Suche:trap them

Following much love for his EPs, remixes and club sets, the virtuosic DJ/producer Simo Cell’s debut album 'Cuspide des Sirènes' doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it takes things to a whole new level.

With a fantastical menagerie of anthropomorphism, sounds create characters and tools; the mermaid-like Sirens, the mind controlling Octopus and the Magic Conch Shell:

“Have you heard of the legend of 'Cuspide des Sirènes'? This is not a simple tale, but an incredible tapestry woven over many years and through countless wondrous adventures. I will recount the legend as it was recorded in the ancient scrolls.

The album’s story explores the themes of magic, enchantment, charm, and allure, but also personal fears. The protagonist (me) embarks on a quest to find the hidden lake and confront his own demons, in order to understand and master his own power.

The protagonist is armed with a powerful conch shell. As he embarks on his journey, he will encounter Sirens who will teach him various chants. These melodies hold unique powers and grant the main character the strength to confront and overcome any danger that may arise.” Simo Cell

Musically, the LP is a continuation of Simo’s journey that began with the ‘YES.DJ’ EP, with a synthesized/modernized take on noughties hip hop, bass music, trap, ghetto house and ghetto tech – but here he broadens the scope, massively.

Exploring new pathways through magical landscapes, via infused melodies, emo and pop, the sensations are bright and addictive, like a sugar and endorphin cocktail. There’s a screen sheen and video game quality too, sounding like the high-octane score to an action flick from the year 3000, with unimaginably wild SFX.

'Cuspide des Sirènes' is the kind of record to stop someone in their tracks, to ask “what IS this?”, provoking bass face, perplexion, fascination and manic glee, all at once. Not so much organised chaos as intricately-crafted-borderline-unhingement, the album is slightly bonkers, in a very good way. There’s a boundless sense of childlike, unencumbered imagination at play, and an abundance of fun, but there are moments of serious-deep-beat-science for the heads, and introspective passages too.

There’s a lot going on, with detail, layers, flourishes, arrangement, melodies and myriad fresh sounds – but it’s never too much; just a really engrossing listen – the kind that that ruins ones appetite for prosaic, vanilla dance music, rendering such 2D pursuits boring and obsolete.

Ideally, the album is meant to be experienced as a seamless narrative from start to finish, so leave any inhibitions or preconceptions at the door, and let the pied piper of electronic futurism lead you way down the rabbit hole.

As one of Britain's finest songsmiths of the 1960s and 1970s, Peter's voice continues to convey magic and emotion with a lustre of lysergic lyrical lacquer.

His brilliant 60's group Kaleidoscope were one of the great psychedelic groups to emerge from the U.K. during those heady days.

With infectious pop tunes laced with folk- rock jingle- jangle goodness and anapaestic lyrics that set them apart from many of their contemporaries, Kaleidoscope were vital as was too their more progressive folk early '70s incarnation as Fairfield Parlour. The band has often been spoken about with the same reverence reserved for Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett era, despite their lack of mainstream success.

This is a 50-50 collaboration with Mark Mortimer, formerly of DC Fontana and The Sorrows, who has always been a fan of Peter's work. Chelsea is more sonic expressionism from the two musicians; the songs are "psychedelic" in a sense without ever falling into the trap of being shoddy xeroxes of past glories. As Spill Magazine put it:"This is not a retro or throwback album. This is an album that may be ahead of its time." This is modern, forward-looking music that longtime Kaleidoscope fans will enjoy.

The album is produced by Julian Cope producer Donald Ross Skinner in London and Rick Reil in New York.

Belgium based band formed by BEAR & Cobra The Impaler guitarist James Falck, alongside his Set Things Right bandmate Kristof Du Jardin, with Strains drummer Simon Janssen & bassist Lieven Casters.

Integrity is the word of choice when describing this new project. Initially created by the former Set Things Right guitarist alongside fellow STR bandmate and current BEAR & Cobra The Impaler guitarist James Falck, the pair set out to create music close to their hearts, with the intention of spilling them in the process. Something that has proven both cathartic and painful.

Digging up certain memories and emotions that, in some cases, would normally be better off buried, resulted in the pair spending a number of years writing an exuberant amount of music together. Their close and deep friendship, combined with their previous work together in their previous band, provided their work ethic with a strong foundation for the music they had dreamed of making ever since meeting, 10 years ago.

The line-up was subsequently completed by Strains drummer Simon Janssen & bassist Lieven Casters, who bring their own influences and tastes to the table to create something intrinsically unique. This can be seen clearly, not only from a musical perspective, but also visually and aesthetically. Together they form the musical collective now known as MANKIND. An expression of catharsis, a light in the tunnel, a way out of the darkness through confrontation.

Indonesian trio Grrrl Gang builds on their considerable worldwide buzz with Spunky!, their full-length debut album. Released on 22 September 2023 by Green Island Music in partnership with exclusive licensees Kill Rock Stars (United States), Trapped Animal Records (United Kingdom) and Big Romantic Records (Japan and Taiwan), the album is preceded by its title track and first single dropped on May 30, featured from the same title of the album, 'Spunky!' Spunky! arrives following some major life changes for Angeeta Sentana (vocals, guitar), Akbar Rumandung (bass, vocals), and Edo Alventa (guitar, vocals), including a switch in locale from Yogyakarta, the city where they formed the band while still in college. “This is Grrrl Gang’s first release after we graduated and got day jobs that made us have to move to Jakarta, which is undeniably 180 degrees compared to Jogja,” says Rumandung. “But moving to Jakarta enabled us to work with Lafa on Spunky! from start to finish.” The song itself essentially describes Sentana's experience during a manic episode. “I feel like I’m on top of the world, untouchable. I do things without thinking, always chasing after that feeling of instant gratification. I feel extra confident in myself to a point of grandiose thinking and that I could do anything,” Sentana explains. That would be Lafa Pratomo, the in-demand producer brought in to help shape the ten tracks that make up Spunky! With a resume that includes the likes of the chanteuse Danilla and legendary singer-songwriter Iwan Fals, Pratomo might not seem the obvious choice to take the Grrrl Gang producer’s chair. But according to Rumandung, “In terms of production, this was something new for us by working with someone outside of Grrrl Gang’s comfort zone.” Indeed, Pratomo considerably beefs up Grrrl Gang’s sound particularly Alventa’s guitar tones, Rumandung’s rumbling bass, and touring drummer Muhammad Faiz Abdurrahman’s muscular beats while preserving the band’s signature raucous energy, catchy melodies, and Sentana’s attitude-filled, equal-parts-honey-and-vinegar vocals. The music video for Spunky! premieres on the Grrrl Gang YouTube channel on the same day as the release of the song. The video, directed by Bathroom Girls, is part of a continuous movie, with Spunky! being the second chapter. It tells the story of an introverted girl who goes to a house party to validate herself among her peers. Despite facing challenges to her self-esteem, she manages to overcome her discomfort to survive the night. During the party, she watches Grrrl Gang perform Spunky! and is mesmerized by the confident performance of Angee, the lead singer. The girl imagines herself as Angee, a confident and cool person that she will never be. Hailing from the cultural city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Grrrl Gang is a rising force in the independent music scene with their infectious melodies, anthemic songs, and electrifying live performances. The power trio, composed of Angee Sentana on guitar and vocals, Akbar Rumandung on bass, and Edo Alventa on guitar, has been making waves in the Southeast Asian music scene since their formation in 2016. Grrrl Gang's music is a celebration of their collective roots and a testament to the power of pop music to connect people across cultures and borders. Their lyrics touch on themes such as feminism, mental health, and relationships with a raw honesty that speaks to a generation of young listeners. With their infectious energy, socially conscious lyrics, and unique sound, Grrrl Gang is poised to take the global music scene by storm and become a voice for a new generation

Revealed a few seasons ago thanks to the abrasive potential of their riffs, the French duo Bandit Bandit consisting of Maëva & Hugo imposes its musical genre, as well as an insolent ease to handle the French language, which one can hear in their amazing first album, 11:11.

In 2019 came the first show, the first music video, the first studio session. The name "Bandit Bandit" was born during a photo shoot with a friend, in a desert landscape, wearing scarves, boots and pistols. As for the repetition of Bandit, it is to better underline the duality of the project which, very quickly, found its own public, thanks to tracks as striking as "Maux", the first french-written one, and an imagination which incites the press to nickname them the Bonnie & Clyde of rock.

