The beginning of the 1970s was a watershed moment in the terrestrial life of Sun Ra. With his band, the Arkestra, he began touring internationally. He and his manager Alton Abraham penned a deal with ABC-Impulse! for a series of records which introduced him to many new and distant listeners, as did his Blue Thumb LP Space is the Place. The film of the same name was under way in northern California at the time, too, and Ra accepted a lectureship at University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, teaching a class titled "The Black Man and the Cosmos." This course of study was held in some secrecy, apparently open exclusively to Black students who were strictly forbidden to record the lectures. Ra's assistants did, however, document the sessions, and some of these recordings have made their way to YouTube. The incredible half-hour of Berkeley Lecture presented here, however, is previously unknown, extracted from the Creative Audio Archive's extensive holdings. It presents Ra walking his students through a series of wonderful paradoxes and riddles, the sound of his chalk on the chalkboard serving as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on or complementing his highly creative pedagogy. At the end of the lecture, Ra performs two musical demonstrations, the first a piano version of the Arkestra classic "Love in Outer Space," followed by a blistering 16-minute solo on the Moog synthesizer. Available for the first time ever, with cover images of the original tape box and reel featuring Ra's annotations. Transfer by Todd Carter. Mastering by Alex Inglizian. Original tape box and reel from CAA. CD designed by David Khan-Giordano. Produced by John Corbett.

LP version. Wewantsounds presents Ryuichi Sakamoto's classic LP Coda, issued in Japan in 1983 as a solo piano version of the Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence soundtrack. The album, which has never been released outside of Japan until now, sees Sakamoto on acoustic piano reinterpreting fascinating versions of his famous soundtrack including the classic theme and "Germination," which was later used in the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack. This reissue has been remastered by Seigen Ono's Saidera Mastering studio in Tokyo and boasts the original artwork plus a four-page insert with new liner notes by Andy Beta. When the film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence hit the cinema in Summer 1983, it was a worldwide instant success, due in no small parts to its renowned director, Nagisa Oshima, and to its superb cast including David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The latter, fresh from his success with Yellow Magic Orchestra and a thriving nascent solo career, was also enrolled to compose the score of the film. The soundtrack was released at the same time as the film in summer 1983. It became equally successful and made the Japanese composer a global icon as the instrumental theme became an instant classic all around the world and also Sakamoto's signature track from then on. That same year, his Japanese label decided to release an exclusive cassette book as the format was getting popular in Japan. The project, called Avec Piano, featured an audio cassette together with a beautiful 80-page book including illustrations and texts by various designers and writers. As for the music, Sakamoto re-recorded the Merry Christmas soundtrack on solo piano at the Onkyo Haus studio in Tokyo. This version of the theme which Sakamoto would re-record many times, is therefore the first ever recorded solo piano version of the composition. The cassette book's success led to an LP release a few months later under a new title, Coda, and with a different artwork by Japanese designer Tsuguya Inoue. The original orchestrated theme "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" was dropped, replaced by two new tracks, "Japan" and "Coda," recorded a couple of years earlier in 1981 and featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto's blend of ethereal ambient soundscapes and modern electronics. Coda is quintessential Ryuichi Sakamoto and an essential album in the Japanese composer's discography.

LP version. Forty years since their inception, and almost two decades since their last release, art-synth auteurs Propaganda return with a brand-new chapter in their enthralling story. This self-titled set from principal songwriting partnership Ralf Dörper and Michael Mertens embodies the depth and drama of their early work, while exploring fresh sounds and styles, and reflecting the personal and societal changes since their last outing. Conceived and crafted entirely in their native Düsseldorf, a deliberate decision to help them stay true to themselves, and featuring guest appearances from the acclaimed Hauschka and ascendant Thunder Bae, this is Propaganda at their most essential. Though an embryonic incarnation was formed by Ralf Dörper, former synthesist with electro-punks Die Krupps, and Andreas Thein in 1982, it wasn't until the addition of Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra percussionist Michael Mertens that the outfit emerged as the dark synth-pop powerhouse which would see chart success as part of the ZTT machine. Upon signing with Trevor Horn's irreverent imprint in 1983, Propaganda, now comprised of vocalists Claudia Bruecken and Susanne Freytag alongside Dörper and Mertens, delivered their classic debut LP A Secret Wish and a slew of international hit singles, "Dr Mabuse," "Duel", and "P Machinery," leaving an indelible mark on the alternative scene and securing an enduring place within the pantheon of synth-dance greats. In an era of impermanence, Propaganda wanted to produce something real -- to be played from start to finish, with artwork and packaging which allows a deeper understanding of the theme of the release. Finding the perfect label to match their ambitions in Bureau B, Propaganda have delivered a third album well worth the wait.

Japan's long running masters of psych/kosmische jamming return to Important Records for a vinyl outing featuring beloved original member Cotton Casino. This first edition is pressed in an edition of 500 copies. Trust Masked Replicants finds AMT in fine form, creating experimental psych-rock improvised around skeletal compositions. The group's leader, Kawabata Makoto, holds the group together while they navigate chaos infused, drone-based jamming at the outer edges of human consciousness. Side B, featuring the 20-minute track "Asoko Ananda," is a classic side-long fast paced AMT burner combining sped up kosmische rhythms, filter sweeps, free-jazz piano, tabla drumming and vocal experiments. "Asoko Ananda" utilizes many of the group's skills, ascending to the height of their collective, mountainous ability. Channeling prog, krautrock, modern composition and noise, Kawabata Makoto formed the Acid Mothers Temple in the early '90s. The group has gone on to release countless albums while touring the globe.

"Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera has re-emerged with Hexa, their sixth release and third for the Touch label. Steven Hess recorded sessions in the group's practice space, handing them over to Vallera, who in turn added his home recordings, mixing and manipulating them. The final product provides only the barest of hints to any instrumental points of origin, such is the extent of their intermixture. Hexa brings the listener interiority and depth, beginning with the slow build of the title track, where chiming details prompt a cycling drone. The 'Magnetic Bloom' pulsations give way to granulated smears, while the well-named 'Time in Return' plays with repetition and layering. The density in the tracks relents with '53S,' a recording from a train station contributed by the field recordist Chris Watson. The spatial sensations brought by the clanking and creaking offer a respite of sorts before the accretion of processed magnetics resume on the aptly entitled 'Sunsickness.' Clouds of static overwhelm the initial melodies of 'Ash.' Pulses, bursts, and points of electronics breach the layered blankets and sheets of sound, as with the concluding track, 'Oval Waters.' If you need to identify a genre locale, put Hexa on the side of the street where current electronic music lives. However you categorize the album, it is an absorbing listen front-to-back. Each track emerges with layers peeling and/or accreting and new details revealing themselves." --Bruce Adams, 2024

Restocked; LP version.If I don't make it, I love u is Still House Plants third album and the fullest embodiment of their sound to date. Where Fast Edit formed with quick attachment and jump cuts, If I don't make it is shaped by persistence -- a commitment to the songs that makes the music solid, warmer and accepted. Marking the trio's decade of friendship, this is the first record written whilst all live in the same city since 2017's Assemblages. The band rehearsed it relentlessly, playing for nobody except themselves, consistently building support for one another and growing the way they play. Jess's voice is deeper. Fin's guitar is full size, richer. David drums harder. Focused on one point together, everyone gets bigger and nothing falls apart. The guitar and the drums blend, raise the voice, make room for what is being said, what is felt. When able to finally record, production allowed layers, gave elasticity, a chance to fully stretch. Playing with length and connections, the band brought in analog techniques -- a Leslie cabinet on "Headlight", sidechaining the snare with the guitar, pushing vocals through cheap DJ software -- each process an attempt to bring one instrument closer to another, to give bass, body, backup. If I don't make it, I love u seeks beauty, holds feeling maximum and builds surety with its sound. The most generous SHP record to date, the music is wide open, demands less. Play it again, it will come clear.

Formed in early 1970 by Deep Purple bassist Nick Simper, Warhorse began as a backing band for singer Marsha Hunt. The group initially also featured Rick Wakeman, but he departed the band in April 1970 to join Strawbs. The band's self-titled debut album was released on Vertigo in November 1970 and is a fine example of progressive hard rock of the era. With a heavy Hammond organ touch the group was in fact leading a new way of thinking, fusing neoclassical elements with heavy blues. Compared to label mates Black Sabbath, Warhorse were in the end much closer to Atomic Rooster and Quatermass. A truly welcomed re-issue in gatefold vinyl.

"Quinnisa Kinsella-Mulkerin recorded her first song at five years old with her parents, who comprise the adventurous Maine band, Big Blood. Ever since the age of five, she was writing songs, banging on chimes, strumming guitars, and clanging together whatever else she could find. Improvisation was natural, and she stuck to the approach. Kinsella-Mulkerin brings this innate sense of songwriting to The Wickies, a duo she formed with Aiden Arel at age 16, whose chill approach and fluid delivery belie true inventiveness in the underneath mechanics. Inspired by seventies folk icons like Stevie Nicks, Krautrock bands like Can, and modern indie-rockers like Alex G, The Wickies feel like an amalgamation of these decade-spanning sounds, but uniquely their own. Kinsella-Mulkerin's voice croons like a seventies folk star, but it possesses a great and controlled tone. Her vocals feel like another instrument within the mix, building and growing each song to its fullest sound, leaving no detail within the mix unheard. Their use of echoing guitar lines recalls sixties psych, a springboard for their unique take. Kinsella-Mulkerin's lush, free-flowing lyrics, created on the spot, complement Arel's fleshed out backing instrumentation and over-dubbing. Quickly, the pair created more material than they ever needed, allowing them to mold their recordings into a self-titled debut album. Like a painter crafting the perfect exhibition of their finest work, Arel and Kinsella-Mulkerin condensed their improvisations to all the best parts. Tracks like 'Campfire Song' and 'Skipping Pond' exemplify the ethereal and lackadaisical atmosphere of their sound. 'I keep finding these weird, obscure bands from the seventies that have one album and nothing else, which is awesome,' Kinsella-Mulkerin says, 'I want my music to sound like somebody found it in a record store that no one has ever heard of and uploaded it to YouTube. I want it to sound a little strange.'"

"Decimus' Evening Ragas Vol. 4 is Pat Muranos first solo guitar LP. Pat uses setting here both as accompaniment and foil. Side A opens with the outdoors and its accompanying sound and slowly over the course of the side, mirrors them back at us in a mutated form -- a photograph melting on the dashboard of a long-inert car. Strings mingle with crickets and become a pair of twins vocalizing, reminiscent, in a way, of a children's lullaby from Night of the Hunter. A plucked string becomes a glistening soap bubble that pops on the end of a branch. A palm muting strings becomes a storm front rolling in and dissipating just as it's noticed. The guitar obscures itself as it becomes cats and foxes communicating across empty fields. The natural world and the sound world meld into some winged thing -- cicadas giving way to delay, giving way to unknown things landing in fields while most of us sleep. I'm reminded more of 'recordists' like Anne McMillan and Knud Viktor than of other guitarists. I sense that Pat is steering and being steered throughout this record. A really true improvisation where any need for authorship kind of falls away and allows for a true sense of discovery and joy in the sounds being made. The B side also twists the familiar but in a different way. Instead of something being reflected back at us, sustained notes rise up, meet and coil around the sound of crickets. A new totality that tonally feels like a microscope placed on the artificial. Melodrama smooths out into morse code. Again music becomes nature, nature becomes music and they are both held there until something real and new emerges. Some kind of Steve Ditko cosmos unfolds into something that feels very modern and very old -- like a skipping media that creates a new world completely unintended or contained in the original piece. I find Pat's approach to be very inspiring and loose, true and unconcerned with anything but what the sounds themselves want." --Bill Nace Philadelphia 2024

Ten blistering performances from Tokyo's legendary High Rise. Recorded live in 1992, Disturbance Trip (BE 016LP) is a previously unreleased, distortion-saturated gem recorded in the same era as their third studio album, Dispersion. Guitarist Munehiro Narita's unmatched ability to channel the pure energy/spirit of rock and roll and hard psychedelia is on full display; his riffs are heavy and propulsive, his solos dizzying and transcendent. Nanjo's fuzz bass lays down hypermobile lines that swing and thunder as he intones lyrics that echo in the distance. Disturbance Trip is the first release on the resurrected La Musica Records, Asahito Nanjo's mystifying, apocryphal cassette label started in the 1990s and documenting the most obscure reaches of the Japanese psychedelic underground. Deluxe double LP housed in custom Unipak-style gatefold jacket and printed inner sleeves with spot metallic inks and gloss UV coating. Featuring: Nanjo Asahito {bass, vocals); Narita Munehiro (guitar); Dr. Euro (drums). Recorded Live in 1992, Tokyo, Japan.

