Поиск:pain in the ass

How about you forget for a moment all the things you thought you knew about Saroos, okay? First of all, let’s forget about all the other projects these guys are part of. Why? Because thinking of The Notwist, Driftmachine, Lali Puna, Tvii Son, to name “only” half a dozen things, might be misleading in this case. What’s more, please make sure to forget the fact that they’re mostly filed under “instrumental,” “post-rock dub,” or “kraut-flavored indie-tronica,” you know, all that. And most importantly, let’s forget that they’re a closed, three-minded system: a fixed and fully committed entity of three. No more!

Known to reinvent themselves in less drastic ways, Christoph Brandner, Max Punktezahl and Florian Zimmer, have opened the floodgates to COLLABORATION – making things open, porous, different, new, in many ways, on their quietly explosive latest album “Turtle Roll”.

Announced by 2021 singles “Tin & Glass” feat. Ronald Lippok and aptly titled “Frequency Change” feat. Leila Gharib aka Sequoyah Tiger, the sixth full-length sees the Berlin threesome add another handful of vocal guests along the way – thus turning into shape-shifting full bands and/or temp quartets, perfectly at home in about as many genres as there are tracks on the LP.

Kicked off by the motoric B-funk (Berlin represent) of the Lippok-assisted “Tin & Glass,” complete with retro-futuristic effects, spoken declarations, and non-terrestrial vibes, it might not be Daft Punk playing at their house, but a byobv (vibe) house party of musical minds isn’t too far off, actually! Once again as much a mixtape as an album, the mood, vibe, and color changes with every new collaborative tune: From ethereally soothing and dreamy (“The Mind Knows” feat. Solent from Canada) to clap-driven and wildly hypnotic (that pounding “Mutazione,” featuring vocals and rhymes courtesy of Eva Geist from Italy) and almost radio-ready (“current, bass-heavy alternative indie hits only!”), when that stadium-sized oomph of “Frequency Change” feat. Sequoyah Tiger arrives around halfway in.

Elsewhere, Japanese guest Kiki Hitomi (WaqWaq Kingdom) adds exotic ecstasy to the hypothermic beatscapes of “The Sign,” while Ukrainian vocalist Lucy Zoria pushes poetic layers over “Southern Blue”’s wonky foundation that hardens and finds more direction with each round the beat clock takes – until it’s impossible to escape that undertow. “My baby makes it better,” sings Caleb Dailey on the faithful and still-loving “Being with You,” a sepia, softly churning look back by the US songsmith, a sweetly shimmering ode to a relationship.

Speaking of foursomes, there’s four instrumental tracks scattered throughout the new LP – ranging from a painting in crystal clear colors of night (“Organ of Recall”) to the highly dramatic sonic tapestry of “Thicket” (actually feat. vocals as well). Before the perfect goodbye of slow-moving album closer “Here Before,” “Passed Out” sounds like Odd Nosdam finding his feet after blacking out on a German carnival.

Titled after a surf maneuver that allows you to break through the crests on the way out, Saroos have skipped the obvious waves with “Turtle Roll” – creating their own kind of sonic “Hang Ten” by adding 7 new voices to the mix.

The next chapter of the Natural Information Society is here. Since Time Is Gravity, credited to Natural Information Society Community Ensemble with Ari Brown, presents a newly expanded manifestation of acclaimed composer & multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams nearly 15 year, 7 albums &-counting flagship ensemble. Joining the core NIS of Abrams (guimbri & bass), Lisa Alvarado (harmonium) Mikel Patrick Avery (drums) & Jason Stein (bass clarinet) are Hamid Drake (percussion), Josh Berman & Ben Lamar Gay (cornets), Nick Mazzarella & Mai Sugimoto (alto saxophones & flute), Kara Bershad (harp) & Chicago living legend of the tenor saxophone Ari Brown. Recorded live to tape at Electrical Audio & The Graham Foundation, cover painting Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla, by Lisa Alvarado. 2xLP on Eremite USA, 2xLP & CD on Aguirre/Eremite Europe. Out 14-04.

Since first developing Natural Information Society in 2010, Joshua Abrams has been gradually expanding the group’s conceptual underpinnings, its musical references & the sheer number of the group’s members. Its music is, in a sense, an expansive form of minimalism, based in repeated & overlaid rhythmic patterns, ostinatos & modality. Its roots, its scale & its meaning become clearer in time. If time is gravity, it also allows us to carry more. Having begun as fundamentally a rhythm section with Abrams’ guimbri at its core, the version here can stretch to a tentet, including six horns.

Abrams has been expanding his minimalism gradually, but he has long understood a key to minimalism’s potential: the breadth of its roots in the late 1950s & early 1960s, ranging from the dissatisfaction of young European-stream composers with the limitations of serialism to the simultaneous dissatisfaction of jazz musicians with the dense harmonic vocabulary of bop & hard bop. The former began exploring rhythmic complexity & narrow tonal palates in place of harmonic abstraction (Steve Reich’s Drumming, Philip Glass’ Music with Changing Parts; perhaps above all Terry Riley’s In C & his late ‘60s all-night organ & loop concerts); the later reduced dense chord changes to scales (signally with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, but rapidly expanding with John Coltrane’s vast project). In the 1950s the LP record opened the world with documentation of Asian & African musics, key influences on both minimalists & jazz musicians. If John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone suggested the keening shehnai of Bismillah Khan, the instrument was rapidly taken up by two key minimalists, LaMonte Young & Riley, similarly appreciative of its flexible intonation, the same thing that kept it out of big bands.

If the guimbri, the North African hide-covered lute that Abrams plays with NIS, involves a rich tradition of hypnotic healing music associated with the Gnawa people, Abrams’ music also touches on other musics as well — other depths, memories & healings, different drones, rhythms & modes. As the group expands on Since Time Is Gravity, he has made certain jazz traditions in the same stream more explicit as well. If there is a mystical & elastic quality involved in the experience of time, both in direction & duration, you will catch it here. The parts for the choir of winds expand on the roles of Abrams’ guimbri, Mikel Patrick Avery & Hamid Drake’s percussion & Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium: at times, the winds are almost looping in the tentet version, each hitting a repeating note in turn, at once drone & distinct inflection on temporal sequence. The brilliance of the work resides in Abrams’ compositions, the NIS’ intuitive execution & in Ari Brown’s singular embodiment of the great tenor saxophone tradition, including the oracular genius of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, & Yusef Lateef. The three pieces by the expanded NIS featuring Brown —the opening “Moontide Chorus” & “Is” & the ultimate “Gravity”— have an immediate impact, & togther might be considered a kind of concerto for tenor saxophone. Here Brown presses almost indistinguishably from composed melody to improvised speech, getting so close to language that he might have a text. Everything here is a sign. Note the tap of the Rhythm Ace that links “Moontide Chorus” to “Is”, the attentive heart always present, even when signed by a machine. There’s a link here to the methodologies & meanings of dub music & the linear & vertical collage of beats, textures & tongues: treated with reverence, a sample of a beat-box can be as soulful, as hypnotic, as a mbira or a tamboura. If those pieces with Brown are heard as a suspended concerto, the three embrace & enfold the other works, like the sepals of a flower. That placement will also touch on the mysteries of our perception of time.

Particularly in “Is”, but elsewhere as well, a phenomenon of transcendence arises in which time appears to be tripartite, at once moving backwards & forwards & standing still. This is an act of technical brilliance certainly, but also an illumination of music’s ability to represent temporal consciousness through polymetrics. This particular listener has only heard it before in a few places, including the horn shouts & bowed basses of Coltrane’s Africa, in moments of Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady, in certain pieces where tapes were literally running backwards, & earlier still in Dizzy Gillespie’s Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, in which the composer George Russell & conguero Chano Pozo found a music that spoke at once in the voices of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring & the vestigial rites, rhythms & songs of the Yoruba language & Santeria religion of inland Cuba.

In Joshua Abrams’ compositions & the realization of them by the NIS, in the time of one’s close listening & memory thereof, distinctions between the “natural” & the “social”, the “quotidian” & the “transcendent” are erased, suspended or perhaps irrelevant. Consider two of the ensemble pieces, one named for nature, the other social science. In “Murmuration” the repeated wind figures of flute & alto saxophone combine with the interlocking patterns of harp, guimbri & frame drum (tar) to create a perfect moving stillness, not an imitation but a witness to the miracle of the starlings’ astonishing collective art, a surfeit of beauty that might be the ultimate defense tactic.

“Stigmergy” takes its name & concept from the Occupy movement’s Heather Marsh, who proposes a social system based on a cooperative rather than competitive models, one in which ideas are freely contributed & developed as ideas rather than an individual’s property. In its form, Abrams’ “Stigmergy” is the closes thing to traditional jazz, a series of accompanied solos by each of the wind players. However, the composed accompaniment is a radically collectivist notion: a repeated rhythmic figure, call it ostinato or riff, in which the different winds each play only a note or two of the figure, a concept both more collectivist & individualistic in its conception than any typical unison figure. It suggests another of the underlying recognitions that propel the Natural Information Society, the group as social organism, the teleology of hypnotic anarchy, all parts in place, functioning systematically, evolving & expressing itself, its nature & society, as a transformative organism.

George Lewis has described music as “a space for reflection on the human condition”. This suggests that, rather than a “distraction”, at least some music might serve as a distraction from distraction. It’s a focus, a clarity, a awareness, an external invitation to interiority, as if music itself is a model for form & contemplation, an organism contemplating for us or as us. If that is a possibility, & I am sure I have heard such musics, than this music is among them. How many of our rhythms, melodies & harmonies (cultural, historical, biological, psychic) might such music carry, translate & transform in the particulate ecstasy of our own murmuration? (Stuart Broomer, April 2022)

The definitive reissue of one of rock’s rarest and most sought-after albums – “acid-folk” – equal parts pastoral folk and contemplative psychedelic. The rst time since 1971 that this album has been pressed from the original master tapes, recently discovered in Italy. Lacquered directly from tape in an all-analog transfer by Bernie Grundman. This is the single LP version that we issued after the Now-Again Reserve Edition sold out. Mark Fry was 19 – recently graduated from high school and in Italy studying painting – when he walked barefooted into RCA’s Italian subsidiary, played some songs he’d written on his guitar and was signed to record the album that would become legend. The first recordings he made proved stuff, so he was paired with members of the Scottish band Middle of the Road, who were in Rome while under contract to RCA Italiana. Convening in a basement home studio with two 4-track reel-to-reel record- ers, Mark’s visions coalesced in a dreamy, airy manner – “Nick Drake meets Dr. Strangely Strange with a touch of Lewis Carroll” The Word Magazine would later write. Pressed in small amounts for Vincenzo Micocci’s RCA sub-label It, Alice remained an out of reach masterpiece for many but its creator, who returned to England in 1971 and subsequently traveled the world, playing music, sometimes recording and painting. By the time of its rediscovery, its master tapes were assumed lost. Their rediscovery allows this pristine transfer to reveal nuances not heard on anything but original It pressings.

A pivotal record for contemporary times; bright, free, adamant, optimistic. Brain Worms is RVG's fullest, most pristine album yet. All throughout Brain Worms, it's apparent that this is a band in very fine form. Album opener 'Common Ground' sets the tone for what's to come; a shiny, thrilling, punch of an album, with all the beloved RVG hallmarks. Vager's voice is unfiltered and commanding as ever when delivering her clever, not-quite-ironic lyrics. Here, though, those lyrics feel so much less resigned to yearning, and so much more defiant and joyous. 'Tambourine' is the only Covid song Vager wrote when "trying not to write Covid songs", and it's a painfully honest portrait of grieving mid-isolation. 'Brain Worms' tells the all-too-familiar story of a person falling down the internet rabbit hole and finding comfort in conspiracies. 'Nothing Really Changes' is a keys-heavy new wave-ish thing, while closer 'Tropic of Cancer' sparkles with Vager's self-assured new manifesto: I know what I'm like, and I know how I get. If you think I'm strange, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Bloxham, Nolte, and Wallace are flawlessly adept in bringing Vager's songwriting to life. Recorded in London at Snap Studios with James Trevascus (Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, PJ Harvey), all ten tracks surge with lush sounds and clear intentions and the magic of an acoustic guitar once owned by Kate Bush, given to her by Tears for Fears (who, legend has it, wrote 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' on it). Between the four bandmates lead singer and guitarist Vager, guitarist Reuben Bloxham, drummer Marc Nolte and bassist Isabele Wallace this is the most confident they've ever felt in RVG. They've moved past their influences, pushed themselves, and tried new things. And they have made a record they can, by all accounts, call their best. "Brain Worms feels like the antithesis to what a post-pandemic record could easily be. For a band who were already writing music about being reclusive "we were depressed and not going outside on our first two albums" the enforced isolation and time to think gave Vager space to write about anything she wanted. And, it turned out, she was ready to write about acceptance. "If we could only make one more album, it would be this one," says Vager. "Easily one of the most vital bands on the Aussie scene today" Rolling Stone "A calling card for outsiders... dynamic and vital post-punk" The Guardian

A legend. Electric. Transformative. The greatest of all time. There’s no superlative that
Richard Pryor hasn’t already earned, and with good reason. From the very start, his voice was
both singular, truly unmatched, and plural, containing multitudes. In a breath, he embodies a
full swath of humanity, dropping his audience into the raucousness of Hank’s Place,
becoming everyone from the streetwise handyman to the lecherous farmers, beautiful black
Irma who loved to tell people to kiss her ass to Weasel who spent all the time he wasn’t
signifying on negging potential marks. He dances between pimps Coldblood and Smooth,
dips into the persona of Tarcy the cop, and transforms into tight-lipped Jesse, the basketball
beast. In another, he paints an entire scene-within-a-scene with “Prison Play.” He’s everyone
(a not uncomfortable feature of his existence: having grown up Black in a Jewish tenement
in an Italian neighborhood, he jokes that the general attitude among the local toughs was
“Get him! He’s all of ‘em!”), everything, everywhere. Along the way, Pryor punctuates every
laugh with a jab, sharply rebuking all the social ills that seek to divide and conquer, all the
filthy, inhumane -isms that offend the senses (or rightly should). And he does it all while
assuring his audience they have nothing to fear from the Black man—except his thoughts.

Opaque Pink Coloured LP Vinyl - M.E.B. (formerly Miles Electric Band) led by Vince Wilburn, Jr collects a progressive All-Star ensemble featuring Miles Davis alumni and the players Miles inspired. This brand new, never-released studio recording captures a multi-generational who’s who of acclaimed artists performing new Miles-inspired compositions. Two tracks of the five on the album include unreleased trumpet performances by Miles and the album, produced by Miles' alumni Lenny White and Wilburn, features music legends including Ron Carter, Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke, Donald Harrison, Darryl Jones, Vernon Reid and John Scofield. This album is dedicated to the memory of Wallace Roney and Bernard Wright and contains some of their final recordings. The cover is an original painting from artist and Miles’ associate Mikel Elam. Pressed on hot pink vinyl, this is the exclusive vinyl release.

