In 'Cyano', Emily A. Sprague builds an intricate world, expanding a sonic register that is both familiar and viscerally new, reflecting the synthesist and composer’s internal register with mirrors to alternate realms. 'Cyano' was conjured through ideas of an imagined planet whose inhabitants are rebuilding forbidden capacities for expressivity and emotional connection. An arc of faithful gestures, 'Cyano' is meditation on visibility, psychic transformation, light transmission, and worlds beyond our knowing. It revels in configurations of connective possibility, where shadow and vision meet incisive truth.

In a pivotal moment of re-engaging film photography around 2019, Sprague became transfixed by cyanotypes and the work of Anna Atkins, a botanist and photographer who documented flowers through cyano methods. The emotional tenor of Atkins’ images sparked narrative threads of a character who lived on a faraway planet, ‘Cyano’—once like Earth—destroyed by misunderstanding and forced into a pseudo-mutuality that eschewed individuality for assimilated symbiosis. Through sensitive attempts, the Cyanic character reintroduces autonomous desire, empathic drive, and authentic expression to their world —part memory, grain, and symbol. Through 'Cyano', Sprague seeks to find a sonic and environmental palette for what this world felt like: familiar yet utterly foreign, sounds that might seem like piano or guitar, but not quite; a continuum that bridges various relational territories—with self, other, ecology, and life in a distant world. 'Cyano' yields an egress for conjuring expressivity, a tool to bridge understanding amidst spectacular and abrading textures of an evolving world.

Sprague’s musical approach is marked by a deeply personal atmosphere, rooted in unearthing histories of self and other—modes of intrapersonal and interpersonal connection—and the mercuriality of these attempts. Through intimate phenomenological exploration, 'Cyano' offers subtle and striking textures that embrace vulnerability. Studio recordings and performances alike serve as a vehicle for Sprague to connect meaningfully with listeners across time, tethered in emotional coherence despite disparate geographies. On 'Cyano', all sounds are synthesized, with no samples or acoustic instruments, and the record introduces singing into Sprague’s previously-instrumental personal, a bridging of wordless and lyrical music.

With more 'Cyano' composition in ideation, this album marks a first offering, intentionally primitive and minimal, a static-y transmission from the place very far away where it all resides. Sprague’s search for feeling, language, and sound brings new arrangement to psychic matter, life force running through a riparian garden into the sea. These tracks map feeling and place across the magnetic terrains of interior and conjured world, where knowing is mystery that breaks through to reality.

TRACK LISTING

1. Double Moon
2. Garden of Charms
3. Harmony in Your Hands
4. Inscription of Wind
5. Lava Surrounds
6. Listening Thru
7. Night Woven
8. Noon Liquid Ore
9. Rising
10. Sing To
11. Spiraling to the Place
12. Transfiguring
13. Under Tone
14. Weather Melody

A boundary-pushing musician and multi-media artist from Brooklyn, New York, Frances Chang disrupts accepted reality through her unique and enchanting compositions. Chang’s songs are an exercise in communication, probing the tension between idiosyncratic personal experience and the drive to understand, and be understood, through a collective language.

For 'I Can Feel The Waves', Chang’s new single and debut on RVNG Intl., a piano-centric melody is ornamented with primitive electronics and poetic vocals. The track boldly demonstrates Chang’s strength for unconventional yet contagious songwriting, and pioneers a genre the artist refers to as “slacker prog”: roomy and playful, offbeat and occasionally jarring, brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance.

The b-side, 'Marry', is a rollicking yet laid-back composition, with undaunted wobbly kicks bubbling under pianistic textures until a dialogue, acted out between Chang and Sylvia Gorelick, takes the foreground in the final moments of the track. As the instrumental carries its freewheeling pulse forward, the conversation, inspired by films like Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret and Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl!, along with Broken Social Scene’s 'Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl', turns toward the relationship between internal subjectivity and the external necessity of “staying small.”

