttime framing while 'Rãs em Xoxo' veers closer to pure musique concréte, crossed by a subdued feeling of unease that lingers in the nostalgia of 'Cozido da Caldeira Velha', brimming within the haze of a Boards of Canada vignette. Summoning the past lives and future hauntings of its scenery, 'Salinas de Pedra Lume' is like the quiet epic of the album, meandering into the unknown among crackling field recordings, decaying synths and flute-like howls - or is it howl-like flutes? - recurring as glimpses from foregone existences, not necessarily Gonçalo’s own. Maybe ours?

Music & Photography by Gonçalo F. Cardoso
Artwork layout by Jeroen Wille
Master by Rashad Becker

Discrepant 2025
Pressed in Spain

Massi NPL’s EP debut on House on the Strand’s label 'Herah' is a wonderful cluster of ambient club adjacent works
Producer and sound artist Massi NPL has spent close to a decade honing his craft as a producer with an impressive growing list of accolades that have seen him try his hand at everything from scoring award winning video games and theatre productions at the Zurich theater to DJ at events and radio stations around the globe.
While the producer’s output may be slim it is considered and precise. His new Fragments EP is a deeply personal project that is the product of years of work.
These select 3 pieces are crafted from a series of field recordings spanning 3 cities that have shaped much of the producers life. These ambient club adjacent works are equally promising at decibel sound system shaking volumes as they are within tucked away headphone and home listening environments. They exude expansive soundscapes, featuring a rich array of washed out synth backdrops and percussions.
As featured on Alex Ruder’s Pacific Notions on KEXP
Mastered by artist engineer Adam Badí Donova (ulla, mu-tate, dj lostboi, Torus)

Turning heads with their unique blend of garage, psych, punk rock Bad Bangs played across notable festivals and club shows throughout a 23 show run in 2024. Making waves at Left of The Dial (NL), Leffingeleuren (BE), Truenorayo (ES) and Gliding Barnacles Festival (PT) Bad Bangs make a charging return to the 2025 European Summer festival circuit. Their 2024 sophomore release Out Of Character was the first offering since their debut album Character Building. Somewhere between punk and country, folk and psych, Bad Bangs find themselves Out Of Character. The Melbourne based outfit's sophomore album bends across genres to form a unique soundscape of their own. Live tracking with the masterful Paul Maybury (Cash Savage & The Last Drinks, The Murlocs) captured the bands enigmatic live energy, whilst mastering by Jim Diamond (Ghetto Recorders, The White Stripes, The Dirtbombs, The Gore Gore Girls) secured the signature gritty sound of Bad Bangs. The album arrives with the punchy, punk-laced opening track Contest, which questions the fabric of an industry hell bent on image and conformity, and concludes with the psych infused Wild Mess which laments the shifting state of the natural world. Themes of social and environmental unrest swirl in the undercurrent of an album reflecting on immediate frustrations and personal reflection. With a staple cult following in their hometown of Melbourne, Bad Bangs have supported a high caliber of contemporaries over the years such as Shannon and The Clams, The Murlocs, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and Chastity Belt. Bad Bangs Out Of Character is set for re-release through Beast records (FR) and locally released via Blossom Rot Records (AU&NZ) (Snowy Band, Cassie Ramone and more) Bad Bangs are part of Ya Ya Yeah's booking roster throughout EU. Bad Bangs members are Shelby De Fazio, Tim Ryles, Sophia Lubczenko and Gab Portocarrero.