After two electrifying EPs, "Bandit Bandi"t and "Tachycardie", the duet needed to "explore further than the rock-genre itself" on a 11:11 produced by Azzedine Djelil (Rita Mitsouko, Catherine Ringer, Minuit, Lulu Van Trapp...). This first album mixes music genres, investigates pop music with all its amplitude, as a guiding thread between raw rock and the more sophisticated alternative style. Until now self-centered and cathartic, the texts of Bandit Bandit remain intimate on 11:11 while proving to be political, freed from prudishness, playing with words. Their unrestrained music resonates loudly throughout this album with a devouring desire as insatiable as contagious.
"11:11", frist album. Includes "Toxique Exit", "Si j' avais su " & " La marée ". Available on Cd & Vinyl.

Read any article or comment thread about the Seattle noise-rock outfit GREAT FALLS and you're likely to see descriptors like cathartic, heavy, crushing, and unhinged. Maybe even psychotic. And sure, those are all apt: For over a decade, vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling (who also played together in the early-2000s noisecore band PLAYING ENEMY and the experimental duo HEMINGWAY) have honed their sludgy, overwhelmingly intense brand of heaviness, punctuated by delectably discordant riffs, terrifyingly low, thwacking bass lines, and mesmerizingly tight percussion. In the live setting, too, they’re notorious for a stage presence that is so aggressively confrontational and menacing that Mehling once broke his own arm mid-set.

But the most striking aspect of GREAT FALLS, setting them apart from the murky sea of sludge metal and AmRep-inspired noise-rock bands, is their ability to paint a deeply, utterly human story through an all-out assault on the senses: an art the band has perfected on their fourth full-length album OBJECTS WITHOUT PAIN, out September 15 via NEUROT RECORDINGS.

The album is not only their NEUROT debut, but also the first LP featuring drummer Nickolis Parks (GAYTHEIST, BASTARD FEAST), who joined the band prior to the release of their exhilarating, cacophonous 2023 EP,FUNNY WHAT SURVIVES.

OBJECTS WITHOUT PAIN takes us on a bleak, purgative journey through a separation–a snapshot of the turmoil and indecision that occurs after the initial realization of someone's misery, and before the ultimate decision to end a decades-long partnership. From the foreboding intro riffs of “DRAGGED HOME ALIVE” to the end of the 13-minute closer “THROWN AGAINST THE WAVES,” its eight tracks explore the thoughts that come up when a person is staring down the barrel of blowing up their life: How did this happen? Is it too late for a new life? Will the kid be OK? What will make me happier: familiar torment or unknown freedom?

For over two decades Jonathan Katsav has used his Crave project to fray rap at its fringes, using Memphis and Houston's low-and-slow legacy to inform sounds that have as much in common with Merzbow as they do Tommy Wright III. Working under a variety of different monikers such as Lieu Noir, Sniper Bait and Soul Collector, the French producer is most prolific as Crave, and "Inner War Delirium" is a substantial and broadly cinematic addition to his canon. Katsav approaches each track as if it's a scene from a movie, using real life experiences to explore separate characters and contrasting emotions. Using different narrators and disparate vocal styles, he navigates grim, blown-out landscapes, driving neon drenched trap synths and horror choirs against overdriven kicks and waterlogged industrial atmospheres. Mangled field recordings, squealing static and gurgling synthesized bass opens 'PHYLLIS', goading the cautious with serrated, carnival synths and cacophonous vocals that sway lugubriously between rap and grindcore. The relationship between dark and light, death and rebirth, is at the heart of "Inner War Delirium", rippling through every track's oozing amalgamation of inebriated hip-hop and buzzsaw noise. Katsav's sounds are an attempt to subject us to the physicality of his own life's puzzle, and he cuts them into vignettes like a director. On the album's final track, listeners are swiped from in front of the speakers and bundled into the trunk of a car, rain rattling on the metal and the album playing on in the distance. It's a way for the producer to turn the camera back on the audience and ask them to consider their own complicated reality - it's Crave's story, but everyone's a part of it.

Germany's DJ bwin returns to First Second Label with a sub heavy offering of experimentational dubstep, bass, techno and trap for the dark smoke filled room in your brain. Moritz Paul aka Leibniz and Alex Hoppe aka CIO known for their label Hundert (alongside Felix Paul) has seen them pushing the boundaries of these sounds and Cell Phone pushes their sound even further with 3 tracks that would give any system a heavy workout.

Accompanied by a blissed out vibration filled remix from Berlin residing Cork born power house ELLLL this puts the icing on the cake for this already wobble heavy 12". The artwork, a combination of photography, paint and textiles is an extract from a cloth print by Irish artist and designer Shauna McGowan.

'We're All Improvisers Now' is the debut solo album by New York/
Montreal-based performer Tommy Crane, a tranquil, introspective journey through boundary-traversing ambient jazz, buoyed by the creative elan of an artist in full experimentation mode.

Using sensory percussion and a battery of synthesisers, Crane creates a sequence of lucid sonic environments, where the real and synthetic meet, overlap and reappear disguised and opaque.The title's double meaning is immediately apparent; the album is an uncommon take on improvising from a performer incorporating ambient sensibilities and the title also accurately describes the situation many artists found themselves in amidst the pandemic. For Crane, the
pandemic provided a rare gift of time that allowed him to explore his love for electronic and analogue production.

"I don't think I will ever make a record like this again - this was one big
experiment," he says of a project with DIY trappings. After eventually returning from Italy where he was teaching drums and improv classes as Siena Jazz Institute, Crane settled in Montreal with his Canadian partner. At the beginning of the lockdown, he created a spaceship- like rig in his spare room comprised of assorted synths and 'sensory' percussion (which assigns new sounds to drums).

The album features welcome contributions from colleagues phoned in from afar, including saxophonists Logan Richardson and Charlotte Greve, guitarist Simon Angell and bassist Jordan Brooks.

First appearing on TV screens in September 1968, Joe 90 was a unique nine year old boy with the ability to absorb the brain patterns of top experts

enabling him to become the most special agent of W.I.N. (World Intelligence Network).

Whilst there are arguably better-known scores amongst Barry Gray's sublime catalogue of work with the Andersons, the composer's work for Joe 90 is in many ways

the most consistent and inventive selection he ever wrote. Developing a theme for the new series was always the musician's starting point, and for Joe 90, the pop charts breezed into Gray's studio,

with an opening tune featuring a genuine groove. Mixing Gray's inventive electronics with 60s "surf rock" guitars was an inspired decision.

It is no wonder that this piece has gone on to enjoy a second life as a Northern Soul disco floor-filler.

For episodic incidentals, Gray was freed from the detached unearthly premise of Captain Scarlet and able to bring back a playful sensibility

and a more mature musical palette which are amply illustrated in this 24 track collection.

The electric eels were the first punk band, full stop. They may not have “started” the genre, but they were the first to tick all the boxes. The eels rejected every 1970s rock convention—professionalism, virtuosity, subject matter, image. Dave E.’s caustic vocals, complete with an aggressive lisp and a head full of snot, would become de rigeur a few years after the group disbanded. Meanwhile, the songs’ focus on car crashes, suicide, neuroses, and generally hating people were as far out of the mainstream as possible. The two eels tracks that do approach the subject of romance couch it in terms of not really caring that much about it (“Jaguar Ride”) or placing it in the context of a grisly murder (“Silver Daggers”). Also consider John Morton’s signature guitar sound, a nails-on-chalkboard tone with brutally free soloing inspired more by Albert Ayler than the blues or aspirations to technical facility. Ditto Dave E.’s clarinet playing and affection for lawnmowers and vacuums during live performance. They were notoriously violent not only among themselves, but towards audiences, police, and anyone unfortunate enough to be around them when things went south. Then of course there are the leather jackets, the clothing festooned with rat traps or safety pins. And no bass player, why bother. There is simply no other “proto” band to have had all these pieces in place circa 1973- 1975. Yet it is a mistake to consider the eels exclusively in such a context. Yes, the eels could and did shock anyone who encountered them, but they also had great songs. While both Dave and John were visionary writers, they also had rhythm guitarist Brian McMahon, a melody and riff machine who wrote many of the band’s signature songs. And they were no one-trick pony. Although much of the band’s material is appropriately high-energy, there is also the downer eels—morbid, harmonically risky, and in full existential crisis. Although it’s not a focus of this compilation, the eels also had a penchant for completely free improvisation. Over the last forty plus years, there have been several electric eels compilations. Spin Age Blasters is quite simply the best one ever assembled, every single key track is here in its best version, properly mastered by John Golden, and sequenced with an eye towards both flow between tracks as well as individation between sides. A true monster of an album.

