After a run of extremely under the radar cassette releases, Penultimate Press is proud to present the first vinyl collection of works by the Winnipeg outfit Korea Undok Group. With more hiss than a valley of snakes the various monikers here cover the gamut of contemporary practice traversing  industrial decay, rhythmic pulse onwards to piano etudes and fractured possession. All these forms come debossed with the signature destroyed tape aesthetic which makes these sharks so lonely.  180 gram vinyl on beautiful reverse board sleeve with passport style booklet all designed by KUG. This is a package that befits this unique scene of one, or many.  Side A Sargasso Sea – Richardson Centre  Sargasso Sea – Patria  Sargasso Sea – Winnipeg Downtown Skywalk Purple Circles – Under the Canopy by the Red River Sargasso Sea – Richardson Reading Terrace Side B Sargasso Sea – Canada Trust Korea Undok Group – This Fantasy Is Unhealthy Korea Undok Group – Quarto Korea Undok Group – There Is Always Somewhere Else

Building on nearly a decade of friendship, with an evolving creative partnership spanning roughly half that time, Swedish/Australian synthesist, John Chantler, and Danish saxophonist, Johannes Lund, return with Andersabo, their second outing as a duo.An intricate, thrillingly unbridled blast of carefully controlled sonic anarchy, pushing at the perceptual boundaries of conversant sound, Andersabo captures the collision of two sympathetic, but often radically different, creative pursuits - Chantler’s subtle complexity, composing for electronics, modular synthesis, and acoustic instruments, and Lund’s full tilt constructions for various saxophones, pointedly defying long standing expectations and syntaxes applied to his chosen instrument — in open dialog with landscape beyond.Recorded during the summer of 2019, while the duo were on a residency in rural Sweden, the LP’s three works present a radical rethinking of aural collectivism. Each is a space within which the environment and its many actors — the floorboards of a barn, a grassy field, distant hills, insects, the pulse of an electric fence, or a passing tractor, threaded with the tones and responses of Lund’s saxophone and Chantler’s pump organ and synth — are given equal presence and voice. A clear, conceptual extension of both artists’ long standing pursuits of collaboration and the building of context, whether creatively or as facilitators, notably via Chantler’s Edition Festival in Stockholm, and Lund’s work within the Danish community as a founder of the legendary space, Mayhem. Andersabo represents a rigorously forward thinking rendering of utopian sound, inextricable from the joy, playfulness, and humour with which it was made. Two artist bound by friendship, dramatically opening the sense of creative possibility for the next.A poignant reminder that art and its making, as serious as it is, can be thrilling, adventurous, and fun, the album’s opener, Back of the House, weaves an immersive and emotive tapestry of dancing texture and tone where the identity of generative sources flutter in and out of view, stripped of hierarchy. Shifting gears with the final minutes of the first side of the LP, Open Field & Forest packs a remarkable density into its length. Long, harmonic tones of a pump organ fall within a cavernous landscape, captured from beyond the farmhouse walls, its breadth riddled with unplaceable rumbles, clatters, and chirps, giving way as the animalistic howl of saxophone takes hold. With Under Barn Floor, stretching across the entirety of the LP’s second side, Chantler and Lund depart into a gripping, abstract portrait of time and place. Playfully pushing at the conceptual boundaries of drone, the hand of the artists rise and fall as the low frequencies of the bass saxophone and Chantler’s synthesized organ tones are challenged with interventions of insect sounds and countless, happenstance incidents, dancing with electronically generated images of themselves. A journey toward the future, locked within a discrete moment in time, which culminates as a collective intervention between voice, geography, ideas, and chance. An unpredictable bridge between acoustic and electronic composition and field recording, Andersabo offers a remarkable image of the rewards found through friendship, community, and uninhibited experimentation.     ---   Johannes Lund / bass saxophoneJohn Chantler / synthesizer, pump organ   --- Recorded by John Chantler and Johannes Lund, August 2019 on location at ANDERSABO, Sweden. Residency graciously hosted by Jason Dungan.Open Field & Forest and Under Barn Floor were mixed by John Chantler at The Royal College of Music (KMH) and Silence is Golden in Stockholm. Back of The House was mixed by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering who also mastered the record. Vinyl was cut by Andreas 'LUPO' Lubich and pressed at Pallas.With support from Koda's Cultural Funds.