Pioneering British electronic musician Mark Van Hoen is set to release his latest solo album, The Eternal Present, on 23 May 2025 via Dell'Orso, a remarkable collection of tracks spanning nearly three decades of recordings from 1998 to 2024.
The Eternal Present embodies its philosophical title, inspired by Joseph Campbell's concept that "Eternity isn't some later time... Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off." The album explores music as the ultimate expression of existing in the present moment, transcending time and creating a sonic experience that is simultaneously "spectral, ghostly, melodic, harmonic, and decayed."
An influential contemporary of Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO and Boards of Canada, Van Hoen is best known for his solo work as Locust in the mid-'90s, which helped push post-rave electronic music into newly challenging realms. His extensive discography spans releases on influential labels including R&S, Touch, and Editions Mego. Van Hoen has worked on numerous collaborations throughout his career, including with Nick Holton and Neil Halstead of Slowdive under the moniker Black Hearted Brother—their album Stars Are Our Home was released in 2013.
The Eternal Present continues the lineage of Van Hoen's most significant works, with artwork by Ian Anderson (Designers Republic) reflecting the album's "eternal present" concept with a mysterious visual approach, allowing listeners to form their own imaginary landscapes. The mastering by Stefan Betke (Pole) enhances this document of the evolution of the artist over the years as he continues to hone his signature sound. Using a host of instruments including analogue synthesisers and employing various recording approaches, Van Hoen's equipment changed dramatically over the years—from early DSP processing used on his first solo record on Apollo ‘Playing With Time’ to various synthesisers, modular systems, tape machines, and digital workstations—contributing to the album's rich sonic diversity.
Throughout The Eternal Present, ideas are woven together through spoken word quotations and abstract vocals featuring notable collaborations from Rachel Goswell on the Slowdive cover "Shine" (from 1998), Megan Mitchell (Cruel Diagonals) on "Somewhere", and session vocalists Clare Dove and Dorothy Takev on "No-One Leave" and "It's Not You (In A Way)" respectively. The use of cleverly assembled vocal samples from an "undisclosed but very famous female vocalist" on "Multiplex" (2016) and the indistinct vocalisations on the Cabaret Voltaire-influenced "Only Me" (2017), constantly challenges and disorientates the listener through fluctuating, ever-changing musical elements.
The album was recorded across multiple locations including Somerset, London, Los Angeles, and New York—even beginning compositions during flights and in airport lounges—reflecting Van Hoen's changing personal circumstances, environments, and situations throughout the years.
Of Indian-Jamaican descent, Van Hoen was born and raised in England, absorbing diverse musical influences from his neighbors—African-Jamaican on one side and Punjabi Indian on the other. "Each family played their own music frequently, and I absorbed it." His musical foundations include Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, OMD, Tangerine Dream, Japan, Cabaret Voltaire, and Cocteau Twins, later finding inspiration in My Bloody Valentine, LFO, and '90s producers Robert Leiner and CJ Bolland.
These eclectic influences are evident on The Eternal Present, which contains snapshots of different periods in his life, with changing circumstances across decades creating a variety of textures and sounds. As Mark explains: "It holds the same sonic signature as many of my solo releases and early Locust albums. It's a natural development that has taken place in the last few decades. It's even related to the earliest music I made as a teenager, although perhaps more sophisticated."
“What a remarkably affecting, majestically broad and captivating work it is..what strikes you most is the album’s myriad diversity. Outstanding” (Electronic Sound)

“Whether channelling mid- 70’s Eno, early Aphex Twin or Neu! his vivid sounds shimmer with emotional weight” (Mojo 4*)

"Musically, Van Hoen belongs to a distinguished family tree. Originally influenced by the likes of Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, and later presaging both Autechre's glitch and Boards of Canada's pastoral IDM." (Pitchfork)

Far Out Recordings continues its reissue campaign of the late Argentinian guitarist Agustin Pereyra Lucena's work with the first-ever vinyl reissue of his singular 1988 private press album, Puertos De Alternativa, now his most sought-after LP. The album features some of Agustin’s most uniquely beautiful compositions, including “Luces de Valeria” and “Preparativos Maritimos,” alongside Baden Powell's “Pequeño Vals” and “O Cego Aderaldo (Nordeste...),” and “Tema Barroco” by his longtime collaborator, Guilhermo Reuter.

By 1988, Agustín had established himself as one of Argentina’s foremost interpreters of Brazilian music. The seventies saw success with his group Candeias, and he gained recognition in Brazil, forming friendships and collaborations with luminaries such as Vinicius de Moraes, Baden Powell, Dorival Caymmi, Toquinho, and Maria Bethania. Following the era of dictatorship in South America, Agustín spent the late seventies and early eighties, living and touring in Norway as part of his European travels with his group Agustín Pereyra Lucena quartet.

Recorded after returning to his native Buenos Aires, Agustin Peyera Lucena’s Puertos de Alternativa emerged from this confluence of diverse experiences and influences, revealing an artist deeply connected to his environment. The album's title, meaning "Alternative Harbours," reflects Agustín's particular affinity for water. He observed that much of his favourite music originated from places with rivers and seas nearby, noting, "There is a flow near water that influences guitar playing for sure."

With a profound connection to both instrument and environment, Agustín’s music is often difficult to place. The album begins rooted deeply in South American soil, drawing clear inspiration from Brazilian guitar masters like Heitor Villa Lobos, Garoto and Baden Powell. But, as it progresses, a sense of journey unfolds, evoking new landscapes and horizons – from the crystalline beauty of glacial Norway to the gentle currents of the Rio de la Plata.

The ensemble on Puertos de Alternativa features notable Argentinian musicians, including drummer Osvaldo Avena, flautist Rubén Izarrualde, and saxophonist Bernardo Baraj.

