Bristol label-turned-blog Innate launches a new sub-label, Innate Editions, which it says is dedicated to timeless UK techno, IDM, electro and ambient music, and it will all come on heavyweight vinyl. The first release revives Connective Zone's Palm Palm, a millennium-era cult classic and Ben UFO favourite that first came out on Mark Broom and Dave Hill's Unexplored Beats in 2001. Now, this long-out-of-print, expensive and hard to find gem has been remastered by Jamie Anderson and so sounds superb with many lavish electronic layers, richly emotive melodies and dynamic drums that lean on UK techno, IDM, and deep electro. Sounds as good now as it ever did.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Palm Palm
2. Palm Palm (Broom & Hill Remix)

Side 2
1. Function
2. Returned

Love International and Test Pressing commemorate yet another cracking festival with the latest instalment in their collaborative compilation series for their LIXTP label. For The Sound Of Love International #006 they’ve chosen Jay Donaldson aka Palms Trax as their selector. He’s a regular at Love International.

The Berlin-based DJ, known for his eclectic sets and long-running NTS show "Cooking With Palms Trax," delivers a diverse selection of tracks gathered from his global journeys.

The album opens with Linda Waterfall’s Clarity. A fabulous flight of late 1970s spiritual jazz-influenced folk from the late Seattle-based singer / songwriter, who released her debut on Windham Hill.

Sebastian’s Follow My Heart is a soulful soft rocker, a sax-y seduction theme.

On Did It Have To Be Me, glorious gospel choir-like backing lifts Frank E. Jeffries Jr.’s cool croon, and the spirits of anyone lucky enough to be listening.

Two tracks travel from `90s South Africa. El Pedro’s La Luna is a pumping piece of S.A. bubblegum. Novidade’s Masingita features great guitar picking and warm, welcoming group vocals.

Dieta Berliner & Jean Baptiste’s Paula & Kaspar transports us back to Berlin and forwards to 2012. A B-side secret weapon from Dieta’s short-lived Pakalolo City Records.

Culled from a cult Canadian 45 Angelo Mallia’s Hideaway is cute, catchy tumbling TR-808- driven synth-pop.

A piece of plugged-in Belgian `80s prog-rock, Zardoz’s brilliant Brasilia Drums pits its titular percussion against big cosmic synths, and segues into a new age-y journey.

Danish keyboard virtuoso Gert Thrue shows off his chops on I Play The Body Electronic. Feeding everything through psychedelic phasing effects, and overdubbing some fab Fender Rhodes

In Trance 95 might be one of the better known acts here, since the Athens-based duo’s work has been collected on Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave, and in the 2010s they also supported Depeche Mode. Their 1991 single, Warm Nights Driving On Wet Streets, is chunky chill out room gear.

Frenchman Alain Salvati is behind Flayer’s Wanna Get Back Your Love, which first appeared in 1983, oddly on an Italian 12. Rediscovered at the turn of the millennium it’s become a bona fide modern Balearic anthem.

The closing cut, Jeancky’s Variations Sur Protestation, kind of brings the album, musically, full circle. Returning to the late `70s with campfire congas, bongos, and gentle acoustic strumming.

The majority of the tracks included were self-released / privately pressed and in many cases the often mysterious artists’ only recorded outings. So, in putting this together Palms Trax has unearthed hidden gems, creating a magical, floor-filling journey through music.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Linda Waterfall - Clarity
A2. Sebastian - Follow My Heart
A3. Frank E Jeffries Jr - Did It Have To Be Me
B1. El Pedro - La Luna
B2. Novidade - Masingita
B3. Dieta Berliner Feat. Jean Baptiste - Paula & Kaspar (Club Mix)
C1. Angelo Mallia - Hideaway
C2. Zardoz - Brasilia Drums
C3. Gert Thrue - I Play The Body Electronic
D1. In Trance 95 - Warm Nights Driving On Wet Streets
D2. Flayer - Wanna Get Back Your Love
D3. Jeancky - Variations Sur Protestation

Nai Palm releases this deluxe reissue of ‘Needle Paw’ via Brainfeeder Records.

Naomi ‘Nai Palm’ Saalfield is the composer, guitarist and tour de force frontwoman of three time Grammynominated group Hiatus Kaiyote.

Nai and her group have been co-signed by Erykah Badu, accompanied by Q-Tip, and sampled by Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Anderson .Paak.

Upon its original release in 2017, Pitchfork gave ‘Needle Paw’ an 8.0, saying of Nai, “her performance as vocalist, producer, arranger, and musical director confirms her talents - and, in her interpretive care, reaffirms listening as an act of love.”