ULTRADISC ONE-STEP BOX SET OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S 1973 DEBUT PLAYS WITH AUDIOPHILE SOUND: LIMITED TO 7,500 NUMBERED COPIES.

1/4" / 15 IPS analogue master to DSD 256 to analogue console to lathe

Teeming with identifiable characters, youthful romanticism, vivid narratives, and sophisticated arrangements, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is a personal postcard from the heart, soul, and mind of a rock ’n’ roll lifer bent on discovering his world and what lays beyond it. The 1973 album establishes many of the signature themes and sounds Bruce Springsteen would embrace throughout his unparalleled career. No wonder a majority of the songs — “Blinded by the Light,” “Lost in the Flood,” “Spirit in the Night” included — remain staples of the New Jersey native’s fabled concerts.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes, pressed at RTI on MoFi SuperVinyl, and strictly limited to 7,500 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 33RPM LP set is the definitive-sounding version of Springsteen’s daring debut. Afforded the benefits of SuperVinyl’s nearly non-existent noise floor, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. plays with a clarity, directness, and emotionalism that practically whisks you into the New York office in which Springsteen — accompanied by then-manager Mike Appel — played a few originals for legendary Columbia Records executive John Hammond and earned a record deal.

That solo-centric aspect of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. — credited only to Springsteen and featuring only a handful of accompanying musicians — helps make it unique in his catalogue. So do the acoustic-based frameworks, revealed on this pressing with newly exposed detail, nuance, and immediacy. The music emerges with an openness that gives flight to the Boss’ storytelling. His words flow with unbridled, stream-of-conscious pacing and vibrant imagery; they pay homage to and update a tradition established by Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac. Equally important, Springsteen’s still-underrated vocal performances can now be appreciated in full-range fidelity. Earnest, transparent, and sincere, his singing comes across with an urgency that distinguishes him from the era’s singer-songwriter mold and a raw energy that underlines his unflinching belief in rock ’n’ roll.

Recorded in just three weeks, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. also stands out by way of its insightful artwork. Designed by Grammy winner John Berg, the inviting cover is appointed with images of the local landmarks, beachfronts, and geography that provide the backdrops for some of the songs. Those graphics are complemented by the beautiful packaging of Mobile Fidelity’s UD1S edition. Tucked in a sleek slipcase, the LP is housed in a special foil-stamped jacket with faithful-to-the-original graphics. In every way, this reissue is made for listeners who prize sound quality and who want to engage themselves in everything involved with this invigorating album.

An aspirational declaration by a then-23-year-old musician who was already a seasoned veteran of the Jersey Shore bar-band scene, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. can in many ways be seen as a semi-fictional autobiography released more than four decades before Springsteen penned his official tome. Elaborate, descriptive, and absorbing, Springsteen’s lyrics spark with the enthusiasm and exuberance of a wide-eyed adventurer ready for possibility, excitement, and fun — but who is also mindful of loss, pain, and disappointment. Words often tumble and collide like dice spilling from a jar; shaken and fully intact, they pour forth with purpose and without self-conscious concern.

One of two songs composed after label president Clive Davis cited the need for a radio-friendly single, the opening “Blinded by the Light” provides an unforgettable introduction. It flares with a blend of confidence, fun, and poetry that helps define Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Crackling with wiry guitars, funky chords, Clarence Clemons’ cool-toned saxophone, and action-packed lyrics, the shuffle simultaneously expands and contracts — and establishes Springsteen as a master of rhyme, alliteration, and breathless expression. The thread continues on “Growin’ Up.” Steered by ascending piano lines, soulful grooves, and frisky rhythms, the coming-of-age confessional is at once rebellious and controlled, fearless and vulnerable, honest and boastful. It is a tale to which multiple generations still relate.

Such universality has always been a Springsteen trademark. It surfaces throughout Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., as does another Boss hallmark: the importance of friendship and tight bonds. These concepts relate to the fact many of the songs — see the feverish “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” strutting “It’s So Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” and tender “For You,” the latter complete with brilliant Hammond organ shading — are directly tied to the friends, acquaintances, places, and happenings he knew. “Lost in the Flood,” whose cinematic drama and epic scope hint at the directions Springsteen would pursue on his next LP, extends that familiarity while addressing the kind of socially conscious issues with which he’s forever been associated.

Balancing the label’s vision of him as a folk-based singer-songwriter and his own desire to play rock ‘n’ roll with a full band, Springsteen never again made a record like Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. One of the most captivating debuts in history, it heralds the start of a legacy whose import Springsteen seemingly foretells on “Blinded by the Light”: “He’s gonna make it tonight.” And how.

Alternative Hip Hop Artist Rebel ACA Channels his Pain in "Migraine" ft. Spragga Benz, Rodney P

LONDON - The word "migraine" can make you twinge, especially if you experience the pounding head, vertigo, and tinnitus associated with migraines. Imagine if you put all those feelings into music - that is what Rebel ACA did with his latest single, "Migraine."

Rebel ACA's new single flows through his twenty-year journey of advising on international tax by day and rapping and producing by night. Perhaps, the ACA stands for his accounting qualification.

Dropping in April, there will be two versions, an original version and a DJ Phantasy Remix of "Migraine" on streaming platforms. Depending on the version, "Migraine" is a musical representation of a severe headache. The drum and bass mix features a funky, constant drone throughout the track, while the original version is a funk-latent hip-hop song.

"I suffer very badly from migraines every week," said Rebel ACA. "To me, it was logical to write a song about migraines. The lyrics talk about what it feels like by using synthesizers to bring out the feeling of a migraine."

Joining Rebel ACA on the single is Spragga Benz and Rodney P. The duo shares their thoughts on using marijuana to cure a migraine. While Rebel ACA acknowledges he is not a medical doctor, studies have shown that smoking weed can reduce migraine pain.

"We talk about smoking weed to fight the migraine," he said. "The lyrics revolve around what it feels like to have one in your head. Doctors have told me that migraines are caused by triggers like alcohol and getting f*cked up. Then you get a migraine and now you get more f*cked up on pills or weed to feel better." This revolving cycle spirals throughout the single.

Born and raised in the UK, Rebel ACA experienced London's musical melting pot from birth. Hailing from northwest London, he was exposed to the rich Caribbean influence and massive underground music scene.

From squat parties to illegal raves, London's music was all mashed up, and Rebel ACA soaked up every genre and cultural influence. As a result, he is a successful singer/songwriter/producer who fuses hip hop, reggae, and indie sounds to create his unique style.

"Where I come from, the UK hip hop is like the 90s hip hop in America," he stated. "There is a hip hop scene that talks about poetry. I'm trying to keep it real with my lyrics and talk about things that are important other than guns, money, and bitches."

Rebel ACA's music is versatile but uniquely his own by utilizing numerous live instruments and coming in hard with a big boom-bap sound. The Rebel ACA sound is born by adding a funk influence on his tracks aligned with funky bass. On "Migraine," he uses some vintage 70s French influence vibes to give the single a flavor of its own. There is nothing out there like "Migraine."

Rebel ACA records under Buttercuts Records, a company he owns and operates. The London-based production company has been "bashing out buttery beats" since 2000. Buttercuts Records is the go-to place for releasing hip hop, reggae, breaks, funk, soul, and folk records with a tongue-in-cheek attitude and marketing that surpasses witty wordplay.

As "Migraine" gains international attention, it is easy to understand how Rebel ACA combines old and new hip hop with effortless flows and brilliant lyrics. Maybe the world is ready for an international tax advisor who drops bars and vibes out to some wicked rhymes.

Make sure to stay connected to Rebel ACA on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.

a A1. DJ PHANTASY VOCAL MIXfeat. Rebel ACA
b A2. DJ PHANTASY DUB MIXfeat. Rebel ACA
[c] A3. DJ PHANTASY INSTRUMENTAL MIX [feat. Rebel ACA]
[d] B1. OLD KOOL F U NKY MIX [feat. Rebel ACA]
[e] B2. OLD KOOL F U NKY INSTRUMENTAL [feat. Rebel ACA]
[feat. Rebel ACA]

"Released in April 1966 by Decca Records, Aftermath was the Rolling Stones’ fourth British studio album. It was issued by London Records in the US in June 1966. Recorded at the RCA Studios in California, it was their first album released in true stereo.
It is also one of the first ‘popular’ albums to eclipse the 50-minute mark, and contains one of the earliest rock songs to exceed 10 minutes (the blues jam Goin’ Home). The album’s release was briefly delayed by controversy over the original packaging idea and title – Could You Walk on the Water? – due to London Reocord’s fear of offending Christians in the US.

The album was considered an artistic breakthrough for the band, being the first to consist entirely of Jagger–Richards compositions, (after their maverick young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, had shut them in the kitchen of their flat until they had written some more original songs!).
It also featured strongly the immaculate guitar work of Brian Jones and the remarkably wry, observant song-writing of Jagger–Richards
Jones played a variety of instruments not usually associated with their music, including sitar, dulcimer, marimbas and Japanese koto, as well as guitar, harmonica and keyboards, though much of the music is still rooted in Chicago electric blues. The burgeoning influences of psychedelia, Bob Dylan and the tensions around the world, are evident in classics like Paint It Black, an eerily insistent number one hit, available on the US version of the LP.

Other classics included the jazzy Under My Thumb, where Jones added exotic accents with vibes, and the delicate Elizabethan ballad Lady Jane, with distinctive dulcimer, the wry observational Mother’s Little Helper with its unashamed lyrical drug references, and the overlooked gem – the brooding, meditative I Am Waiting.

The American edition was issued with a shorter track listing, substituting the single Paint It Black in place of four of the British version’s songs, in keeping with the industry preference for shorter LPs in the US market at the time."

"Released in April 1966 by Decca Records, Aftermath was the Rolling Stones’ fourth British studio album. It was issued by London Records in the US in June 1966. Recorded at the RCA Studios in California, it was their first album released in true stereo.
It is also one of the first ‘popular’ albums to eclipse the 50-minute mark, and contains one of the earliest rock songs to exceed 10 minutes (the blues jam Goin’ Home). The album’s release was briefly delayed by controversy over the original packaging idea and title – Could You Walk on the Water? – due to London Reocord’s fear of offending Christians in the US.

The album was considered an artistic breakthrough for the band, being the first to consist entirely of Jagger–Richards compositions, (after their maverick young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, had shut them in the kitchen of their flat until they had written some more original songs!).
It also featured strongly the immaculate guitar work of Brian Jones and the remarkably wry, observant song-writing of Jagger–Richards
Jones played a variety of instruments not usually associated with their music, including sitar, dulcimer, marimbas and Japanese koto, as well as guitar, harmonica and keyboards, though much of the music is still rooted in Chicago electric blues. The burgeoning influences of psychedelia, Bob Dylan and the tensions around the world, are evident in classics like Paint It Black, an eerily insistent number one hit, available on the US version of the LP.

Other classics included the jazzy Under My Thumb, where Jones added exotic accents with vibes, and the delicate Elizabethan ballad Lady Jane, with distinctive dulcimer, the wry observational Mother’s Little Helper with its unashamed lyrical drug references, and the overlooked gem – the brooding, meditative I Am Waiting.

The American edition was issued with a shorter track listing, substituting the single Paint It Black in place of four of the British version’s songs, in keeping with the industry preference for shorter LPs in the US market at the time."

marbled vinyl in 3 different colours

Four years on from the release of Astral Projection, ASC's last LP for Horo, a re-listen reveals a body of work that still sounds prescient and current, mapping out a simmering landscape that stood proudly on it's own in the crowded world of electronica.

Hiding in Plain Sight takes the musical baton left by Astral Projection and expands the environment. The two opening tracks (No Mask, A Whisper In Your Ghost) are sumptuous palette cleansers that paint the walls with bliss. As we continue on, mesmerising waves of melancholy wash over Grey Area themed constructions, sometimes jagged (No Mask, Dying Star, Centrifuge, Galaxies), other times propulsive (Dreadnought, Surface Encounters). Pensive, frozen constructions that come off as soundtracks to movies only James has seen pepper the LP (Overscan, Dying Star, Mirrored Sequence) while the centrepiece of the LP soars unbound over stuttered, sculpted breaks (Orbiting Neptune).

ASC's great gift is his ability to create worlds of music that are densely layered and complex and yet project a sense of perfect effortlessness while they assimilate into your psyche.

Hiding In Plain Sight is not so much a journey, as a destination. A rich, full bodied alien planet intricately designed to envelop your senses.

The endlessly prolific and unpredictable Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with Modern Sorrow. As any Youngs fan knows, one of the great pleasures of following his career comes from not being able to predict what the next entry in his inexhaustible string of releases will bring: Unaccompanied voice? Country songs? Shakuhachi? Guitar pieces played with his feet? Shredding fuzz bass over the top of hyper-speed distorted drum machine beats? Continuing in the grand Youngs tradition of exploring new techniques, instrumentation and approaches while bringing to all of them his idiosyncratic touch, Modern Sorrow serves up two sides of twistedly elegiac, radically stark takes on contemporary pop production. The side-long title track is built from a piano sample, synthetic bass notes and organ swells, and an iterative blurt that seems to have wandered out of a 90s jungle track. Eventually joined by a shuffling drum machine, the track moves very slowly through a series of chords, each delayed long enough that its arrival comes as a major event. Over the top, Youngs’ heavily pitch-corrected voice is heard. The processing paints his signature wandering melodic improvisations with shades of contemporary R&B; at the same time, it cuts the natural swoops and glides of Youngs’ melodies into rapid microtonal trills, giving his voice a quavering, middle eastern feel. Unfolding languorously over more than 17 minutes, the piece’s final minutes make room for an extended drumless coda, returning to the stark palette of its opening moments. On the second side, the two parts of ‘Benevolence’ push this minimalism ever further, its first half consisting of nothing more than a remarkably slow drum machine hit, bass-heavy chords and pitch-corrected voice, here so heavily processed that it starts to resemble a shawn solo. In its second part, the harmonic foundation drops out from under the piece while two more voices join; at some moments the voices pause, leaving nothing more than isolated, metronomic drum hits. Though Youngs has explored the sound worlds associated with dance music and contemporary pop in previous work, here these elements are radically reduced, foregrounding a meditative bed of silence with a boldness equal to any more academically inclined contemporary composer. Embracing the accessible digital tools of contemporary music production just as at another moment he would pick up a kazoo, like much of Youngs’ work Modern Sorrow uses simple DIY tools to generous ends, producing formally radical music that remains both free from pretension and deeply moving.