Mastered by Stuart Hawkes at Metropolis Studios from the original master tapes which had been lovingly kept by Agustin’s nephew José Lucena Perreyra


Tracklist & Credits:

A1. Luces De Valeria (Agustin Pereyra Lucena)
Guitar, Vocals – Agustin Pereyra Lucena
Piano, Bass, Drums, Vocals – Guillermo Reuter
Tamboril – Julio Said

A2. Pequeña Valsa (Baden Powell)
Arranged By Flute – Lucho González
Drums – Osvaldo Avena
Flute – Alejandro Santos
Guitar – Agustin Pereyra Lucena
Tambora – Eduardo Avena

A3. Planicie (El Llano) (Agustin Pereyra Lucena)
Arranged By Flute – Lucho González
Flute – Rubén Izarrualde
Keyboards, Acoustic Bass, Percussion, Arranged By Keyboards – Guillermo Reuter
Guitar – Agustin Pereyra Lucena

A4. Tema Barroco (Guillermo Reuter)
Guitar – Agustin Pereyra Lucena
Percussion – Guillermo Reuter

A5. O Cego Aderaldo (Nordeste...) (Baden Powell)
Guitar – Agustin Pereyra Lucena

B1. Tres Que Quedaron (Agustin Pereyra Lucena, Andrés Laprida)
Drums – Osvaldo López
Flute – Rubén Izarrualde
Piano, Keyboards, Bass, Directed By – Guillermo Reuter
Soprano Saxophone – Bernardo Baraj
Electric Piano, Arranged By – Andrés Laprida
Guitar, Electric Guitar, Vocals – Agustin Pereyra Lucena

B2. Preparativos Maritimos (Andrés Laprida, Agustin Pereyra Lucena, Guillermo Reuter)
Guitar, Vocals – Agustin Pereyra Lucena
Keyboards, Acoustic Bass, Percussion, Arranged By – Guillermo Reuter

B3. Puertos De Alternativa (Agustin Pereyra Lucena)
Guitar, Effects – Agustin Pereyra Lucena

B4. Casi-Numbe (Luis González Cárpena, Agustin Pereyra Lucena)
Bass – Lucho González
Bass Flute – Rubén Izarrrualde
Berimbau – Horacio Veros
Keyboards, Piano, Vocals, Drums, Arranged By – Guillermo Reuter
Guitar, Vocals, Arranged By – Agustin Pereyra Lucena

Peaceful electronic ambient and tribal echo environments. Music that explores feelings of calm, spirituality, and ceremony. Long-form voyages to temple meditations, “trips in search of something,” looking in as looking out.

The artist himself says: “This is an attempt to look into the heads and souls of "unnecessary" people, inconspicuous people, but striving to make the world a better place. People who have lost the horizon and the outlines of reality are desperate and stuck in the middle of nothing... people who cannot accept the rules of this world and unpleasant aspects of daily life, boring and unfair into unreality, other existence... it's all about escapism, rethinking their inner world, and discovering new facets of the soul.”

FFO Jon Hassell, O Yuki Conjugate, Bitchin Bajas, Laraaji, The Chi Factory…

"soft brushes of undefinable sounds and tropical field recordings that almost create ASMR-inducing vibrations in the minds of the listener" - Simon Eliasson

First part of the Drexciya re-issue series! Drexciya might need an introduction for some, for others it is the most influential techno project ever. Part of the heritage of Detroit's Underground Resistance, Drexciya explored techno music like no-one else before. Raw and uncompromising music that reflects the harsh environment of the city where Drexciya was conceived. The aesthetics and the mythical approach combined with the unique music made this one of the biggest cult projects in techno music. Drexciya arguably stands for the darker side of techno and electro, music not only made for the club scene, but a further development of the music as an expression and extension of the mind. 20 years after the release of ''Deep Sea Dweller'' (their first release), and 10 years after ''Grava 4'' (their last), we present ''Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller''. This series is an almost complete collection of their early works, and is remastered from the original master tapes. Since the original releases have such a strong character, appeal and stand on their own, this re-issue can never re-create the magic of those originals. So instead we stirred up the catalogue taking the tracks out of their original context, giving the 'in the know' listener a fresh experience and the new listener a document that is the best possible introduction to the aquatic world of Drexciya.

Temple Fang is a rare breed of band - one that refuses to compromise in an increasingly cutthroat and number-obsessed music industry. Formed in 2018 in Amsterdam, the band hit their stride in 2019 with acclaimed Roadburn performances and a reputation for electrifying live shows across Europe, all before releasing a single track. With alternating lead vocalists, dual harmonizing guitars, and a rhythm section powered by pure psychedelic energy, Temple Fang quickly became a phenomenon in the heavy-psych underground. Though always leaving live viewers in awe of their performances, the band struggled against internal fractures and external forces, all stalling efforts to create their vision of a proper studio album. This fueled speculation that Temple Fang"s live sound was too in-the moment, too whimsical, too untamed to be properly captured in a studio environment, something the band never themselves believed to be true, quite the opposite. It just would require the right set of circumstances. Fast forward to 2025 as Temple Fang is ready to release "Lifted from the Wind" on Stickman Records. A record they themselves consider to be their true debut studio album. On this sprawling double record Temple Fang appears, for the first time in their existence, fully formed: fierce and strong, hard rocking yet elegant, with 20+ minute psych freak-outs and prog ballads side-by-side. Temple Fang truly delivers on the promise they"ve always held, to really stretch the possibilities of what it means to be a rock band in 2025. With spectacular wild-man Daan Wopereis as a full member on the drums, Temple Fang now can deliver on their commitment to really rock, to blow your mind AND tear your heart out.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger’s Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet’s electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe’s impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet’s approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O’Malley and Jim O’Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title’s meaning is close to the concept of ‘Wanderlust’, fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls ‘climates’. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid ‘closeness’; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space.

Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block. Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous ‘scenes’, with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies. Like his friend and collaborator Jim O’Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

These new collaborations follow the mesmerising 'Dissolve In the Rain' in 2022 where Calibre leaned into the blues of Chelou.

Belfast-born Dominick Martin has spent the last 30 years creating. With over 100 Singles and 25 albums, encompassing a myriad of tempos and genres. Painter, Multi-instrumentalist, singer, writer, producer and DJ.

Chelou is the moniker of London-based artist Adam Gray, a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer known for his psychedelic blend of folk, blues, and indie electronics. Raised in Camden and influenced by a musically rich environment, Chelou developed a reverb-soaked, dreamlike sound that combines minimal vocals, distorted guitar, ambient textures, and offbeat lyricism. His name, "Chelou," is French slang for "bizarre" or "strange," reflecting his enigmatic and unconventional identity.

He emerged in 2014 with the DIY EP The Quiet, gaining early support from BBC Radio 6 Music DJs like Lauren Laverne and Tom Ravenscroft. Tracks like "Halfway to Nowhere," "Out of Sight," and "Garden" drew attention for their raw, intimate tone and distinctive visual accompaniments. His debut album Out of Sight (2018) expanded his sound and artistic reach, featuring a popular animated video created by Robin Eisenberg.

Emerging from the fertile chaos of Düsseldorf’s Salon des Amateurs scene, Sequence of Events, the collaborative project of Deniz Saridas and Joshua Gottmanns, presents The Art of Memory, an album that feels both intimate and ungraspable, like recalling a dream that fades upon waking.

Rooted in the post-industrial landscapes of West Germany, The Art of Memory channels the bleak resilience of these environments into its sound. It’s a collage of kraut-infused electronics, shoegaze textures, and industrial pulses, filtered through a lens of introspective psychedelia. “We don’t consciously break down or combine genres,” they explain. “Everything is interwoven, like chemistry. Some reactions happen immediately, others take years under pressure.”

From the opening track TAR, with its stoic vocals and drum-heavy propulsion, to the robotic Meagre Gardens, where autotuned chants coil around unconventional drum programming, the album moves like a fever dream through fragmented memories. Soul Divider unfolds like a cinematic journey through yearning and desire, its repetitive pulses echoing the ache of unfulfilled longing, while Nature Hates Life distills pop music through the eyes of a killjoy: “Kurt Cobain on an AKAI MPC2000,” as the band describes it. Even moments of tenderness, like the drifting Becomings, shimmer with absolute sensuality: a seductive exploration of presence defined by absence. We lift each other up and hold each other down.

The creative process behind The Art of Memory is as fluid as the music itself. Saridas and Gottmanns, both self-taught musicians with backgrounds in fine art, worked intuitively, drawing from a shared pool of samples, text fragments, and images. Operating somewhere in the space between fin de siècle aesthetics and occultism, it’s a dream wedding with a continuous stream of meaningless (moving) images generated by human and non-human entities.

Ultimately, The Art of Memory is not an escape but an immersion. A meditation on the sensory overload of the present and the ghosts it leaves in its wake. In a world where music is often reduced to background noise for consumption, Sequence of Events offers something more elusive: a record that lingers, unsettles, and demands to be remembered.

New Environments & Rhythm Studies finds Andrew Pekler returning to the humid zones he explored on previous albums such as Sounds From Phantom Islands and Tristes Tropiques. Split between longer immersive compositions and shorter glimpse-like sketches, these 12 tracks feature new juxtapositions of Pekler's familiar palette of synthetic field recordings, warm, undulating electronic textures, shifting percussion patterns and serene melodies.

As with much of his recent work, Pekler's compositions here are structured around the beguiling effect of synthetic and non-synthetic sounds mirroring, mimicking and modulating one another. The teeming atmospheres within tracks such as Globestructures, Cymbals In The Mist or Globestructures: Option II are, despite their seemingly anthropogenic nature, entirely synthetic. Elsewhere, the lopsided grooves of Cumbia Para Los Grillos or Fabulation For K are derived from recordings of crickets and other insects which Pekler loops and uses to trigger electronic percussion – producing a pleasantly skewed rhythmic base for the fragments of melody which are layered on top. The six Rhythm Studies also follow the same principle – a playful interweaving of the organic and synthetic.

New Environments & Rhythm Studies is a further attempt to re-describe past tropes which laid claims to authentically represent music and sound from beyond the Western world (exotica, ethnomusicology, field recording) as undertakings of the imaginary.

Written and produced by Andrew Pekler, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, artwork by Morgan Cuinet, graphic design by Dmytro Nikolaienko.

