quête:forms

Debut solo album from DC polymath Jack Abok. When not making zines and visual art, singing for Des Demonas' or drumming AND singing for SEXFACES, Abok's busied himself by bringing this, his most personal and ferousious vision, to (immortal) life with VAMPYRES FROM AFRICA. 11 tracks of electro punk, melding Abok's massive love for the delta blues, post punk, Krautrock and hip hop. Or, in his own words: VAMPYRES FROM AFRICA MANIFESTО: 1. Ideas > skill 2. Don't be a musician 3. Cool > smart 4. It's not about money or being liked, it's about expressing ourselves. 5. Bands should have an expiration date 6. Fuck originality! 7. Don't stop creating And Syd's Angelika Piper at the Gates of Dawn: "All movements is accomplished in six stages And the seventh brings return The seven is the number of the young light It forms when darkness is increased by one Changel return / success Going and coming without error Action brings good fortune Sunset"

An alto saxophone and acoustic piano engage in an intimate musical dialogue, reflecting on the current state of improvised music. Okuda and Dyberg’s album unites two artists at the peak of their musical collaboration, deconstructing jazz history into shimmering fragments, reassembling them in new forms that deliberately move away from traditional references. The music incorporates diverse influences—glimpses of classical composers like Webern and Prokofiev, abstract electronic elements reimagined acoustically, and a genuine spirit of exploration seeking a unique musical fusion.

Rooted in jazz, the Okuda / Dyberg Duo performs conceptual improvisations that include pulse, durations, interactions, natural/everyday life objects, soundalized: water dropping, light rain comes to a coffee-filter dripping, construction work or glass breaking sounds. Born in 2018. Glasscut is their third release – the first on vinyl – after Nigatsu 二月 (2019) and Naboer (2020).

Ston Elaióna is John Also Bennett’s first album for Shelter Press since his 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe. The American born, Athens, Greece, based flautist, synthesist, and composer weaves a strikingly singular electroacoustic excursion for bass flute and Yamaha DX7ii, largely recorded in the golden haze of the early morning hours - bending time at the otherworldly juncture of consciousness and place. Translating from Greek as “in the olive grove”, Ston Elaióna is permeated with the ambiences of the ancient and present world, guided into form by a playfully rigorous approach to sound.
Initially emerging during the mid 2000s as part of Columbus, Ohio’s noise scene, before relocating to NYC around 2010, Bennett’s diverse activities picked up an increasing sense of pace over the following decade - performing and recording as a solo artist (JAB), with the trio Forma and with CV &JAB, his prolific duo with his partner Christina Vantzou, as well as playing in Jon Gibson’s ensemble among many other multifaceted collaborations. However, since 2020 the flautist and electroacoustic composer has existed in a semi nomadic state: drifting between Brooklyn, Brussels, extensive tours, and Greece, where he finally came to rest in Athens last year.

Drawing upon a carefully honed attentiveness to the environments and experiences of everyday life, Ston Elaióna is a suite of nine pieces (with an additional track exclusive to physical formats), many of them composed and played live as the early morning sun touched the Parthenon, in full view from Bennett’s studio window in Athens. Bennett’s refinement and restraint, honed over his years adrift, led him to adopt a limited palette focused on his primary instrument, the bass flute, and a Yamaha DX7ii synthesizer tuned to just intonation scales. Alongside a handful of other keyboards, digital oscillators triggered by his flute, and occasional field recordings, this simple palette is reflected by the deeply emotive sense of minimalism that permeates the album’s two sides. Following two solo albums defined by outward facing temperaments - 2022’s Out there in the middle of nowhere (Poole Music), which used a lap steel guitar and generative oscillators to evoke the surreal landscapes of the South Dakota badlands, and the largely synthetic atmospheres of the 2024 anthology Music For Save Rooms 1 & 2 (Editions Basilic) - the shift in Bennett’s worldly circumstances offered an intuitive return to the calm, inward states of creative exploration that have historically defined JAB’s sound. In parallel, context provided clear sources of inspiration for many of the album’s themes, as well as sources for some of its sounds. The aura of Greece, from the ancient to the present, from its stones and olive groves to its traffic, figures heavily across Ston Elaióna’s two sides. John Also Bennett’s Ston Elaióna forms an elegantly rigorous world of electroacoustic sonority, bridging the expanse of time with the immediacies of environment and happening in the here and now: a profound sonic mediation on the countless dimensions unlocked by life in Greece.

Fresh from annihilating EU/UK audiences with his steppas tropicalia on the Bokeh Dekalog tour, Felinto presents a crazed vision of Sao Paulo party punk - industrial scuzz, dub squelch, grinding guitars and riot-ready vocals.

Festa Punk is a call to rage, to ritual, to celebration — as forms of resistance against the grim, creeping global fascism. It’s a shout to bend time, to create moments that shake off erased identities and flip the script on a world that treats violence like gospel.

It's also a homage to Brazilian hxc heroes, Os Replicantes, whose classic 'Fest Punk' appeared on the '87 LP Histórias De Sexo E Violência.

The piano recital/album sans retour forms the concluding part of Croene's 'Trilogy of Hopelessness' (Cortizona). The overarching theme is the sense of doom inherent in our responses to climate change. After the doomed indulgence in nostalgia ('cul de sac', 2019) and the doomed yearning for landscapes lost through climate change and human mismanagement ('solastalgia', 2022), he now presents 'sans retour': the doom of the inevitably failed fantasy of escape.

Six piano pieces serve as an in memoriam for six fearless aviation pioneers who ultimately lost their lives in plane crashes. The album opens with a sound recording of the communication between Yuri Gagarin and mission control one minute before the launch of the first manned space flight. At the end of Side A and the beginning of Side B, excerpts from the conversation between Richard Russell and air traffic control can be heard.

Conceived as a single, Beethovenian composition, Croene once again demonstrates the wide range of sound palettes a piano can produce. The common thread is a melody based on the 'Dies Irae', which takes six different forms to embody the in memoriam concept.

Dino Lenny debuts on Rekids with the ‘Not About The Volume’ single. The bona fide legend arrives backed with a remix from Rekids regular Tiger Stripes.

Dino Lenny debuts on Radio Slave’s Rekids with ‘Not About The Volume’ on 5th December 2025 alongside a remix from label regular Tiger Stripes. Active for over three decades, Italian/UK DJ, producer, singer, and Fine Human Records label owner Dino Lenny has released on R&S, Diynamic, Innervisions, and Bedrock, while working with artists such as Underworld, Missy Elliott, Wu-Tang Clan, and Madonna on remixes and collaborations. Since 2021, he’s hosted Tomorrowland’s Core, the festival’s alternative electronic stage's radio show, which has featured Nina Kraviz, Ellen Allien, DJ Tennis, and more.

Lenny’s ‘Not About The Volume’ boasts a loopy groove that forms the base for impactful, jazz-infl ected hits, and at the centre, a quirky, party-starting vocal that’s sure to cement itself in the minds of the dancefl oor. Tiger Stripes reworks ‘Not About The Volume’ with a fresh new bassline, quicker drums, and amplifi ed synth elements for a more hypnotic take on yet another Rekids anthem.

After screaming to the world You Don't Know What Chiptune Is, arottenbit returns with an even more radical and collective statement: You Don't Know What A Rework Is. Ten tracks, completely deconstructed and rebuilt by twenty Italian bands, each in their own sonic language. From drone swallowing the void to the most savage death metal, from visceral punk to a fearless flamenco twist, every track becomes an uncharted territory, a journey where arotttenbit's identity dissolves and multiplies into twenty new forms. Most of the recordings were captured by Otto himself with his mobile studio, during a tour across Italy that took him into basements, rehearsal rooms, and underground spaces, harnessing raw and direct energy from the bands in their natural environment. Mixing and mastering then came to life at Otto Engineering Labs, his personal sound-space where everything was stitched together and transformed into a single living organism.



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Zwei Meister-Improvisatoren, die ihre wortlosen Gemälde aus dem Nichts komponieren, erforschen weiter den tiefen Raum der Zukunft/Vergangenheit. Ihre kollaborativen Kräfte sind noch lange nicht auf dem Höhepunkt, und diese Reise führt sie weiter ins Unerforschte. Diese Stücke entfalten sich als offenkundige Geistesblüten. Sie schaffen einen Baldachin aus Klangformen, in dem sie die seltene Sprache der Welterschaffung sprechen. Dies ist nicht einfach nur Musik, es ist eine Reise ohne Karten, Inside. Diese neue LP führt Nelson & Kramer tief unter die Meere der Erde und zieht den Hörer an ihrer Seite hinab, während sie die unbekannten Strömungen erforschen, die die menschliche Vorstellungskraft beflügeln, flüssig, immer in Bewegung und immer im Wandel. Es ist ein Ausflug in die tiefsten Tiefen der Ambient-Musik und ein Neuanfang an dem Ort, an dem das Leben selbst begann. Der Grund des Ozeans hat einen neuen Klang, und er ist atemberaubend schön. ENG Further explorations into the deep space of the future/past by two master-improvisors who compose their wordless paintings out of thin air. Their collaborative powers are nowhere near their peak and this voyage takes them further into the Uncharted. These pieces unfold as revelatory mind blooms. Creating a canopy of sound forms inside which they speak the rarified language of world creating. This isn't just music, it's a journey without maps, Inside. This new LP takes Nelson & Kramer deep under the earth's seas, pulling the listener down beside them as they explore the uncharted currents that fuel the human imagination, fl uid, always moving, and always changing. It is an excursion into the lowest depths of Ambient Music, and a new beginning from the very place where life itself began. The floor of the ocean has a new sound, and it is breathtakingly beautiful.