Tape Runs Out's debut album, Floodhead On 180GSM, River Green Vinyl, with beautiful matt varnish artwork, Green vinyl strictly limited run of 350 ,. Floodhead is an exploratory sonic journey from the mind and soul of long-time band leader, Liam Goodrum-Bell (guitar, vocals). Tape Runs Out’s experimental sound comes in part from their excellent array of instrumentation - the band members bring violin (Clare Myerscough) and the hammered dulcimer (Ellie Winter), as well as bass (Takeshi Kanemoto) and drums (Laurence Moore). Recorded and produced by Liam and Dan Dawson (band’s guitarist) at Dan’s home studio over the course of a year, the album thrives off experimenting with different textures and sounds, with each song seeking to be its own microcosm of creativity, delivering its unique part within the whole. The painstaking detail and time spent by Liam and Dan between the initial recording session during the summers of 2021 and 2022 has resulted in an incredible production, and one that takes the listener through the Tape Runs Out universe. The first single from Floodhead, Souvenir made God is in the TV's track of the week and was heaped praise on by Steve Lamacq on his BBC 6 Music afternoon show and new music fix.

Lawrence Hayward knew that he wanted to be a pop star as a teen, and he devised a plan to release ten albums and ten singles over ten years to make that dream come true. A particular and determined individual, he would only be known as Lawrence from that day forward. His hopes for stardom would be pinned on his newly formed band, the succinctly named Felt. Soon signed to Cherry Red Records, Lawrence’s achingly cool vocals and the group’s way with walking melodies were evident on their debut for the label, “Something Sends Me To Sleep.” This compilation collects material from Felt’s Cherry Red period of 1981 to 1985, kicking off with that confident start, assembling numerous high points, and closing with their biggest hit, “Primitive Painters.”

This phase of the band is defined by the songwriting partnership and unique interplay of Lawrence and guitarist Maurice Deebank, with Deebank’s stylish and confident playing the envy of many of their counterparts. He delivers a constant string of shimmering hooks that wrap themselves around and over top of Lawrence’s more traditional beat combo song structures, as if trying to fit four songs worth of ideas into a pre-set radio friendly cutoff time. It works wonderfully as Lawrence always counters with a solid bedrock.

In one of many brushes with the brass ring, in 1984 Felt recorded versions of “Dismantled King Is Off The Throne” and “Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow,” for the newly formed and Warners-backed label Blanco y Negro, in hopes that the band would follow their A+R man Mike Alway to the executive suite. Despite putting forward two of their finest songs, it was not to be. While major label dreams had to remain on the shelf, fans were delighted to be able to hear these beautifully stripped down and more direct versions when this compilation was released a few years later.

By 1985 the Felt roller coaster was something Maurice Deebank was constantly getting on and off of. As Gary Ainge always kept the beat, and Lawrence never lost focus, they were joined by local teen prodigy Martin Duffy on keyboards, filling out the arrangements, and following Deebank’s racing six-string cascades in “The Day The Rain Came Down” you can even hear a tiny hint of the next phase of the band in Duffy’s organ before Maurice swoops to the finish. The newly expanded Felt would then put everything they had into making one of the defining releases of the 80s: “Primitive Painters.”

Lawrence Hayward knew that he wanted to be a pop star as a teen, and he devised a plan to release ten albums and ten singles over ten years to make that dream come true. A particular and determined individual, he would only be known as Lawrence from that day forward. His hopes for stardom would be pinned on his newly formed band, the succinctly named Felt. Soon signed to Cherry Red Records, Lawrence’s achingly cool vocals and the group’s way with walking melodies were evident on their debut for the label, “Something Sends Me To Sleep.” This compilation collects material from Felt’s Cherry Red period of 1981 to 1985, kicking off with that confident start, assembling numerous high points, and closing with their biggest hit, “Primitive Painters.”

This phase of the band is defined by the songwriting partnership and unique interplay of Lawrence and guitarist Maurice Deebank, with Deebank’s stylish and confident playing the envy of many of their counterparts. He delivers a constant string of shimmering hooks that wrap themselves around and over top of Lawrence’s more traditional beat combo song structures, as if trying to fit four songs worth of ideas into a pre-set radio friendly cutoff time. It works wonderfully as Lawrence always counters with a solid bedrock.

In one of many brushes with the brass ring, in 1984 Felt recorded versions of “Dismantled King Is Off The Throne” and “Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow,” for the newly formed and Warners-backed label Blanco y Negro, in hopes that the band would follow their A+R man Mike Alway to the executive suite. Despite putting forward two of their finest songs, it was not to be. While major label dreams had to remain on the shelf, fans were delighted to be able to hear these beautifully stripped down and more direct versions when this compilation was released a few years later.

By 1985 the Felt roller coaster was something Maurice Deebank was constantly getting on and off of. As Gary Ainge always kept the beat, and Lawrence never lost focus, they were joined by local teen prodigy Martin Duffy on keyboards, filling out the arrangements, and following Deebank’s racing six-string cascades in “The Day The Rain Came Down” you can even hear a tiny hint of the next phase of the band in Duffy’s organ before Maurice swoops to the finish. The newly expanded Felt would then put everything they had into making one of the defining releases of the 80s: “Primitive Painters.”

On her third album, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, asks what guiding forces might be driving, enticing, and affecting us. “All Above” is rooted in her deeply personal philosophy as an artist, blurring the boundaries between electronic music and acoustic music and sculpting familiar ambient forms into personal themes painted with rich emotional colours. Written painstakingly over the last two years, the album is the most ambitious and divergent set of music Portioli has assembled so far, with a wide variety of instrumentation (including voices, strings, organs, guitars, and synthesisers) focused around the piano. She‘s keen to assure listeners that while that instrument isn‘t always heard, it‘s constantly at the forefront of the album, shepherding its emotions and anchoring its mood. It makes sense then that on the opening track ‘Quasicristallo’, the acoustic piano is the first element we hear, recorded closely, so its characteristic rattle and creak can speak as loudly as the familiar tones themselves. When the music blooms into abstraction and processed electronics, it‘s almost imperceptible: reverb mutates into ghostly vapour trails, and distortion forms the keys into another instrument entirely.

“All Above“ follows 2020‘s acclaimed “Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes“ and 2018‘s “Pineapple” released on Donato Dozzy and Neel‘s Spazio Disponibile imprint. Having garnered praise from outlets like Resident Advisor, XLR8R, The Quietus, Inverted Audio, and The Verge, Portioli operates in a unique space within the electronic music scene, straddling the art world and the wider electronic music scene. She‘s developed sound art installations for Rome‘s La Galleria Nazionale and the Terraforma Festival-related Il Pianeta, and has appeared at Barbican, MUTEK, Le Guess Who?, Kraftwerk, and other internationally renowned venues and festivals, often collaborating with Marco Ciceri on A/V presentations. Ciceri also maintains the visual identity of Portioli‘s label One Instrument, a concept imprint that asks artists to create music only using a single device. All this experience is poured into “All Above”, a richly visual album that‘s far more than just an imaginary film score. While on ‘Human’, her piano punctuates a rhythmic synthesised bassline and smudged choirs that can‘t help but trace out the silver screen. The composer is keen to clarify that she doesn‘t think of her music (or sound in general) in visual terms.

Portioli studied as a linguist and used her art to develop an emotional language that‘s not bound by expected cultural constraints. When she adds a different instrument or process, it‘s not to reference a visual cue but to mark a journey through different states of being. Each element embodies a different emotion or mood: the electric guitar represents strength or violence, synthesisers shuttle us into the dream world, and the acoustic instruments highlight intimacy and warmth – even heart. Read like this, the tracks are like meditative poems rather than cinematic vignettes: ‘The World At Number XX’ is seemingly centred around a chugging synthesised arpeggio, but the cosmic, Klaus Schulze-esque pads, strangled guitar and evocative organ tones hint at the open-hearted, literate psychedelia of the 1970s; ‘In The Present As The Future’ meanwhile is breathy and windswept, juxtaposing urgent rhythmic phrases with light, flute-like gusts of harmony.

Dedicated to Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, who died suddenly last year, “All Above” demands engagement and refuses to evaporate into the background. The album asks listeners not just to absorb the album as a whole but notice the cracks in the structure and discern the tension they cause. That‘s never more evident than on the closing track ‘Cost What It May’, a piece of music almost jarring when Portioli chops into noisy waves of electric guitar. In the wrong hands, this might sound like a power move – some rock posturing to act as a finale. But Portioli‘s expression is different. She‘s forcing a level of engagement that perceives the negative space as just as necessary as the saturated positive, and what could be more haunting and emotionally resonant than that?

Composed, produced and mixed by Aimée Portioli.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin.
Photography by Federico Boccardi.
Design and layout by Riccardo Piovesan.

Dana Kelley, aka DKMA, is a much revered writer, producer, remixer, performer and creative force whose releases have become timeless classics and Holy Grails amongst DJs, music heads and collectors alike. A true artist and innovator, his productions possess the unique ability to engage, transport, challenge and enthral as only next level musicians can.

Grounded in the deep, soulful US House sound of the mid '90's, his earliest releases can be found on Strictly Rhythm, before moving on to produce under his DKMA alias as well as releasing music as Callisto on Guidance. Although Dana sadly passed away in 2013, he left us with a remarkable body of work that has remained both exciting and relevant throughout the last 2 decades and beyond.

Boston Boy Vol.2 is the 2nd in a series of compilations that focuses on Dana's visionary work as DKMA, during his most compelling and creative phase between 1997 and 2002. The compilations themselves are collated from an incredible & far reaching archive of over 20 of Dana's original DATs that have been generously shared with us by the Kelley Family. In the archive, some of Dana's most sought after & cherished works were uncovered, restored and meticulously assembled alongside previously unheard archival material.

The tracks themselves are bold, clever and inventive, characterised by a need for innovation. Passages of deep soulful house underpin more forward thinking electronics without ever losing dance floor appeal. Jazz solos sit imaginatively on top of gritty swinging rhythms, deep infectious b-lines, eerie textures and chord sequences are warm and effortlessly soulful yet with a sound design, sonic range, dynamism and a technical prowess that most could only dream of.

These compilations celebrate the life, vision and art of one of house music's most hallowed producers. Unique and essential, these collections pull together DKMA's most coveted works. Respectfully sourced, restored and compiled from all audio sources courtesy of the Kelley family and Above Board Projects.

Mastered by Frank Merritt at The Carvery, London, with special artwork by Atelier Surplus featuring a special unseen image of Dana from his family's photo albums.

Pauline Marx, formerly of the fantastic duo La Fureur de Vouivre, seems like a being from another time and place; namely, an escaped marauder lurking in the forests of a Bruegel painting and integrating the surreal flora and fauna of a Boschian creation into the scenery and lore of deep Brittany. Her invented mythology is loaded with murky rituals and contorted mantras, backed by the surprising sounds and textures of terrains so earthly and so unreal.

The Devil at the Crossroads

Where do you think you come from? Where do you think you're going? Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate: you, with the noodle to the four winds, who pass the threshold of this disc, you better leave all hope there, and glide in the poisonous footstep of the devil your guide.

Where do you think you come from? The mountain is no longer just the mountain; after your passage, it will no longer even be a mountain. Like the whole landscape, it will have been eaten, sauced by invisible leeches. Your nostalgia for the ground and your thirst to find the source will have only discovered a forest of vain words and foul water. Where do you think you're going? At the crossroads, the world is consumed in the previous future. Only the devil will know how to make you overcome the disgust of traditions, and only the love for the devil will give you enough vim to reach your goal: a village, perhaps, but which belongs to no one, a haven to your excessiveness .

The dark tradition to which this game of ternary trampling belongs, like the rhythm of a heart in tune with the inverted world, has no country and no assigned time. Rather a topology of Eve awakened after a thousand-year sleep, an idiosyncratic and possessed reading of our common humus, made up of stories composted in the limbo of the past, of songs captured in extremis vitae and rebus in the privatized antechambers of death.

What does she tell us about? Of our automobile and in love roamings, of the porosity of the membranes that separate beings and things, of the constant inversion of signs. The seventeen stages of this short journey, where intertwine the throbbing of objects, blown horns and rubbed horsehair, form the map of a country never to be found, ours, where only the voice of an old child and the disgusting devil's poisonous charm can guide us.

* Comes with an 8 page booklet **

The Dead Mauriacs is the project of French artist Olivier Prieur, "Paravents et miroirs, une cérémonie" is a live soundtrack.

The Dead Mauriacs describe their music as "Exotica Concrete" - their music is composed of field recordings made on a daily basis, as well as a diverse collection of sounds, including piano, Indian harmonium, violin, ukulele, didgeridoo, pieces of wood, glass, paper, and metal plates. The album is a spectacular 40-minute sound collage, assembled by sampling Exotica music represented by musicians and arrangers such as Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman, who were active in the 1950s.

"Exotica is a musical genre or sub-genre that emerged in the 1950s in the United States with musicians and arrangers like Les Baxter or Arthur Lyman. It is an extraordinary music because it is false: bird calls imitate bird songs, you can hear the sound of the waves, it is a Western fantasy, particularly North American, of a world and an imagery that never existed. It is a music associated with mass tourism, mass entertainment, consumerism. Arthur Lyman recorded about 30 records in 10 years in Waikiki. With his band, they played and recorded under a geodesic aluminum dome. The dome belonged to the owner of the hotel he played for every night. They did this at night to avoid noise. It's music that is both profoundly naive and totally flawed. In this, it is seductive and intellectually interesting. It is music that could easily be criticized today, but it is an imaginary in itself, like the Italian film music of the 1960s and 1970s." (Excerpt from the calax's interview)

The Dead Mauriacs are not only involved in music, but also in a wide range of other creative endeavors, including video and painting. He also repsonsible for the artwork of this LP. The inside of the product is also accompanied by an 8-page interview with Mauriacs and compiled his amazing artworks.

The Dead Mauriacs
Paravents et miroirs : une cérémonie / Screens and mirrors: a ceremony

Side A
Courte dérive, une ouverture / Short drift, an opening
Le retour des insectes électriques / The return of the electric insects Les oiseaux étranges / The strange birds Tension, terreur factice / Tension, false terror
Dénouement malais / Malaysian ending
Rituels et vanités 1 / Rituals and vanities 1
Rituels et vanités 2 / Rituals and vanities 2
Italiens dʼHambourg / Italians in Hamburg

Side B
Secrets pour piano / Secrets for piano
La suite Monory, Padoue-Le Caire-Nassau / The Monory Suite, Padua-Cairo-Nassau Hommes à découper / Men to cut out Lassitude moite / Clammy weariness
Le soleil artificiel du pont croisière / The artificial sun on the cruise deck
Pirogues et palmiers, vus de la scène / Pirogues and palm trees, seen from the stage La traversée / The crossing Rideau / Rideau
Fields recordings : Semproniano and Siena, Italy, Figueira, Portugal, Charentes, France. An electrical wire with a frequency shifter gave birth to the insects. Real and fake piano. Everything made with a computer and a midi keyboard.
Music premiered at Hörbar, Hamburg, 28th of December 2017. Music (and video) Olivier Prieur.
Thanks to Thorsten Soltau and all people at Hörbar.
Hello to Felix Kubin & Marie-Pierre Bonniol, Julia & Jan Warnke. Kisses to Hélène.