Having crested the west coast modular-ambient wave in just a few releases - including 2018's Sharing Waves on the influential LA experimental imprint Leaving Records - Sean Hellfritsch has swapped the mossy analog synth improvisations of his prior output for refined melodic arrangements dressed in sprightly dawn-of-digital textures. Big Earth Energy plumbs the depths of Hellfritsch's multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game MYST, and the work of Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. Inspired by the aforementioned, and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise, and a twist of psychedelic charm. In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog sixty-five-million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive changes the planet has gone through over the eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable - or as the album's creator puts it - "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." Big Earth Energy is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on previous Cool Maritime albums has been fully replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s work by composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa - using true-to-period gear no less. Even given its referentiality, Big Earth Energy comes off as forward-facing where so much reminiscent music remains fixed to a bygone moment in pop culture. Hellfritsch has created a musical world where the endless verdancy of the biosphere finds its parallel in the golden age of early 1990s video games, and late 80s Japanese environmental music, all while pointing to a hopeful planetary and artistic future that vindicates the motives of all of these muses.

This is an album made during a crucial period in South Africa’s history during which there was a palpable feeling of a slow turning towards the collapse of the apartheid state side by side with an increasingly well-organised culture of resistance through the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and various affiliated bodies. However, as a result, there was increased pushback from the state security establishment, a turning to dirty tricks and the formation of hit squads whose members murdered and tortured many of our friends and created chaos throughout South Africa as well as neighbouring countries.

This album is situated in this political environment however it took advantage of the new do-it-yourself music technologies available at that time. Technologies that made it possible to make and release records without interference from traditional record company executives. Two musician friends of mine pooled their resources after their respective bands had broken up. Ivan Kadey (National Wake) and Lloyd Ross (Radio Rats) built an 8-track recording studio control room and fitted it out in a second hand caravan and called it Shifty. They parked it in a garage attached to the only house left in a demolished and derelict mining village near Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
All the work on this album was completed there, mainly after hours and mostly alone where I enjoyed an exhilarating freedom to develop a whole new set of musical skills and ideas, incorporating my love of a wide range of music I’d grown up with. Influences of 1970s progressive/kraut/and psychedelic rock combined with mbaqanga bass styles, early reggae/dub and Indian tabla rhythms. Stockhausen, early Zappa and Holgar Czukay were radio text and shredding influences, and Chris Cutler’s band Henry Cow & Art Bears helped me see a way to political expression. Mostly though was the exciting post-punk and no-wave music coming through to us from Europe and America: bands like This Heat, the Mekons, Raincoats, Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu were immensely important to me as was my reading from the period: J.M.Coetzee’s first 3 novels are strong influences on Free State Fence; the stark landscape, superstition, ritual, and sexual repression are in many of his settings. JG Ballard was a constant presence throughout that period, especially whilst living in such a surreal environment, surrounded by mine dumps, but mostly I think the whole French post-modern philosophical movement—Derrida, Foucault and of course, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation—set out a new sense of possibilities, possible ways to express oneself, ways to think, and ways to try and analyse the political intersection of public and private life. Most important at that time was the influence of sound recordings I had made and experiences garnered from working as a sound recordist on documentary films. These financed my work and later the studio and were consistent employment throughout the 1980s. Film work also enabled me to experience much of South Africa that was hidden from most. The track Independence Day is a good example; drawn from some time spent in the rural homeland of Venda. This then was the first full length Kalahari Surfers album, completed in summer of 1984 it was taken to EMI pressing plant but rejected by the cutting engineer as being ""political, pornographic and anti religious"". Chris Cutler at Recommended Records took up the challenge and released the album through his label. He wrote the original liner note

"Receive” is the fully improvised fourth album from I Am An Instrument. It follows up on a series of 3 elegant and melodic recordings by a finely tuned and talented group of musicians at the height of their powers.

For I Am An Instrument ( IAAI) the focus is always on the music and this fourth album is no exception. This session was performed and recorded live to an enchanted and attentive crowd at “All-Dayer” Copenhagen, taking place halfway through a free 12 hour Sunday session of dancing and listening in an audiophile environment.

While picking up on tempo, compared to previous recordings, this record also reveals the polyrhythmic dance dynamic central to the improvised style these fresh players have developed amongst themselves. ‘ Receive’ is an elegant and powerful celebration of music and melody evolving in the seconds as they pass.

"Wind, Again" is Sary Moussa’s fourth studio album and second album on Other People. Based between France and Lebanon, Moussa returns with a riveting electro-acoustic album informed by his ever-changing relationships to space, listening, and resonance as well as his growing interest in the study of harmonics in electronic and electro-acoustic music.

Years in the making, “Wind, Again” approaches distinct musical worlds and languages by bringing together improvisations by musicians performing on Western and West Asian instruments such as the Hammond organ, clarinet, saz, and buzuk with electronic arrangements and textures. Rather than force a rapprochement of these musical worlds through the instruments, and keenly aware of the weighty sonic histories they carry, Moussa proposes another way through which they can exist together in contemporary electronic composition.