Where is Frances headed from here? A piano is at the center, synths and strings swelling around its shoulders. A little less tension, a lot more production. Some shadows will be encountered, some forgotten skeletons unearthed. Music excavated from the subtler, deeper layers of cerebral and shared experiences. Music that is truly its own.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Can Feel The Waves
2. Marry

The music on Horse Lords’ 'Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!' feels both impossibly detailed and eminently human. The twelve pieces assembled are layered, interwoven, tonally and rhythmically complex––moiré-like patterns of interaction and tessellation that play out for both mind and body, full of sonic warrens with an inescapable groove. Artists aren’t necessarily scientists, logicians, or spiritual leaders, but through their personal understanding of order and experience, they provide experiential access to heightened states of both materiality and immateriality.

Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore in 2010; they evolved from another group called Teeth Mountain and began as a trio with guitarist Owen Gardner, bassist Max Eilbacher, drummer Sam Haberman, soon adding alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to the core ensemble. Though the quartet grew out of a fertile noise and experimental rock scene, a storied environment for artists and weirdos that has nurtured many an influential outsider band (Lungfish, Matmos), their approach across six albums, various collaborations and as a celebrated live act has been more omnivorous than the stippled rhythms of instrumental electric rock would indicate. For this outing, they are augmented by bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone, trombonist Weston Olencki, and in a first for Horse Lords, vocals courtesy Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor.

The process of constructing 'D2BT2HA!' involved geographic hurdles, as the unit’s four members have lived in different cities since 2021. Given sixteen years as a working band, their shared language transcends locale. German transplants Gardner, Eilbacher, and Bernstein met in Berlin for tracking sessions while Haberman put together drum parts in Baltimore. One would not necessarily know this from listening, nor is it rare these days to collectively create remotely. The band notes that “trusting each other’s concepts and visions was more important than repeatedly playing a section to see if the music worked, although this trust was only made possible through working very closely together.”

While 'D2BT2HA!' isn’t a suite per se, the music influences and interacts with itself in complex linkages. Horse Lords observe that “we like the idea of art as a tool for changing your perspective, being able to rotate ideas and see/hear/feel them from a different vantage point.” Or to use a phrase attributed to Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, “understanding is standing under where you are already standing.” The opening piece, 'Eureka 378-B', is an arrangement of 19th century sacred harp music, lead by Guo and Saylor’s vocals; its melody flowers outward, setting a tonal launching pad for much of the music that follows. There are the brief 'Rotations', which isolate fragments from other pieces; and “a transformation algorithm was used to structure the title track, ‘Brain of the Firm', and part of ‘Second Galactic Utopia'. This lends itself to a recursive approach where… the compositional scale becomes more ambiguous.”

There’s clearly a lot of weight in the language used to title pieces, and 'D2BTA2H!' is no exception––transcendence and uplift are inherent in the music’s operation and if all art is political, Horse Lords’ leanings are optimistic and community-centered. Transformation and re-viewing are not just a compositional strategy but a philosophical outlook, given such themes as 'A City Yet To Come', the title track, or utopic references. As they put it, “we try to make music that challenges the status quo and offers a path toward liberation for the listener. The study and exploration of sound and music has a spiritual and ecstatic dimension, and we have a great reverence for its impact on the individual and the world.”

The tension between striving for something beyond and what constitutes our lived reality is not lost, either, as 'After the Last Sky' draws from poet Mahmoud Darwish’s 'The Earth Is Closing in on Us', which “uses the Palestinian case to problematize our utopian quest, acknowledging that this rests on a sense of security that is out of reach for many.” There are numerous sonic and conceptual layers in 'D2BTA2H!', but given the music’s undeniable power and humanity, the process of unpacking them is enthusiastic and deeply rewarding. Rare indeed is the record that grabs one by the lapels yet lands utterly anew on each hearing.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eureka 378-B
2. Brain of the Firm
3. Rotation I
4. Playing and Reality
5. Rotation II
6. First Galactic Utopia
7. Rotation III
8. Before the Law
9. After the Last Sky
10. A City Yet to Come
11. Second Galactic Utopia
12. Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!

'Paradessence', Visible Cloaks’ third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album’s fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they’ve produced so far.

Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts: organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The album title itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar’s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence,” reflects these tensions directly: the paradessence of consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives rise to its desirability (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of 'Paradessence' brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.

Silence is an important character in 'Paradessence', felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s concept of “positive space,” an idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.

There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin 'Paradessence'. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. “Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments,” says Doran, “we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux.” Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.

