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BBE Music continues its highly acclaimed J Jazz Masterclass Series with Kemo Sabe, the
debut album from pianist Masao Nakajima. Recorded in 1979 on Yupiteru Records, it’s an
elusive beast in the field of J Jazz and balances delicate and refined playing with power and
vigour.
The Kemo Sabe album features bassist Osamu Kawakami, who has performed and
recorded with such J Jazz figureheads as Sadao Watanabe, Isao Suzuki, and Kunihiko
Sugano. Sax duty is by Toshiyuki Honda, leader of the popular fusion group Burning Waves.
On drums is Donald Bailey, the noted American drummer most known for playing on classic
Jimmy Smith Blue Note sessions. Bailey lived and worked in Japan for a number of years
from the late 70s and recorded several album dates with local artists such including Keiko
Nemoto, Isao Suzuki and George Kawaguchi.
Recorded at the height of the electric fusion era, Kemo Sabe is an avowedly acoustic album,
which may account for the small sales and low profile of the album at the time. The
propulsive title track, written by New Zealand jazzman Mike Nock, was gifted to Nakajimsan when they briefly met and was featured on J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan vol 3.
The reissue’s liner notes features an exclusive interview with Masao Nakajima himself,
discussing his career and background to the album.
The BBE J Jazz Masterclass Series is curated by Tony Higgins and Mike Peden and is
dedicated to presenting the very finest in Japanese jazz. The series features rare, long-lost
and unreleased material presented in the highest quality reproductions of the original
releases, fully licensed and authorised.

Moullinex makes his debut on Crosstown Rebels with a three-track EP titled A Fistful of Stars. The release highlights the multi-dynamic approach of the artist, who blends enchanting electronic melodies with club-orientated moods. Fascinated by the solar system, Moullinex's music conveys cosmic feels and radiant energy, perfect for an open-minded dancefloor.

The title track unfolds with a lugging kickdrum and lustrous chords, meandering into a celestial soundscape that tingles the senses—a poignant opener. On the flip, Atacama Skies bristles with shaker-led percussion and tribal drums before a starry synthline winds between the beats. Closing tune JFC switches the vibe with an elastic bassline and choppy rhythm, in typical Moullinex style, he penned it live in one afternoon.

Moullinex is a producer, DJ and co-founder of the label Discotexas. He runs the imprint alongside fellow Portuguese artist Xinobi. Together, the pair release nu disco, melodic techno and organic house by international producers spanning Anja Schneider, Diana Oliveira, Oma Nata and many more. Having spent his early years looking up at the star-spangled sky, Moullinex pursued a career in astronomy while developing a passion for music, science and art. Today, Moullinex combines each field into electronic music production, evoking exuberant sounds for reflective listening and club-based audiences. With a versatile aesthetic, Moullinex has remixed tracks by Cut Copy, Sebastien Tellier, Royksopp and Robyn.

The 1980s will forever be remembered for electropop sensations, yet few, if any, are quite as sensational as Yaz's Upstairs at Eric's. A standard-setting mélange of smoky blues singing, jazzy arrangements, disco-tinged beats, and dancefloor vibes, the smash debut fits equally as well at a late-night club as it does in a living room, where the record's complexity and exoticism takes listeners hostage. No wonder the 1982 landmark remains one of the decade's most essential albums.

This numbered edition Silver Label LP breathes with a decongested openness, textural richness, and expansive tonal palette. Alison Moyet's inimitable vocals, such a huge part of the record's appeal, are dramatically enhanced, her sensual timbre, bittersweet crooning, and knockout range now encompassing the full frequency spectrum and projecting outward in a way that traverses the flatness of the original pressings.

Indeed, her bluesy deliveries are at once elegant and exuberant, and give collaborative partner Vince Clarke free range to construct beat architectures that encompass freewheeling disco, house music, uptempo dance, and chilled-out pop. The former Depeche Mode member also layers on elegant keyboard melodies, establishing contagious hooks and electronic-laced landscapes that preceded the techno explosion and do so with a cooler elegance. Tape loops, random field-noise dialogues, and synth-stroked bass notes add to what's nothing less than a perfect collusion of moody paranoia and soulful warmth.

While a cousin to synth-pop LPs by the likes of the Eurythmics, Soft Cell, OMD, and Depeche Mode, Yaz's Upstairs at Eric's is singular for its chemistry between Moyet and Clarke – and an insouciant batch of songs high on emotion, style, and substance.

Felicity is an Australian sound artist, composer and educator based in Berlin and her latest effort "Train Tracks Recorded And Edited By Felicity Mangan" will be out world wide on tape and digital December 9.

"Train Tracks Recorded And Edited By Felicity Mangan" composed of field recordings was made during a Green Tour, while traveling only by train and ferry through Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway in June 2022.

For this release Felicity utilised raw and sampled field recordings to create a sense of slow travel by train, train networks, train delays and the moments in between waiting for trains or missed train connection in cities and small towns.

Felicity has presented projects in many different settings from galleries, gardens, clubs, festivals and online platforms throughout Europe, including National Gallery Denmark, Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW, Sonic Acts Academy, RIVERSSSOUNDS.org and recently sound design for 100 Climate Conversations , Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.

““Stations In Between” establishes a pulse early, recreating the initial excitement that turns to tedium. Four minutes in, the drums disappear, swept away by chimes; no longer stuck, the passenger is moving forward again. The station comes to life: another radio, a street musician, a bicycle, a cough ~ the last sound bearing a reminder of the last two years.”
Richard Allen — A Closer Listen

“the elements of sound are manipulated for effect, and the performance nature of Mangan’ work tends to be an effects driven construction of collated and improvised sounds.”
INNERVERSITYSOUND — Cyclic Defrost

“Throughout the album, it sounds rather as if Mangan had written elaborate electronic music permeated by discreet rhythms and pulsating drones equipped with a whole range of devices. The fact that this is not the case is as impressive as the actual music itself.”
— Fieldnotes Berlin

Long time out of stock, now available: José González Krautrock band Junip’s fulminant debut album incl. singles Always, In Every Direction and Rope & Summit

“An album to savour when autumn leaves are falling – and through the rest of the year, too” The Guardian

"There'san invigorating, charging energy to Junip's Krautrock-meets-country soul.”

