Celebrating the 30th anniversary of its original release, Night Song returns in a special edition on rose leaf green coloured vinyl. A Grammy Award nominee, the album captures the extraordinary meeting of the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Canadian guitarist, producer and composer Michael Brook, whose atmospheric soundscapes provide the perfect setting for Nusrat's ecstatic, transcendent vocals. 

With Nusrat's legacy continuing to reach new audiences following the landmark 2024 release of the unearthed archive recording Chain of Light, Night Song remains one of the defining cross-cultural collaborations of its era. This anniversary edition includes a printed inner sleeve with updated liner notes and photographs.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
My Heart My Life
Intoxicated
Lament
My Comfort Remains

SIDE B
Longing
Sweet Pain
Night Song
Crest

‘Echo’ is likely Sheila Chandra’s final album. A collection of live performances, the title loosely references the nymph of Greek myth who lost her voice – just as Chandra did 15 years ago. 

A shy and infrequent live performer in her time, and very much aware that so many of her fans were disappointed never to have seen her in concert, Chandra has put together this collection of recordings to give them a taste of what her breathtaking virtuoso solo voice performances were like.

It’s a set drawn from an extensive search for every concert, TV or radio session recording that Chandra ever made. From these she has picked the finest performances of her songs, drawn largely from the first two albums of her 90s solo-voice-and-drone trilogy, which was reissued on vinyl on its 30th anniversary, in 2023. Other additions here include two songs from her fifth solo album ‘Roots and Wings’ where she was refining the techniques she would later come to use on ‘Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices’, and ‘The Zen Kiss’ - and a final track drawn from her appearances during the first ‘Imagined Village’ tour in 2007. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Speaking in Tongues III (Live)
2. Ever So Lonely/Eyes/Ocean (Live)
3. Dhyana and Donalogue (Live)
4. The Enchantment (Live)
5. Waiting (Live)6. Speaking in Tongues II (Live)
7. Lament of McCrimmon/Song of the Banshee (Live)
8. Mecca (Live)
9. Sacred Stones (Live)
10. The Blacksmith (Live)

'The Endless Dance' is the first collaborative album from Northern Irish producer and composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The record is grounded in the strength of ancient concepts, but comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, Peel and Wang travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion.

The album is collaged together from recordings made over five days at legendary rural studio Real World, a setting which aligned with the duo’s inspiration from the natural world creating a permanent record of their shared musical landscape, informed by the flora and fauna that emerge and retreat through the seasons. 

Both genre-defying, storied artists in their own right, Peel and Wang met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON and 'The Endless Dance' certainly represents a step-change from the duo’s shared classical backgrounds – but their knowledge and training is also the foundation of its freewheeling audacity, giving them the confidence to trust their instincts.

The album is produced by Mike Lindsay [LUMP, Tunng, Guy Garvey, Jon Hopkins] who, with free rein, brings added energy and creativity to the album, whilst Peel & Wang are also joined by Hyelim Kim on Daegeum, a Korean flute with “colourful overtones on every note”. 

Track to track, 'The Endless Dance' is unpredictable and unexpected, which is in part due to the genuine curiosity and outside perspectives that each player brought to the sessions. “I am so familiar with Chinese heritage, but I don't see how it can present in electronics, for instance,” says Wang. “Hannah comes in with that direction, to imagine what the sounds could be together.” The characterful richness of the album stems from the commonalities they found in the sessions. “We both come from cultures where story is really important,” explains Peel. “The attention to detail comes from telling a story, and one note can set that off in a different direction.” 

'The Endless Dance' is a major work from two accomplished, singular artists - but it’s also the sound of mutual curiosity and shared fun, or as Wang puts it: “Two women talking in totally different language that had a wonderful chat.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A wonderfully evocative album, forged through a mutual understanding and collaborative chemistry that you dont often hear. Peel's powerful electronic core and jagged, glitched melodies are bolstered by the thundering percussive power of the myriad instruments of Chinese percussionist extraordinaire, BeiBei Wang. A wonderful collaborative endeavor.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wild Geese Arrive
2. Awaken The Insects
3. Mantis Vs Horse
4. Grain Rain
5. Tiger Sex
6. Feed The Fireflies
7. Offerings To The Beast
8. Limit Of Heat
9. Thunder Begins To Soften

The new album by L.Y.R., their third commercial release, begins with the idea that the furthest points of light - stars - can only be seen in the dark. It’s a kind of contradiction that finds musical expression in these new tracks, the band always navigating towards sightings of hopefulness and constancy in an increasingly bewildering and storm-battered world.

The term ‘dark sky reservation’ has its origins in environmentalism and several tracks on the album deal with the messed-up weather of our contemporary planet, both meteorological and psychological, from descriptions of an earth deluged by thunderstorms to the soggy back gardens of suburbia, a climate crisis brought on by rampant urbanism. In that context, dark sky reservations are those regions of the landscape where light pollution is discouraged and even outlawed, to allow scientists and casual stargazers to peer into the cosmos and see the glory of the constellations, patterns of light that have entranced and mystified us for hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s from those designated zones that human beings get a sense of their place in the universe and experience the wonder of the here and now against a context of eternity and infinity. An alternative to the hectic craziness of everyday life, so often virtual and synthetic, the dark sky reservation is a place of refuge and dreaming, and like L.Y.R.’s music, such spaces are earmarked for contemplation and thoughtfulness.

L.Y.R. are author and current British poet laureate Simon Armitage, singer songwriter Richard Walters and multi- instrumentalist and producer Patrick Pearson.

TRACK LISTING

1. Dark Sky Reservation 
2. A Walled Garden
3. Blah! Blah! Blah!
4. Pray Silence 
5. Where Have You Been All My Life? 
6. French Cursive 
7. Guernica Jigsaw 
8. Eclipse 
9. The Goldilocks Zone 
10. Sirius Alpha, Sirius Beta
11. Under Artificial Lighting 
12. Collared Dove

Swedish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen makes records and plays shows under the enigmatic name of Loney Dear. In the early 2000s, in his Stockholm apartment studio, Svanängen made a name for himself by creating homemade CDrs with a minidisk microphone and a home computer, self-releasing albums which, by 2007, had pricked Sub Pop’s ears and they released ‘Loney Noir’. Two more albums - ‘Dear John’ and ‘Hall Music’ - followed, as did glowing reviews in The Guardian, BBC, Drowned in Sound and Pitchfork and earlier this year The Line of Best Fit went as far as calling him a “brilliant genius.”

Loney Dear has consistently crafted elegant, deeply stirring music, described by The Quietus as “the obsessive work of one man, albeit one that can sing with the vulnerable delicacy of an angel and makes bedroom recordings that sound like God’s own orchestra.” Multi-layered with instrumentation and Svanängen’s fragile yet irrepressible vocals, Loney Dear’s songs bloom with a sense of both intimacy and openness, at once uplifting and heartbreaking, tenacious yet tender.

TRACK LISTING

Pun
Humbug
Hulls
Sum
Lilies
Little Jacket
Isn't It You?
Dark Light
Harbours
There Are Several Alberts Here