Noisy, chaotic, and defiantly experimental, Swell Maps may not have found commercial success in their time, but their impact on music is undeniable. An inspiration to bands such as R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement and Nirvana, with Kurt Cobain famously being a fan and often seen sporting a Swell Maps T-Shirt. A democracy within the confines of punk’s anything is possible, members Biggles Books, Jowe Head and brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks – helped shape the landscape of post-punk and DIY music. Now, for the first time in over 40 years, 'The John Peel Sessions' brings together all three of their recordings for John Peel, a figure instrumental in championing their sound.

Formed in the early ’70s and fully realised by 1976, Swell Maps embodied the DIY ethos, launching their own label and self-releasing the jagged, frenetic debut single ‘Read About Seymour’ in 1977. Peel was an early supporter, playing their record as soon as it landed on his desk – a moment the band described as one of disbelief and elation. His regular airplay of their music helped solidify their cult status, and these sessions capture the raw energy, off-kilter melodies, and boundary-pushing creativity that defined them.

'The John Peel Sessions' is a vital document of Swell Maps at their most unfiltered – three sessions of unpredictable, exhilarating noise.

TRACK LISTING

1. International Rescue - 16/10/78
2. Harmony in Your Bathroom - 16/10/78
3. Read About Seymour - 16/10/78
4. Another Song - 16/10/78
5. Full Moon / Blam!! / Full Moon (Reprise) - 16/10/78
6. Armadillo - 15/5/79
7. Vertical Slum / Forest Fire - 15/5/79
8. Midget Submarines - 15/5/79
9. Bandits One Five - 15/5/79
10. Big Empty Field - 18/3/80
11. Bleep And Booster Come Round For Tea / Secret Island - 18/3/80
12. Let's Buy a Bridge - 18/3/80
13. Helicopter Spies / A Raincoat's Room - 18/3/80

Long out of print, this limited reissue of 2023's groundbreaking Underground Rap hit, 'Maps', by billy woods & Kenny Segal features all new artwork.

For the first time since their epic 2019 album, 'Hiding Places', billy woods teams with Kenny Segal (producer) to bring us, 'Maps', billy woods' most accessible album to date. A-list features include: Danny Brown, Sam Herring (Future Islands), Aesop Rock, Elucid, Benjamin Booker, and more.

TRACK LISTING

1. Kenwood Speakers
2. Soft Landing
3. Soundcheck
4. Rapper Weed
5. Blue Smoke
6. Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams
7. Babylon by Bus
8. Year Zero ft Danny Brown
9. Hangman
10. Baby Steps
11. The Layover
12. FaceTime ft Samuel T. Herring
13. Agriculture
14. Houdini
15. Waiting Around
16. NYC Tapwater
17. As the Crow Flies

One of the first punk bands to set up an "indie" label, they were also pioneers of "alternative" music, mixing punk with experimental sounds. Swell Maps released four singles and two albums in a brief but eventful career, in partnership with Rough Trade, topping UK indie charts and influencing acts including Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Stereolab, and Blur. The original line-up split in 1980, but still their studio albums, 'A Trip to Marineville' and 'Jane From Occupied Europe', attract new generations of enthusiasts.

In 2021, Jowe organised performances with ten musicians to play a diverse selection of Maps material over two consecutive nights at London's Cafe Oto, and did it again at the Rough Trade launch for Jowe's book on Swell Maps in 2022. Concerts followed across the UK and Europe, with more planned. This ongoing project has resulted in a new studio album, 'C21', released through Tiny Global Productions. The material was composed at various times between 1979 and the present, including older songs never recorded professionally, a remake of Soundtracks' astonishing Jelly Babies and plenty of surprises.

'C21' offers memorable melodies, wild riffs with super hooks, yet never veers from their adventurous spirit, radical ideas and eccentric musical shapes. The current collective of musicians features: Jowe Head, David Callahan of Wolfhounds / Moonshake / solo fame, Jeff Bloom out from Television Personalities, Alternative TV's Lee McFadden, Lucie Rejchrtova (Crazy World Of Arthur Brown), Chloe Herington from chamber rock faves Chrome Hoof, and Luke Haines, who led Auteurs and Black Box Recorder and plays with REM's Peter Buck.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Morning Star
2. Foam Rubber Wedding
3. Vertical Take-Off And Landing
4. Crow Crow
5. Jelly Babies
6. From Head To Phones
7. Johnny Seven
8. HAK Utopia
9. Water Ev'rywhere
10. Saved By The Warts
11. Tele Visions
12. Au Rora

Swell Maps unveils the CD of The John Peel Sessions. This follows the release of the limited edition red vinyl for Record Store Day — remastered and available officially for the first time in over 40 years.