Q ★★★★ Mojo ★★★★ 7.5 Pitchfork

Since 2013 Jail Job Eve has become an indispensable part of the German
rockstages - Whether festival stage, live club or rustic rockmusic venue -
for more than eight years now the five musicians from Osnabrueck,
Germany, have been playing their way across the country
After their first release "Bird of Passage" in 2015, the band signed a contract with
MiG - music in 2018, the label that, among other things, distributes the legendary
"Rockpalast" recordings of the German TV- and radio-station WDR and with bands
such as Siena Root, Br selmaschine and Wucan, the label has signed in the field
of retro rock under contract.Jail Job Eve's album "The Misson" received
recommended reviews in the music press throughout Europe, and the band thus
earned the reputation: "the hope of the national blues rock scene" (eclipsed
Magazine, Germany).With their upcoming release "Wildfire", Jail Job Eve is once
again setting new standards. The album, recorded entirely live, confirms the band
as a finely balanced rock machinery. The music is much harder, more
experimental and coarser, while the lyrics deal offensively and aggressively with
the most important ideological issues of our time, such as climate change,
sexism, LGBTQ + rights or the responsibility of art and culture as a mirror of
society and an instrument of peaceful protest. For example, the first single "Lost"
is a song about female empowerment and therefore an energetic, feminist
statement to sing along to.The band's audible role models include Rival Sons,
Blues Pills, Greta Van Fleet, but also the classic rockers of Deep Purple or the
omnipresent ubiquitous instance Led Zeppelin. The clearest fist in the face of the
listeners still is Victoria Semel, who virtuously puts her heart and soul into her
singing. Benedikt Schlereth, who plays his way through the album with his
distinctive guitar sound coined by the grand repertoire of rock history, Jens
Niemann, who lets his Hammond wobble sonorously and suffer shriekingly, as
well as Tim Beckers on bass and Josef R hner on drums, who create fulminant,
cast-iron floors under their bandmates

We have a very limited amount of these available now for stores. 4LP boxset - white vinyl - edition of 300 - includes: The Dream Derealised LP, Lightnesses I & II LPs, Near Future Residence LP. It’s nearing a decade since William Doyle released his Mercury Music Prize nominated debut album, Total Strife Forever, as East India Youth in 2014. A year later, he had toured the world and was releasing his second album, Culture of Volume, but it would be another four years before Doyle returned with his third full album, and the first official release under his own name. The dizzyingly ambitious Your Wilderness Revisited arrived in 2019 and was followed last year by the artpop masterpiece, Great Spans of Muddy Time. In the years between leaving the old project behind and re-emerging under his own name, Doyle self-released a string of ambient-leaning albums, The Dream Derealised, Lightnesses Vol I & II and Near Future Residence, which are now to receive a first vinyl pressing via Tough Love as both a highly limited four LP box set, titled ‘Slowly Arranged: 2016-19’, and as separate albums. The Dream Derealised is a collection of nine abstract, lo-fi pieces that were recorded during the summer of 2016, when focusing on creating them helped guide Doyle through a “difficult period of anxiety, panic and a regular dissociative feeling called derealisation.” At the time, doing something creative in a quick and immediate fashion felt vital to Doyle, carrying him to a new place: “I’m releasing them now as a cathartic measure, and as a message for others who may be going through difficult times themselves. What I told myself at the time, what I can tell you now: You are not in danger. You are not going insane. You are not alone.” Lightnesses Vol. I & II sees Doyle create what we might understand as true ambient music – that is, music intended for the background that wasn’t composed as such, but allowed to blossom out of the setting of some rules and parameters, played by sounds he created and then resampled. The deceptively simple, droning pieces are unlike anything Doyle has made before or since. “During their creation I’d often take photographs of the light coming in through the windows of the two houses I lived in during their creation. I’d post these on social media and they became quite popular parts of my output. This music was intended to accompany those visuals. The first volume’s photo is a double exposure of the sun shining in on my notebook and my hand, whereas the photo for the second volume was taken in Joshua Tree Park, California as I saw our tail lights illuminate one of the trees.” Near Future Residence is music for an imagined place based on real ideas; the soundtrack for an ecologically sustainable housing development somewhere in a not-too-distant future Britain. The eleven instrumental pieces here come from a place of optimism, imagining a future that is based on cooperation, community and ecological urbanism. It's music intended to sit in this imagined environment rather than impose upon it, similar in principle to the function of Kankyō Ongaku (Japanese environmental music). The ideas contained on Near Future Residence laid the groundwork for - and can be seen as a companion piece to - the album Your Wilderness Revisited, released to critical acclaim in 2019. Doyle explains how the pieces “were composed in entirely generative ways using samples of instruments, synthesisers and field recordings I've collected and developed throughout 2018. In generative composition, rules are set and parameters are chosen and then put into motion, the results constantly changing and surprising.”

The story of Del cuarto rojo (From The Red Room) began in March 2020, when the Peruvian composer and percussionist Manongo Mujica received a call notifying him that the visual artist Rafael Hastings, his friend of almost half a century, had passed away. Since then, and in the midst of the pandemic, Manongo Mujica began a personal journey searching for sounds, which has resulted in a new set of pieces that evoke the memory of a friendship. Del cuarto rojo (From The Red Room), subtitled Homenaje sonoro escuchando la pintura de Rafael Hastings (Sound Tribute Listening To Rafael Hastings' Paintings), is Manongo Mujica's new album, and it has also motivated the preparation of a new show by the dancer and choreographer Yvonne von Mollendorff, wife of Hastings. The history of this friendship dates back to 1974, when a young Manongo returned to Lima, after ten years living in London, while young Rafael Hastings and Yvonne von Mollendorff settled in Peru after a long period in Europe. Since then, the collaborations between these artists have been continuous, always marked by an experimental impetus. The attitude of listening to images and painting sounds was more than a metaphor and became a code that identified them and a way of working, where the crossing of disciplines set the tone, both in video works and in unusual visual / conceptual scores, works of dance and experimental music, in the context of a creative effervescence that renewed the arts and music in Lima in the 70s. Del cuarto rojo is an album that integrates many of the musical resources developed by Mujica. It is an amalgam that well sums up his own language: from the creation of environments with extended techniques and objects, to experiments in jazz fusion; from the use of field recordings and sound montages to compositions with string arrangements: everything around the hypnotic pulse of percussion and drums, which oscillate between moments of subtlety and explosive improvisation. The album features the participation of outstanding musicians such as Pauchi Sasaki (violin), José Quezada (cello), Terje Evensen (electronic effects), Jean Pierre Magnet (Saxophone), Cristobal, Daniel and Gabriel Mujica (sons of Manongo Mujica, on percussion, string and wind arrangements). It is published in vinyl LP and includes a full color 12-page booklet with a sample of Rafael Hastings' visual art, which also illustrates the album cover.