Composed of six tracks, each of which demonstrate an array of recording and processing techniques, the album generates moments of tension produced by the synthesis of textural, tonal, and harmonic encounters that Moussa calls “shadows”, which outline an impressionistic musical language, existing at the edge of familiarity. Such moments permeate tracks like “Everywhere at once” and “Violence” that open with the Hammond organ and the saz respectively and slowly reveal an expansive field of sounds that showcases each of the musicians’ characteristic performances and Moussa’s densely layered textures. It is a latent yet unrelenting tension through which the composer invokes rather than represents a collective experiential state, especially familiar to those who know his environment. In “Wind, Again” these shadows are articulations of sounds steeped in traditions they are never quite tethered to. Such articulations are implied and alluded to, they play within a musical reference without the latter explicitly existing in the recording, always teetering, never completely here nor there.
Sonically and musically, the album is fueled by the cultural, social, and personal realities that Moussa was brought up and lives in.

Both personal and musical ties with the musicians who feature on the album is central to Moussa’s practice. In the title track “I will never write a song about you”, musician Julia Sabra opens with rolled piano chords, followed by Paed Conca on clarinet and Abed Kobeissy on buzuk, before Moussa’s electronic processing pieces together, lifts, and sustains the melodic direction of the track that emerged from the musicians’ separate improvisations. For Moussa: “The initial connection between the three performances was made on a track that no longer existed, the original recording was both an obstacle and necessary step for the track we hear on the record. It’s as if we were all telling different stories and I pulled on the thread that held them together”. The track, and more generally the record, is tinged with a melancholy of things lost, though it never fully succumbs to it.
“Everything inside a circle”, Moussa’s most personal track and for which he provides the only vocals on the record, harkens back to a childhood memory of listening to music with his mother in a car: “There was a sound I was looking for — a memory of a sound and how I first heard it. This track is a hybrid of that memory and what I wanted to make of it”. The track relies heavily on generativesystems and perhaps embodies most the ambiguous quality of the record’s music in its refusal to be pinned down by one musical tradition or another.
“Wind, Again” is both familiar and alien, cold and warm; it pays homage to the mechanics, materials, and tactility of the instruments and converges acoustic and synthetic spaces. What anchors the sound of the album are the elements of a whole that cannot find its own idiosyncrasy and that is precisely why Moussa’s album is a tour de force.

Wytch Hazel's stellar 2016 debut Prelude confirmed these Lancastrian apprentice wizards to be Britain's most promising new hard rock band. Two years on, that promise comes to abundant fruition on II: Sojourn, an album that moves Wytch Hazel on from the innocence and exuberance of the debut to a darker, more profound and complex place, carefully wrought into optimum shape by the band's singer, guitarist, songwriter and mastermind Colin Hendra. "I'm really into the idea of an album," notes Colin. "I don't do mix-tapes, I don't listen to singles, I'm interested in albums. I want to make a good, listenable, cohesive work, that is the whole thing." Asked what inspirations were brought to bear this time, Colin has good news, and even better taste: "I was listening to plenty of Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash last year," remarks the frontman. "This seems to be more of a hard rock album, where the last one was more rock-folk. It's definitely more rock than folk!" The most crucial influence fully expresses itself via Les Paul guitars in sweet twin harmony through cranked Super Lead Marshalls - "Exactly the same type of amp that Thin Lizzy would have used," beams Colin - a benefit of working in James Atkinson's Hand Of Law Studio, a converted gaolhouse in Leeds. "We knew there would be a lot more great gear, more amps, more options," enthuses Colin of this productive new work environment. "We were more prepared, we planned better. I had a lot more vocals to record on this album, pretty much every song has at least three harmonies, but James is a really chilled out guy, he made it easy for us. I had a very clear idea of how I wanted each song to sound, I thought about every single aspect. I probably over-prepared for this album, and it paid off!" Wytch Hazel's proud, avowed Protestant Christianity continues to set them apart from the occult hocus-pocus of their peers, and the very title Sojourn has a Biblical inspiration: "It's used a lot in the Old Testament, people would travel somewhere to stay for a short period of time," explains Colin, comparing the idea to Wytch Hazel's development since Prelude. "We're going to reside here with this sound for a while, and the next album might not sound the same. Come and have a listen to this aspect of Wytch Hazel - it's a temporary stay. We'll be here for a while, then there will be something else. I'm always writing, it's a constant stream, but I'm always trying to raise the bar, because I don't want the next album to be not as good as the other ones!"

Glasgow-based Effective Dreaming—the solo project of Scottish artist and musician Iain Ross—unveils Dream Catalogue Vol. 1, arriving June 21st, 2025 (Summer Solstice) via Swedish experimental label Fluere Tapes.

Issued as a limited run of 50 cassettes, each adorned with hand-worked, corroded copper sheet inserts and labels, Dream Catalogue Vol. 1 feels less like a release and more like an unearthed artefact: weathered, humming, quietly alive. The materials echo the music’s exploration of fragile impermanence and erosion: oxidised metal, magnetic tape, hiss, hum. A tactile world where sound wears its decay like a patina.