Following the April 2022 reissue of the album Shrimp Boats, We Are Busy
Bodies presents companion titles Plum and Cherry and Deeper in Black
to round out a Lionel Pillay and Basil Mannenberg Coetzee trilogy as part
of the label's As-Shams South African jazz archive series
The connection between these three albums is tight as the 1987 release Shrimp
Boats compiled unreleased recordings from both the 1979 session for Plum and
Cherry and the 1980 session for Deeper in Black. These two rare records have
been carefully remastered from their original tapes and are back in print for the
very first time in over 40 years.Shrimp Boats and Plum and Cherry capture the
extraordinary musical chemistry that existed between pianist Lionel Pillay and
tenor saxophonist Basil Coetzee in the late 1970s. The respective album
showpieces Shrimp Boats and Cherry each occupy an entire side of vinyl with
both exquisite musical journeys clocking in at an epic 25 minutes a piece. While
Shrimp Boats was an instrumental reimagining of the popular 1951 song by
American singer Jo Stafford, Cherry drew inspiration from Abdullah Ibrahim at the
behest of producer Rashid Vally, who wanted to emulate the success of the
famous track that had helped launch his independent As-Shams/The Sun record
label in 1974.
Ibrahim's hit Mannenberg had also featured Basil Coetzee and it was this zeitgeist
South African jazz recording that had given rise to his stage name. Capturing the
grace and vitality of working- class township life on the city fringe, Cherry
channels the type of laid-back Cape groove that Abdullah Ibrahim, recording as
Dollar Brand, introduced to South African jazz in the 1970s. On the flip side, Plum
appears to take its own simple chord change in the same direction before
breaking into a chugging 20-minute romp that verges on proto-electronica and on
which Pillay hangs all manner of savage keyboard riffing and experimentation.
The two distinct flavours of Plum and Cherry make for a well-rounded platter with
an iconic cover featuring the work of abstract expressionist painter and AsShams/The Sun collaborator Hargreaves Ntukwana.

After 9 full length studio albums and playing their asses off at over 800 shows, the Finnish disco metal machine Turmion Kätilöt is ready for the next level in their world dominance. Their 10th full length studio album “Omen X” will be released in 36 countries on 13th January 2023 via Nuclear Blast. The touring cycle starts in Finland immediately after the release of Omen X. Band will play its biggest show ever in Helsinki Ice hall on 14th January 2023. After couple of shows in the home country “Omen X” will be served all over Europe with 20 gigs inFebruary 2023 – see the full show schedule below.
”In the Omen X production, we encountered only positive problems. Due to the closures caused by Covid 19, there were so many songs available this time that it was even painful to choose only one album of songs from them. The amount of material and the difficulty of selection seemed to take up an unnecessary amount of valuable studio time at times. Otherwise, making the album went smoothly as always. From the artist's point of view, the album got a hell of a new sounds and atmosphere. A very cleansing experience. The tenth prophecy has been given. You're welcome!” - MC Raaka Pee
Turmion Kätilöt was formed in 2003 in Finland by MC Raaka Pee and Dj Vastapallo. Soon they were joined by the other members of what would become Turmion Kätilöt: Master Bates, Run-Q, DQ and Spellgoth as a second vocalist. With a couple of line-up changes as Dj Vastapallo left the band in 2009 replaced by Bobby Undertaker on guitars (ex-Deathchain) and Spellgoth leaving in 2017 replaced by Shag-U (Fear Of Domination) on vocals, Turmion Kätilöt has become the mean disco metal machine they are today.
From the very beginning Turmion Kätilöt has had a reputation of being a great live band. Disco beats from the 90’s, metal to the pedal, melodies, sing-a-longs, you name it – there are no rules. Yet still if you peek under the skin you can find the darkness pointing its finger to you. Their live shows have been praised to be the fiercest and craziest mayhem to be witnessed creating the twisted world of Turmion Kätilöt.

tobi lou cements a connection to countless listeners through his creativity. The Nigeria-born, Chicago-raised, and Los Angeles-based rapper and producer builds music meant to last with unpredictable flare and inimitable spirit. As the story goes, tobi lou flourished as a football player and baseball player until undergoing a dream-ending injury and jumping from a semi-pro career to the mic. A series of buzzing EPs—tobi lou and the Moon, tobi lou and The Loop, and tobi lou and The Juice—paved the way for his 2019 mixtape, Live on Ice. The latter included “I Was Sad Last Night I’m OK Now,” which racked up 42.9 million Spotify streams. Earning widespread acclaim, Pitchfork hailed 2020’s “Student Loans” as “a refreshing dose of joy.” Meanwhile, Lyrical Lemonade christened him, “Chicago’s Rising Superhero.” Along the way, he headlined shows coast-to-coast and shut down festival stages at Lollapalooza and beyond. He also collaborated with everyone from Smino to Dreezy. Throughout 2021, he assembled Non-Perishable out of his East Los Angeles apartment. He notably produced on every track, lending his touch to the entirety of the project. After amassing hundreds of millions of streams, packing shows, and receiving acclaim from GQ, W Magazine, and more, he architects an immersive experience on his second full-length project and the first installment of a 2022 trilogy, Non-Perishable.

Most audiophiles know Alan Parsons Project's I Robot by heart. Engineered by Parsons after he performed the same duties on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the 1977 record reigns as a disc whose taut bass, crisp highs, clean production, and seemingly limitless dynamic range are matched only by the sensational prog-rock fare helmed by the keyboardist and his creative partner, Eric Woolfson. Not surprisingly, it's been issued myriad times. Can it be improved? Relish Mobile Fidelity's stupendous UltraDisc One-Step 180g 33RPM box set and the question becomes moot.


Mastered from the original master tapes and pressed at RTI on MoFi SuperVinyl, I Robot comes to life with reference-setting realism on this numbered, limited-edition reissue. Boasting immaculate highs and lows, generous spaciousness, and see-through transparency that takes you into the studio with Parsons and Woolfson at Abbey Road, this definitive edition is designed to demonstrate the full-range capabilities of the world's best stereo systems while offering listeners the convenience of having all the music on one LP.

Featuring a nearly inaudible noise floor, this transcendent UD1S edition functions as a repeat invitation to savor reference-grade soundstages, immersive smoothness, sought-after instrumental separation, three-dimensional imaging, and consummate tonal balances. Able to be played back at high volumes without compromise or fatigue, it is a demonstration record for the ages – the likes of which are no longer being made. This is the very reason you own and invest in high-end audio gear.

The special characteristics of this UD1S version extend to the premium packaging. Housed in an elegant slipcase, the reissue features special foil-stamped jackets and faithful-to-the-original graphics. Aurally and visually, it is made for discerning listeners who prize sound quality and production, and who desire to fully immerse themselves in everything about this conceptual landmark. The Alan Parsons Project's most famous record deserves nothing less.

Inspired by and loosely based around the Isaac Asimov stories of the same name, I Robot delves into themes of artificial intelligence and technological dominance that make the record extremely relevant in the 21st century. Indeed, Parsons and Woolfson's pinnacle creation dovetailed with the ascendency of Star Wars, which itself is experiencing a rebirth in an age of self-driving cars, smart devices, and mindless automation. Lyrically, songs such as "The Voice" call into question human behavior – and their relationship to increasing robotic supremacy – in everyday life. Parsons and Woolfson reflect the associated paranoia, dichotomy, and transformation via shifting sci-fi arrangements steeped in drama and moodiness.

The absorbing tunes on I Robot also continue to fascinate due to their perfectionism and innovation. Borrowing from Pink Floyd's strategies, Parsons and Woolfson utilize a looped sequence on the title track to create new downbeats. "Some Other Time" employs two different lead vocalists and yet gives the illusion that only one is involved. Captivating strings, a piccolo trumpet, and bona fide pipe organ grace "Don't Let It Show." The origins of "Nucleus" stem from a unique analog keyboard concoction dubbed "the Projectron," devised by Parsons and electronic engineer Keith Johnson. Andrew Powell's orchestral and choral arrangements top it all off, with "Total Eclipse" arriving as a frightening track that presages the climactic "Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32."

Does man or machine win in the end? Decide as you get lost in Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc 180g 33RPM LP pressing. Secure your numbered copy today!

More About Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc One-Step and Why It Is Superior
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's UltraDisc One-Step (UD1S) technique bypasses generational losses inherent to the traditional three-step plating process by removing two steps: the production of father and mother plates, which are created to yield numerous stampers from each lacquer that is cut. For UD1S plating, stampers (also called "converts") are made directly from the lacquers. Since each lacquer yields only one stamper, multiple lacquers need to be cut. Mobile Fidelity's UD1S process produces a final LP with the lowest-possible noise floor. The removal of two steps of the plating process also reveals musical details and dynamics that would otherwise be lost due to the standard multi-step process. With UD1S, every aspect of vinyl production is optimized to produce the best-sounding vinyl album available today.

MoFi SuperVinyl

Developed by NEOTECH and RTI, MoFi SuperVinyl is the most exacting-to-specification vinyl compound ever devised. Analogue lovers have never seen (or heard) anything like it. Extraordinarily expensive and extremely painstaking to produce, the special proprietary compound addresses two specific areas of improvement: noise floor reduction and enhanced groove definition. The vinyl composition features a new carbonless dye (hold the disc up to the light and see) and produces the world's quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also allows for the creation of cleaner grooves that are indistinguishable from the original lacquer. MoFi SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what the label's engineers hear in the mastering lab.

Debut album by Dutch producer w1b0, who passed away in August, to be released in November on U-TRAX.

Wibo Lammerts' sudden death on August 15thshocked the worldwide electro community, and also left the record label, that had been working on the debut album with the artist known as w1b0 for the past two years, dumbfounded and in grief.

Wibo had jokingly always called his upcoming debut album 'his legacy', which now sadly has become a painful truth. With the support of Wibo's family, U-TRAX is now doing the only thing that doesn't feel totally wrong: proceed as planned, and release 'When Humans Ruled The Earth' on November 11.

W1b0 made quite a name for himself with heavy electro tracks that he released on labels like Bass Agenda, Hilltown Disco and Discos Antónicos. Standing at 202 meters, and combined with a cheerful character, most people remember him as the gentle giant of electro.
For this album, Wibo wanted to steer away from the dark and heavy electro he mostly made until then. The idea of having a platform to create delicate electronic music in different styles, and make it a showcase of his versatility, was very appealing to him. And that is where he and U-TRAX found each other.

The full-length album (over 75 minutes on cd and digital) comes after 'The Pilex Program EP', released in October, that featured a remix by Detroit's Ectomorph of 'Pilex Driver' and saw 'Program Yourself To Feel' remixed by a well-known Dutch producer that recently created the new 'techno alias' Human Form.
As usual with U-TRAX, the album comes in three different editions, with the 11-track double vinyl version containing the Ectomorph and Human Form remixes. The CD and digital version boast original versions only, plus four additional tracks: 'Alternate Reality Interface', 'Mixed Matter Fluctator', 'Synthetic', and 'In There'. The cassette version more or less has the same track list as the CD/digi version, but has both aforementioned remixes and a bonus track in the incredibly hypnotizing 'I Wanted You', a track that unfortunately couldn't be on the CD and vinyl versions.

Buyers of the physical releases get treated on superior quality products, another trademark of U-TRAX. The vinyl edition boasts over one hour of music, on two 180 grams, green vinyl discs, in a black & white & neon green gatefold sleeve. The eye-catching artwork is created by Utrecht artist Leffe Goldstein, known amongst others for his psychedelic beer can designs for Utrecht brewery Maximus. Wibo, being the beer lover he was, had zero doubts about having Leffe Goldstein do the cover for his album. The CD has a total playing time of 75 minutes and comes in a beautiful 6-panel digipack, while the cassette will have full-color on-body print and comes in a plastic-free Maltese cross fold-up sleeve.

Buyers of the physical releases get treated on superior quality products, another trademark of U-TRAX. The vinyl edition boasts over one hour of music, on two 180 grams, green vinyl discs, in a black & white & neon green gatefold sleeve. The eye-catching artwork is created by Utrecht artist Leffe Goldstein, known amongst others for his psychedelic beer can designs for Utrecht brewery Maximus. Wibo, being the beer lover he was, had zero doubts about having Leffe Goldstein do the cover for his album. The CD has a total playing time of 75 minutes and comes in a beautiful 6-panel digipack, while the cassette will have full-color on-body print and comes in a plastic-free Maltese cross fold-up sleeve.

Opener 'Acid Whip' is one of the oldest compositions on this album, in which a dark 303 bassline hums over layers of spacey strings. Wibo named it after the legendary Whip It party in Amsterdam's De Melkweg. 'Alternate Reality Interface' then presents bouncy rhythms toying around with all sorts of analog (bass) synthesizers, before we go really deep with the epic ambient techno track 'Wandering Souls'.
Then things get a little lighter spirited: 'Mixed Matter Fluctator' is an electro track that builds on sounds created by Matt Buggins. It has very strong Detroit influences, the city Wibo loved so much and that he made a pilgrimage to with a group of friends that called themselves 'The Techno Tourists'. The tempo goes up a notch in 'Program Yourself To Feel', that halfway opens up in wide science fiction strings that evoke memories of Star Wars, the movie series that Wibo was a great fan of, and that was the source of many of his tracks' names. The Human Form remix opens the vinyl edition of this album and is a downright belter of a track.

Next is a somewhat experimental intermezzo named 'Synthetic'. Erratic beats and pounding bassdrums get accompanied by very subtle eerie-sounding strings, before melancholic synthesizers and piano chords take over. This is an excellent prelude to the epic 'Hologram Computing', a track that is one of our favorites. It slowly and softly builds and builds, before a pounding bassdrum breaks loose and a hypnotic arpeggio takes you to higher planes.
Not ready to letting the listener relax, w1bo then serves 'Beilstein Reference', which again presents his trademark cocktail of down-to-earth electro rhythms and catchy melodies, covered in all sort of little sounds and noises, giving the song a lot of energy. What follows is 'Hit me', a track loosely based on a song by Dutch indie rock band Mr. Joe Abe. Wibo met the band's singer on a camping site while being on holidays and the two decided Wibo should do a remix of one of their songs. Nothing was left of the original except the vocals, and the result is a remarkable cheerful, poppy electro song.

'Anticipated Input' is one of the more recent tracks Wibo made for this album, combining electro, acid and, yes: epic strings. But not all is peace and quiet on this album, as 'Pilex Driver' shows. This is w1b0 going experimental in a danceable fashion: Industrial sounds make the track sound like we're passing a construction site that is playing loud electro music. On the vinyl version of this album, Ectomorph totally decomposed the original and made it into a mysterious, almost subdued, and totally brilliant electro track that sees a main role for the retro Roland CR drum machines sounds.

