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10Questions is a record label by Dam Swindle’s Lars Dales and graphic designer Bas Koopmans. After two prolific first releases, 10Questions drops another EP, this time by long time friend and synth wizard Lorenz Rhode. Lorenz finds himself exploring the depths of 80’s inspired Italo disco with a modern touch. Just how we like it.

The ‘Le Noir EP’ is spearheaded by two A sides of which title track ‘Le Noir’ is the first one. “Le Noir’ features the sensual vocals of ‘Margerita’ and is one of those tracks that we love instantly because of it’s strong theme and even stronger execution. Italo drama in optima forma. The chord progression on this track gets you hooked and never seems to end; a perfect example of why we call Lorenz the ‘synth wizard’.

The second A side ‘Yayoi’ is a track with a big nod to Lorenz’ memories of 8bit games and early days music programming. This track pulls you in from the start with an emotional theme but with the drop into bassline and percussion it’s clear this theme is not one to linger on. The addition of both claps and stabs add loads of energy on top making this track a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The full B side is reserved for ‘Pan Di Stelle’ and is the exact counterpart of ‘Yayoi’. It starts of with an Italo inspired bassline and with the percussion on top, it immediately dictates the energy. Only after the two minute mark the spacey theme comes lurking around the corner and fits perfectly in it’s own sonic pocket. This track is a another example of Lorenz’ expertise in utilising vintage synths and why he has been immensely popular for his production and playing skills.

10Questions is a label build on the concept that the record and record sleeve are an integral part of the full experience of an EP. The artist is given a questionnaire and depending on his/her answers the artwork is made. This way the music and art co-exist in the same creative universe, that of the artist and the label alike.

At only eighteen years old, Paris DJ and producer u.r.trax has a C.V that would make most seasoned selectors blush. Blending the innocence of youth with a ferocious production palette, the emerging techno star has already played Concrete, Dehors Brut, and La Toilette, and has released on Hector Oaks Kaos label, having become infatuated with the sound at a young age - even visiting Tresor at just fourteen!

From death comes rebirth, and on ‘Dying Generation' u.r.trax flies the flag for future-gazing doof with its twisting, left-field turns and throbbing noise. An instant Berlin classic. The glitch and suspense of ‘What Was On Their Mind’ melts into the raver’s core; alarm bells ring, heartbeats race and eyes widen on its six-minute journey.

The headsy vibes on ‘You Are Your Own Distraction’ is a welcome switch-up, its punchy kicks and bouncy aesthetic inviting the listener to dance as weird as they want, before the techno tradition is dropped in favour of a hefty cut of electro flavour, molding the artists own vocals with her production for a “Miss Kitten 2.0” vibe.

Galaxial atmospherics, horror-synths and anxious energy bow us out on ‘Race Against Time’, completing the package with a furious digi-only rework from MRD.

In most any Dungeons & Dragons adventure worth
completing, the hero must come face-to-face with
themselves in some form - a cursed, mystical mirror that
reveals all that our hero is and is not; a reflection in some
Blood River that displays for our hero the monster they
have become; a doppelganger that reveals how much our
hero has changed since the beginning of the adventure.
 So, as their year-long 25th Anniversary campaign enters
its final chapter, Jagjaguwar must also confront their
former self. They’re going all the way back to the
basement of the sushi joint in Charlottesville; all the way
back to when they were just a haphazardly made zine; all
the way back to the original mantra which served at
Jagjaguwar’s early guiding force. The Sentimental Noise
echoing through the caverns of self-discovery is tender
and deafening.
 The label have uncovered new and unreleased work from
some of their earliest friends like Drunk, Manishevitz and
Bevel. They’ve called upon necromancers like Norway’s
Jenny Hval, Jagjaguwar legends Wilderness and
Bloomington post-rock heroes Tammar. Mysterious noise
mongers like Canada’s Wold and Oslo’s Some Nerve have
delivered on their promise to absolutely split skulls open.
There are two loving tributes to Patron Saint of Jagjaguwar
John Prine. And they have unearthed two songs from
Atsushi Miura, who once upon a time allowed founder
Darius Van Arman to book shows in the basement of the
sushi restaurant he ran. He dedicates one song to Darius
and in the other, humorously lambasts the college town he
called home for all those years. Today Jagjaguwar dies;
tomorrow Jagjaguwar is reborn.
 Double LP on metallic silver vinyl.

Following their recent solo releases Soniscope (Dauw) and Cells #5 (Important Records), Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Midori Hirano and Tokyo based string experimentalist Atsuko Hatano have teamed up for their first collaborative full-length: Water Ladder. An intense, multilayered continuation of earlier collaborations (Atsuko was featured on Midori’s debut LP back in 2006), the foundation for this new collaborative album was laid when they shared stages in Berlin (Ausland) and Japan in 2019. Working remotely at first, they later recorded parts of the album in Nara’s snoihouse (using omnidirectional polyhedral speakers).

“As we rallied back and forth with our recordings in the process of creating this album, unanticipated fluctuations and irregularities emerged, coming together into a kind of music with a unique resilience and buoyancy that cannot be confined to existing molds. It was as though we had built a Water Ladder to bridge the gap between us,” explains prolific composer and viola player Atsuko Hatano, who’s been busy recording solo and with colleagues such as Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Mocky, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Takeo Toyama, and Anzu Suhara (Asa-chang & Junrei).

Kyoto-born, Berlin-based Midori Hirano, who’s also been releasing music under her MimiCof moniker, adds multiple instruments to the ever-changing sonic landscapes of Water Ladder – an album defined by suspenseful and seemingly suspended compositions that often feel like floating in midair, a sensation the musicians compare to “that distinctive feeling you get from riding a high-speed elevator, where you can no longer tell whether you’re going up or down.”

Devoid of birdsong, the late summer air is nevertheless full of buzzing, whirring, hissing sounds on foreboding album opener “Summer Noise,” a cinematic intro with slow-moving piano chords and an ominous build-up over the course of its sprawling eight minutes. Elsewhere, sudden bursts of viola cut through nighttime peace (“Nocturnal Awakening”), followed by “Cotton Sphere” – which makes the sensation of floating in midair complete: harmonies and melodies rise and form to fall apart again, leaving only trails of previously defined space shimmering in their wake…

Whereas the title track truly explodes half-way in, the final “Cascade” brings closure to the electro-acoustic six-track collection: the floating continues, but the interlocking musical planes are no longer ruffled or rippling, no longer torn in many directions at once. Instead, the sonic streams merge and eventually disappear like ephemeral water falls after heavy rain or sudden snowmelt.

“Water cannot retain its form on its own, and can take any shape as effected by external forces. Its movements cannot be captured by eyesight alone: A body of water that appears to be crashing down into a deep, bottomless waterfall could actually be rising up very slowly into midair,” says Atsuko. “This is an invitation for you to cross the ever-transforming Water Ladder built between Midori and myself.”

