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Lukah’s unprecedented trajectory shatters new heights with A Lost Language Found, his most thoughtful, sonically-diverse record yet. With the multiplatinum OG Statik Selektah on production duties, Lukah’s by now iconic, razor-sharp pen-game goes toe-to-toe with some of the best. Trading verses with Houston innovator Bun B, Memphis legend 8 Ball, and the larger than life Killer Mike, all parties involved operate at the peak of their skill. The first of what will be multiple collaborations with heavyweight hip-hop producers, this new LP establishes what we already knew in our hearts: Lukah is here to take over.

The stage set to deliver this latest opus is intensely personal: in the heart of his community, Lukah holds court with his trusted fellows at his great grandmother’s house in French Fort, Memphis, a historically black neighborhood long rec-ognized as a stately, proud vision of Black suburbia in a city still healing from deep racial trauma. Recently laid to rest in Elmwood Cemetery, the pain and strength of mourning her influence is present in the deep lyrics of A Lost Lan-guage Found, where Lukah traces not just his own legacy, but that of the linguistically rich and diverse dialects of his people. The cover image depicts the game room of the house, a place that once hosted civil rights leaders and revolu-tionaries, now a monument both to a history of leadership and to its future. For the first time, Lukah himself appears on the album art to mark this significant occasion, flanked by his partners, the symbolic source of knowledge in his hand. Listening to Lukah spit has always been a privilege and a revelation. His artistic power lies in uncovering secrets thru torrents of lucid, poetic rhymes. The listener is invited to share in this bountiful feast. Witness the real god expansion.

The album is available as a limited edition vinyl release of 500 copies in gatefold jacket.

RAWAX welcomes TIJ from UK to the artist family!
Highly recommended!

KITCHEN. LABEL is proud to present AGATE, the latest album by Japanese artist MEITEI, marking a deepening of the world he first shaped through his Kofū trilogy released between 2020 - 2023.

Named after the mineral agate, a stone formed through slow accumulation, pressure, and time, the album reflects MEITEI’s patient approach to sound. AGATE brings together extended and newly rearranged works from across the Kofū cycle alongside new compositions and passages, refining material developed through years of performance and sustained practice.

The album presents seven tracks:

HAŌ (Previously unreleased track)
SHIN-OIRAN (Remodeled from Oiran I, Kofū 2020)
SHIN-SADAYAKKO (Remodeled from Sadayakko, Kofū 2020)
SHIN-WAROSOKU (Remodeled from Wa-rōsoku, Kofū III 2023)
KYŪGEKI (Remodeled from Shinobi and Akira Kurosawa, Kofū II 2021)
SHIN-OIRAN II (Remodeled from Oiran II, Kofū 2020)
SHIN-EDOGAWARANPO (Remodeled from Edogawa Ranpo, Kofū III 2023)
Across these works, MEITEI expands the musical vocabulary first introduced in Kofū, a sound he once described as “lost Japanese mood.” While Kofū drew from fragments of folklore, theatre, ghost stories, and forgotten urban memory, it was never an act of historical reconstruction. Rather, it reflected a sensibility of the past observed from the present. With AGATE, this worldview is clarified as Shinpu, a process of discovery in which historical awareness becomes a foundation for contemporary creation rather than a constraint.

During five years of Kofū tours across Japan, Europe, and Asia, MEITEI performed this material in a wide range of spaces, from underground live houses and listening rooms to culturally significant sites. These environments influenced pacing, dynamics, and structure, shaping how the material evolved over time. AGATE is therefore not only a studio album, but the result of material refined through repeated performance.

If the Kofū albums were windows into forgotten eras, AGATE explores what lies beneath, sediment and strata formed through time and pressure. MEITEI’s approach to sound mirrors the nature of agate itself. Grains become texture. Texture becomes narrative. Voices drift through decaying layers of sound, while ancient instruments are used in non-traditional ways, forming distinctive percussive rhythms and melodies that appear and vanish without fixed resolution.

The album’s visual materials were developed under MEITEI’s direction through physical art-making processes. The cover artwork originates from a letterpress print created by Kamisoe, a Karakami atelier in Nishijin, Kyoto, using Kyo-karakami paper. The original artwork, produced through traditional woodblock techniques on handmade washi, was subsequently reproduced on print for the album edition. Kamisoe continues to reinterpret this historical Kyoto craft with a contemporary sensibility.

The title calligraphy was created by Bio Xie, whom MEITEI personally invited to participate in the project. During his performances abroad, MEITEI encountered in Taiwan a lingering atmosphere reminiscent of “Shitsunihon” — a sense of old Japanese memory that quietly endures beyond time. He was deeply drawn to Bio Xie’s distinctive use of Chinese characters, which resonated with this experience, and asked him to contribute to the visual expression of AGATE.

In parallel, MEITEI continues to reinterpret Japanese sensibility through his concept of “Shitsunihon,” presenting it as a contemporary musical language. The refined Kyoto motifs envisioned by Kamisoe and the distinctive calligraphic expression by Bio Xie intersect with MEITEI’s singular artistic direction, weaving together a newly articulated worldview.

The accompanying visual imagery, including the liner photographs, was created by photographer Hiroshi Okamoto, who was also responsible for the visual direction of MEITEI’s previous work, “Sen'nyū.” It draws from MEITEI’s lived experiences of winter seas, solitary cliffs, and breaking waves. These scenes symbolize the inner conflicts of the ten years he spent living in Hiroshima, and his confrontation with solitude and the sounds he creates.

AGATE will be released on 17 April 2025 via KITCHEN. LABEL on 180g vinyl, CD, and digital formats. The album is mastered by Kelly Hibbert, known for his work with Flying Lotus, Madlib, and J Dilla.

With AGATE, MEITEI returns to the material of Kofū with greater focus and discipline, continuing an ongoing process of working forward with inherited material.

Roberto Zanetti, better known as Savage or Robyx, is without a doubt a fully realized artist. When he stepped into the world of dance electronics in 1983, success came instantly. Not only across Italy, but far beyond its borders. Alongside his own chart-defining run as Savage, Zanetti was simultaneously shaping the scene from behind the desk, developing talent and refining a signature sound that would define an era. By the late ’80s, Robyx was already an established powerhouse producer. Around that time, he wrote three tunes for Maurizio Felici, performing under the alias Wilson Ferguson. These tracks carried all the hallmarks of Zanetti’s late-’80s aesthetic: lush melodies, smooth, flowing arrangements and high-energy grooves built for the dancefloor. In Europe, where house music was rapidly taking over, this sound faced tougher competition, but in Japan, where Eurobeat was exploding into the mainstream, these productions were untouchable. Felici’s rich, throaty vocal delivery gave the tracks an unmistakable emotional weight and identity.

Responding to long-standing requests from fans, Vintage Pleasure Boutique now revisits the most melancholic and emotionally charged of these three recordings: “I’m Singing Again”, a bittersweet tale of lost love told through the language of Italo disco. It’s a perfect fusion of Savage’s late-’80s sonic elegance and a truly distinctive vocal performance.

For this new release, the story is pushed one step further with a fresh remix, slightly faster in BPM and clearly nodding to Robyx’s classic Eurobeat instincts, a version built to move bodies while keeping the original’s emotional core intact.

(Extrawelt Remix) The second vinyl installment of 20 shifts focus toward cinematic structure, melodic depth, and genre-crossing reinterpretations. Collaborations and remixes involving Extrawelt, Noga Erez, Perfect Stranger, PRZ, and A. Balter underline Eitan Reiter's refined and flexible production approach.



20 (Part 2) is a 12-inch vinyl release featuring exclusive vinyl cuts that are not available digitally, offering collectors insight into Reiter's evolving sonic language.



LS003 completes the vinyl-only snapshot of 20, presenting carefully selected collaborations adapted for the physical format.

There’s no direct English translation for the word “hiraeth”. In the Welsh language, it describes a form of longing for an intangible something, somewhere or someone that no longer exists. Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka draw on the concept to guide their second collaborative album, a suite of vulnerable, open-hearted improvisations and reflections that attempt to grasp an image of the past that’s chimeric, dissolving almost as soon as it materializes. The duo’s process follows the same distant beacon; unlike Languoria, their critically acclaimed debut, Hiraeth is, at heart, an acoustic record, informed by in-person improvisations with voices and string instruments that gesture to an era before computers, AI and DAWs. It’s just as lush, but Hiraeth is warmer and more muted than its predecessor.
Nowacka and Birch conceived the album in the wake of a slew of collaborative live concerts, spurred on by serendipitous improvisations and an interest in paring down their setup. Unsound arranged a retreat in Sokołowsko, an idyllic village nestled in the verdant hills of Southern Poland, close to the Czech border. Sokołowsko surrounds a large ruined sanatorium that’s rumored to have inspired Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, and has long been a magnet for artists. The two took the opportunity to rethink their approach completely, arriving with just a guitar, a zither and a portable Nagra reel-to-reel machine. Recording directly to tape, they sketched out ideas with just their voices and instruments, reflecting their surroundings without being distracted or mediated by modern technology.
“We wanted to get away from screens as much as possible,” says Birch, “to bring to the world something vulnerable and honest. Without advance preparation, every day we went out into the open air, finding places to sit, during sunset or the midday sun. We discovered new tunings on our instruments, picked up a melody, and started the machine, playing over
and over till we got a take.” In the autumn, they met again in a Copenhagen studio, sparingly and carefully layering old synths and organs to add more depth without muddying the mix.
Both Nowacka and Birch sing throughout, their voices threading the acoustic instruments and tangling with each other, almost becoming one. But it’s the environment of Sokołowsko, “the birds and the light, even the wind playing against the harps,” that’s woven into the music’s lining. Affected by time spent meditating and in nature, as well as the fact that Birch was pregnant whilst recording, the album feels alive and remarkably present. Even the sound quality of the tape machine gives Hiraeth a tactile, organic quality, as Nowacka puts it, “like being in a warm bath.”

They still have the raw recordings from Sokołowsko on old reels, physical souvenirs of their time spent making music in a “habitat for intuitive songs, a little ecosystem, alive and spirited.” The outmoded gear and remote setting helped the duo disengage from the modern world for a few moments and imagine an existence that’s been lost to time and nominal progress. With digital technology receding into the background, Nowacka and Birch had space to make “intuitive connections with frequencies and people,” as Birch explains. Hiraeth is a testament not to nostalgia, but to the power of kinship.

Preceded by Piazza Centrale and the subsequent Seia the album of the singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, new promise of the Italian music scene, moves along the traces of memories to tell a timeless story, using a very personal language in which singer-songwriter music, pop, and electronic experimentation naturally coexist. Hypnotic and magnetic, her music is a subtle, elusive seduction, an emotion that delicately insinuates itself into the mind, an invitation to get lost in its beauty. A passion that touches the deepest chords of the soul, without the overwhelming rush of the senses, but with the intensity of a pure and profound feeling. Gaia Banfi was born in Milan, has been living in Bologna for years, but in her album, it is Genoa that resonates, the place of her childhood, which here becomes an imaginary setting for a symbolic dimension in which everyone can recognize themselves, through seven tracks in which all those melancholies that swell as we grow up, the lacks, the turbulent and dark loves, the unrequited ones, but also the vitality, the discovery, the absence of judgment, and finally the awareness, the inner conquests, the clemency, and the love for oneself, take voice.

Nonesuch Records releases Let X=X, by Laurie Anderson with Sexmob. This triple-LP/double-CD set was recorded live during a 2023 tour by Anderson and the jazz band Sexmob – Steven Bernstein and Briggan Krauss on brass, Kenny Wollesen on percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. Its cover and interior packaging feature paintings by Anderson. The album features 23 songs, including many favourites from throughout Anderson’s career, performed in new arrangements – plus one by Lou Reed and Metallica, ‘Junior Dad’. Anderson and Sexmob play more US and international dates this spring and summer (details below).