Across its length, the album unfolds in a series of flickering vignettes—drifting, dissolving, reappearing. Shaped by synths, environmental recordings, tape loops, and soft drones, the pieces move like glints of light on water—never fixed, always in motion. Achingly beautiful melodies rise and vanish, tracing fragile pathways through a landscape of shifting sensations. Some moments glow with a gentle warmth, like sunlit glass or breath on a fogged mirror. Others slip into shadow: slow, submerged passages feel closer to memory than music. The album feels loose and weightless, yet dense with feeling—a presence more sensed than held.

There is no fixed narrative here—only fragments and artefacts, half-remembered places, echoes of dreams. Each track hovers just at the edge of clarity, evoking not specific stories, but moods, textures, and the quiet drift of time. It’s music that feels both intimate and remote, like overhearing a distant signal only you can understand.

The name Effective Dreaming is drawn from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, where a dreamer's visions alter the very fabric of reality—past and present reshaped, histories rewritten, unnoticed by all but the dreamer himself. In a similar spirit, Ross’s music inhabits a space where memory, perception, and matter blur—where each sound carries the residue of something once real, now transformed and dissolving as one drifts through the seams of the world.

Dream Catalogue Vol. 1 is a meditation on texture, transience, and the quiet resonance of what slips away.

For listeners of: Wave Temples, Dolphins Into the Future, Guenther Schlienz"

First ever release of pioneering radiophonic / experimental / electronic / soundtrack composer you may never have heard of but really should have by now. 26 tracks in all.
As we began the mammoth task of whittling down material for this album Elizabeth recalled the time she met Delia Derbyshire. It was during a party for existing and former Radiophonic Workshop composers at BBC Maida Vale in the early 1980s. Delia introduced herself with typical energy and exuberance proclaiming "It's up to you now - I'm passing the baton. Show these men how we get things done". That must have been quite an honour and responsibility for a young, female composer establishing herself within the male-dominated environs at Delaware Road.
Looking back over a musical career spanning almost five decades, it's clear Elizabeth rose to the challenge and made her mark. She was consistently in demand with television and radio producers, composing for an array of ground-breaking, critically acclaimed and popular BBC projects. Whilst Delia's legacy has achieved mythical status with her position as an innovator and feminist icon secured, the majority of Elizabeth's recorded work remains unavailable so her contribution to the output of the Workshop and evolution of British electronic music is somewhat under-appreciated.
Perhaps this record will help start to remedy the situation. Included are early tape experiments, home demos and non-BBC commissions from the early 1970's to the late 2000s. Having listened to 260+ digital audio tapes from Elizabeth's personal archive we have barely scratched the surface but hope to provide an indication of the breadth of her compositional and sound design skills.
Classically trained in cello and piano, Elizabeth graduated from the University of East Anglia with a degree in Music in 1973. She was mentored by Tristram Cary who helped her to become UEA's first recipient of a Masters in Electronic Music and later awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Staffordshire University. Joining the BBC as a studio manager in 1975, Elizabeth transferred to the Radiophonic Workshop in 1978. One of her first tasks was to create special sound effects for Blake's 7 using tape loops, the EMS 100 and trusted VCS3.
Her celebrated score for The Living Planet in 1982 featured early use of the PPG synthesizer and earned an Emmy nomination. Over the following years studio technology evolved rapidly, but Elizabeth transitioned from analogue recording techniques to newer digital platforms with relative ease, using samplers, midi sequencing and computer controlled workstations.
With an incredible 1,400 commissions to her name, she created special sound for The Day Of The Triffids, Lord Of The Rings, countless radio dramas including Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, Harold Pinter's Moonlight, all of Howard Barker's plays, productions of King Lear, Wordsworth's Prelude and The Pallisers. The success of The Living Planet led to further work for the BBC Natural History Unit followed by numerous commissions for The Natural World. At one point in the late 1980's at least five of her signature tunes were being broadcast every week including Points Of View, Horizon, Doctors To Be and Everyman.
After the closure of the Workshop in 1996 Elizabeth became freelance, arranging Faure's Pavane for the BBC World Cup '98 coverage (reaching no. 9 in the UK singles chart). She wrote additional music for Monty Python's Holy Grail DVD, scored Michael Palin's Full Circle and Sahara TV series, The Lost Gardens Of Heligan and The Human Body with Robert Winston.
Retiring from the music industry in the late 2000's, Elizabeth recently returned to her East Anglian roots and now lives near the coast. She walks daily, listening to all kinds of music, new and old, on her beloved air-pods.

Iori Wakasa, one of the leading lights of the Tokyo club scene is set to release his second 12” from his own label, “BOTANICA” which he established to express his own primal sensibilities.

The Concept of the Label:
Tokyo-based DJ/producer, Iori Wakasa launched BOTANICA to assert that his label’s activities in itself is art and a palette for his creative, self-expression. It is also based on 2 main concepts: To integrate the sensibilities of both "nature" and “artificial and human activities" and to “contribute music that presents a scenery from the listener's point of view”.

