An in-demand headliner in dark rooms worldwide and one of techno’s most distinctive producers, Wata Igarashi has achieved a perfect harmony between his work as a musician and a selector. Born in Tokyo in the late ’80s, with significant parts of his youth spent in England and Spain, he spent time in skate punk and avant-garde jazz circles before taking to DJing and production. His earliest explorations of Detroit textures and Villalobos-esque minimalism were released on buzzy labels like DJ Nobu’s Bitta, Midgar in Berlin, and long-standing New York label/party booking company the Bunker NY. His debut record, 2023’s Agartha, veered into Krautrock-tinged explorations of hazy ambient, Space Age easy listening, and the Moogsploitation of Wendy Carlos…
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…Originally released on 11th September 2000, Leila’s acclaimed second album Courtesy of Choice followed the success of her Rephlex Records debut Like Weather and felt like a broadcast from a futuristic radio station no one else could tune into. Twenty-five years on, alongside collaborations with the likes of Bjork, Aphex Twin and Terry Hall and iconic performances at the likes of the V&A and Venice Biennale, more and more listeners have found the frequency.
This new version, Courtesy of Choice… asides and besides, re-presents the original 14 track album — including the previously vinyl-only “Relax the Pleasuredome” — alongside a wealth of unreleased material. Leila chose to re-edit rather than remake the album (she has all the original data…
In April 2022, the wild and inquisitively wilful British free-jazz keyboardist Pat Thomas was improvising with his eyes shut in the company of his quartet [Ahmed] at Glasgow’s Glue Factory. The music was dedicated to the 1950s-70s legacy of the late Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist, oud player and early global-music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the inspiration for the group’s work. When Thomas emerged from his trance, he was astonished to hear that an ecstatic crowd had been dancing the night away around him.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. Since [Ahmed]’s inception, their collective heat has fused abstract improv and groove music from all over the world: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, dub, jungle, electronics, and the 1990s…
Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival and premiered at its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire was performed live in an evening marked by the dim glow of the stage, an orchestra breathing with the electronics, the wealth of sounds conjured by sampler Jan Bang, and Arve Henriksen’s trumpet cutting through the hall like a quiet flame. The premiere offered an immersion into a unique sonic world. Now released as a physical album, the recording feels both familiar and freshly transformed — like the same landscape viewed at a different hour.
The album is built around an eight-movement suite, a careful weaving of live performance and studio work, though it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
A frequent collaborator of a diverse array of artists – including Laurie Anderson, Jessika Kenney, Bill Frisell and Sunn O))) – New York composer/violist Eyvind Kang presents his first solo recording on viola d’amore, an instrument he came to explore during the pandemic. An Italian bowed instrument used primarily in the Baroque period, the viola d’amore has a set of sympathetic strings that create a resonance not unlike that of Indian classical instruments.
Drawing upon his prior study in spiritual jazz and Indian raga, Riparian is Kang’s self-created means of improvising within modes of his own devising – one that alternates between arco and pizzicato (bowing and plucking), giving the impression of an organic dialogue between the two.
About two minutes into “Burn,” the second track on Black Eyes’ Hostile Design, Daniel Martin-McCormick yelps “Kill your shitty parents/let their blood flow free”: a signal that, in the two decades since the band last released new music, it has lost none of its anger. Born at the start of the century in the D.C. punk scene, Black Eyes — with two drummers, two bassists, two singers, and a guitar that sounded like Rowland S. Howard possessed by the ghost of Sonny Sharrock — upended the genre’s norms, melding no-wave noise and funk, percussive assault, and obtuse but guttural screeds against Bush-era America. By the time their second album, Cough, came out, a free-jazz influence had taken center stage, with songs that sounded like the work of a band ripping…
…special one-year anniversary edition includes 3 additional tracks.
It would have been logical for Canadian blues rocking guitarist Steve Hill to gather a few like-minded musicians to tear through a set of mostly original tunes as his supporting players urged him on. Which is what he did after the release of his 1997 debut. But that was too easy.
Instead, in 2012 the industrious and musically agile musician became a one-man performing machine, playing bass drum and snare with his feet, using an extension on the neck of his guitar to hit the crash and hi-hat cymbals, while whipping off solos and chords like a caged animal. Bass? Who needs that? First came a hat-trick of albums, Solo Recordings Volumes 1-3, netting him…
Recorded live in their hometown of Nottingham on 30th November 2024 to a sold-out crowd, this incredible show was part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the iconic Bodega venue. It’s rare for Sleaford Mods to perform for such a small crowd, which made this show feel even more intimate and memorable.
Combining the revolutionary fury of punk and hip-hop with the bleakness of austerity-era Great Britain, Sleaford Mods capture the spirit of their time with blunt eloquence. Andrew Fearn’s minimalistic, intentionally cheap-sounding loops, guitars, and keyboards provide a fitting backdrop as Jason Williamson rants about politics, injustice, and pop culture with outrage, scathing humor, and occasionally, rough-edged poignancy.
All That Remains is a collection of live performances captured on the road, live and in living color.
Austin, Texas roots rockers the Band of Heathens play music that filters contemporary singer/songwriter and alt-country flavors through the guiding influence of dusty 1970s soft rock. Founded by three songwriters, the group specialize in tales with a distinct Southern flavor and characters with a taste for misadventure, buoyed by tasteful arrangements and harmonies.