TFHats, Wibo's fellow member of the Transhumanism collective, added lyrics to 'Cartesian Coordinates'. His vocals add a pleasant New Wave flavor to this song, that has breaks that remarkably reminds one of Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. What follows is the most personal track on this album. 'Fornan' is a song that Wibo made for his wife Nanette, and was added as the last piece of the puzzle that creating an album is. The warm Detroit techno atmosphere in this electro song couldn't be a more beautiful tribute to his love, and mother of their two young boys.
The album then takes a surprising detour through a 1980s landscape with 'In There', that features the Joy Division-esque vocals of another one of Wibo's friends, indicated only as Vincent. The super slow and gloomy track is a treat for anyone that loved the darker side of New Wave. The album has a worthy closer in the sensitive, yet playful 'Schlegel Diagram'.








h 08: Hit Me (w1b0's Slugfest Assault Dub) feat. Mr Joe Abe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingredient is the elegant collaboration of Toronto poets, composers, producers and dear friends Ian Daniel Kehoe and Luka Kuplowsky. Their self-titled release is an enigmatic electronic avant-pop record attuned to the micro and macro perspectives of the natural world. Ingredient is an album whose lyrics are more poem than lyric, and whose songs exist in a merger of house music, philosophically-minded lyricism and contemporary R&B. One might recall electronic and art-pop luminaries such as Yukihiro Takahashi, The Blue Nile, and Arthur Russell, or connect it to contemporaries like Nite Jewel, Westerman and Blood Orange. A distinct world of dance, of questions, of secrecy and ultimate softness.

Eight years of friendship forges strange telepathy.

In the summer of 2020, Ian Daniel Kehoe was entrenched in a new feeling of heaviness; psychosomatic symptoms had started to proliferate; stress made new pores across the body, bending sensitivity into pain. His days were met with confusion, detachment, sleeplessness and pain without causation. Disfigured, he felt that what had been central and centering was blown out to the periphery of things. In a moment of self-preservation he reached out to his dear friend Luka Kuplowsky to make an album together. For Kehoe, it was an instinctual grasp for the anchoring truthfulness of deep friendship and the potential for a dedicated creative collaboration. Kuplowsky’s presence was light, supportful and curious, eager to explore musically the sounds they were mutually drawn to: house music, ambient pop, dub. The duality between Kuplowsky and Kehoe – between the Aflight and the Unmoored – is a portrait of a friendship whose exchanges came easy and produced an outpouring of song. Creation and therapy crisscross. In email correspondence that catalogs their process of collaboration, affection abounds: “feels bare without the Luka Licks”, or “Love you so much”, or “Kinda just overwhelmed with deadliness coming in at all angles.” When their voices first come in together on “Wolf,” that harmony arrives in a dramatic avant-pop sound that is bold and wondrous.

Kuplowsky and Kehoe both arrive at Ingredient as established artists whose works are committed to language’s propensity to provoke and mystify. Kuplowsky’s 2020 album Stardust is an idiosyncratic and otherworldly blend of pop and jazz romanticism grounded by Cohen-esque vocals and a stirring philosophical curiosity. Kehoe’s entrance into the new decade has hatched four records of pop experimentation, most recently 2022’s Yes Very So, a euphoric and bold album of poetic synth-pop and meditative ambient instrumentals. Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s union as Ingredient is a beautiful and unusual chemistry that integrates their distinct approaches while bringing forth a newness: a sound that alternates between cinematic technicolor and dubbed out fogginess; a lyricism that exchanges their lucid and clear poetics for a playful and obtuse verse. The album intuitively taps into the opposing emotional states of Kuplowsky and Kehoe during the conception of the record, contrasting the buoyancy of trumpeting keyboards (“Resurface”), angelic synthesized voices (“Come”), and rolling bass (“Photo”) with the record’s underlying darkness of whirring buzzsaw textures (“Transmission”), whooping sirens (“Wolf”) and murky ambience (“Illumination”). Lyrically, this duality arises in the record’s flux between openness (“Variation”, “Raindrop”) and existential dread (“Wolf”). “Illumination” most clearly crystalizes this opposition, reconciling the verses’ neurotic yearning for enlightenment with the chorus’ liberating doctrine of negation: “no more devotion… no more delusion”. Amidst the gradations of light and dark, Kuplowsky and Kehoe trade indelible, lush melodies as though their voices are made of a substance that melts easily one into the other. The harmony of poetry, sound, and texture cuts through your brain fog like a wet diamond.

Ingredient’s self-titled record was assembled by Kuplowsky and Kehoe over the course of six months in a home studio they frequented daily. Amidst synthesizers and drum machines they composed, re-composed, and workshopped a wide array of music, ultimately focusing on a set of eight songs that lived in a shared musical and philosophical world. Recording days often ended in basketball games at a local court or a rooftop commune over a pot of tulsi tea and a crossword puzzle. Kuplowsky brought in the Blue Cliff Record – the classic anthology of Chan Buddhism – whose inscrutable and sublime insights remained constant throughout the recording process as an activator of reorientation and reflection. While Kehoe was frequently rendered physically immobile by bouts of anxiety, a patience and mutual caring governed the pace of their creation; rest, stretching and meditation became equally important as the act of arrangement. Invited into their intimate circle of composition was Thom Gill, whose heavenly voice uplifts “Variation” and “Raindrop,” and Karen Ng, whose alto sax simmers and dances around the funky strut of “Raindrop.”

The lyrics on Ingredient reflect the persistence of change, the infinite variability of nature where randomness and divergence are no accidents. In Daoism, duality, in the form of Yin and Yang, is not contradictory as it is in Western idealist philosophy, but rather composes the eternal and lived paradox of our changeless-changing universe: changeless because all is change, and changing because the dynamism of the Dao makes each moment transformational. Kuplowsky and Kehoe refract this way of seeing the world, as in Variation: “Variation in the natural world / there it is.” Ingredient is an experience of the manifold ways of saying there it is of the transformational world, and there it is, unfolding. Elsewhere, change and ephemerality is addressed through the record’s preoccupation with non-human perspectives, reorienting the listener to the wolf, the mouse, the emerald frog, the centipede, the bird, the fly in the lamp. The album cover visualizes this fascination with the striking image of a reddish-orange frog atop a defamiliarized landscape of dark green leaves. Mirroring the exploratory process of the record’s collaboration, the frog also signals the amphibian’s natural inclination to leap into boundless potential. Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s lyrics manifest philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton’s concept of “the mesh,” drawing attention to the “vast, entangled web” of interconnectedness that connects all life forms and interweaving the songwriters’ shared wonder into the Animal’s unknowability. As Luka narrates in the breakdown of the dance-floor ready “Photo,” “the closer we observe things, the further they retreat into abstraction.” In Ingredient’s ecosystem, perception is a reversible fractal where the world’s minutest details mirror the shape of the cosmos.

According to the Dao, the path to healing starts by reorienting perception away from the self and toward the self’s subsumption in Totality. For Kehoe, collaborating with Kuplowsky became the reorientation necessary for the self-preservation he was seeking, opening up a shared creative practice to navigate and soften the complexity of his psychological shattering. The album begins with Kuplowsky intoning “colossal faith” which bounces around the stereo field in a cloud of echo, and it is the enormity of “faith” that centers both Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s collaboration and their inquisitiveness in the vast mysteries of our very being. Truth in Ingredient is not an essential nugget, but a bending of the light – it is the equivocal entanglement of how we are in nature as nature, but with a plea or prayer under our breath that marks our felt distance from what we are a part of: “carry me towards the mountains of my birth / returning to the nest / the silence of the earth.”

With I was born by the sea, Richie Culver brings to a close a period of intense introspection and emotional reckoning with a debut album that serves as both an optimistic statement of intent and a final glance back at the painful places it explores. Following recent work with Blackhaine and Pavel Milyakov, I was born by the sea picks up where Culver’s EP for Italian label Superpang, Post Traumatic Fantasy, leaves off, painting an unabashed portrait of contemporary malaise, detailing a life lived behind closed doors, pinned under the crushing weight of austerity, sapped of the strength to do anything other than gaze out to sea and all the grey possibilities it represents. Where Post Traumatic Fantasy saw Culver returning to his hometown of Hull after a period spent entangled in London’s relentless sprawl, his first full length project reaches further back to his formative years working in a caravan factory and going to raves in and among Hull’s outskirts. Unspooling like a fever dream, I was born by the sea is the anxious clutter of a racing mind spoken clearly, a stark reflection on how it feels to have too many ideas and too much time to act on them.

Though unquestionably a snapshot of a time of significant difficulty, Culver reflects on this period with tender empathy and pitch-black humour, stitching together unflinching observations from England’s neglected corners, ‘there’s more mobility scooter repair shops and bookies than there are bookshops,’ and devastating vignettes of everyday struggle, ‘tears on the tin foil’, with surreal depictions of industrial grit, ‘skimming stones in a small pond by the slaughterhouse’. His DIY approach to production stretches the rough sinew that connects these fragments of memory, a process he describes as using a paired back collection of synths and drum machines to the best of his ability, ‘but to the least of their capabilities,’ wringing out visceral sound with self-taught urgency. During the album’s most impressionistic passages it’s as though Culver has transposed past internal turmoil into powerfully resonant noise, the Sisyphean sonics of ‘Create A Lifestyle Around Your Problems’, which evokes in its concrète clatter and MRI machine barrage the sound of making the same mistake again and again, or the stuttered jumble of ‘Its Hard To Get To Know You,’ its garbled vocal modulation and frayed edges of distortion channeling the paranoia of somebody listening to muffled voices through thin plaster, climbing the walls of their bedroom with the curtains closed, a nervous breakdown in stereo.

In counterpoint to this glides the ever-present spirit of the dance floor, which haunts the record from the moment it is invoked in its first few seconds. Opening onto a sea wall of bright synthesis, the stuttering vocals and bass tone chops of ‘Nervous Energy’ dump us directly into post rave ecstasy, the echoing cry of a voice amplified by loudspeaker carrying the loose energy and surge of crowds moving in darkness. The incessant, dead phone line beep of ‘Pigeon Flesh’ builds to a pulse that suddenly swells into an anxious technoid surge, shapeshifting at lysergic speed into head shrinking audio hallucinations, a descent into the void of the present via machine music hypnosis. Even ‘Its Hard To Get To Know You’ summons the ego death drive of hardcore techno within its scorched textures, flickering indiscernibly between attritional noise and frazzled hardware stomp. Paying homage to both the parties of his youth and a countless succession of Sundays spent offering himself up within Berghain’s hallowed architecture, Culver’s experiments in addressing his formative relationship with rave provide an energetic glimpse at where he might take his sound next.

Between spikes of propulsive energy and grim mood pieces Culver returns to suspended passages of aching, glacial drift, the cold swell of the North Sea, accompanied by some of his heaviest testimonials. The gauzy ebb of ‘Daytime TV,’ its tumbling loops reminiscent of boats bobbing off a distant shore, sees the artist at his most checked out, slumped in front of his television, seven days a week. ‘I used to dream of doing something,’ he admits, ‘anything to get out of this town.’ ‘Love Like An Abscess’ pairs swirling currents of ambient shimmer with violent images of baseball bats lying next to beds and blood-stained mattresses, next to which Culver pleads in a desperate mumble, ‘let our love grow, like a broken abscess.’ Yet it’s with the album’s final word and title track that Culver reveals a glimmer of cautious optimism, a parting gesture of exposition and closure. ‘I knew I had to get away,’ he asserts, ‘so I did and I never looked back.’ What follows builds from a low throb, the flutter of a tiny heartbeat, to a resonant glow, embellished with unfurling synthetic burbles, oil rigs sparkling in the distance, golden light spilling across the sea. In reckoning with the place he had to escape, Richie Culver is now free to look towards the promise of something new, something hopeful.

No Way Out is the classic rap album helmed by Puff Daddy and featuring his Family of labelmates and trusted collaborators from across the Bad Boy universe and the music industry at large. Debuting in the Summer of 1997, the Grammy Award winning album sold well over half a million copies in its first week of release—securing the Number One spot on the Billboard 200 chart. It also spawned several Billboard Hot 100 singles, including the international chart-topping Biggie tribute “I’ll Be Missing You” which sat in the top spot for 11 consecutive weeks and has the distinction of being the first ever rap song to debut at Number One on the Hot 100 chart.

Originally conceived as an ode to Harlem and a nod to the mob narratives of Scorsese and Puzzo, Puff changed course (and album titles!) following the death of his friend and fellow Bad Boy artist The Notorious BIG. Assembling a powerhouse production team of rotating talent known collectively as “The Hitmen” and stowing away to Trinidad, they spent weeks expanding on the project. What came of those sessions were not only major hit records for No Way Out, but also tracks that appear on Life After Death and various other Bad Boy releases throughout the late 90’s.

Since his debut 25 years ago as a bona fide solo artist, Diddy has gone on to develop countless other talented performers and produce a myriad of projects that reach beyond music into fashion, film and television. Yet and still, No Way Out—which has been RIAA certified 7x Platinum—remains one of Puffy’s most successful, highest grossing albums to date.

Puckered with ruggedly pointillist swagger and evoking discrete worlds hidden in plain sight, »Traditional Music of South London« is a riveting masterwork by experimental music’s distinctive and cherished modernist, Dale Cornish. It is a concrète grimoire of recent and ancient folklore that binds Dale’s music, lyrics, and background into a strikingly personal synecdoche of South London.

Since emerging as part of London’s shouty electroclash movement in the mid ‘00s, and assuming the role of deconstructed rave pioneer and poet in 2011, Dale Cornish has been (lo)key to new movements in electronic music’s underbelly for the best part of this century. His 12th LP, proper, »Traditional Music of South London« is Dale’s definitive record; a confident testament to artistic maturity that comes with doing your thing against the grain over decades, and a potent expansion on ideas chiselled during his run of releases with the inspirational (now sadly defunct) label, Entr’acte, who helped foster Dale’s explorations of concrète rave and industrial pop tropes during the ‘10s.

On one level the album reads as a deep topography or psychosexual-geography of London’s lost gay club haunts, with the meat-motoring deep house of ‘Great Storm’ recalling DJ Sprinkles taking Loefah to the darkroom in its concrète carved and flesh trembling 8:08 perfection; or more literally in »Foxhole«, with Dale’s deliciously Croydon-toned accent describing urban gay mythologies with pungent lyrics about rotten fox cadavers synced to drily ricocheting hand claps, while the tight swinge of his “requiem for all the dead gay venues” in the gut-level bass of »Hoist Crash Fort«, and the playful evocation of “internecine conflict within the gays - live!” on »Palace Intrigue« just utterly slap like nothing else.