Ein charmanter Dieb und eine Gruppe ungleicher Abenteurer unternehmen einen epischen Raubüberfall, um ein verlorenes Relikt zu bergen.

Mit ”Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves” kommt die vielschichtige Welt des legendären Rollenspiels in einem unterhaltsamen und actiongeladenen Abenteuer auf die große Leinwand. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head und Hugh Grant spielen die Hauptrollen in diesem epischen Fantasyfilm, der auf dem kultigen Hasbro-Tischspiel Dungeons & Dragons basiert.

Der Soundtrack stammt aus der Feder des Grammy und Emmy Gewinners Lorne Balfe, der auch die Musik von Blockbustern wie Mission Impossible Fallout oder preisgekrönten Serien wie The Crown geschrieben hat. Mit rasanten Orchesterarrangements und starken Melodien erweckt der schottische Komponist diesen Film zum Leben.

Über die Musik selbst sagt Balfe: ”Ich bin so glücklich, der Komponist für ’Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves’ zu sein. Ich habe mit diesem Spiel begonnen, als ich 7 Jahre alt war, und ich bin begeistert, dass eine neue Generation das Spiel entdeckt, mit dem ich aufgewachsen bin. Die Musik ist voll von zarten, mystischen, keltischen Reisen, gemischt mit einem großen, üppigen Kino Orchester. Mit diesem Werk konnte ich meine schottischen Wurzeln richtig ausleben!”

Ein charmanter Dieb und eine Gruppe ungleicher Abenteurer unternehmen einen epischen Raubüberfall, um ein verlorenes Relikt zu bergen.

Mit ”Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves” kommt die vielschichtige Welt des legendären Rollenspiels in einem unterhaltsamen und actiongeladenen Abenteuer auf die große Leinwand. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head und Hugh Grant spielen die Hauptrollen in diesem epischen Fantasyfilm, der auf dem kultigen Hasbro-Tischspiel Dungeons & Dragons basiert.

Der Soundtrack stammt aus der Feder des Grammy und Emmy Gewinners Lorne Balfe, der auch die Musik von Blockbustern wie Mission Impossible Fallout oder preisgekrönten Serien wie The Crown geschrieben hat. Mit rasanten Orchesterarrangements und starken Melodien erweckt der schottische Komponist diesen Film zum Leben.

Über die Musik selbst sagt Balfe: ”Ich bin so glücklich, der Komponist für ’Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves’ zu sein. Ich habe mit diesem Spiel begonnen, als ich 7 Jahre alt war, und ich bin begeistert, dass eine neue Generation das Spiel entdeckt, mit dem ich aufgewachsen bin. Die Musik ist voll von zarten, mystischen, keltischen Reisen, gemischt mit einem großen, üppigen Kino Orchester. Mit diesem Werk konnte ich meine schottischen Wurzeln richtig ausleben!”

The follow up to the band’s celebrated 2020 release Fish Pond Fish and Darlingside’s fourth LP marks a subtle but remarkable departure for the Boston-based quartet NPR once described as “exquisitely arranged, literary minded, baroque folk- pop.” While the album retains much of the lushness and sophistication of Extralife (2018) and Fish Pond Fish, the band’s latest work highlights the individuality of the four songwriters in a way that adds a fitting element of reinvention to an album that captures brilliantly the quality of the moment in which it was made. Grappling with change both personal and universal, with quandaries domestic and existential, Everything Is Alive is an album about loss and the struggle for a semblance of redemption; themes of grief, distance and hope permeate an album filled with vivid imagery and lyrical creativity. Comprised of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner and David Senft, four likeminded multi-instrumentalists who first met at Williams College in 2009, Darlingside’s career has been defined by the elegance of their compositions and the remarkable unity of their four voices. Their talent for harmony and melodic world-building is part of what garnered praise from outlets like NPR, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and what has created demand worldwide for their extraordinary live performances. Becoming beautifully unindividualized has, in other words, worked very well for Darlingside in the past. With a vigor and discipline more common to graduate-level writing workshops than to indie rock, Darlingside have, over the years, experimented with all manners of idiosyncratic methods for elevating and upholding a truly democratic process of songwriting—processes that include multiple rounds of group writing and recording exercises—all with the aim of escaping the trap that bands with multiple songwriters often fall into: the ruse of ego-driven infighting and artistic incoherence. Everything Is Alive is Darlingside taking a risk. Nudged by the limitations created by pandemic isolation, as well as through other more voluntary catalysts, the album, which was produced and recorded by the band and mixed by Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, Iron and Wine), foregrounds in a sustained and heretofore untried way the individual voices of each member.

END REIGN makes their Relapse Records debut with their explosive album, The Way Of All Flesh Is Decay. Masterminded by underground music fixture Domenic Romeo (Integrity/Pulling Teeth/A389 Recordings) and featuring an all-star cast of musicians and contributors, END REIGN fuses apocalyptic hardcore with vicious metal in a deadly collision of the classic and the modern. Taking musical inspiration from ’80s linchpins Amebix, Bathory, Slayer and Cro-Mags, END REIGN features the talents of Mike Score of New York metalcore kings All Out War, Adam Jarvis of grind titans Pig Destroyer and Misery Index, the former Bloodlet bassist Arthur Legere and Exhumed/Noisem shredder Sebastian Phillips. Score’s lyrics explore the psychological torment of being trapped between opposing realities. “Most of the album, especially songs like ‘The Hunger’ and ‘Death Comes Crawling,’ deal with being caught between two worlds—the living and the dead, heaven and hell, what was and what is to come,” the vocalist explains. Recorded over a year at Landmine Studios with Len Carmichael at the helm, END REIGN’s full-length debut features vocal cameos from Romeo’s longtime collaborator and Integrity bandmate Dwid Hellion, Full Of Hell’s Dylan Walker and—incredibly—Ed Ka-Spel from avant-rock fabulons The Legendary Pink Dots. The result is one of 2023's most aggressive and enthralling albums. “This album is like riding a rollercoaster in a theme park based on all the extreme music I’ve enjoyed throughout my life,” Romeo says. “I hope that any fans of our musical family tree will enjoy the ride as much as we did.”

On their sophomore effort Tusky, surrealist duet Robbie & Mona ascend beyond the lo-fi scrawlings of their debut album to something altogether more grandiose. Between the lights down drama of sprawling opener ‘Sensation’, to the ‘roll credits’ coda of closer ‘Always Gonna Be A Dead Man’, Tusky exists as a glitzy, lucid journey playing out before the listener.
While debut album EW captured William Carkeet and Ellie Gray as they were finding their feet with one another, creating Tusky was a wholly symbiotic process from day one. “We got better at knowing what each other wanted,” William offers. “This was the album that we were trying to make from the beginning.”

Simultaneously evoking multiple eras of music, the album drifts through worlds of synth pop, jazz, trap, drill, ballroom waltz and leftfield electronica, with the scatterbrain sound palette melded by a peppering of instrumental motifs and William’s addiction to sampling sounds across multiple tracks. “I wanted there to be this weird dimensional thing going on,” William explains, “where songs from the album are playing in multiple places.”

The record sees an expansive cast of musicians assembled, with a much heavier focus on live instrumentation than previous outings. Alongside the expected fare of crackly synths, samplers and drum machines, Tusky gets its glossy sheen from a rich tapestry of jazz drums, double bass, grand piano and saxophone.

Most of the tracks are laden with improvised saxophone from Campbell Baum (Sorry, Broadside Hacks) and Ben Vince (Housewives, Joy Orbison), much of which was scrambled by William in post-production, lifting scraps from one song and layering them atop an entirely different track. Elsewhere, session musicians were cherry picked, including Bingo Fury, his drummer Henry Terrett, and a string ensemble led by Caelia Lunniss and Jo Silverston (Spindle Ensemble).

Most surprising is a rap feature from Monika (of South-East London collective Nukuluk), who brings album centrepiece ‘Mildred’ to new heights with a fiery verse on pain. Aside from being the most unlikely addendum to a sombre piano ballad, it demonstrates Robbie & Mona’s natural state of playfulness, forever following emotions and sensuality over any notion of traditional compositional boundaries.
Many of Tusky's tracks owe their inception to cinema, be it the soundtrack to Betty Blue, the glowing films of Wim Wenders, or the surprising parallels between La Belle Et La Bete and Bad Boys. Equally, much of Robbie & Mona's new-found sense of tension and spectacle comes from William’s recent work soundtracking independent filmmakers, while Ellie gave greater priority to threading a narrative through her stream of consciousness writing style.

