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

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2025 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 12TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 14th.

One of the very best ever Tribal Ambient Dub albums, originally released on the famous Australian Extreme label. Brilliantly new mastered, sounds way better than the original recordings.

For fans of early WARP, Muslimgauze, Future Sound Of London, The Orb, Rapoon and alike.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Eraser
2. Topology Of A Phantom City
3. The Velvet Horizon
4. Eating The First Map
5. Sacred Agents
6. Doubts About Waking
7. The Mutant Beautific
8. A Soul Reports
9. Dead Heart
10. Hallucinations (In Memory Of Renalso Arenas)
11. The Memory Of Water, Part One
12. All That Was Solid

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

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

Juju's third album Maps And Territory reaffirms and at the same time transcends Juju's unique formula. A blend of Neo-psychedelia and Mediterranean Folk, New Wave and African tribalism, the sound of Juju is now deconstructed, reassembled and expanded, even bordering Jazz territories with the contribution avant-garde composer and improviser Amy Denio. The album also featuring guest appearance by Goatman from Goat. The album is beautifully wrapped in the artwork of Marco Baldassari (one half of Sonic Jesus), where the liquidity and movement of the Mediterranean blue (the territory) is counterpoised to the soily colour of the ground (the map). 

TRACK LISTING

1) Master And Servants
2) I'm In Trance
3) Motherfucker Core
4) If You Will Fall
5) God Is A Rover
6) Archontes Take Control

‘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