Royaume / Aimant + Aimant – is second in the three part re-issue series focussing on the works of Etant Donnes based around field recording and voice. Royaume (originally a CD on Touch, 1991) is made up of 4 tracks and is a kind of purifying travel through the four elements which symbolically refers to the light evoked by the colour green, an allegory of the grail and of the light- carrier angel. As to the poems, they tend to amount to their essentials, as is the case in Matin which is both Taoist and surrealistic. Aimant + Aimant – (originally as a split 10”/CD on Danceteria,1992) presents itself as a magical alchemical mantra based upon the force of love, the force of life. Two pole like two bodies like two hearts like two magnets. Like true buffoons from ultra – world , Eric and Marc Hurtado succeed in achieving what many sages consider to be the very purpose of magical art : to create one’s own ritual and , being one’s own referent, to become a vibrating point in the cosmos and be a receptacle for natural energy, like those bright patches or that black point recurring in their magical music, real poems-paintings and irremediably aiming , like an insect caught between the circle and the cross, in the heat of the sun in an attempt to merge with the Whole. – Stephane Duval

Theologians still can't fully agree, but you're sure to believe after vibrating along with God Is Good. Chants and prayers, non-denominationally laid out with a heaviness that would make Heston-as-Moses blush.

Heather Leigh takes her Throne as queen of pedal steel with a suite of heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs. After the rawness of its precursor I Abused Animal, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; intimate love songs smoked in sensuality. The songs on Throne are woozy, gorgeous and uncomfortable, smothered in thick layers of bass but lifted by multitracked vocals. These are rich song forms that stand in contrast to the stripped down steel in her duo with Peter Brotzmann. Prelude To Goddess sashays in wearing leopard print jeans under the twinkling fluorescent illuminations of the British seaside, like Brighton Rock with extra bass. It is followed in by Lena – arguably Leigh's Jolene – a perverse love song soaked in a subversive sexuality, weighed down with a heavy pulse. Soft Seasons is anchored with sunken beats shrouded in wailing, growling steel and an earwormy melody. Gold Teeth, the longest track on the record, crests and breaks in waves; ecstatic peaks balanced and echoed by melancholic troughs. It soars on an updraft, and from cosmic heights dives seaward into a gnarly and riotous pedal steel breakdown, before catching the breeze again. Days Without You and Scorpio & Androzani are shorter, intimate songs, in the latter the synths seethe and the steel bows and bends as Leigh's voice falters above a Greek chorus of shadows and reflections. But this isn't autobiography, and Throne departs on Days Without You, a confrontationally unfinished romantic song, anxious with half-thoughts and missed connections. It glides into the night on stilettos leaving unanswered questions, in a fug of psychic disturbance and lovesick sensuality. Leigh's artwork (which she photographed and designed) is a visual mirror of the songs on Throne. It is an album of cosmic echoes, abstractions and introspection, of characters and stories that make up Leigh's first best pop record, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel.