The New York Times said Anderson and Sexmob’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) ‘wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums. With musicians who can double on electric guitar and bass clarinet, its members offered a rich range of textural variation throughout the evening.’

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Her work, which encompasses music, visual art, poetry, film, and photography, has challenged and delighted audiences around the world for more than 40 years. In a recent 60 Minutes profile, Anderson Cooper said she ‘is a pioneer of the avant-garde, but... that doesn’t begin to describe what she creates... It’s experienced by audiences who come to see her perform: singing, telling stories, and playing strange violins of her own invention... she blends the beautiful and the bizarre, challenging audiences with homilies and humor. She blurs boundaries across music, theater, dance, and film.’ The Washington Post has said she ‘doesn’t just tell stories; she draws out every word with a kind of physical pleasure, tasting its flavor as she probes the everyday mysteries of life.’

Anderson released her first album with Nonesuch Records, the critically lauded Life on a String, in 2001. Her subsequent releases on the label include Live in New York (2002); Homeland (2010); the soundtrack to her acclaimed film Heart of a Dog (2015); and her Grammy-winning collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (2018). Nonesuch released a re-mastered edition of Big Science in 2007 for its 25th anniversary, followed by a vinyl LP re-issue in 2021; the album includes Anderson’s beloved, surprise hit, song, ‘O Superman’, which also is featured on Let X=X. Her recent Nonesuch release was 2024’s Amelia, about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight.

Anderson’s virtual-reality film La Camera Insabbiata, with Hsin-Chien Huang, won the 2017 Venice Film Festival Award for Best VR Experience, and, in 2018, Skira Rizzoli published her book All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code, the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date. Recent exhibitions and installations of Anderson’s work include Habeas Corpus at New York’s Park Avenue Armory; her largest exhibition to date, The Weather, at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art; and Looking into a Mirror Sideways at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which was her largest European exhibition to date.

Laurie Anderson was awarded the 2024 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, along with Christopher Nolan and David Attenborough, and the International Astronomical Union named a minor planet in her honour: Asteroid 270588, Laurieanderson. That same year, she was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

A divine transmission continues…

The signal never stopped — it just went deeper.

For the second chapter of JESUS LOVES SKYLAX, we return to the source: raw emotion, machine soul, and the sacred pulse of the underground. A continuation of the Todd Edwards spirit — not imitation, but devotion. On the A-side, Byron The Aquarius opens with “House Music Was Good While It Lasted (Goodtimes)” — a bittersweet sermon in sound. Dusty, looping, hypnotic — somewhere between lost tapes and eternal truth, echoing the soul of Detroit at its most intimate. UK craftsman Tom Carruthers follows with “Crank Up” — raw, skeletal, almost industrial in its tension. A direct lineage from early machine music, channeling the stark energy of Cabaret Voltaire through a house framework. No compromise. Just rhythm and intent.

Flip the record.

Blue Mondays deliver “Warm Up For Ron Hardy (Disco Mix)” — a fever dream built for the booth. Loose, emotional, and dangerously effective. A tribute not in name, but in spirit — the kind of record that lives between two worlds, where disco dissolves into house under strobe lights and sweat. Closing the EP, CNVX – “L’Amour (Floorfillers Remix)” hits with pure peak-time electricity. Acid lines twisting through the mix, driven and ecstatic — a modern weapon forged in the language of the underground. A direct nod to the timeless pressure of Floorfillers energy, built for dancers who still believe.

✝ JESUS LOVES SKYLAX ✝

He still does.

For his sixth solo album, Ezéchiel Pailhès returns with a new collection of songs infused by a sunny wandering spirit.
Within each of the twelve songs on SOL is a thread of melancholic happiness that has permeated much of Pailhès’ music and songwriting. He addresses love, the passing of time, hope, lost illusions, fleeting moments of grace, the temptation of forgetting, a need to escape, and desire. All this is
insulated by understated orchestrations that blend acoustic and electronic instrumentation with deft confidence.
The Portuguese and Brazilian concept of saudade—a form of melancholic longing and nostalgia— pervades, thanks in part to Pailhès decision to record the album in Rio de Janiero and to reinterpret some of the finest works of Música Popular Brasileira (MPB). In particular, he revisits a handful of
lesser known classics from the mid-century samba and bossa nova era—originally written or performed by talents including Vinícius de Moraes, João Gilberto, Tom Zé, Dorival Caymmi, João Donato, Os Tincoãs, and Ataulfo Alves.
The shift from Brazilian Portuguese to French and the decision to adapt rather than perform a straightforward cover versions, allows Pailhès to invent a form of prosody and euphony (the musicality and harmonious combination of words) that feels vibrant and unlike anything else in today’s French
chanson landscape.
“Some lyrics are simple translations from Portuguese, in what I’d call an expanded version. For others, I started from a single word or a single phrase and embroidered an entirely new text that carried me elsewhere,” explains Pailhès. “I allowed myself great interpretive freedom, while preserving the humanist dimension of the original songs. I’ve always been deeply moved by the way Brazilians transfigure reality through heightened emotion. I love this visceral and spontaneous country, which always seems to live through emotion. And above all, I love its music both popular and unifying,
bringing together all social classes. In that sense, it’s very political music, but even more so utopian, made by the people and for the people.”
On this new album, however, the French artist was keen to avoid cliché. Each song is therefore built around a carefully balanced interplay between Pailhès’ piano and synthesizers, alongside restrained arrangements of percussion, brass, bass, and cavaquinho (a small four-string plucked guitar). These parts were recorded in Rio de Janeiro with two musicians who regularly perform alongside the legendary Caetano Veloso—Kainã Do Jêje and Alberto Continentino—joined by Thomas Harres, Antônio Neves, Eduardo Neves, and Gabriel Loddo.
Since the 1960s, France and Brazil have shared a long-standing cultural and musical relationship. Some Brazilian artists, most famously Gilberto Gil, took refuge in France during the dictatorship years (1964–1985). But above all, French chanson quickly fell in love with the richness and ingenuity of
bossa nova and samba, translating and reinventing them in the language of Molière. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, albums and hits by Henri Salvador, Georges Moustaki, Pierre Barouh, Pierre Vassiliu, and Claude Nougaro all drew from the MPB repertoire.
Fifty years later, with SOL, Ezéchiel Pailhès reinvents this rich Franco-Brazilian musical legacy, bringing to it a personality and modernity that stand confidently alongside those of his forbears.

Concrete City's two residents re-emerge with 'Serious Coin', the second long-player from label head DJ Superherb and long-time collaborator Ten Years Lost. Where their 2023 debut basked in heat-hazed hedonism, this follow-up sharpens the focus. At times deeper, and consistently drawing from the pair's shared language, Serious Coin is an unmissable entry in the Full Dose catalogue.

Across eight tracks, the duo lean further into their soulful instincts, balancing weighty low-end pressure with a distinctly human emotional warmth. Vocoded vocals, coalescing with dungeon synths, being carried by heavily swung rhythms represent a new strand in the pair's musical DNA.

The album captures the stillness of early morning city streets, yet still manages to push rhythmic elements forward. Barely-present samples and subtly detuned synths give the tracks a lived-in feel, as if they’ve already soundtracked a hundred late nights before reaching your speakers.

Like the first, this album has one foot firmly in dancefloor utility and the other in headphone introspection. Don't miss this dustier and deeper evolution to the Full Dose sound!

Emily Wittbrodt's "Wearing Words" is a cycle of ten instrumentals and songs for harpsichord, cello, drums, clarinet, accordion and tenor. With precision, humor and grace, Wittbrodt translates a baroque sensibility into pop terrain, combining her fascination for language and poetry with her love for unusual instrumentation and classical forms.

Words courtesy of FOND/SOUND –

What makes チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura) so fascinating is that, in some weird way, it’s a meeting of minds and musical language of disparate artists at the forefront of a new kind of groove. There might be no “L” in the Japanese language but that doesn’t stop it from trying to find a working substitute. Similarly, Chito enlisted members from his Asiabeat and East Pulse, others from Mu-Project, K2, and Adi, and brought in Haruomi Hosono to play mercurial bass. In the great expanse of experimental Japanese-made pop music all of them might have gone in “out-there” in separate directions but on this record it was Chito who pointed their focus all on the same track.

“Bayou (バイヨー)” presents this floating idea of dance music with beats and rhythms that hover among the ethereal. Other like “Scribble Dance (らくがき)” use Harry’s acid bass lines to dig cavernous grooves that only come up for air via adrenaline-fueled jumps by Haruo Kubota’s quite Adrian Belew-esque guitar lines. Perhaps, Discipline-era King Crimson is an apt comparison to what Chito and his crew pull off here.

Where Discipline signaled a way to reconcile the most out-there polymeter music of prog with the more satisfying parts of post-punk and the new electronic wave, so to do I think チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura) has that bit of heart/spirit in mind. This is the out-there of Japanese experimental music satisfying the best parts of the, then, new electronic wave. It takes a certain degree of proficiency and sheer chutzpah to go from “11” to the wonderfully impressionistic, ambient minimalism of a track like “Sanghyang (サンヤン)”.

It’s the joy of not knowing what each new track will hold and just letting yourself follow the hard-working hands of such learned musicians that brings the most out of Chito’s vision. It’s this very liquid music that keeps you on your toes on tracks like “Astral Lamp (無影灯)”. Tracks like “Jagg-chagg (ジャグチャグ)” and “Filament (フィラメント)” present a fourth world music bifurcated in exponential parts by the glitch of newer, modern, electronic modalities, intersected by expressions by differing voices. Every track you switch to presents a new way to get lost in the many phases and places Chito wants you to travel to.

In the end, as always, it’s not the destination but the journey through it that plants this album in your memory. – Diego Olivas

Archeo Recordings is a record label. Old, lost, obscure and forgotten gems and a boundless focus on the new Balearic scene for a wider audience of collectors, DJs and music lovers. All releases are limited edition. This release is the second in a series of EPs on which the label's favourite contemporaries pay homage to past masters for ‘10 Year Anniversary’. 4 new Remixes: limited edition on black vinyl (AR032). With the first volume still singing out both in our ears and on our turntables, Archeo Recordings lifts the veil on the second chapter of its celebratory EP series - another shimmering tribute to the timeless and the timely. Once again, the torch is passed to a new ensemble of sonic sculptors, who delve into the archives and emerge with reimagined treasures, equal parts reverence and reinvention. Philosopher and musical polymath Riccardo Giagni made his name as a cultural curator for RAI TV and radio, before lending his expertise in ethnomusicology as a studio musician and songwriter. Originally released to little fanfare and long overlooked until its Archeo reissue in 2019, his 1988 debut LP Kaunis Maa is a masterwork of Balearic ethno-jazz - a guitar-led journey through imagined geographies and dreamt-up dialects. Its closing track, Passeggera, pairs Mediterranean nylon with synth halos, sampled percussion, and the unplaceable vocals of Matia Bazar’s Antonella Ruggiero, singing not in language but in emotion. Now, Claremont 56’s Paul Murphy aka Mudd lends his gentle hand to the piece, reworking its al fresco fusion into something even more languorous. Highlighting the South American sway hinted at in the original, Mudd introduces jazzy synth flourishes, airy percussion, and occasional organ bass, casting the piece anew as a hammock-swung hymn - less a remix than a relocation, from the hills of Lazio to the lush gardens of Mudd’s imagination.