Written and recorded between 1972 and 1982 in Western Oregon, Back to the Woodlands is a previously unreleased, and nearly lost, album made by Ernest Hood during the same era as his near mythical album Neighborhoods . A visionary combination of field recordings, zithers, and synthesizers, Back to the Woodlands offers an unprecedented depth of access to this singular artistic mind. Born into a musical family, Ernest Hood began a promising career as a jazz guitarist during the 1940s, touring internationally with his brother Bill Hood and the saxophonist Charlie Barnet , before contracting polio in his late twenties. The disease left Ernest unable to play the guitar and confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It also forced him to adapt and innovate around his musical practices in the face of adversity; Hood's value of sound matured with a remarkably democratic and nonhierarchical approach and application. Taking up the zither, a less physically-demanding stringed instrument to the guitar, embarking upon the unprecedented process of incorporating field recordings into his work as early as 1956, and eventually discovering the synthesizer, Hood's music became imbued with optimism and subtle cultural critique. This ethos and technique - refined over the coming decades - would lay the groundwork for a sprawling body of radio work, mail order recordings for homebound listeners, and Neighborhoods , self- issued as a small vinyl edition in 1975. Where Neighborhoods , a nostalgic opus, drawing from a well of collective memory of the 1950s, is defined by traces of human activity, Back to the Woodlands leaves the modern world behind, delving into Hood's love for nature. Only recently discovered in his archives, the album dramatically expands his concept of "musical cinematography," imagistically triggering states of sensory memory from within its zither and synthesizer melodies, intertwined with field recordings made during Hood's extensive travels throughout Oregon. If Neighborhoods is a retreat into the gauzy joys of a romanticized past, Back to the Woodlands is an immersion in the timeless sanctuary of the natural world. A fascinating counterpoint to its predecessor, Back to the Woodlands brings us even closer to Hood's belief in the transportive qualities of sound; that field recordings could serve as a vehicle for the imagination and liberation, particularly for those with similar mobile disabilities as his own. Across the album's twelve compositions, the rippling instrumental harmonics - shifting between abstraction and playful melody - fold so seamlessly into the birdsong, bubbling brooks, and other environmental ambiences, that they often give the impression of having been recording within the landscapes toward which they whisper. Falling somewhere between the immersive calm of healing music and New Age, the creative field recording practices of sound ecologists world building for Folkways, and the jazz infected ambiences during Obscure / Editions EG's highest heights, Back to the Woodlands sculpts an singular proximity of music for its moment; a form of ambient sonic realism that draws the consciousness toward its surroundings as much as within. Working closely with his estate to maintain his original vision, Freedom to Spend has restored and remastered this never before released, lost masterpiece by Ernest Hood from the original tapes. Ernest Hood's Back to the Woodlands will be issued on vinyl, as well as on CD in combination with its contemporary Where the Woods Begin , with new liner notes by Michael Klausman . On behalf of Ernest Hood and Freedom To Spend, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Oregon Wild, an organization dedicated to protecting and restoring Oregon's wildlands, wildlife, and waters as an enduring legacy for future generations.

Experimental - Ambient - Tribal Ambient Mathias Delplanque was born in 1973 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. He lives and works in Nantes and cultivates close links with the spheres of ambient, electronic, electro-acoustic and concrete music as well as dub and field recording. A rather elusive character, discreet but prolific, who can be found in the credits of dDamage or Ghislain Poirier's records as well as behind the mixing board for Charlélie Couture, when he doesn't have fun under the name of Lena releasing fabulous minimal dub albums on excellent labels such as Belgian Quatermass.Mathias Delplanque is also known for his ex- cursions as well as for his collaborations with various musicians using traditional instruments: the Korean E'Joung-Ju (geomungo player in the Keda duo), or the Nazairian François Robin (veuze, duduk and mizmar player).

After previously releasing stand-out music on labels such as VEX, DPR, Rhythm N Vibe, Obstacle Records and on his own imprint Moodwing, DJ Perception has decided the time is right to truly express himself via the album format. As the standard bearer of modern UKG and after 1.5 years in the making Timehri is extremely proud to finally unveil DJ Perception's debut album, Journey To The Star. A 2x12" LP built for millennia in the future, retrieved during Perception’s deep exploration through space, guided by a faint starlight in the outer reaches and beamed back to earth for your listening pleasure.

As a forward thinking bridge between UK Garage and House music, Timehri Records has established itself as a fiercely independent, leading contributor to the underground scene in the UK and overseas since its inception. Three records deep, production guest mixes via cassette and events for the sonic purist provide the output for this label, who’s emphasis on heritage and the afrofuturistic ideas that underpin it, hold huge importance.

Jon K and Elle Andrews’ MAL imprint returns with a new LP from one of the London experimental underground's best kept secrets, Rory Salter aka Malvern Brume. His music is rare, eccentric and mysterious - somewhere between Coil's bleak ritual magick and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's most experimental, minimal fringes. 

Malvern Brume operates just beneath the radar, occasionally turning up at Café OTO lineups and on a smattering of releases for Low Company, Alter, Infant Tree and Kasual Plastik - but he’s never one to shout too loudly about his work. ‘Body Traffic’ is his most interesting set to date, laying bare a process melting found sounds, field recordings and spoken word into throbbing, pulsing rhythms. It’s an evocation of a fraught mindset during the early weeks of lockdown in 2020; sequestered in his flat next to a trainline, the infrasonic - and more audible - rumbles of rolling stock and a nagging sense of dread infecting his ambiguously discomfiting recordings.

Operating in a headspace that values world-building and vivid, visual emotionality, Salter’s careful melodies are familiar - the distant, weeping melancholia of 1970s British TV hangs off the recordings like net curtains, and his atmosphere loops into experiments that weave through bare traces of industrial music, blank-faced electro pop, and hedonistic Brummie techno, all reduced to a cinder. 

The mood is set on the bellyaching resonance and crawling walls of the title tune, while 'Through Beaked Fog Horns' is drowned beneath morning mists: lopsided synth drones choke and drift, percussion mutates into inebriated bubbles, and tape-f*cked environmental whirrs create an atmosphere that’s hard to decipher in one take. 

‘Moss Spines Clenched’ follows cryptic stains on peeling flocking, and the icy creep of ‘Tense Branches Waver’ quivers beyond a cracked windowpane. The artist’s voice appears from beneath a cardboard box fort in the imaginary world of ‘Cornered Into Sleat’ as a distant drum beats out a marching thud and traffic squeals are sculpted into chirpy whistles, before ‘Bri Dun’ resolves the eerie tension in an OOBE-like ascent above the dado-rail and across the tracks, watching himself fade into a dissociative bliss.

"All chatter falls quiet…” Salter murmurs thru saturation and white noise. It’s a sound that’s gonna stick with us for a while.

London based label Natural Selection present their 3rd release in the form of a 4-track physical and digital EP courtesy of Kamikaze Space Programme (aka Christopher Jarman), entitled "Ashes To Ashes, Dust To Dust EP". The release also features a remix from Slave To Society (ex AnD). Cut by Simon at The Exchange Vinyl and mastered by Dadub Studios, Berlin.

Jarman is widely considered as one of the most forward thinking and innovative sound designers around. With roots indebted to the music he released as Raiden in the early 00's, his abstract, field recorded, industrial and broken admission into the annals of Techno via his prevailing alias; Kamikaze Space Programme, has seen his music backed, supported and released by the heaviest of renowned labels such as MORD, Mote-Evolver, Osiris, TRUST & more.