Deluxe LP edition, remastered using transfers from the original
tapes lifted from the Phillips vault by mastering legend Kevin Gray.
 Pressed at Pallas on 180g heavyweight vinyl and housed in a thick
reverse-board sleeve with additional insert featuring photographs
and words by bassist on the session Bill Crow.
 This session, recorded at New York’s Nola Penthouse Studios in
1963, is a little-known masterwork from the incredible Gerry
Mulligan catalogue.
 Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was a true icon of jazz, being
one of the prominent figures in the West Coast scene through the
1950s until his death in 1996. Voted Number One musician in his
instrument by Downbeat Magazine for 42 years in a row, Mulligan
was one of the key players of his time and a figurehead who
helped shape the sound of jazz to come.
 From periods in the ‘Birth Of The Cool’-era Miles Davis line up, as
well as forming a piano-less quartet with Chet Baker, Gerry was
always on the frontline of what was hip and happening in
America’s one true art form.
 With its striking Oliver Hardimon designed cover, ‘Night Lights’ is
the very definition of refined cool jazz. Shimmering with a latenight beauty that perfectly evokes a sophisticated New York City in
the early 1960s, Gerry and his Sextet fuse slow burning jazz noir
alongside emerging contemporary Brazilian rhythms, with the
interplay between Mulligan and guitarist Jim Hall a particular
standout throughout.
 Title track ‘Night Lights’ is a wonderfully smooth, low light tune,
while the Latin-tinged ‘Morning Of The Carnival’ really finds the
band in their finest and most swinging form. A cover of jazz
standard ‘In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning’, followed by
Chopin’s ‘Prelude In E Minor’ continues the delightful groove
before we finish out with Mulligan originals ‘Festival Minor’ and
‘Tell Me When’.
 For this version of the release, New Land have also included the
1965 version of ‘Night Lights’, which gives an interesting
comparison, performed by his later day Quintet featuring the
Wrecking Crew’s legendary Hal Blaine on drums, amongst others.

Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder afolder.studio, Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis.

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions using probabilities to compose music, various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work.

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled 'Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics', consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, 'In writing electronic music,' Robin Mackay once wrote, 'you also have to direct the invention of new tools.'

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the artifical acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow's investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, '. . . What emerged from this fog or soup for me were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.'

Geese are a band that begins and ends in Brooklyn, as a
project between friends to build a home studio out of a
basement.
 Their debut album, ‘Projector’ (from which this single is
taken), is born from the same ambition: make music by
any means necessary. The songs were recorded with
sneakers as mic stands and blankets draped over the
amps, all within the afternoon following a school day, up
until they ran the risk of noise complaints.
 As a result, ‘Projector’ is as much a moment in time as it is
an album. It represents five teenagers whose love of
music touches every part of their lives: their restless
anxiety about their futures, and their pent-up frustration
with their present - a perspective all too familiar in today’s
uncertain world. Perhaps then it only makes sense that the
figure on the album cover was born from a dream:
curiously alien, yet strangely familiar.
 Creative direction by Matt De Jong and Jamie JamesMedina (Fontaines D.C., Arlo Parks, Mura Masa, FKA
Twigs).
 Two sold out London shows at The Windmill and The
Sebright Arms. First time ever playing in the UK.
 7” features ‘Low Era’ on the A side and a never before
heard bonus track called ‘Smoke In Japan’ on the B side.

Geese are a band that begins and ends in Brooklyn, as a
project between friends to build a home studio out of a
basement.
 Their debut album, ‘Projector’ is born from the same
ambition: make music by any means necessary. The
songs were recorded with sneakers as mic stands and
blankets draped over the amps, all within the afternoon
following a school day, up until they ran the risk of noise
complaints.
 As a result, ‘Projector’ is as much a moment in time as it is
an album. It represents five teenagers whose love of
music touches every part of their lives: their restless
anxiety about their futures, and their pent-up frustration
with their present - a perspective all too familiar in today’s
uncertain world. Perhaps then it only makes sense that the
figure on the album cover was born from a dream:
curiously alien, yet strangely familiar.
 Creative direction by Matt De Jong and Jamie JamesMedina (Fontaines D.C., Arlo Parks, Mura Masa, FKA
Twigs).
 Two sold out London shows at The Windmill and The
Sebright Arms. First time ever playing in the UK

Geese are a band that begins and ends in Brooklyn, as a
project between friends to build a home studio out of a
basement.
 Their debut album, ‘Projector’ is born from the same
ambition: make music by any means necessary. The
songs were recorded with sneakers as mic stands and
blankets draped over the amps, all within the afternoon
following a school day, up until they ran the risk of noise
complaints.
 As a result, ‘Projector’ is as much a moment in time as it is
an album. It represents five teenagers whose love of
music touches every part of their lives: their restless
anxiety about their futures, and their pent-up frustration
with their present - a perspective all too familiar in today’s
uncertain world. Perhaps then it only makes sense that the
figure on the album cover was born from a dream:
curiously alien, yet strangely familiar.
 Creative direction by Matt De Jong and Jamie JamesMedina (Fontaines D.C., Arlo Parks, Mura Masa, FKA
Twigs).
 Two sold out London shows at The Windmill and The
Sebright Arms. First time ever playing in the UK

No Bragging Rights are releasing a brand new self titled album. As a band we still felt we had more to say. Life took us all in different directions which made writing difficult. Anthony (Tron) joining the band was the spark and the resource we needed to start writing. Daniel would drive 2hrs to Tron’s studio in Tacoma to write and send the demo’d ideas. I was in my last year of undergrad so I would write lyrics/melodies over my Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. We hit the studio in January which was the first time Martin had seen Daniel or Tron since our last show in 2016. We feel that we were able to bring new elements to our sound without sacrificing our identity as a band.

Tape

Tony Rolando's debut release Old Cool Echoes is the kind of tape you flip over and play again and again. His second release, an LP for Important titled Breakin' Is A Memory, will be available in early 2022. A CD titled Shared System will follow.

Imagine if you wished away your surroundings and found yourself in a synthetic landscape where the simplest three color pattern animated an entire horizon. If you could suppress your memory enough to experience the new beauty of it, but not so much that you lost the pieces of yourself that make life worth living, this could be your soundtrack.

For more than a decade, Tony Rolando has composed electricity into musical instruments at Make Noise. When he collaborated with Alessandro Cortini in 2019 to create the Strega instrument, the experience rekindled Tony's love of composing and recording music. On "Old Cool Echoes," Tony follows mutating patterns and slow timbral gradients, allowing them to suggest composition as much as he does, occasionally exploring digital media catacombs and dabbling in the microtonal, all with minimal percussion interruption.

Bristol's loudest and fiercest duo Bad Tracking step up on home turf via ATC as part of the double drop, giving us their debut album, jammed with unhinged sonics, raw & industrial at its core. But contained within the fury, there's a definite heart, soul and musicality contained within, setting it apart from 'just another noise album' - it's a special one. Mastered and cut by Lewis at Stardelta. Served in printed sleeve, designed by Kin40k.

Mainly known to DJs for the funk groover "Te Queria", Rota-Mar is the first solo album by the charismatic Zéca do Trombone. During a vertiginous career which started in the late 60s, Zéca was a permanent member of Wilson Simonal's band, toured with Luiz Eça's Sagrada Família (alongside Joyce, Naná Vasconcelos, Nelson Angelo and others), recorded the seminal Brazilian funk "Coluna do Meio" for his joint effort with Roberto Sax, and played and recorded for some of the big names of Brazilian music such as Tim Maia or Martinho da Vila. Particularly for samba artists such as Alcione, Leci Brandão or Moreira da Silva, Zéca do Trombone was the trombonist of choice.

Rota-Mar displays the work of an established musician who has nothing to prove. Impregnated with Zéca's characteristic voice, the songs draw inspiration from the sea, love and bohemian life, and let us all dream of what life in Rio the Janeiro was during that time. "Te Queria", penned by Zéca's childhood friend Elízio de Búzios (known for his highly collectable funk/boogie single "Tamanqueiro") is the obvious highlight, although we believe the real beauty of the album lies in the relaxed sea-side groove and MPB in the rest of the songs, including Zéca's superb take on Martinho da Vila's "Manteiga de Garrafa".

Originally hailing from Scotland, now based in Copenhagen, Numbers present 23-year old producer and deejay Perko with his debut release NV Auto.