Archeo Recordings is a record label. Old, lost, obscure and forgotten gems and a boundless focus on the new Balearic scene for a wider audience of collectors, DJs and music lovers. All releases are limited edition. This release is the second in a series of EPs on which the label's favourite contemporaries pay homage to past masters for ‘10 Year Anniversary’. 4 new Remixes: limited edition on black vinyl (AR032). With the first volume still singing out both in our ears and on our turntables, Archeo Recordings lifts the veil on the second chapter of its celebratory EP series - another shimmering tribute to the timeless and the timely. Once again, the torch is passed to a new ensemble of sonic sculptors, who delve into the archives and emerge with reimagined treasures, equal parts reverence and reinvention. Philosopher and musical polymath Riccardo Giagni made his name as a cultural curator for RAI TV and radio, before lending his expertise in ethnomusicology as a studio musician and songwriter. Originally released to little fanfare and long overlooked until its Archeo reissue in 2019, his 1988 debut LP Kaunis Maa is a masterwork of Balearic ethno-jazz - a guitar-led journey through imagined geographies and dreamt-up dialects. Its closing track, Passeggera, pairs Mediterranean nylon with synth halos, sampled percussion, and the unplaceable vocals of Matia Bazar’s Antonella Ruggiero, singing not in language but in emotion. Now, Claremont 56’s Paul Murphy aka Mudd lends his gentle hand to the piece, reworking its al fresco fusion into something even more languorous. Highlighting the South American sway hinted at in the original, Mudd introduces jazzy synth flourishes, airy percussion, and occasional organ bass, casting the piece anew as a hammock-swung hymn - less a remix than a relocation, from the hills of Lazio to the lush gardens of Mudd’s imagination.

As The Matrix ushered in the new millennium, voices of apocalypse and optimism alike wrestled for the narrative high ground over what the future held in store. Ever more inclined toward skepticism than hope, we have since grown prone to withdrawing in exhaustion when confronted by such gargantuan expectations — “lost in the Matrix,” if you will.

Less’s new album opens by building a bridge back to his previous album “Stranger” (released on the “Freude am Tanzen” label and conceived as an imaginary Blade Runner soundtrack). In the intro, breathy references from vocalist Alice immediately set the tone for the journey ahead: Electro, High Energy, Acid, Chicago, Italo Disco.

A full-fledged club album quickly unfolds—one that invites the listener to dance and switch off, while at the same time, if you allow it, provoking reflection through its lyrics. Now a Berlin-based artist with Thuringian roots, Less draws on deacades of DJ experience and channels it deftly into ten tracks. Less (real name Stefan Leßner) isn’t afraid to go “old school.” Classic touches like vocoder effects are as integral here as Alice’s irresistibly
cool spoken-word vocals—delivered in English (“I Care”, “Mirror, Mirror”) and German (“Alles was du willst”). This retro spirit even extends to his remix of the French-language Underground Cottage track “Canada (2003 Less Remix)” which surfaced in DJ Hell’s setlists last year—bringing things full circle.

“Living in the Matrix” on Lebensfreude Records is not merely a nostalgic reference to times past, but also counters exhaustion with a sense of trust in the future. It is, in essence, a call — an appeal — not to lose oneself in any kind of ‘Matrix.’ Accordingly, the album will be released both digitally and analog. The latter will come as a 180g double vinyl with a high-quality, thematically appropriate gatefold cover.

After a six-year hiatus, Efdemin returns with POLY — his fifth studio album, released on the recently revived Berghain-affiliated label, Ostgut Ton.

As the title suggests, POLY explores multiplicity: of rhythm, texture, style, and emotion. Across eleven meticulously sculpted textures, the album weaves a multidimensional web of sonic references, nodding to the origins of techno while pushing resolutely into uncharted terrain. POLY feels like an afterglow—of decades on the dancefloor, of restless sonic exploration, and of a profound connection to the spaces and communities that have shaped Efdemin’s sound.

Over the course of 60 minutes we are taken through different territories and landscapes of sound. Mysterious and swirling, abstract and droning textures over at times fast and stoic rhythmic concepts. Sometimes the sunlight breaks into the opaque and mysterious soundscapes before the pulse is taken over and sucks us back straight into the club.

The overall tone of POLY is mild and playful, introvert and at times dreamy. The music is rich in sonic expression and breathes the spirit of musical concepts that have been refined over the course of decades. What Sollmann has condensed here feels like a culmination of his multilayered and polyphonic personality situated between Club, Museum, Studio and Academy.

The album cover features a striking photograph of a human ear by renowned German artist Isa Genzken. Known for her radical visual language, Genzken’s work here functions as a metaphor for deep listening. The ear symbolises the layered complexity and immersive quality of the music on POLY — an invitation to perceive sound in all its depth, fragility, and force and unlock it’s potential to unite different voices in a distorted reality.
Nach einer sechsjährigen Pause kehrt Efdemin mit POLY zurück – seinem fünften Studioalbum, das auf dem kürzlich wiederbelebten Label Ostgut Ton, dem in-house Label des Berghain erscheint.

Wie der Titel vermuten lässt, beschäftigt sich POLY mit Vielfältigkeit: von Rhythmus,Textur, Style und Emotionen. In elf Stücken webt das Album ein multidimensionales Netz aus klanglichen Referenzen, das auf zurückliegende Ansätze der Klubmusik verweist und gleichzeitig entschlossen in neues Terrain vordringt.

POLY wirkt wie ein Nachglühen – von Jahrzehnten auf der Tanzfläche, von unermüdlicher klanglicher Erkundung und von einer tiefen Verbindung zu den Räumen und Communities, die Efdemins Sound geprägt haben. Im Laufe von 60 Minuten werden die Hörer*innen durch verschiedene Territorien und Klanglandschaften geführt. Mysteriöse und wirbelnde, abstrakte und dröhnende Texturen über teilweise schnellen und stoischen rhythmischen Konzepten. Manchmal bricht das Sonnenlicht in die undurchsichtigen und geheimnisvollen Klanglandschaften ein, bevor der Puls wieder die Oberhand gewinnt und uns direkt zurück in den Klub saugt.

Der Gesamteindruck von POLY ist mild und verspielt, introvertiert und manchmal verträumt. Die Musik ist reich an klanglichem Ausdruck und atmet den Geist musikalischer Konzepte, die im Laufe von Jahrzehnten verfeinert wurden. Was Sollmann hier verdichtet hat, fühlt sich wie eine Kulmination seiner vielschichtigen und polyphonen Identität an, die sich zwischen Klub, Museum, Studio und Akademie bewegt.

Das Albumcover ziert die Nahaufnahme eines menschlichen Ohrs der renommierten deutschen Künstlerin Isa Genzken. Genzken´s Arbeit wirkt hier als Metapher für deep listening. Das Ohr symbolisiert die vielschichtige Komplexität und immersive Qualität der Musik auf POLY – eine Einladung, Klang in seiner ganzen Tiefe, Zerbrechlichkeit und Kraft wahrzunehmen und sein Potenzial zu erschließen, widerstreitende Stimmen in einer verzerrten Realität zu vereinen.

"After being praised as one of the best releases of 2025 by multiple platforms, the highly praised debut album from Obeka lands on vinyl via YUKU.

The rhythmic dynamics and emotive attitudes of A World No More captures the density of soundsystem culture in Obeka's ancestral roots. YUKU presents the Bermudians debut album capturing a Neo-Colonial dystopia, protest and Afro-Futurism hyperextended through decaying sonic structures of a dark past and its grievances which very much exist today.

Growing into adulthood within the walls of British and European Colonial systems meant the disconnection and lostness in a new country hid me from the world at a young age. Unlike London's vast and culturally engaging migrant communities, the industrial milling town of Stockport introduced a coldness towards people from other countries I experienced in my first year after relocating from Bermuda. I couldn't understand why. Whether cold words thrown towards me or actions upon other people who look like me, it has shown to be a dooming societal virus with no cure. The most comfort was found through what was familiar - drums and rhythmic spirituality of my homeland. It was a safe-haven, a place to empty the anger and confusion. It's been 15 years since relocating and as my sound evolved, it seems classism, racism, oppression and civil control of ethnic peoples has become worse - even now more legalised and normalised. Ogun (a powerful Yoruba deity associated with anger, justice and war) acts as the opening sequence of the record and its symbolism. Using distorted bass frequencies and dissected Regga-Dub immersed in live-sampled ghostly voices of the lost ones. This sonic exercising is also applied in Drillaman - a stampede of industrial framework and metallic instruments wielded over moody Dancehall MC'ing, magnifying two parallel worlds in cocooned evolution. The resurrection of Transatlantic African cultures and identity have never been silenced, rather carried elsewhere through trade routes of enslavement, which was pivotal when composing and completing the album upon returning home to the Caribbean for the first time ever. After reconnecting with my heritage my blurred vision of what's wrong in the world became so clear. Guidance in empty plains seek truth throughout the pain - A statement of finding oneself expressed on the poetic closing track A World No More.

On Fawohodie (A West African Adinkra symbol that represents independence, freedom, and emancipation stamped on the album cover) the motive and atmosphere begins to change. Afro-Caribbean idealism which refers to the philosophical concept that emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals and the importance of community, often contrasting with Western individualism, begins to take shape in a new universe. We can co-exist. The track framework uses machine-led software forming frequencies we have no control over, then manipulated through decomposing soundscapes, scattered hand-drums and human-made weapons of control - exposing the hidden disparity that's been carried over generations whilst balancing hopeful and musical foundations towards equality and peace. On Pressure and Kuduro! the writing direction attempts to wake people up. Not settling for a composed approach like in past projects, quite the opposite. A call for native sonic awareness, dismantled vocals of protests, eroded percussion using chains, gears and motorised harmonies sculpted in challenging abstract behaviors far outside my comfort zone. A direct abrasiveness and weight I want people to feel, whilst finding hope and solace through enchanting choirs and hypnotic basslines in complete synchrony.

"Purity in sound manifests when you least expect it. The smallest memory or feeling grows from a seed into a sonic language that you, and only you can interpret and release back into the world." "

Originally released following his acclaimed sophomore album, HYBRIDISM finds Ecuadorian producer Nicola Cruz at the height of his exploratory powers. Now reissued on limited editon green vinyl, this expansive EP re-emerges with renewed relevance—blending North African rhythms, ethereal Persian motifs, and vocal fragments that evoke both ancient traditions and imagined worlds. A contemporary take on global exotica, HYBRIDISM is a vital entry in Cruz’s ever-evolving sonic journey.

'Aima’, named after the refrain sung by Igbo girls from Nigeria, creates the illusion that you’ve dusted off a lost LP. The aesthetic details recall expertly produced French exotica from the 70s, an overall feeling of warmth and character rarely pulled off with such panache.

‘Naeku,' in Cruz’s words, is "a sorrowful song in minor tonalities, but with a warrior energy, strength and forward vision: a soul departs, but a new one arrives in the name of Naeku, a maasai child. Not all grief needs to be a suffering; a feeling which I can relate to the place I come from with a Quechua word: Llaquilla - triste, pero feliz (sad, but happy). As always, the 303 adds that heart touching feeling.” If there’s a template for Multi Culti’s ethos, Cruz has synthesized the formula: Masai lamentation filtered through Quechua wisdom with a touch of 303 for the soul.

'Drom Tradisie' is a nostalgic vignette that captures the fantasy of a scenic horizon on a lost beach, a portrait done with the FM domain of synths that somehow associates with tropical imagery.

'Third Eye Dub’ takes things deeper, exploring the fractal realm of concentration, a point where the Oud (played by Nasiri) acts on the pineal gland. This inward journey through the cavernous depths of the subconscious sails on a smooth modular groove that transports the listener across this psychic expanse, a filigree of Persian harmonies (in Shur, to be exact) tracing outlines in the dark.