Formed in Austin, the Band of Heathens became a group totally by accident. Songwriters Colin Brooks, Gordy Quist, and Ed Jurdi were all doing regular sets at Momo’s in Austin when they began sitting in with each other, eventually making the whole…
Friends for two decades, their creative partnership began when Philip Glass invited Tenzin Choegyal to perform at Carnegie Hall, igniting a dialogue between their two distinct yet deeply connected musical worlds. Choegyal is an acclaimed Tibetan artist whose music bridges ancestral tradition and contemporary expression. Raised in exile and now based in Australia, he channels his lineage through his art — shaping powerful compositions and serving as an ambassador for Tibetan culture and stories.
Be the Sky features original works from Choegyal and Glass’s two-decade collaboration, with Glass performing on the title track. The 7-track recording also spotlights performances by Scorchio Quartet, actress Saori Tsukada…
…newly remastered by Josh Bonati and includes the entire five-hour suite that Basinski originally captured while looping analog tape as it actively deteriorated in the process.
A work of minimal, process-based tape music, experimental composer William Basinski‘s Disintegration Loops series achieves astonishingly moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrases of sound into an increasingly ghostly and…
On their first album in five years, Antibalas return to the sound that launched their career back at the turn of the millennium. Hourglass is a straight-up slab of rich, punchy Afrobeat with a funk heartbeat, jazz lucidity, and no vocals. The Brooklyn band’s core foundation was built around their instrumental prowess, though surprisingly, this is their first all-instrumental set.
Over the years, they have paired elegant grooves with thoughtful lyrics about everything from late-stage capitalism and climate change to Native American genocide. Following 2020’s conceptual Fu Chronicles, Antibalas parted ways with singer Duke Amayo, who had been with them since their debut. Rather than seek a new vocalist, they decided to emphasize what has been their…
Yves Jarvis’s Polaris Prize-winning record, All Cylinders, is expanded upon with 5 extra tracks.
“Polymath” is one of the misused words of music journalism, cousin to the even more hyperbolic “genius”. In pop coverage it usually gets applied to musicians who play more than one instrument and do not fit neatly into a genre bracket — impressive, perhaps, but hardly the same as translating Sumerian while extracting DNA from an apple.
A recipient of this overblown term is Canadian singer-songwriter Yves Jarvis. Born in Montreal as Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet, he plays all the instruments on his new album All Cylinders, which he has also produced. Its songs are filled with switches in direction and doublings back. “If this trail bifurcates, then I just have to choose,”…
Even in the most deeply personal narrative records, you can only know so much of an artist’s story by what they choose to tell you. Maybe the picture only adds up to 75% once you’ve had your fun pushing pieces together on the countertop. More likely you only get a curated chunk, the rest safely banked in the artist’s head forever. Maybe they don’t even have it all put together themselves. It’s all fragments, the way memories can be.
A Fear of Open Water is, in the words of its creator Mike James, “sort of an anthology of opaque memories from my childhood” and deals with an attempted coming to terms with a traumatic event from those years. He speaks of sifting through social worker reports trying to piece together the whole of it, this thing unspoken to us…
Those silhouettes on the cover of Big city life? That’s you and me! Smerz’s latest and best album feels like it was made for projection.
It’s not designed to be relatable, that most cursed descriptor of meaningless contemporary pop, but to be lived in, tailored to your body, snagged on the pedal of a Lime bike. In that sense, it lends itself fabulously to a remix album, and so arrives Big city life EDITS, an album of sinuous reinterpretations that highlights the endless plasticity of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s voices and songwriting.
Across these 14 reworks, 18 acts write artful Smerz fan fiction: For the most part, the duo’s voices are left intact, but layered atop sounds far removed from the original record’s arch,…
Artifact marks a new chapter in Parov Stelar’s creative career. For the album, the Austrian drew inspiration from fragments of memory, parallel worlds, and the fleeting nature of the moment. The tracks range between sweeping pop and electronic concepts, late-Romantic grandeur, and cinematic power.
Musically, this results in a very open and emotional language: electronic sounds merge with classical orchestration, strings, piano, and expansive soundscapes unfold alongside pulsating beats and grand melodies. It’s a sound that relies less on hooks and more on atmosphere, on musical associations rather than linearity – and culminates in hits such as Rebel Love, Falling Into Time, and the Artifact Version of Lana Del Rey’s Art Deco.
In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.
To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis…
…Deluxe CD includes two additional tracks ‘Angel Like You’ and ‘Carmen’s Song’.
In theory, the making of Celeste’s second album should have been plain sailing. Boosted by a win in the BBC Sound of 2020 poll, and her single ‘A Little Love’ appearing on the John Lewis Christmas ad the same year, her debut album Not Your Muse entered the charts at No 1, spawned two big hits – ‘Stop This Flame’ and ‘Strang’e – and ultimately went gold. That’s the perfect starting place from which to make a second album: success, acclaim and attention, but not on the kind of overwhelming scale that seems ultimately paralysing, where it’s impossible to work out how you can follow it up.
And yet, the making of Woman of Faces has clearly been attended by some difficulty.