The world Visible Cloaks have built over time is often rendered physical by collaborators, a familiar cast of whom return for 'Paradessence'. Motion Graphics (Joe Williams) makes an appearance on “synthetic woodwinds” and also co-mixed the album, contouring its shapes with his signature sheen. Interlinked pieces 'Shapes' and 'Thinking' were developed with environmental music innovators Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, who also worked with the duo on the intergenerational FRKWYS collaboration serenitatem. The latter piece features a spoken text written by Ojima, read in Japanese by Shibano and in French by composer and longtime friend Félicia Atkinson.

Componium Ensemble, Doran’s “indeterminate chamber music” project of self-playing software instruments, provides the infrastructure for 'System' in a moment of Pessoa-ian heteronymity. The album also features Ioana Șelaru, a Romanian composer and violinist who lends her voice and string playing to 'Intarsia'. Doran describes their collaboration as “an exercise in illusionary presence” which they jointly developed from “the idea of juxtaposing her real instrument playing with virtual instruments to blur the boundaries between synthetic string instruments and those existing in reality.”

Șelaru’s charged performance on 'Intarsia' is a clear demonstration of the dramatic core of 'Paradessence': an urgent sculptural undertaking, an instrument and a human voice modulated by a sea of synthetic growth. Doran describes how for him “this slippage between the real and the virtual captures something else entirely, something strange and ineffable that is an inherent aspect of life in digital modernity, both online and in real life.” It is electronic music which not only conjures an abstract representation of our current dream reality through its shifting forms but builds imagined spaces which are emotionally nuanced and rise to moments of grace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Apsis
2. Skylight
3. Disque (ft. Motion Graphics)
4. Balloon
5. Slippage
6. Zinna
7. Telescoping (Lockgroove Version)
8. Shapes (ft. Yoshio Ojima And Satsuki Shibano)
9. Thinking (ft. Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima And Satsuki Shibano)
10. Swirl
11. Steel
12. Intarsia (ft. Ioana Șelaru)
13. System (ft. Componium Ensemble)

In 'Library Copy Do Not Remove', Discovery Zone’s JJ Weihl presents a digital enchantment of reality, braiding together the material and non-material to reveal that they are, in fact, two aspects of one and the same thing. In Weihl’s world, Nature and technology are not enemies, but instead create each other in an infinite dance of meaning and reflection.

Originally created in spatial sound for the Zeiss- Groß Planetarium in Berlin, 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' is a creation mythology for the simulated universe. However, this is not some dry, Bostromian, masculine fantasy of a digital reality devoid of nature’s mysteries. Instead, Weihl insists that the listener allow space for the awesome reality of the natural world within the framework of a simulation. If our world is simulated, then the simulation has to be capable of creating the beauty and splendor of Nature. In this way, Weihl engages an ambient alchemy, calling for a grand reconciliation of Nature and the technological, while asking us to consider how and where the experience of transcendent human consciousness might exist between them.

Written while Weihl was simultaneously completing her sophomore album 'Quantum Web', the songs on 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' reflect an expansive, inspirational state of both excitement and anxiety at the task of composing music for such a unique space. The songs themselves were shaped through Ambisonics, a specific format of spatial audio that is directional instead of being channel-based (like stereo), and were transmitted through a mosaic of 49 speakers. Because it was written for live performance, 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' was never conceived as an album per se, but instead as a three-dimensional event. In this way the sonic staging mirrored how we perceive sound in our everyday lives: surrounding us from all directions. For this album release, Weihl mixed all of the songs again from the ground up with long time producer E/T, reimagining and reworking the constellation of tracks for a stereo experience.

Inspired by the work of James Gleick, LD Deutsch, Johannes Kepler and Jorges Luis Borges, 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' explores the creative tension between reality and perception, information and mythology, harmony and disorder. Throughout the album, Weihl asks how we as humans come to understand the universe around us and the underlying code which animates it. What emerges is a sonic mythos that tells of spiraling digital universes, each nested within each other, in which every participatory agent is both a part, and the whole, of reality, at once. In this way, 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' is a cyber- expression of perennial wisdom: instead of “as above, so below,” Weihl might suggest, “as with input, so with output.”

