Japanese experimental sound artist Kent Watari debuts on Phantom Limb with new album 'Subtraction in Spiral', coding deep sonics to quantum-percussion and collapsing, post-IDM glitchscapes based on a meticulously constructed metaphysical thought experiment.

“This work is centred around a very personal philosophical model,” writes Kent Katari (b. Tokyo, 1993). “I have constructed a metaphysical model of thought, employing concepts from philosophy and science. This thought model centres on a recursive structure. The infinite is compressed into the finite world of reality, beginning with a scene where “something happens or has happened”. Thought then unfolds through every possible development before scattering once more into the infinite beyond. Then, it returns once more to the juncture where “something happens or has happened”.

With this deep conceptual investment in their compositional work, Watari employs information-overload polyrhythm and nano-particles of electrical impulse to mimic minute neuro-existential events. New album 'Subtraction in Spiral' is the result of months of developmental practice, echoing a thought cluster stretched out into a compositional narrative. Its sound design crackles with percussive clamour and reverberates in soft granulation across a tour of metaphysical chambers, sometimes intense and at others dreamy.

Key moment 'Nervefield Flickering' feels abstracted from the tangible in its complex matrix of interlaced simulacra. A metaphysical landscape machine-drawn from synaptic impulses and fragments of sonic imagery half-remembered from real life. An unexpectedly sonorous arpeggio eventually zones into the space, relentlessly pursued by a battering shudder that crushes every frequency into square wave discord. The piece is about the evolution of personal identity, both emotionally and structurally. “In my thought model, after something occurs, the world first acquires a foundation of matter. Then, when that matter forms a system open to the external environment, the mechanisms of life emerge within it.”

The bouncing ball of 'First Sediment' does not belong to Bucephalus, but to an artificial construct that leaves a trail of neon plasma about a dense negative space, as if an entire MRI laboratory has been bitcrushed into a black hole. Watari’s invitation to follow it through the tunnel gives us a breathless perception of infinity, reality, and real-time epistemology. “Our perception contains what are called 'qualia' – pre-verbal 'feelings'. When we see the colour red, we possess no means to describe that 'redness itself'. I wonder if qualia might be the 'leftovers' that couldn't be contained when the world's infinity was compressed into the finiteness of perception,” they write.

Kent Watari is a musician based in Tokyo, Japan. Their primary activities centre on composition, arrangement, production, and drumming. Their key works include advertising music, the soundtrack for the anime LINK CLICK, and collaborations with singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura and guitarist Ichika Nito. As a drummer, watari has also participated in projects including the contemporary pop band Tokyo Shiokouji and the solo project of arauchi yu. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Critical Point
2. First Sediment
3. Nervefield Flickering
4. The Morning Chimes Ring Out
5. I Saw The Ghost
6. The Experience Of Margin
7. On The Subway
8. Protoflux

Debuting UK-US experimental black metal trio Qasu join Phantom Limb for inaugural album 'A Bleak King Cometh', a crushing and terrifying self-described “ancient future black metal” that swallows elements of blackened psychedelia, occultist techno, and tripped-out sound design.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Bitter Waters Of The Abyssal Sea
2. Jewels Where The Eyes Once Were
3. Death Dreams
4. They Drag Unfortunate Mortals
5. Faith In Violence
6. The Long Knives Of The King
7. An Orchard Of Bone Flues

Brighton’s vital auteur-songwriter Milo Korbenski returns with new album Sex Angel, a masterfully crafted suite of slacker-dream-pop whose depth belies its irresistible and addictive earworming.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Good Lickin'
A2. Sex Angel
A3. Demi Mure
A4. The Kids In Six
A5. Pine Spirit
B1. Six Angle
B2. Bedrock
B3. Ratworm
B4. Mahalo    
B5. Gone Fishn
B6. Yeah, Nice

Japan’s cult, half-forgotten goldmine DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time (from 1980 to 1985), they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their social and creative circles.

Each of their cassette releases came with abstract, xerographic artwork, often created by the musician themselves, while the label’s recorded output encompassed avant-punk, Cubist ambient music, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and anything else their roster cared to throw at them. Housed in sleeves of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more, these records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades.

Two facets of DD. Records shine through even this unique story: firstly, they were friends. Founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada formed the label alone, but it wasn’t long before he was joined by like-minded allies T. [Teruo] Nakamura, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu, K. [Keiichi] Usami, and T. [Takafumi] Isotani, among a few others. All were contributors to Kamada’s tape-trading network The Recycle Circle, formed at the University of Yamanashi, most of its members at the time around 20 years old. Their bond was a love of exploratory sounds and a hunger for deeper excavations into the tunnels and caves of experimental music. “An independent, private circle where members who owned expensive records or rare imported vinyl with limited distribution could send a cassette tape and a return postage stamp to dub the record back to each other for free,” Usami explains, in interview with Jon Dale for Bandcamp Daily.

Secondly, the aforementioned cassettes remained almost entirely unavailable to the world outside Japan, with only a single US retailer engaged to carry the releases. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.” A German archivist, Jorg Öpitz, is primarily (and almost exclusively) responsible for the entire English-language directory of the label’s output, cataloguing online surviving and lost cassettes with completist dedication. Largely autodidactic and almost always hermetic, this company of hobbyist and amateur (and in many cases, totally untrained) musicians rarely performed live. Many of them collaborated remotely, sending home-recorded tapes and collaged artwork in the post. “[We were] isolated from the rest of the [Japanese] indie movement,” Usami remembers. Strangely, and sadly for many, Tadashi Kamada has completely retired from public view. According to one-time collaborators, it is likely he is unaware of the cult following his label has garnered over the decades. Some sources point to a successful career in consumer electronics, a family, and a contented indifference to his early experiments in record label curation. But no-one seems certain about these details, none of which has harmed the image of a label that revels in mythmaking. An artefact left behind was Disk Musik.

Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl was rare. Only a handful of Kamada titles - presumably self-funded - were released on vinyl, right at the start of the label’s life, and it is not until 1985 and Disk Musik that the format reemerges. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices. There are endless and curious gems within. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Circadian Rhythm - Shela
2. Kum - One Day With Kakusuko
3. 10T - Israel
4. Abnormal Sex - NHK
5. T. Isotani - 1/2 Orange
6. Mask - In And Out
7. Mosque Of Torment - Ceramic Dance
8. T. Tukimoto - Did The Thought Of Love Surpass Everything?
9. T. Kamada - Muzikapart
10. Y. Tabata - Summer Initiation
11. Cat Dog - Grain
12. Young Hormones - Egg
13. K. Usami - Soma Illusion

Acclaimed Baltimore experimental hip-hop duo Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals return with vital new album 'A City Drowned in God's Black Tears', an incendiary, irresistible rap record that marries unflinching discourse with bold and unpredictable production. Last LP was AOTY in various outlets inc. Spin, Loud & Quiet, and others, and sold out in record time.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Iron Wall
2. Live At The Chinese Buffett
3. A City Drowning. God's Black Tears
4 BAGGY
5. Soft Pack Shorty
6. Тревога/Trevoga
7. Sometimes, Papi Chulo
8. Everyone I Love Is Depressed
9. Two Headed Buffalo
10. Foggy

Acclaimed Icelandic theremin musician Hekla returns with 'Turnar', her third album of devastatingly heavy, spectral soundscape-songwriting, entering a sublime paranormal plane of haunting dread.

Now augmenting her virtuosic solo theremin work with cello, voice, and the sacred church organ of Icelandic master Kristján Hrannar, the evolution of Hekla’s unique magic summons new worlds with 'Turnar'. The album was recorded partly in (and named after) a medieval castle tower in rural France, its ruinous black broken in spare beams of angelic stained-glass light. But, writes Hekla, “the sound of theremin kind of opens up a portal into a new realm that both looks into a dark old world and to the future.” The record is an alternately beautiful and crushing space voyage into a glacial underworld cascading with phosphorescence and cave drip, conjuring ancient choral ritual just as readily as redolent sci-fi gloam.

Opener 'Inni' begins with swooning and shimmering lines of theremin that shiver with electrified energy before subfrequency bass elevates them into a glowing plasma, hovering above a crystallised surf. Key moment 'Gráminn' wails with ghostly harmonics while distorted drones crash together in a stormy and blackened netherworld sea. It traces a neat progression from Hekla’s last album - the acclaimed Xiuxiuejar - while also welcoming an expanded timbral palette and flourishing compositional confidence. At the end of side A, 'Var' delicately places sonic artefacts about a desolate negative space, creating a dense inverse gravity. As with the rest of the record, a claustrophobic gauze hangs over music that could otherwise be called subverted songwriting, aligning Hekla’s sonics with avant-garde, musique concréte and sound-art. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Inni
2. Kyrrð
3. Ókyrrð
4. Var
5. Í Ösku Og Eldi
6. Ólga
7. Gráminn
8. Flækjur

Vital NYC experimental solo artist OHYUNG explores their own gender transition with arresting new album of trip-hop laced, rave-inspired electronic songwriting 'You Are Always On My Mind'.

Lia Ouyang Rusli describes their new album as OHYUNG as “my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives.” The record represents their lengthy, complicated, but crucial journey between lives, strewn with both doubt and excitement. It is an ecstatic, pop-oriented shift in direction from an artist primarily known for noise, experimental hip-hop, and ambient music, but carried with sleek confidence, maturity, and a silvery, hallucinogenic shimmer that reveals Rusli’s experimental background. It is, writes Rusli, “sometimes written from a dark place and other times from a place of happiness.” Throughout, darkness and light rise and fall in layers of phased strings, trip-hop drum production, and earworming vocal lines.

Also a film score composer, Rusli’s songwriting craft is meticulous and nuanced. 'You Are Always On My Mind' was, perhaps surprisingly, formed primarily from processed “generic string loops” found in online sample packs - a strange and wilfully jarring reminder that what seems to be is not always what is. Recontextualised, these string loops enshadow the simplicity of their origins and reveal a grace and purposefulness perhaps not even imagined by their authors, subtly drawing out euphoria and tension in equal balance.

Rusli also writes of the influence of rave culture central to their transition, and of the record’s production and theme. “It’s a declaration of love for raves and the dark hazy rooms that helped me to be free and true with myself— seeing other people who are so free and beautiful and thinking that one day that can be me— that’s me in the future.” But there is also a fear and unease present. Key moment “no good” explores “the worst version of myself as a trans person, feeding doubt to my pre-transition self” with its core lyric anyone can see / I’m no good for you, delivered over a relentless beat, swooning strings, and glistening synthesis.

TRACK LISTING

1. You Are Always On My Mind
2. No Good
3. Dog Medicine
4. I Swear That I Could Die Rn
5. 5 Strings {lake} Ft. J. Fisher
6. Crush
7. Dancing On The Soft Knife
8. Im Holding Close The Memory Fades
9. Id Rather Be A Ghost By Your Side Than Enter Heaven Without You
10. Years Ago
11. Im Coming Towards You