The six tracks on this EP hear Perko mining the grooves between his favourite genres for building blocks of inspiration. Drawing from UK soundsystem culture and modern experimental music, half of the record explores deeper atmospheric passages and meditative repetition, characterised by layers of subtly shifting chords, field recordings and delicate polyrhythms.

Three dancefloor cuts, spread throughout the rest of the record, retain this detail and interplay with added energy. Perko's sense of rhythm & space is clear with 'Rounded's glacial synths, blown out drum machines and sculpted sub sine waves. 'What Otters' forges playful UKG touches within a paperclip framework of space-echoes and sparks, whilst 'Songbirds' flips into 4/4 drive with percolated alarms and shimmering pads.

'Density, Noise, Dust, Distortion, Space...' says Perko, if you want it simple.

The debut release from a London duo weaving vibrant patchworks of dance floor debris, from line-dancehall to hopscotch breaks. Enter the world of Angel Rocket…BIG TIP!

Angel Rocket is the eclectic new project from Angel Hunt (Good Morning Tapes) & Peter Rocket (BEAM). As dual specialists in new-clear fusion, primordial blooze and glittering bass-bin pressure, Angel Rocket is a match made in heaven.

The AM003 EP is a masterclass in playful dance floor navigations, charting territory from dancehall and techno to blissful Balearic plod, and beyond. It's the perfect release for Accidental Meetings debut wax release after a string of impressive cassette tapes & forward thinking compilations.

'Pomelo Fog' is a 100bpm wormhole with warm reese-bass expansions and washes of serotonin-soaked pads incubating a new mutant techno-dancehall variant.

'Oyster Perpetual' boasts an immaculate palette of harsh, tactile mid-highs and glossy bass swoops, sitting pretty between the realms of 100bpm Dembow and 200bpm Jungle.

Next in line is 'Tunnelrunners Unltd'; a pop’n’lock maze of funkee wall banging 4x4 techno with a noizy, UK-inspired lean.

'Foamstone Hoedown' closes the record, its low-slung Balearic wobble and weirdo 5th World polyrhythms gently beaming listeners back down to earth.

Composer, electronic music innovator, and Pere Ubu's original synthesist Allen Ravenstine returns to Waveshaper Media with the diptych LP (comprised of 1 EP per side) Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir, the final two parts in Raventine’s Tyranny of Fiction series. Waveshaper Media first came into contact with Ravenstine when we interviewed him in 2012 for our modular synthesizer documentary I Dream Of Wires.

Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir brings together 21 of the prodigious composer’s recent lyrical and abstract compositions collectively comprised of the sounds of analogue and digital synthesizers, alongside traditional acoustic instruments. The first 10 recordings, subtitled Nautilus, are found on Side A of this LP while the second 11, Rue Du Poisson Noir, comprise Side B.

Using a singular blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, each track on Nautilus, weaves its own wayward travelogue amidst stray bits of audio verité and wafting musical fragrances—by turns tropical and foreboding. Rue De Poisson Noir takes cues from its fragmentary companion both in palette and approach, slithering between cinematic intrigue, off-brand jazz, avant-garde mischief, and fried electro without ever batting an eye. Together they form a beguiling collection of hyperrealist miniatures that remains strange, restless, inquisitive and — most of all — evocative throughout.

For those in the know, Allen Ravenstine has been one of the most creative synthesizer players of the past forty-plus years. Ravenstine started out in the mid-1970s experimenting in his Cleveland apartment with an analogue EML 200 synthesizer, eventually creating a piece in 1975 that became known as Terminal Drive. While he had no intention of releasing his compositions, word got out about the kind of sounds he was experimenting with, which led to an invitation to join pioneering “avant garage” group Pere Ubu for the recording of the group’s first 45, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.” He soon joined Pere Ubu full-time, bringing to the band’s sound unpredictable textures, effects, bleeps, squalls, pulsating washes of sound—whatever he felt could enhance the soundscape of the band’s performances and recordings.

By the early 1990s, Ravenstine had grown sick of the road, band infighting and the music industry in general. Deciding a change was needed, he opted to forego music altogether, making his living as an airplane pilot. His music career remained in limbo until 2012, when an interview for the I Dream Of Wires documentary, alongside Robert Wheeler who had succeeded him as Pere Ubu’s synthesist, turned into a recording session for the duo, leading to a series of collaborative releases. As well as having his 1975 Terminal Drive recordings released to great acclaim in 2017, Ravenstine has been prolific in recent years, with Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir now marking his 4th solo full-length.

LP is limited to 1000 copies, black vinyl. Swansea Sound started in the middle of lockdown. They realised that fast, loud, joyous, angry indie-pop punk was the answer to being stuck indoors. Who needs introspection? Hue Williams is reunited with Pooh Sticks partner Amelia Fletcher (ex- Talulah Gosh, Heavenly). Rob Pursey (also ex-Heavenly) and Ian Button (Wreckless Eric’s live collaborator) provide the noise. Swansea Sound are the fast, acerbic and joyous past, present and future of indie. Four of the tracks were released as singles, all of them now impossible to obtain. ‘Corporate Indie Band’ was a limited edition cassette, ‘I Sold My Soul on eBay’ was a one-off lathe cut that got auctioned on eBay (with a £400 winning bid), ‘Indies of the World’ was a 7” inch single that briefly hit the UK physical charts, but immediately sold out and plummeted back out again. And then there was ‘Swansea Sound’: a requiem for a lost radio station; an anti-corporate lament - another limited edition cassette single. First track Rock N Roll Void gives a three minute revision session, just in case you’ve forgotten about The Ramones, The Kinks, The Buzzcocks and the brief explosion of indie noise pollution of 1986. Some of the songs are reflexive – ‘Swansea Sound’ and ‘The Pooh Sticks’. (Who else was going to write a tribute to The Pooh Sticks?) Others are searching for hope in the digital desert – ‘Let It Happen’, ‘I’m OK When You’re Around’, ‘Pasadena’, ‘Angry Girl’. ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’ is pure pop throwaway fun. The others songs are dead catchy too, they just happen to express a sickness and a contempt for the state of things. ‘Corporate Indie Band’ is about a group who have mortgaged their creativity to a major label and sold their identities to an online marketing team of public schoolboys. Freedom of Speech takes a look at three contemporary ‘alternative’ music stars and considers how they’ve responded to BLM, the pandemic and the rise of right-wing populism. ‘Like self-serving arseholes’, is the unfortunate answer. (You won’t struggle to work out who the three ‘alternative’ stars are.) Swansea Sound took their name from a well-loved local radio station when it was given a corporate makeover in 2020. They even used the radio station’s abandoned logo. Like the indiepunk pop songs, something modern acidic and angry has taken up residence in a familiar, borrowed frame. You can throw yourself around to Swansea Sound like it’s 1986, but if you catch the lyrics you’ll remember you’re in 2021. (Sorry about that.) The Rum Puncheon, a notorious pub in Swansea, closed down decades ago.

Gábor Lázár's colourful discography extends from sound art to his more recent dancefloor detonations. From his first release on Lorenzo Senni's Presto! label to his collaborations with Russell Haswell and his popular 'seizure inducing' team-up with Mark Fell entitled 'The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making' to his last album 'Unfold' on The Death of Rave, where he balanced relentless, snappy rhythms and wonky melodic tones against more measured chords to create a deliciously fruity futurism.Gábor has now signed to Planet Mu for his new album 'Source' which moves forward with the dance music direction he started to formulate with 'Unfold'. Gábor first fell in love with electronic music simultaneously through dance music and it's IDM offspring, and also with harsher, noisier computer music on labels such as Editions Mego. This collection, which develops slowly over 8 tracks, works its way through his own take on these influences, moving across themes and loops as if each track is a different stage in a process. All these tracks sound incredible on a club sound system. The listener can hear nods to hoover bass and 2-step in 'Phase', or trance techno in ‘Excite', the dive-bombing bass of dubstep in 'Effort ' or the frantic techno influence of 'Route', emulated in the minimal forms Gábor has created with a sound artist's precision and a strict adherence to his vacuum-like grids. Gábor bends his sounds, abstracts them and re-contextualises them; basslines fire out of the grid at strange angles and squirm as if they've come alive, shards of melody shoot off at wild angles, attacking with drama and a thrilling sense of energy

Truly adventurous and life enhancing music that invigorates your soul. TIP!