In all its majesty, Tusky celebrates creativity with creation. “If you begin to see fiction as real, you can reincarnate and become different things. You can grow,” Ellie implores. “Nothing stays the same. You can shed old characters in yourself. There’s great joy in that.”

'BATSUMI’s 1974 classic. Repressed at Pallas in Germany on 180g black vinyl. Cover printed on reverse board and includes printed inner sleeve with liner notes from Francis Gooding. Initial copies shipped with exclusive 30cm x 30cm print of Batsumi performing in 1974.

Batsumi is a masterpiece of spiritualised afro-jazz, and a prodigious singularity in the South African jazz canon. There is nothing else on record from the period that has the deep, resonant urgency of the Batsumi sound, a reverb-drenched, formidably focused pulse, underpinned by the tight-locked interplay of traditional and trap drums, and pushed on by the throb of Zulu Bidi’s mesmeric bass figures. The warm notes of Johnny Mothopeng’s guitar complete a soundscape that is at once closely packed with sonic texture and simultaneously vibrating with open space, and in whose shimmer and haze Themba Koyana and Tom Masemola soar. A sonorous echo emanating from an ancient well, reverberant with jazz ghosts and warmed by the heat of soul and pop, Batsumi is nothing short of revelatory.

Many groups from this period did not issue recordings at all, and Batsumi are unusual in even having left an official recorded legacy. Out of print since the 1970s, and never issued outside of South African in its entirety, Batsumi is a landmark South African jazz recording, and a key musical document of its time.'

This King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard ‘Live In Austin’ bootleg album is comprised of two performances recorded at the 2014 and 2016 LEVITATION festivals in Austin, Texas. Capturing a historic moment for King Gizz, the 2014 set was the band’s first-ever North American show and includes raw early versions of fan favourites from the ‘I’m In Your Mind Fuzz’, ‘Oddments’ and ‘Float Along - Fill Your Lungs’ LPs.

The 2016 show on discs 2 and 3 captures their return to Austin two years later hot off the heels of the release of ‘Nonagon Infinity’, and also sees them storm through Gizz bangers from ‘Paper Mache Dream Balloon’, ‘Quarters’ and ‘12 Bar Bruise’. This bootleg is remastered exclusively for Fuzz Club and arrives as a triple LP box set with new and exclusive artwork by Elzo Durt. Each box-set also includes a 62cm x 62cm poster

Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour printed inner sleeve exclusive to this edition.

In 2009 the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP sold out within two weeks, receiving a glowing full-page review in The Wire Magazine by the late Mark Fisher (later reprinted in his book Ghosts Of My Life), was selected for Boomkat's Top 10 releases of the year (alongside debut albums by Leyland Kirby, Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never) and was greeted with universal praise in the underground blog network as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork.

The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era.

From the original Type one-sheet:
"The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of "songs" for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking 10-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."

Mark Fisher in The Wire:
"But what if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously - what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It’s a question that connects fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I’m reminded of a filmic space in which magic and mechanism meet: JF Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the LP are crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic designer and toymaker brought to his miniature automata, with their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter’s musical pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials - record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic instruments. ….. JF Sebastian's apartment was itself an update of older spaces in which science and sorcery co-existed: the workshops of ETA Hoffmann's inventor-magicians, or of Pinocchio's creator, Geppetto. I think, too, of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's astonishing 1886 tale The Future Eve in which Edison, using the expertise he has recently acquired from inventing the phonograph, sets himself the task of constructing an artificial woman. But if there are songs here, they are sung by the gramophone and other recording and playback machines. Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has snuck into a room and recorded the objects as they played (to) themselves. Rather than simply automating his music, as in the case of Pierre Bastien and his mechanical machines, Richter makes us feel that he has merely recorded the unlife of objects. ….. Indeed, the impression of things winding down is persistent on Alphabet 1968. Entropy has not been excluded from Richter's enchanted soundworld. It feels as if the magic is always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into the inanimate again at any moment."

From Alehouse to Playhouse Bjarte Eike and his barnstorming Barokksolistene capture the vital spark of Restoration London’s entertainment scene with a captivating new recording for Rubicon Classics! The Playhouse Sessions will be released on 23 September 2022 to coincide with Barokksolistene’s concert double-bill at London’s Southbank Centre.

‘A smattering of Purcell, dances from Playford’s Dancing Master, shanties, reels and ballads succumb to a nine-piece ensemble drawing on Baroque, jazz and folk styles for a no holds barred hooley of riotous improvisatory give and take,’ (BBC Music Magazine review of The Alehouse Sessions, August 2019)

London’s musicians, pushed in the 1650s, to the margins of society by order of Oliver Cromwell, found room for new forms of entertainment in city-centre taverns and alehouses. They remained there long after the restoration of the monarchy, performing sets of dances, theatre songs and bawdy ballads to audiences glad to be free from Puritan constraints on pleasure.

Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike and his Barokksolistene have restored the spirit and substance of those long-forgotten performances with their Alehouse Sessions, hailed by The Times as ‘irresistible’ and ‘fabulously unrestrained’ by The Guardian. Five years ago the Norwegian violinist and his band scored a best-selling album with The Alehouse Sessions on Rubicon Classics. They return to the label with another compelling collection of music and words of the kind on offer more than three centuries ago at Henry Purcell’s favourite Westminster watering holes. The Playhouse Sessions, set for release on Rubicon Classics on 23 September 2022, reflects the uplifting energy and engaging emotional contrasts of Barokksolistene’s Alehouse performances.

“The album contains a sort of inner narrative that runs through the recording,” says Bjarte Eike. “It has become like a play in its own right, with each track being a small tale within a larger story.” The recording’s tracklist includes Eike’s beguiling arrangements of music from Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen and his own original compositions on words from the play on which it is based, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; popular songs and ballads such as ‘The Irish Washerwoman’, ‘I often for my Jenny strove’ and ‘The Three Ravens’; tunes from Purcell’s welcome odes and stage shows, Come ye sons of art and Dido and Aeneas among them; the ‘Willow Song’ from Shakespeare’s Othello; Eike’s own voice in Puck’s monologue from Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and John Dowland’s sublime air ‘Can she excuse my wrongs’.

London’s theatres were closed at the start of the English Civil War in 1642 and remained shut until the Restoration. Alehouses offered redundant musicians, actors and dancers a place to scrape a precarious living and soon became their creative refuge. “Although a few surviving theatres reopened in 1660 with the return of Charles II, there was little money around to rebuild those that had been demolished,” observes Bjarte Eike. “And a generation of musicians had already found an audience in places like the Black Horse in Aldersgate Street. So popular were their alehouse sessions that Cromwell tried to abolish them! But they outlived him and became part of Restoration musical life.” The form of a Barokksolistene Alehouse, he adds, is like a creative room. “Within its framework I can frequently refurbish the show with new contents. The Playhouse project is likewise an extension of the ever-evolving Alehouse Sessions. Together they tell the story of music and theatre in London during Cromwell’s time and after the Restoration. Of course there’s an historical context to what we do. But there’s also the practical context – which is even more important to me – of connecting with a contemporary twenty-first century audience. An Alehouse / Playhouse performance is not something for the museum; it's about music made in the present moment, just as it was in the London alehouses of Purcell’s day -- with their playhouses annexed to the rear of the beer-drinking saloons. The encounter of musicians onstage and the audience in the hall is the real magic of it. We have to fuse the audience into the action of our performance!”

The Playhouse Sessions will be launched on Friday 23 September with a late-night concert at the Purcell Room and a post-concert Alehouse Session in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Soprano Mary Bevan is set to join Eike and his Alehouse Boys for the first half of their Southbank Centre double-bill, offering unique interpretations of songs from Purcell shows and other hits from the late seventeenth-century London stage. “The Southbank Centre is a direct descendant of concerts given in the 1650s in the alehouses of London,” notes Eike. “These alehouses after all staged some of the world’s first public concerts. Later, after the Restoration, it became common for promoters to advertise alehouse concerts in the press and offer subscription tickets. Purcell and his fellow musicians were thus just as at home performing there as they were in the chambers of the royal court or in London’s new theatres.”

Bjarte Eike launched his Alehouse Sessions in company with like-minded musicians 15 years ago. The ensemble comprises a core of regular performers, all of whom have committed to memory a huge setlist of up to four hours of music. Typically they meet a day or so before a concert tour to share a meal and make music together; then next day, re-grouping thirty minutes before the show, they discover Eike’s select-menu for the evening. “That ensures that every show is fresh,” he notes. “I make sure we never repeat the same programme twice. It’s therefore essential to work with people who share my outlook and dare to adventure. We’re into a high-risk sport, with lots of traps and places where the unexpected appears - for good or for ill. And so the audience knows we’re vulnerable. But our skill is seen in how we re-act on the hoof to the unpredictable. That’s authenticity and honesty - and above all it’s a performance that’s genuine.”