Finally, 'Kawe’s Dream’ ventures even further into the imaginary spaces of the mind. It is an aural reconstruction of the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, or ‘Book of the Dead’, a sacred text that guides the spirit through the passage out of the body. In Nicola’s words "To paint that depth, I had these Tibetan chants in mind, that I ended up crafting with Ableton's vocoder over a piece of Ayan’s vocals (sung in a made-up language). A few notes, and it gave the gravity I was looking for in the song.” Stuff that only a producer as capable as Cruz could pull off.

Hybridism’s five tracks are sonically diverse, yet all possess an ephemeral quality, a pastoral, transitory feeling that travels through the music - we listen to the sounds pass us by, we might even catch a hook or two, but the feeling is of sand running through our hands, deep, elusive, beautiful.

Following on from the celebrated first instalment, the second part of The Male Body Will Be Next compiles an entourage of daring sonic experiments, composed in response to bell hooks’ landmark book The Will to Change. Prompting artists and musicians to envision cross-gender solidarity, Osàre! Editions founder Elena Colombi presents an enrapturing, narrative album, conceptualised around collective transformation.

Resonating with hooks’ challenge to men to reclaim the sensitivity that patriarchy denies them, the name of the record arises from a photograph by Peter de Potter and Rebecca Salvadori’s film of the same title. In these depictions, naked flesh is exposed, made vulnerable and trembles with emotion as the fragility of masculine bodies are examined through the queer and female oppositional gaze. Transforming this visual language into musical expression, The Male Body Will Be Next swirls with punk vitriol, electrified noise, acid, electro and free-wheeling encounters charged by love, lust and limerence.

Gently plunking chords signal Pose Diva’s reimagining of lover’s rock before Sissy Fuss smashes in with a heavy-weight instrumental version of their erotic anthem ‘No Restraint’.
Made up of Turkish musician Etkin Çekin and Belarussian songstress Galina Ozeran, God is God delivers a gentle lullaby, while Low End Activist flirts with dark and brooding bass, shattering penetrating frequencies into luminous fragments. Riffing off the 2020 documentary about female early electronica pioneers, Loma Doom crafts a slowly oscillating drone zenith, the ultimate climax. In line with the conceptual underpinning, there are plenty of collaborations – Daytripper’s Riva and Sitar player Tommy Khosla, Lebanonese experimentalist N R and Swiss-French producer John Silvestre (AKA Typhon), as well as Colombi herself and trans author/activist Juno Roche. Within these partnerships, new modalities come alive as mediums, practices and perspectives are ignited and pushed in otherworldly, metamorphic directions.

180 G. BLACK VINYL WITH LINER NOTES IN CREOLE, FRENCH, ENGLISH

Originally released in 1979, "Spiritual Sound" lives up to its name, a soaring, triumphant album, six tracks of spirit magic from Guadeloupe.

Telluric, intense, terribly alive, the gwoka drums of Guadeloupe carry the identity of a painful and fervent island. Marked forever by the crime of slavery, Guadeloupe's créolité cherishes the ka drums and their natural environment: the low-pitched boula drum with male goatskin, the high-pitched soloist makè drum with female goatskin, the chacha, ti bwa, triangle, calabash and other percussion instruments that surround them, and the voices - the fiery, proud, timbred, urgent voices of the gwoka.



This album is also a legend for its voices: in his then dazzling youth, singer Lukuber Séjor was one of the first gwoka artists to largely feminize the chorus of répondè, who converse with his text delivered in a straight and powerful voice.

And everything here sets new standards. In 1979, Mizik Filamonik - Spiritual Sound proclaimed a spiritual patriotism of ferocious intensity. The album by Lukuber Séjor - whose spelling alone is a battle - sets out to give Guadeloupe the intangible weapons of self-respect and self-knowledge, through a singular practice of traditional music.

The genesis of gwoka music is less straightforward than one might imagine... The drums performed the servile task of accompanying the work of slaves in the fields and during the “corvées” imposed by the administration, before being freely practiced by the common people after the abolition of 1848. At the heart of the conviviality of the Guadeloupeans furthest from the cities - geographically and socially - the gwoka drums come out for carnival, funeral wakes and neighborhood celebrations, but also during strikes, fits of anger and armed vigils of the riots and revolts that have punctuated the island's history. For generations, governors of the colony and then the prefects of the overseas department of Guadeloupe have been viewing the gwoka as a potential for turbulence and a threat to public order.

But as the Beatlesmania, “chanson engagée” and rock revolutions unfolded in Europe, young people turned to the drums of mizik a vié nèg (“bad negro music”, in Creole), which Guadeloupeans had learned to despise by following the “assimilation” process advocated by the school system and most of the political class. At the end of the sixties, in a Guadeloupe mourning the deadly repression of the May 1967 social movement, they played traditional music, refusing to wrap it up in tourist prettiness and madras folk costumes. Instinctively, they played a rough and contemporary gwoka, led by the incendiary Guy Konkèt. This was the era of decisive 45 rpm records such as Robert Loyson's Kann a la richès, which brought to light the fieriest words of union rallies.

At his home in Sainte-Anne, Lukuber Séjor played with flautist Olivier Vamur and his brother Claude Vamur, who cobbled together a drum kit from tin crockery and became, a few years later, the most influential drummer in Kassav'.

These were the years of the Bumidom program, when young Guadeloupeans were encouraged to emigrate to mainland France. At the age of twenty, Lukuber Séjor embarked on the liner Irpinia, disembarking at Le Havre and taking the train to the Gare Saint-Lazare - the route taken by thousands of young West Indians who went on to study or looked for work, all the while trying to maintain a link with their homeland. In this case, it's at the Antony university residence, where Lukuber played the drum and participated in a thousand gwoka updates and aggiornamentos, while exile reinforced the need for a spiritual link with the native land.

In 1978, Guy Konkèt played at the Salle Wagram, a historic event for West Indian music. After serving as répondè - i.e. backing vocalist - on one of his home-recorded albums, Lukuber joined his live band. Little by little, he became one of the key artists on a circuit parallel to French show business. At a student party in Caen, he met a young woman from Martinique who, at the time, was more motivated by her ambitions as a visual artist than by her vocation as a musician. Her name was Jocelyne Béroard and, a few years before she plunged into the Kassav' adventure and became the greatest West Indian singer of her generation, she designed the cover of Lukuber Séjor's LP.

This ambition was obvious and imposed its will. A more or less regular band was formed, with Roger Raspail, Rudy Mompière and Éric Danquin on ka drums, Claude Vamur on ti bwa, Olivier Vamur and Françoise Lancréot on flutes and Annick Noël on keyboards. Lukuber Séjor is set on wanting to extend the gwoka palette to other instruments, as the jazz-rock revolution opens a thousand new doors. Annick Noël will play a wide range of timbres and textures on electric piano and synthesizer. Another novelty: the répondè are two men and two women, Roger Raspail, Olivier Vamur, Françoise Lancréot and Maryann Mathéus ...

Mizik Filamonik - Spiritual Sound is a self-production in which the singer and leader sank all his savings, allowing him no more than a single day in the studio. The first side is more of a musical manifesto, with the first two tracks, Éritage and Penn é plézi, being instrumentals. The third, Son, forcefully celebrates the need for Guadeloupeans to connect with the gwoka. In fact, Jocelyne Béroard's cover shows a tambouyé in the shadow of a cloudy sky, against which a radiant sun is rising and whose light will soon flood the entire landscape. The silhouette and face of this man strongly evoke the immense Vélo, master of the ka, rejected at the time on the fringes of society.

The second side of the LP is surprising. Formally, three tracks are explicitly linked like the three parts of a triptych. Primyé voyaj evokes the appalling tribulation of Africans deported as slaves to Guadeloupe; dézyèm voyaj speaks of the Bumidom program and the economic, political and social forces driving young Guadeloupeans towards the mirage of prosperity in France; twazyèm voyaj closes the cycle with the emigrants' return from Europe after years away from their island...

This gwoka, obsessed with the need to save Guadeloupe spiritually, appeals far beyond the politicized audience. Mizik Filamonik - Spiritual Sound instantly became a classic, although Lukuber Séjor never really made a career for himself as a musician.

After all, the album was released in 1980, with no promotional resources in France or Guadeloupe - and therefore no concerts. The thirty-two-year-old author, composer and performer made his own third trip back to Guadeloupe. He set up a small woodworking business, which he lost in Hurricane Hugo in 1989. His other activity, teaching in a medical-educational institute, became the core of his professional life. He continued to be an active campaigner - a campaigner for the Creole language, a campaigner for the reawakening of identity, a campaigner for special education, a campaigner for a thousand causes that he ignited with his generous and perceptive enthusiasm, such as the defense of breadfruit fries...

The echoes of his 1979 album have not died down. Of course, the use of Penn é plézi as the theme tune for Radio Guadeloupe's funeral notices from 1980 to 1992 kept him in the collective memory, but he continues to sing and compose sporadically, as with his all-female

vocal group Vwapoulouéka... Still convinced that music is a means of liberating the spirit, he continues the journey of a young man eager to deploy the power of Creole music and language.

Bertrand Dicale

Proudly presenting, ‘Калі ты запытаеш (If You Ask)’, a brand new, blissed-out pop production with a ‘70s AOR touch, by the ever-on-point SOYUZ (СОЮЗ). Coming at a period between albums, the single features guest appearances from the sensational musicians, Biel Basile (O Terno, Sessa) and Anthony Ferraro (Toro Y Moi, Astronauts, Etc.). Friends of the band, they add their signature touch on the drums and synth respectively. To complete the package, SOYUZ back the title track with a short but sweet, Wurlitzer-laden, MPB-tinged number, ‘Tenório’.

‘Калі ты запытаеш (If You Ask)’ tells the story of lost dreams. A track that can be interpreted either as a bittersweet longing for childhood times, or for a native place you can’t return to. For the writer Alex Chumak he suggests, "In my case, as in the case of many Belarusians, it’s both".

For this song, Alex chose to sing in his native Belarusian tongue. As he explains this language "to me feels underrepresented in pop music, also it’s a beautiful legacy and sonority that I wanted to share with the listeners of our project around the world". One of the key inspirations was a Belarusian band “Песняры” (“Pesniary”), who produced a host of great progressive folk, jazz fusion and AOR, from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, predominantly sung in Belarusian.

Another key influence was the music coming out of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the ‘70s, drawing inspiration from the sentimental and harmonious music of Beto Guedes, Lô Borges, Fernando Oly and Wagner Tiso.

Having parted ways with their drummer Anton, SOYUZ needed to find a new way to produce songs. The answer was to go remotely. Alex contacted the brilliant Biel Basile, who had recorded Sessa's contemporary classic ‘Estrela Acesa’, in which Alex also participated. Utilising Biel and Sessa’s newly built studio in São Paulo, SOYUZ had Biel record the drums directly to tape to get the rich sound they were after. Adding the final magic into the mix, California’s Anthony Ferraro provided a beautiful Solina String Ensemble synth arrangement, with drummer/recording engineer Albert Karch expertly assisting with the production.

To capture the essence of the single visually, Alex and the Brazilian one-man-industry visual artist Gabriel Rolim, spent a blazing sunny May day in Berlin shooting film and stills – one of which became the perfect cover image. We hope you enjoy this little nugget of SOYUZ mastery, a sweet taster to savour while the new album is recorded.