Press Release:

Gordan join traditional Serbian singing with abstraction, energy and minimalism. Their music is marked by radical reduction, seemingly endless ascension and a passion for experiments.

The Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić is an internationally recognized and acclaimed artist. She, like almost no other contemporary singer, is a master of all the complex local stylistic variations of singing from Balkan music. Guido Möbius plays bass and various electronic sound generators. Additionally he uses guitar amps, microphones and effects to provoke feedback which either harmonize or are juxtaposed with the song. It is a dialogue between sound and noise which is accentuated or fragmented by means of Andi Stecher’s expressive drumming. With a rich pool of ideas the percussionist drives the sound forward breathlessly and grounds it. Together the trio form a dynamic body of sound.

Gordan recorded their debut during the first wave of the Covid19 pandemic in Europe in March 2020. Due to the lockdown in Berlin at that time the city didn’t have many distractions to offer, so the trio just concentrated on work. The atmosphere of being isolated in a recording studio had a big impact on the musical results. All three band members came up with ideas for new pieces, which were immediately tested, worked out and recorded. On abstract instrumentals provided by Stecher and Möbius, Svetlana Spajic sometimes reacted with personal interpretations of serbian traditionals, and the other way around. Most of the time it was as if the music just happend to the band; playing together felt natural from the first moment on.

Some of the old serbian traditional songs that Spajic sang are extinct forms with a specific local melodic mode. The skillful improvisation of their lyrics and ornaments was of great importance and very estimated among village singers. The title song Down In The Meadow for instance originally is a love song from the village of Odevce in eastern Kosovo, Serbia. The singing manner is of a great intensity and sonority, with lots of specific local ornaments. It disappeared along with the village communities from the area. Oh, my Rose flowers is from the region of Kopaonik mountain (southwest Serbia) and the mode, scale is known as ”kopaonički glas” (Kopaonik mountain air). Svetlana adopted the style from the late singer Veličko Veličković from the village of Ostraće. It is an old mountain solo chant, rich in fast ornamentation movements and microtonal intervals. Don’t ask how I live is Svetlana’s homage to the new popular folk music movement from the 80ies known as Južni Vetar (Southern Wind) led by a musician and composer Mile Ilić, known as Mile Bas (“Mile the Bass”) which revolutionized popular music introducing tabooed oriental music and original arrangements.

All music by Spajic Stecher Möbius except ‘Don’t Ask How I Live’ by Miodrag M. Ilić, original title Što me pitaš
All lyrics are traditional, except ‘Don’t Ask How I Live’

Svetlana Spajic — vocals
Andi Stecher — drums & percussion
Guido Möbius — bass, feedback, electronics

Recorded by Alberto Lucendo at UFO sound studios Berlin in March 2020 mixed by Morphosis
Mastering by Neel at Enisslab, Rome
Artwork by Lorenzo Mason Studio

The gala evening at the Paris Opera on December 19, 1958 was announced in the press as "the greatest show in the world". Maria Callas, at the height of her glory, performed for the first time in front of a Parisian audience. The diva delivered all the facets of her art through the Italian classics that she loved, with the theatrical genius that is proper to her. Paris gave her a triumphant evening!

The original recording of this evening, broadcast in Eurovision throughout Europe, has been newly restored with the greatest care.

Presentation by Benoît Duteurtre, novelist, essayist and music critic.

Excerpts from Norma by Bellini
Excerpts from Il Trovatore by Verdi
Excerpts from Il Barbiere di Seviglia by Rossini
Complete second act of Tosca by Puccini

You Should Be Here, the 2015 follow-up to debut mixtape Cloud 19 from Bay Area-born two-time GRAMMY Award-nominated multiplatinum songstress Kehlani, is out on vinyl on November 26th.

The 15-track mixtape, available as a physical vinyl, includes the hugely popular tracks “The Way”, “You Should Be Here” and “Jealous”, with appearances on the album from Chance the Rapper, BJ The Chicago Kid, Lexii Alijai & Coucheron. After bowing at #5 on the Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums Chart and at #1 on the iTunes Top R&B Albums Chart, the mixtape garnered a 2016 Grammy Award nod for “Best Urban Contemporary Album”. Upon release, Pitchfork praised how, “You Should Be Here’s dynamism and generosity is something to be amazed by,” while Billboard proclaimed it, “The year’s first great R&B album.” It landed on Complex’s “Best Albums of 2015,” Noisey’s “50 Best Albums of 2015,” and Rolling Stone’s “20 Best R&B Albums of 2015.”
Critically acclaimed R&B pop songstress Kehlani is praised by Complex as “a special talent, making the kind of personal music that speaks to her fans as much as it functions as a therapeutic release for her”. It doesn’t really need an explanation – you know exactly what Kehlani means when she sings. Without sugarcoating or softening a word, she will drop a hard truth in one breath and flip a middle finger in the next. She may extend a seductive invitation or an empathetic plea before leaving you in your thoughts and feelings. Either way, she finds a way to consistently relate without filter and with each move she strengthens this connection to listeners everywhere.

Beppe Loda and 'was resident DJ at the disco Bisbi
Pavone Mella (BS) in 1980 and semi-resident until 1992,
the year of final closure of the club, in this double
collection, have been selected the most significant
songs of the musical journey started by Loda in that
period.

Gatefold double LP. Black Vinyl. No DL Code is out in January, 1000 copies available. Since 2006 Maybeshewill have released four full-length albums of towering, cinematic instrumental music. After a decade long career that saw them tour across four continents they bowed out in 2016 with a sold out show at London’s Koko. Having reformed briefly in 2018 at the request of The Cure’s Robert Smith for a show at Meltdown Festival, 2021 sees the band return with their first new material since 2014’s Fair Youth. Having worked on ideas separately in the intervening years, it was the sketches of music that would become ‘No Feeling is Final’ that pulled the band back together. Building on the songs that they felt needed to be heard, together. ‘No Feeling is Final’ was born from a place of weary exasperation. From the knowledge that we’re living in a world hurtling towards self-destruction. We watch as forests burn and seas rise. As the worst tendencies of humanity are championed by those in power; rage, fear, greed and apathy. We see every injustice, every conflict, every catastrophe flash up on our screens. We stay complacent and consume to forget our complicity in the structures and systems that sustain that behaviour. As the world teeters on the edge of disaster, we sigh and keep scrolling, the uneasy feeling in our stomachs eating away at us a little more each day. However easy it would be to switch off and pretend all is lost, there’s no choice but to remain engaged. To set that feeling of hopelessness aside and use the fear and frustration as fuel to make something positive. ‘No Feeling is Final’ is a message of hope and solidarity. It’s a story of growing grassroots movements across the world that are rejecting the doomed futures being sold to us, and imagining new realities based on equality and sustainability. It’s a reckoning with the demons in our histories and a promise to right the wrongs of the past. It’s a plea to take action in shaping the world we leave for future generations. It’s a simple gesture of reassurance to anyone else struggling in these troubled times: “Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Continuing and building on the self-sufficient, do-it-yourself ethos that has been core to their existence, ‘No Feeling is Final’ was once again recorded and produced by bassist Jamie Ward, and released on the bands own Robot Needs Home Collective Label, in collaboration with close friends Wax Bodega (North America), New Noise (Asia) and Birds Robe (Australasia).