"Dark Entries calls on Philadelphia experimental duo The Ghostwriters to resurrect their 1981 LP of minimalist mayhem, Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and the immediate. 1981 saw the release of their debut album, Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear, a whirling, messy, telepathic slipstream cascading across an imaginary landscape. Recorded in Don Buchla's childhood home, Objects offers eight cuts of minimalist electronic bliss, equal parts icy and quirky, with standout cuts including the grooving havoc of 'Fix it in the Mix' and the otherworldly hymn 'Moon Chant.' These angular pearls will be cherished by fans of John Bender, Ceramic Hello, and all strains of outsider '80s electronics. Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear has been freshly remastered and includes an insert with photos and liner notes. Proceeds from the album will be donated to SOSA (Safe from Online Sex Abuse), a nonprofit that combats online child sex abuse and trafficking."

2024 repress. Goodfellas present a reissue of Picchio Dal Pozzo's self-titled album, originally released in 1976. Picchio Dal Pozzo can be considered as the definitive "Canterbury"-inspired band coming from Italy's 1970 progressive rock scene. Their 1976 debut album shows an incredibly rich sound tapestry, made out of some peculiar ingredients. Oblique tunes and liquid harmonies, airy flutes, crispy horns, loads of electric piano and fuzz bass, drops of jazz, pop romanticism, waves of minimalism and deep pataphysical vocals and lyrics. The whole album develops through a sequence of highly composed material and wide open sound forms. A deep journey through a multi-layered soundscape with echoes of Hatfield & The North, Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt and Zappa. Picchio Dal Pozzo's first work was out on Grog Records and subsequently reissued only in Japan (Grog Records was an independent label known for releasing the work of Italian underground pop groups of the seventies such as Corte Dei Miracoli, Latte e Miele and Celeste). 180 gram vinyl. "One of the most original, impressive and highly respected of all the experimental groups to have come out of Italy in the 1970s" --Chris Cutler.

2024 repress; LP version. "Originally released in 1982, Kakashi is another high water mark in the 80s Japanese underground. This album, which has gathered cult status in recent years, is the project of musical visionary Yasuaki Shimizu, and considered to be a highlight of his solo career. Shimizu was the bandleader of Mariah, who also saw their album Utakata No Hibi reissued by Palto Flats in 2015. Kakashi offers a similar blend of saxophone experimentations, jazz fusion and ambient dub excursions."

Sedimental presents the newest work, A Rift In the Horizon's Wall (ARITHW), from Paris-based electronic musician and sound artist Kassel Jaeger (François Bonnet), realized during a week-long artist residency at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont in June of 2023. In addition to creating and performing ARITHW he also performed Eliane Radigue's "L'île resonante," bookending the week. ARITHW was developed during an artist residency at the Epsilon Spires art center based in Brattelboro, VT, USA. During this residency, François J. Bonnet appropriated the space to create original music. Using their 1906 Estey 3-Manual Organ Pipe as his primary source, Bonnet then set about exploring secondary instrumental sources, such as the in house grand piano, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the acoustics of the three-tiered sanctuary of the former historic church (built 1889) that is now Epsilon Spires. ARITHW unfolds like an interstice, a gap between two frames on a flat surface generated by the organ, a surface that shatters to reveal an unclear, ghostly, and elusive space. In this work, Bonnet focuses on more instrumental material, only to subvert it and dilute it further before melting it into an uncertain acoustic space that evokes reminiscences of Erik Satie, Walter Marchetti, or even Eliane Radigue, as well as his own previous music and the liminal electroacoustic climates that have been his trademark for many years. A profound work of subtle complexity and suspended tension. ARITHW also refers to the vernacular literary mythology of New England, a land, at the same time, still attached to Europe and torn from it. The album artwork consists of works by Bonnet, with the first edition accompanied by a limited edition of 70 unique engravings produced by the artist at Brattleboro-based First Proof Press. The residency and project were made possible by a Jazz & New Music Creation Grant from FACE Foundation, Supporting French-American Cultural Exchange in Education and the Arts. François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. He is a writer and theoretician: his books The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, The Infra-World, and After Death are published in English by Urbanomic. He is also the co-editor of the SPECTRES series of publications. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has collaborated with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Akira Rabelais, James Rushford and Gisèle Vienne.

The second album from the high-caliber improvising trio Fictional Souvenirs captures a visceral meeting between three of todays improvised music's most idiosyncratic, elusive figures. On Volatile Object, Pat Thomas (piano and electronics), John Butcher (saxophones), and Ståle Liavik Solberg (drums) were recorded live at London's Café Oto in January of 2023. Since emerging in the 1980s, saxophonist John Butcher has been one of the most important figures in a second wave of British free improvisation, adapting the innovations of pioneers like Derek Bailey and Evan Parker for a new generation. His musical language adapted those practices with a new emphasis on pure sound, including the use of amplification or reverb-rich spaces. Thomas and Butcher first played together on a Derek Bailey Incus night in 1993. Solberg has been performing with Butcher for more than a decade, often in duo settings, but also alongside figures like bassist Barre Phillips and pianist Kaja Draksler. Still, their connection with Thomas stands out. In 2019 Astral Spirits released the album that gave the trio its name, Fictional Souvenirs, a live session from the beloved and deeply missed London venue Iklectik, where Thomas eschewed piano in favor of a Moog Theremini and electronics. The results from the Oto concert captured on Volatile Object reinforce the special rapport of these musicians, elevating the connection heard on the debut album into something truly sublime. The new album includes both sets from that thrilling evening, with Thomas on grand piano during the first half, electronics for the second. The instrumentation obviously alters the sound of each set, with the piano providing a more familiar thrust as Thomas injects thunderous left-hand patterns and skittery upper register runs with his other hand to illustrate the group's deep engagement with free jazz history. As much as Butcher is known for his original language, his roots in swing-driven sound peak through the proceedings, with forceful tenor blowing that locks in with Solberg's deliciously off-kilter propulsion. The electronics used in the second set reveal a radically different side of the trio, pushing towards a steadily evolving flow of sound-rooted abstraction. Of course, what binds the two sets together is the fierce commitment to spontaneity and heightened listening. The members of the trio push one another out of any comfort zone just as much as their sounds magically coalesce.