On An-Ting’s extensive travels around the UK, Mongolia, Sichuan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, she took field recordings of birdsong and mixed them with dark experimental electronic music with droning soundscapes and hard beats, creating an album that sonically encapsulates the very essence of nature itself, drifting from peaceful ambience to haunting melancholy through to dark and foreboding.
“There is a light and darkness in nature that civilisation has made us numb to and that we want to explore” Using a binaural recorder to capture the surrounding sounds of birds, An-Ting has created a completely different expression that opens the seemingly simple, yet complex, languages of the birds, furthering the other-worldly, unique feel of Lost Communications ०妏ԏ宙. From An-Ting: “We live with other creatures on earth and are surrounded by all different sounds. Through Lost Communications, I blend the birdsongs with my artistic expression to introduce people to these complex languages and nonhuman voices. I hope this will make us more aware of different life forms on this planet and inspire greater kindness to the earth.” Composed, performed, and mastered by An-Ting Co-produced by AnTing and Ian Gallagher

Originally released in the mid 80's on UK cassette label Bite Back!, this nearly lost gem finds new life 30 years later on Cocktail D'Amore Music. Steve has cobbled together a superbly melancholic electronic concept album. Wistful melodies often evoke sentiments of a lost childhood and hazy English mornings.

Each song within remains untitled allowing full perceptive freedom as to what they all communicate, a language for the feelings that have no name.

Untitled A1 - A6 leads one along intimate soundscapes of pattering drums and tinkering piano, a sense of closeness and trust develops with the introduction of each new idea much like the beginning of a bed time story. Untitled B1 - B3 then begin to breathe more openly awash in angelic colours before abruptly turning downward on B4, a wall of booming drums and atmospheres from the furthest reaches of the galaxy before the last trio of songs settles gently back on Earth.

We've been writing new material as a trio since the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. 
An organic and electro-acoustic impulse that translates both mine and Eliete's need of self-archiving, 
re-inventing and auto-cannibalising Tetine's past, present and

future in order to explore other aural 
landscapes and modes of composing intuitively, while at the same time, re-experiencing moments of our 
trajectory as a hybrid organism. 



Music For Breathing was born as a respiratory, meditative, and improvisatory piece of DIY 
tropical-mutant-punk "chamber music" written for cello, voice, piano, organ and electronics. 
The work responds to the suspended acts of breathing and vertigos experienced in contemporary polluted
 environments in political, social and philosophical transitions, whilst investigating the 
secret ontologies of inanimate objects and architectures, as well 
as the echoes and ethics of modes of operating things. 



Recorded during the intense period of heatwaves that hit London between July and August 2022, in 
a small studio set up in our flat's kitchen - so that we could capture the acoustic instrumentation 
(in particular, for the recording of cellos) without much

noise interference from the street - 
this vinyl version of the album comprises of 5 distinct yet complementary reflective movements. 


Musically and lyrically, it explores the atmospherics and syntaxes of time and space, voice, rhythm, 
as well as themes such as hearing loss, menopause, pollution and respiration. It builds an expanded suite of unexpected 
electro-acoustic textures through repetition, minimalistic motives, simple melodies, chromatic 
developments, free counterpoint and atonalism. Conceived as an ode to the poetics of slowness, 
the sounds you hear give continuity to the music we composed for the performance-film 
The Ether - Prelude No.1 over the first lockdown in 2020 as it simultaneously explores the warmth, 
melodiousness and power of the cello in conjunction with electronics. 
Music For Breathing evokes this transitory moment: a place and time where language runs out, 
communication and information lose their functions, sound and meaning do not correspond. Facts do not correspond to contexts. Spaced Out in Paradise. The last degree of the structure, the 
loss of memory. The lost voice.


The album also features our 12-year-old daughter Yoko Afi on cello and vocals. It reflects 
a period of free sound experimentation influenced both by romantic composers of the late
 19th / early 20th centuries and contemporary electronic music. The pieces you hear were composed, arranged, and recorded 
with the joy and melancholy of "those who do not know". In other words, "with the arrogance 
of a second childhood" as Derek Jarman once put it. 'Agile and candid as a child'(1).

1) Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil, Oswald de Andrade, Correio da Manhã, 18 de Março de 1924.

Welcome to the second instalment of the collaboration between THE REFLEX’ DISCOLIDAYS label and BECAUSE MUSIC in Paris, remixing gems from the ZAGORA catalogue.

Created in 1975 by producer Daniel Vangarde (father of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter), the Zagora label created some of the most exciting disco music in France, ranging from cult underground artists Who’s Who and Starbow, to massive international hits by the Gibson Brothers, la Compagnie Créole and Black Blood.

On this 12’’, we’ve got two first time ever remixes from LA COMPAGNIE CREOLE, one of the most successful acts in France during the 80’s who expertly mixed tropical sounds from the West Indies with pop and disco to staggering record sales.

With tapes thought to be long lost, a chance find of stems from two of their songs not only makes this release possible, but also perfectly showcases two sides of the band with ‘Le Bal Masqué’ which was a huge hit commercially in 1984 and ‘La Nuit Des Requins’ which is probably their least known and most underground track, both masterminded by songwriters DANIEL VANGARDE and JEAN KLUGER.

‘LE BAL MASQUE’, now devoid of its cheesiest sections, puts the focus on that infectious groove adorned with percussions and electronics but with its singalong chorus intact and stronger than ever. A guaranteed tropical disco floor filler at 122bpm, regardless of your knowledge of the French language!

‘LA NUIT DES REQUINS’, an ode to session musicians found regularly in Paris studios back in the day, gets a complete overhaul by putting the exhilarating drums and killer bass line of the original to the fore into a brand new 124bpm version that is destined to rock the most discerning dance floors the world over.

Released on 180g vinyl with custom artwork on card sleeve designed by AL KENT / MILLION DOLLAR DISCO.

Synthpop, minimal wave, post-punk, goth, new romantic - fans and critics alike have dug deeply into their vintage thesauruses to describe the beguiling work of Nation of Language. And if you can't precisely define the band, that's the point. Frontman Ian Richard Devaney has become prodigious in expanding what synthesizer-driven music can evoke, such that his output is as much an extrasensory journey as it is an all-too-human destination. With that experience in mind, he wrote the band's fourth album - the spectral, spacious Dance Called Memory - in the most humble of ways: chipping away at melancholia by sitting around and strumming his guitar. Nation of Language's first two albums, Introduction, Presence (2020), and A Way Forward (2021), came as pandemic godsends: gorgeous, relatable soundtracks to our collective doldrums. But it was their last LP, Strange Disciple (2023), that catapulted the group from cultural standouts to critical darlings, with the album being named Rough Trade's Album of the Year. With that release, Pitchfork wrote that the band "are learning what it means to get bigger and better." This is Devaney's calling: soulfully translating individual despair into a comforting, collective mourning. The single "Now That You're Gone," which radiates and reverberates with a devastating wistfulness, was inspired by witnessing his godfather's tragic death from ALS, and his parents' role as caretakers for this ailing friend. At its heart, the song is a reflection of how friends can be there for each other, and also highlights a theme throughout the record: the pain and lost promise of friendships that fall apart. On Dance Called Memory, the band once again collaborated with friend and Strange Disciple producer Nick Millhiser (LCD Soundsystem, Holy Ghost!). "What's so great about Nick is his ability to make us feel like we don't need to do what might be expected of us," says synth player Aidan Noell, who, along with bassist Alex MacKay, rounds out the Nation of Language lineup. They imbued Dance Called Memory with a shifted palette - sampling chopped-up drum breaks on "I'm Not Ready for the Change" for a touch of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine or smashing all of the percussion of "In Another Life" through a synthesizer to cast a shade of early-2000s electronic music. Ultimately, the hope was to weave raw vulnerability and humanity into a synth-heavy album. "There is a dichotomy between the Kraftwerk school of thought and the Brian Eno school of thought, each of which I've been drawn to at different points. I've read about how Kraftwerk wanted to remove all the humanity from their music, but Eno often spoke about wanting to make synthesized music that felt distinctly human," Devaney says. "As much as Kraftwerk is a sonically foundational influence, with this record I leaned much more towards the Eno school of thought. In this era quickly being defined by the rise of AI supplanting human creators I'm focusing more on the human condition, and I need the underlying music to support that_ Instead of hopelessness, I want to leave the listener with a feeling of us really seeing one another, that our individual struggles can actually unite us in empathy."

Don Leisure has cemented his name as one of the most forward-thinking and experimental beatmakers & producers within the current musical ecosystem. As well as being 50% of Darkhouse Family (alongside Earl Jeffers) he has collaborated with the likes of Angel Bat Dawid, Gruff Rhys, DJ Spinna and First Word label-mates Amanda Whiting & Tyler Daley (Children of Zeus). Garnering serious support from Lauren Laverne, Tom Ravenscroft, Huw Stephens, Gilles Peterson, Huey Morgan, The Vinyl Factory, Clash, Uncut and many more. Following the release of ‘Cynnau Tân (feat. Carywyn Ellis)’ (which gained support across BBC Radio from Tom Ravenscroft, Zakia & Huw Stephens) Welsh beatmaker Don Leisure announces the release of a new album ‘Tyrchu Sain’) as he returns with a new single ‘Tyrchu’ due for release on 22nd January 2025. ‘Tyrchu’ features the soft-spoken vocal stylings of Gruff Rhys over a gently rolling, tape saturated and expertly chopped instrumental, creating (in Gruff’s own words) ‘Shiny new beat-treasures with ghostly reflections of Welsh pop’s past - skillfully dug from Sain Records’ deepest veins’

A dedicated student of music, over the years, Don has amassed a vast encyclopaedic knowledge of music genres and subcultures, including a fascination with Welsh psychedelic folk music from the mid-20th century. This introduction was made by respected musician, producer & selector Andy Votel’s 2005 two-part compilation series ‘Welsh Rare Beat’ (in collaboration with Gruff Rhys and Don Thomas), comprising twenty-five tracks from Sain Records’ back catalogue. Now the oldest independent record label in Wales, Sain is a wildly influential bastion of home-grown Welsh talent, co-founded by Welsh-language folk singer Dafydd Iwan, whose music has seen a cultural resurgence in recent years with his 1983 song Yma o Hyd (We’re Still Here) becoming a huge anthem for Wales football fans. Set up in the Welsh capital, many of Sain’s early releases were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, but in the early 1970s the record company moved to the Caernarfon area and opened their first recording studio in 1974 near Llandwrog. Announcing a huge digitisation project throughout 2024, Sain Records took on the mammoth task of painstakingly digitising their entire back catalogue spanning 55 years, working in partnership with the National Library of Wales the resulting archive then be submitted for to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, preserving them for future generations to enjoy. Taking this period of rediscovery as an opportunity to reimagine their impressive inventory, Sain invited Don Leisure to dig into their musical treasure chest, creating a sprawling sonic tapestry from the dusty gems within. On this exhilarating excursion, Sain Records founder Dafydd Iwan explains: ‘Imagine someone gave you access to over 50 years of Welsh popular music – almost all of it unknown to you before. It would be a strange experience of discovery, an unknown territory which could baffle and excite. This happened to Jamal (Don Leisure) – and he was captivated by a world of music he barely knew existed, and when he was asked to distill the experience into one album, he immediately warmed to the idea. And this is the result – a kaleidoscope of sounds to encapsulate a half century of Welsh music. To call it unique would be superfluous: no-one could ever recreate this album. Listen, and enjoy.’.

The resulting product is ‘Tyrchu Sain' (translating to ‘Digging Sain’), a fearless and exploratory album, which sees Don put his signature unparalleled and unpredictable skills to work, weaving together moments of forgotten beauty into celestial and otherworldly compositions. The record features appearances by artists from Wales who have a similar obsession as Don Leisure in these classic Welsh rarities including Gruff Rhys, Carwyn Ellis, Earl Jeffers Amanda Whiting and Boy Azooga. A shimmering patchwork quilt of sound, ‘Tychru Sain’ traverses a shifting landscape of acid folk, eerie vocal melodies and interstellar soundscapes, propelled forth by crisp, head nod-inducing drums and grainy textures. Breathing new life into compositions lost to time, and paving a path for new listeners to discover the magic that lies within.