Armed with a classical training and a background in folk music and improvisation, Bjarte Eike was drawn naturally to Early Music in all its stylistic variety. “I never really felt at home with only one genre,” he recalls. “Early Music allowed me to study profound, complicated compositions, but performing it has also opened up the chance of rebellion and uproar! Early music offers wide, multi-faceted areas of musical exploration for me. You find, for instance, links to different types of music wherever you look in seventeenth-century English repertoire. And I am fascinated by all these connections. They offer a foundation for the Alehouse Sessions and for all Barokksolistene performance more generally. Every member of the group plays, sings, dances and improvises without limitation. We’re all interested in the many different fields of being a stage performer and pushing hard at the ‘normal’ boundaries of what it means to be a classical musician.”

Lewis Taylor's legendary magnum opus: The Lost Album. "Now you're talking. That's my favourite LT album. Unlike all of the others, there isn't anything about it that embarrasses me." Straight from the genius's mouth. What can we say about this? Well, it's the most requested record ever at Be With Towers. The Lost Album was the intended follow-up to his first album but Island rejected it for fear of "confusing" the marketplace and its conception of Lewis as a soul artist. Their loss. It's a breezy sunset masterpiece.

The genesis of this incredible record needs unpicking a bit. Lewis stopped promoting the first album after a year and went home to record a completely different record that was the most un-R&B album you could probably ever hear: "I pushed in such an extreme direction the other way with what eventually became The Lost Album. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived ‘trapped in R&B’ feeling I was going through at the time. Some people around me were in favour of it and others weren’t. In the end I think I lost confidence in it and did Lewis II instead." We did at least get Lewis II, which is a remarkable album, and he kept Island happy...for a bit. Not long after, Lewis was dropped. And what was to become The Lost Album could've been...er...lost. Forever.

Thankfully, however, Lewis and longtime partner Sabina Smyth revisited those scrapped demo tracks in 2003. They decided to re-arrange, re-record and then self-release them. So it was that the brand new version of The Lost Album finally dropped in late 2004. It's sheer perfection, and we don't say that lightly. The Lost Album was a fully 50/50 collaboration between Lewis and Smyth. As well as production, Sabina did a lot more writing on it, from the melody to "Listen Here" to the chord sequence for "Let's Hope Nobody Finds Us." Thankfully, Sabina is credited this time around.

No, it's not straight up "soul music" in the vein of his previous work. Yet, in its perfectly formed suite of one dozen songs, The Lost Album is dripping in soul. It's so warm, so effervescent and so alive with possibilities. It features deep, fresh imprints on well-loved, accessible sounds. It's a proper 70s style double album. Just one listen and the musical influences on The Lost Album are fairly self-explanatory, as Lewis recently told us, but it's always nice to hear that, in case we were in any doubt, he was definitely channeling Love, Yes, Brian Wilson, CSN, Laura Nyro and, of course, Todd Rundgren. The influences don't end there: "I’m particularly fond of my bass playing on that album, there’s a lot of Chris Squire going on which is cool."

Deep orchestral opener "Lost" is a sublime, harp-laced, string drenched gem, a cinematic, melancholic Axelrod-esque mini-epic that simply beguiles. Written by Smyth, it evokes Donny Hathaway's celestial "I Love The Lord, He Heard My Cry" from Extensions Of A Man. The only problem is the brief 90 seconds running time. It segues into the classic Brian Wilson-meets-power-pop-rock splendour of "Listen Here" which, with its outstanding extended harp-licked beatless intro, sounds like the younger cousin to Boston's "More Than A Feeling". We then drift into the ringing guitars of classic 70s rock anthem "Hide Your Heart Away". It's Lewis's personal favourite, "especially the multi-tracked guitar solo – I was listening to Boston at the time, which was fun." A-ha!

A new version of the heart-stopping, shoulda-been-a-massive-pop-hit "Send Me An Angel" opens Side B before the arrival of, in Lewis's completely correct words, "the clear standout, "Leader of the Band"; the perfect distillation of everything that album was trying to achieve." Soaring, piano-led Rundgren-esque power pop that makes the hairs on the back of your next stand on end. Truly, otherworldly. This is pure pop for now (and then) people. The simple jangly brilliance meets experimental prog-rock of "Yeah" sounds like simultaneously like prime CSNY and late 90s Radiohead (if they'd had a slightly more accessible bent and could write better tunes).

Oh, you wish The Beach Boys had continued writing amazing songs beyond Holland? Well, allow us to point you in the direction of the downlifting stunner "Please Help Me If You Can" and the warm textures and brilliant atmospherics of goosebump-inducer "Let’s Hope Nobody Finds Us". Words can't really describe the sheer beauty of these songs. So we'll stop trying. Just listen. Listen, listen, listen. Closing out this remarkable side of music, the accidentally Balearic "New Morning" should be blasting out at every sunrise set in Ibiza, this summer and forevermore.

The final side opens with the vaguely Beatlesey "Say I Love You". It's just classic, soaring pop-rock songwriting and should strictly be canonical. It's that good. The sassy, Stonesy swagger of "See My Way" injects enough rock'n'roll attitude to compensate for the rest of record's peace-loving, AOR sun-dappled vibe whilst album closer, "One More Mystery", emerging out of the rubble of the previous track, comes on initially like a Baroque-Pop George Harrison before piling crunching drums and screeching guitar solos atop the dreamy harmonies til close.

When asked what it means to have these records available on vinyl for the first time, Lewis is in no doubt: "It’s great and it’s really nice to be able to offer fans a different listening experience. There’s a whole other dimension with vinyl that taps into that whole nostalgia thing, well for me anyway. Something about the physical aspect of pulling it out of the sleeve and putting it on, it does tend to make you feel like you’re more engaged."

Lewis was adamant that he wanted all new artwork for The Lost Album vinyl sleeve and his brief was just the sort of classic tropical-beach-at-sunset you’d want to see on the front of a record that sounds like this. On the finished sleeve, the beach at sunset is just where we start out, before heading up through the painterly clouds and heading out into the stars. And yes, the lettering is a definite subtle nod to all those in-between-period Beach Boys bootlegs we all love. Simon Francis's sensitive mastering combines with Cicely Balston's precise cut for Alchemy at AIR Studios so the album sounds appropriately outstanding. The immaculate Record Industry double LP pressing will ensure this previously lost masterpiece stays forever found.

Repress!

Montreal’s eclectic producer CFCF (aka Mike Silver) follows 2019’s effusive corporate jungle opus Liquid Colours with a kaleidoscopic capital-E Electronica album that takes a range of styles from his earliest formative listening years (1997-2000) and throws them in a blender. Elements of jungle, house, UK garage, trance, pop and post-grunge are blended to form a glossy picture of restless youth in an
identity crisis: memoryland.

Inspired as much by Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins as the Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx; as much by films like Millennium Mambo, Demonlover, Morvern Callar, Safe and Perfect Blue as late 90’s Prada — CFCF jumps across genres as a means of portraying a breadth of overlapping milieus and identities in this hyperactive Y2K period-piece that both explores and criticizes our own nostalgic impulses. From the opening intro’s announcement of arrival to the final credits, it’s an album as film as RPG, with the listener as its protagonist.

Opener “welcome.WAV” functions as a start-up sound file for the journey ahead: from “Life is Perfecto”, a propulsive breakbeat-dreampop hybrid, to a grotesquely-remixed ultra-French-house version of previously released single “Self Service”, and the recursive, metaphysical garage of “After the After”. Two guest vocalists lend their talents: Montreal neo-shoegaze icons No Joy, fresh off their own genre-defying Y2K exploration Motherhood, laconically lists off advice for aspiring fashion ingenues with bite in the alt-rock-IDM “Model Castings”, while Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Bonito sweetly delivers the penultimate “Heaven”, grunge-pop paean to the myth of Icarus.

In CFCF’s words:
“I was feeling fatigued by an overabundance of ‘calming’, productivity-oriented music, and wanted to explore something angsty, messy, and dark, while also applying a pop sheen. I see a loose narrative across the album: your early 20’s, a new city, new people, new temptations and new traps. Losing your sense of self to the whims of your surroundings and trends in music and fashion; the wrong people, and trying to dig yourself out of that hole. There’s a hope of moving forward that glimmers in the last quarter of the album, but it’s out of reach and seems to come at a price. And then the looking back on it later with perspective; or the looking forward to it before with anticipation. As a kid I couldn’t wait to be in my 20’s; in my 30’s it’s bittersweet to look back. That’s the core of memoryland: the gulf between the fantasy, the reality, and the memory, and how we live inside each of those at different points.”