Long overdue repress of Urpa i musell beutiful reisse of Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro's seminal 1990 album Mr. Wollogallu   Urpa i musell feels very fortunate to announce the reprint of its second release (reissued in 2018), the first ever vinyl reissue of Mr. Wollogallu, the collaboration album between Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro originally released in Portugal on União Lisboa, Produções Audiovisuais Lda. in 1991. The collaboration began when the manager António Cunha, a mutual friend of both musicians, brought the two together for a performance. Afterwards they decided to embark on Mr. Wollogallu. They had never worked together before, although their careers had parallels between them. Both were part of the 80s Portuguese pop-rock scene: Carlos Maria Trindade had played with Corpo Diplomático and Heróis do Mar, while Nuno Canavarro played in Street Kids and Delfins. Moreover, individually, Carlos Maria had released the single Princesa / Em Campo Aberto (Vimúsica, 1982), and Nuno had done the LP Plux Quba (Ama Romanta, 1988), now recognized worldwide for its uniqueness. The conception and recording of Mr. Wollogallu took quiet a long time. Both luminaries would convene in a home studio during the first half of 1990, brainstorming together with calm, care, and love. The sessions resulted in this collaborative record. Although the A side is credited to Carlos Maria and the B side to Nuno, everything was done hand in hand, each artist taking active part in the other’s side. After the release of the record and some live performances together, each musician set out on separate paths: Carlos Maria joined the internationally renowned band Madredeus, while Nuno concentrated on making music for documentaries and feature films. As such, this record is evidence of a unique, magical moment. When Mr. Wollogallu was released, it went mostly unnoticed; the public reaction was not as enthusiastic as one might expect. It was an ouvre ahead of its time, difficult, winding, and diffuse, one that would take years to become more widely accepted. After a second release on CD in 1996, the album was finally praised in an important article published January 2000 in the supplement Sons of the Portuguese newspaper Público, in which the influential music journalist Fernando Magalhães traced the history of Electronic music in Portugal –by then Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba had become more recognized worldwide, thanks to a 1998 reissue on Jim O’Rourke’s label Moikai. At the end of the article, Mr. Wollogallu appeared on a list of ten fundamental national Electronic records. Apart from the media’s contribution, word of mouth among music lovers around the world has also been crucial in amplifying the record’s fame and status. Carlos Maria and Nuno created everlasting music that contains an undeniable, enchanting mystery. Mr. Wollogallu features sophisticated, adventurous soundscapes that depict, in a manner both blurry and clear at the same time, ancient maps, distant travels and evocative landscapes, an alchemy of the acoustic and the electronic, created using techniques that were unusual at the time. The reissue includes the remastered album, with the original artwork and a new insert, in which Mia B. gives an insightful view of Mr. Wollogallu’s conception.

Before coming to Europe, in 1970, pianist Manuel Villarroel was a vet in his native Chilli. A few years later, as leader of the Machi Oul Big Band, he returned to the animal kingdom. A very specific kind of animal, for sure, the Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Feathered Serpent. What is behind this title (also the name of one of the three original compositions on this album released on the Palm label in 1976), is first and foremost a sort of homecoming… After discovering the jazz of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Villarroel was taken by the free jazz which was all the rage at the time in America and Europe, and this would inspire the first version of his Machi-Oul, project. This was a septet, with which the pianist would record, in 1971, the tremendous Terremoto (re-released by Souffle Continu FFL085). After this masterstroke Villarroel was invited to record with Perception (Perception & Friends) and with Baikida Carroll (Orange Fish Tears). While these were notable contributions, Villarroel was already looking into other combinations. “I had to deal personally with my situation as an expatriate, without disavowing it. I tried not to betray my roots, I tried to translate into my music what was essential to me, to reflect my origins – Latin America, its musical and above all human feelings – while remaining faithful to jazz, which is the mode of expression of the musicians in the group”. This then is the ‘homecoming’ we mentioned, which would incite Manuel Villarroel to compose what he would call “structured free music”. In January 1972 the pianist enlarged his formation to reach the size of a real big band: the Septet became the Machi-Oul Big Band. Three years later in January 1975, with producer Jef Gilson at the helm, fifteen musicians including those from the old Septet (Jef Sicard, François and Jean-Louis Méchali, Gérard Coppéré) worked on a rare form of jazz. From togetherness to dissonance, we danse to it “Bolerito” then shake it up on “Leyendas De Nahuelbuta”. As for the concluding serpent, it is a piece which is impossible to pin down: “Quetzalcoat” is as impressive as it is difficult to grasp. To remind ourselves of this, lets listen to it again.

Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa is an album of deeply exploratory pieces by legendary percussionist and composer Djalma Corrêa. This double-LP set features previously unreleased recordings that cover a wide range of sonic experiments, revealing an unknown side of the prolific and groundbreaking Brazilian artist. Most of the tracks on this album were digitized for the first time – directly from the original tapes – and were compiled in collaboration with Corrêa just before he passed. The result is a wild and unsettling collage that shows us just how original and intense Corrêa could be: from the unorthodox electroacoustic piece Evolução (Para Fita e Filme), which channels ancestral African inspirations to create a sonic cosmogonical narrative, to the proto-mixtape Exemplo de Sintetizadores, in which he transitions from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas. While the compilation might seem disjointed at first listen, it is in fact the most accurate translation or representation of his central concept: spontaneous music. Djalma's relationship with sound was always guided by his fearless approach to listening, and by his audacious and dynamic interaction with both musicians and equipment, which enabled him to work across a wide array of genres: from jazz to completely abstract music, always through a personal DIY ethic. Corrêa developed a strong bond with experimentalist and inventor Walter Smetak, with whom he shared a studio during his formative years at Universidade Federal da Bahia. Suite Contagotas, featured in this collection, is no less than a sonic materialization of that bond: an experiment revolving around dripping water and its randomness – a tentative exploration of the ideas and possibilities envisioned by Smetak for his audacious, albeit unrealized, Estúdio OVO. Djalma, however, is best known for his studio work in historical albums, including many by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben, and for his own polyrhythmic opus Baiafro. The last track is an early recording called Bossa 2000 dC, first performed by Djalma at the 1964 Nós, Por Exemplo concert, an event which is often cited as marking the beginning of the Tropicalia movement. At the time, he was the only artist in the lineup using electronic devices to create sounds, e.g. medical oscillators and contact mics to augment his percussive palette. The artwork is an amalgamation of material found in the Djalma Corrêa Archive (currently managed by his son Caetano Corrêa) and other material created during the period in which the record was being put together. The intention is to guide the listeners through this possibly tempestuous soundscape, giving them additional resources so that they may draw their own meanings and make their own sense of this extremely immersive and original experience – which is like nothing we've ever heard before.

L’Escalier des Aveugles, or The Stairway of the Blind, was commissioned in November 1990 by Spanish National Radio (Radio Nacional de España). Asked for a piece to premiere as part of the European Day of Music, Luc Ferrari returned with a radiophonic concept that organised his anecdotal music into montage form, sequencing short, elusive narratives in a successive way.The completed composition is formed of thirteen chapters containing a mixture of environmental and synthesised sound, commentary, chatter, and encounters with people and places. Each focuses on a small event within this playbook, and Ferrari notes that each “in addition to being a realistic photograph, will be the subject of a ‘setting to music’: fragments of voice and atmosphere will be sampled and will produce musical matter or a ‘song’.”The sonic language of Madrid forms the setting to which Ferrari lays out the persistent theme of the piece, that of the composer being guided throughout the city by a young woman. Using a game-like structure (liners for this edition include Ferrari’s “Regles de Jeu”, or “Rules of the Game” which act as a script or score to the piece) the motivation is posed: imagine that one day you are told “I know a place in Madrid that sounds amazing (or bizarre)”, to which you reply “Let’s go to it together.” The recordings toy with the relationships between guide and tourist, translator, director and actress, and masculine and feminine that emerge as Ferrari and the actresses follow this action, documenting the shared experience and connections they make as they visit these places.Six actresses guide Ferrari (and the listener) through locations simultaneously ordinary and sonically rich: the metro; the El Corte Inglés department store where we hear the gossip from changing rooms set against music emanating from the PA; vagabonds declaiming their political stance in the Conde de Barajas plaza; interactions buying apples in a market; the reverberant and spacious halls of the Prado Museum where one actress gives a moving description of her favourite painting - Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808.Ferrari replies in French to their comments in Spanish, and there are several self-referential plots, devices, and word games that flirt with the poetics and rhythm of language and sound. A recital of Lorca’s poem "La Casada Infiel" in “Hommage À Lorca” in amongst the location recordings feels striking, and the call and response of “La Nouvelle de L’Escalier”, where one of the actresses descends the staircase of the blind - a long stone stairway in Madrid proposed to Ferrari as an interesting location to visit during the trip by producer José Iges. She replies to Ferrari’s vocal enunciation of the place (and title) in French - L’Escalier des Aveugles - with the place-name in Spanish: La Escalera de los Ciegos.Using this repeated title and image of the staircase of the blind as a symbolic place, a line is drawn to a situational landscape experienced and diffused through snapshots and allusion rather than holistically overviewed, sound conjuring pictures within the imagination. In the sensorial qualities of Ferrari’s treatment of emotion and language—fortified with electro-acoustic motifs and musical properties—the piece accelerates towards a render that is truthful, beautiful, yet also surreal; somewhere between theatre and reality, a gonzo cinema of the ear.