Noisy, chaotic, and defiantly experimental, Swell Maps may not have found commercial success in their time, but their impact on music is undeniable. An inspiration to bands such as R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement and Nirvana, with Kurt Cobain famously being a fan and often seen sporting a Swell Maps T-Shirt. A democracy within the confines of punk’s anything is possible, members Biggles Books, Jowe Head and brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks—helped shape the landscape of post-punk and DIY music. Now, for the first time in over 40 years, The John Peel Sessions brings together all three of their recordings for John Peel, a figure instrumental in championing their sound.

Formed in the early ’70s and fully realised by 1976, Swell Maps embodied the DIY ethos, launching their own label and self-releasing the jagged, frenetic debut single ‘Read About Seymour’ in 1977. Peel was an early supporter, playing their record as soon as it landed on his desk—a moment the band described as one of disbelief and elation. His regular airplay of their music helped solidify their cult status, and these sessions capture the raw energy, off-kilter melodies, and boundary-pushing creativity that defined them.

The John Peel Sessions is a vital document of Swell Maps at their most unfiltered—three sessions of unpredictable, exhilarating noise.

TRACK LISTING

1 International Rescue - 16/10/78
2 Harmony In Your Bathroom - 16/10/78
3 Read About Seymour - 16/10/78
4 Another Song - 16/10/78
5 Full Moon / Blam!! / Full Moon (Reprise) - 16/10/78
6 Armadillo - 15/5/79
7 Vertical Slum / Forest Fire - 15/5/79
8 Midget Submarines - 15/5/79
9 Bandits One Five - 15/5/79
10 Big Empty Field - 18/3/80
11 Bleep And Booster Come Round For Tea / Secret Island - 18/3/80
12 Let's Buy A Bridge - 18/3/80
13 Helicopter Spies / A Raincoat's Room - 18/3/80

Old Saw, the enigmatic New England collective led by Henry Birdsey (Tongue Depressor), return with their third long-playing record, Dissection Maps. It is not enough to trace the fields. The choreo-cartographic demands the casting of stone, a grassfire, a carnival; something with which to rupture the horizontality of existence and imagine the vertical.Earth is the eighth morning, folded against the week's work. The field is a line drawing of oblivion. The house is a forest in the shape of a womb. America is a quarry in the image of god.(Aidan Patrick Welby – 2024)

“The band captures the American stretch, the spaces in-between and the hollowness that haunts us along those routes…fades the radio to static to let the nothingness linger among the soul.” (Raven Sings the Blues) “ evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describes as “a rusted and granular shadow world where the dive bar meets the divine.” It recalls one of those junkyard shrines built by some sincere eccentric, improbably wonderful forms of weathered stone and scrap metal standing like totems to an unrecognised religion rooted in the earth around us.” (Various Small Flames).

TRACK LISTING

Sleeps With Dice
Singing Loom
Dealt In Silver
Revival Hearing
Measured Mile End
Last Rings

Mercury-nominated artist Maps, aka James Chapman, presents his fifth studio album, Counter Melodies.

Maps’ music has always embraced melancholia, but with Counter Melodies Chapman has produced an album of upbeat and uplifting dance tracks. The album is a new adventure through the familiar emotional terrain of the Maps sound, while also transporting you to more resolutely optimistic and hopeful places.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A near perfect collection of rave-influenced electronics, with a bright sidechained synth lines and saw wave stabs, underpinned with an intricate and dynamic percussive backdrop. It's a heady and hypnotic mix, and one that results in an album that sits somewhere between chilled home listening and dark dancefloor business. Really lovely.

TRACK LISTING

Witchy Feel
Heya Yaha
Thru Lights
Psyche
Windows Open
Transmission
Lack Of Sleep
Valentine
Fever Dream
My Love Is Like

An album crammed full of rare and unreleased tracks from the vaults of swell map founder Jowe Head. Swell Maps formed out of various bedrooms in the mid -70s and became the pioneers of DIY punk. 

Swell Maps founding members were Nikki Sudden, Epic Soundtracks, Jowe Head & Phones Sportsman

• Includes demo versions of 2 of the bands Singles “Dresden Style” & “Read about Seymour”. 