GENRE: Modern Classical, Experimental, Ambient Metal. RIYL: György Ligeti, Sarah Davachi, Stars Of The Lid. 180g LP pressed at Optimal, 350gsm jacket, inner & DL card. Jessica Moss Also Known For Her Tenure In Thee Silver Mt. Zion (2002-2015), Black Ox Orkestar (2002-2007), Recordings By Vic Chesnutt, Carla Bozulich, Arcade Fire, Basia Bulat, Roy Montgomery, Sarah Davachi, Big Brave & More. A phosphene is “the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye.” The title of the heart-rending and resolute new album by composer/violinist Jessica Moss could not be better chosen. Moss is by now a seasoned practitioner of immersive isolation music; across three previously acclaimed solo records of minimal and maximal post-classicism, her acoustic, amplified, and electronically-shifted violin is the raw material for deeply expressive, palpably haunted, wholly committed compositions. But Phosphenes inscribes fleeting halos of refracted ghostly light out of a prevailing darkness with especially plangent determination and intensity. This is the most overtly searching, mournful and inexorable music Moss has made to date. The pieces on Phosphenes exquisitely navigate consonance and dissonance, building patiently from single notes to multiple voicings, harmonic stacks and clusters. These compositions channel themselves like slow-moving water in a dark cave, finding small eddies and catching glints of luminescence from within. Signal processing is kept to a minimum in the three-movement “Contemplation” suite on Side One, where Moss deploys amplification chiefly in the service of activating overtones and pitch-shifts, thickening and widening the sonics, carving out her unique timbral space. Based on a four-note sequence that sets whole tones against one another, “Contemplation” is a bona fide requiem that finds Moss at her most instrumentally naturalistic, measured, and modern. Side Two unfolds in a more foreboding vein: “Let Down” is marked by cavernous octave-dropped arco and pizzicato, providing a gothically-inflected substratum upon which hauntingly wordless vocal invocations and cumulative gyres of violin melody unfurl. “Distortion Harbour” grinds with noisier grit and a more harrowing complexion, highlighting Moss’s ambient-metal sensibility and her distinctive palette of industrial-inflected power electronics a reminder of why she’s also been a go-to player on albums by the likes of Big Brave, Oiseaux-Tempête and Zu in recent years. These two songs also feature upright bass from old friend and former bandmate Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Black Ox Orkestar). Album closer “Memorizing & Forgetting” is inarguably the most tender and beautiful song in Jessica’s oeuvre: a keening lullabye of sorts, on which she plays piano, violin and guitar, joined by her partner Julius Levy in a lustrous ambient vocal duet. Everyone has been trying to find a way through and out of pandemic, lockdown, social isolation and often darkened hope and for many musicians, the absence of touring, of live performance, live sound, live audiences, and a living. For Moss, it’s also been “like when you press your fists hard against your eyes and eventually there is fireworks.” The light gets in where it can, even or maybe especially as imaginative sensory simulacra (if/when we shut down our screens and are left to our own devices). Phosphenes is a stoic, acutely sensitive, superlative musical statement from Moss

With the release of Sweet Inspirations At Muon, the first appearance on vinyl of Tori Kudo’s mythical early ‘80s primitive rock gang Sweet Inspirations, another piece of the seemingly endless puzzle of the Japanese underground has fallen into place. Recorded some time in 1982 at Yokohama venue Muon – precise details are sketchy – we’re now given another chance to discover what was going on in Kudo’s mind just before he formed the group he is now best known for, the ragtag gang of pro and amateur musicians that was Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

Sweet Inspirations were one of several groups formed by Kudo around this time. He’d already released the visionary naïve-art album, Tenno, in collaboration with Reiko Omura, in 1980, and a trip to New York the following year led to the recording of Atlantic City, under the name La Consumption 4. Returning to Japan, Kudo first formed Guys’N’Dolls with Jun Yoshiwara (bass) and Kiyoaki Iwamoto (drums); Yoshiwara carried over into Sweet Inspirations, who existed for a few years, their membership, at various times, featuring Asahito Nanjo (High Rise etc.), Jutok Kaneko (Kousokuya), Yoshio Kuge (Les Rallizes Denudes etc.), 3C123 and many more.

The material here was originally released, without permission, by the Cragale label on CD-R in 2000. It was one of a sudden wave of archival CD-Rs that Cragale pumped out that year of material recorded at Muon, which was owned by Kohei Iehara, who co-founded Cragale with Tamotsu Hongo. In the context of the recent unleashing of material from the Kudo archives – the 9CD At Goodman set, the reissue of the first two Maher Shalal Hash Baz cassettes and the Noise LP, and the tantalising glimpses of other historical gems via Tori’s own Bandcamp page – hearing Sweet Inspirations with such clarity fills in a significant piece of the puzzle; here is Kudo, just before Maher, channelling the rough conceptualism of Red Krayola and the glinting, staggered rhythms of Syd Barrett into extended blooms of ragged glory, sketching out future classics like “Manson Girls”; A bonus CD includes a cover of a song by legendary South Korean rock group San Ul Lim.

Get yo ass in the house, robot-- you cyber-spectre, you outhouse prime minister, you hard-headed mirror ninja, snapping selfies, living in the pixelated seams between bursts the of flashing images, birthed in a pool of TV static and Tik Tok dust. BLACK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AIR is here, not to save but to drown you. Heads better learn how to swim cause listen, this record is beat soup, hearty yet still minimal, a sonic mirage of prophetic soul that drop kicks your "chill beats to study to" Youtube playlist and hyper-intellectual rap podcasts into a hadron collider; it's only black matter on the other side-- 13 mesmerizing tracks about memory and imprinting and the future, all of them wafting through untouched space like the ghostly cinders of a world on fire, unbound and uncharted, vast and stretching across the universe. Moor Mother is a holographic figment of an Afrotopian dream, all at once goddess and warrior, mystic and cyborg, griot and future time traveller, etching noisy pieces of reverie into our consciousness for decades now. But check it: on BLACK ENCYCLOPEDIA she's joined by a wide-range of friends, collaborators and co-conspirators on a trip through the murky cosmos, navigating the black universe with stardust as currency. In these times, they'll say, as they click and mash their way through the same inter-webs that seek to strangle them, BLACK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AIR is just what we need: a post-everything, 12:01 on the doomsday clock, anti-trip hop type of situation. "We ain't gotta fight no more," they'll say; the rest of us, we'll put this record on and imagine again that it's real.

After delaying the inevitable for over half a decade, the west coast's most versatile indie rock everyman (Rob Crow, co-creator of Touch and Go sentimental pop superstars Pinback) and the world's most left-of-everything drummer (Zach Hill, one-half of the outlandish noise duo Hella and drummer for Deftones side-project Team Sleep) have joined forces to unite the disparate worlds of noise and pop as The Ladies on the stunningly addictive and efficient They Mean Us. More adventurous than Pinback, and more accessible than Hella, The Ladies prove to be the best of both worlds. It's even better than the ideal album you've been making up in your head for the last half decade or so.

French electronic producer Chloé teams up with Bulgarian percussionist Vassilena Serafimova for their debut collaborative album "Sequenza". The duo first met in 2017 and then started working together at Xavier Veilhan's Studio Venezia. The result is his dreamlike & harmonious collision between Chloé's electronics & Vassilena's marimba.