Presented on blue and red color double vinyl. Joseph Omicil Jr, a.k.a. Jowee Omicil, is a Haitian-Canadian jazz musician. He has worked in the past with artists such as Roy Hargrove, Pharoah Sanders, Tony Allen, Kenny Garrett, Jacob Desvarieux, Glen Ballard, Harold Faustin, Michel Martell, etc. He hosted Quincy Jones' 85th birthday celebration at Montreux Festival. On his new album, Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite, Jowee performs his ancestors' revolution in his own way. Jowee brought together all his inner tubes, soprano, alto, tenor, wood, clarinets, piccolo flute, cornet, that blows, that winds, that rumbles. This record is an incantation, a therapy, it cleanses the world by drawing on the fantasized memory of the Haitian revolution. There are Freedom Suites by Sonny Rollins, Max Roach and others. Prayer music, music to break the chains in your head and on your wrists, music of black power and white magic. For Jowee, a kid from Montreal, son of a Haitian pastor, who sang Jesus in all the tones, and then Michael Jackson, and then 2Pac, who learned jazz from Ornette Coleman, the ceremony necessarily has the taste of free. This record is a healing hour-long improvisation.

2024 repress, now presented as a double LP; gatefold sleeve. "Some have made the claim that Get On Down may love James Brown just a little too much. To which the label replies, it's not possible to love James Brown too much. The label's welcome obsession with Mr. Brown and the incredible line up of talent found on his People Record imprint continues with the reissue of Funky People Part 1. Long out of print on vinyl, Funky People Part 1 features the top tier of artists from Brown's People Records label, including The J.B.'s, Lyn Collins, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker. Some of the James Brown organizations all-time best material is collected here, including The J.B.'s 'Pass The Peas' and 'Hot Pants Road', Fred Wesley's in your face politics through funk statement 'Damn Right, I Am Somebody', Lyn Collins smash hit 'Think (About It)' and many more. Newcomers and diehard fans alike continue to dig into the James Brown and People Records vaults, and the more they do so, the more they realize that it's a nearly never ending source of truly next-level funk and soul music. And you can be sure this aural goodness will keep flowing to the public, thanks to the exhaustive efforts of Get On Down."

LP version. Brand-new remastered version of Pentagram's legendary album Sub-Basement with a brand-new cover designed by Solo Macello. Doom is made out of 666 tons heavy riffing, vocals filled with pain, regret and spite as well as leaden song-structures stretched taut to the point of ripping. Pentagram embody all those virtues like no other contender in this oldest of all genres of metal being founded by none other than Black Sabbath. Many have named Pentagram the true heirs of those originators of heavy metal and honorably dubbed them "the American Black Sabbath." In this sixth incarnation of the band, doom lord Bobby Liebling had reunited with drummer Joe Hasselvander, who had already been a member of Pentagram twice before. Hasselvander played all the instruments, while Liebling added his matchless vocals. Sub-Basement was the second output of this line-up and is regarded as the most rock n' roll effort of the doomsters ever. On top of Pentagram's perfect doom sound an irresistible groove and capturing catchiness was added, which made the album an all-time favorite for many fans. Sub-Basement will kick your ass and twist your legs. Also available on CD (HPS 316CD), Blue Vinyl (HPS 316LTD-LP), and Yellow/Orange/Blue Vinyl (HPS 316ULTRA-LP).

"The union of composers Lawrence English and Loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of 'rich sources' as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuations of room tone infuse the music with a subdued, sacred feel, like vaulted light in a nave of stained glass. They describe the album as 'an iterative project, a reduction and eventual expansion,' sifting the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance. The tracks are named for the hue each piece suggests -- from the gauzy levitational miasma of 'Yellow' to the pulsing melancholic mirage of 'Violet' to the seething twilit sandstorm of 'Magenta.' Morgan and English are both adept at conjuring moods of muted grandeur, like landscapes veiled in dusk, still looming and luminous. Here their combined powers open pathways to heightened realms of deep listening and bewitching restraint, finding flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust."

2024 restock. January 1981 found Gudrun Gut and Bettina Koster in Christopher Franke's Berlin-Spandau Studio recording their first Malaria! EP (Zensor Records). Christine Hahn of The Static with Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess, joined in from New York, and Manon P. Duursma fresh from Nina Hagen's O.U.T. project, and Susanne Kuhnke completed the line-up. Malaria! started touring intensively soon after the release of their 12", commencing with a concert with New Order at Brussel's Ancienne Belgique, and going on from there to concerts with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Birthday Party, The Slits, The AuPairs, Raincoats, Nina Hagen, John Cale, and Einstürzende Neubauten. They played venues as diverse as the Mudd Club, Peppermint Lounge and Studio 54 in New York, the Documenta in Kassel, the Bat Cave in London, Les Bains Douche in Paris, Milky Way and Paradiso in Amsterdam, ICA in London, the Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and Markthalle in Hamburg and naturally, again and again, at the SO36 in Berlin. While touring, Malaria! used their time off to record in Studios in New York, London, Brussels, New Orleans, and in Berlin -- How Do You Like My New Dog? 7" (1981), Weisses Wasser 12" (1982), New York Passage 12" (1982), Revisited cassette (1983), and the Emotion album (1982). At the BBC studios in London, Maida Vale, Malaria! recorded a John Peel Session. Malaria! took a break in 1984 -- Bettina and Christine re-located to New York, and Gudrun and Manon stayed in Berlin to form Matador with Beate Bartel, but not before they recorded their mini-album, Beat The Distance (1985). In 1992 Gudrun, Bettina, Christine, and Manon met up in New Orleans with Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) to record Elation 12". Elation was followed by Cheerio (1993), which again was recorded in Berlin. Chicks on Speed did their own version of Malaria!'s song, "Kaltes Klares Wasser" in 2001, and the remix went into the German Top 10. Malaria! has been an instrumental part of Berlin music history, as recently presented at the "Zurück zum Beton" at Düsseldorf's Kunstakademie, Kunsthalle Wien "Punk!", "Geniale Dilletanten" Goethe Institut, and in B-Movie.