• Exclusive artwork originally designed by Epic Soundtracks & Jowe Head in 1977. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE 1: 1976-77
1/Intro/Sweet And Sour Extract
2/Almost Grown
3/City Boys (Dresden Style)
4/Sahara 5/One Of The Crowd
6/Wireless
7/Ripped And Torn
8/God Save The Queen
9/Platinum Blind
10/Harvist
11/Gramofonica

Side 2: 1977
12/Read About Seymour
13/Shubunkin
14/Trade Kingdom
15/Pets’ Corner
16/Fashion Cult (Opaque)
17/Plankton
18/Johnny Seven
19/Below Number One
20/Plumbing/Radio Ten/Here’s The Cupboard 21/Organism 22/Sweet And Sour Reprise

SIDE 3:1978-79
23/Vertical Slum
24/Avalanche Prelude
25/International Rescue
26/Deliferous Mistail
27/Armadillo
28/Avalanche Part 2
29/Off The Beach

SIDE FOUR
30/Drop In The Ocean
31/Whatever Happens Next (acoustic)
32/Elegia Pt.2
33/Bandits 1-5
34/Secret Choir
35/Big Cake Over America
36/Tibetan Bedsprings

This is the eighth Mapstation album Stefan Schneider has released since 2000. Hailing from Dusseldorf, the electronic music artist and producer finds inspiration in African and South American folklore, dub and, naturally, Krautrock, taking his time to process his responses in a consistently thoughtful manner, never resorting to cliche. He has also found time to pursue other projects in recent years, one with Electronic Music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius for example (2011).

Turning The Mind, recorded with Tim Holmes (Death in Vegas) at the Contino Rooms in London, is Maps’second album from 2009 and followed the release of Maps’ Mercury Prize shortlisted debut We Can Create in 2007. Includes the tracks ‘I Dream of Crystal’, ‘Die Happy, Die Smiling’ and ‘Valium In The Sunshine’

“The tracks for this album never seemed to stop flowing from the day I began working on them, it is a true statement of Maps' music at this precise moment.”James Chapman aka Mapsin 2009.

Maps has remixed Depeche Mode, Public Service Broadcasting, Susanne Sundfør, Moby, C Duncan, M83 and more.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Turning The Mind
A2 I Dream Of Crystal
A3 Let Go Of The Fear
A4 Valium In The Sunshine
B1 Papercuts
B2 Love Will Come
B3 Everything Is Shattering
B4 Nothing
C1 The Note (These Videos)
C2 Chemeleon
C3 Die Happy, Die Smiling
C4 Without You

A hugely ambitious, widescreen and epic record that recalls everything from the far away electronics of Basic Channel and Carl Craig, through the skewed songwriting of Postal Service, Flaming Lips and Grandaddy to the euphoric sound-scapes of Sigur Ros and My Bloody Valentine, We Can Create is a work of heart stopping extremes.

The album was recorded without computers, preferring the painstaking process of splicing sounds together on MAPS’ battered 16 track recorder in his Northamptonshire bedroom, the results were subsequently co-produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Bjork) and mixed by Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, Hope Of The States). The critically acclaimed album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2007.

Maps has remixed Depeche Mode, Public Service Broadcasting, Susanne Sundfør, Moby, C Duncan, M83 and more.

TRACK LISTING

A1 So Low, So High
A2 You Don’t Know Her Name
A3 Elouise
A4 It Will Find You
B1 Glory Verse
B2 Liquid Sugar
B3 To The Sky
B4 Back + Forth
C1 Lost My Soul
C2 Don’t Fear
C3 When You Leave

‘Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss.’ is a career-defining, ambitious album that sees the bedroom producer step out of the bedroom with his most collaborative project to date, including work with classical ensemble The Echo Collective, percussionists and guest vocalists from across the world.

These stunning, immersive and impressionistic songs, scored and produced by Maps himself, are inspired by an orchestral approach and by the rolling Northamptonshire countryside beyond the window of his studio, which provides peace, isolation and inspiration.

“I wanted to push everything to the limit with this record, and explore new territory for Maps. The orchestral instrumentation and addition of other musicians and singers played a huge part in finding the purer and more human emotion I was searching for. I learnt the violin as I was growing up, so I’m glad it finally came in useful!” (Maps)

Three years in the making, ‘Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss.’ is informed by the richness of life experience. It is an album he could only have made now and one that represents a creative reinvention for Maps.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Chapman has created his opus here, swinging from soaring anthemic rock to brittle shoegazing ambience in the blink of an eye, but bolseted throughout with a firm emphasis on driven percussion and shimmering synths to keep things moving forward in spectacular fashion. A shining and spine-tingling collection, an absolute career high.

TRACK LISTING

1 Surveil
2 Both Sides
3 Howl Around
4 Wildfire
5 Just Reflecting
6 She Sang To Me
7 Sophia
8 The Plans We Made
9 New Star
10 You Exist In Everything

Maps and Atlases Lightlessness Is Nothing New, their first since 2012s critically acclaimed Beware & Be Grateful, serves to foreshadow an emotionally and musically dynamic collection of songs that contemplates the jolt of loss and the strain of longing to music that, against our better judgment, makes us want to dance.

TRACK LISTING

The Fear 
Fall Apart
Ringing Bell
Violet Threaded
Fog And The Fall
Learn How To Swim
Super Bowl Sunday
War Dreams
4/25
Wrong Kind Of Magic