As an avid field recording artist, Jarman's release by and large is made up of foley sound design and sonic experimentation using bespoke apparatus and homemade microphones. Capturing internal resonances and electromagnetic radiation of objects, re-amplified or organic, classic hardware dub mixing completes his instantly recognisable Kamikaze Space Programme aesthetic, and successfully traverses the divide between Techno, Drum and Bass, Electro and Breakbeat.

Natural Selection are well known for bridging the heavier spectrum of Techno, Electro, Acid, etc. with new, experimental style and form. One can always expect cutting-edge, hard-hitting, underground electronics from Natural Selection, with extreme diversity in sound.

'Hidden Gem' is the Zenmenn's first full album produced together with songwriter and vocalist John Moods and follows their much-loved debut record, 'Enter The Zenmenn'. Named after a country song that didn't quite make it to the final selection, 'Hidden Gem' is the result of an extended jam session at a friend’s studio, in a field of mystical meadows somewhere south of Hamburg, in which the band would experience a series of inexplicable phenomena.

It was their earlier collaboration on the future classic, 'Homage To A Friend' that kickstarted their idea to team up with John Moods again, and in the late summer of 2021 the band set to work on a full album of material together. Using The Zenmenn's trusted drum kit, good old DX7, an unusual Ukrainian bass and an almost discarded pedal steel guitar, combined with Moods’ uniquely fragile voice, the outcome resulted in six timeless songs. The resulting harmonic sound is, as the band put it, “something like Adult Oriented Rock with a teaspoon of Celtic sentimentalism, a pinch of big city Country wrapped in a late night '70s style jam”.

'Hidden Gem’, much like their previous LP, was recorded without pre-arranged songs or any fixed musical concept. Instead, it captures fleeting moments of creativity and reflects the joint musical sentiments of the band members at the time. “Some artists are amazing at vision and curating, our work-flow is opposite to that. We are pretty messy and all over the place in our creation, as in life. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but hopefully it comes out all right in the end.”

First Word Records is very proud to bring you a brand new album from Takuya Kuroda!

Takuya Kuroda is a highly respected trumpeter and arranger born in Kobe, Japan and based in New York City. 'Midnight Crisp' is Takuya's seventh studio album, entirely self-produced and following 2020's highly acclaimed 'Fly Moon Die Soon', also released on UK label First Word (winner of the Worldwide Award's Label of the Year in 2019). Consisting of six new tracks, this once again sees Takuya displaying his unique hybrid sound, blending soulful jazz, funk, post-bop, fusion and hip hop.

After following the footsteps of his trombonist brother playing in big bands, he relocated to New York to study jazz & contemporary music at The New School in Union Square; a course he graduated from in the mid-noughties. It was here that Takuya met vocalist José James, with whom he worked on the 'Blackmagic' and 'No Beginning No End' projects.

Following graduation, Takuya established himself further in the NYC jazz scene, performing with the likes of Akoya Afrobeat and in recent years with DJ Premier's BADDER band. Premier said "The BADDER Band project was put together by my manager, and an agent I've known since the beginning of my Gang Starr career. He said, 'What if you put a band together that revolved around a trumpet player from Japan named Takuya Kuroda? He's got a hip-hop perspective and respect in the jazz field…"

Takuya Kuroda is already incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in the past decade and fortifying a solid reputation in the global jazz scene. 2011 saw the release of Takuya's independently-produced debut album, 'Edge', followed by 'Bitter and High' the following year and 'Six Aces' on P-Vine in 2013. Takuya was signed to the legendary Blue Note Records in 2014 for his album 'Rising Son', as well as appearing on their 2019 cover versions project, 'Blue Note Voyage'. He released his 5th album 'Zigzagger' on Concord in 2016, which also featured Antibalas on a reimagining of the Donald Byrd classic 'Think Twice'.

His last album was the afore-mentioned 'Fly Moon Die Soon' on First Word, which received plays and support from the likes of Pitchfork, Earmilk, Bandcamp Weekly, Worldwide FM, All About Jazz, Apple Music, Tidal, Stereogum, Treble, Brooklyn Vegan, FIP (France), Tony Minvielle, Jazz FM, Huey Morgan (BBC 6 Music), BBC Radio 3, Novena Carmel, KCRW and tons more DJs, tastemakers, selectors, radio stations, bloggers & magazines.

The new project 'Midnight Crisp' will be released October 21st 2022 on vinyl, CD and digital, worldwide via First Word Records.

repress !

Wax’o Paradiso Recordings presents its debut outing on vinyl, OK EG’s Intertidal Zone EP. The new label from the long standing Naarm (Melbourne) party is set to explore hi-fidelity, landscape-driven and cerebral music from the antipodes and beyond.

After sold out pressings on local imprints Animalia and Steeplejack, this EP explores a more contemplative side of OK EG, suitable for discerning dancefloors and meditative home listening alike.

Conceived in 2019 and completed in 2020, Intertidal Zone was recorded in collaboration with percussionist Phil Stroud. The rhythm tracks are a fusion of drum machines and hand drums, loose percussion, human voices and tuned percussion immersed in water. Joined by analog synthesisers, layered vocals, processed guitar and field recordings, the music evokes solastalgia and a reverence for nature.

The final track, Golden Hour, came from an improvisation with multi-instrumentalist Adam Halliwell on flute and jazz musician Jack Doepel on Korg bass, later transposed to modular synthesiser.

Wax’o Paradiso and OK EG acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this music was recorded, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and pay their respects to elders past, present and emerging.

On their third album, »Rideau«, Swedish trio Tape made their great leap forward. Released in 2005 on Häpna, following two albums of pastoral folk meets electronica, »Rideau« saw the trio of Andreas and Johan Berthling, and Tomas Hallonsten, working with an outside producer, Marcus Schmickler (best known for his post-rock outfit Pluramon). On »Rideau«, Tape’s music opened out considerably, embracing traditional minimalism, and luscious melodicism. Now, seventeen years later, »Rideau« has a new home with Morr Music, who are reissuing the album on vinyl, marking its first appearance on the format, including an extra track.

It’s only logical that »Rideau« should reappear via Morr Music. Like Tape themselves, Morr Music was a significant part of the worldwide gang busy reconciling electronica, pop, and acoustic, group- oriented sound across the 2000s, and »Rideau« sits neatly alongside other releases of similar heritage. And yet, »Rideau« feels contemporary, suggesting the creative discoveries made by the trio have ongoing resonance; their elliptical poetry echoes through recent music from the likes of Tara Clerkin Trio, and Tape’s sometime collaborators, Tenniscoats.