Wonderful, previously unreleased recordings by Derek Bailey and his guests at Company Week in 1983. What's remarkable throughout this album is the respect and affection the musicians show for each other, exemplifying the dictionary definition of "company" as "the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment." It starts with "Landslide", a brilliant, spiky, spluttering, twanging reunion of Music Improvisation Company members Evan Parker (tenor sax), Hugh Davies (electronics), and Jamie Muir (percussion). Next up, "Seconde Choix", with Joëlle Léandre's close-miked prepared bass and Bailey's acoustic guitar seemingly heading in different directions before coming together miraculously in just four minutes. The opening of "First Choice", a duet between Bailey and Muir, is a revelation for those who moan that the guitarist plays too many notes. His patient and truly exquisite exploration of harmonics is beautifully counterpointed by Muir's metallic percussion. On "Pile Ou Face" (Heads Or Tails) Davies concentrates on his high register oscillators, carefully shadowed by Parker's soprano until Léandre's deft, springy pizzicato lures them into the playground. "JD In Paradise" is a surprisingly delicate wind quartet, with John Corbett's trumpet, fragile and Don Cherry-like, punctuating the sinuous interplay between Peter Brötzmann and J.D. Parran (on sopranos, flutes and clarinet), while trombonist Vinko Globokar growls approvingly in the background. Igor Stravinsky's magnificent definition of music as the jeu de notes comes to mind listening to Bailey's duet with cellist Ernst Reijseger (executing fiendish double-stopped harmonics with staggering ease). Technical virtuosity has never sounded so effortless -- it is, as its title "Een Plezierig Stukje" simply states, a fun piece. On the closing "La Horda", Bailey and Reijseger team up with the horns for what on paper looks like it could be rough and rowdy sextet but which turns out once more to be a thoughtful, spacious exchange of ideas, shapes, and colors.

"Since my childhood I have been interested in listening under water. That's exactly what we do every summer in Bern, when we dive into the river Aare. A universe of sounds opens up." Edition of 200 vinyl, all copies numbered and signed by the artist. His work explores the relationship between sound, silence and action in space. He studied music in Basel, Paris and Zuerich, with a concentration in experimental music and improvisation. Kobi performs and creates with various musicians, composers and artists in context of long term partnerships with artists such as Phill Niblock, Jürg Frey, Taku Sugimoto and Keith Rowe. Since 2004 he curates the „zoom in“ festival for improvised music at the Minster of Bern. Christian Kobi teaches improvisation at the Bern University of Arts (HKB).2004 Founder and artistic director of »zoom in«, a festival for improvised music at Berne Minster.

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC from the 16th June Tracklisting: 1. Potential - 22:50 2. Morning Star - 10:37     CD-R version comes in trigger case, with artwork printed on disc. No liners. Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

Sholto Dobie puts forth ‘23’ on Infant Tree, his debut solo LP. A wildly accomplished document of practice. After many years spent working with pipes and air, ‘23’ offers us his current developments. Recorded in a year in which the artist worked in Lithuania, Vietnam and Sweden, the record distills a broad approach to sound, using a wide net to gather recordings from performances, gatherings, walks and personal life. Sholto carefully leads the listener between distinct environments and the intimately documented network of compressed air, tubes, reeds, flutes and timers which he works with. In these recordings, life is welcomed in, interiors are heard and felt, obscured voices, insects, forests drift in and out of focus, as we are transported through an unfamiliar landscape.Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius, he performs with self-constructed wind instruments, using a frankenstein-like set up which has evolved over many years. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources - organs, bagpipes and khene - which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones. ‘23’ captures the rich world of pulses, beatings and breaths that have emerged from Sholto’s performance settings, whilst weaving them into a distinct and unique audio work.For anyone more familiar with Sholto’s work you will no doubt be warmed by recognisably delicate and evocative styles reminiscent of previous solo recordings such as ‘Nevery’ and ‘The Ringer’ as well as influences from friends and collaborators such as Judith Hamann, Malvern Brume, Ahti & Ahti, Rie Nakajima and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan.The 12” LP comes with beautifully matched artwork by Zoë Annesley and printed on reverse board, pressed by Monotype Pressing. Limited to 300 copies.

