When you’re immersed into something you never actually realize if the essence will project as bright as the efforts, as deep as the process and as loud as the intentions. WOW, the Roma Est duo of China and Leo Non, have never had to create magic or delve into mystique along their meandering path, it’s just been a long solemn wait for what life throws at them and actually sticks. Cause and reaction, because the essence is quietly there when the clamour fades away.

Their new album ‘Rosa di Luce’ is as pure as they come, a crystalline documentation of a new family, new meanings and new languages where the only rule is to gently adapt and just let things flow. Welcoming Mina Wow, a tiny creature, into the fold was never going to be easy for a life lead on the road and for a band as radical as WOW where nothing is sugar-coated or constructed behind the scene, a different approach was desperately wanted, needed and searched. Almost total disarm, doing the small things, undress, get rid of the unnecessary feedback. That’s why ‘Rosa di Luce’ more than ever showcases WOW’s other-worldy spectral capability of creating songs that contain immense and minimal emotions, raw but welcoming, sincere but cutting and could play out to be a career defining album. Loosely recorded between their house in Rome and a campsite in Southern Puglia (where WOW organizes their yearly Shawala Festival) these songs are masqued my a minimalist entendre that leaves space for China’s stellar vocal delivery, a haunted range with frequencies to tickle a soul and pierce hearts, with Leo’s resolute guitar playing leading a timeless revolution.

The center-piece ‘Le Montagne E Noi’ is a perfect example of their stripped-back nakedness hiding complex arrangements (the beautiful sax played by Ryan Spring Dooley and celestial flutes by Alessandra Lazzarini) that sound effortless and imperative. Spiritual orchestrations that match our times and most importantly their new family and definition of space. Peaks that can always be reached, forests that need crossing (La Radura) in order to find a sound. There is no pretension or conceit to WOW’s style, it is entrancingly vibrant yet melancholy, taking notes from the most visceral strand of Italian traditional music, yet, still, walking down a trail that is very much their own. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Rosa Di Luce
2. Primavera
3. Le Montagne E Noi
4. La Radura
5. Creature Fragili
6. Samba E Amore

Tense from the first note and decisively uncompromising ‘GHSTING’ is the debut collaboration by Polish artists Alex Freiheit and Aleksandra Słyż, an incredibly unique piece of work that mixes fiction, spoken word poetry, theatrical antics, dense synthesis, acoustic ensemble and dark landscapes all set within the backdrop of a sinister Eastern Europe hotel. The resulting sound is menacing, humorous, harmonious, tumultuous, and at times quietly erotic.

Alex Freiheit, a poet and vocalist, is widely recognized for her captivating work with the SIKSA duo. Over the past decade, she has delved into the realms of personal feminist storytelling, postmodern fairy tales, and queer legends, crafting unique and thought-provoking narratives. In this groundbreaking collaboration with talented composer Aleksandra Słyż, they are now delving into the herstory of lies and exaggerations, extracting the raw essence of these tales filled with stench, stains, secretions, and torn organs. Eyeless Freiheit haunts the hotel guests while dressed in a binder and holding a bottle filled with a corrosive substance. She shares compelling stories about the hidden activities and other secrets that unfold within the walls of hotels when no one is watching. Her gripping narrative is complemented by equally haunting and eerie music. Słyż divides the text into four chapters, skillfully intertwining synthetic and acoustic elements. She combines the sounds of synthesizers, woodwind and percussive instruments with vocals, creating a tense, dynamic soundscape. Freiheit’s voice possesses an earnest quality, where a frightening cadence suspiciously flips into a meditative cycle.

Together, Freiheit and Słyż have crafted a bold and suggestive story that feels like the mesmerizing soundtrack to a contemporary Eastern European horror film, captivating an essence that is hard to pinpoint but instantly recognizable. This is abstractly powerful music that pushes listeners into a kaleidoscopic spiral that channels ecstatic over loss. 

TRACK LISTING

1. 303 Eyelashes Out 
2. Her Panties
3. Unwashed (105 Oven) 
4. Another Stain 

U.S. Maple's first album, before they fell all apart on 'Sang Phat Editor'. This is the album that "rocks". Disjointed machinations, poppy locksteps and jarring sideways excursions all leading down a path to nowhere's-ville. Engineered by Jim O'Rourke with a cold. Pressed on Muleta Maroon Colored Vinyl LP includes a vinyl-only bonus track plus a two-sided footlong OBI and lyric sheet.