Asked about the album, Johan Berthling recalls, “»Rideau« was a special album for us to make”. While they had previously recorded their albums in rural Sweden, for »Rideau«, the trio decamped to Schmickler’s Piethopraxis Studio in Cologne. The creative space that Schmickler carved out for the group allowed them to explore this new material to its fullest. For his part, Schmickler found himself drawn to Tape’s music –“Their focus was a combination of seemingly timeless folk influences with noisy electronics and field recordings,” he explains. You can hear Schmickler’s influence at an almost molecular level – Tape had never sounded quite so graceful and assured with their compositions. “Marcus really shaped the music, working architecturally to build the form of the pieces,” Berthling recalls.

»Rideau« represents a collective exhalation for Tape, with the trio exploring more involved, longer pieces, which situates them in yet broader musical contexts. There are clear connections with the history of minimalism, for example, via the repeating organ phrase of »Sunrefrain«, and the insistent piano arpeggio of »A Spire«, which builds into a Reich-ian dream song, with sensuous electronics and glinting vibraphone dappling abstract shapes across the song’s stretched canvas.

Reflecting on Tape’s essence, Schmickler isolates their “uncompromised ethos, caring about small details.” This echoes most radically through the twilight environment of »Long Lost Engine«, which sets the listener adrift on impossibly radiant drones, while a gentle, almost Feldman-esque melody plays out over the song’s surface. It’s followed by the reissue’s extra track, Japanese electronica quartet Minamo’s remix of »Roulette«, a connection that would lead to a Minamo/Tape collaborative album, »Birds Of A Feather« (2007).

For now, though, here is the gorgeous, penumbral abstraction of »Rideau«, an album of whispers and clues, quiet moments and grand gestures, reintroduced to a welcoming world.

Tape

»No Date Tapes 2« is the second official cassette release from Harry Bertoia's tape archive and, like the first cassette, these recordings were chosen from a small collection of tapes in Bertoia's archive missing recording dates.

This cassette is packaged in a metallic shell and produced on super-ferro tape for incredible analog sound.

Bio:

Harry Bertoia first gained some artistic visibility in the early 1940s, then came into prominence with his sculptural, ergonomic chairs, produced by Knoll Furniture beginning in 1952, which quickly became classics of modernist furniture. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the late 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania.

Harry Bertoia's recently dismantled Sonambient barn collection was an attentive listener's paradise full of warm, expressive instruments that were gorgeous visually and audibly. Nothing could prepare you, even on return visits, for the overwhelming experience of entering the spacious wood and plaster interior where gongs, some of them giant, hung among the ranks of standing sculptures of various metals. Over nearly twenty years of adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. He considered this barn a full experience, sights and sounds comprising not a collection of works, but one piece unto itself. It was here, deep in the woods, that his Sonambient recording work took place.

Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, sometimes backwards, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills. Bertoia was a careful editor of his own work and only chosen recordings remained, each with a date and carefully considered observations written on a note included with each tape. Through these pieces of paper a the artist's logic can be uncovered, a careful approach to composition, ideas, feelings and forms. The story of Sonambient barn collection will slowly be told through the release of recordings from the archive as well as installations and performances built from Bertoia's own recordings, lectures and a book.

BODYXVIII delivers his debut release on Southern Lights in the form of the “Fields” EP, straddling the fringes of ambient, experimental and linear techno. The A-side features the pulsating waves of “An Ocean of Signals” and the hypnotic and undulating atmosphere of “Swiss Army Knife in The Wet Grass”. The B-side features “Umbra”, carrying an understated energy and tension and closing with the menacing ambience of “Clearing (Clandestine I)”.

Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privatelypressed opus of 1975.

Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to offer, in his words, joy in reminiscence. Hood’s nostalgic impulse ran parallel to the developments of other artists, writers, and filmmakers of the 1970s who were looking back to the 1950s to convey a collective memory of childhood. Unlike some of the widely embraced work of this nature, the music of Neighborhoods eschews irony or detachment for lucidity, striving above all for a dream-like return to the details of sensory memory.

Born into a musical lineage, Hood’s early, promising career as a guitarist in a globetrotting jazz outfit was cut short when he contracted polio in his late twenties. Moving from guitar to less physically-demanding stringed instruments in the late 1940s, Hood first began implementing field recordings in his jazz ensemble collaborations as early as 1956. In 1961, Hood and trumpeter Jim Smith collaborated on a local Portland television program, with their large, tight ensemble providing breakneck contemporary jazz for an action painting by famed West Coast modernist painter Louis Bunce. Hood incorporated his own field-recorded sounds of birds in the performance – an element that would resurface in Neighborhoods with great abundance among other found sounds.

Shelter Press extend a quietly cine-poetic invitation to visit the Outer Hebrides via immersive sounds - field recordings of psalm singing and local dialect - collected and arranged by interdisciplinary artist Joshua Bonnetta, going hand-in-hand with Shelter Press’ core interests in the fading light of its 10th year in operation. A beautiful artefact - complete with 60 page photobook.

Accompanied by an evocative photo study and access to an accompanying film and essay, Bonetta’s second release for Shelter Press following 2016’s ‘Lago’ imparts a real feel for the archipelago, off the north west coast of Scotland, where he was stationed during an artist’s residency during 2017-2019. Stitched together from observant field recordings and interviews with residents on the islands of Barra, Berneray, Harris, Lewis & North Uist, the work elicits a sense of timelessness in its slow drift between shores, hills, standing stones and the intimacy of its voices, including Gaelic spoken word, folk song and whistling. Save for the appearance of a plane overhead, the sounds of car and boat motors, plus a little bit of electronic disturbance that pull you into the modern era; the results practically imagine what it would have been like to visit the islands with a recording device at any point since the last ice age. 

For Bonetta, who hails from rural Canada, the similarities between his formative landscapes and those of Scotland must have appeared familiar, perhaps a subconscious recall/reminder that the two places shared a landmass, albeit 425 million years ago. His sound sensitive subtlety and cinematic ear in arranging his collected sounds serves to highlight the way the modern world only just infringes on Innse Gall’s ancient landscapes and only relatively modern tongues (if we’re thinking in geologic terms of scale). We hear the sounds of its avian population seamlessly eliding its humans in the whistling of Alick Macauley, and the natural cadence of of its mild oceanic climate mirrored in lilting Gaelic folksong, here performed by Calum McDonald, Joey Morrison, and Maggie Smith, and more generally practiced by only a tiny percentage of Scotland’s population (some 1%) but still surely alive in its meridian isles where time moves much more slowly.

With the nuance and poetry expected of a Shelter Press title, ‘Innes Gall’ reflects on the area’s anglicised name, meaning “islands of the strangers”, with calming, soberly documentarian results as heartwarming and fascinating as a visit to the area, just without the effort of travel, and from the comfort of your own living space. Bonnetta is incapable of ignoring the cinematic frame, and intersperses each shot with enough poetry to keep you entranced.

"Brilliantly remastered picture LP / LP / CD with new stunning artwork!