Ex Wiish is a fleeting dream. The new musical project of Ben Shirken, a sound artist and composer based in New York City.

Shirken is the founder of record label & performance series 29 Speedway which features improvisational electronic music, 4-point guerrilla sound installations, live multimedia performances and has hosted Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Poncili Creación, Debit, Pent, James K and various other New York-based artists. Shirken also produces for and plays modular synths in acclaimed free jazz group ‘Nu Jazz’ with Dan Orlowski of electronic hardcore staple Deli Girls.

Their debut record, “Shards of Axel'', is out on Incienso June 23, 2023. Born from a story-based video game composition; the listener finds themselves as the disoriented main player respawned into a harrowing, metallic landscape, wandering through cable ridden labyrinths, caught in progress traps as digital noises grind past submerged cityscapes.

For fans of Khruangbin, El Michels Affair, Tame Impala and Bonobo. “I spent a while thinking about the title for this album; it was quite hard to pin down the feeling I felt it represented. At a certain point I realised it was nostalgia, for everything; our life passed by, childhood, moments of happiness and sadness, where we grew up”. – Skinshape // Will Dorey aka Skinshape has proven himself time and again as a connoisseur for the cosmopolitan, across a prolific career expertly exploring understated sounds and theatrical textures. Taking his place alongside the likes of Khruangbin, Tame Impala, Bonobo and Madlib, Skinshape’s global kaleidoscopes are loaded with warmth and wisdom created on vintage analogue equipment applying a perfectionist’s touch. As a former member of indie band Palace, he has played everywhere from Glastonbury and BBC Maida Vale to headlining Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Conversely as a solo artist Skinshape has never played live preferring to record, releasing an album a year (two in 2020’s lockdown) and keeping away from the trappings of stardom.

“Come, Sweet Death” alternates between brutality and winding single string melodies that brings you back to the golden age of Swedish Death Metal! They say that the more things change the more they stay the same. If there’s one thing that has remained stable despite living in 2023 is that we love Swedish Death Metal. The style has become a favorite of ours over the past 35 years. Something about the guitar tone just makes you want to devour any release that can be described as “Inspired by early Entombed and Dismember”. The good thing is that there’s an incredible wealth of bands that draw from that well. The bad thing is that said wealth leads to a lot of bands becoming indistinguishable due to how same they are. Thankfully, Imperishable’s “Come, Sweet Death” manages to stand out from the pack, in no small part due to breaking away from the genre’s usual trappings. And in a way this is no surprise since the band members were or are involved in Vampire, Portrait, Nominon and Dr. Living Dead! As you might have already gathered, the band draws a lot from the Stockholm scene, more specifically Dismember, that is undeniable. What’s really interesting though is that they draw from their later, and more melodic influenced era as much as from the early days. Imperishable, like their peers effortlessly blends the aggressive buzzsaw riffing with leads brimming with melody, which most modern bands in the style avoid in favor of pure aggression. Said blend can be seen throughout their debut album, though it can be felt more on the longer tracks, like “Teeth of the Hydra” and “Fangs”, where the band has more room to develop their ideas and mix grinding Death Metal with NWOBHM-inspired leads and riffs. In short: Imperishable has great songs, great melodies, well-arranged structures and still is brutal, just like the great old bands were. And the production is spot on for this release. It is good to hear a band experiment beyond the confines of the original old school Swedish Death Metal sound. “Come, Sweet Death” is an extremely promising release, and a small breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale scene. Imperishable’s love for the more melodic aspects of the style make them worth keeping an eye on now and in future.

Black + White Haze Vinyl. With a sound that was swampy, primal and modern-urban all at once_as much in the tradition of rock n' roll and punk rock as it was a rejection of those things, the Scientists' formula was as universal as it was specific to their own experience. The themes of getting wasted, driving around in hotted-up cars, being trapped in crap jobs, and paranoia were their subject matter. Machine throb bass and drums with jagged car-wreck guitars were their modus operandi. Fitting into no place or time they spurned all but the most rudimentary and elemental of rock structures to create a sound all their own. Quadruple CD includes their complete studio recordings, live recordings, and a previously unissued set from Adelaide UniBar, plus dozens of previously unpublished photographs, discography, and fold out Perth Punk family tree. Double LP version boils the box down to 22 essentials, plus unpublished photographs, discography, and fold out Perth Punk family tree.




















t 20 THIS IS MY HAPPY HOUR LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR
u 21 FIRE ESCAPE [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[v] 22 WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[w] 23 RAVER [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[x] 24 THE SPIN [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[y] 25 CLEAR SPOT [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[z] 26 REV HEAD [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xa] 27 SET IT ON FIRE [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xb] 28 BURN OUT [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xc] 29 THIS LIFE OF YOURS [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xd] 30 SOLID GOLD HELL [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xe] 31 BLOOD RED RIVER [LIVE AT ADELAIDE UNIBAR]
[xf] 32 DON'T LIE TO ME [LIVE AT THE LOFT]

[xh] 34 MELODRAMATIC TOUCH [LIVE AT STOREY HALL]
[xi] 35 SLOW DEATH [LIVE AT STOREY HALL]
[xj] 36 STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT [LIVE AT THE SYDNEY UNI]
[xk] 37 I'VE HAD IT [LIVE AT LE TOTE]
[xl] 38 GONNA MAKE YOU [LIVE AT THE PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL]
[xm] 39 WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [LIVE AT SYDNEY TRADE UNION CLUB]
[xn] 40 GHOST TRAIN [LIVE AT THE PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL]
[xo] 41 THE OTHER PLACE [1985 FLEXI DISC]
[xp] 42 SHE CRACKED [1985 FLEXI DISC]

THULCANDRA’s rise to power ignited when the Germany-based outfit unleashed their debut album, Fallen Angel’s Dominion, upon metaldom in 2010. The group, fronted by founding member and visionary Steffen Kummerer (also of Obscura fame), have tightened their hibernal grip on blackened death metal since. The desolate melodic emanations in follow-up studio records Under a Frozen Sun (2011), Ascension Lost (2015), and the chart-topping, 2021-album A Dying Wish, dedicated to the late drummer Chris Kratzer, solidified THULCANDRA as a superior force, expertly thrusting the magic and mystery of mid-’90s melodic black-death metal into the modern era. Their fifth attack, entitled Hail the Abyss, sees THULCANDRA prove yet again why they’re atop death metal’s malefic vedette! Fierce tracks such as "As I Walk Through The Gateway", or the uber-brutal "Blood Of Slaves", showcase the band‘s affinity for dark, aggressive, and mellifluous metal while the album title track and the epic, mid-tempo rager "On The Wings Of Cosmic Fire" rip and terrorize with the intensity of hell. As always, THULCANDRA's about a vibe - there's a distinct "feel" to the band's latest album that's distinctly old-school but without the tired trappings of it. The hotly-anticipated Hail the Abyss is slated for release on May 19, 2023 via Napalm Records. Cooperation with renowned producer Dan Swanö (Dissection, Opeth, Katatonia), who handled the crushing album mix, was compulsory, as was the re-invitation to cover-master Lochner. Don’t fear the reaper—fear the majestic might of THULCANDRA, as Hail the Abyss will see them ultimately rise to full power!

Entirely remastered from the original analogue tapes and featuring brand new artwork designed by Luke Insect, this Four Flies reissue finally brings back to life one of the most surprising albums from the strange phenomenon that was the Italian library music of the Seventies.

Gianni Safred's Electronic Designs was released in 1977 on the Milanese label Jump, in their "Music Scene" series, simply as a collection of musical pieces intended for use in television programmes. However, hidden behind a nondescript cover were twelve electronic music tracks revealing a recognizable style of composition; twelve little gems masterly combining experimentation, catchiness and practical functionality thanks to a unified and unique style. Each through a specific mood, these tracks give expression to Safred's distinctive sound, where irresistible mechanical grooves are over-layered with melodic lines perfectly played on a Polymoog or ARP Odyssey.