2024 restock; LP version. "Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78'17" is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux. Side one was recorded at a private concert (on the date and time indicated by the title) and features Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone. This work is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's 'Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery' (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). The piece evolves with the oscillator changing pitch and dictating an ornate pattern over the course of the performance. Side two is an example of one of the sets of frequencies sustained in the Dream House, the composite sound environments conceived by Young and Zazeela. The composer suggests listening while seated -- to experience how the sound interacts with the room and other perceptions of its arrangement -- as well as while walking. As Young states, 'The frequency ratios are monitored continuously as lissajous patterns on the oscilloscopes and, in spite of the great stability of the oscillators, the phase relationships of the sine waves gradually drift which causes their amplitudes to add and subtract algebraically. Not only does the sound become a bit louder and softer, but at very loud levels, one actually begins to have a sensation that parts of the body are somehow locked in sync with the sine waves and slowly drifting with them in space and time.'"

"Kindred spirits Passepartout Duo and Inoyama Land embody the essence of play -- charting a new chapter and reinvigorating the environmental music and electronic landscape. Passepartout Duo is formed of Nicoletta Favari (IT) and Christopher Salvito (IT/US), who since 2015 have been on a continuous journey travelling the world's corners, engaged in a creative process they term 'slow music.' Having been guests of many notable artist residencies and with live performances in cultural spaces and institutions, their evocative music escapes categorization. With no fixed abode their musical pilgrimage brought them to Japan first in 2019, which prompted a deep connection to Kankyō Ongaku 'environmental music', a genre in which Inoyama Land is often associated with, soundtracking the duo's first immersive experience. In 2023 the duo revisited Japan and set out to reconnect in particular with the music of Inoyama Land, performed by Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita. The highly revered album Danzindan-Pojidon (1983) produced by Haruomi Hosono amongst other well publicized and acclaimed reissues produced a global resurgence and admiration of the environmental music movement. Nicoletta took the lead to seek out Inoyama Land and in making contact successfully their intrigue and eagerness to meet was warmly reciprocated, and the group scheduled to meet in the form of a spontaneous improvisation session. Radio Yugawara was recorded in 2023 in Makoto Inoue's hometown of Yugawara where his family runs a kindergarten, whose space has doubled as a Sunday recording studio. Upon arriving a circle of four tables was set up in the school's auditorium -- the tables were carefully populated with children's instruments: a full set of handbells, a glockenspiel, a xylophone, recorders, melodicas, and harmonicas. Surrounding the tables were racks hanging all sorts of bells and wind chimes and within this environment each performer set up their own electronic instruments. Dialing into each other, a simple set of playground 'game rules' was devised where time was divided into three separate sessions (1) 'only electronic instruments', 'only acoustic', and 'a mix of both', (2) 'revolving duets' each taking turns to play through a cycle of 'four duos' and (3) 'anything permitted', accumulating to more than three hours of material which was then carefully distilled into succinct tracks. Radio Yugawara is a unique one-off transmission from a specific place and point in time, unlikely to ever occur again."

2024 repress. LP version. Wewantsounds present a reissue of Donna McGhee's Make It Last Forever, originally released in 1978. Donna McGhee has been one of the key female singers of the New York disco scene, gracing several cult albums with her superb singing. The Brooklyn native began her career singing gospel in her grandmother's choir from an early age. Her first break in the industry came when she was spotted by bass player Johnny Flippin, who invited her to join his band. The group was none other than The Fatback Band led by drummer Bill Curtis. This was 1975 and the album was Raising Hell. McGhee's vocals can be heard throughout the album, including the dancefloor classic "(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop". She stayed with the group for another few years recording Night Fever in 1976 and touring across country. Following an encounter with producer Greg Carmichael, Donna McGhee jumped ship and started working with the prolific producer and his partner Patrick Adams. A string of collaborations followed with singles and albums: Donna can indeed be heard singing with Bumblebee Unlimited, Universal Robot Band, and on Phreek's classic self-titled album from 1978, singing on the track "May My Love Be With You". In 1978, After Greg Carmichael set up his own label, Red Greg Records, he and Adams decided to get McGhee in the recording studio and produce her first solo album. With the pair playing most of the instruments, they got five tracks out of the session. The result, Make It Last Forever is an all-time Adams/Carmichael classic: funky disco arrangements with a touch of synths over a pulsating groove magnified by McGhee's superb sexy singing. All five tracks have become classics in their own right. "I'm A Love Bug" was a remake of Bumblebee Unlimited's cult favourite from 1976, "Love Bug" (also released on Carmichael's Red Greg label) while "Make It Last Forever" was later re-recorded by Inner Life (featuring Jocelyn Brown). "Do As I Do" and "Mr. Blindman" keep the groove going and finally, we have "It Ain't No Big Thing". The remake of a 1976 single by Personal Touch, produced by Adams for his PAP label and arranged by Leroy Burgess, it is one of the highlights of the album and is a superb catchy composition which has now become a true underground disco standard. An essential disco album. Newly remastered audio.

LP version. Between the release of his first album in 1962 and 2024, Marcos Valle has released twenty-two studio albums traversing definitive bossa nova, classic samba, iconic disco pop, psychedelic rock, nineties dance and orchestral music. With his twenty-third studio album Túnel Acustico, Valle set out to bring it all together. Originally moving over in the mid-sixties on the back of bossa nova's international proliferation, Valle toured with Sergio Mendes and became hugely in demand as a composer and arranger. He spent the years following Vietnam in Rio writing music for TV and film, as well as four cult favorite albums in collaboration with some of Brazil's most groundbreaking musicians including Milton Nascimento, Azymuth, Som Imaginario, and O Terco. Túnel Acústico features two songs originally conceived during Valle's time on the West Coast: "Feels So Good," a stirring two-step soul triumph written in 1979 with soul icon Leon Ware, and the sublime AOR disco track "Life Is What It Is," composed around the same time, with percussionist Laudir De Oliveira from the group Chicago. Built around an unfinished demo Marcos found on a shelf in his house 44 years after it was made, the "Feels So Good" demo was restored with the help of producer Daniel Maunick, who also utilized AI stem-separation to remove the placeholder vocal ad-libs. Valle added Portuguese lyrics to sit alongside Ware's vocal hook, as well as extra keyboards and percussion. On Túnel Acústico, Valle's core band features two members of the renowned Brazilian jazz-funk group Azymuth: Alex Malheiros on bass and Renato Massa on drums. The rhythm section is completed by percussionist Ian Moreira, with additional contributions from guitarist Paulinho Guitarra and trumpeter Jesse Sadoc. The contemporarily composed music on Túnel Acústico features an impressive lineup of guest lyricists, including renowned Brazilian artists: Joyce Moreno, Céu, and Moreno Veloso, as well as Valle's brother Paulo Sergio Valle.