Each track on 'Library Copy Do Not Remove' reflects the larger themes in question. An audio representation of the Big Bang created by a physics professor is run through a vocoder, translating an astronomical origin story into a digital cosmogony: A universe born in a dial-up tone. Infinite libraries are conjured and reinforced by true mirrors and cosmic projections. Oceans of data create looped architectures that blur the line between the posthuman and the divine. Human consciousness reaches its upper limits, and then ascends even further. A tapestry of nature sounds is woven into an electronic field, infusing an aspect of intelligent hope back into the digital. A middle way opens up: natural, spiritual, technological.

All songs on the album were written by Weihl, and co-written and co-produced by Lucas Chantre. Timo Bittner, who designed and installed the spatial audio sound system at the Zeiss-Groß Planetarium, and his colleague Andrew Rahman, provided Weihl with tutorials and support on how to compose for the unique sound system, guiding her through the process of composing with Ambisonics. Bittner and Rahman arranged the material for live interpretation, while Rahman mixed the album in spatial audio for the 2023 performance, and for wider release in Dolby Atmos. 

'Library Copy Do Not Remove' tells an ancient secret in futuristic language: our perception of reality is the very thing that shapes it. Weihl reminds us that any understanding of Nature as a simulation must invert upon itself to recognize that even a simulated universe is contained within a larger Nature. And in much the same way, Weihl discloses that we too are catalogued, symbiotically, within a larger reality. Like copies within a library, mutually dependent on each other for our very existence.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big Bang
2. Dusk
3. Library Copy Do Not Remove
4. Habitat
5. Arp Angels
6. Castle in the Moon

In 'Osni the Flare', the second chapter of Tristan Allen’s mythic trilogy, finds the composer, producer, and puppeteer following a mortal’s transformation into deity through the discovery of fire. Recorded over four years using wordless vocals, organs, ocarinas, an arsenal of toy instruments, and intricate sound design, 'Osni the Flare' unfolds the origins of flame and temporality across four sonically and visually compelling acts. Weaving a creation myth that shifts between beauty, shadow, and wistful embers, Allen provides a portal to meticulously crafted, emotionally potent sound and story that echo through a fantastical realm.

Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, with early childhood memories from his family’s tenure in Japan, Allen’s path wound through formative encounters including teacher Andy Iorio, who encouraged improvisational techniques in the young musician’s burgeoning interest and prowess at the piano, and Amanda Palmer, who discovered them at 16 during a Berklee summer program and crowdfunded their first release. After studying piano at Berklee, co-founding the live-electronics collective Nue, touring China with metal band Dent, and releasing two solo-piano EPs, Allen fled Boston for Brooklyn in 2018.

A Craigslist ad led to puppetry training under Mike Leach, who spent six months teaching them to properly walk a marionette, leading to a position as a performer at the vaunted Puppetworks Theater. This rigorous work, combined with exposure to their father’s Bread and Puppet Theater artifacts and Balinese shadow puppetry, led Allen to their creative practice: composing for acoustic instruments, arranging electronically, and performing through puppetry.

'Osni the Flare' traces a creation myth following the titular character who awakens in a garden and picks apples from a tree. Beckoned by a Loon, Osni sets forth to safeguard the tree from winter’s chill. When the Loon is devoured by a Dragon, Osni ventures into its belly and discovers embers. In offering these embers to the tree, it catches flame—the origin of fire itself. Iso, god of the sea, intervenes with a flood that drowns Osni’s garden. In death, Osni’s soul enters the shadow realm to join Tin and Iso, becoming the deity of fire—'Osni the Flare'.

The album sounds more human and childlike than its predecessor, 'Tin Iso and The Dawn', shifting from the overseer perspective of deities to follow the first mortal character in Allen’s world. Underpinned by new love, the project channels feelings into music that becomes an enchantment all its own. Like Tin Iso, the album opens and closes with piano as a portal representing home, as Osni embarks across three realms: the land of the living, the in-between, and the beyond.