Ajo Sunshine (pronounced “Ahh-Ho”) is heralded by
an alarming horn ensemble, stabbing with the dramatic
urgency of a killer’s theme in a midnight movie. It’s a
jarring but appropriate entry point for this brilliantly blasted
listen, an array of exquisitely sharp edges punctuated by
kaleidoscopic respites of throbbing warmth and surprising
tenderness. J.R.C.G. (Justin R. Cruz Gallego)’s previous
work with Seattle’s excellent Dreamdecay may foreground
the broad strokes here, but he’s pushed things way outward
in terms of his sonic palette. Abutting field recordings
captured from rodeos off Ajo Way, a stretch of highway
that leads one westward out of Tucson Arizona directly into
the sun, both acoustic instruments and gleaming walls
of synthetic noise are framed in dour and dissonant chord
shapes, crackling with overdriven drum mics and seasick
waves of distortion. It’s homage that plays out like a
collage, a dream switching from station to station, a series
of dedications broadcast on late night radio. All pin-hole
size images from scenes never seen whole, strung together
in but one version of complete, all making for a dazzling
listen.

Since her debut onto the techno scene with the 2018 release of her EP 'Post-Traumatic Rave Syndrome' on Paula Temple's "Noise Manifesto" and a string of international festival and club appearances, Femanyst has gained a reputation for militant individuality. Akua Grant sets herself apart from the crowd with her aggressive & unrelenting industrial techno sets tinged with elements of Hardcore and Gabber. She has become known for her rebellious and innovative style in her adopted home of Berlin. Her self-assured approach to gripping and brawling techno tension sees her perform a fast paced and fervent flow on the dance floor. Femanyst continues to bring her unapologetically bold signature sound with her own techno imprint "Dark Carousel" as an extension to her much revered DJ sets of twisted and aggressive, high octane electronic music.


A2 Fluid - Post Industrial Transformation
Fluid is a queer DJ and producer based in Berlin. Supporting FLINTA* DJs, producers and party events are one of his priorities. His first release begun in January 2021 and he is still modelling his sound. His interest in electronic music goes from industrial techno to ebm to trance to hypnotic techno.

Post Industrial Transformation is a track which combines aggressive sounds and a lot of industrial elements. The transformation refers to Fluid's evolving own path. This evolution is similar to the tension that builds up all through the track. This track evokes change, modification, passage from one form to another.


B1 Hybral - Unheard Voices
Hybral is a Berlin-based non-binary DJ and producer drawn to eerie energetic industrial techno. They mix and produce haunting techno, EBM, and noisy-driven experimental sounds. Hybral's productions are made of dark atmospheric patterns linked with pushing percussions and basslines as well as heavily distorted kicks and harsh industrial noises. Mixing DJ sets the track selection is ranging from contemplative ambient to stern and fast techno - connecting vast influences from Hybral's personal experiences of spending days and nights on Berlin's dancefloors. They are founder of the queer label, podcast, and event series 'Subverted' which focuses on a distinct program aiming to lead dance music back to its roots of resistance and diversity.


B2 Marsch - Mrs. Jones
Marsch is a Berlin-based dj and producer from France, who initially began 8 years ago as a music curator and selector. She started to produce when she moved to Berlin, and has mostly been focusing on this for the past few years. She would define her music as a balance between melody, energy and texture, with a blend of minimalistic elements, rhythmic and percussions, and voices and futuristic synths.


DURCH BLN/TLV is a queer collective with a clear vision of solidarity and community building. DURCH operates in Tel Aviv and Berlin trying to bring queer people together, building a culture of inclusion, diversity and tolerance. In the tradition of original raves DURCH organizes solidarity events ranging from parties, to art and community events, with the strong belief that raves are a much needed place for people to come together, celebrate their diversity and learn to respect each other. Musically DURCH is eclectic inspired by hardcore, straight forward techno, ghetto and scouse house and 90s acid.

We proudly announce the release of our first vinyl record "dogged boldness". This is a long held dream by the entire crew. With Femanyst, Hybral, Marsch and Fluid we are happy to showcase four artists that are close and dear to DURCH BLN/TLV. The record is a compilation of four hard-hitting, inciting techno tracks. Rough, bold and aggravating, just the way we like it. We are proud that we are able to continuously work with queer artists and to be a platform to further queer artists visibility.


Disclaimer: The world needs more queer artist, more queer music, more queer techno, more queer perspectives, more queer love and more queer intimacy.
No place for any racist, sexist, trans- or homophobic shit.

Artwork by Rory Midhani
Mastering by Chlar

The first vinyl LP release from Fluxus pioneer Alison Knowles (b. 1933). Sounds from the Book of Bean is an assemblage of noises and texts related to The Book of Bean (1982), Knowles’ 8-foot tall walk-in book constructed at Franklin Furnace in New York. This recording, the sounds of making the big book, was continually played back inside of the installation. Echoes of Yoshi Wada hammering together the circular spine of the book, other collaborators mixing ink, feeding a horse, the flowing waters of the Hudson Valley... all superimposed with texts and poems read by Knowles and her daughter Jessica Higgins.

On the second side of the album, the piece Essential Divisions features Knowles performing with red, black, and white beans. Recorded in Annea Lockwood’s underground studio, Knowles sounds the beans in glass, ceramics, wood, as well as in her mouth. Further bean histories and sound poems are recited, concluding with “Popular Bean Soup” – an ancient recipe translated by George Brecht.

Knowles’ big books are, as she describes them, transvironments: a transformationally experienced environment. The phenomenological nature of her book is distilled aurally in the case of this record. As Knowles describes the end of her book, “the reader leaves via a ladder or out the window and through a muslin panel printed with contradictory wisdom concerning beans and dreaming… one can begin again either by going on or turning back.”

Originally published as a cassette in 1982 on the New Wilderness Audiographics label, this remastered edition has been transferred from original tapes. An expansive 20-page booklet is included, holding graphics and writings from Alison Knowles, George Quasha, and Charlie Morrow.

Recorded by Alison Knowles, 1980
Produced by Alison Knowles, Sean McCann, & Charlie Morrow
Design by Alison Knowles, cover image courtesy George Quasha
Jessica Higgins adds voice to tracks 1, 3, 4, 5

Over the course of the decade, Meatbodies’ Chad Ubovich has been
a perennial candidate for MVP of West Coast’s fertile rock scene. The
LA native could be seen peeling off guitar solos in Mikal Cronin’s
backing band, supplying the Sabbath-sized low end for Ty Segall and
Charlie Moothart as the bassist for Fuzz, and, of course, fronting his
own Meatbodies. Today the recently dormant experimental noise /
freak-rock outfit has announced their return with 333—a corrosive
stew of guitar scuzz, raw acoustic rave-ups, and primitive
electronics that charts Ubovich’s journey from drug-induced darkness
to clear-eyed sobriety. 333 simultaneously reflects on how the world
he re-entered was still pretty messed up—if not more so. “These lyrics
are dark, but I think these are things that a lot of people are feeling
and going through” he says. “Here in America, we’re watching the
fall of U.S. capitalism, and 333 is a cartoonish representation of that
decline.”
In mid to late 2019, the band—Ubovich and drummer Dylan
Fujioka—had a new album in the can, ready to be mixed. But
when COVID hit, like so many other artists, they put their release
on hold as they rode out the pandemic’s first wave. During that idle
time, Ubovich discovered a cache of demos that he and Fujioka had
recorded in a bedroom back in the summer of 2018, and he really liked
what he heard. In contrast to Meatbodies’ typical full-band attack, it
was deliriously disordered. “It sounded gross, like a scary Magical
Mystery Tour,” he recalls proudly. After subjecting them to some
mixing-board freakery, Ubovich fast-tracked the songs into becoming
this third release of theirs, 333. It proves Meatbodies have greatly
expanded their palette, opening new portals to explore. And for an
album that wasn’t supposed to exist, 333 is the ultimate testament to
Meatbodies’ renewed vitality.