With Dominik Eulberg and Arne Schaffhausen (of EXTRAWELT) we welcome back two longtime Cocoon heroes to the label. The two were featured in a VICE Magazine special last year for a 'field recording' documentary. you-need-to-hear-this/dominik-eulberg-westerwald-extrawelt-zurich-lost-and-found) which marked the beginning of a new collaboration. Dominik and Arne checked their fresh recorded sounds in the studio and found out that there have a common base and musical understanding. They started to work on new tracks and it looks like this joint venture will continue for a longer time. The first results of their mutual work is 'A Little Further' which will be released in three different versions on Cocoon Recordings in the next weeks (COR12117). So let's start with 'Not On A Map' version: This one seems to be tailor made for the next afterhour and the rising sun. Dominik and Arne create the perfect mood for those special moments on the floor with a nice mix of energetic beats, interesting sounds and an emotional bass- and synth-programming. So many layers and different levels however the overall picture never gets overcharged or too demanding. Coming up next is the '37 Routes' version which quite stands out with the used breakbeats and no standard 4/4 kick drum. The synths are more scratchy and louder and the bassline seems to jump out of the speakers, this is a massive wall of sound production. The direction here is clear. However the two incorporated some cool and magic breaks that seem to refer to the deeper Eulberg sound which forms a great mix of two different techno-visions. Last but not least there's the 'Imaginery Escort' version which appears a bit like the dub edit of 'A Little Further".

One Instrument welcomes Morning Seance, composer and sound artist, originally from Italy and based in Vienna. On this debut LP, Morning Seance traces a drifting narrative composed of unstable harmonies, fluid structures, and ghostlike forms. The album unfolds like a dream told in fragments, oscillating between fluctuating pulses and decaying transmissions, from nocturnal stillness to acoustic mirages. The first half of the record moves through zones of suspended tension and evanescent contours, where tracks like “Be faster than your own depression” and “The tenderness of our own autobiography” sketch fragile architectures of affect. The second half enters a more spectral terrain — “Breakfast in a night club,” “A visit to the Brion-Vega tomb” — not places, but agglomerates of sonic sensation, detached from any personal frame.

With each piece, the music dissolves and reconstitutes itself, resisting finality or form, and doing so with an indestructible joy that hums beneath the wreckage. This is degenerate ambient music: anti-geometric and subject to emotional weather — not a refuge, but a slow collapse of structure and purity, where atmosphere gives way to excess and disobedience.

The album is crafted entirely from a single source: the Roland Alpha Juno-1. Despite this constraint, it achieves a vast sound spectrum, transforming one synthesizer’s voice into a layered landscape of textures and moods.

The electronic music of Morning Seance is built on constant variation and intricate, looping patterns with no clear beginning or end. This variation is not simply applied to an audio element, but enacted as a compositional logic — avoiding mechanical combinations and obvious rhythms. The result is a mutable mass of audio matter and tonal debris, guiding the listener through richly divergent environments.

When people think of Yacht Rock-those smooth, sun-drenched sounds that once drifted from Californian radio stations in the late '70s and early '80s-they rarely imagine it echoing through rehearsal rooms in Hamburg or Linz. Yet even far from the Pacific coastline, the appeal of shimmering chords, laid-back grooves, and polished production found fertile ground.
This compilation gathers rare and overlooked tracks from Germany and Austria. These artists embraced West Coast aesthetics with sincerity and subtle twists, resulting in music that feels both familiar and refreshingly new-smooth sounds for cloudy skies. So drop anchor, pour something cool, and enjoy this unexpected cruise through the lesser-charted waters of Euro Yacht Rock.

Our journey begins in Austria, where Reflection's Because (1981) set the tone with blue-eyed soul and analogue warmth-a sunlit blend of Doobie Brothers polish and local charm. Its creator, Dieter Heyduk, reappears with Austrian Sky, a heartfelt nod to his homeland that fuses mountain calm with oceanic longing.
From the North Sea island of Föhr, Ara Pacis dreamed of California on their 1979 self-release To the Westcoast. Inspired by Steely Dan and Lake, they turned German rock precision into breezy, melodic sophistication. Meanwhile, in Düsseldorf, Mainpoint fused funk and jazz-rock on Frisbee, their 1980 single bursting with rhythmic drive and optimism before the tide of the Neue Deutsche Welle swept such grooves aside.
Bremerhaven's Nuages offered the compilation's only instrumental gem, Strange Weekend (1985)-a gentle blend of jazz-funk and rock and largely lost to time. Its cool restraint captures the European interpretation of Californian ease.
Around the same period, British traveler Gavin James recorded River of Laughter in southern Germany, backed by the blues-rock band Black Cat Bone. His acoustic reflections on water and flow mirrored the soft, meditative pulse at Yacht Rock's core.
Berlin's Top Spin kept things playful with Bikin (1985), a funk-fusion snapshot of urban joy that showcased the city's finest session players. From the Ruhr area, the Jan Pack Band is up next. While not a typical Yacht Rock track, Cable Dance is driven by an effortless, groovy '80s vibe.
Peter Seiler's Goldfinger project reimagined Walkin' in the Sand as a relaxed reggae-tinged track, while Munich's Major Seven closed the voyage with Silverboat, a wistful soft rock ballad gliding between melancholy and light.

Across these hidden harbors of German and Austrian pop, the West Coast dream took on new forms-reflected in rivers, skies, and studio lights half a world away from L.A. Under and Above the Clouds celebrates that spirit: the enduring pull of smooth music, wherever it's made.

First Word Records are very proud to bring you 'Ghouls', the 6th studio album from Bastien Keb.

Through the reflective and introspective multi-mood journey of its 19-tracks, this album spans psychedelic-chamber-funk, warped anti-ballads, cinematic instrumentals, Ethio-jazz & ethereal ambience.

Part soundtrack, part beat-tape, part memoir, this is a dreamlike soundscape sewn together from half-forgotten memories & late night breakdowns.

Entirely sample-free, this album is full to the brim with musical experimentation, with Keb's compulsion to make all the individual pieces of music independently; combining strings, harps, saxophones, theremins, clarinets, flutes and trumpets.

He signals to the fuzzy, nostalgic nebulous of mid '90s skate videos, as well as harking back to the scores & moods of movies like The French Connection, Taxi Driver, The Warriors and La Haine. There are whispers of sounds in the air from jazz clubs, street preachers & Turkish restaurants.

Keb describes the sonic experience of this album simply as this… "You're half awake, and half asleep, but you're warm…"

For this 19-track opus, Keb is joined extensively by Malik Ameer Crumpler; a poet, composer, editor and professor based in Paris, who's been involved in numerous albums while writing for various forms of experimental media.

A multi-instrumentalist originally from the Midlands, Bastien Keb (aka Sebastian Jones) previously released his highly-acclaimed album '22.02.85' on First Word back in 2017; this new album being a very welcome return to the Worldwide Award-winning UK independent label.

His music has been widely supported across BBC Radio in the past by DJs including Gilles Peterson, Huey Morgan, Huw Stephens, Jamie Cullum, Lauren Laverne, Mary Anne Hobbs, Nemone and Tom Ravenscroft. This is in addition to glowing press reviews from the likes of Pitchfork, The Guardian and The Line Of Best Fit.

He's built up a steady fanbase through his extensive catalogue over the years, with material for labels like Def Pressé, Gearbox, One-Handed Music and most recently for Shabaka Hutchings' Native Rebel Recordings imprint, on a collaborative project with South London's Confucius MC (Speakers Corner Quartet).

Keb concludes "this record is for anyone feeling lost in a world that seems to have lost itself without knowing it. It's for the people who know that the world is missing the beauty of the lights in the distance, whilst being distracted by new shoes and flashy phones..."

'Ghouls' is due to be released on vinyl & digital worldwide, November 14th 2025.

Valby Vokalgruppe was initiated in 2008 by Anja Jacobsen, the Danish collective’s current line-cup is completed by Lil Lacy, Sonja LaBianca, Cæcilie Trier and Laura Marie Madsen. The group has written and performed a large number of cross-aesthetic pieces over the years, including an album Bah New Era released in 2012 on Eget Værelse.