Recorded almost entirely with an Aston condenser mic in Allen’s Brooklyn apartment overlooking the Cypress Hills Cemetery, 'Osni the Flare' was built from toy piano and flutes, ocarinas, harmonium, pump organ, electric and upright bass, gadgets, and extensive collections of music boxes and bells. The vocal melody— inspired by partner Virginia Garcia Ruiz’s humming evoking Pan’s Labyrinth—was Allen’s first foray into voice, using wordless melody to allow listeners to remain protagonists. Flutes were meticulously recorded note by note from Balinese sulings, Chinese souvenir shop finds, and bird-shaped ocarinas. Music boxes were wound slowly, sampled individually, then rearranged and tuned to double Virginia’s humming. A dying Casio SK-1 with a blown-out speaker is paired with a harmonium to form chordal textures.

TRACK LISTING

1. Osni Opening
2. Act I: Garden
3. Act I: Loon
4. Act II: Dragon
5. Act II: Pyre
6. Act III: Umbra
7. Act III: Rite
8. Act IV: Flood
9. Act IV: Everglow
10. Osni Closing

Tender / Wading finds Matthew Sage, aka M. Sage, in the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing, recording, and returning to a patch of his homeland and identity, one act of sympathetic care informing the next. Constructed primarily on piano and clarinet, and then embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings captured around the perimeter of his home, the album is a sweeping, serene vision of vitality, radical softness, and the reassuring sense of coming home, even if home has changed. Since the early 2010s, Sage has assembled an idiosyncratic catalog of music that sprawls in various sound directions, manifesting with releases on Geographic North, Orange Milk, and Moon Glyph, and garnering both critical attention and a loyal listenership present for each new turn. In 2023, Sage debuted on RVNG Intl. with Paradise Crick, which coincided with his ongoing output within the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet, Fuubutsushi, and he now delivers his next solo endeavor and direction. Tender / Wading follows Sage’s return to Colorado after nearly a decade in Chicago, now nurturing a couple acres of neglected space with his young family thirty miles outside his hometown. In a holistic contrast to Crick’s synthetic sound-world, Sage renders art from the act of stewarding new growth, questioning constructs of domestic life, and understanding the footsteps of his former self through the dirt-smeared, sweat-fogged lens of the present. The yield is his most autobiographical material to date, marked by time and changes in perception and meaningful details from Sage’s psychic search.

Sage likens the sensation of seeing different versions of yourself to the famous rabbit-duck theory from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “It’s the same drawing, but depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are, some people see a rabbit and some people see a duck, or both,” Sage explains. Here is the subject and viewer, back in familiar landscapes, a partner and parent, cutting back brush, humbled by invasives, infestations, and compacted clay soil, his priorities vastly changed. And still, that other self is there too; a wily academic who often thinks in memes and feels the tug of a cell phone in his pocket. “This album is about feeling out those perception changes, giving them room to do both: to hop and quack.” It is an inner child that leads Sage’s intermedia practice in his studio, a pole barn converted during home-wide DIY renovations after the big move in 2022. Inside, poems become drawings become backyard sculptures and beyond, and silly excursions into birdsong or enjoying the challenge of learning the clarinet give way to serious music. “I think what I’ve discovered is that there are these lines that tie it all together,” he says. “And for this album, there’s a lot of stubborn optimism and hope in it, but also being present with this late-stage moment that we’re in and trying to deal with the rhetoric of it.”

For Tender / Wading, Sage deploys a distinct sound: a pastoral kind of folk Kosmiche, contemplative electro-acoustic barn jazz for the Front Range, brimming with pale puddle blues and rusted oil drum reds. Most songs began on a 1910 Hamilton upright piano, curiously built in Chicago, left behind by the previous owners and inhabited by mice. The chance encounter with the instrument felt cosmic, not just for its link to the Windy City, but also given Sage’s evolving approach to songwriting after Fuubutsushi. He’s become more comfortable behind the keys and getting back behind the drum kit (his teenage love), and within a fittingly woodwind space, embracing the elemental and intentional, giving the music more structural heft and warmth from the onset. Tender’s M. Sage synthesizes the studio experimentation and improvisation of his past with a sharpened ear for melodic phrasings and chord changes, culling his usual bounty of demos down to a tight final nine. His world-building signatures remain, from woodhouse toads swimming in static to rustling grass and rain piddling in the gutters to waltzing constellations under the moonlight. Where Crick’s universe was born from magical realism and digital fantasy, Tender / Wading cuts from the human experience more directly. He’s quick to push back on notions of it being a highly conceptual record; “I’m just making the music that I would want to be playing in my headphones while weeding or whatever.” It could be both, as the rabbit and duck would assert, deeply personal and abstract, a fascinating and natural turn from a twenty-first-century experimental artist whose legacy continues to shape and grow in real-time