A native of Trieste, Safred started out with little swing bands soon after WW2, before eventually playing with great soloists like Django Rheinhardt. Ultimately, it is his background as a jazz pianist that makes Electronic Designs so special. As with other Italian jazzmen who got into synthesizers (above all, Piero Umiliani), Safred's blend of complex harmonies and (quasi-) bebop virtuoso flourishes, with its obsessive repetitions and refined tone colours, gives a retro-futuristic quality to this library album, whose electronic music islight-years ahead ofthe 'pop' electronic music of the time and, in many ways, anticipates the best stylistic features of early-Nineties dance music.

Safred best expresses his experimental verve – and does a great job in creating the 'electronic designs' of the title – in "Mystification", "City Problems", "Trapdoor", "Planetarium" and "Poe's Clock", all of which unfold through hypnotic beats and sinusoid or square wave explosions. In other tracks, however, the compositional style is less unconventional, with relaxed yet not banal atmospheres ("Spheres", "Elastic Points", "Sacred Interlude"), as well as flashes of irresistible groove inspired by Herbie Hancock's more pop-oriented work ("Automation Age", "Jazz Motion Study", "Bottom Up"). The album's masterpiece is arguably "Hasty Chant", a detective-funk ride with an unforgettable theme, which manages to pull all of the album's various strands into a cohesive whole – as a side note, the allusive and apt description of the song on the back cover reads: "Things are happening".

Das aktuelle Album der US-Alternative Metal Band nun als Deluxe-Vinyl-Pressung erhältlich.

"Hotel Kalifornia" ist das achte Studioalbum des mit Platin ausgezeichneten Quintetts Hollywood Undead . Es stellt eine Gegenüberstellung zwischen Reichen und Armen dar, thematisiert die anhaltende Obdachlosenkrise und die hohen Lebenserhaltungskosten im Heimatstaat der Band, Kalifornien. Im Jahr 2021 nahmen die Jungs in Nashville und Los Angeles mit den Produzenten Erik Ron Panic! At The Disco, Motionless In White, Andrew Migliore [Sueco, Papa Roach] und Drew Fulk [Lil Wayne, Lil Peep] auf. Bei der Arbeit von Angesicht zu Angesicht ließ Hollywood Undead die ungezügelte
Intensität ihrer früheren Werke wieder aufleben, jedoch mit einer Verfeinerung, die nur durch jahrelange harte Arbeit möglich ist.

Time to resound the trumpet as Australian blackened sludge veterans Lo! return with another grand infernal vision, captured in capital riffs and gargantuan grooves! After the universal acclaim of the band's 2017 studio endeavour Vestigial the Australian interstate quartet show no intention of slowing down with The Gleaners_a soul-ripping hell-ride across nine visceral anthems; an affair of raw violence with a touch of sophisticated madness. Lo! herald the end of the existing order of things, executing crushing judgement upon those tyrants who put the poor to powder. On The Gleaners Lo! firmly continue in the vein of their much-lauded third album, setting an over-arching storyline with multiple characters to a symphony of sonic death and destruction. "Vestigial opened up the writing arena for Lo! in many ways," explains guitarist and main-songwriter Carl Whitbread about the predecessor of The Gleaners. "We created an album of anthems without losing the groove or viciousness of performing live, using defined characters and themes that are revisited and interwoven across the record, while also experimenting with atmospheric and cinematic samples to breathe life into the recording." Above all, this record is nothing but a firm rattling of your cage - and who could expect something else from the minds of this Australian quartet who have been churning out nothing but stellar sludgy blackened hardcore over the past twelve years? Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, the storyline of The Gleaners has little of a focal point, the characters crawl all over the place - its chaos is complete - but somehow its impact is phenomenal. Lo! have gone and done it again, creating a terrifying vision of the infernal madness of our reality that shakes you to your core! FFO Converge, Baptists, Black Breath, Mastodon, Trap Them, LLNN Ltd red single coloured vinyl w/ poster!

After the "curfew" (cf. album Out Past Curfew) and the "strange time" of adaptation following the health crisis (cf. EP Stranger Times), comes the relief and the open up to the world until now confined: the Salvation. Third artistic collaboration for Youthstar & Miscellaneous, the album Salvation is a 13 tracks journey with strong and optimistic subjects such as motivation, the quest for happiness, mixed with more melancholic themes such as addictions or dependency but always through incredible percussive flows and chorus with heady gimmicks that make you want to headbang! Faithful to the rap/hip-hop that forged the duo, this album also borrows the codes of electro, trap, bass music or even reggae. We find on this album a whole crew of top notch beatmakers such as Tha Trickaz, La Fine Equipe, as well as renowned artists & MCs like Biga*Ranx, Dope D.O.D, FP from ASM... Ltd. col. LP (splatter)!

Gondwana Records announces 'Goodbyes' the debut album from Estonian pianist and composer, Hanakiv, a deeply beautiful, meditative piano album featuring special guest Alabaster dePlume

"This is an album about healing. It is about saying your goodbyes to everything that doesn't serve you anymore. Each of these songs has a little goodbye in it. So, these are very beautiful and necessary goodbyes".

Hanakiv is a young composer and musician from Estonia (now based in London) who creates meditative piano-based ambient music with elements from classical and electronic music. 'Goodbyes' is her debut recording and draws on influences as diverse as Tim Hecker, Björk "Vespertine", Kara-Lis Coverdale, Arvo Pärt, Erkki-Sven Tüür and Aphex Twin as well as her own cultural heritage. Music has an important part in Estonian culture, especially choir music and its traditions, but Hanakiv also draws on her love of nature – the beautiful Estonian seaside and forests - and on her time in Iceland. However, it was moving to London that gave her the freedom to make her own music: "London gave me the freedom and courage to really be who I am (as a person and musically)" and her heritage and her new home both offer inspiration to Goodbyes, as Hanakiv moves between these two opposite places, a bustling metropolis and a small country full of nature, drawing inspiration from both as she sculpts her own voice.

Hanakiv had an unconventional music education – she started studying music at a school for handbells when she was nine and was part of a handbell ensemble for eight years. Starting on piano at the same time she went on to study composition at high school, and later at the Estonian Academy of Music. Eventually switching to electroacoustic composition, she studied in Reykjavik, and did internships in Malmö, and again Reykjavik before moving to London. She grew up in a musical family and her grandmother was a piano teacher and choir conductor.

"I would always ask her to take me to her choir rehearsals. I remember sitting under the grand piano, listening to the choir and just being mesmerised by the sounds. She also teaches in a local music school in the south of Estonia with about ten pianos, and I'd spend a lot of time there as well. I believe this was the starting point for me to get to where I am now. The last two pieces on the album (Home II and Home I) are composed in this same music school, so it feels like a full circle.

An early influence was Regina Spektor "the first artist who made me really want to play piano" alongside dream pop and Sigur Rós' as well as Estonian contemporary composers such as Erkki-Sven Tüür and Arvo Pärt. Later her studies took her to Reykjavík: "There is this amazing record shop called 12 Tónar in Reykjavik where you can drink espressos and listen to all their vinyls. I spent quite a lot of time there. There is something about Icelandic music that really excited me (the mixture of contemporary electronic sounds with melancholy, emotionality). This is when I started getting more into electronic music, and experimenting outside of classical music". Following a year long break from studying and inspired by making an electroacoustic soundtrack for a friend's abstract video, she was inspired to complete a masters in electroacoustic composition, diving fully into the worlds of sound recording and mixing and focusing on surround sound and how to position and move sounds in space, eventually doing an internship with composer Kent Olofson in Malmö, who works with multi-speaker systems for theatre productions. "I learnt a lot from him and he introduced me to some of my favourite plugins I've used a lot on this album as well."

Hanakiv moved to London just as the pandemic hit and found herself trapped, in a big new city, without any network or family and so just concentrated on making music. "I stayed in my room with my basic equipment - keyboard, Korg minilogue, SM 58 and Rode nt1-a microphones, laptop and speakers. I was reading about mixing, and trying out different things and listening to a lot of music to get the sense of the mixes and production and finishing a commission piece for 5.1 multi speaker system at that time so I set up four speakers for quadrophonic surround sound in my room!". She also found her way back to piano - my instrument – and started practicing again, playing the pieces she used to play, but also just improvising, and this was the beginning of what would become her debut album, 'Goodbyes'.

"I started appreciating everything about music again (even melody!), and everything just came together naturally, and I arrived to a point where I finally found my voice, and I had something that I wanted to say and share. I composed "Meditation I" first and started with "Goodbye", and all the other pieces are derived from that. Without "Meditation I" there wouldn't be this album. If you listen closely, "Meditation I" starts where "Goodbye" ends; "Meditation II" is born from "Meditation I".