Visionary engineer, producer and dub experimentalist, Scientist returns to his roots to mix new album direct-to-disc for latest Night Dreamer session. With over 60,000 recordings to his name, Scientist (born Hopeton Overton Brown) is one of the most influential figures in dub. From Studio One to King Tubby's, Channel One to Tuff Gong, he worked at Kingston's premier studios, pioneering recording techniques and elevating the dub mix into an art form in his own right. Known as the "Dub Chemist" for both his technical expertise and forward-thinking ideas, Scientist's Night Dreamer session brings together musicians from across the London reggae scene, including The Instigators' rhythm section Mafia (bass) and Fluxy (drums), Creation Rebel guitarist Tony Ruffcut, vocalist Donovan Kingjay, Jah Shaka keyboardist Greg Assing, and saxophonist Finn Peters. Joined by Amsterdam-based trombonist Salvoandrea Lucifora and backing vocalists Alyssa Harrigan and Peace Oluwatobi, Scientist went about taking the studio apart and reassembling to his exacting specifications. He spent hours on the kick drum alone, rewired the mixing desk's high pass EQ, brought in two 18" subwoofers, piled everyone (bar Fluxy on drums) into the control room and had the whole place shaking under the power and clarity of the bass. Having set up the studio just right, the group cut six tracks that were subsequently dubbed direct-to-lacquer by Scientist, allowing his creativity to come to the fore: "In dub mixing, the engineer now becomes the artist and it's a performance that the engineer do," Scientist explains, with almost five decades of experience to his name. The centerpiece of the album is lead single "Missing You," on which Scientist strips back the crisp groove to let Donovan Kingjay's vocals soar. Dubbing in the horns, guitar and keys with an improvisatory flair, Scientist channels the energy towards the chorus, a masterclass in tension and release, filtered through Scientist's signature sci-fi dub sound. Surrounded by vintage analogue gear, and recording direct-to-disc in a manner familiar to his early days cutting dubs at King Tubby's, Scientist described the experience as being "thrown back in time." Having made records for everyone from Sugar Minott to Barrington Levy and released a treasure trove of cult albums under his own name, a new chapter in the extraordinary story of Scientist is opening up. As this Night Dreamer session attests, dub would sound very different without the one and only Scientist.

Alan Licht returns to VDSQ with Havens, a sprawling double-disc set of exploratory guitar-based compositions forged from the myriad possibilities arising when strings collide with electricity and space. Licht is masterful and relentless in his negotiation of the often-unknowable intersections that exist between juxtaposing strands of sound. His work is marked by contrast and contradiction: maximalism versus minimalism; rockist inclinations versus avant, expanded-field expression; loose improvisation versus considered performance. What these dichotomies shouldn't obscure, however, is the simple pleasure that transpires in his refracting of idiom, conjuring expansive pieces that collapse, stratify and convolve competing schools of music to wholly singular ends. 2LP housed in full color gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves.

"Havens documents a new sound for Licht, building on a previous VDSQ release Currents, his last major solo outing from 2015. Playing those solo acoustic tracks live on tour, their lyricism translated through the power of a PA, Licht was taken by the overtones surging atop those song-like pieces, transforming them into something new. The compositions here, particularly the mesmeric title track, luxuriate in that newfound sense of possibility, infused with a rock-born urgency by way of lightning-fast, urgent strumming gradually unfurling layers of phantom harmonics. The record is rich with considered, contained explosivity, firmly minimalist in its patient pace and ear for hallucination but expressed in defiantly, deliciously rock terms, each piece its own lyrical hybrid built of scant elements unfurled with painterly grace. This loving dislocation and reframing of the rock lexicon remains true to the Licht M.O., Havens being a resoundingly deep listen teeming with visceral energy, a glorious love letter to the still-unexplored potentialities of a simple guitar thrust into the hands of an individual who simultaneously reveres its known nooks but steadfastly continues to push it into crannies uncharted." --Edward Beaver, Nature's Trip Records

UK-based noise rock outfit Schande presents their debut LP Once Around, via The Daydream Library Series, the house record label of Ecstatic Peace Library operated by Thurston and Eva Moore. The band, fronted by Thurston Moore Guitar Ensemble member Jen Chochinov, has shared a trio of singles showcasing the band's melodically angular approach to songwriting -- searing and calm in equal measures, reminiscent yet distinctive. Inspired by the works of writers such as Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, Once Around focuses on notions of personal existence and subjectivity. Mirrored by the band's collaborative musical process, the album aims to explore the ways in which even the most personal journeys depend on others, something the band of expats -- Chochinov is from the US, drummer Ryan Grieve hails from Canada, and bassist Gio Villaraut is from Italy -- navigate daily as they establish and reinvent themselves in their adoptive home of the UK. Schande's current sound was shaped by Chochinov's stint playing in the Thurston Moore Guitar Ensemble. On the heels of playing with the group, Chochinov started experimenting with alternative tunings, including those she learned from Thurston himself. The freedom offered by new tunings gave the band a chance to approach songs and song writing in a new way. The California-born Chochinov has been crafting catchy, propulsive rock in DIY circles since the early 1990s. Solo and full band adventures throughout the years have included a split 7" with The Cribs and James Murphy's pre-LCD Soundsystem group Speedking, playing the legendary Indie Tracks festival (UK), and playing Happy Happy Birthday to Me's Athens Pop Festival (US). Since relocating to London in 2013, she has continued playing shows throughout the UK and US both solo and with her full band. In 2018 and 2019, she was a touring member of Thurston Moore's Guitar Ensemble and played shows throughout the UK and Europe alongside James Sedwards, Deb Googe, Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Jem Doulton (Thurston Moore Group, The Oscillation), and Jonathan Leideker (Wobbly).