Sharpened to its core, the group dives deep into rhythmical architectures built almost solely from the voice - think Platonic solids reimagined as sound objects. Think trance without electronics. These new compositions are compressed, sparkling forms — vocal geometries that spin, collide, and dissolve through repetition. From inside the circle: radical precision, soft dissonance, and playful intuition guide the way. The group explores the voice not as melody alone, but as material — vibrating, modulating, refracting.

Solids For Voices transcends into deep concentration calling for a clear state of mind, in recognition of an increasingly fragmented and incoherent reality. Valby Vokalgruppe endeavours a total absorption into the voice, the rhythm and the trance.

Mona Steinwidder (Museum of No Art) and Mitko Mitkov have spent years exchanging sounds and words across Hamburg's creative landscape - Swimming Pool Reflections is where those exchanges accumulated in Steinwidder's studio beneath the slanted roof of a former barracks. Premiered in November 2024 for Gesa Troch's exhibition "you say water is sweet", the work intertwines Mitkov’s texts (originally composed as emails to members of a swimming club, as imaginary as they are real) with Steinwidder’s clarinet and synthesizer, full of dubby resonance.

Swimming Pool Reflections isn't about swimming. It's about standing at the edge and watching - the way light fractures through water, how shadows play across tile, everything that forms and dissolves in the viewer's eye. The libretto moves through straits where bodies of water collide, small lakes with white slides, pools suspended in generic landscapes generated from uploaded photographs. Binary gods and transparent shadows. Sediment and cosmic hands weaving existence on overdimensional looms.

Across two uninterrupted sides, words float like those oil spots Mitkov describes: "swallowing light, drifting between the waves, forming a strange pattern". The music holds space for these reflections without trying to contain them. Everything stays permeable. Everything keeps moving.

2025 Repress

“UR wonders” What happens to jazz if combined with the current electronic sound tools used to make Detroit techno now?
What might Jazz sound like if the inspirational pioneers of fusion ie; Return to Forever, Astral Pirates or Weather Report had access to the music production technology available now or in the future?
The artform called Jazz was a unique reflection of “The African American experience here in the United States.Unfortunately by the 90″s it had been compromised by major record companies and made “smoother” for mainstream consumption and more profits.
Born in America’s rural black south Rock & Roll had suffered the same fate years earlier. Original artists eventually replaced by well studied clones and corporate mega profits!! Also happening the original artform of jazz appeared to be caught, processed & throughly EXPLAINED by people who sought to intellectualize “struggle & human emotion” into mere words and then benefit immensely financially by being authorities on the subject.
Hmm sound familiar?

As you watch the current intellectual colonization of the urban inner city African American art forms house music, hip-hop, Jungle & Detroit techno get studied, bent, twisted renamed and turned into EDM profit formulas.

There stands records like Nation 2 Nation that defy these definitions and inspire the next generation of Pioneers who continue the undefined exploration of Jazz like Derek Jamerson, Jon Dixon, Raphael Merriweathers, Desean Jones, Timeline, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Raphael Statin & Ian Finkelstein. Mother to daughter, Father to son,

Nation 2 Nation a work inspired and that inspired what’s next.

The Chisa Years: 1965-1975 (Rare and Unreleased) is a compilation album by South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela. The album consists of 14 rare or forgotten tracks recorded by Stewart Levine and Hugh Masekela from 1965 to 1975 when they ran their own Chisa Records label.Thom Jurek of Allmusic wrote 'In sum, there isn't a weak moment on this entire collection. It's appeal is wide and deep and one can only hope this is the first of many volumes of this material to appear. BBE Records has done a stellar job in making this slab available.' Dan Nishimoto of the Prefix Magazine stated 'The compilation focuses on Masekela's original idea of 'African American Music.' From the early experiments of the Zulus (a group featuring M'Bulu) in mixing doo-wop, rhythm & blues and South African gospel and the mbaqanga/'Grazing in the Grass'-style work of the generically named Johannesburg Street Band to the clearly Fela-influenced Ojah (Masekela's band in the mid-'70s, consisting of players from Ghana and Nigeria) and the readyfor-primetime belting of M'Bulu, each track reveals a multi-pronged effort to find and challenge the notion(s) of how African and American cultural forms could interact.'

2026 Repress

Tripped teams up with Swiss Hardcore Techno legend Celsius.
This EP features glorious reworks of classic Celsius tracks such as MORG and An1x657,
the latter carefully mutilated by Tripped, while Drokz delivered an early rave gabber remix of Snotcake.
- A guaranteed dancefloor weapon.

All this accompanied by 2 brand new Tripped bangers to finish you off.

Hardcore Techno bliss in all its forms.

MADINCH009 comes in full colour artwork (painted by Tripped himself)

2025 Repress!

Recorded in a remote cabin on the Devon coast, STILL OUT is an album-length collaboration between musician-filmmakers – and childhood friends – Will Cookson and Tom Haverly. A reflection on friendship, landscape and the passing of time, it inspired a road trip from North Yorkshire to North Devon they took together in the summer of 2024, and forms the soundtrack to a film of the same name which had its premiere screening as part of Stroud Film Festival in March 2025.

Like the film, STILL OUT is also an oblique homage to The KLF’s iconic 1990 album Chill Out, which the Gloucestershire-based pair revisited after it turned up unexpectedly a few years back in Tom’s dad’s record collection. Inspired to create their own recording using a similarly free-spirited process, Will and Tom relocated to the Devon coast in late summer 2023, splicing together a 40-minute mix from their personal archive of recordings and found sounds in a remote cabin with no electricity or mobile reception.

"It came together using cut-and-paste techniques, with ongoing shifts and tweaks,” says Will. “The final result was an audio collage that felt like something legendary hip hop producers The Bomb Squad might make - if ambient music was the only material in their sample library."

Using ‘ambient’ as a starting-point rather than an end in itself, they took inspiration from across the musical spectrum – classic-period Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Bill Evans, plus outliers such as 80s singer-songwriter Virginia Astley and the late DJ-producer Andrew Weatherall. The connections, though, are anything but obvious as the audio shifts seamlessly from field recordings and spoken-word interludes to mood pieces and snatches of vintage pop.

Edited and assembled using freely available open source programs, the source material was often radically altered using tools such as “PaulStretch”, a digital sound-morphing algorithm that allows users to stretch audio files to extreme lengths.

"When we found ourselves in a creative slump or unsure how to navigate a tricky part, we'd say, ‘Let's put some syrup on it and slow it down,’” says Tom. “That always helped us get back on track during late-night recording sessions at the cabin."

Part-soundtrack, part-meditative experiment, STILL OUT is intended as a reflection on the mental and emotional shift that occurs when stepping away from the routine of daily life – an album that forms a celebration of our ever-changing relationship to the world around us and the mystery of what it means to pass through time and space.

“The true follow up, 35 years later, to The KLF’s ‘Chill Out’”.
JD Twitch (Optimo).

An ambient journey reflecting on friendship, the British landscape - and The KLF’s landmark album Chill Out

"This record and film are just lovely. You need this in your life. Moo-Moo!” Balearic Mike (Down To The Sea & Back)

"The album is a perfect companion to the KLF classic, utilising the British countryside as the setting, occasionally reminding you that Mother Nature is not to be messed with.” Strictly Kev (DJ Food)

"A beautiful ambient journey into the landscape, taking the listener from reality to dream state and back again. A mystical realm full of mysterious chanting, rattling trains and sounds from the very depths of the earth."
Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw (Stone Club)

More Than Meets the Eye is the debut album by Belgian artist Léonard Steyaert - an evocative blend of experimental electronics and intimate songwriting. Across six tracks, the album unfolds like a psychological thriller, navigating themes of alienation, vulnerability, and ecstatic release. Think Radiohead meets Aphex Twin, with echoes of Björk, Portishead, and Messiaen.
More Than Meets the Eye is the debut album by Belgian artist Léonard Steyaert - an evocative blend of experimental electronics and intimate songwriting.

Across six tracks, the album unfolds like a psychological thriller, navigating themes of alienation, vulnerability, and ecstatic release.

Think Radiohead meets Aphex Twin, with echoes of Björk, Portishead, and Messiaen.

Mixed by James Ginzburg (Emptyset), mastered by Joker, the sound is raw, detailed, and immersive.

Tracks like Caught Breaking In and See You Burst oscillate between whispered confessions and intense sonic ruptures.

The album forms a narrative arc - from inner tension (A Threatening Morning) to the revelation of What Really Happened.

Artwork and live visuals are part of a strong visual identity created in collaboration with artists Joséphine Steyaert, Thomas Vanderniet and Esther Denis.

A limited vinyl edition and a performance-based live show will support the release.

Perfect for adventurous listeners and tastemakers seeking something personal, cinematic, and genre-defying.