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Garden Spot
A2. Witch Grass
A3. Chinook
A4. Wading The Plain
A5. Open Space Properties
B1. Telegraph Weed Waltz
B2. Fracking Starlite
B3. Field House Deer (Mice)
B4. Tender Of Land

'Taba' voices a subtle yet surprising shift for the Japanese musician and producer Satomimagae. Observing and absorbing the fleeting scenes and sounds of life flowing outside of her home studio, 'Taba' unfolds as a series of vignettes that document the personal and the universal. Satomi sings beyond herself in an orbit of souls and systems known and unknown, seen and unseen, in the present and in the strange flux of memory, leaving linear songwriting to rest for circuitous stories expanded and expansive in tone and texture

Following the logic of 'Taba', a Japanese term for a bunch, bundle or grouping together of different things, the album is assembled as a loose collection of short stories. Shapeshifting into something like a poet-narrator, Satomi casts her writer’s eye to the often perplexing shapes that form from quotidian events and exchanges defining our increasingly alienated age. Where Satomi’s last full-length, 2021’s, bloomed from the lush soil of a private inner sphere, the bird’s eye of Tabasearches to place the artist—somewhere, somehow—within a wider, wilder world.“I was thinking about how we see people as a group and individuals within a group,” Satomi says.“How groups are connected and how borders exist. The awareness that we are just one element in the collective (taba) and yet each individual’s invisible experiences and memories remain somewhere, influencing us, or society, without realizing it. We are small dots within a mass.

The first murmurs of Tabacan be heard surrounding Satomi’s song 'Dots', one of many shimmering points mapping the constellation of 2021’s 'Salutations' compilation on RVNG Intl. Drawn from a deep well of drafts that Satomi recorded to her iPhone during the early pandemic, 'Dots' was a wordless inner guide, ushering her down a shadowy yet still inviting path. Intrigued and inspired, Satomi held this feeling close, experimenting with new chords, rhythms, and tempos within these new creative surroundings. But it was another exchange with sound artistduenn, transmittedon their collaborative albumKyokai, that conjured the spirit of 'Taba'.

Kyokai’s theme of “something more than haiku but less than music” gave words to feeling, and activated an understanding that the sonic fragments Satomi was documenting were not simply unfinished sketches but potent formations. Setting aside her traditional folk song approach, and doing away with demos altogether, Satomi’s songwriting evolved into something closer to puzzling or patchworking with her cornerstone acoustic guitar and vocals connecting the pieces together into the imaginative arrangements heard throughout 'Taba'. Collaborations with other artists and musicians close to Satomi’s universe further elevate the sweeping sonics. Synthesizer lines from Norio, who also helps define the album’s visual identity through photo and video, enliven the tender ballad 'Kodama'.The bell-like Rhodes piano ringing in and around Satomi’s guitar on 'Dottsu' is played by Akhira Sano, who created the cover art for her 2021 'Colloid' EP.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ishi
2. Many
3. Tonbo
4. Horo Horo
5. Mushi Dance
6. Spells
7. Nami
8. Wakaranai
9. Dottsu
10. Kodama
11. Tent
12. Metallic Gold
13. Omajinai
14. Ghost

soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky is the debut album from multi-disciplinary British artist Wayne Phoenix. Originally conceived over a decade ago as one part of an elaborate project encompassing music, film, and performance, story the earth and sky is not only a profoundly personal and vulnerable expression unbound by Phoenix’s exploration of creative potential and mystery, but a bridge beyond the artificial boundaries that separate us all from an unfiltered voice within us all.

The impetus of this album formed around a musical improvisation that occurred in 2009 between Phoenix and Richard, a man who he was working with as a support client. Richard suffered from severe autism, and had been labeled as non-verbal. But as Wayne sat down to play the piano one day with Richard in the room, he was met with some surprising behavior. Richard began uttering some simple phrases over Wayne’s piano, his speech interplaying with the melancholic chords.