Koma Saxo, the explosive quintet led by Berlin-based Swedish bassist/producer Petter Eldh, returns on We Jazz Records with their new album, cut live at We Jazz Festival in Helsinki, December 2019. Whereas their lauded debut was a triumph of remapping the goal posts for an acoustic jazz combo for the 2020's, "LIVE" takes you right to the heart of the actual ensemble sound, with 5 musicians tearing the place down, no post production. From the fiery opening sequence kicking off with "Euro Koma", on to the much calmer beauty of "Waltz Me, Waltz Me Baby, All Night Long" and the first single "Fiskeskärsmelodin", the 8-song set is pure fire, never failing to convey the extraordinary intensity of the group: Eldh on bass, Otis Sandsjö (Y-OTIS), Jonas Kullhammar and Mikko Innanen on saxes, and Christian Lillinger on drums.

An excerpt of liner notes by Peter Margasak:

"When I first saw Petter Eldh's quintet Koma Saxo in Berlin in September of 2019 I was floored. The raw, sprinting energy of the band was both infectious and astonishing, but what I most remember was a sense of cognitive dissonance. Was this the same combo that recorded a fantastic eponymous 2019 studio album that represented one of the most convincing, pleasurable, and driving hybrid's of searing post-bop and the production ethos of hip-hop? There have been endless stabs by producers trying to remap the machinations of an organic, all-acoustic jazz band with electronic post-production, but Eldh, channeling a sonic language heavily informed by J Dilla, nailed it in a way I'd never experienced before. Having the trust of his three imaginative, high-octane saxophonists—Jonas Kullhammar, Otis Sandsjö, and Mikko Innanen—he used their grainy sound as raw material, smudging and smearing it like a painter creating new hues on a palette, and then extending, editing, and powering it up within the imperturbable grooves meted out by he and drummer Christian Lillinger. He didn't really alter the essential core of the band's performances. There's no question that a seriously burning quintet had laid the tracks down, even if the performances reflected the kind of concision many jazz groups adapt for a studio endeavor. But the way his jacked-up bass lines and Lillinger's impossibly peripatetic, stuttering rhythms buffeted the massed saxophones elevated Koma Saxo to plane all its own, and I repeatedly returned to that place—half the time trying to figure out what the hell Eldh had done, and the other half lost in giddy ecstasy.

The live show, on the other hand, featured the band without any production tricks. Its soaring, pithy repertoire came alive in a different way, and this excellent live recording from the 2019 We Jazz Festival, has reminded me of how fun and visceral that experience was."

Koma Saxo "LIVE" is released by We Jazz Records on 30 April 2021 on two vinyl editions (silver + black), as a bundle with an unreleased 7" (+ silver vinyl edition), on CD and digitally. The vinyl versions plus the CD come complete with silver embossed lettering. The vinyl is delivered on heavy-duty tip-on sleeve, complete with an insert featuring liner notes by Peter Margasak, Andreas Müller, Matti Nives and Petter Eldh.

a 01: Euro Koma (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
b 02: Puls Koma (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
c 03: Fanfarum for Komarum III (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
[d] 04: Waltz Me Baby, Waltz Me All Night Long (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[e] 05: Otis and Christian (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö & Christian Lillinger]
[f] 06: Blumer (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[g] 07: Fiskeskärsmelodin (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]

Silver Vinyl

Koma Saxo, the explosive quintet led by Berlin-based Swedish bassist/producer Petter Eldh, returns on We Jazz Records with their new album, cut live at We Jazz Festival in Helsinki, December 2019. Whereas their lauded debut was a triumph of remapping the goal posts for an acoustic jazz combo for the 2020's, "LIVE" takes you right to the heart of the actual ensemble sound, with 5 musicians tearing the place down, no post production. From the fiery opening sequence kicking off with "Euro Koma", on to the much calmer beauty of "Waltz Me, Waltz Me Baby, All Night Long" and the first single "Fiskeskärsmelodin", the 8-song set is pure fire, never failing to convey the extraordinary intensity of the group: Eldh on bass, Otis Sandsjö (Y-OTIS), Jonas Kullhammar and Mikko Innanen on saxes, and Christian Lillinger on drums.

An excerpt of liner notes by Peter Margasak:

"When I first saw Petter Eldh's quintet Koma Saxo in Berlin in September of 2019 I was floored. The raw, sprinting energy of the band was both infectious and astonishing, but what I most remember was a sense of cognitive dissonance. Was this the same combo that recorded a fantastic eponymous 2019 studio album that represented one of the most convincing, pleasurable, and driving hybrid's of searing post-bop and the production ethos of hip-hop? There have been endless stabs by producers trying to remap the machinations of an organic, all-acoustic jazz band with electronic post-production, but Eldh, channeling a sonic language heavily informed by J Dilla, nailed it in a way I'd never experienced before. Having the trust of his three imaginative, high-octane saxophonists—Jonas Kullhammar, Otis Sandsjö, and Mikko Innanen—he used their grainy sound as raw material, smudging and smearing it like a painter creating new hues on a palette, and then extending, editing, and powering it up within the imperturbable grooves meted out by he and drummer Christian Lillinger. He didn't really alter the essential core of the band's performances. There's no question that a seriously burning quintet had laid the tracks down, even if the performances reflected the kind of concision many jazz groups adapt for a studio endeavor. But the way his jacked-up bass lines and Lillinger's impossibly peripatetic, stuttering rhythms buffeted the massed saxophones elevated Koma Saxo to plane all its own, and I repeatedly returned to that place—half the time trying to figure out what the hell Eldh had done, and the other half lost in giddy ecstasy.

The live show, on the other hand, featured the band without any production tricks. Its soaring, pithy repertoire came alive in a different way, and this excellent live recording from the 2019 We Jazz Festival, has reminded me of how fun and visceral that experience was."

Koma Saxo "LIVE" is released by We Jazz Records on 30 April 2021 on two vinyl editions (silver + black), as a bundle with an unreleased 7" (+ silver vinyl edition), on CD and digitally. The vinyl versions plus the CD come complete with silver embossed lettering. The vinyl is delivered on heavy-duty tip-on sleeve, complete with an insert featuring liner notes by Peter Margasak, Andreas Müller, Matti Nives and Petter Eldh.

a 01: Euro Koma (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
b 02: Puls Koma (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
c 03: Fanfarum for Komarum III (Live) feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger
d 04: Waltz Me Baby, Waltz Me All Night Long (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[e] 05: Otis and Christian (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö & Christian Lillinger]
[f] 06: Blumer (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[g] 07: Fiskeskärsmelodin (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]

[a] 01: Euro Koma (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[b] 02: Puls Koma (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[c] 03: Fanfarum for Komarum III (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[d] 04: Waltz Me Baby, Waltz Me All Night Long (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[e] 05: Otis and Christian (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö & Christian Lillinger]
[f] 06: Blumer (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[g] 07: Fiskeskärsmelodin (Live) [feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]
[feat. Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger]

Grupo um celebrate 50 years with release of lost dictatorship-era album nineteen seventy seven!

First time release - vinyl comes with printed innersleeves

Brazilian avant-jazz vanguardists Grupo Um celebrate their 50th anniversary, sharing a second previously lost 1970s album from the vaults. Nineteen Seventy Seven (titled after the year it was recorded) is another rip-roaring instrumental fusion treasure from the band which spawned from within Hermeto Pascoal’s famed mid-1970s São Paulo collective.

Like their debut album Starting Point, Grupo Um’s Nineteen Seventy Seven was recorded when Brazil's military dictatorship was at its most repressive. “There were no open doors to those who dreamt to be protagonists in creative instrumental music”, remembers drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario, “even popular composers and singers had to submit their songs to censors and many records were banned and confiscated from the stores.”

Just like Hermeto Pascoal's Viajando Com O Som (1977) and Grupo Um's previous album Starting Point (1975), both of which remained unreleased until the 21st century, Zé Eduardo asserts that the 1977 album was flatly 'without any chance to be released at that time."

Recorded at Rogério Duprat’s Vice-Versa Studios in São Paulo, the group were under both time and space restraints, “we chose the small Studio B,” Lelo Nazario recalls, “which had a Tascam (TE AC) 12x8 console and a 4-channel AMPEX AG 440 machine. Therefore, we had to record without overdubs, everything straight to tape.”

Expanding from a trio to a quintet, original Grupo Um members Lelo Nazario (keys), Zé Eduardo Nazario (drums), and Zeca Assumpção (bass) were joined by saxophonist Roberto Sion and percussionist Carlinhos Gonçalves. Carlinhos, Zé and Zeca had already played together in the group Mandala, while brothers Lelo and Zé had just finished a stint backing Hermeto Pascoal during his years in São Paulo.

Lelo was deeply immersed in modular synthesizer experimentation during this period, working extensively with the ARP2600 and EMS Synthi AKS. These electroacoustic explorations formed the sonic foundation for "Mobile/Stabile," one of his first compositions to merge modular synthesis with Brazilian music, a fusion that would ripple throughout the Brazilian jazz scene. The piece premiered at the first São Paulo International Jazz Festival in 1978, performed by Grupo Um with guest trumpeter Márcio Montarroyos. In a shocking moment, festival organizers interrupted the show mid-performance, sparking fierce backlash from both audience members and journalists who denounced the incident as artistic censorship during Brazil's era of political and cultural repression. The version on Nineteen Seventy Seven is the first recording of the composition.

Nineteen Seventy Seven combines Afro-Brazilian rhythm, modular synthesis and a plethora of whistles, percussion and effects pedals. Album opener “Absurdo Mudo” - so titled for the absurd difficulty it poses to the musicians performing it - starts out in a cloud of mysterious dissonance, before the haze breaks for a glorious keyboard and saxophone interplay atop an uptempo samba groove. “Cortejo dos Reis Negros (Version 2)” (Procession of the Black Kings), based on the maracatu rhythm, inverts the traditional jazz song structure by beginning with improvisations, which are followed by the theme and a final coda. “The studio also had two Parasound electronic reverb units,” Lelo notes, “and the timbre is very audible on the soprano sax and percussion.”

Grupo Um’s daring music represents a manifesto of resistance during the dictatorship years, but it’s one which remains just as relevant today. As Lelo puts it: “For me, the aesthetic issue has always been about combining contemporary avant-garde languages with Brazilian music, independent of categories and commercial interests. The result of this fusion takes music to a new level.”

Recording credits (1977)
Recorded at Vice-Versa B Studio, São Paulo, November 9, 1977
Produced by Lelo Nazario and Zé Eduardo Nazario
Engineered by Ricardo “Franja” Carvalheira



Lelo Nazario – Wurlitzer electric piano, acoustic piano, signal generator, percussion

Zé Eduardo Nazario – drums, percussion

Zeca Assumpção – electric bass

Carlinhos Gonçalves – percussion

Roberto Sion – soprano sax, clarinet

Release credits (2025)
Produced by UTOPIA Studio, São Paulo
Project Coordination in Brazil by Irati Antonio (Utopia Studio)
Tape Restoration and Digital Mastering by Lelo Nazario at Utopia Studio, July 2025
Liner Notes by Lelo Nazario and Zé Eduardo Nazario
Photography by Jorge Las Heras, Lelo Nazario, and artists' personal archives
Photo Restoration by Lelo Nazario
Artwork and Design by Alessandro Renaldin

When the ghost in the machine meets the breath in the reed, expect sparks. Electronic sound artist Robin Rimbaud – Scanner joins forces with acclaimed British bass clarinetist Gareth Davis to create an album where circuitry hums, wood vibrates, and the air between notes crackles with possibility.