2005...it"s 20 years since already? We can still feel the sensuous tickle of the wind at our back during that marvelous time. It was, as the Scorps promised, a wind of change, and we were drawn to a number of like-minded birds floating in that breeze! Today, we salute Six Organs of Admittance; their School of the Flower was just the record we"d never dreamed of when we asked them if they wanted to do one with us. Turned out their pronoun of choice was "him." "He" was Ben Chasny and we"ve been happy collaborating with him ever since. Coming on the heels of records like Dark Noontide and Compathia, School of the Flower found Six Organs riding high. Having achieved much in his traditional home-recorded kingdom, he too was looking for something different. What our Ben recalls: "It was the first time Six Organs was in a studio, so that"s cool. I wanted to play with Chris Corsano to expand on some of the rhythms in my playing, to kind of suggest some different forms for the way the folk-psych/folk music were being played at the time. The title track was inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley"s Church of Anthrax - I remember we had a big tape loop stretched around the whole studio to form the basis of that. I was taking a lot of cold medicine that week - not the coolest drugs to be on, but, you know..." School of the Flower was indeed a whole new thing - containing enduring fan favorites like "All You"ve Left," "Words for Two," Ben"s revelatory take on Gary Higgins" "Thicker Than a Smokey" (pointing the way for our reissue of Red Hash later that year) and a deep vibe of spiritual folk-jazz throughout. And best of all? It was just the beginning of twenty years of sending the inspiration of Six Organs of Admittance out into the world! But today, we"re happy to send you back to School of the Flower. There"s nothing like it.

Elations Recordings presents "Depois do Silêncio", an intimate, forward-looking acoustic bass, digital keyboard and synthesiser recording by Brazilian avant-garde jazz luminaries Zeca Assumpção and Lelo Nazario. This release celebrates almost fifty years of the duo's friendship and musical affinity, continuing a musical dialogue between long-time collaborators. The duo began working together with Hermeto Pascoal's "Grupo Vice Versa" in the mid 1970s before forging one of Brazil's most adventurous experimental jazz groups "Grupo Um" in 1976; releasing three albums with a shared avant-garde and lateral, exploratory approach to sound fusing jazz and contemporary synthesis with expanded and prepared acoustic playing.

"Depois do Silêncio" reflects the duo's long development of a shared conception of music, resulting in a work that is both timeless and modern. The music on the album was primarily recorded in Nazario's UTOPIA Studio, São Paulo, in 1994, featuring Assumpção on acoustic bass and Nazario on his newly acquired Ensoniq TS-12; these recordings were supplemented with acoustic bass for "Quintal da Memória" in 2018 and completed with an additional layer of rich, complex analog and virtual synthesis following their rediscovery of the material in 2022.

Assumpção's deeply expressive acoustic bass playing forms the backbone of these compositions, augmented by Nazario's expansive and exploratory approach to synthesis, its constantly shifting timbres "making music a living organism, which adapts to situations as they appear." Nazario explains that "although the themes are written, much of the music is improvised based on an organic development of ideas, all intertwined and interrelated exactly as happens in a living organism".

The album title "Depois do Silêncio" (After Silence) references a phrase by the writer Aldous Huxley; "after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music". Assumpção and Nazario continue a search for new forms of musical expression, and here they succeed in creating music that "expands the sound of musical instruments, so opening new horizons in the minds of listeners".

Recital releases The Holy Restaurant, the new full-length album by Derek Baron, and their first solo LP since Curtain (Recital, 2020).

The album is built from years of miniature transcriptions of improvisations, functioning in many ways as a sister to Curtain. Half-thoughts and mistakes are revisited, gilded, and illuminated. The floorboards of the album are laid with piano, organ, string pads, while serrated accruements (distortions, flourishes, and recording interferences) step and drop overhead. The resulting conflux, as Baron notes in the accompanying booklet “becomes the point and the problem to explore.”

The second track “Oven Girls” opens with us galloping on a horse in some video-game meadow on a bed of MIDI strings. Abruptly, a helicopter soars over us and we transition to a latticed guitar and woodwind exploration. The album rolls on in this fashion, juxtaposing musical half-sentences within a museum of sounds rag-picked from history and daily life. Emotional interviews with Midwestern friars who build and sell caskets are set against gothic piano and guitar duets. On “Music in the Casket,” A disorienting and hilariously epic guitar solo erupts. The penultimate titular piece, “The Holy Restaurant,” sets a text written by Baron’s grandfather. A small chorus voices his words, echoing the humanistic storytelling of “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s A Letter From Home. Under sunlit piano progressions, a fleet of smokey trumpets emerges.

Running throughout the album is a series of “traces”: short melodic phrases painted over again and again with different real and MIDI instrumentation. The “luxurious asceticism of doubling” as Baron puts it. They explain, “Part of the allure for me is that the ‘original’ material is itself kind of thin, sketchy, meaningless, maybe calling attention to itself only by way of a felicitous mistake. Hearing, transcribing, and learning what was basically only ever played first on accident becomes the guiding concern.”

The album’s shifting, variegated forms and voices pass quickly; the record feels both comforting and elusive, suitable for any hour of the day.

The Holy Restaurant features guest players Ed Atkins, Lucy Liyou, Quentin Moore, Emily Martin, Dominic Frigo, Jacob Wick, and several of Baron’s family members. It is released in a limited edition vinyl pressing of 200 copies, accompanied by a booklet of effusive program notes by the composer, alongside an assemblage of photographs, scores, and artwork.

In between the folds of ceremony and commonality lies a perennial spring of musical expression.

A statement along the time continuum, or a testament to the resilient resourcefulness embedded in that truth, forms the philosophical approach of this album – the first outing of Dídac.
Studying an extensive archive of instruments, artifacts, and field recordings at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève—a space steeped in folkloric gesture – Dídac encountered a cosmos of liturgical music and folk song. Anchored in reverance for tradition and transformation alike, this album navigates the old-world Mediterranean lore through a post-modern ambient lens, threading drone, gentle rhythm, electroacoustic textures and the crude tactility of archival material into one woven tapestry.

Under the guidance of Dr. Madeleine Leclair, Dídac was invited to work within one of the world’s most extensive ethno- musicological archives—L’AIMP. In the saturated basements and tape-lined backrooms of the museum, he submerged himself in the sounds of ritual and rural life: wax cylinders from the Eastern Mediterranean, tapes of liturgical hymn, the worn edges of communal song.
In a makeshift studio on the fourth floor of the museum, he sifted through the hours of material he collected, gradually discovering that the archive was no static source – It did not dictate; rather, it served as a companion—offering not answers, but questions. Not a beaten track, but a cluster of sonic clues and riddles. Samples do appear occasionally, tenderly interwoven into the dialogue of the songs. In Dídac’s self-titled debut, the past is not worn as ornament or kitsch; it is listened to and responded to. The museum, its archives, and the visit to Geneva became a foundational culisse of sorts, igniting a myriad of rough cuts and improvisational outtakes.
Dídac, or Diego Ocejo Muñoz, was born in Madrid in 1994 to a family of both Catalan and Castilian origin.

Brought up in a religious household, the influence of the Catholic Church innately shaped the social fabric, schooling and daily life. This lingering dominance led the adolescent Diego into a path of rejection of everything sacramental, promptly resorting to subversion in the shape of grafitti, skateboarding and underground music. Only later in life, after a rigorous venture as an acid and electro producer, the Church re-emerged before him in new light, invoking a deep fascination for its mysticism, iconography and choral tradition.

Spain in general and Catalonia in particular, has long served as a crossroads of the eastern–western Mediterranean continuum, with many of its cultures sharing aspects of way of life and ceremony. At the MEG, Diego found himself puzzled with this realization, resulting in a sonic amalgamation that reaches farther away from the rugged mountains of Catalonia than you might perceive at first encounter.

The deeply embedded memory of rite and public ceremony, religious hymn and landscape—sieved through the undercurrent of personal re-emergence, forms the emotional topography of this album. The record does not trace this landscape; it inhabits it. Its repetitive mysticism and ambient, wide-eyed gaze could possibly evoke (perhaps redundant) comparisons to artists such as Dimitris Petsetakis, or Popol Vuh’s late 70’s cinema scores.
The delicate lines between the sacred and the secular – between memory and re-invention – serve as a cipher to understanding this album in its entirety. Titles like Malpàs Mines or Pantocrator’s Portal Outro nudge toward a folkloric and devotional bedrock—places where labor and spirituality coexist, where names preserve both dust and veneration.

Nevertheless, this is far from mere nostalgia. It is a reclamation — singing alongside the spirits of the past, nurturing what still hums beneath the soil. It is an intimate reflection on tradition, rebellion, adolescence, ceremony and fantasy – a pastoral contemplation on what once was and what is to be.