SPICE singer Ross Farrar speaks of the band’s ambition to forge a sort of aesthetic patois: a mode of expression as strikingly regional as it is recognizable. Last year’s self-titled debut, released in the depths of the pandemic, fully achieved this goal, distilling decades of North Bay punk and post-hardcore into an urgent, artful set of emotive unrest. Their latest single, A Better Treatment b/w Everyone Gets In, further refines the group’s singular mix of weathered melody and abrasive poetics, equal parts bracing, bruised, and cryptic.

“A Better Treatment” began as a song about a friend who died but through the turmoil of collaboration transformed into something more macroscopic and opaque, blurring the boundary between hopeful and defeated (“I thought loving someone would cure my self-hatred”). Bass and drums build against walls of guitar while the violin threads its own melancholy within the noise; Farrar is blunt about the intention: “The violin is an instrument of death you know.”



“Everyone Gets In” is both poppier and more pained, an anthem for angst aging into the reverie of regret: “We lose our strength / along the way / we lose each other / the funeral sways.” The tempo sways too, gradually slowing to an anxious crawl before finally revving back into a storm of shimmering guitar and splashing drums, fighting against the dying of the light. It’s music of raw truths and
rejected pedestals, storied but unswerving, a revolt against the great regress: “and my / my time is spent / adoring seasons / that I / I never should’ve.”

SPICE singer Ross Farrar speaks of the band’s ambition to forge a sort of aesthetic patois: a mode of expression as strikingly regional as it is recognizable. Last year’s self-titled debut, released in the depths of the pandemic, fully achieved this goal, distilling decades of North Bay punk and post-hardcore into an urgent, artful set of emotive unrest. Their latest single, A Better Treatment b/w Everyone Gets In, further refines the group’s singular mix of weathered melody and abrasive poetics, equal parts bracing, bruised, and cryptic.

“A Better Treatment” began as a song about a friend who died but through the turmoil of collaboration transformed into something more macroscopic and opaque, blurring the boundary between hopeful and defeated (“I thought loving someone would cure my self-hatred”). Bass and drums build against walls of guitar while the violin threads its own melancholy within the noise; Farrar is blunt about the intention: “The violin is an instrument of death you know.”



“Everyone Gets In” is both poppier and more pained, an anthem for angst aging into the reverie of regret: “We lose our strength / along the way / we lose each other / the funeral sways.” The tempo sways too, gradually slowing to an anxious crawl before finally revving back into a storm of shimmering guitar and splashing drums, fighting against the dying of the light. It’s music of raw truths and
rejected pedestals, storied but unswerving, a revolt against the great regress: “and my / my time is spent / adoring seasons / that I / I never should’ve.”

Ten years after its release, the reissue of this fabulous Matt Elliott record seemed essential to us since it was eagerly expected! It is undoubtedly the most dramatic sequel to the songs trilogy being outstanding for its darkness, from which he has progressively turned away. The Songs Trilogy is over, A new chapter entitled 'The Broken Man' is about to open and is the most delicate of Elliott's albums to date. The angry noise has all but abated, making way for more fragile melodies and a more subtle approach to intensity to immerse the listener. Ideally listened to in total darkness to discover the hope hidden deep within the guitars, voice, choirs, bells, ethereal trumpets, the howl of the dog beneath the skin, in the sincerity of the music. Inspired by the ghosts of European folk music, the voice often resigned but always expressive. Always finding new ways of working, Elliott collaborated with Katia Labeque who interpreted an improvisation of his that became the backbone of one of the central epic pieces on this album 'If Anyone Ever Tells Me That it is Better to Have Loved and Lost Than to Have Never Loved At All I Will Stab Them in the Face'. 'Dust Flesh and Bones', another of the epic pieces on this album, is perhaps Elliott's most beautiful and moving work to date, simple in it's form but emotionally profound. 'The Pain that's Yet to Come' hints at a new almost psychedelic era to come. 'The Broken Man' is an album to be discovered gradually over many listens, and with each one a new depth is surrendered until one can appreciate the panorama in it's entirety. Each track is an invitation to explore one mans analysis of his own descent reflecting the frustrations and sadness that touch us all at some point. Mixed by Yann Tiersen this album is a bridge between the more acoustic work of 'Songs' and the more electronic, ethereal work of Third Eye Foundation. It is finely balanced in the centre of Matt's musical universe.

You have to know how to move away from the rich, strong and noisy streets, if you want to discover another Havana. A Havana far from the tourist circuits and preconceived images. A Havana where one discovers bucolic, but hard and stripped too after slow journeys in the crowded buses, a Havana with which Al Quetz maintains a passionate history since more than fourteen years.
Installed in one of those neighborhoods that can only be reached by going deeper into the alleys, from the open window of the studio comes the sound of banging drums and thumping bass. The sound reaches the streets on which the day rises.
The place wakes up in a growing tumult, with some rare engines coughing, conversations under the windows, songs of the street vendors , an urban ballet sets up as the sun darts its rays.
Far from the musical clichés with percussions and horns, Cuba is an island bombarded with influences that one discovers.
An island which vibrated for the jazz, the soul, the psychedelic rock , from the waves coming from the Caribbean to those of the bulky neighboring ogre.
A musical flowering as varied as abundant that the glorious post-revolutionary label Areito has on thousands of recordings,
and that Al Quetz has designated as the sole source of his samples to compose Habanologia.
From the ambiences that punctuate the local daily life caught by his samplers, he let the melancholy infiltrate his hip hop beats, the nostalgia melting in the depths of his grooves. Nostalgia in the Cuban air, even during moments of intense laughter, which never totally disappears.
Habanologia restores these moments when the song of the birds has extinguished those of the cars. Where, sitting on a doorstep, we comment on the life of the neighborhood, we watch the women's swaying at eye level. The whole day if necessary, the coffee at one peso, after a certain hour, which leaves its place to the Planchao rum. Wandering through its streets where a chance encounter can itself bring others and lead to the essence of the habanera life. From Regla, after a short trip on the bus-boat that crosses the bay, savor the end of the day, observe the capital from afar, let the nocturnal insects ensure some arrangements and drift towards mysterious horizons, bringing to the contemplation of the place and the moment.
A flute, a keyboard, percussions or a voice. Al Quetz also invited his friends from the island or elsewhere to decorate his productions with their live touch. To share with him this Havana for which he covered his tracks, mixed times and distorted space-time to make it timeless.
To write with Habanalogia, a declaration of love to the Cuban capital, to make Havana, His Havana.

