New project by Apolline Schöser (half of Nina Harker) & Thomas Coquelet. Apolline & Thomas have been performing since 2022 under the KOU guise with 24 electronic harmoniums. Producing dense layers of tones & overtones. On their debut album KOU steers in another direction. The harmonium appears occasionally, but more prominent are delicate guitar pluckings, distant vocal effects, synths, flutes, piano strokes, a touch of musical magic and Apolline’s jazz not jazz vocals. As soon as the needle drops it’s clear we are jump-cutting straight to the other side of the mirror. Cats purr, a woman sings as if asleep, drum machines stutter and warp and Alvin Lucier is not 'sitting in a room that is not different to the one you are not in now’. If you’re already confused, join the club. But, it’s the good kind of confused, a bewildering experience akin to the first time hearing the Faust Tapes or watching Inland Empire. Wait though, as pigeons coo and the tape machine clunk-clicks a gorgeous weirdo version of Roger's and Hart’s Blue Moon emerges to let you know this isn’t just dada splurge, there’s a genius pop sensibility at work here too. Side two takes us further into the murk with mournful detuned brass, stoned Joan La Barbara-esque vocalese and a droning Farfisa hymn, before ending with another too-tempting snatch of DIY pop. Some of the references are recognisable. All kinds of 70s/80s European art prog - think early Battiato, Pierot Lunaire’s Gudrun, Lucia Bosè and Gregorio Paniagua's Io Pomodoro etc etc. There’s a strong whiff of 90s us goof-off surrealism too- Bongwater, Siltbreeze, Royal Trux’s Twin infinitives, the damaged folkier side of Alastair Galbraith, Half-Japanese, early Beck even all feel relevant. Like an oddball group of friends you might meet by chance and end up weirding-out with for days, the minds behind this deliciously odd music allow you to stay for a while in their strange subcultural world. You might not want to live here forever but a short trip, while it lasts, rewires your brain for the better.

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment.Alan Moore

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey. 

C60 with on-body printing in jewel case and printed two-sided j-cardReturning to the Czech Republic for the next release with a reissue of Richter Band’s first album, Smetana (Czech for ‘Cream’), released originally in 1990. Pavel Richter gained a considerable reputation as a guitarist, playing in a number of Czech avant-garde rock groups, including Švehlík, Marno Union and Elektrobus, and became one of foremost figures of the Prague scene which opposed the socialist regime of the 70’s and 80’s. Towards the mid 80’s, he began to focus on calm music and subtle sound structures, playing a number of gigs channelling this energy wtih Oldřich Janota and Luboš Fidler, and eventually forming a new group alongside Štěpán Pečírka and Jaroslav Kořán. Smetana is one of the highlights of that creative period, characterised by a fusion of Richter’s gentle electric guitar alongside the fidlerophone, a unique percussive instrument, invented by Fidler, made of jars and struck by plastic strainers, and whose sound is similar in character to Tibetan bowls or Gamelan.Recorded in the spring of 1990 in the apartments of Štěpán Pečírka and Pavel Richter. Track 1 recorded in October 1988 at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. Overdubs and track 10 recorded in October 1988 in the apartment of Pavel Richter.

"After his self imposed exile from the global world music niche, Mamer found his stage at Shenzhen’s two annual music festivals – Tomorrow Festival and OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival – curated by his loyal friend and supporter Tu Fei, who would always reserve at least one set for Mamer’s newest sonic experimentations. Mamer’s most recent album Faintish Radiation documents his full performances of solo improvisation at the seventh (2017) and eighth (2018) OCT-LOFT Jazz Festivals, in which he performed electric bass, guitar, dombra, jew's harp and vocals. These recordings register Mamer’s trajectory towards a maturing avant garde composer who is able to capture the audience with an everchanging bizarre sonic kaleidoscope, one which summons industrial noise, doom drones, heavy metal riffs, dark and punchy grooves, and broken pieces of folk melodies. In each of his solo performances, Mamer would start from random notes and eventually build up an overpowering atmosphere that is distinctively his own, knowing only too well when to release a delicate Kazakh tune as a reward for intensive listening. Here “Daidiydao”, a heartbreaking love song believed to be composed by Kazakh poet Magzhan Zhumabayev, was unleashed towards the end of the 2018 performance, before an abrupt, typically Mamer stop that ended the whole set. --- 录音 Recording：曾君 Zeng Jun；罗绿野 Luo Lvye混音 Mixing & 母带处理 Mastering：刘英 Liu Ying制作人 Producer：涂飞 Tu Fei设计 Design：尹思卜 Yin Sibo封面照片 Front Cover Photo：@Waitetc_等等其它摄影 Other Photos：阿瓜 Wain；陈鸿@DAFA；蒙润

Finis Africae, a group without fixed members organized in Spain in the early 1980s by Huang Alberto Arteshe Guell, is a studio project that emphasizes work, especially "Amazonia" (1990) in the far north. It is a standing masterpiece. Inspired by Conan Doyle's adventure novel that he once read, Huang Alberto develops a soundscape that depicts the fantasy unexplored Amazon that circulates in his brain. In the late 80's, Arteshe upgraded his studio equipment to 16 tracks, and the technique he had tried on his two albums was complete. Manipulating many European and African instruments, overdubbing most of them alone, and combining the natural sounds of wind and rain, birds, insects and creatures, this "Amazonia" has a mysterious atmosphere and a mysterious sign. Expression. His unique organic groove feeling is also very comfortable, and it became a masterpiece worthy of its name (* note).* "Africae" is an old name for "Africa" in Europe based on Latin, and adding "finis" creates nuances such as the farthest land and unknown places.+ Japanese / English publication+ CD version: Paper jacket, liner included