Yet it’s in the LP’s slower, bloozier and folky vocal bits that Dale’s dare- to-differ character comes into its own. The clandestine skulk of ‘My Geography’ portrays him like a modern Jandek traversing London’s brutalist- meets-semi rural meridian, and at its gooier core flashes of folk-classical brilliance such as the groggy ‘Norman Lewis’ give way to the writhing foley orgy of »Crowd Scene«, while the naked, one-take end of szn paean of »SCY BFR HNH« and slurred, Tricky-esque confessional »Shout Outs« consolidate and temper the conflicting aspects of his persona with a deep burning pathos in the LP’s fading phosphorescence.

In an era of overproduction and imitation-not-innovation, Dale’s strikingly original, sensually brutalist industro-folk-dance-pop critically cocks a snook at conventional, careerist music while embracing its heartical truths. An extremely personal record certain to resonate with those who believe art in music still matters.

Opaque pink vinyl LP. For fans of: Tirzah, Caroline Polachek, Erika de Casier, Oklou, Smerz. Between the ages of 2 and 18, Cora Gilroy-Ware lived in a haunted place. On the outside, this small edge of Connecticut coastline was a quintessential New England town. Yet beneath its quaint surface was a netherworld that got steadily darker over the course of those sixteen years. From a serious drug problem to environmental pollution leading to deadly illnesses, frequent suicides and an above average number of fatal accidents, something about this place was cursed. Amid this world Cora was an outsider, someone who preferred pop and RnB to the music of her peers, who mostly subscribed to the dregs of a Deadhead culture that was more nihilistic than utopian. Still, she found herself on weekends drinking in the woods with the rest of them, playing along until it was time to leave. Christmas breaks and summer months were spent across the Atlantic in a completely antithetical environment. In London, the city of her birth, Cora spent her teen years taking the bus home at dawn after raves under the railroad arches, or riding the tube to her cousin’s house in Camden. For a long time, Cora’s life was composed of these two strands—ghostly East Coast suburbia and inner-city London—which she was forced to fold in and out of one another like a two-strand French braid. She quickly learned to adapt and be whoever the particular moment demanded. Her outsider status was intensified by the fact that, being of mixed Afro-Caribbean and European descent, her family didn’t look like the others in Connecticut. In the 2000s, this meant Cora had to contend with a deeply ingrained kind of folk-racism, both conscious and unconsciously expressed. Nobody talked about these things back then, and she internalized a lot of shame. The ability to shape-shift became integral to Cora’s artistic practice. Her survival mechanism at school was to carve out her own worlds through visual art and dance. Music was less of a creative outlet than a way of life, something like a form of religion for her family, who all played instruments and saw music as the form to which all art aspires. She studied violin and learned enough guitar chords to write her first songs. Cora always wanted to be a performer, but, having moved around constantly, craved stability and independence. Eager to make her own way in the world, she began to write about painting and sculpture, which eventually led to time spent working in Naples, Italy and a day job teaching the History of Art at university level. It wasn’t until 2018 that Cora first shared her first songs with the wider world. Having collaborated and played live with Jam City (Jack Latham, who has co-produced each of her releases), she finally embarked on a solo career, which for her felt inevitable, only a matter of time. Following four acclaimed EPs—Toxic Femininity (2018), Lashes in a Landfill (2019), Dreamcatcher (2020) and Maiden No More (2021), this year will see the release of her debut album The Golden Ass. For her artist name she chose, “Fauness”: a play on the Latin faunus, a woodland god with the body of a man and the horns, ears, and legs of a goat. The feminine equivalent—fauness—is a modern invention, made up by rococo sculptors in 18th century France. Cora was drawn to this pseudonym because of its temporal layers and amalgamation of beauty and beast, which, for her, captures something of her complex personal story. an utterly individual voice in underground pop music" - The FADER // "a sparkling sweet pop ride" – NYLON // “It is hard to write a perfect pop song. It’s even harder to make it look as easy as London artist Fauness” - GUARDIAN GUIDE // Tracks 01. Lonely 02. Mystery 03. Peaches 04. Hours 05. Siena 06. Grape & Grain 07. Laura 08. High 09. Cinnamon 10. Girl In The Moon

What Are People For? make the perfect kind of dystopic dance music for our times. Born from a collaboration between artist Anna McCarthy and musician/producer Manuela Rzytki, the band could be the illicit lovechild of Tom Tom Club and Throbbing Gristle, displaying the ideal balance of hip shaking vibes and dark provocative content.

On their collaborative debut, McCarthy and Rzytki share songwriting duties. The album was produced by Rzytki herself. They are joined by Paulina Nolte on backing vocals and Tom Wu on drums, while Keith Tenniswood mastered the record.

The whole project stems from a publication and exhibition by McCarthy laying the foundations for the content and lyrics of the album, which is humorous, poetic and political. As a lyricist, McCarthy uses her storytelling ability to explore anxieties and desires, digging into free surreal word associations reminiscent of Su Tissues’ tongue in cheek experiments with Suburban Lawns, but also explosive and gripping like a Kae Tempest rap.
Rzytki’s precise sonic palette and talent at penning structured bangers perfectly complement McCarthy’s playful and subversive language manipulations. Rzytki's beats are rooted in old school Hiphop loop principles and an authentic love for the analog. Her use of an array of synthesizers and other "real" instruments adds to WAPF's depth, soul and sincerity.

The album opens with a joyful anthem, full of energy and melodic hooks. The audience is confronted with the quintessential titular question What Are People For? and told that they are just a mere disposable commodity. Throughout the album, lyrical themes revolve around underground aspects of society, violence, political ideologies, sexuality and mysticism. The content is deep but the album is as danceable as it is biting.

73, with its drum machine hysteria and hypnotic synth basses is a a text collage written on the 73 bus through London, consisting of situations and conversation snippets encountered along the way. Drones indulges in the narrator’s paranoia as they feel they are being watched by cigarette machines, whilst the haunting choir is half spoken, half sung, ending on the orgasmic chanting of the word “mummy”. Nursery Rhyme brings more soothing incantations. There is definitely an affinity for fairytales, albeit adult ones and especially the anarchistic ones such as The Moomins, who were a consistent influence on the band. The artwork for the record, created by McCarthy, is a beautiful children's book-style painting of the group in a forest, seemingly about to engage in a magical encounter to which we are invited.

WAPF? have absorbed and digested a variety of influences. Trip hop, Punk and Techno are rubbing shoulders on Party Time. 1977 was coined “Summer of Hate” in the UK and unsurprisingly in WAPF?’s Summer of War, ethereal singing alternates with a powerful marching Garage/Grime chorus reminiscent of street protests and UK culture.

Mz. Lazy starts like an invitation to meditation and references Gertrude Stein’s book Ida in which she develops the idea that publicity is a new religion and people are now famous for being famous. Repressed anger explodes into violence and freedom at the end of the song as our heroine eventually grabs an axe to destroy her oppressors.
Fantasize, on its part, is raw, sexual and liberating while the closing track Bring Back the Dirt is a welcome hymn into a world that is becoming more and more sanitised.

While exploring deep subject matters throughout their album, WAPF? manage to remain satirical, exciting and funny. Each and everyone of their songs have a cathartic quality.

The visual identity of the band is intrinsic to their appeal. Live, they are eccentric, wild and unapologetic, wearing see-through costumes, bright miniskirts and intricate headpieces while delivering their songs with sharp intensity. Their performances radiate queer sexiness and transcend B52's thrift store aesthetics, creating a space for collective dreaming.

WAPF? is a rare combination of contemporary punk energy, irresistible groove, absurdist dry humour and astounding depth of field. They have the mighty power to create a party with their music and soon you will find yourself lifting your arms as if controlled by an external force, to chant: WAPF? WAPF? WAPF?

– Marie Merlet (Malphino, Little Trouble Girls, London)

Following the compass of an entrancing debut, Flore Laurentienne’s Volume II presents another palette of rich orchestral sound, where changing forces of water inspire metaphorical markers that navigate passages of life and loss.

Mathieu David Gagnon resumes his voyage into environment and emotion with Volume II, drawing inspiration from the rivers and rugged wilderness of the composer’s native Quebec. In his return as Flore Laurentienne – the namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora – Gagnon assembles vivid melodic motifs and delicate modulation with a vast string ensemble to emulate the tides of human experience.

Listeners of Volume I will recognise Gagnon’s signature approach towards reworking and reframing an emblematic melody or concept across a series of works inVolume II, a process he likens to that of a painter creating multiple sketches of the same view. Continued from the first album, the enigmatic “Fleuve” series is conjured to evoke the multiple personalities of the great St. Lawrence River, and the “Navigation” works (“III” and “IV”) wade through dappled progressions and expansive streams of string, the latter of which harbors the gentle meanderings of improvised clarinet.

Charlotte Dos Santos announces debut album Morfo with lead single 'Hello Hello'. Described as 'as assured as Solange' by The Guardian, Charlotte Dos Santos is a formidable multi-faceted producer, single and composer who has worked with the likes of Blood Orange and Gotts St Park and makes music free of any confines
“MORFO is a sonic tale about transformation, about love and pain. It's a playful journey through my deepest inner thoughts combined with elements of music I admire, such as Soul, R&B, Funk, MBP/Samba and Classical. I am a child of the world, born in two cultures and on this album I am digging deeper into my ancestral roots and into my consciousness, and MORFO is the result”. – Charlotte Dos Santos

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…"

Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within."

"I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them.

"Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone."

"People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something.

"That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me."

In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

=

Born in 1963, the baby boy of nine siblings, Lee Tracy spent his earliest years living amidst the shotgun houses on Nashville's south side. "We was poor, man!" he says, recalling the outhouse his family used for a bathroom and the blocks of ice they kept in the kitchen to chill perishables. "But I actually don't think I really realized I was in poverty until I got grown and started thinking about it." Lee's mom worked at the Holiday Inn; his dad did whatever he had to do, from selling fruit from a horse drawn cart to bootlegging. "We didn't have much," Lee continues, "but my mother and my father got us the things we needed, the clothes on our back." By the end of the decade with the city's urban renewal programs razing entire neighborhoods to accommodate construction of the Interstate, the family moved to Edgehill Projects. Lee remembers music and art as a constant source of inspiration for he and his brothers and sisters – especially after seeing the Jackson 5 perform on Ed Sullivan. "As a small child I just knew that was what I wanted to do."

His older brother Don began musically mentoring him, introducing Lee to a variety of instruments and sounds. "He would never play one particular type of music, like R&B," says Lee. "I was surrounded by jazz, hard rock and roll, easy listening, gospel, reggae, country music; I mean I was a sponge absorbing all of that." Lee taught himself to play drums by beating on cardboard boxes, gaining a rep around the way for his timekeeping, and his singing voice. Emulating his favorites, Earth Wind & Fire and Cameo, he formed groups with other kids with era-evocative band names like Concept and TNT Connection, and emerged as the leader of disciplined rehearsals. "I made them practice," says Lee. "We practiced and practiced and practiced. Because I wanted that perfection." By high school the most accomplished of these bands would take top prize in a prominent local talent show. It was a big moment for Lee, and he felt ready to take things to the next level. But his band-mates had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened," he says, still miffed at the memory. "It must have blew they mind after we won and people started showing notice, because it's like everybody quit! I was like, where the hell did everybody go?" Lee had always made a point of interrogating prospective musicians about their intentions before joining his groups: were they really serious or just looking for a way to pick up girls? Now he understood even more the importance of finding a collaborator just as committed to the music as he was.

=

Isaac Manning had spent much of his life immersed in music and the arts – singing in the church choir with his family on Nashville's north side, writing, painting, dancing, and working various gigs within the entertainment industry. After serving in the armed forces, in the early '70s he ran The Teenage Place, a music and performance venue that catered to the local youth. But he was forced out of town when word of one of his recreational routines created a stir beyond the safe haven of his bohemian circles.

"I was growing marijuana," Isaac explains. "It wasn't no business, I was smoking it myself… I would put marijuana in scrambled eggs, cornbread and stuff." His weed use originated as a form of self-medication to combat severe tooth pain. But when he began sharing it with some of the other young people he hung out with, some of who just so happened to be the kids of Nashville politicians, the cops came calling. "When I got busted," he remembers, "they were talking about how they were gonna get rid of me because they didn't want me saying nothing about they children because of the politics and stuff. So I got my family, took two raggedy cars, and left Nashville and went to Vegas."

Out in the desert, Isaac happened to meet Chubby Checker of "The Twist" fame while the singer was gigging at The Flamingo. Impressed by Isaac's zeal, Checker invited him to go on the road with him as his tour manager/roadie/valet. The experience gave Isaac a window into a part of the entertainment world he'd never encountered – a glimpse of what a true pop act's audience looked like. "Chubby Checker, none of his shows were played for Black folks," he remembers. "All his gigs were done at high-class white people areas." Returning home after a few years with Chubby, Isaac was properly motivated to make it in Music City. He began writing songs and scouting around Nashville for local talent anywhere he could find it with an expressed goal: "Find someone who can deliver your songs the way you want 'em delivered and make people feel what you want them to feel."

One day while walking through Edgehill Projects Isaac heard someone playing the drums in a way that made him stop and take notice. "The music was so tight, just the drums made me feel like, oh I'm-a find this person," he recalls. "So I circled through the projects until I found who it was.

"That's how I met him – Lee Tracy. When I found him and he started singing and stuff, I said, ohhh, this is somebody different."

=

Theirs was a true complementary partnership: young Lee possessed the raw talent, the older Isaac the belief. "He's really the only one besides my brother and my family that really seen the potential in me," says Lee. "He made me see that I could do it."

Isaac long being a night owl, his house also made for a fertile collaborative environment – a space where there always seemed to be a new piece of his visual art on display: paintings, illustrations, and dolls and figures (including an enigmatic cardboard robot). Lee and Issac would hang out together and talk, listen to music, conjure ideas, and smoke the herb Isaac had resumed growing in his yard. "It got to where I could trust him, he could trust me," Isaac says of their bond. They also worked together for hours on drawings, spreading larges rolls of paper on the walls and sketching faces with abstract patterns and imagery: alien-like beings, tri-horned horse heads, inverted Janus-like characters where one visage blurred into the other.

Soon it became apparent that they didn't need other collaborators; self-sufficiency was the natural way forward. At Isaac's behest Lee, already fed up with dealing with band musicians, began playing around with a poly-sonic Yamaha keyboard at the local music store. "It had everything on it – trumpet, bass, drums, organ," remembers Lee. "And that's when I started recording my own stuff."

The technology afforded Lee the flexibility and independence he craved, setting him on a path other bedroom musicians and producers around the world were simultaneously following through the '80s into the early '90s. Saving up money from day jobs, he eventually supplemented the Yamaha Isaac had gotten him with Roland and Casio drum machines and a Moog. Lee was living in an apartment in Hillside at that point caring for his dad, who'd been partially paralyzed since early in life. In the evenings up in his second floor room, the music put him in a zone where he could tune out everything and lose himself in his ideas.