Michael Atherton is a writer, composer and educator from Sydney, Australia. Originally born in Liverpool, England, to Welsh-Irish and German parents, his family later migrated to Australia in 1965. Moving to the suburbs in La Perouse, he grew up in a mixed, multicultural community, where he fostered friendships with existing indigenous members and Iberian migrants. His formative migrant experience and his curiosity about vernacular, as well as notated music, led him to study music formally where he was attracted to ethnomusicology. From a self-taught guitarist to an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Michael’s recorded output spans many different genres and styles – he was a member of the Renaissance Players, an early music group; Sirocco, a pioneering cross-cultural folk group; and Southern Crossings, an innovative ethno-classical ensemble. By 1990, he had moved beyond his earlier musical endeavours, and away from Australia, with ‘Windshift’ seeing him draw on resources from the Asia-Pacific and Europe. With an impressive arsenal of instruments, such as the didjeridu, hurdy gurdy, kulintang, saron and jaw harp, to name but a few, Michael adds intense colour to the recordings using samplers, synths and modulating effects. Recently remastered by fellow Australian-based musician and engineer, Mikey Young, and visually re-imagined by Glasgow-based artist, Jamie Johnson, ‘Windshift’ is now presented once again by Infinite Expanse with a first-time reissue on vinyl.

* ltd to 400, black vinyl, color silkscreened jacket with obi (white, dark blue), inserts and a postcard * Je prie pour que la goutte ne tombe pas (I pray that the drop does not fall) is the first international release by Japanese trio Chi To Shizuku. While they have released five albums and a 7” in Japan, their spectral, haunted rock songs haven’t yet reached a much wider audience overseas. With this album, then, a live recording taken at Koenji HIGH, Suginami, Tokyo on 23rd November 2021, the unique, quartz-like character of Chi To Shizuku’s music is writ large, the bleak bliss of their songs carved onto twelve-inch vinyl.

Official Mr Bongo reissue. Replica original artwork, including the insert with listening instructions, in Spanish and English. A1. Culto Solar - In Altepetl Tonal / A2. Suite Al Culto Solar - Xochiyaoyoloh / A3. Suite Al Culto Solar - Ketzalkoatl Yauh Miktlan / B1. Ipan In Xiktli Metztli Luis Pérez was born in Mexico City on July 11, 1951. From 1971 onwards he dedicated much of his time to the research of the pre-Columbian instrumentation of Mesoamerica. This research allowed him to travel the Mexican territory and study musical traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. He learned directly from the living sources of the music and collected samples of musical instruments and the songs of different native speakers including Maya, Nahuatl, Mazateco, Yoemem, Comcaac, Raramuri, Wixarika and more. His personal collection of native Mexican instruments includes ethnographic instruments still in use by ethnic groups, along with archaeological artifacts some of which are more than 2,000 years old. He continuously utilises these instruments in performances, concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and recordings, keeping them alive. ‘El Ombligo de la Luna’ delves deep into the past but also exists entirely outside of time, as Luis Pérez ‘Ixoneztli’’s offering to the world – the soul of Mexico channeled through the hands and heart of a master musician.

Via Bridman comes The Numbers, the latest outing of Michael Morley's (The Dead C.) solo alter ego, Gate, the project's first LP since 2018. Glacial, distorted guitar fuzz and drones meet downer folk, this is the best of Morley doing what he does best. Highly recomended!

O’Rourke’s process – sourcing resonant sounds to enmesh together into a music that supersedes their resident parts – makes a fitting soundtrack for Kyle Armstrong’s “prairie gothic” tale of down-on-the-farm horror way up north in Canada. His minimalist score inhabits the wide open, big sky landscape, flowing into suddenly-deep (and opaque) emotional waters, then panning out to a chilly omniscient remove.