A1 taken from VA – 110 Below – No Sleeve Notes Required (110 Below, 1995)
A2 taken from VA – Assemblage Volume Two (Extreme, 1996)
A3 taken from Nonplace Urban Field – Golden Star (Incoming!, 1996)
B1 taken from VA – Le Sacre Du Printemps (Gonzo Circus, 1994)
B2 taken from VA – X-X Section (Extreme, 1991)
B3 taken from VA – Directions 2 (Direction Music, 1989)

An Other Voices Records / Kontakt Audio Co-operation Release

Compiled by Terry Bennett and Oleg Galay
Re-mastered by Višeslav Laboš
Artwork by Oleg Galay"

"Brilliantly remastered picture LP / LP / CD with new stunning artwork!

A1 taken from VA – 110 Below – No Sleeve Notes Required (110 Below, 1995)
A2 taken from VA – Assemblage Volume Two (Extreme, 1996)
A3 taken from Nonplace Urban Field – Golden Star (Incoming!, 1996)
B1 taken from VA – Le Sacre Du Printemps (Gonzo Circus, 1994)
B2 taken from VA – X-X Section (Extreme, 1991)
B3 taken from VA – Directions 2 (Direction Music, 1989)

An Other Voices Records / Kontakt Audio Co-operation Release

Compiled by Terry Bennett and Oleg Galay
Re-mastered by Višeslav Laboš
Artwork by Oleg Galay"

Black Screen Records has once again teamed up with Focus
Entertainment to release the soundtrack to A Plague Tale:
Requiem - the sequel to the award-winning adventure game A
Plague Tale: Innocence - by IFMCA award-winning and BAFTA
nominated composer Olivier Derivière on 180g double vinyl and
CD. After signing the soundtrack for A Plague Tale: Innocence,
Olivier Derivière is back to enrich the intense emotional journey
of A Plague Tale: Requiem with his poignant compositions.
Olivier Derivière is a passionate video games composer and an
international star in the field, who won multiple awards and a
nomination for the 2017 BAFTA. His degree of implication is rare
among video games composers, putting the gameplay at the
center of his considerations and even influencing the
development through his input. The compositions also feature
the cellist Eric-Maria Couturier, and the Estonian Philharmonic
Chamber Choir. Eric-Maria Couturier is a distinguished member
of the Ensemble intercontemporain, a contemporary music
ensemble founded by Pierre Boulez, whom Eric-Maria Couturier
collaborated with among other eminent modern music icons.
The two-time Grammy Award-winning Estonian Philharmonic
Chamber Choir is one of the best-known Estonian ensembles in
the world. With a repertoire that extends from Gregorian chant
to contemporary music, it le

Jazzrausch Bigband has more or less invented a new art form,
techno jazz, and has become well-known for performances of it. But
the band also has another, different story to tell. It has invented its
own tradition of hitting the road and touring at the end of each year
with a programme consisting of Christmas music, and has been doing
this ever since the band first emerged eight years ago. Bandleader
and founder Roman Sladek explains: “Whereas our regular projects -
the most recent album, ‘Emergenz’, is a good example - are all about
working through a specific theme and finding new ways to reinvent
ourselves, our Christmas thing is something we do for one reason
alone: to have fun. It was our very first programme, we still love it, and
we’re still nurturing, developing and growing it. Being able to devote
one month a year entirely to the big band tradition is something we’re
all really passionate about.”
Some bands might have been tempted just to throw together an
album of Christmas chestnuts any old how, but the Jazzrausch way of
doing things is not like that at all. Unlike any other album by the band,
for the first time we hear purely instrumental music. Furthermore,
Kuhn has taken ten classic Christmas songs - each one of them
rarely heard in jazz, and tunes which can often come across as a bit
staid in their original settings - from ‘Tochter Zion, freue dich# to
‘Adeste fideles’ or ‘Ihr Kinderlein, kommet’. The title track, ‘Alle Jahre
wieder!’ (based on the 1830s carol to music by Silcher which is very
familiar to children and adults in the German-speaking world) appears
here in completely new orchestral garb.
Sometimes the listener will recognise the kind of swing typical of
Glenn Miller. At other moments it is the incomparable big band
elegance of, say, Artie Shaw. ‘Es wird scho glei dumpa’ (an Austrian
carol) is given the full extra high pressure Tijuana brass treatment.
‘Maria durch ein’ Dornwald ging’ gets the touch of the Thad Jones /
Mel Lewis Orchestra after a Henry Mancini-like intro, and ‘Ich steh’ an
deiner Krippe hier’ recalls more of the great swing heritage.
Once again Jazzrausch Bigband has succeeded in a way that only
very few in the jazz field can, notwithstanding the openness of the
genre: they have brought young and old together, tradition and
revolution, the familiar and the new. Which is why it feels so
completely natural and right that they should continue to do this
‘again every year’, as the album title tells them: ‘Alle Jahre wieder’.

Tuhka, like its titular cinder or ash symbolises new beginnings, fertile ground and creativity after a long lapse. In the same vein, the tracks on this edition were created after a long fallow period.

Tuhka was created out of archival snippets and new vocal loops created on the sunny top floor of Merlijnstraat in early 2022. Late lockdown there was spent writing on the balcony and walking or playing in nearby parks. This creative but relaxed time is embodied in the feeling on ’Tuhka,’ a release wrapping itself around the core of two long-form tracks:

Kärpässieni is a soft, pensive number, with an archival cheap synth track and a chopped-up mystery field recording mingling with a simple subdued vocal loop. There is a titular reference to amanita mushrooms, a fungi encompassing the mystery and the melancholy bitterness present in the track. The feeling is akin to a frosty morning spent on a walk to the Mercatorplein library and feeling your toes start numbing.

Varisevalehti means ’shudderingleaf’ and it consists of an airy, optimistic voice loop that progresses and winds around the length of the track. Alongside it, at times you can hear tape-manipulated samples from a ’learn Italian’ record I used to own. The feeling is more of a wander around Westerpark when the blossoms have started come loose and fly around in the air, forming soft pink deposits in the corners of streets.

Thanks to Haron Aumaj for enduring support and for the copious quantities of Banjaan borani.