In high school, the members of U.S. Maple never said a word to anyone. And although this had disastrous results (stolen shoes, constant de-pantsing, gum in the hair, etc...), a fire was burning inside each one of them. A beginning was struck in Chicago, early in 1995. The four met near the corner of Grand and Western Avenues to devise a working method for reorganizing rock and roll, keeping what was felt to be it’s most important core elements. The mumblings are slick. The melodies are souped-up and soured. The drums are spastic bursts of laughter, rocket fuel and confetti. It is fronted by a singer who reminds one or the other of Kevin Costner's stoner bro. A 7” single and a version of AC/DC’s 'Sin City' are the first to be recorded. U.S. Maple’s debut full-length, 'Long Hair In Three Stages' was recorded late in 1995 with Jim O'Rourke at Solid Sound Studios in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. This was Jim's first legitimate recording session with a rock and roll band. The album receives critical acclaim. Soon thereafter, U.S. Maple find themselves flying coach to Deutschland for a European tour. The extensive six-week tour spans 12 countries and includes a Peel Session for the BBC's John Peel Show. More history is made. 'Long Hair In Three Stages' goes on to be ranked #85 on the Alternative Press “90 Greatest Albums of the '90s” list. We all know better.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hey King
2. Letter To ZZ Top
3. Home-Made Stuff
4. Magic Job
5. The State Is Bad
6. Aplomado
7. You Know What... Will Get You You Know Where
8. When A Man Says Ow
9. Northwad
10. Lady To Bing
11. Found A Place To Have My Kittens

Shrouded in mystery just like their magical compositions Torino’s collective Heart Of Snake are joined by Mira for their first release in six years, the enchanted ragged vibration of ‘Chamareops’, a 40 minute opus that just like the cold-hardy palm that lends its name to the album, blends classical guitar, desert folk, meditative exotica and distant island lullabies that withstand the test of time.

Originally led by Vincenzo Marando (Movie Star Junkies, Krano, Similou), Alberto Danzi (I Residenti, oAxAcA) and Cosimo Rosa (Krano), Heart Of Snake have expanded on ‘Chamaerops’ by adding Francesca Colombo aka Mira, violinist and composer based in Rome (member of Il Quadro di Troisi and the Misto Mame collective). The result is a unique voyage into the unknown, beautifully recorded by Paul Beauchamp, an immersive and cohesive listen that resembles a lost Polynesian documentary, a lysergic road trip through sweeping Mediterranean brush lands, lonely shrubs, torrential storms and Appalachian creeks. Divided into two sides, Chamaerops, embodies the melancholy of a lonely plant sitting in an apartment, facing a window where stardust and rays of light gently dangle a promise of an outsider microcosm.

The spirit of Frantz Casseus gently blowing through the reeds is deconstructed through field recordings, kosmische electronics, Haitian waltzes, the submerged quality of Pauline Oliveros’ accordion work and the steel guitar-delia of Santo & Johnny, half-speed-doped up Ry Cooder-ism and the spiritual sorcery of Dorothy Carter’s best work.

Once again Heart Of Snake & Mira deliver an other-worldly soundtrack, a mesmerizing record that hypnotizes as soon as the first sweeping arpeggio kicks in, transforming energies from ancient and distant musical sources into dreams that lives here and now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chamaerops Pt1
2. Chamaerops Pt2

Sometimes records reflect life with an unsettling precision, your own breath sticking to a mirror, confounding or transforming reality. J.H. Guraj, real name Dominique Vaccaro, is back with ‘The Flip Side’, an accomplished work of grace and sprawling elegance documenting struggle and a near-death experience that summons ghosts of Western primitive masters, rollicking free folk, minimalist orchestrations, weeping guitars and smooth psychedelics.

Time stopped for J.H. Guraj in 2021 following a brush with mortality, extensive forced recovery and subsequent hints of depression after an almost fatal bike crash, leaving our wandering soul, once again, at the edges. While his previous record ‘Introspection / Migration’ hinted at Middle-Eastern influences and merged the artists’ Arbëreshë upbringing with stoic ecstasis, free-form structures and guitar wizardry under sepia tone curtains, ‘The Flip Side’ twists, turns, falls down and rises to new heights, the widescreen breadth of Dominique Vaccaro’s cinematic vision projects new colours, a stark contrast of pastoral emerald green and pitch black asphalt, urban decay and mercurial mystery.