LP version. USA exclusive cream color vinyl. The Daydream Library Series record label has confirmed Thurston Moore's new full-length album Flow Critical Lucidity, his ninth solo recording. Some of the songs were written and arranged in Europe and The United Kingdom and include lyrical references to their environments and inspired by nature, lucid dreaming, modern dance and Isadora Duncan. The album was arranged at La Becque in Switzerland and recorded at Total Refreshment Studios in London in 2022, and mixed at Hermitage Studios in London with Margo Broom in 2023. Flow Critical Lucidity comes from a lyric in the single "Sans Limites" and the album sleeve cover art features Jamie Nares' "Samurai Walkman" -- a helmet befitted with tuning forks. Jamie Nares (born in Great Britain) is a life-long friend of Thurston Moore from his New York No Wave days and the two have often collaborated in art and music. In 2023, Thurston released two singles: the energetic Isadora Duncan inspired "Isadora" with a music video starring Sky Ferreira. "Hypnogram," which press called "one of the most intensely cerebral cuts Moore has ever released, [in which] he blends the more melodic moments of his former band with the layered, heady flourishes of his bassist Deb Googe's main band, My Bloody Valentine. Emphatically conveying the feeling of dreams, the new material has fans excited for what the American has in store with his next album." In April of 2024, Thurston shared the stirring Earth Day anthem "Rewilding." The musician delivered chilling lines as he ruminated on the removal of the human hand from nature. Moore sang about renewal, and a period for friends of the Earth to sleep and realize a natural way by "coralmorphologically dreaming." The musician said the U.K.'s rewilding movement aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. The players on Flow Critical Lucidity: Thurston Moore (vocals, guitar); Deb Googe (bass); Jon Leidecker (electronics); James Sedwards (piano, organ, guitar, glockenspiel); Jem Doulton (percussion); Laetitia Sadier (backing vocals on "Sans Limites").

2024 repress. "Volume, repetition, volume, repetition, volume and repetition, this is the sonic mantra of Austin, Texas's Water Damage. On their new double album, Water Damage continues to scorch the earth with walls of punishing sound. It's no secret that something truly special can happen to the psyche when you are being pummeled with trance inducing drones, you can transcend time, you might laugh, you might cry but hopefully you look inward, letting a calm wash over you with metric tons of distortion. Water Damage are the rare 'rock' band that follow in the lineage of artists like Faust, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, and Pärson Sound, one that creates such heavy yet minimalistic audio treasures that not only hit you viscerally but also give space to contemplate on your place in the cosmos. Their longest offering yet, Water Damage hits you with four side-long tracks of krautpunk ending with a cover of 'Ladybird' by Shit & Shine featuring Craig Clouse on vocals. Drone until you hear god speak." --Joe Trainer, Dummy

LP version. Includes eight-page booklet with lyrics and translations and 14x19 inch poster."Saint of the Pit, Diamanda Galás' fifth studio album and the second in her trilogy, The Masque of the Red Death, is an urgent record. Its theme is essentially passion, in the sense of suffering, although here, and unlike the passion of Christianity, there is little to offer solace. Re-released on Galás' own Intravenal Sound Operations (ISO) after its initial release on Mute in November 1986, Saint of the Pit is a masterpiece of witnessing, forged from grief and fury during the HIV-AIDS epidemic. While its precursor, The Divine Punishment (originally via Mute, now ISO), released only five months before in June 1986, invoked Old Testament laws around the clean and the unclean, as a way of raging against the inhumanity of systemic neglect of people with HIV-AIDS, this album is focused on a more interior response. Saint of the Pit was an urgent record and now, nearly 40 years on, it remains an urgent record because, ultimately, its major theme is not limited to HIV-AIDs, but profound suffering. It is this music's capacity to bear witness, to wrap a humanity around another's pain, to hear that anguish, that gives Saint of the Pit its continuing relevance. Remastered by Heba Kadry in 2024. Vinyl pressed at RTI, packaged in a printed euro inner sleeve with lyrics and translations and 18 x 24-inch poster."

Double LP version. Color vinyl. "The complete uncollected Noise New York studio recordings of Galaxie 500. A twenty-four-track chronological journey through rarities and outtakes including never-before-heard songs, from the start of their incendiary career to their final studio session. Uncollected Noise New York '88-'90 marks Galaxie 500's first release of new archival material in nearly thirty years and their most comprehensive collection of unreleased and rare material ever. Produced and engineered by Kramer at Noise New York."

Translucent orange vinyl version. "Originally released in 1996 as a limited fan-club pressing for Rockathon, Guided By Voices' Tonics & Twisted Chasers has always existed as an anomaly in Robert Pollard's vast discography. In many ways, the album serves as the tail of a creative comet that in just two years included the 'classic line-up' trilogy of Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under the Bushes, Under the Stars and countless singles that crammed endless hooks in their grooves. In the intervening space, Tonics & Twisted Chasers has taken on a mythic status. It's arguably Pollard's strangest, gnarliest, most enlightened record and also the fans first chance to see the stitches that bind his galaxy of songs. It's like peering at the caliber inside a watch, responsible for making the whole enterprise tick. This nineteen-song collaboration with guitarist Tobin Sprout could be interpreted as spontaneous sketches, late-night improvisations, ideas that blossomed later in the timeline ('Knock 'Em Flyin'' and 'Key Losers'), but as with anything in Pollard's orbit, its intention is clear when heard as a cohesive whole. The Pollard tenet that 'less is more' is on full display here. The songs rarely creep past ninety seconds and coalesce much like Pollard's collage-styled visual art. Arena anthems in miniature ('158 Years Of Beautiful Sex') bash up against eerie piano laments ('Universal Nurse Finger') without any time to breathe, acoustic lullabies that sound like a Midwestern summer's twilight ('Look It's Baseball') segue into monochromatic post-rock ('Maxwell Jump'). The euphoric joy and obtuse melancholy in Pollard's voice is so palpable on the album's standout, 'Dayton, Ohio 19 Something & 5' (which has since become a live staple), that it's impossible to find a more autobiographical yarn in his catalog. The album's closest analog is 1993's Vampire On Titus, as it contains that album's prickly, dark and shimmering obfuscation that only reveals its beauty after repeated listens. Tonics & Twisted Chasers maintains the lore because the melodies are so strong. Using a primitive drum machine, Radio Shack effects, minimal instrumentation and the DIY spirit that guided them in the first place, Pollard and Sprout constructed a masterpiece of pop that could only come from a basement in north Dayton, Ohio. Anyone in that hallowed era who happened upon it, kept it as a secret."