Moved, if not transformed, by the event, Phoenix began developing a vocal style in tune with our natural, unmanufactured voice as a means to accomplish boundless interconnectivity. He searched for “the voice of the child within, which has no concept of the world it inhabits, nor any means to navigate that world.”

This realization spurred a deeply creative period for the artist, spanning nearly fourteen years to date. Originally conceived as one part of a multimedia project, soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky, communicates the core of the artist’s creative intentions. Phoenix says that “all these works to date are the by-product of something else, which has manifested as music and has been spread over various artistic formats, not limited to any one specific discipline.”

Phoenix perpetuates this hazy aura of his work, stating “if it came to finding the converging principle that ties it all together, one could find oneself in a position similar to Rumi’s story of the elephant in the dark, in which each person felt a different part of the elephant and considered it to be the whole”

Mirroring this theme of subjectivity, the first half of story the earth and sky starts in abstract, words and thoughts left hanging in the ether. Phoenix’s broken, spoken word obscures itself in melodic white noise and distortion. As we reach the middle of the record, the smoky sound of the opening pieces begins to clear, making space for a melancholic yet musical manifestation of Phoenix’s work, that while still somewhat disarming, soars to higher heights. soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky focuses on the artist’s internal search and dissolves in the surrounding ambiance before eventually, and undeniably, arriving outside and beyond itself. A powerful, intentional debut from an artist determined to find and define a new form of expression.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Mood
A2. Alone
A3. Place
A4. Home
A5. ...and Sleepless Skies
A6. Burn False Messages
A7. I Gave You Power
A8. Reserve
A9. Death Is Pure Objectivity
B1. Latika’s Grace (it’s Not What You Go Through, It’s How You Go Through It)
B2. Gate
B3. Nightswim Feat. Run Rivers
B4. Cygnet
B5. The Light The Lamb
B6. One Man Island Feat. CrystalXulu

Mikael Seifu’s 'Zelalem' is an ode to - and a fearless break from - the storied lineage of Ethiopian music. The literal Amharic translation of Zelalem is “eternity,” and through Seifu’s conceptual frame it becomes a “vector of light.” Seifu shines this light on the music of his home country while guiding us through an uncharted “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” - a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa.

Illuminating the rich sounds of Addis-Ababa’s azmaris, Seifu’s music becomes a “dream brew” in which these traditional musicians collaborate and contribute vocals and lead voicings from folk instruments such as the Masenko and the Krar. Seifu was educated at the Lycée Guebre-Mariam in Addis-Ababa. The French academy’s international group of students was Seifu’s first exposure to a world outside Ethiopia; his second was at Ramapo College in suburban New Jersey.

Here Seifu met a mentor in Ben Neill, the composer and music technologist who trained with La Monte Young. Seifu was inspired by Neil to take serious his calling in music. A calling of a different, spiritual nature brought Mikael back to Ethiopia. As a repatriated young man in Addis-Ababa, Seifu felt a renewed sense of allegiance to his home country and allowed its ubiquitous music to guide his creations. Seifu’s early work was shared across a string of EPs for stalwart Washington DC imprint 1432 R, demonstrating an interplay of regional folk music and international electronic music. Mikael’s music does not westernize or electronicize extant Ethiopian music. Instead, Seifu uses Ethio-jazz’s spirit of brewing estranged styles for his own musical tincturing. Seifu’s passion above all else is to create something befitting of its time, yet “eternally Ethiopian.” The latter phrase was the mantra guiding Seifu through the creation of Zelalem, and a source of inspiration for the cover artwork. Zelalem spotlights the music of Ethiopia’s past as well its future. Mikael Seifu illustrates the potential for reinterpreting sacred and proud sources through energized palettes. His latest effort heralds the future of this new music and signals the genesis of Ethiopian Electronic, where the known and unknown commune.

TRACK LISTING

1.The Protectors
2.The Solipsist
3. Soul Manifest (Mikael Seifu Feat. LA)
4. How To Save A Life (Vector Of Eternity)
5. ዘላለም (Vector Of Light)