Alga Marghen presents the last chapter from the Feedback Works documentation series, a brand-new LP including "In Memoriam-Ostinato" and "Danse des Dakinis", two previous unreleased tracks by Eliane Radigue. Among the works of fixed duration from the feedback period, "In Memoriam-Ostinato" is the link between "Jouet Electronique" (ALGA 029LP) and "Opus 17" (ALGA 045LP), and allows you to understand the evolution of her approach. "In Memoriam-Ostinato" is a game of mirroring symbols which glide into a non-measured, bent and elastic, temporality. Eliane Radigue's working method and her aesthetic direction are evident in this work from 1969: her very own unique temporal space of sonic experiences. Even though it bears the same name as the third part of "Adnos III", "Danse des Dakinis" is a peculiar work in Eliane's oeuvre. Conceived in a short time, with all kind of tapes from the composer's past work, it fluently shows a kaleidoscopic vision of Radigue's sensibility for sound. In 1998 she put together a curious self-portrait in sound. There is a feedback ostinato conceived around 1969 and which refers to "In Memoriam-Ostinato" and "Opus 17". All through "Danse des Dakinis" you plunge into the sound of a creek recorded at Mills College campus that brings you back to the field-recordings from the beginning of the 1960s, made on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Such elements construct "Elemental1" (ALGA 029LP) as well. There are also some discreet interventions on the ARP 2500 synthesizer. It is indeed a peculiar work, which doesn't have the same features of her other compositions, especially at that time of her compositional path. There is an explanation for the composer producing this kind of sound material in 1998, and not limited to the sound waves of the ARP synthesizer. Invited to a workshop at Mills College in 1998, Eliane Radigue could not load herself down with her bulky instrument on such a trip. So, she left with just a few tapes taken from her own collection, drawn from different periods, and composed "Danse des Dakinis" with those old elements. There is tension in this composition, a certain wildness, an unpredictability of elements, those which are recognized as fundamental elements, which give structure to the universe. "Dance des Dakinis" is an intimate and wild symphony, alive and unpredictable, which is to be the next-to-last gesture of the composer before completely stopping her work with electronics.

Directed by Isao Takahata, "Grave of the Fireflies" is now available in the analogue edition series of the popular ""Studio Ghibli"" works! !



Image album collection and soundtrack collection of the movie

"Grave of the Fireflies" released in 1988, two titles

A precious analogue board with the latest remastering and a complete reprint of the jacket, obi,

commentary, roundtable discussion, score, script (excerpt), etc.



Grave of the Fireflies Soundtrack Collection (Original LP release date 1988.6.25) All 20 tracks

Music: Yoshio Mamiya

Yoshio Mamiya is in charge of the music for the main part of the movie.

This album is literally a soundtrack board that contains not only the music but also

the dialogue and sound effects of the movie. Select and record famous scenes.

* Saddle-stitched 16 liner notes (includes the script of the part recorded on the LP) included.

Tiger Stripes returns to Drumcode for his annual EP outing, crafting a pair of blue-ribbon dancefloor weapons inspired by the night.
The Swedish artist is a cherished act on the label, his involvement with DC going back to 2009. One of the most creative in his field, he typically mines influence from across the musical spectrum. Indeed, a Tiger Stripes track could employ subtle nods to everything from rock and pop, to reggae and hip hop, all seamlessly integrated into a dynamic techno palette.


For his latest outing, he's drawn on his love of classical music, specifically Chopin, for the powerful ‘Nocturne’. "I loved listening to his compositions as a toddler when my mother played her vinyls for me. I still love and listen to his piano music today and it might be where my taste for drama comes from. In my ears his music still sounds very modern and cool,” he tells. 'Nocturne' switches between driving dancefloor business and a lilting piano-laden break, the energy amplified by his peak-time arrangements.


In ‘Renegade’, his love of rock, electronica and indie is at the fore, as propulsive techno rhythms give way to an emotion-charged mid-section laden with breakbeats. When the beats kick back in, we’re lobbed back into exhilarating laser-kissed territory.

"Soutien Gorge" make a much welcome return to release their latest album "Tarskapcsolatodban" on "Touched Music". I'm not as familiar with their backcatalogue as I would like to be but intend to remedy that ASAP! The double CD compilation "Meseerdö" on Touched Music is a great place to do that... Soutien Gorge are two guys from Hungary who make interesting experimental electro-acoustic music. Their first release was around 2002, making this release their 20th anniversary release ! This latest release Tarskapcsolatodban by Soutien Gorge makes me think fondly of a lot artists on labels like City Centre Offices, Morr Music, and some outlyers on Warp Records. Musically coming in somewhere between, ISAN, B. Fleischmann, and Plone. The melodies have simple, often nursery rhyme like appeal. Arrangement wise there are acoustic and electronic instruments, with some field recording elements, and and sampling of speech in to me what is just a foreign language and difficult to understand. Good use of guitars to create additional layers at times remind ne of Duo-505, the B. Fleischmann side project. The field recordings and reserved electronics reminds me of the 2018 "Wanderwelle" album "Gathering Of The Ancient Spirits" on "Silent Season (Canada)".

Second Editions presents a new collaborative work by Marja Ahti and Judith Hamann.

After their distinguished duet ‘Portals’ for Cafe Oto's Takuroku label, ‘A coincidence is perfect, intimate attunement’ is a wonderful sophomore collaborative work pieced together over two years of changing seasons, ideas, moods, and feelings. The release is formed from a shifting field of sound correspondence that pivots on moments of coincidence, of a tuning in.

What are we opening ourselves to when we tune in to sound? How can one be truly open to a sound? How can the activity of recording move beyond notions of capture and release into more generative frames? Rather than a tool purposed for preservation or ‘conservation’ of memory, of time and place, can recording sound instead form new vibrant or vibratory spaces of attunement?

‘A coincidence..’ is an LP length composition of multiple interlocking parts, created through exchange, alignment, unpredictability: the title borrowed from poet Fanny Howe falling right into place, a flock of birds in flight, pitches matched and moved across different geographies and temporal frames. Marja & Judith have created an intuitive, lyrical longform piece that considers the idea of attunement itself as, in some sense, the smallest form of measure or denominator connecting their respective practices: across field recording, just intonation, electronic sonorities and instrumental bodies. ‘A coincidence..’ reflects a sense of a willingness to tune in to impulses given, or gifted to the other, a position that embraces an intimate synchronicity.

Recordings & correspondances between 2020-2022. Mixed by Marja Ahti & Judith Hamann. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, 2022. Title quotation from Night Philosophy by Fanny Howe, Divided Publishing, 2020. Photogrpahy by Joshua Bonnetta. Thanks to Nino Bulling, Niko-Matti Ahti and leo. The work was supported by Kone Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude and NEUSTART KULTUR.

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish composer and sound artist based in Turku, Finland. Ahti works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers and electronic feedback in order to find the space where these sounds start to communicate. She makes music that rides on waves of slowly warping harmonies and mutating textures – rough edged, yet precise compositions, rich in detail. Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.

Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne in so-called Australia, currently based in Berlin. Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, field recording, electronics, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a deeply considered process based approach to creative practice. Currently Judith’s work is focused on an examination of expressions and manifestations of 'shaking’ in solo performance practice, a collection of works for cello and humming, as well as ongoing research surrounding ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface, and the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies (human and non-human) in European settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which sometimes includes people like Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Golden Fur (with James Rushford and Sam Dunscombe), Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Anike Joyce Sadiq.

Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah Record Shop in old Pasadena. Inspired by The Residents, LAFMS self-released records and periodicals, organized performances and connected with fellow outsiders via post in the years before punk. Their uninhibited, egalitarian ideal of music-making and DIY distribution would influence generations of underground musicians.