LP version. Wewantsounds presents the release of BAG's first album since 1973, For Peace and Liberty, recorded in Paris in Dec. 1972 when the musicians had recently arrived from St Louis. BAG only released one album during their existence. This long-lost performance, recorded at Maison de l'ORTF in optimal conditions just a few months previously, was thought lost until recently unearthed from the vaults of INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel). Here the group unleashes an incandescent 35-minute set mixing free improvisation and spiritual jazz with funk grooves. Released in partnership with the band and INA, the album features sound remastered from the original tapes, plus a 20-page booklet featuring words by Oliver Lake, Joseph Bowie, and Baikida Carroll plus Bobo Shaw's and Floyd LeFlore's daughters as well as extensive liner notes by BAG scholar Benjamin Looker and previously unseen photos by cult French photographer Philippe Gras. The Black Artist Group (BAG) was founded in St Louis, USA, in 1968 to promote local artists from the burgeoning Black Arts movement, including musicians, playwrights, dancers and poets. The BAG quintet heard here pulled together key musicians from the larger organization, including Oliver Lake on sax, Baikida Carroll, and Floyd LeFlore on trumpet, Joseph Bowie on trombone and Charles 'Bobo' Shaw on drums. The musicians emerged from the organization to become a vital force within the late '60s free jazz revolution. Modelled on the AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago with whom they had close ties, this subset of BAG musicians followed in the footsteps of their Chicago colleagues, relocating to Paris in the early '70s on the recommendation of Lester Bowie, Joseph's older brother. Arriving in the French capital in Oct. 1972 the group made an instant impact on its underground music scene. In December of that year, Andre Francis, ORTF's jazz supremo invited them onto his "Jazz sur Scene" radio show, which showcased four groups live over two hours. Arriving onto the stage of the prestigious Studio 104 auditorium of the Maison de la Radio, the group delivered a jaw-dropping 35-minute set that left the audience mesmerized. Only thanks to a chance listening of another concert -- where the BAG live set was buried within -- was the recording unearthed making this historic release possible fifty years on. The release counts as an invaluable document, shedding fresh light on one of the most fascinating groups in modern jazz history.

Black Truffle presents A Song for two Mothers/Occam IX, the first ever solo release from Laetitia Sonami. Born in France in 1957, Sonami studied with Éliane Radigue in Paris before moving to California in 1978 to study electronic music at Mills College. Sonami is perhaps most closely associated with one of her inventions, the Lady's Glove, an arm-length tailored glove fitted with movement sensors allowing the performer fluidly to control digital sound parameters and processing, as well as motors, lights and video playback. Having performed with the Lady's Glove for 25 years, Sonami retired it in 2016, turning her attention to the interface/instrument heard and pictured here, the Spring Sprye. After decades of aversion to documenting her work on recordings, A Song for two Mothers/Occam IX treats listeners to two side-long performances with the Spring Spyre: the very first piece developed for the instrument and the most recent, the two contrasting remarkably in sound palette, energy and form. "A Song for two Mothers" (2023) spins an intricate web of rippling synthetic burbles, rapid sweeps and fizzing textures. Performed in real time with the sensitive and partly uncontrollable Spring Sprye, the music is delicate yet chaotic. Abrupt gestures hover against a backdrop of silence, "devoid of spatial or temporal direction." After several minutes, the sound-world becomes metallic and percussive, tapping and ticking in pointillistic flurries before a wavering harmonic cloud emerges, sprinkled with resonant drips and pops. "Occam IX" is a radically different proposition. At the outset of Sonami's exploration of the Spring Sprye, she asked her former teacher Éliane Radigue to compose a piece for it -- and her: like all of Radigue's work since she ceased working with analogue electronics at the beginning of the 21st century, "Occam IX" is written not only for an instrument but also for a particular performer. These scores are developed verbally, through meetings and conversations between performer and composer; each is grounded in an image (usually kept from listeners, to avoid influencing their experience); all magnify the subtlest acoustic phenomena and require great commitment and patience from the performer. Beginning from a rumbling low tone, the listener is gradually immersed in slowly lapping waves of synthetic tones, eventually thinning out into delicate bell-like pings against a background of white noise. Accompanied by notes from Sonami, her longtime collaborator Paul DeMarinis, and Radigue, and illustrated with scores, photographs and images of the Spring Spyre, A Song for Two Mothers/Occam IX is an essential document celebrating an under-recognized pioneer of electronic music and performance.

Klara Lewis' latest offering is undoubtedly a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg. The opening track "Thankful" resides as a direct tribute to the track recorded under his PITA moniker, the timeless "Track 3." Countless new youth carve and project wildly distorted melodic digital matter which all falls back with a knowing or unknowing wink to this original ground zero monster. Klara's take on this is one that resides as a tribute to Rehberg with a cascading emotional melody gradually succumbing to a euphoric digital abyss. Thankful also comes across as a farewell gesture to her deceased friend with its beautiful, almost funeral tone. The abrupt ending is not only a method Rehberg would have relished but also a signifier of a life suddenly cut short. The track "Ukulele 1" is another tender tribute within an album made by a human, utilizing contemporary technology with absolute sincerity, surprise twists and sublime emotion. The sound of the instrument in the title gently loops and deconstructs in a recording replete with the sound of the room it is recorded in. A human element appears at exactly the point an increasingly inhuman approach is becoming the forced raison d'etre today. One of Peter's many repeated phrases was the word "top." One he used at any occasion to agree with a vast array of subjects. With this musical tribute to Rehberg's favorite phrase, Lewis conjures a short blast of mutant acid techno which shrivels and thrives as much as it lives and dies. Following "Top" is the reflective and deeply moving "4U." No words. Just sounds. As it was. And lives on. "Ukulele 2" sits at the end, as an epilogue of sorts, fashioning itself as an ouroboros with the return of the initial methodology of the previous track "Thankful." This time around the sublime melody of the previous "Ukulele 1" plays out in returnal as it is gently swarmed by all manner of digital play. Thankful is an emotionally considered and precise homage to the methodology and spirit of Peter Rehberg. A new work which inhabits the spirit for what this was written for and the general guise devised with the launch of the original MEGO label many moons ago.