For fans of Erykah Badu, Moses Sumney, Little Dragon, Jordan Rakei, Nick Hakim.

“On her solo debut, Nai Palm abandons her band Hiatus Kaiyote’s expansive future-soul aesthetic in favor of acoustic intimacy; it is, above all, a testament to the power of the voice.” - Pitchfork (8.0).

“‘Needle Paw’ is a sea of vowel runs and stressed syllables, interwoven throughout angelic backing vocals and gospel-like notes.” - Billboard.

TRACK LISTING

Wititj (Lightning Snake) Pt 1
Atari
Crossfire / So Into You
Haiku
Mobius
Molasses
Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)
Atoll
When The Knife
Blackstar / Pyramid Song / Breathing Underwater
Borderline With My Atoms
Homebody
Wititj (Lightning Snake) Pt 2

“The brash clangor of pre-SST Sonic Youth, the tricky time signatures of math rock demigods Battles and the wonky iridescence of Deerhoof and tUnE-yArDs (the latter two have shared producer Eli Crews with Palm). - Pitchfork 'Shadow Expert EP' review.

“Palm’s unpredictable songs prove there’s still room for boundary-pushing in rock” FADER.

On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.

Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.

Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.

Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.

This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak’s album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.

TRACK LISTING

1 Pearly
2 Composite
3 Dog Milk
4 Forced Hand
5 Theme From Rock Island
6 Bread
7 Colour Code
8 Swimmer
9 Heavy Lifting 

In the midst of the music industry crisis art student Norman Palm had an idea: Why not visualize the rough recordings he had made between Paris and Berlin, produce a 200-page artbook with a cd and throw it on the collapsing market via his own DIY-record label? Sometimes it seems one has to ignore all golden rules to make something work: Norman Palm's book did not only sell pretty well, soon he was also invited to play live shows all over Europe such as the renowned Austrian art festival Steirischer Herbst and Haldern festival where he played along with bands such as Fleet Foxes and Yeasayer. He played at countless art events, sang next to Jane Birkin in a Parisian radio studio, was hyped by music magazines such as Stereogum, got filmed by french Blogotheque and eventually even found himself featured on the world's most visited blog run by Hollywood gossip boy Perez Hilton. Norman Palm got around.

Norman Palm also gets around because he decided not to live his life at one place only. Taking the adventures of a long-distance relationship to a not always easy level he practically commutes between Berlin and Mexico City. Enough exercise for body and soul to make contacts, get inspired and write new songs.

While Norman Palm's DIY-debut was a loose collection of songs, "Shore to Shore" is a homogenic piece and a musical quantum leap! Palm gets rid of his singer-songwriter image, irony and shyness of his debut have vanished. "Shore to Shore" is pop and love-long-distance set to music. Start/Stop, the album's overture brings together what is later split up into its parts: Ukulele, electronic beats, crazy choirs, African vs. technoid vibes, warm vs. synthetic. Above all floats Palm's distinctive voice. In Smile Palm sets foot into the american indie-terrain normally conquered by the likes of Wilco, he designs a 2.0 version of Paul Simon's Graceland with Images, flirts with Beck and the Beta Band in Landslide and spins out of $20 with an extensive Krautrock steelpan synth loop. Easy, virtually the title track of the album and a lyrical centrepiece ("Let's all be friends with the telephone calls / Let's all be friends with the departure halls") layers voices, basslines and synthesizers thus providing a perfect soundtrack for an early morning after clubbing. It's almost like listening to the radio, only that radio stations of such quality are hard to find!

Norman sings about love and how it interferes with life. About distance and closeness, about intimacy and strangeness, about missing and losing, love in a digitalized and globalized design of life. Doing that he avoids kitsch and cliché, writes poetry without being corny, makes himself clear, honestly and humble, never awkward, never bigger-than-life. Palm throws his very personal and his musical influences into a pot, cooks his own soup and puts it right on the table of international contemporary pop culture.

TRACK LISTING

01. Start/Stop
02. Smile
03. Images
04. Landslide
05. $ 20
06. WDYD?
07. Easy
08. Sleeper
09. Phantom Lover
10. Go To Sleep

Soundtrack album to the eagerly-awaited history of scratching documentary "Scratch". Mixing dialogue from the film - Theodore on how he first invented scratching, MixMaster Mike, Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow, Jazzy Jay, Bambaataa, Q-Bert... with exclusive live tracks from the film - DJ Krush, Mike & Disk, Faust and recent scratch bombs - the new version of "Rockit", X-Ecutioners "Primo's X-Ecution", not to mention classics like Skratch Piklz vintage team routine "Invasion Of The Octopus People". Can't wait for the movie!