LAFMS primarily reached outside Los Angeles via word-of-mouth and the United States Postal Service, foreshadowing the self-publishing and cassette trading networks of post-punk and industrial subcultures. In 1976, Joe Potts solicited recordings from LAFMS affiliates and admirers to edit and compile I.D. Art #2, utilizing correspondence art's technique of "assemblings." (The first installment in this series was a magazine, and the third was a coloring book.) Potts received dozens of pieces by members of Le Forte Four, Doo-Dooettes, Smegma and Ace & Duce as well as painters, filmmakers and non-artists with few recording credits to their name, creating a delirious, winking sound-art collage of field recordings, voicemails and improvisations. Participants purchased time on the record and received one copy each of the finished LP, realizing the philosophy contained in LAFMS' motto: "The music is free, but you have to pay for the plastic, paper, ink, glue and stamps."

This first-time vinyl reissue is limited to 500 numbered copies. Comes with insert.

Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building and Acoustically Tuned Spaces opened at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in the summer of 1979 (and was also on view later that year at PS1 in New York). Curated by Bob Wilhiteand Robert Smith, the exhibition surveyed the field of sound art. The forty-four participants were painters pivoted toward performance, conceptual artists attracted to time-based mediums, self-styled creators of environments, and musicians (formally trained and otherwise) fashioning new instruments from household items and consumer electronics. They were more or less object-oriented and, at the same time, more or less music-oriented. What brought them all together, as the exhibition catalog gamely asserted, was sculpting in three-dimensional space.

The Sound exhibit included installations, recordings played in the exhibition space and a series of live performances, demonstrating instruments that otherwise rested inert in the gallery. For a broader sense of the show than a single visit provided, the curators also produced a compilation album featuring short pieces, or excerpts from longer works, by many of the participants. (Artists in the exhibition, but not on the LP include Alvin Lucier and Mike Kelley.) Selections from bright lights of the 20th century avant-garde – such as composers Bill Fontana, Yoshi Wada and Paul DeMarinis; conceptual artists and performance artists Terry Fox, Tom Marioni and Jim Pomeroy; experimental vocalist Joan La Barbara; and Los Angeles Free Music Society members Tom Recchion and John Duncan – feature alongside the sounds of Jim Hobart's tuned jars, Ivor Darreg's fretless banjo, Doug Hollis' aeolian harp and Richard Dunlap's rubber bands.

This first-time reissue is limited to 500 numbered copies. Comes with poster.

Deestricted strikes again with its third vinyl EP with a trippy excursion into Georgian landscapes and sounds. Techno beats in favor of oppressed cultures, bring new light and freedom for all

Federico Madeddu Giuntoli is an italian multidisciplinary artist. Mostly autodidact, his art is based on groundedness and simplicity, and focused on the complexity of human journey in a non aggressive, warm and unfiltered way.

His works, ranging from contemporary art, music, writing and photography, are usually delicate and subtle, yet unequivocally tuned into a certain kind of pop communication, however essential and experimental it may be.

"The text and the form" is his first solo album, featuring german e-poetess AGF and japanese artist Moskitoo (12K).

The album is a collection of 11 minimal and intimate short songs, in which piano fragments, lonely guitar solos, spoken words and evocative vocals resonate with processed microsounds and lo-fi field recordings, creating a concise and very deep journey into romance and sense of mystery.

In the artist's words, "the album shaped itself according to a loose process of refinement and layering. A long, undisturbed assembling across more then a decade, often against my own will to reach a definitive form. If any relevance in this work can be found, I would say it resides in its capability to deliver a rare sense of vulnerability, longing and aliveness together, an aroma of improvisation and instability mixed with a unexplicable impression of perfection".

Y Bülbül is back on the controls accompanied by Yumurta, a percussionist from Istanbul. Pingipung introduced the London based artist in 2020 with his psychedelic, synth-laden debut “Fever”.

“Not One, Not Two” is based on a one-way transmission of improvised drum recordings from an industrial estate in Maslak, Istanbul to another one in Tottenham, London, where Y Bülbül laid down fragmented layers of bass, synths, guitars and field recordings over Yumurta’s singular drum takes. The result is a free-form deep listening album for fans of dub, ambient and kosmische music, where the groove and harmonies are mystically interwoven, yet somehow manage to stay on the brink of collapse. Although the sessions were non concurrent and scattered over two continents, the collaboration evokes scenes of a telepathic communion where individual perspectives, circumstances and stories are exchanged between the two.

Resembling Moondog, Holy Tongue or Luis Paniagua in the sense that they favor the raw over the polished, holistic presence over conceptual perfection and questions over answers, the duo’s focus on bare sounds and repetition guides the listener throughout the album. The ride cymbal opening the minimalistic “I’m This”, for instance, briskly disarms the listener who might have been looking for more traditional songwriting or production clues. There are plenty of immediately rewarding moments too in “Not One, Not Two,” like the organic acid bassline in “Maurin Quina”, the euphoric drum fills of “Big K” and the intoxicating groove of the hypnotic vibe-setter “Jah Oto”.

Bülbül is Turkish for a singing bird while Yumurta simply means egg. Which one is first? Who is to follow? It’s this enigmatic entanglement between the two artists which creates the lurking tension, emphasized by the Zen Kōan-like title. The beauty in this album is a peculiar one, and it certainly is a rabbit hole too. Dissonance is fluid as everything moves, and whenever two sounds collide, a third one emerges.

Born Bangalter in 1947, Daniel Vangarde is a French songwriter and producer. In 1967, he met Jean Kluger who became his publisher. In the 1970s, their tandem stood out in those fields, for a plethora of popular French artists such as Petula Clark, Claude François, Joe Dassin, Dalida, Régine, Sheila and Ringo. 1975 saw the birth of Vangarde’s label, Zagora, and his first and only solo LP. Later on, Vangarde and Kluger were responsible for a number of hit songs by The Gibson Brothers, Ottawan and La Compagnie Créole. With or without Kluger, Vangarde also wrote and produced songs that remained underground, under several monikers (Starbow, Who’s Who, Soul Iberica Band, Yamasuki, Rocky & Vandella…) and for various artists. Let’s open these incredible cosmic disco funk vaults! Available on Double Vinyl (featuring 2 exclusive tracks) & CD .

The journey from trauma to healing and understanding inspired Andrew Oda’s beautiful new album: »Back To The Body«. More delicate and plaintive than his previous work, but no less adventurous in its broad palette of synthetic and acoustic sounds, this music is the topography of a descent into the wisdom of the body, “as frightening and unsafe as it may feel” as the composer puts it. A sweet piano, a gently plucked guitar, and a mournful cello sit alongside garbled synth melodies, rustling field recordings, and sweeping cosmic backdrops throughout, a mimic of the counterintuitive harmony of sensations that meet the traumatised body.