Debut album by Cindy is aptly called I'm Cindy. Produced by Kai Hugo a.k.a. Palmbomen II. Vinyl comes with a 20-page handmade booklet, an individually signed and kissed handkerchief of Cindy (some of them even have her teardrops on them) and a huge fold-out poster! Who exactly is Cindy? If producer Kai Hugo used oblique strategies it would be this question that's been central to his past four years of musical output. First appearing on his 2015 LP Palmbomen II as the titular subject of the track Cindy Savalas, her life has become intertwined with the producer's. "Following that release, I made a music video for Cindy Savalas, where Cindy came to life through the portrayal by Blue LoLan,' Hugo explains. 'I really felt a connection with this character and went deeper into developing who she was and the world she lived in. The result was the creation of the LP Memories Of Cindy, where my goal was to reveal more about Carmel Vista, the town Cindy lived in. Afterwards, I imagined Cindy having her own 'lost' album, as if she had once released a record that was kind of forgotten.' I'm Cindy is altogether different though. It sits at an uncommonly explored intersection between Italo disco and shoegaze - Cocteau Twins and Slowdive are mentioned as influences and you can hear that in the blurred textures and hazy synths of the 13 tracks here. But Hugo also revels in a chance to use his self-created character as a conduit to explore his love of both mainstream pop and its more skewed forms. In many ways the record is as much LoL?n's. It was she who gave the character her voice - initially across 27 tracks recorded with the producer - but her own connection to Cindy runs deeper than that. 'It makes me really nostalgic thinking about everything Cindy went through, she and I have similar feelings' says the vocalist. 'Cindy is a mix of me and Kai so when I listen to the album I feel like I'm half entering Kai's head and half in mine, with a whole bunch of deep emotions, purity and loneliness that just makes me want to dance and cuddle with all my cats in a disco forest somewhere outside of Carmel Vista.'

Debut album by Cindy is aptly called I'm Cindy. Produced by Kai Hugo a.k.a. Palmbomen II. Who exactly is Cindy? If producer Kai Hugo used oblique strategies it would be this question that's been central to his past four years of musical output. First appearing on his 2015 LP Palmbomen II as the titular subject of the track Cindy Savalas, her life has become intertwined with the producer's. "Following that release, I made a music video for Cindy Savalas, where Cindy came to life through the portrayal by Blue LoLan,' Hugo explains. 'I really felt a connection with this character and went deeper into developing who she was and the world she lived in. The result was the creation of the LP Memories Of Cindy, where my goal was to reveal more about Carmel Vista, the town Cindy lived in. Afterwards, I imagined Cindy having her own 'lost' album, as if she had once released a record that was kind of forgotten.' I'm Cindy is altogether different though. It sits at an uncommonly explored intersection between Italo disco and shoegaze - Cocteau Twins and Slowdive are mentioned as influences and you can hear that in the blurred textures and hazy synths of the 13 tracks here. But Hugo also revels in a chance to use his self-created character as a conduit to explore his love of both mainstream pop and its more skewed forms. In many ways the record is as much LoL?n's. It was she who gave the character her voice - initially across 27 tracks recorded with the producer - but her own connection to Cindy runs deeper than that. 'It makes me really nostalgic thinking about everything Cindy went through, she and I have similar feelings' says the vocalist. 'Cindy is a mix of me and Kai so when I listen to the album I feel like I'm half entering Kai's head and half in mine, with a whole bunch of deep emotions, purity and loneliness that just makes me want to dance and cuddle with all my cats in a disco forest somewhere outside of Carmel Vista.'

SDK is the collaboration between Stano and David Kitt. Stano, a post-punk pioneer from Dublin, is known for his strikingly individual work. A recurring collaborator with All City, Going Back to the Unknown marks his first new material for the label and his return to vocal work after many years.

The project began after a chance meeting at All City led to a connection with David Kitt. In Kitt’s studio, guitars, pedals, tape delay, and synths combined to form dense, dreamlike textures. The music moves between ambient atmospheres, layered guitars, and fractured song forms. Stano’s words appear only where the music calls for them:

“I just turned the pages until the right lyric appeared — I like when the music dictates what the words should be.”

On the collaborative process, Stano adds:

“There wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just a reaction to what David was playing. It seemed to happen organically, we were really on the same wavelength. At the end of that day I knew we had something really interesting.”

The result is Going Back to the Unknown, a collection shaped as much by intuition and chance as by design. The album is completed by Kitt’s contribution “Fireworks,” which seals the record’s arc.

Argentine pianist Hernán Jacinto and Uruguayan drummer Mateo Ottonello, come together in this boundary-pushing duo album recorded in New York. Blending acoustic and electronic textures, tradition and innovation, this project reimagines South American jazz through a contemporary lens-offering a powerful journey into the evolving sound of the Rio de la Plata. The two shores of the Río de la Plata-Buenos Aires and Montevideo-share a deep and vibrant jazz tradition, one that merges global influences with the region's rich musical heritage. For over half a century, rhythms like tango, candombe, and milonga have intertwined with jazz and other instrumental forms, continually exploring new directions and pushing creative boundaries. Argentine pianist and composer Hernán Jacinto and Uruguayan drummer and percussionist Mateo Ottonello embody this spirit of exploration. Though from different generations, both are among the most innovative voices in the Río de la Plata music scene-artists unafraid to blend past and present in pursuit of something new. Recorded in New York, their duo album offers a journey into the musical soul of the Río de la Plata, reimagined through a contemporary lens. It weaves a rich tapestry of acoustic and electronic textures, tradition and experimentation, groove and introspection. More than a fusion, it's a reinvention-revealing a new dimension of South American jazz musicianship.

The Sator Arepo, or Sator Square, is an ancient word puzzle comprising five palindromes that's etched on various historical sites throughout the Western world. Its origins are unknown, but the square has long been thought to hold magical properties, used as a charm against illness and evil, to cure insanity or to determine whether someone was guilty of witchcraft. Self-styled "punk ethnomusicologist", acoustician and musician Julien Hairon uses this mystical symbol as the starting point for his debut Judgitzu album in an attempt to reconnect with his Celtic heritage, exploring how its hallowed messages might harmonize with contemporary Tanzanian dance music.Hairon has been traveling across the world for over a decade, collecting field recordings from countries such as Indonesia, Australia, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh, and presenting them on his Les Cartes Postales Sonores label, re-issuing any curious cassettes and CDs he came across on the PetPets' TAPES imprint. It was during this time that he became fascinated by rituals that involved spirits, prompting him to examine his own ancestry when he returned to Brittany. "Many artifacts in the landscape remain," Hairon explains, "and the power of spirits is still palpable." He represents this Celtic mysticism on 'Sator Arepo' with murky drones and magickal synth tones, using xenharmonic scales (tuning outside of standard 12-tone equal temperament) that reach back to the ancient world. These sounds are augmented with fast-paced, sci-fi rhythms informed by his time in Tanzania; "Singeli has contaminated me," admits the producer.The most astonishing example of this is 'Miracle', a thrusting soundsystem experiment that layers serpentine, bagpipe-esque electronic wails over extravagant clusters of blocky percussion. Driven by the frenetic 175BPM pulse that echoes through the streets of Dar Es Salaam - popularized globally by forward-thinking producers like Sisso, Duke and Jay Mitta - Hairon opens up a rare conversation, seeking to draw parallels between today's most urgent dance forms and the archaic rituals of antiquity. On 'Vitalimetre', Hairon drives his sonic palette into the red, harmonizing with Dutch hardstyle and gabber, and splaying distorted drones over maddeningly blown-out kicks and ratcheting percussion. 'L'or Des Fous' takes a more meditative route, prioritizing Hairon's eccentric tonality with expressive sheets of pitch-warped sound that ghost walk across energized, rattling beats.If you heard Hairon's last Judgitzu release 'Umeme / Kelele', described by Boomkat as "one of 2019's deadliest dancefloor sessions," then you'll know how mindboggling this material can be. And with 'Sator Arepo', the French producer deepens his reach, grasping a world that we've almost forgotten and juxtaposing it with a landscape most of us barely comprehend.

Following the reissue of their acclaimed debut album in July - Rocket Girl Records is proud to announce the second transmission in the triptych of releases from Welsh sonic alchemists, White Noise Sound (WNS): an exultant, transmutational remix album celebrating the band’s admired self-titled inaugural LP featuring Pete Kember/Sonic Boom, Cian Ciaran (Super Furry Animals), Phil Kieran (techno producer/DJ), Sean Johnson (Hardway Bros) and Timothy J Fairplay (Andrew Weatherall’s Scrutton Street Circle).

WNS’s cult 2010 self-titled debut saw the band channelling their own chimeric wall-of-sound - an incantation in layers of feedback, kosmische rhythms and celestial distortion.  Now, that spell is rewritten.

Fold In Time - WNS1 Remixed sees an extraordinary line-up of artists from across the psychedelic and electronic spectrums dive deep into the band’s original recordings, dynamically reimagining the sonic architecture - unearthing new forms, hidden frequencies and arcane resonances.

Furthering the mythology of an album revered in underground circles - by peers and critics alike - these remixes push the band’s hypnotic, feedback-soaked sound into entirely new dimensions.  Expect deep psych, repetitive beats, acid purity, expansive dubbed-out landscapes and spectral ambient drones.  Tracks collapse and re-emerge, shimmering with new light.

“We wanted to honour the spirit of the original album while inviting some of our favourite artists to completely destroy it,” says White Noise Sound’s Adam Tovey.