"Oh I loved it," he recalls. "I would really experiment with the instruments and use a lot of different sound effects. I was looking for something nobody else had. I wanted something totally different. And once I found the sound I was looking for, I would just smoke me a good joint and just let it go, hit the record button." More potent a creative stimulant than even Isaac's weed was the holistic flow and spontaneity of recording. Between sessions at Isaac's place and Lee's apartment, their volume of output quickly ballooned.

"We was always recording," says Lee. "That's why we have so much music. Even when I went to Isaac's and we start creating, I get home, my mind is racing, I gotta start creating, creating, creating. I remember there were times when I took a 90-minute tape from front to back and just filled it up."

"We never practiced," says Isaac. "See, that was just so odd about the whole thing. I could relate to him, and tell him about the songs I had ideas for and everything and stuff. And then he would bring it back or whatever, and we'd get together and put it down." Once the taskmaster hell bent on rehearsing, Lee had flipped a full 180. Perfection was no longer an aspiration, but the enemy of inspiration.

"I seen where practicing and practicing got me," says Lee. "A lot of musicians you get to playing and they gotta stop, they have to analyze the music. But while you analyzing you losing a lot of the greatness of what you creating. Stop analyzing what you play, just play! And it'll all take shape."

=

"I hope you understood the beginning of the record because this was invented from a dream I had today… (You tell me, I'll tell you, we'll figure it out together)" – Lee Tracy and Isaac Manning, "Hope You Understand"

Lee lets loose a maniacal cackle when he acknowledges that the material that he and Isaac recorded was by anyone's estimation pretty out there. It's the same laugh that commences "Hope You Understand" – a chaotic transmission that encapsulates the duality at the heart of their music: a stated desire to reach people and a compulsion to go as leftfield as they saw fit.

"We just did it," says Lee. "We cut the music on and cut loose. I don't sit around and write. I do it by listening, get a feeling, play the music, and the lyrics and stuff just come out of me."

The approach proved adaptable to interpreting other artists' material. While recording a cover of Whitney Houston's pop ballad "Saving All My Love For You," Lee played Whitney's version in his headphones as he laid down his own vocals – partially following the lyrics, partially using them as a departure point. The end result is barely recognizable compared with the original, Lee and Isaac having switched up the time signature and reinvented the melody along the way towards morphing a slick mainstream radio standard into something that sounds solely their own.

"I really used that song to get me started," says Lee. "Then I said, well I need something else, something is missing. Something just came over me. That's when I came up with 'Is It What You Want.'"

The song would become the centerpiece of Lee and Isaac's repertoire. Pushed along by a percolating metronomic Rhythm King style beat somewhere between a military march and a samba, "Is It What You Want" finds Lee pleading the sincerity of his commitment to a potential love interest embellished by vocal tics and hiccups subtlely reminiscent of his childhood hero MJ. Absent chord changes, only synth riffs gliding in and out like apparitions, the song achieves a lingering lo-fi power that leaves you feeling like it's still playing, somewhere, even after the fade out.

"I don't know, it's like a real spiritual song," Lee reflects. "But it's not just spiritual. To me the more I listen to it it's like about everything that you do in your everyday life, period. Is it what you want? Do you want a car or you don't want a car? Do you want Jesus or do you want the Devil? It's basically asking you the question. Can't nobody answer the question but you yourself."

In 1989 Lee won a lawsuit stemming from injuries sustained from a fight he'd gotten into. He took part of the settlement money and with Isaac pressed up "Saving All My Love For You" b/w "Is It What You Want" as a 45 single. Isaac christened the label One Chance Records. "Because that's all we wanted," he says with a laugh, "one chance."

Isaac sent the record out to radio stations and major labels, hoping for it to make enough noise to get picked up nationally. But the response he and Lee were hoping for never materialized. According to Isaac the closest the single got to getting played on the radio is when a disk jock from a local station made a highly unusual announcement on air: "The dude said on the radio, 107.5 – 'We are not gonna play 'Is It What You Want.' We cracked up! Wow, that's deep.

"It was a whole racist thing that was going on," he reflects. "So we just looked over and kept on going. That was it. That was about the way it goes… If you were Black and you were living in Nashville and stuff, that's the way you got treated." Isaac already knew as much from all the times he'd brought he and Lee's tapes (even their cache of country music tunes) over to Music Row to try to drum up interest to no avail.

"Isaac, he really worked his ass off," says Lee. "He probably been to every record place down on Music Row." Nashville's famed recording and music business corridor wasn't but a few blocks from where Lee grew up. Close enough, he remembers, for him to ride his bike along its back alleys and stumble upon the occasional random treasure, like a discarded box of harmonicas. Getting in through the front door, however, still felt a world away.

"I just don't think at the time our music fell into a category for them," he concedes. "It was before its time."

=

Lee stopped making music some time in the latter part of the '90s, around the time his mom passed away and life became increasingly tough to manage. "When my mother died I had a nervous breakdown," he says, "So I shut down for a long time. I was in such a sadness frame of mind. That's why nobody seen me. I had just disappeared off the map." He fell out of touch with Isaac, and in an indication of just how bad things had gotten for him, lost track of all the recordings they'd made together. Music became a distant memory.

Fortunately, Isaac kept the faith. In a self-published collection of his poetry – paeans to some of his favorite entertainment and public figures entitled Friends and Dick Clark – he'd written that he believed "music has a life of its own." But his prescience and presence of mind were truly manifested in the fact that he kept an archive of he and Lee's work. As perfectly imperfect as "Is It What You Want" now sounds in a post-Personal Space world, Lee and Isaac's lone official release was in fact just a taste. The bulk of the Is It What You Want album is culled from the pair's essentially unheard home recordings – complete songs, half-realized experiments, Isaac's blue monologues and pronouncements et al – compiled, mixed and programmed in the loose and impulsive creative spirit of their regular get-togethers from decades ago. The rest of us, it seems, may have finally caught up to them.

On the prospect of at long last reaching a wider audience, Isaac says simply, "I been trying for a long time, it feels good." Ever the survivor, he adds, "The only way I know how to make it to the top is to keep climbing. If one leg break on the ladder, hey, you gotta fix it and keep on going… That's where I be at. I'll kill death to make it out there."

For Lee it all feels akin to a personal resurrection: "It's like I was in a tomb and the tomb was opened and I'm back… Man, it feels so great. I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin." Success at this stage of his life, he realizes, probably means something different than what it did back when he was singing and dancing in Isaac's front yard. "What I really mean by 'making it,'" he explains isn't just the music being heard but, "the story being told."

Occasionally Lee will pull up "Is It What You Want" on YouTube on his phone, put on his headphones, and listen. He remembers the first time he heard his recorded voice. How surreal it was, how he thought to himself, "Is that really me?" What would he say to that younger version of himself now?

"I would probably tell myself, hang in there, don't give up. Keep striving for the goal. And everything will work out."

Despite what's printed on the record label, sometimes you do get more than one chance.

After his appearance on Frigio Allstars Vol 3, Scannoir (also half member of the amazing GOTT project) delivers his first full length EP with "Through My Silence". Emotive and raw, the style pursued blurs the lines between synth wave, EBM and techno. “Industrial Technology” opens with powerful percussion and thick strings as distant vocals recite the coming of change. “Get Ready (For Sorry)” maintains the stern drum patterns as samples and lyrics float on rumbling chords. The breadth of Scannoir’s style is truly remarkable, with this amazing 5 track EP being emblematic of his range. The flip takes a different direction, the lovelorn lament of “Through My Silence” melts sweetened synth lines with cold pain-streaked words before blooming into a brooding burner. A shaky alliance between samples and vocals runs through the rhythmic assault and violent undertones of “Why Old News.” The closure comes with the marching melancholy of “Alles Wird Gut”, a dark and moody end to this debut EP.

Following the compass of an entrancing debut, Flore Laurentienne's Volume II presents another palette of rich orchestral sound, where changing forces of water inspire metaphorical markers that navigate passages of life and loss. Mathieu David Gagnon resumes his voyage into environment and emotion with Volume II, drawing inspiration from the rivers and rugged wilderness of the composer's native Quebec. In his return as Flore Laurentienne - the namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora - Gagnon assembles vivid melodic motifs and delicate modulation with a vast string ensemble to emulate the tides of human experience. Listeners of Volume I will recognise Gagnon's signature approach towards reworking and reframing an emblematic melody or concept across a series of works in Volume II, a process he likens to that of a painter creating multiple sketches of the same view. Continued from the first album, the enigmatic "Fleuve" series is conjured to evoke the multiple personalities of the great St. Lawrence River, and the "Navigation" works ("III" and "IV") wade through dappled progressions and expansive streams of string, the latter of which harbors the gentle meanderings of improvised clarinet. In the world of Flore Laurentienne, complexity emerges from simplicity as the composer roams familiar environments in constant flux. Gagnon extracts beauty through repetition and constraint, utilizing the writing style of counterpoint for which one of his greatest musical inspirations, Johann Sebastian Bach, is renowned. The lilting waves of "Canon" possess the eponymous formation of melodic 'leader and follower' motif, and magnify the softness of the album's eighteen string musicians into a force of full euphoric resonance. In Volume II, Gagnon continues his expansion of classical composition archetypes to meet a new realm of sonic romanticism. Thematic conventions of wandering the pastoral sublime become altered into glimmering refractions, relaying the emotional and kinetic power of natural energies. Volume II forms an estuary where streams of auditory microcosm reach a horizon of dynamic contrast, and reflect the parallel tenors of nature and humankind.

Re-pressed at last!! Limited purple vinyl. The cultural phenomenon that is the Wu-Tang cannot accurately be described without referencing one of the pillars in the Clan's discography, Chef Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx remains firmly planted as one of the defining triumphs in their artistic legacy. The oft referred "Purple Tape", has been cited and debated by many as the greatest Wu-Tang solo project to date and a remains a bullet point in any discussion involving the greatest "Cocaine Rap" or "Street Hop" albums of all time. Raekwon's narrative, plays out like a movie script from the violent, drug fueled, underbelly of New York City's criminal landscape, intricately woven over instrumentals from the legendary mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan, The RZA. Even the album's main feature "Tony Starks aka Ghostface Killer", referred to as such rather described as a "guest star" appearing on 12 of the albums 18 tracks. It should be noted that while the Only Built 4 Cuban Linx did produce a string of successful singles, such as "Ice Cream", "Incarcerated Scarfaces", and "Criminology", like all classic cinema, the album was intentionally engineered to be appreciated in one sitting, played from beginning to end. In continuing with it's proud tradition of honoring historically significant hip hop albums, Get On Down is honored to present Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx" for the first time ever on double translucent purple vinyl housed in a high density resealable poly bag. This edition features for the first time ever on vinyl, the formerly CD only bonus track, "North Star (Jewels)". And if that wasn't enough, the entire album also features completely enhanced and painstakingly remastered audio. This is the definitive must-own vinyl edition of Raekwon's masterpiece.

With Panorama, Frank Maston pays homage to the classic era of library records and Italian soundtracks of the 70s. A blissed-out, grooving collection of filmic cues, it continues the unique brilliance of Tulips and Darkland. Elegant and easy, subtle and stylish, breezy and beautiful; this is his Maston-piece. Commissioned by legendary label KPM, Panorama cements Maston as a master of modern classics and the most mesmeric of contemporary composers.

In early 2020, Be With suggested to Frank that he should make a KPM record. He wasn't aware that they were still putting out new library records - but he was super keen: "It was completely surreal and it still hasn't fully sank in that I have a record in that catalog, sitting alongside those incredible albums that were so influential to me."

Frank was visiting family in his hometown of LA in March 2020 when the world ground to a halt so the KPM project arrived at a fortuitous moment. Having fantasised about committing to a record with no distractions, with a proper budget, access to his gear and space to work in - to really dig in and try to write and arrange the best work he could possibly make - it was a real "be careful what you wish for" moment. But, as Frank explained, "it completely saved my year and sanity to have something to focus on and get excited about. It was my lifeline." He spent seven months on it, working almost every day.

Maston had already been making library-influenced music so when KPM outlined the criteria for the tracks it was exactly what he had been doing all along. He thought the best approach would be to make a follow-up to Tulips that had a parallel life as a KPM record. Enjoying complete creative freedom, “gave me the drive to power through and dig in deep. I'm not sure if I could have kept myself on such a rigorous recording schedule under my own steam, and I think the momentum I had writing and recording it is part of the strength of this record."

Maston’s sleek retro-groove instrumentals emulate the classic KPM “Greensleeve” reel-to-reel recordings that provided mood-setting music for mid-century cinema, television, and radio programs. Apparently in close conversation with the John Cameron-Keith Mansfield KPM pastoral masterclass Voices In Harmony, Maston's Panorama could be heard as that record's funky follow-up. Yes, it's *that good*. Another reference point from the hallowed library would be Francis Coppieter's wonderful Piano Viberations.

Opener "First Class" is a blissed-out groove, featuring the soothing vocals of Molly Lewis and a glistening harp over drums, a two-note bass motif (from Eli Ghersinu of L'Eclair) and an assemblage of guitars, synths, French horn and glowing vibraphone. Acid Lounge, anyone? The irresistibly funky "Easy Money" is a gorgeous cut led by more of Molly's vocals, pastoral flute and Rhodes, underpinned by drums and percussion, grooving bass, chilled guitars and synth strings. Kicking the tempo up, the percussive "Storm" is a vibin' filmic-fusion jam where psychedelic guitars (courtesy of Pedrum of Allah Las/Paint) organ, jazzy flute, Rhodes and vibes all compete for a place in the sun, over drums and walking bassline.

The heavenly "You Shouldn't Have" is a delicate, melancholic wonder; a dreamy instrumental where the melody is shared by a whistle, harpsichord and celeste, over a cyclical piano chord sequence and bass, synths, guitars, organ and distant French horn. The tempo rises again with the passionate, sticky "Fling", a summery, nostalgic groove with skipping drums and percussion, warm bass and electric guitar, yearning flute and synth strings. The brilliantly titled "Fool Moon" has that Voices In Harmony sound down pat. A romantic slow-mo dreamscape of Rhodes and harpsichord, piano, light drums and softly strummed acoustic guitar.

Side B opens with "Medusa", a hopeful, mellowed-out track with shuffling drums, feel-good flute, muted horns, glowing Rhodes and synth strings. The soft and gentle "Morning Paper" is an elegant way to start the day; a beatless blend of flute, guitar, percussion, ambient synths and vibes. The upbeat head-nod jam "Scenic" has that widescreen car-chase feel, uptempo drums and percussion, grooving bass, piano, synths and ambient electric guitar. "Adieu" is a smooth summer vibe, relaxing with brushed drums, Rhodes, flutes and horns. Molly Lewis's gorgeous vocals steal the show, alongside vibes, jamming organ and synth strings.