This is no polite meeting of minds — it’s an elegant collision. Scanner’s intricate electronic textures weave around Davis’s deep, resonant tones, blurring the boundary between acoustic breath and digital pulse. The result is a sound world that’s at once intimate and expansive, familiar yet thrillingly unpredictable.

Think late-night conversations in abandoned buildings. Think fog rolling over neon. Think sound that slips through your fingers even as it takes hold of you.

The songlines in question , memories and distorted images of travels across various continents, form an imagined biography of places that might or might not have been but somehow seem to exist . Landscapes of blurred statements , lost words and echoes of meandering structures.

"If Miles Davis had been raised on shortwave radio static and midnight phone calls, it might have sounded like this."

As trans-Atlantic alchemists pulling from a shared dialectic that somehow encompassed both postmodern deconstructionist tendencies and a delightfully subversive sense of poptimism, it’s easy to see how David Cunningham and Peter Gordon immediately hit it off upon initially meeting each other back in the late-1970s at the height of their youthful transgressions. Having initially worked together on the second Flying Lizards’ LP fourth wall, with its ingenious fusion of dismantled rhythms and rearranged melodies juxtaposed against the slyly sultry singing of Snatch’s Patti Palladin— with Gordon adding a few sprinkles of mischievous sax in the mix— it’s no wonder the collaboration would lead to further musical adventures.

Which leads us directly to the genesis of The Yellow Box. Embarking on a collaborative exercise in the structural repurposing of music as untethered puzzle pieces in need of rearrangement with no predetermined outcomes, the duo gave birth to a project that would see them move through both time and recording studios across Europe, taking nearly two years from 1981-1983 to complete. Enlisting the great Anton Fier on drums from The Feelies/Lounge Lizards nexus and John Greaves on bass from Henry Cow/Soft Heap lore to round out their dueling creative counterparts, the album would be something of a lost treasure until its eventual release on Cunningham’s Piano imprint in 1996.

Cinematic in scope, and filled with drifting drones, beautiful counter-melodies, eery minimalism, Kraftwerkian synthesizers, looped voices, skronky interludes, and other shifting undercurrents of sound, it was an album that utilized both a diverse array of expressive languages, as well as early sampling techniques and prepared instruments, well before most people were thinking in such expansive, integrated terms at the dawn of the 80’s. But such is life at the vanguard of new music. And one of the reasons that it likely sat on the shelf for so long before finally being released well over a decade later. Like a sparser, less groove-oriented version of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or a more radical take on the experimental work of Can’s Holger Czukay, The Yellow Box stands at the crossroads of time and technology, fusing multiple strands of musical thought and compositional techniques into a disjointed whole that somehow still comes off as a conceptually complete record.

Now, here it is again, over 40 years later, with perhaps even more historical resonance than it had before, remade and remodeled just waiting to be rediscovered again.

Returning with its final instalments, Die Schachtel's Decay Music series extends its explorations of inspired contemporary experimental efforts of the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract with Luigi Turra and Elio Martusciello’s “Liminale” and Sergio Armaroli and David Toop’s “And I Entered Into Sleep”, two astounding electroacoustic gestures of blurred space and time, plumbing complexity of meaning bound to sonority. Creatively groundbreaking and inspired, radically rethinking the terms of what ambient music can be perceived to be, they stand among the most striking efforts to appear within the series to date.

Reconfiguring the notion of bridge building on a multitude of terms, it feels fitting that the tenth and final installment of Die Schachtel’s Decay Music series, Sergio Armaroli and David Toop’s “And I Entered Into Sleep”, was co-created by an artist whose work featured in the first suite of LPs issued by Brian Eno’s Obscure Records in 1975, the groundwork toward which Decay Music’s own efforts nod. Since that auspicious debut, “New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments” — his split with Max Eastley — David Toop has been regarded as a pioneer in British experimental and improvised music: a sonic voyager who has continuously challenged the sources and materiality of sound through rigorously thoughtful performances, a vast catalog of recordings, and a steady flow of highly influential texts. Be it as a member of Alterations, his group breaking group with Peter Cusack, Terry Day, and Steve Beresford that ran between 1977 to 1986, or through is noteworthy work with artists like Rie Nakajima, Thurston Moore, Paul Burwell, Rhodri Davies, Lee Patterson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Akio Suzuki, Elaine Mitchener, and numerous others, collaboration has always played a central role within Toop’s singular practice, but few can claim the sprawling sense of beauty and intimacy that’s achieved by “And I Entered Into Sleep”, his first recorded outing with Sergio Armaroli.

A composer, percussionist, vibraphonist, and multidisciplinary artist, Armaroli has been issuing radical and forward-thinking musical gestures for decades, working as one of Italy’s most noteworthy interpreters of composer’s like Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, Franco Evangelisti, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and Walter Branchi, as both a solo performer and member of the highly regarded Rib Trio, as well as forging a singular practice as a composer, intertwining his efforts as a painter, concrete percussionist, fragmentary poet and sound artist, within a total art, rooted “within the language of jazz and improvisation” as an “extension of the concept of art”. Like Toop, Armaroli’s career has been populated by many collaborators, notably with Riccardo Sinigaglia, Alvin Curran, and Walter Prati, among others, setting the stage for a remarkable meeting between the pair.

Featuring Armaroli on vibraphone and prepared vibraphone and Toop on electronics, “And I Entered Into Sleep” is “a sonic journey, a Proustian suggestion à la Recherche, into the unconscious between electronic and acoustic sounds”. Using a bell that sounds at the beginning of Proust’s “À la Recherché du Temps Perdu”, which reappears more than 3,000 pages later — signaling a transition of phases, as well an auditory trigger of memory — as a departure point, as an association to the percussive vibraphone pulses that thread the album’s two sides, the pair weave a striking interior world of immersive psychological depth. Feeling almost subaquatic at times, like captured glimpses of rumbling, shadowy ecosystems lost within murky ambiences, before washing ashore in a series of pointillistic, highly detailed alien landscapes of the mind, each artist’s markedly different sound-sources, and treatment of the subsequent material elements, dance in abstract grace, incorporating subtle nods to minimalism, free jazz, and musique concrète within its seamless total form of sparse texture and tone.

Easily one of the most striking and memorable releases by either artist to appear in recent years, Sergio Armaroli and David Toop’s “And I Entered Into Sleep” traverses uncharted realms at the borders of literary reference, sound art, ambience and abstraction through delicately musical sounds, revealing new depths at every turn. Issued as the tenth and final album in Die Schachtel’s Decay Music series, highlighting inspired contemporary experimental efforts of the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract.

Ostinato as resistance: Rafael Anton Irisarri’s landmark work reimagined. Marking the tenth anniversary of the American composer’s critically acclaimed album 'A Fragile Geography', this new edition arrives renewed, both sonically and visually.

First released in 2015 (Room40) during a period of personal upheaval and creative reinvention, it endures as a testament to resilience, transformation, and the connection we hold with the places that shape us.

Written in the aftermath of a devastating theft, A Fragile Geography was born out of loss. Just days before a cross-country move to New York, Irisarri’s entire Seattle-based studio was wiped out. Instruments. Recordings. Archives. Gone without a trace. He arrived on the East Coast to an empty room and the daunting task of starting over.

“This album wasn’t just a record; it was a lifeline,” Irisarri reflects. “It became a way to process the emotional chaos that followed: uprooting, instability, and ultimately, the slow, intuitive rebuilding of a life.”

Composed and recorded in the rural woods of the Hudson Valley, the album took shape in seclusion, surrounded by nature, and through a process guided by improvisation. Embracing limitations, Irisarri wove textural layers of field recordings with half-remembered melodies from his Seattle years, piecing them together like fragments of memory. Tracks like “Displacement,” “Hiatus,” and “Persistence” juxtaposed haunting stillness with restless momentum, mapping an inner terrain of grief, catharsis, and rebirth.

Among its defining sounds is “Empire Systems,” a monumental centerpiece built around a simple four-chord progression, organ textures, and guitar drones. Gradually, the track expands into layers of immersive loops and thick, enveloping distortion that wash over the listener like a rolling wave. Often cited as the album’s most majestic passage, it captures Irisarri at his most sonically ambitious. With a harmonically saturated structure crafted from restraint and repetition, it remains one of his most recognizable compositions: an exercise in the art of maximal minimalism.

From the outset, “Reprisal” received praise from BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs, who championed the track on her radio show. Her support played a key role in introducing Irisarri’s work to wider audiences and solidifying his place within the lineage of electronic, drone, and experimental sound artists. A slow-burning elegy, the piece emerges from a haze of distortion and sub-bass, with dense, unrelenting drones carrying a sense of mounting tension. Just as it seems to collapse under its own weight, flickers of guitar emerge like distant light through fog. It’s a meditation on dissonance, resolve, and the elusive possibility of release.

The closing track, “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” is steeped in saudade: a longing for Seattle’s dour grey skies, lush green landscapes, and desaturated sunsets. Through it, Irisarri mourns a vanished chapter of life bound to the city, a time documented in scattered mementos and cherished collections, now permanently gone. A reflection on what could never be recovered: an era lost to time. Julia Kent’s looped cello motifs added a melancholic warmth to the track, marking the first collaboration between the two artists and sparking a musical dialogue that would keep growing in the years that followed.

More than a career highlight, A Fragile Geography has laid the foundation for Black Knoll studio, which Irisarri rebuilt from the ground up. The studio has since grown into a creative hub for countless projects, with Irisarri engineering records for iconic music figures like Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt, Julianna Barwick, and many others. Carried by its lasting influence, the album has quietly captured the ear of a younger generation, its sound and emotional arc finding new listeners in unexpected corners.

The album’s new visual language was reimagined in collaboration with Mexico City–based designer Daniel Castrejón. Irisarri captured ghostly images at Gaztelugatxeko Doniene, a historic coastal site in Bermeo, Euskal Herria. Castrejón then treated the photographs with distressed textures and spectral overlays. The final artwork channels the rugged, elemental forces that shaped both the music and Irisarri’s aesthetic, renewing his ties to ancestral ground inspired by the Basque homeland of his bloodline.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with exceptional attention to detail, this anniversary edition uncovers every nuance in the sound design, enhancing clarity and presence. With each listen, new elements emerge, inviting discovery and reconnection.

“I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” says Irisarri. “I hear adaptation and I'm reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”

Ostinato as resistance: Rafael Anton Irisarri’s landmark work reimagined. Marking the tenth anniversary of the American composer’s critically acclaimed album 'A Fragile Geography', this new edition arrives renewed, both sonically and visually.

First released in 2015 (Room40) during a period of personal upheaval and creative reinvention, it endures as a testament to resilience, transformation, and the connection we hold with the places that shape us.

Written in the aftermath of a devastating theft, A Fragile Geography was born out of loss. Just days before a cross-country move to New York, Irisarri’s entire Seattle-based studio was wiped out. Instruments. Recordings. Archives. Gone without a trace. He arrived on the East Coast to an empty room and the daunting task of starting over.

“This album wasn’t just a record; it was a lifeline,” Irisarri reflects. “It became a way to process the emotional chaos that followed: uprooting, instability, and ultimately, the slow, intuitive rebuilding of a life.”

Composed and recorded in the rural woods of the Hudson Valley, the album took shape in seclusion, surrounded by nature, and through a process guided by improvisation. Embracing limitations, Irisarri wove textural layers of field recordings with half-remembered melodies from his Seattle years, piecing them together like fragments of memory. Tracks like “Displacement,” “Hiatus,” and “Persistence” juxtaposed haunting stillness with restless momentum, mapping an inner terrain of grief, catharsis, and rebirth.