Returning to Die Schachtel with his fourth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music - overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, - “Lacinia” stands as a high-water mark in Pilia’s already remarkable and forward-looking career.

Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi ArchettI, Valerio Tricoli, etc. Running like a spine through the label’s output is a deep dedication to the work of the Italian guitarist and electroacoustic composer Stefano Pilia. Now Die Schachtel returns with “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth full-length with the label and their first release of 2024. Building on the ground of deeply personal engagement with metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, explored within his previous LP with Die Schachtel, 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, “Lacinia” encounters the composer working in close calibration with various ensembles, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze and Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, weaving synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion into an astounding reconfiguration of immersive, contemporary minimalism that stands among Pilia’s most noteworthy releases to date. Issued by Die Schachtel in two special double vinyl editions and a CD edition, “Lacinia” features artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano, and is an absolute marvel that draws you in and doesn’t let go.

First emerging during the early 2000s, over the past two decades – via solo releases and numerous collations with artists like Oren Ambarchi, Valerio Tricoli, Alessandra Novaga, Z'EV, Andrea Belfi, David Grubbs, and numerous others - the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia has presented a singular voice within Italian experimental music, harnessing visceral energy and hands-on immediacy within delicately woven tapestries of sonority, each investigating the sculptural properties of sound and illuminating its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time. “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth solo venture with Die Schachtel, encounters the composer reentering his longstanding practice of collaboration with various ensemble forms, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze, for the albums central piece, “Lacinia Off Axis”, spinning stunning string confirmations by Pietro David Carami and Elena Maury on violin, Alessandro Savio on viola, and Mattia Cipolli on cello.

A new, important cycle of compositions by Pilia, “Lacinia” (meaning "lace" in Latin) builds upon the exploration of the metaphysical, spiritual, and divine dimensions through numbers, geometry, and the creation of tonal forms explored by 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, mirroring archetypal, immutable forms at the juncture of the abstract realm of mathematics and architectural structures in the physical world, expands the poetics and compositional ideas featured in its predecessor. Regraded by Pilia as both a series of individual compositions and a single work, “Lacinia” was conceived to “define a circular path (a sort of "rhizomatic lace") where the beginning and end touch, suggesting the concept of time not only as linear but also cyclical and ritualistic—an eternal return, a process of transformation where matter changes, its state changes, but without altering the invisible internal principle of mutation”, embarking upon a a series of “steps, degrees, and energetic quanta in a progression of archetypal whole numbers and transcendent creation.”

The resulting 16 tracks unfold as a series of complex sonic meditations. While deeply resonant with the minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Eliane Radigue, Pilia digs deep and moves far beyond the predictable tonal relationships and structures of that idiom, echoing the ancient liturgical and devotional music of composers like Gesualdo da Venosa, Monteverdi, and John Dowland, at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music.

Fascinatingly structured as a whole to include a number of motif returns, across which we encounter works like “Lacinia Off Axis” appearing in slightly different rendering, states, or evolutions three times, and compositions like “Eve” appearing twice in subtly different forms and arrangements - first for four oscillators, guitar and voice and then for string orchestra - as well “Maris Stella”, which similarly makes two appearances, first for horn trio, organ and percussion, and then for string orchestra, with “Lacinia” Pilia delves further into the world of chamber music than ever before, creating a deeply inward, mediative body of work the totality of which, guided by its rich string arrangements of arching, sorrowful tone, feels almost like a mass for some unproclaimed loss; simultaneously locked in the nuances of a moment, while managing to suspend time.

Perhaps most remarkable is Pilia's ability to create a remarkable sense of sonic cohesion while using such a varied number of ensembles and instrumentation. From the sprawling string arrangements delivered by Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, under the direction of Paolo Mancini, and Ensemble Concordanze, and a flute trio (Cadux / Plectere) brilliantly played by Manuel Zurria, to pieces for sax, organ and percussion, violin duo and percussion, organ and percussion, Pilia manages to create a sense of singular, encompassing world that flows forward like a shifting stream.

Overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, “Lacinia” is unquestionably a high-water mark in Stefano Pilia’s already remarkable, forward-looking career. Nothing short of a marvel of contemporary Minimalism that, through its shifting arrangements of harmonics, tonality, and texture draws flickering images of ancient forms of music into the present day, “Lacinia” is Issued by Die Schachtel in two special editions on double vinyl and a CD edition, featuring artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano. This is an immersive all-consuming listen that can’t be missed.

Furthering the passionate exploration of cinema that has guided her two previous LPs - 2017’s ‘Fassbinder Wunderkammer’ and 2020’s ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’ - the Milanese guitarist/composer, Alessandra Novaga, returns to Die Schachtel with ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’, two sides off shimmering, tense compositions – culminating as one of her most creatively ambitious and conceptually rich outings to date – freely inspired by the life and work of the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Classically trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland, over the last decade Alessandra Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy’s thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, rendering striking solo efforts, in addition to collaborations with Loren Connors, Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Nicola Ratti, Paula Matthusen, Sandro Mussida, Kid Millions, Travis Just, Francesco Gagliardi, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar embarks upon a relentless deconstruction and rethinking of her instrument’s unique properties through distinct applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating in a deeply personal and emotive music, seeking narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound.

In 2017, with the LP, ‘Fassbinder Wunderkammer’, issued by Setola Di Maiale, Novaga embarked upon the exploration of her love of film. Having begun with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was followed in 2020 by Die Schachtel’s release of ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’, a deeply intimate mediation on the life and work of Derek Jarman. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration or a single film to work from, these pieces achieve a form of abstract portraiture, distilling elements drawn from these filmmaker’s life and work into ambient networks of texture and tonality. ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle”’ freely inspired by the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, finds Novaga radically expanding her sonic palette within this approach.

The seeds of ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ can be traced to a conversation that Novaga had with Alan Licht (contained in the highly regarded Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians 1995–2020, Blank Forms, 2021), relating to the connections between music and cinema, which led her to consider Andrej Tarkovsky’s use of Bach's music within a symbiotic framework: how the music illuminates the imagism of the films, and the film illuminates new dimensions of the music. Slowly developing over the subsequent years, the resulting album comprises six individual works, some of which draw directly upon pieces of Bach’s music that Tarkovsky used in his films – specifically 'Erbarme dich, Mein Gott', 'Das alte Jahr vergangen ist', and 'Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ' - while others draw upon the sensibilities and moods evoked in the imagination by the director’s films.

As a point of departure and illumination into the process and spirit that underscored the creation of the album, Novaga points toward a passage in Tarkovsky’s "Sculpting in Time”:

“Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake. What purports to be art begins to look like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalized action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher and communal idea.”

‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ can be understood as a realisation of the collectivism of which Tarkovsky speaks, in the service of something far beyond the expression of self. Encountering Novaga moving into fairly uncharted waters, three of the album’s pieces incorporate the human voice we encounter the voices of others: that of the poet Arsenij Tarkovsky, the director’s father; a singer from Bach’s ‘Erbarme dich, Mein Gott’, capturing a broadcast in an underground parking lot, and Novaga’s own, rendering the melody from Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”. Roughly alternating between solo excursions on guitar and bristling electroacoustic pieces, over the course of the album’s two sides Novaga weaves one of her most abstract and ambitious bodies of recordings to date, shifting between the complex tonal mediations generated by the six strings of her instrument, and phycological densities activated by the expanded pallet of sonority made possible by the tactics and approaches of musique concrète.

An immersive, deeply engaging meeting of beauty and melancholy within a labyrinth of voices and ideas, ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ transfigures the life and work of Andrej Tarkovski – one of the greatest auteurs in the history of cinema – into a singular, experimental statement of collective truth. Belonging to recent, ambitious stream of contemporary new music releases on Die Schachtel that’s already included Novaga’s ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’, Stefano Pilia’s ‘Spiralis Aurea’, Jim O'Rourke & Giovanni Di Domenico’ ‘Immanent In Nervous Activity’, Claudio Rocchetti’s ‘Labirinto Verticale’, and Damāvand’s ‘As Long As You Come To My Garden’, among others, ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ is available on as a limited edition of 300 dark turquoise vinyl LPs released on June 21, 2024. The LP, designed by Bruno Stucchi / dinamomilano, comes with an 8-pages insert illuminated by Alessandra’s text as well as the lovely and intense photographs of Matilde Piazzi.

A hill repeating its own name.

Ben Beinn — mountain mountain — an imagined summit, recursive and unstable.

Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, and deepens his exploration of environment, voice, and abstraction. If the previous record moved with flowing water and submerged hymns, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability: passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.

Across ten tracks, Poole entangles the Celtic New Age sound world — traditional instrumentation (flute, low whistle, bagpipe, piano, strings) — with synthesis, environmental recordings, and abstracted voice. The sound palette is tactile — marked by microtonal harmony, swelling dissonance, and a breathy naïvety. Voices in Gaelic, Norwegian, and English surface and dissolve, stretched beyond recognition — more weather than word.