4 Reworked & Reimagined tracks from Motherhood and a cover of Deftone’s “Teenager”. Clear w/ Blue Glitter Colored Cassette Shell, with full pull-out J-Card artwork. Recommended If You Like : Bjork’s Live Box, The Deftones Cate Le Bon. Montreal’s No Joy—since 2009, a noisy four-piece shoegaze band, from 2015 onward, the sonic experiments of founding member and principal vocalist Jasamine White-Gluz has rejected convention, opting to find cohesion in vast, bold, indiscernible structures. In the beginning, the group excavated melodious riffs from squalling guitars, now, White-Gluz approaches songwriting with abstract meticulousness, no longer tethered to her six-string instrument. In 2018, it was the modular electronica of No Joy / Sonic Boom, an EP collaboration with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember. In 2020, her first full-length as a soloist and No Joy’s first album in five years, Motherhood, her guitar returned for a genre-agnostic, maximalist treatise on aging. Fertility, family, death, birth, her voice heard loud in the mix, White-Gluz became a commanding force among the many-splendored sounds of trip-hop, trance, nu-metal, dance rock, and, of course, shoegaze, delivered through banjo, vibraphone, scrap metal, slap bass, even kitchen appliances. Who knew chaos could have such lucidity? Now, White-Gluz’s ever-expansive evolution has brought forth Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven, an EP reanimation of five songs from Motherhood, transformed by new orchestral instrumentalists: an opera singer, a cellist, a harpist, French horn musician. These songs, recorded entirely remotely, are not a correction. They are a spring rebirth—an opportunity to grow those tracks, similar to the transformation they would’ve undergone live, on stage. “Songs take on a new life when I’m on tour. These songs didn’t get that chance. I still had more to say with them,” White-Gluz explains. “I probably never would’ve been like ‘let’s get a bunch of classically trained players together,’ if it wasn’t for covid-19 canceling tours. This EP was an opportunity to do something that wasn’t obvious. It’s a bedroom recording, but it doesn’t sound like we recorded this in our bedrooms. I wanted to do something that sounded bigger than Motherhood did, and Motherhood was recorded before covid.” Where many musicians used last year’s disaster to look inward, releasing solitary, insular albums, No Joy did the opposite: “It was more, ‘Let’s try everything!’ Give me something to look at!”

Translucent Orange Vinyl. "Deep States" ist ein Protestalbum, das neues kulturelles Terrain erforscht und im subjektiven Zustand zeitgenössischer Panik gräbt. Aber TROPICAL FUCK STORM predigen heimlich, immer im Bewusstsein der Tatsache, dass sie schließlich Popmusik machen, egal wie avantgardistisch oder "out there" es wird. Entsprechend kommt "Deep States" komplett mit Q-Drops, Anspielungen auf den Capitol Riot vom 6. Januar 2021, einem Riff auf Pizzagate, Waterboarding-Marsianern, gefährlichen Kulten von Heaven's Gate bis The Shining Path und, nicht zu übertreffen, Romeo-Agenten, die uns nachts ins Bett legen, um uns am Morgen zu verraten. Wir leben in einer Welt, in der das Bizarre zum Normalen geworden ist, und TROPICAL FUCK STORM lotet dieses Paradoxon aus. Was TROPICAL FUCK STORM so großartig macht, ist die Schnittmenge zwischen ihrem düsteren, aber satirischen Storytelling und den musikalischen Arrangements, die darauf abzielen, erhaltene Kanons und Weisheiten zu pervertieren. Diese Songs sind ein Experiment, das sich in seinem eigenen idiosynkratischen, zutiefst beunruhigenden Tempo vor- und zurückbewegt. Sie hängen am schrägen Beat und gleiten in jazzige, verzerrte Jams, die so turbulent sind, dass sie Charlie Mingus stolz machen würden. Musikalisch macht "Deep States", was es will: Pop, R&B, New Wave im Stil der Talking Heads, Delta Blues, Tom Waits und einige der HipHop-Lieblinge der Band wie Wu-Tang Clan und Missy Elliott. Barrieren werden nicht nur durchbrochen, sie scheinen komplett weggefallen zu sein.

LTD. VINEYARD GRAPE VINYL-

Typically, a band's big indie label debut doesn't come 15 albums into its career, but with Constant Smiles' Paragons, here we are. Primary songwriter and sole "constant" member Ben Jones_who considers Constant Smiles a collective_sees its impressive output as a way to document the group's evolution. Since its live debut as a noise duo on Ben's home of Martha's Vineyard in 2009, Constant Smiles has grown to include contributions from 50 other members, all of whom have personal connections to the group's extended family. And while the collective has indulged an array of musical whims along the way - including Ben's penchant for penning a new set's worth of material for each live performance - Constant Smiles' sound has tightened up considerably over their past couple of albums, in large part as a result of Ben's working relationship with Mike Mackey, who has become his main creative partner. This increased focus manifests on Paragons in the band's most cohesive batch of songs to date, ranging from shimmering psych-pop excursions to bittersweet, piano and string-accented strummers, and an execution that feels like a massive step forward for the band. Through its recent forays into dream pop and shoegaze (Control) and synth-pop (John Waters), Constant Smiles has learned how to incorporate its experimental inclinations more fluidly into the mix. Artists like Yo La Tengo, and the more recent Rat Columns, are good touchstones for Constant Smiles' musical approach - tethering to an indie-pop core while perennially mining genres, always finding new ways to intrigue listeners and pursue a unique vision. Paragons was produced and engineered by Ben Greenberg in the last two weeks of December 2020 at Gary's Electric, with additional recording done by Ben Jones at his home studio, The Void, and his Aunt Leanne's house. The album was mixed at Circular Ruin Studio and mastered by Josh Bonati. The band on Paragons consists of Jai Berger (who performed "Introduction"), Spike Currier (bass and synth), Matthew Addison (drums), Emma Conley (violin), Nicky Wetherell (cello), Adam Lipsky (piano), and Ben Greenberg (guitar and Mellotron).

Featuring Squirrel Flower and Liam O’Neill (SUUNS). Recommended If You Like: Mount Eerie, Low, Richard Swift, the Weather Station, Lomelda, Fleet Foxes, Squirrel Flower, L’Rain. Cedric Noel is a songwriter, bassist, collaborator and producer currently based in Montréal, Québec. The newest longplayer from Tio'tiá:ke/Montreal staple Cedric Noel lands with a stunning sense of surety and self. Hang Time stands as a high water mark for a songwriter who's spent the past decade quietly expanding the borders of his music. Longtime fans will recognize the fluid elements of the album’s open-ended rock formations: reflective strumming, soaring choruses, searing guitar lines, subtle bass grooves; all occasionally dissolving into pools of pure ambience. New listeners will find surprises throughout: threads of folk pop, ambient and sound collage fasten the foundations of this expressive whole. However, what’s most striking on Hang Time is Noel’s newfound sense of voice, both literal and metaphorical. Written primarily in 2017-18 during an intense period of self-reflection, this collection of songs finds Noel wrestling profoundly with his sense of identity, self and place. The album’s material was captured faithfully at The Pines, a beloved downtown Montreal studio whose doors shuttered shortly after amidst the strain of the pandemic. Noel worked closely and patiently with friend and engineer Steve Newton, ensuring the songs had the time and space needed to come fully to fruition. Hang Time features subtle rhythm work from drummer Liam O’Neill (SUUNS) and guest spots from Brigitte Naggar (Common Holly) and Tim Crabtree (Paper Beat Scissors) among others. The album opens in mid-air with ‘Comuu’, a song that implores a becoming-more while hovering triumphantly. Then follows a suite of songs (‘Headspace’, ‘Keep’, ‘Stilling’) that recall the heart-rending power of y2k-era Low, albeit with a more vigorous beat. On ‘Bass Song’, an intimate duet with musician Ella Williams (Squirrel Flower) that explores the depths of interpersonal constriction. At the crux of the album sits ‘Born’, a deceptively pleasant-sounding song that explores the confounding emotionality of adoption before fading into a distended soundfield. Throughout the back half of the album, Noel double’s down on this commitment to his genuine, proud, Black self. The most confrontational track, ‘Allies’ finds him refraining “Are you on my side?” as a trailing guitar solo interweaves a Malcolm X soundbite, eventually engulfing the composition. Glorious lead single ‘Nighttime (Skin)’ traces the artist’s sense of ancestral dissociation through to a triumphant moment of pride in self-acceptance. Throughout Hang Time, Noel finds a way to ask hard questions (both of the listener and himself) in ways that are compassionate, open and honest. The ebb and flow of tension and tenderness that moves within these tracks helps to grow the heart and redefine what Black music can be in 2021.