For Iori, his label is an interface of some sort and is also a symbol of his own personal musical expectations.

Iori produced these 2 new tracks during the recent pandemic when the world was under severe restrictions. While taking into account and focusing on both 'his current outlook' and returning to “the roots of his own production aesthetic', he strived to produce something that would substitute it and as a result, created these two new tracks and the artwork that are presented in the label's second release, 'The Party Is Here EP’.

In this EP, he also attempts to express the sentiment that 'the experience that music provides to people is invaluably infinite' and that 'if you truly want to go out and party, it will happen, then and there!’.

About the tracks:
For the track, ’Bedroom Disco’, Iori tries to express his memories of 'a virtual night of partying’ that he experienced during Covid and created this track while being ‘in a state of wanting to break free from oppression’ and reminiscing about a party in a bedroom at night.

He also wanted to express the idea that no matter what situation or environment you are in, you can go to anywhere you want if you really want to and with that sentiment, he wanted to express a scenerio that transcends it and at the same time, he also wanted to convey his feelings of nostalgia for the past, rebellion against the environment and his feelings of desire.

For this track, Iori did not use any sampled voices or field recordings and created it by layering pure sonic imagery repeatedly folded and desolved which triggered the creation of new developments while imagining the thought that “a party actually begins when you step out” and the swaying of emotions that take place from it.

’Tropica' is a track that Iori produced by heavily mixing a utopian feel that people have inside of them with his own sensuality and is designed to ‘guide you to a tropical seaside', regardless of what the listener may have experienced in the past.
Unlike 'Bedroom Disco', this track uses a variety of samples and envisages "many elements intertwining with each other, working together to create this sound structure”. And it also expresses that equal opportunity exists for anyone who wants to visit an imaginary tropical land as well as the hope that even a brief break of the mind can be created by yourself and those close to you, if one pursues it.

About the artwork:
The cover of this new EP, the concept text 'Is your window open?', and the label's logo was designed by illustrator, HILOSHI SHINOZAKI who also worked on the first release, BOTANICA EP. For over 10 years, he has been a regular visitor of Hawaii, where he tries to cultivate his "true way of life” in his art.

And, artwork for the cover and label design of the EP is complemented by the label design and art direction of the record by hiro, a graphic designer who has been his partner and best friend since the first Botanica EP.
hiro expresses Bedroom Disco track's shifting compositional changes and its complex series of sound waves by creating an intricately multi-layered design that is a perfect representation of the way he sees it.
Also initially inspired by the fluctuations of waves, islands, sun, rays, sky and time, the artwork of Tropica also found inspiration from a drawing that made by Iori’s daughter who drew a picture of a scenery when she listened to the track. So through this design, one of the label’s concept of “the label’s activities is in itself art” was realised via the surprising contribution coming from his own family.

Manchester-based producer Lily Mumby, the creative force behind Lapalace, has chosen Lavender as her botanical muse for this sixth instalment. Like the aromatic herb that grows from tiny seeds to fragrant purple stalks, her compositions unfold with a similar patience and elegance. Her synthesisers breathe with a natural rhythm, creating textures that emerge and recede like morning dew on lavender buds waiting to bloom.

The standout track ‘new age night’ – a stunning love child of William Basinski's decaying tape loops and Aphex Twin's intricate programming—carries subtle lavender-inspired tones, balancing the plant's calming essence with hypnotic rhythms. Just as lavender requires thoughtful tending before rewarding the gardener with its distinctive aroma, Lapalace's landscapes reveal deeper complexities with each listen.

Much like gardening itself, Mumby demonstrates an innate understanding of when to intervene and when to allow natural development. This approach echoes throughout her career, from her debut EP "Ephemera" which caught the attention of Insult to Injury Records' Timothy Clerkin, through to her contributions to Chez De Milo's "So It Goes" Remix EP and Manchester label Skiptrace's various artists compilation.

Her work across BBC Introducing and fossil.radio reflects this same philosophy – creating environments where sound, space, and organic movement find their natural harmony. But this composition really feels that Mumby has come of age. "Music To Watch Seeds Grow By Vol. 6" represents the continued cultivation of Lapalace's distinctive sound and demonstrates the maturity of an artist way beyond her years. This music stands as a lighthouse through a thick fog of nostalgia, much like lavender standing tall amidst an English cottage garden.

Early DJ support including - Auntie Flo, Ruf Dug, Courtesy, Vladimir Ivkovic.

Johnny and Robert began work on the album in the first weeks of the pandemic, wanting to make music that sang of those dangerous, disorienting spring days; when birdsong was brighter –– and the sense of bewilderment more powerful –– than any of us had known before. They drew inspiration in part from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world literature; an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia that contains the earliest version of the Flood Myth. To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment –– and it catalysed their song-writing. For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves. Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong. The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness –– and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.