After 10 years of making music together, Oceans Roar 1000 Drums is finally releasing a proper vinyl document of their work. Recorded on a rainy day in the Summer of 2017, the trio's first release in 5 years features the floating presence of Catherine Lamb's "secondary rainbow synthesizer", which is filtering both recordings of the band and environmental recordings to add another layer to the trio's dense and loving music.

'If I don't make it, I love u’ is Still House Plants’ third LP 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’ 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 analogue techniques - a Lesley 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. --- Finlay Clark / guitarJess Hickie-Kallenbach / vocalsDavid Kennedy / drums

'Turning in Space,' a new cassette box set by Áine O’Dwyer, compiles a series of sonic choreographies conducted at the artist’s living and studio space in suburban East London. Since summer 2015, O’Dwyer has been a resident of the Lady Helen Seymour House, a former hospital, in a building-wide unit that gives the artist a stereophonic impression of the auditory surround. Inspired by the “natural musics” of the house’s structure (its acoustics, creaks, and room tone) and the community that holds it (sirens, bells, the weather, pedestrian murmurs), O’Dwyer live-mixes multiple vantage points—an extension of her search for Klangfarbenmelodie, a melody split between instruments, which “binds together both the intrinsic and extraneous in real-time.” These three tapes, recorded between 2019 and 2023, capture an array of post-collagist techniques, in which splicing, over-dubbing, and dissolving are performed live, and O’Dwyer’s subtle compositions for found-tune piano and synthesizer blend seamlessly with the environment, keeping true to her belief that listening is “both an instrument and a compositional element” in her work.

Very pleased to present a bracing, protean performance from long-time collaborators, Steve Beresford (piano) and Mandhira de Saram (violin). Recorded at OTO in the first week of January 2024, Beresford and de Saram waste no time in getting the year started. Ma Petite Heffalump starts at a furious pace in a barrage of sharp, punctuated notes; four hands dance across the strings as if they were hot coals, deftly combining in breathlessly propulsive fashion. The temperature soon cools, however, settling into a richly textural, crepuscular trip that spans the full range of both instruments and beyond. There’s a relentless searching quality to Beresford and de Saram’s playing; piano and violin skittering and stalking back and forth on separate yet symbiotic paths, each weaving around the other in an intricate, labyrinthine dance, recalling the enthralling and unsettling immediacy of a dream. The destination is unknown and yet the performers seem to know exactly how to get us there in any case. Spanning just under 25 minutes but with enough depth and expansiveness to fill a release several times that length, this is a deeply immersive recording from two improvisers at the very peak of their craft. -- Recorded by Rory SalterMixed and mastered by Oli BarrettCover image by Calum Storrie

amaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting.Norman C. Stolzoff brings a fan’s enthusiasm to his broad perspective on dancehall, providing extensive interviews, original photographs, and anthropological analysis from eighteen months of fieldwork in Kingston. Stolzoff argues that this enormously popular musical genre expresses deep conflicts within Jamaican society, not only along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion but also between different factions struggling to gain control of the island nation’s political culture. Dancehall culture thus remains a key arena where the future of this volatile nation is shaped. As his argument unfolds, Stolzoff traces the history of Jamaican music from its roots in the late eighteenth century to 1945, from the addition of sound systems and technology during the mid-forties to early sixties, and finally through the post-independence years from the early sixties to the present. Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a general introduction for those interested in dancehall music and culture. For the fan or musicologist, it will serve as a comprehensive reference book.

Sophie Agnel plays the whole piano. Its body matters as much as its strings. The keyboard's lid is just as good closed as it is open - in fact it’s best slammed open and closed rapidly. Joined by bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, Three on a Match explodes the piano trio - each player sparking off the other so quickly that it’s impossible to figure out who lit the flame.  Recorded at OTO in 2023, this was the second two night residency for a trio that has fast become one of our favourite improvising groups. Each individually brilliant, Agnel, Edwards and Noble’s enduring connection is in their seriously playful approach to their instrument - in their way of looking at it as a whole and then tearing it apart, breaking it down into its raw materials - wood, brass, steel.  Born in Paris in the 60’s and playing her parents piano as soon as she could stand up, Agnel is classically trained and had a turn in modern jazz. What frustrated her was the strange disconnect between the frame of the piano and its keyboard - a weird boundary that seemed to form some hushed code of etiquette. “The first thing I put inside the piano was a plastic goblet. I’d seen a few pianists do it: Fred Van Hove, for example, put rubber balls inside his. But what didn’t appeal to me was that there seemed to be no link between the piano’s outside and inside.” If you see Agnel play now, the body of her piano is littered with fish tins, ping pong balls, wooden blocks - not that you’d recognize their sounds. Steve Noble surrounds his drum kit with whistles, tubes and towels alongside gleaming brass cymbals and gongs. Their stage is a heady mix of high and low - the grand piano and the gong alongside rubber balls and tiny bells; players half stood up, reaching in, bending toward - relentlessly working their instrument to unburden its sound from genre.  Free improvisation is always a leap of faith, a test of commitment, and these three players are completely unafraid. The music switches deftly from super taut string manipulation to extremely loud percussive collisions. The trio can play microscopic mutations on a bass note and then scale up on the turn of a pin to plunge into huge, black chords and ricocheting sonority - dissolving the boundary between body and sound. The crescendo of Part Two is shaped by such cumulative repetition that it feels like a confrontation - a controlled test for breaking point. What happens if we keep going?   As so we left Part Three as the last encore of the residency. It’s a totally exhilarating, skittering reprise - short and energetic - delivered with the kind of grounded abandon you hope to see improvisers play with but rarely do.