Among its defining sounds is “Empire Systems,” a monumental centerpiece built around a simple four-chord progression, organ textures, and guitar drones. Gradually, the track expands into layers of immersive loops and thick, enveloping distortion that wash over the listener like a rolling wave. Often cited as the album’s most majestic passage, it captures Irisarri at his most sonically ambitious. With a harmonically saturated structure crafted from restraint and repetition, it remains one of his most recognizable compositions: an exercise in the art of maximal minimalism.

From the outset, “Reprisal” received praise from BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs, who championed the track on her radio show. Her support played a key role in introducing Irisarri’s work to wider audiences and solidifying his place within the lineage of electronic, drone, and experimental sound artists. A slow-burning elegy, the piece emerges from a haze of distortion and sub-bass, with dense, unrelenting drones carrying a sense of mounting tension. Just as it seems to collapse under its own weight, flickers of guitar emerge like distant light through fog. It’s a meditation on dissonance, resolve, and the elusive possibility of release.

The closing track, “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” is steeped in saudade: a longing for Seattle’s dour grey skies, lush green landscapes, and desaturated sunsets. Through it, Irisarri mourns a vanished chapter of life bound to the city, a time documented in scattered mementos and cherished collections, now permanently gone. A reflection on what could never be recovered: an era lost to time. Julia Kent’s looped cello motifs added a melancholic warmth to the track, marking the first collaboration between the two artists and sparking a musical dialogue that would keep growing in the years that followed.

More than a career highlight, A Fragile Geography has laid the foundation for Black Knoll studio, which Irisarri rebuilt from the ground up. The studio has since grown into a creative hub for countless projects, with Irisarri engineering records for iconic music figures like Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt, Julianna Barwick, and many others. Carried by its lasting influence, the album has quietly captured the ear of a younger generation, its sound and emotional arc finding new listeners in unexpected corners.

The album’s new visual language was reimagined in collaboration with Mexico City–based designer Daniel Castrejón. Irisarri captured ghostly images at Gaztelugatxeko Doniene, a historic coastal site in Bermeo, Euskal Herria. Castrejón then treated the photographs with distressed textures and spectral overlays. The final artwork channels the rugged, elemental forces that shaped both the music and Irisarri’s aesthetic, renewing his ties to ancestral ground inspired by the Basque homeland of his bloodline.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with exceptional attention to detail, this anniversary edition uncovers every nuance in the sound design, enhancing clarity and presence. With each listen, new elements emerge, inviting discovery and reconnection.

“I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” says Irisarri. “I hear adaptation and I'm reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”

Ostinato as resistance: Rafael Anton Irisarri’s landmark work reimagined. Marking the tenth anniversary of the American composer’s critically acclaimed album 'A Fragile Geography', this new edition arrives renewed, both sonically and visually.

First released in 2015 (Room40) during a period of personal upheaval and creative reinvention, it endures as a testament to resilience, transformation, and the connection we hold with the places that shape us.

Written in the aftermath of a devastating theft, A Fragile Geography was born out of loss. Just days before a cross-country move to New York, Irisarri’s entire Seattle-based studio was wiped out. Instruments. Recordings. Archives. Gone without a trace. He arrived on the East Coast to an empty room and the daunting task of starting over.

“This album wasn’t just a record; it was a lifeline,” Irisarri reflects. “It became a way to process the emotional chaos that followed: uprooting, instability, and ultimately, the slow, intuitive rebuilding of a life.”

Composed and recorded in the rural woods of the Hudson Valley, the album took shape in seclusion, surrounded by nature, and through a process guided by improvisation. Embracing limitations, Irisarri wove textural layers of field recordings with half-remembered melodies from his Seattle years, piecing them together like fragments of memory. Tracks like “Displacement,” “Hiatus,” and “Persistence” juxtaposed haunting stillness with restless momentum, mapping an inner terrain of grief, catharsis, and rebirth.

Among its defining sounds is “Empire Systems,” a monumental centerpiece built around a simple four-chord progression, organ textures, and guitar drones. Gradually, the track expands into layers of immersive loops and thick, enveloping distortion that wash over the listener like a rolling wave. Often cited as the album’s most majestic passage, it captures Irisarri at his most sonically ambitious. With a harmonically saturated structure crafted from restraint and repetition, it remains one of his most recognizable compositions: an exercise in the art of maximal minimalism.

From the outset, “Reprisal” received praise from BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs, who championed the track on her radio show. Her support played a key role in introducing Irisarri’s work to wider audiences and solidifying his place within the lineage of electronic, drone, and experimental sound artists. A slow-burning elegy, the piece emerges from a haze of distortion and sub-bass, with dense, unrelenting drones carrying a sense of mounting tension. Just as it seems to collapse under its own weight, flickers of guitar emerge like distant light through fog. It’s a meditation on dissonance, resolve, and the elusive possibility of release.

The closing track, “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” is steeped in saudade: a longing for Seattle’s dour grey skies, lush green landscapes, and desaturated sunsets. Through it, Irisarri mourns a vanished chapter of life bound to the city, a time documented in scattered mementos and cherished collections, now permanently gone. A reflection on what could never be recovered: an era lost to time. Julia Kent’s looped cello motifs added a melancholic warmth to the track, marking the first collaboration between the two artists and sparking a musical dialogue that would keep growing in the years that followed.

More than a career highlight, A Fragile Geography has laid the foundation for Black Knoll studio, which Irisarri rebuilt from the ground up. The studio has since grown into a creative hub for countless projects, with Irisarri engineering records for iconic music figures like Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt, Julianna Barwick, and many others. Carried by its lasting influence, the album has quietly captured the ear of a younger generation, its sound and emotional arc finding new listeners in unexpected corners.

The album’s new visual language was reimagined in collaboration with Mexico City–based designer Daniel Castrejón. Irisarri captured ghostly images at Gaztelugatxeko Doniene, a historic coastal site in Bermeo, Euskal Herria. Castrejón then treated the photographs with distressed textures and spectral overlays. The final artwork channels the rugged, elemental forces that shaped both the music and Irisarri’s aesthetic, renewing his ties to ancestral ground inspired by the Basque homeland of his bloodline.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with exceptional attention to detail, this anniversary edition uncovers every nuance in the sound design, enhancing clarity and presence. With each listen, new elements emerge, inviting discovery and reconnection.

“I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” says Irisarri. “I hear adaptation and I'm reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”

Vines, the solo project of New York-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Cassie Wieland, offers a window into her inner world through expansive swaths of sound. She pieces together a celestial mix of synths, percussion, strings, and vocoded voice, making music that is at once deeply personal and cinematic in scope. This diaristic approach first took shape with her 2023 EP Birthday Party, and is crystallized on her debut LP, I’ll be here. With the sweeping and vulnerable I’ll be here, Vines arrives fully formed as an artist who crafts deeply resonant and open music–the kind that invites listeners in to listen, reflect, and share in the journey of learning through living.

“It was through making music that I was able to meet myself,” Wieland said. “Anything I’m going through or feeling is something that somebody else out there can relate to, and that’s really special to me.”

I’ll be here is both a culmination of years spent creating gossamer soundscapes and an opening to a new journey for Wieland as an artist. The album grew out of her years as a composer and songwriter, and builds on the language she developed on Birthday Party, which transformed the tumultuous feelings of the passing of time into minimalist meditations. It was just a start, though–a prologue, a development of the kind of language and ideas she wanted to express. With I’ll be here, she digs deeper and writes music that feels more sprawling, further solidifying her singular voice.

Wieland’s musical composition process is similar to journaling, lending itself to the music’s honesty. When she writes, she makes room for all the ideas she has; in these sessions, there are no wrong ideas, and she allows the music to be attuned to the experiences she’s having at the time. With I’ll be here, Wieland zeroes in on themes of anxiety, loneliness, navigating human connection, and having to grow up from a young age, ultimately coming to a place of acceptance. And though it began as a journal written in solitude, her collaborators shape the music with her.

Working with friends, in fact, was a crucial part of bringing the record to life. “Everything that was supposed to happen came together so easily because of the people involved,” Wieland said. I’ll be here was co-produced and recorded with Wieland’s longtime collaborator Mike Tierney, a four time Grammy-nominated engineer who has worked with artists across the contemporary classical and experimental scene like minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, LA’s preeminent classical ensemble Wild Up, and various bands on Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label. Percussionist and composer Adam Holmes and violinist Adrianne Munden-Dixon are two other longtime collaborators who are frequent fixtures of her live show. Holmes plays synths, drums, and banjo; in live settings, his kit is loaded with elements of the songs that are then triggered by MIDI, making the music an interactive, evolving experience. The album’s gentle, filamented edges are colored by Munden-Dixon, whose poignant string melodies elevate Wieland’s introspective compositions, as well as cellist Helen Newby, saxophonists Julian Velasco and Jordan Lulloff, and bassist Pat Swoboda.

Wieland takes an economic approach to writing music, building the swirling and immersive landscapes of Vines through short melodies, lyrics, and phrases. As each element layers and interweaves, they grow into sprawling webs of ghostly sound. Prior to Vines, Wieland composed pieces for other people to play using a minimalist’s sensibility, writing slowly unfolding melodies for instruments like violin and saxophone. In recent years, she sharpened her solo style across a variety of singles and covers which have garnered significant attention on social media for their emotional resonance (“being loved isn't the same as being understood” in particular went massively viral on TikTok in 2024). Birthday Party, her debut as Vines, brought her writing to a much more intimate space, centering on her vocoded voice cloaked in feathery reverb. A series of recent singles, meanwhile, including “I am my home,” showcase the way that Wieland’s music is born from the story of her innermost feelings, extending far beyond just the self.

Though Wieland’s music often deals with dark themes, it unfolds with tender melancholy, the kind that feels like a warm embrace. On “Evicted,” Wieland wonders if she’s getting sick or moving on, if she’s lost or found. Her vocals expand with each lyrical repetition, as the instrumentals slowly encircle and the music’s rhythm grows and bursts into a heart-wrenching, yet radiant wave reminiscent of post-rock bands like Explosions in the Sky. “Tired” follows a similar trajectory, building from a looping, melancholy rhythm and floating lyrics into a solemn resignation. Elsewhere, Wieland takes a more ruminative approach: “Omw” begins with twinkling piano and melancholy strings that gradually transform into an undulating mass. It is a song born out of the warm feeling of reminiscence, the slight return of hope that comes with nostalgia.

With any searching journey, there is also a point of understanding. The title track closes the album with the freedom of acceptance. A marching drum beats steadily beneath Wieland’s open vocals, moving forward, ever onward as it flies into the ether. In Wieland’s delicately textured music, there is room to come into yourself, and learn to love whomever that is. I’ll be here is a special space that can be all your own, one in which to feel what needs to be felt. “This is music for your story,” Wieland said. “I want you to use it how you need it.”

Swimming Paul's first album is available again as a new edition.



In the vibrant city of London, a talented French producer named Swimming Paul made his mark. While he had already spent several years producing music for others, Swimming Paul felt a strong calling to embark on his own creative project—one that would redefine the concept of dance music and infuse it with meaning.
Paul drew inspiration from the early days of house music, recognizing it as more than just a genre. It represented a cultural movement that united people from diverse backgrounds. Motivated by this spirit, Swimming Paul sought to create music that not only made people dance but also brought them together and conveyed powerful messages.
With each composition, Paul approached his work as an artist would approach a blank canvas. He poured his heart and soul into every beat, melody, and rhythm, meticulously crafting a sound that blended elements from various genres while bearing his own unique touch. His music pulsated with the infectious energy of a crowded dance floor, yet it also possessed the ability to evoke deep emotions and provoke introspection.
Swimming Paul’s vision extended far beyond mere entertainment. He aspired to establish a space where people could connect, express themselves, and find solace in the universal language of music. Every track he produced served as an invitation to embrace the present moment, to let go of inhibitions, and to discover the transformative power of music.