Àlááfíà
Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The…
No Sound In Space
Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in '2001: A Space Odyssey', is Blake's far-reaching canvas on 'No Sound In Space', a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rathe…
September 23rd
September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski's new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: "The original piano rec…
Planetes
Big Tip! After four tape editions on Seil Records, Sofie Birch's 2019 debut record "Planetes" is finally available on vinyl featuring new artwork and a beautiful analog remastering. Sofie creates dream-like, elegant ambient music with an emphasis on exploration and wonder. Her distinctive organic and melodic sound is shaped by improvising with analog synthesizers, acoustic instruments, and field recordings. Repetitiveness is clinically avoided with harmonic progressions that resolve all tension …
Remote Dreaming
Dark Entries summons Philadelphia synthesizer scribes The Ghostwriters to rouse their ambient masterwork Remote Dreaming. 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. Following their debut album, Ob…
Luminous
*2024 stock* "Two brothers, Roger Eno and Brian Eno, released their first collaboration in more than a few decades. Released in March of 2020,, the brothers reunited for a full-length album called Mixing Colours. (For those unaware that Brian Eno has a creative brother out there, well, he does. In 1985, Roger Eno released a brilliant set of piano treatments called Voices.) It’s easy to think that the released album wasn’t all of the music they worked on. Deutsche Grammophon's release is called L…
Negative Space : Gradients
Originally conceived as a four-song experiment, “Negative Space: Gradients" marks a new chapter for Lehnen. Building on the lush synthesizer and ambient textures of its parent album, “Gradients" brings the ambient and electronic elements to the forefront, setting it apart from anything else in the band’s discography. While attentive listeners may recognize familiar melodies, tracks, or structures, many of the album's songs transform into something entirely new. Where “Negative Space" channels th…
Virtual Dreams II - Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999
The next installment of MFM's popular multi-artist compilation Virtual Dreams: 'Virtual Dreams - Ambient Explorations In The House And Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999'. As with Part One, released in 2020, 'Virtual Dreams II' shines a light on house and techno-adjacent music that helped redefine the definition of ambient music during the 1990s.
Plume
‘plume’ is the latest in a series of cassette releases Nate Scheible made following his acclaimed album ‘Fairfax’ (2017), following ‘indices’ on Never Anything Records (2019) and ‘prions and scrapie’ on Unifactor (2020). The sounds on ‘plume’ date back to around 2021 when Scheible received a small grant from Rhizome in Washington, DC to produce work for a new Community Supported Art initiative. His contribution to the program included recordings of over 100 miniature pieces which were distribute…
Season Two
A sonic portal to a parallel universe where neon-soaked dreamscapes transform the stark realities of a post-pandemic world. Music for a forgotten future, where echoes of the 80s cast long, enigmatic shadows through a rich tapestry of emotion that charts a journey from isolation and fear towards healing and hope. This is the journey of Season One and Season Two, the debut companion albums for the solo project of Italian composer Battaglia, both out this fall on Four Flies Records.
In 2020, as the…
Season One
A sonic portal to a parallel universe where neon-soaked dreamscapes transform the stark realities of a post-pandemic world. Music for a forgotten future, where echoes of the 80s cast long, enigmatic shadows through a rich tapestry of emotion that charts a journey from isolation and fear towards healing and hope. This is the journey of Season One and Season Two, the debut companion albums for the solo project of Italian composer Battaglia, both out this fall on Four Flies Records.
In 2020, as the…
There Are Other Worlds
"The seeds of this album were planted in April 2023 and as is often the case, germinated through a combination of various environments and my own somewhat unmanageable imagination. I’d become hyperfixated on the idea of Alternate Reality Games, and the way that through what are essentially acts of play, a person can experience a degree of brain-change. A form of magic. We can all experience other worlds." - Stephen J. Buckley
-time samples-
A rhythmic minimal ambient piece played with organic electronic sounds. Elements of electronic, psychedelic, and ethnic music are interwoven. The vinyl debut of Japanese composer/electronic musician NAT000.
Jazz Plates
'Jazz Plates’ finds Ulla and Perila making music in the same room for the first time, exhaling an improvised ambient-jazz air gently crackling with a dream-textured haze for the ages. It’s remarkably intimate material, linking the duo’s own hypnagogic portrait of jazz, in all its most hushed permutations. ‘Jazz Plates’ catches the mutual spirits measuredly channelling their shared love of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders over three sessions, making use of voice, clarinet, guitar, piano, vocals…
Atlas of Green
Ever-evolving the mythologies and magic of Dialect’s sonic sphere, Andrew PM Hunt returns with Atlas of Green, elegantly molding unexacting details of memory and mistranslation into the framework of the British musician and composer’s creative pursuit. The album imagines a young musician named Green working in a future dawning era where lost signals and enduring impulses are unearthed from the sediments of technology and time. Across twelve compositions, which embrace encounters with the malfunc…
Terraforma
Terraforma has just announced the release of a limited edition vinyl LP commemorating the eight remarkable editions held at Villa Arconati from 2014 to 2023.
home recordings 2018 - 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered)
Big tip!
Home Recordings (2018-2021) “Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie te…
Blickwinkel
Tip! LP version. After dipping into the archive to deliver a series of essential reissues, Bureau B continue to encourage the chaotic brilliance of Faust with an LP of brand-new music curated by originator Zappi Diermaier and a band of musical friends, including fellow founder Gunther Wüsthoff. Over the years Faust has become many things, each as separate as the fingers, but as together as the hand which makes up their eponymous fist. From 1971 to 1974 the Hamburg band blazed a bold sonic trail,…
Enmixed
*50 copies limited edition* Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s enmixed, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.”
In Bat…
Ecotone
*150 copies limited edition* Build Buildings is Brooklyn, New York, based Ben Tweel. He makes music with computers, instruments and household sounds. The sounds on “Ecotone” are sourced from acoustic guitars, lap harp, ukulele, mbira, and clarinet, and played through the gestural iPad program Samplr. He has released numerous albums since 2004, most recently 2022’s “Bring in the Lampstand and Light Its Lamps” on Audiobulb Records.