"Hydra" is another laid-back 70s-sounding retro cinema cue with light drums and percussion, walking bass, spacey synths, clavinet, glowing vibraphone, vintage organ and electric guitar. Closer "Jet Lag" is a laconic bow out; bass-driven drum machine soul, featuring hand percussion, Rhodes, vibes, synths and organ.

Multi-instrumentalist Frank played a bit of everything across Panorama. Yet, humble as ever, he believes the time, energy, and enthusiasm of all of the musicians invited to the sessions helped him realise his vision: "There were two Italian flautists who really understood what I was going for. Two french horn players, cor anglais, a vibraphonist and a flügel horn player. I've never involved this many people in my projects before, and yet the result is the most "me" record I've ever made."

Musically, a strong Italian theme runs through the record. Frank is fascinated by ancient Rome and both his parents are Italian (Maston was originally Mastrantonio before anglicisation). So, it felt natural to fully embrace these strands and tie everything together with the striking artwork. The Romans were influenced by Greek culture, emulating their art and architecture, which, in turn, influenced Renaissance era artists. Frank acknowledged this tradition when reflecting on his place in the lineage of library and soundtrack composers. He then asked his friend Mattea Perrotta, a painter and sculptor, for some sketches. What he received was exactly what he had in mind: "Especially the theater mask, which really captures the range of moods on the album". Frank arranged them as per the cover and it soon felt right: "I wanted to make a cover that was reminiscent of the classic KPM albums without making it too pastiche - so it has its own identity and looks at home alongside other library records, while still fitting in nicely in the KPM catalogue." The last step was for us to introduce Frank to Be With-KPM’s Rich Robinson, who helped put together the back and centre labels and align it all within the KPM standard.

Panorama is a perfect title for the album. With no opportunity to travel for tours or recording projects, Frank arranged postcards from his collection on his desk with beautiful views of the mediterranean coast, the Roman Colosseum and Cinque Terre. These also served as visual prompts: "That was part of the sonic concept - imagining myself driving down the mediterranean coast with this music on, with the top down." Additionally, the range of moods and vibes - "I tried to make each song very different from the previous one in terms of tempo and arrangement and feeling" - speaks to the idea of a Panorama of music and sounds and emotions. The last track was originally called Panorama, but KPM already had that title in their catalogue so it was changed to "Jet Lag", which, as Frank notes, "is perhaps even more fitting, since the trip is over".

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…"

Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within."

"I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them.

"Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone."

"People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something.

"That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me."

In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

=

Born in 1963, the baby boy of nine siblings, Lee Tracy spent his earliest years living amidst the shotgun houses on Nashville's south side. "We was poor, man!" he says, recalling the outhouse his family used for a bathroom and the blocks of ice they kept in the kitchen to chill perishables. "But I actually don't think I really realized I was in poverty until I got grown and started thinking about it." Lee's mom worked at the Holiday Inn; his dad did whatever he had to do, from selling fruit from a horse drawn cart to bootlegging. "We didn't have much," Lee continues, "but my mother and my father got us the things we needed, the clothes on our back." By the end of the decade with the city's urban renewal programs razing entire neighborhoods to accommodate construction of the Interstate, the family moved to Edgehill Projects. Lee remembers music and art as a constant source of inspiration for he and his brothers and sisters – especially after seeing the Jackson 5 perform on Ed Sullivan. "As a small child I just knew that was what I wanted to do."

His older brother Don began musically mentoring him, introducing Lee to a variety of instruments and sounds. "He would never play one particular type of music, like R&B," says Lee. "I was surrounded by jazz, hard rock and roll, easy listening, gospel, reggae, country music; I mean I was a sponge absorbing all of that." Lee taught himself to play drums by beating on cardboard boxes, gaining a rep around the way for his timekeeping, and his singing voice. Emulating his favorites, Earth Wind & Fire and Cameo, he formed groups with other kids with era-evocative band names like Concept and TNT Connection, and emerged as the leader of disciplined rehearsals. "I made them practice," says Lee. "We practiced and practiced and practiced. Because I wanted that perfection." By high school the most accomplished of these bands would take top prize in a prominent local talent show. It was a big moment for Lee, and he felt ready to take things to the next level. But his band-mates had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened," he says, still miffed at the memory. "It must have blew they mind after we won and people started showing notice, because it's like everybody quit! I was like, where the hell did everybody go?" Lee had always made a point of interrogating prospective musicians about their intentions before joining his groups: were they really serious or just looking for a way to pick up girls? Now he understood even more the importance of finding a collaborator just as committed to the music as he was.

=

Isaac Manning had spent much of his life immersed in music and the arts – singing in the church choir with his family on Nashville's north side, writing, painting, dancing, and working various gigs within the entertainment industry. After serving in the armed forces, in the early '70s he ran The Teenage Place, a music and performance venue that catered to the local youth. But he was forced out of town when word of one of his recreational routines created a stir beyond the safe haven of his bohemian circles.

"I was growing marijuana," Isaac explains. "It wasn't no business, I was smoking it myself… I would put marijuana in scrambled eggs, cornbread and stuff." His weed use originated as a form of self-medication to combat severe tooth pain. But when he began sharing it with some of the other young people he hung out with, some of who just so happened to be the kids of Nashville politicians, the cops came calling. "When I got busted," he remembers, "they were talking about how they were gonna get rid of me because they didn't want me saying nothing about they children because of the politics and stuff. So I got my family, took two raggedy cars, and left Nashville and went to Vegas."

Out in the desert, Isaac happened to meet Chubby Checker of "The Twist" fame while the singer was gigging at The Flamingo. Impressed by Isaac's zeal, Checker invited him to go on the road with him as his tour manager/roadie/valet. The experience gave Isaac a window into a part of the entertainment world he'd never encountered – a glimpse of what a true pop act's audience looked like. "Chubby Checker, none of his shows were played for Black folks," he remembers. "All his gigs were done at high-class white people areas." Returning home after a few years with Chubby, Isaac was properly motivated to make it in Music City. He began writing songs and scouting around Nashville for local talent anywhere he could find it with an expressed goal: "Find someone who can deliver your songs the way you want 'em delivered and make people feel what you want them to feel."

One day while walking through Edgehill Projects Isaac heard someone playing the drums in a way that made him stop and take notice. "The music was so tight, just the drums made me feel like, oh I'm-a find this person," he recalls. "So I circled through the projects until I found who it was.

"That's how I met him – Lee Tracy. When I found him and he started singing and stuff, I said, ohhh, this is somebody different."

=

Theirs was a true complementary partnership: young Lee possessed the raw talent, the older Isaac the belief. "He's really the only one besides my brother and my family that really seen the potential in me," says Lee. "He made me see that I could do it."

Isaac long being a night owl, his house also made for a fertile collaborative environment – a space where there always seemed to be a new piece of his visual art on display: paintings, illustrations, and dolls and figures (including an enigmatic cardboard robot). Lee and Issac would hang out together and talk, listen to music, conjure ideas, and smoke the herb Isaac had resumed growing in his yard. "It got to where I could trust him, he could trust me," Isaac says of their bond. They also worked together for hours on drawings, spreading larges rolls of paper on the walls and sketching faces with abstract patterns and imagery: alien-like beings, tri-horned horse heads, inverted Janus-like characters where one visage blurred into the other.

Soon it became apparent that they didn't need other collaborators; self-sufficiency was the natural way forward. At Isaac's behest Lee, already fed up with dealing with band musicians, began playing around with a poly-sonic Yamaha keyboard at the local music store. "It had everything on it – trumpet, bass, drums, organ," remembers Lee. "And that's when I started recording my own stuff."

The technology afforded Lee the flexibility and independence he craved, setting him on a path other bedroom musicians and producers around the world were simultaneously following through the '80s into the early '90s. Saving up money from day jobs, he eventually supplemented the Yamaha Isaac had gotten him with Roland and Casio drum machines and a Moog. Lee was living in an apartment in Hillside at that point caring for his dad, who'd been partially paralyzed since early in life. In the evenings up in his second floor room, the music put him in a zone where he could tune out everything and lose himself in his ideas.

"Oh I loved it," he recalls. "I would really experiment with the instruments and use a lot of different sound effects. I was looking for something nobody else had. I wanted something totally different. And once I found the sound I was looking for, I would just smoke me a good joint and just let it go, hit the record button." More potent a creative stimulant than even Isaac's weed was the holistic flow and spontaneity of recording. Between sessions at Isaac's place and Lee's apartment, their volume of output quickly ballooned.

"We was always recording," says Lee. "That's why we have so much music. Even when I went to Isaac's and we start creating, I get home, my mind is racing, I gotta start creating, creating, creating. I remember there were times when I took a 90-minute tape from front to back and just filled it up."

"We never practiced," says Isaac. "See, that was just so odd about the whole thing. I could relate to him, and tell him about the songs I had ideas for and everything and stuff. And then he would bring it back or whatever, and we'd get together and put it down." Once the taskmaster hell bent on rehearsing, Lee had flipped a full 180. Perfection was no longer an aspiration, but the enemy of inspiration.

"I seen where practicing and practicing got me," says Lee. "A lot of musicians you get to playing and they gotta stop, they have to analyze the music. But while you analyzing you losing a lot of the greatness of what you creating. Stop analyzing what you play, just play! And it'll all take shape."

=

"I hope you understood the beginning of the record because this was invented from a dream I had today… (You tell me, I'll tell you, we'll figure it out together)" – Lee Tracy and Isaac Manning, "Hope You Understand"

Lee lets loose a maniacal cackle when he acknowledges that the material that he and Isaac recorded was by anyone's estimation pretty out there. It's the same laugh that commences "Hope You Understand" – a chaotic transmission that encapsulates the duality at the heart of their music: a stated desire to reach people and a compulsion to go as leftfield as they saw fit.

"We just did it," says Lee. "We cut the music on and cut loose. I don't sit around and write. I do it by listening, get a feeling, play the music, and the lyrics and stuff just come out of me."

The approach proved adaptable to interpreting other artists' material. While recording a cover of Whitney Houston's pop ballad "Saving All My Love For You," Lee played Whitney's version in his headphones as he laid down his own vocals – partially following the lyrics, partially using them as a departure point. The end result is barely recognizable compared with the original, Lee and Isaac having switched up the time signature and reinvented the melody along the way towards morphing a slick mainstream radio standard into something that sounds solely their own.

"I really used that song to get me started," says Lee. "Then I said, well I need something else, something is missing. Something just came over me. That's when I came up with 'Is It What You Want.'"

The song would become the centerpiece of Lee and Isaac's repertoire. Pushed along by a percolating metronomic Rhythm King style beat somewhere between a military march and a samba, "Is It What You Want" finds Lee pleading the sincerity of his commitment to a potential love interest embellished by vocal tics and hiccups subtlely reminiscent of his childhood hero MJ. Absent chord changes, only synth riffs gliding in and out like apparitions, the song achieves a lingering lo-fi power that leaves you feeling like it's still playing, somewhere, even after the fade out.

"I don't know, it's like a real spiritual song," Lee reflects. "But it's not just spiritual. To me the more I listen to it it's like about everything that you do in your everyday life, period. Is it what you want? Do you want a car or you don't want a car? Do you want Jesus or do you want the Devil? It's basically asking you the question. Can't nobody answer the question but you yourself."

In 1989 Lee won a lawsuit stemming from injuries sustained from a fight he'd gotten into. He took part of the settlement money and with Isaac pressed up "Saving All My Love For You" b/w "Is It What You Want" as a 45 single. Isaac christened the label One Chance Records. "Because that's all we wanted," he says with a laugh, "one chance."

Isaac sent the record out to radio stations and major labels, hoping for it to make enough noise to get picked up nationally. But the response he and Lee were hoping for never materialized. According to Isaac the closest the single got to getting played on the radio is when a disk jock from a local station made a highly unusual announcement on air: "The dude said on the radio, 107.5 – 'We are not gonna play 'Is It What You Want.' We cracked up! Wow, that's deep.

"It was a whole racist thing that was going on," he reflects. "So we just looked over and kept on going. That was it. That was about the way it goes… If you were Black and you were living in Nashville and stuff, that's the way you got treated." Isaac already knew as much from all the times he'd brought he and Lee's tapes (even their cache of country music tunes) over to Music Row to try to drum up interest to no avail.

"Isaac, he really worked his ass off," says Lee. "He probably been to every record place down on Music Row." Nashville's famed recording and music business corridor wasn't but a few blocks from where Lee grew up. Close enough, he remembers, for him to ride his bike along its back alleys and stumble upon the occasional random treasure, like a discarded box of harmonicas. Getting in through the front door, however, still felt a world away.

"I just don't think at the time our music fell into a category for them," he concedes. "It was before its time."

=

Lee stopped making music some time in the latter part of the '90s, around the time his mom passed away and life became increasingly tough to manage. "When my mother died I had a nervous breakdown," he says, "So I shut down for a long time. I was in such a sadness frame of mind. That's why nobody seen me. I had just disappeared off the map." He fell out of touch with Isaac, and in an indication of just how bad things had gotten for him, lost track of all the recordings they'd made together. Music became a distant memory.

Fortunately, Isaac kept the faith. In a self-published collection of his poetry – paeans to some of his favorite entertainment and public figures entitled Friends and Dick Clark – he'd written that he believed "music has a life of its own." But his prescience and presence of mind were truly manifested in the fact that he kept an archive of he and Lee's work. As perfectly imperfect as "Is It What You Want" now sounds in a post-Personal Space world, Lee and Isaac's lone official release was in fact just a taste. The bulk of the Is It What You Want album is culled from the pair's essentially unheard home recordings – complete songs, half-realized experiments, Isaac's blue monologues and pronouncements et al – compiled, mixed and programmed in the loose and impulsive creative spirit of their regular get-togethers from decades ago. The rest of us, it seems, may have finally caught up to them.

On the prospect of at long last reaching a wider audience, Isaac says simply, "I been trying for a long time, it feels good." Ever the survivor, he adds, "The only way I know how to make it to the top is to keep climbing. If one leg break on the ladder, hey, you gotta fix it and keep on going… That's where I be at. I'll kill death to make it out there."

For Lee it all feels akin to a personal resurrection: "It's like I was in a tomb and the tomb was opened and I'm back… Man, it feels so great. I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin." Success at this stage of his life, he realizes, probably means something different than what it did back when he was singing and dancing in Isaac's front yard. "What I really mean by 'making it,'" he explains isn't just the music being heard but, "the story being told."

Occasionally Lee will pull up "Is It What You Want" on YouTube on his phone, put on his headphones, and listen. He remembers the first time he heard his recorded voice. How surreal it was, how he thought to himself, "Is that really me?" What would he say to that younger version of himself now?

"I would probably tell myself, hang in there, don't give up. Keep striving for the goal. And everything will work out."

Despite what's printed on the record label, sometimes you do get more than one chance.