The album’s title refers to a tautological hill — Ben Beinn, or “mountain mountain” — a recursive site where motifs surface, fracture, and re-emerge. On 365 Days of Rain, rainfall data becomes a rhythmic lattice that slips from metrical order. 1000 opens the record in cinematic emergence: mountain icicles and frozen streams swell into strings and breathy melodic weight. Pulling from the connective folktales of hill and mountain trolls — “Dance for a thousand years,” Poole writes, “for jeg har sovet tidlig så lenge.”

Recorded in Scotland between 2024–2025, Ben Beinn draws from environmental recordings of frozen hill passes, storm drains, and peat bogs using contact mics and hydrophones. Rather than simply reflecting place, these recordings press against it — layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. An inflection point between fabrication — folk music as performed identity, a carrier of story — and its obfuscation through digital networks, where tradition is refracted into plural forms.

Musical reference points include the emotionally saturated textures of Inoyama Land, the folk-electronic hybrids of Eli Storbekken, the hyperrealist collage practices of Noah Creshevsky, and the disquieting sonic simulations of James Ferraro. While Ferraro captures the uncanny surfaces of networked life, Ben Beinn turns inward — toward a located listening, shaped by weather, memory, and terrain.

The second in a triptych that began with In a River Shadow, Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods. If the first record submerged itself in flowing water and submerged hymns, this one is shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky — a music of erosion, recurrence, and elemental presence.

Wrong Filament embodies Robert Piotrowicz's creation of fictional traditional music - not studied but invented, a utopian and oniric construct that becomes tangible in sound. These imagined traditions act as communal forces of music-making, resisting dominant structures of power.

The album unfolds in six dense compositions built on rhythm, repetition and minimal melodic gestures that draw on archetypal patterns of Eastern European traditions. Entirely synthetic yet strikingly instrumental in character, they develop as autonomous sound events, expanding into multi-part forms that evoke the physicality of ensemble performance - as if played by an imagined community of musicians.

Rather than reconstruction, Piotrowicz invents forged dances - a pre-techno of sorts, where complex meters and dense textures point to a parallel history of collective sound beyond industrial uniformity. They imagine a utopian and fictional genealogy of collective sound: one where industrial modernity yields to more unstable, communal energies.

This is celebratory music with invocatory charge: calls to dance, echoes of ceremony, microtonal melodies shaped by emotional weight, and traces of Eastern ornamentation stretched through synthetic means. Wrong Filament sacralises performance through sound alone, spinning a world where spectres of collective experience vibrate against the limits of rupture and resistance.

These pieces confront the traces of violence inscribed in body and memory, yet also affirm freedom, emancipation and integration. They manifest celebration, identity and resistance while opening a path toward liberation and shared needs that exceed social, private and intimate categories.

Belgian singer-songwriter Emma Hessels releases her debut EP 'Constant Distance' on October 24 via Unday Records. With a voice that lingers long after the song has ended and lyrics that feel like pages torn from a diary, Hessels has quickly carved out her place in the Belgian scene. She was named laureate of Sound Track in 2023, went on to play intimate yet arresting sets at Ancienne Belgique, Botanique, and the prestigious Cirque Royal, and appeared at Best Kept Secret this summer.

Milestones that signaled the arrival of a singular new voice in folk and soul.

'Constant Distance' gathers six songs bound by a recurring undercurrent: the presence of distance in its many forms - absence, longing, loneliness, the fear of loss, but also the desire for belonging. The songs weren't conceived around a single theme, but when brought together, a pattern revealed itself. Loss implies distance, longing implies distance, even love can. Yet the EP closes on 'Breaking', a gospel-tinged anthem of connection and alignment, written during a women's writer's retreat where community and music became inseparable.

Musically, 'Constant Distance' moves between folk and soul, carrying the feel of modern blues and occasionally leaning into gospel's call-and-response. The atmosphere is warm and nostalgic, drawing inspiration from Laura Marling, Damien Rice and Big Thief as much as from Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone and Richie Havens. Emma's voice remains the constant thread: soulful, unforced, quietly commanding. "I hope my songs can be like a warm blanket, something that keeps you company, that makes you feel a little less alone."

Though written solo on guitar, often during long train rides, the songs expanded into layered productions through collaboration with Aram Santy, Nard Houdmeyers and Fender Mackenson Rooms, with additional contributions such as Marthe van Droogenbroeck's evocative trumpet. Recorded over two intense days at Studio Beertje, the EP captures both intimacy and expansiveness. The result is music that carries the weight of Emma's fears and questions, but also the joy of collective creation.

With 'Constant Distance', Emma Hessels doesn't just deliver a debut - she opens a world where fragility and strength coexist, and where music becomes a way of closing the gap between people.

Die Cinematic-Funk-Visionäre The Diasonics liefern mit ihrem neuen Album ,Ornithology", das am 3. Oktober über Record Kicks veröffentlicht wird, ein weiteres solides Set aus östlich angehauchtem Psychedelic, Cinematic und Disco-Funk. Nach ihrem 2022 von der Kritik gefeierten Debütalbum ,Origin of Forms", das von PopMatters zum Library Music Album of the Year gekürt wurde, kehren die in Moskau ansässigen Instrumentalisten The Diasonics mit ,Ornithology" zurück, einem zweiten Album, das ihre klanglichen Grenzen erweitert und gleichzeitig ihrem unverwechselbaren Stil treu bleibt. Aufgenommen in ihrem eigens errichteten Studio 23, das sich in einer umgebauten Lampenfabrik aus der Sowjet-Ära befindet, ist das Album das Ergebnis von zwei Jahren intensiver kreativer Erkundungen und Experimente. Mit ihrer ganz eigenen Mischung aus cineastischem Funk, östlich angehauchten Melodien, instrumentalem Hip-Hop und analogem Soul haben sich The Diasonics einen einzigartigen Platz in der globalen Funkszene geschaffen. ,Ornithology" markiert ein neues Kapitel: Inspiriert von wiederkehrenden Vogelmotiven in ihrer Umgebung, von Zügen und Bahnhöfen bis hin zu lokaler Folklore und den Schreien der Vögel, die über ihrem Studio kreisen, kanalisiert die Platte Ideen von Bewegung und Freiheit, sowohl thematisch als auch musikalisch. ,Das Thema Vögel und Ornithologie ergab sich ganz von selbst - wir fingen einfach an, überall um uns herum vogelähnliche Namen zu bemerken: Züge und Bahnhöfe, Geschäfte, Orte, Nachnamen von Menschen, Bücher und Filme", sagt die Band. "Wir besorgten uns ein paar alte Synthesizer und stimmten die Oszillatoren, während wir den Schreien der Möwen lauschten, die um die Fabrik flogen, in der sich unser Studio befand. Die Ideen von Flug, Freiheit und Raum wurden zentral für die Musik des neuen Albums." Klanglich gehören zu den wesentlichen Merkmalen von Ornithology nicht nur die Synthesizer, sondern auch Diana Grebs hypnotischer Gesang, der sich nahtlos in die Klangpalette einfügt und dem instrumentalen Funk Leben und Seele einhaucht. ,In unserer Vorstellung balancieren wir wie Vögel zwischen der Erde und dem Himmel und haben versucht, unsere eigene musikalische Sprache innerhalb des Konzepts der Ornithologie zu erschaffen, die den Wunsch eines jeden Menschen widerspiegelt, den Vögeln näher zu kommen und frei zu schweben, jenseits von physischen oder mentalen Grenzen." Die 2019 gegründete vierköpfige Band, bestehend aus Daniil Lutsenko (E-Gitarre), Kamil Gazizov (Keyboards), Maksim Brusov (Bass) und Anton Moskvin (Schlagzeug & Perkussion), erlangte durch eine Reihe von begehrten 45er-Scheiben auf Mocambo Records und Funk Night Records schnell Kultstatus. Ihr von der Kritik hochgelobtes Debütalbum Origin of Forms,, das von Henry Jenkins, dem Produzenten der australischen Kultband Surprise Chef, gemischt wurde, erschien 2022 auf Record Kicks und wurde von PopMatters (US) zum Library Music Album" des Jahres und von FIP (Radio France) zum Album des Monats gekürt. Das Vinyl war innerhalb weniger Wochen ausverkauft und ist nun in der internationalen Cinematic-Funk-Szene sehr gefragt. ,Origin of Forms" erhielt begeisterte Kritiken von Zeitschriften wie Wax Poetics, Mojo, Rolling Stone FR, Clash, Uncut und wurde von Jamie Cullum (BBC2), KEXP, Radio France und Huey Morgan, Don Letts, Cerys Matthews und Tom Ravenscroft von BBC 6 Music, um nur einige zu nennen, unterstützt und gespielt. Mit dem neuen Album Ornithology tauchen The Diasonics in üppige Synthesizer, stripped-down Grooves und rohes instrumentales Zusammenspiel ein, schöpfen aus der Library-Musik der 1970er Jahre, sowjetischer Jazz-Fusion und Disco-Funk und liefern eine weitere supersolide Veröffentlichung, die all die Einzigartigkeit bestätigt und vorantreibt, die ,Origin of Forms" so verlockend machte. Unverzichtbar für Fans von Khruangbin, Surprise Chef und instrumentalen Funk-Grooves.

