A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life. --- 'Profound and unforgettable' Sally Rooney'A classic . . . I have long thought of Boyer as a genius' Patricia Lockwood'An outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique' Ben Lerner'Some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read' Hari KunzruBlending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world --- Penguin, 2020

Originally a tape-only companion piece to Laila Sakini’s quietly stunning ‘Vivienne’ AOTY contender last year, 'Into the Traffic, Under the Moonlight’ now gets a standalone vinyl release, newly mastered by Rashad Becker to provide us with a chance to swoon at its endless, quiet charms from a new perspective. Featuring Laila’s voice, plus piano, samples, cello, bass clarinet, flute and handclaps, it’s a totally unique late night/intimate pop anomaly that sounds to us something like the missing link between Grouper, Bohren & der Club of Gore and The The’s Soul Mining.  'Into the Traffic, Under the Moonlight’ is no doubt woven from the same fibre as Laila's ‘Vivienne’ album - one of the records we listened to - and loved - most last year, but it expands on its minimalist palette of piano, voice and effects to include more instrumentation, samples and full bodied arrangements. Listening to  ‘Vivienne’, followed by this one, feels a bit like emerging from a small room - curtains drawn - into the outside world for the first time in a while. The quietly suggestive presence of Sakini’s music evokes ciné-rich scenarios and vignettes from a careful paucity of ingredients to limn scenes of lonely existential angst and hypnagogic dreaminess that contrast with ruffer cuts of late night trip hop and nerve-bitten breakbeats that resemble a makeshift coffee table strewn with bits of baccy and weed, mug stains and unpaid bills, rather than unwieldy art books and pot pourri. Despite their quiet nature, these are ambitious, layered, memorable songs for the ages. It pays to start at the back here, as the creaking cold space and aching vox of ‘Night Emotion’ really seems to sum up the wistful sensuality of the whole release, but -  to do it properly -  the album unfolds as a total artwork, looping from the plaintive vocals - and flute - of ‘Talk My Way’ in succinct turns thru the dust-mite dance of her instrumental ‘Wade High’, to the opiated night flight of ‘Into The Traffic’, while curled-lip smackers in ‘Easy Does’, and her restlessly cranky ‘Metro’ help play out a flux of feelings, ambiguous and determined - that remind you that no one ever really knows what goes on inside other people’s heads. In a world of overly produced and controlled music, this here is yr antidote - Laila Sakini is producing some of the most vital and brittle music of our time.

Issued somewhere between Mica Levi’s emergence in 2008, and their recent gush of solo and band releases with Curl and Good Sad Happy Bad, Mica wrote and recorded ‘Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill’ around about the time they were receiving award-nominations and resounding acclaim for their soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer film, ‘Under The Skin.’ Naturally it shares some of that OST’s tones and moods, but the results are far more febrile, lush rather than dark and tense, stitching together a tapestry like mixtape-cum-production showreel of curdled chamber pieces, shrugged hip hop, ambient flights of fancy and gorgeous snatches of strings recalling the intervals of Carl Craig and Derrick May’s seminal ‘Relics’ set going into what sound like early sketches for what would become Tirzah’s ‘Devotion’ album a few years later. Replete with new, minimalist artwork symbolic of the album’s enigmatic nature, the record’s second wind is arguably ideally timed for the world’s current state of torpor and tentative anticipation, with 60 minutes of figurative, quietly perplexing, evocative melodies that work by inference as opposed to ever beating you around the head with a message. It’s peppered with some exquisite, often unexpected moments that arrive and recede into its matrix with uncanny logic that perhaps comes as close as you’ll get to living inside Mica’s iridescent, endlessly intriguing mind. --- DDS, 2021

"Razen is the Belgian band led by the duo Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour who have been exploring different musical worlds since 2010. For the past decade we witnessed the shape of their own sound without repeating themselves in a truly unique way.Razen played their very first concert at les ateliers claus and came back a decade later. This concert stands for 10 years of Razen-evolutionary music while revisiting our venue. It took place end September 2019. Razen has been a constant factor in my own personal musical journey, while working at Kraak - listening to their debut recordings, seeing the first performances and then witnessing them refine the Razen sound without compromising. Not losing their focus, but in the contrary mastering a certain continuity in their layered compositions while carefully choosing the instrumentations. A heady brew of deep listening music that is almost medieval in mood and wholly reverential in technique."--- Brecht Amee / santur & monochordKim Delcour / bass recorder, reeds, tambourine & bagpipePaul Garriau / hurdy gurdyDavid Poltrock / ondes-Marthenot & synthPieter Lenaerts / sarangi & 5string double bassJean-Philippe Poncin / bass clarinet, chalumeau & tenorarecording & mix by Christophe Albertijn. 

Roxane Métayer came to play les ateliers claus December 2019. She performed on our 1st floor where she surrounded herself with her violin, electronics and field recordings.Born in France and currently residing in Brussels, Roxane Métayer is a multidisciplinary artist. Learning the violin at a young age, she also developed herself as a visual artist, creating drawings, sculptures in uncommon materials as soap, and in recent years video. Her work as a musician is of an equally spontaneous nature. The violin is often taking the melodic lead, but at the same time serves a drone background.

"Live recording from the performance of Tomaga & Pierre Bastien, on 24th January 2020. 'Bandiera Di Carta’ is the collaboration between instrument builder and composer Pierre Bastien and the London based duo Valentina Magaletti and Tom Relleen who release music under the name Tomaga. We're glad to be able to share this unique and historic audio recording." --- Valentina MagalettiTom RelleenPierre Bastien --- artwork by Bruno Hellenboschrecorded by Christophe Albertijn