But it was meeting Fi Roberts, a sound engineer based at the legendary Strongrom Studios in Shoreditch, London in December 2020 that really brought the album into focus. The pair bonded over an interest in prepared piano and a similar approach to production ideas (a balance of not overdoing it, and letting the songs speak for themselves, but being open to explore) and Fi became a friend but also a confidant and eventually co-producer

"Fi has a big impact on this record but I don't know how to really explain that properly. Of course, this album is sonically stunning thanks to her amazing mixes and recording skills, but she also believed in this music so much and it created something very special - that's difficult to measure with words. She just works with heart, and I really appreciate that"

This then is 'Goodbyes', the first offering from a major new voice, who offers us a meditative work full of space and tranquillity but also life and friendship and meaning. And we are very proud to welcome her to the Gondwana family.

DOUBLE BLACK LP : 2 x 140 G Black Vinyl , Sleeve & 2 x Heavy Weight Printed Inner with UV Gloss Finish

Legendary electronic music duo Orbital return Early 2023 with new album “Optical Delusion”, the Hartnoll brothers first studio album since 2018’s Monster’s Exist. Recorded in Orbital’s Brighton studio, “Optical Delusion” includes contributions from Sleaford Mods, Penelope Isles, Anna B Savage, The Little Pest, Dina Ipavic, Coppe, and perhaps most surprisingly, The Medieval Baebes.
Earlier this year, Orbital celebrated their storied history with “30 Something” which, unlike other Best Of’s, contains reworks, remakes, remixes and re-imaginings of landmark Orbital tracks including “Chime”, “Belfast”, “Halcyon”, “Satan”, and “The Box”

SHORT BIOG:

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest of humanity – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”


But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

2 x Solid White LP, 5mm spine Sleeve UV Gloss Finish, 2x Heavy Weight Printed Inner Sleeve UV Gloss finish, marketing sticker.

Legendary electronic music duo Orbital return Early 2023 with new album “Optical Delusion”, the Hartnoll brothers first studio album since 2018’s Monster’s Exist. Recorded in Orbital’s Brighton studio, “Optical Delusion” includes contributions from Sleaford Mods, Penelope Isles, Anna B Savage, The Little Pest, Dina Ipavic, Coppe, and perhaps most surprisingly, The Medieval Baebes.
Earlier this year, Orbital celebrated their storied history with “30 Something” which, unlike other Best Of’s, contains reworks, remakes, remixes and re-imaginings of landmark Orbital tracks including “Chime”, “Belfast”, “Halcyon”, “Satan”, and “The Box”

SHORT BIOG:

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest of humanity – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”


But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

Kelman Duran introduces LA’s Holodec to his Scorpio Red label with a debut album of flickering R&B torchsongs and ambient trap-soul that aches in a very special way. RIYL Dawuna, Burial, Junior Boys, MssingNo, claire rousay, Joy O, Triad God, Sampha…

The smouldering ’All Dogs Come From Wolves’ is a definitive statement by a quietly gifted artist who operates inside the long shadow of late ‘90s US R&B and the space where it intersects ambient, neo-classical, and the weightless bass interzones of contemporary UK club music. Bare boned and bathed in a dusky Californian half-light, the album’s 11 songs feel unnervingly stark yet full of tongue-tip sensuality, making a virtue of negative space and atmosphere with a lo-fi soundtrack-like quality that evokes the idea of nostalgic reflection as the route to the future; “a reminder to look to the past to remember where you’re from, to see where you’re going.”

Holodec's been assembling rugged dancefloor constructions for years now, teetering between 2-step, jungle, nu-rnb, and vaporous ambient forms, but rarely has he been as pointed or full-bodied as he is on ‘All Dogs Come From Wolves’. It's an album that can't possibly be cleaved from the place where it comes from, documenting LA's immigrant experience (Holodec is Asian-American), and finding thematic common ground with Space Afrika's "Honest Labour", absorbing prismatic reflections of footwork, rnb and hip-hop instead of trip-hop and dub techno.

Holodec croons soulfully over muted piano motifs on 'Tiles', evoking the spirit of Sampha or Dawuna, but with a gaseous glamor that's unmistakably Californian. The mood carries into 'The Wild', utilising wistful pads and saturated noise but refusing to let his music sink into the background. If you feel yourself drifting, there's inevitably a voice, a womp, or a stifled drum sound to drag you back into its presence. 'Bounce' is rhythmically heavy, but still somehow smudged around the edges; beats don't so much pump as fray, the closer you listen the more you hear it falling out of time and just out of space. It's more like a memory of neon-hued dance forms than a replication of the thing itself.

Even at the album’s rudest, the flinty jungle drums of ‘Black Market’ still remain desiccated, just out-of-reach, suggesting not telling, in a way that makes the album’s other highlights such as the vaporous R&B voice note of ‘And My Angel Dies Too’ or the shivering baroque figures of ‘Spirit’ so unusually seductive with their nuanced grasp of inference and a reserve of humility.

Splatter Vinyl

Skins is the third studio album and first posthumous release from rapper, singer and songwriter XXXTentacion. Recognized for his raw and adventurous style of music, the album touches on themes of heartbreak and mental anguish, and draws heavy influences from lo-fi, emo, punk rock, ambient, trap and acoustic. Skins include the lead single, “Bad!”, as well as appearances from Kanye West and Travis Barker (of Blink 182). The release was met with wide acclaim, debuting at number one on the US BIllboard 200, remaining on the chart for 18 weeks, further cementing Jahseh’s legacy as an icon.

Ready for a bit of new rocking punk with just a touch of garage psych thrown in for good measure? Well, if you are, then The Mundaynes debut album 'Love It' should do the trick. Recorded during Summer 2021 on the front line of Bexhill-On-Sea, 'Love It' is stuffed to bursting with 15 great new songs. During lockdown, Bevis Frond frontman Nick Saloman, having little else to do, found himself writing loads of songs. Some were used on the Fronds’ ‘Little Eden’ album, many were discarded, and some were kept with a view of doing something with them in the future. Nick felt that a batch of these songs were pretty good, but not really suitable for The Bevis Frond, maybe being a bit too punky. However, wanting to record these songs, he called up his mate Tony Page, the former lead singer with vintage punk bands The Ploy and Apocalypse, to see if he fancied doing some vocals. Tony was only to pleased to take part. Then Nick asked bandmate Paul Simmons if he’d do all the guitar parts. Paul agreed and the three of them went into Bexhills’ Graffite Studios and laid down the tracks. The results were so good that the trio decided to put them out as an album. The impromptu band needed a name, so they became The Mundaynes, thought up by Tony because it was a Monday! Bearing in mind that all three guys played in punk bands, Tony as mentioned above, Nick with The Von Trap Family & Room 13, Paul with The Cravats and Jello Biafra, and, of course his own band The Alchemysts, the pedigree here is pretty solid. So what do we have here then? I guess it’s a loud, angry, melodic, wry punk rock album full of great tunes. Hope you ‘love it’, and if you don’t, well, that’s life.

Prolific Japanese producer T5UMUT5UMU has built up a reputation in the last few years for his ability not just to recreate club styles but to flip them into almost unrecognizable dancefloor hybrids. "Asyl" follows a blistering run of Bandcamp releases where T5UMUT5UMU has melted together gqom and techno, deconstructed grime and welded dubstep to traditional music from Japan and India. Here, he's operating completely off the grid, pulling raw materials from across the globe and hammering them into confounding shapes and patterns. On its surface, 'Fireball' sounds like a liquid metal approximation of South African gqom, but move in closer and you can make out dubstep bass squelches, trap hats, and industrial techno jet propulsion filling in the gaps with rubberized mortar. 'Desert' is the EP's most lightheaded cut, a psychedelic percussive spiral that curves micro-tuned mbira clangs around bee sting bass, aerated noise blasts and sub-aqueous kicks. It's a hard track to place, but fits in somewhere between Donato Dozzy, Menzi and 33EMYBW, all shifting rhythms and precision-edited sound design. 'Sea of Trees' retains this momentum, pushing the tempo and interspersing woodblock vibrations with syncopated bass drums and goosebump-inducing synths, while closer 'Bottomless Valley' shifts back into a gqom framework, shuffling the expected pulse with a powerful dembow swing, half step subs and Indian-inspired rattles. "Asyl" is a varied but shockingly coherent statement from an enigmatic producer who refuses to confine himself to a single path, and at a time when "cross-genre" is the norm rather than the exception, it's refreshing to witness a producer who's unafraid to truly make stylistic left-turns, rather than simply mash together top-level aesthetics.