»Chitin« captures Berlin-based duo Narval (Peter Strickmann and Evgenija Wassilew) in a series of recordings made during a 2025 residency in the village of Schöppingen, Münsterland. Known for their use of everyday objects, self-built wind and percussion instruments, feedback systems, and small-scale electronics, Narval treat the performance space itself as a collaborator. In Schöppingen, this meant farmhouses, a parish church, a sculptor’s studio, and surrounding cornfields — each site imprinting its acoustics and atmosphere onto the performances. The result is a set of recordings where birds, insects, and ambient traces of rural life seep into the music, blurring the boundary between intentional gesture and environmental chance.

The title refers to chitin: the hard-yet-flexible material that forms insect shells, fungal walls, and crustacean exoskeletons. Like tape or rural matter, it is at once protective and permeable, tactile and intimate — qualities mirrored in the album’s sound world. By working with a deliberately limited palette of tools, Narval allow small sonic details to accumulate into shifting durations, giving each piece the strange, layered texture of surfaces both organic and mechanical. Chitin offers a portrait of site-specific listening where the line between instrument and environment continually dissolves.

Peter Strickmann – objects, smartphone, ceramophone, cornfield, iron bar Evgenija Wassilew – AM radio, prepared Stylophone, feedback, smartphone, Bastl Kastle, iron bar Recorded by Peter Strickmann and Evgenija Wassilew Mastered by Jacob Calland

Maurizio Pollinis Einspielung der Polonaisen, die inzwischen Klassikerstatus erreicht haben, sind nun als Teil der Original Source Serie erhältlich. Pollinis Spiel ist sowohl von herausragender Beherrschung als auch von subtiler Poesie geprägt. Seine höchste Leistung besteht darin, die Unmittelbarkeit einer inspirierten Improvisation zu suggerieren und gleichzeitig die formschöne Einheit eines vorgedachten Ganzen zu bewahren. Um eine optimale Audioqualität zu gewährleisten, wurde das Werk von den ursprünglichen 4-Spur-Bändern neu gemastert, in 45rpm geschnitten und auf zwei LPs verteilt.

Die audiophile Vinyl-Serie The Original Source präsentiert herausragende Aufnahmen der 1970er Jahre in ganz neuer Klangqualität. Dafür haben die renommierten Emil Berliner Studios die originalen Vier- und Achtspur-Bänder mit eigens für die Produktion der Serie entwickelten Technologien in 100% analoger Qualität (AAA) neu gemastert und geschnitten. Die klanglichen Unterschiede zu den Originalveröffentlichungen sind beträchtlich: Größere Klarheit, mehr Feinheiten und Verbesserungen im Frequenzgang, zugleich weniger Nebengeräusche, Verzerrungen und Komprimierungen ermöglichen ein audiophiles Hörerlebnis wie nie zuvor.

Auf 180g Vinylplatten und in einer Deluxe-Gatefold Edition mit Originalcovers und -texten werden die Exemplare dieser Serie limitiert und nummeriert veröffentlicht, begleitet von zusätzlichen Fotos und Faksimiles der Aufnahmeprotokolle und Bandkartons.

NILS FRAHM and F.S.BLUMM have confirmed the release of their fifth collaborative album, Handling. Containing three tracks but 40 minutes long, it finds the duo advancing from 2021’s dub-influenced 2X1=4, deploying its lessons in ambitious new territory that also nods to earlier collections. Recorded at his studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album will be released by LEITER on vinyl and via all digital platforms on September 19, 2025.

Handling’s three exquisitely detailed pieces are each entitled ‘Leuchter,’ German for ‘candlestick,’ encapsulating the LP’s luminescent glow and rising inner energy. Its scrupulous arrangements exploit a magic cabinet of instruments, among them pianos, celestas and cristal baschets, glockenspiels, guitars and multiple forms of percussion. Their painstakingly engineered improvisations were equally meticulously reassembled in a series of intense editing sessions.

That the duo’s collaboration is built on a friendship and mutual admiration dating back to the early 2000s enables an unusual level of trust, despite both operating in their own distinct manner. “It’s not Frank, it’s not Nils,” they reflect. “We’ve become a new persona.” Handling blends Blumm’s organic chaos with Frahm’s structured intuition, offering a distinct and luminous experience that doesn’t just sound different, but feels like its own evolving world.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Melopea, presenting two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches. After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s (BT079 and BT092), the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom with which Cuni explored new contexts and settings for her singing.

Both make use of a long recording of Cuni singing the pentatonic Raag Bhoop (or Bhopali) made in 2012 by her partner Werner Durand in Berlin. ‘Melopea’ began from Cuni and Durand’s superimposition of this recording with violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker’s performance of Éliane Radigue’s ‘Occam River II’. Inspired by the beauty of this chance encounter (and other experiments with non-synchronous collaboration during the pandemic years), Tarozzi and Walker recorded independently, without hearing Cuni’s voice but ‘having her present in memory’. Tarozzi and Walker’s bowed strings places Cuni’s magisterial performance in a new context, emphasising, as Radigue commented upon hearing the initial layering of her piece with Cuni’s voice, a shared ‘searching toward the partials, overtones, these natural constituents of acoustical sounds in their richness’. Beginning with whispered bowed harmonics, the violin and cello swap the stability of dhrupad’s traditional tanpura drone for a slowly evolving, uneasy web of harmonic interactions recalling some of Harley Gaber’s work, sometimes sitting on dissonances for long periods or allowing changing interference patterns to come to the fore. Primarily focusing on her lower register, Cuni’s performance demonstrates her mastery of microtonal pitch subtleties, elegant sweeping glissandi and meditatively unhurried pacing.

The continuation of the same recording by Cuni forms the foundation of ‘Bhoop-Murchana’, with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone. In contrast to the randomised layering of the first piece, here Durand and Caddy have carefully selected pitches based on the raag Cuni sings, using the ‘Murchana’ form, which uses the constituent notes of the raag as tonics of new raags, retaining the same interval structure. Both players who have developed tones of striking depth and harmonic purity on their instruments, Caddy and Durand’s patient long tones are simultaneously rigorously grounded in the physical properties of sound and possessed of an immaterial, floating quality. Combined with Cuni’s voice and, near the piece’s end, her contributions on hammered and plucked tanpura, the effect borders on miraculous. To surrender to this music is like slipping into an onsen pool, feeling the instantaneous release of every tension. Accompanied by liner notes from Durand, Tarozzi and Walker, Melopea is both a moving tribute to the profound art of Amelia Cuni and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to it.

“Tunggak Semi” is the third album from Indonesian musician and producer Bambang Pranoto. Originally released in 2000, it’s an exemplary slice of what has become his signature style, a dream-like meditation on aspects of nature, combining elements of accordion, acoustic guitar, flute and percussion. The compositions cross eastern and western notation to inhabit a world of their own, a world between worlds, where harmonies reflect the beauty and joy of nature.

Bambang had a rather atypical entry into music, and studied electronics and telecommunications, before he took advantage of the wave of computer software like Cubase and Protools in the 1990s that enabled him to set about recording his own compositions and soundscapes. After playing in groups, he developed his own approach to constructing his productions. He invites musicians to record interpretations of his themes, which he then pieces together in Protools like a jigsaw puzzle. “The musicians have never even met!” he chuckled on a Skype call.

“Tunggak Semi” refers to the giant trees that appear all over Bali, and their process of renewal and regeneration. “If you cut the tree, and leave the roots, they will grow again. Everytime we cut, they grow again. It’s limitless. This philosophy means there’s always something new coming, whether an idea or music, anything.” This approach has grown out of Bambang’s studies into meditation, including Indian and Chinese scriptures, also Balinese and Indonesian religions. Music, like meditation, is a daily practice, and acceptance of the music and its ‘unfinishedness’, forms a central part of the process.

“We must not just think, but we must also feel, and we must accept that feeling,” explains Bambang, and that’s a step of opening one’s mind to possibility. It seems in keeping with two of Bambang’s musical inspirations, namely Ryuichi Sakamoto and Peter Gabriel, both known for their love of world folk music, and fusion of musical traditions. That’s mirrored in Bambang’s own collage-like approach, recording elements and piecing them together to make something unimagined. While the acoustic sound palette for “Tunggak Semi” is rooted in live recordings, Bambang is not afraid to put the digital technology to good use.

“We have to use the computer as a tool in the best way we can,” Bambang says. “Sometimes people say music is made by people, not by the computer, but it’s just another piece of equipment. What can we compose from this equipment? It’s technology music!”

Written and produced by Bambang Pranoto at interactive garden studio, Depok, Bogor between September and December 2001. 2025 version remastered by Wouter Brandenburg at Brandenburg Mastering.