Like passages from some archaic songbook what astonishes is how detailed the new compositions are, a warm embrace like ‘Way To Long Goodbye’, counterpoint pianos leading the way down a Gershwin avenue; ‘You Got It All Wrong So Did I’ with its Van Dyke Parks arrangement; the 9 minute epic ‘Us As Ghosts’ a haunting ballad that resolves into kosmische landscapes; the muted symphony of ‘Fake Af’ and the spectral disorientation of ‘Nothing I Can Do But Flow’. Gentle drumming from collaborator Gianluca Panici augment the eeriness of ‘The Flip Side’, motions that create a sense of suspension and yearning.

Vaccaro’s long standing career in electroacoustic music informs the record directly with a rich textural approach that blends looping, tape manipulation and electronic synthesis creating the perfect backdrop for his acoustic and resophonic guitars.

J.H. Guraj’s musical realm bridges avant-garde, harmonic song-styling, silky piano-guitar interplay, musique concrète, abstract restraint and modern chamber music. A world where Charles Ives, Dirty Three, Branko Mataja, Dead Moon and Loren Connors collide.
J.H. Guraj might be still looking for belongingness but us listeners are already far ahead of him, we already know he resides with the greats. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Leap Of No Faith
2. Ask The River
3. Way Too Long Goodbye
4. Spleen On Speed
5. You Got It All Wrong So Did I
6. Fake AF
7. Slowdown Attempts
8. Nothing I Can Do But Flow
9. Everything Sideways
10. Us As Ghosts

After four EPs of skeletal kraut-punk and slimmed down post-motorik alienage Milan’s Tv Dust are back with an entirely different beast, their proper debut ‘Transition’, an incredible collection of no-jazz, breakneck rhythms, mutant-wave, trance-funk, shredded sax jags and furious, yet mysterious assaults.

Tv Dust run a tight ship, they jam econo, with the album strongly based around the incredible interplay of drums (Sergio Tringali), bass (Filippo Aloisi) and sax/synth (newest member Gaetano Pappalardo). Shedding the use of vocals has completely freed the band up into a mutating beast, wild horses racing beside a volcano eruption, improv bursts that perfectly soundtrack the ruins of a city facing the inhuman consequences of wild expansion and dumb economics.

'Transition' is a no-jazz, no-panic, no-border album, born between a small bar and a basement, reworking some ideas from the first Tv Dust sessions with a new mindset, with improvisation becoming an important tool in the trio's new path that already sees releases on Occult Punk Gang, My Own Private Records, Sentiero Futuro and Maple Death.

'Transition' like the transformation of the group, you still get the original package of furious hypnotic grooves, shortwave radio alien funk, devo-id convulsions, jittery no-wave and Italo post-punk tradition alongside dada-jazz and freeform freakouts.

'Transition' is our natural condition. No one is excluded.

TRACK LISTING

1. Transition
2. Last Call
3. Smelly Floor
4. Why Spuzz Out
5. Ivory
6. Fly
7. Lila
8. U Say II
9. Storm
10. So
11. Volcanic Collapse

Italian composer and saxophonist Laura Agnusdei returns with 'Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica' a career defining record that sees the artist diving into uncharted waters, a profound timeless meditation on our relationship with planet Earth, the eco-conflicts arising and the fascination with non human forms of life, backdropped to a vivid soundtrack of coral exotica, spiritual Jazz, fourth-world minimalism, tropical electronics, tribal futurism and contemporary elegance.

Every step of Laura Agnusdei’s path, from electroacoustic experimentation to her constant research based upon the acoustic dimension of wind instruments and their interaction with polymorphic electronic sounds, seems to have pivoted into a new sense of awareness, as if the mind and intellectual practice has finally caught up with the body, the heart and the soul, resulting in her most organic and transcendent work yet. 'Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica' is loosely inspired around a trifecta of pioneering ideas that explore unconventional reality: James Bridle’s ‘Ways Of Being’ with his radical story that mixes ecology, tech and intelligence; Luigi Serafini’s late-70s fantastical ‘Codex Seraphinianus’, an unparalleled collection of flora, fauna, anatomies metamorphosed into new fragile beings; J.G. Ballard’s climate-fiction foreshadowing sci-fi ruminations. These influences shift Agnusdei’s musical trajectory injecting doses of terrestrial malaise, the earthy sub-saharan ‘Ittiolalia’ with its wah-wah filtered sax and trance inducing groove; the rubbery playfulness of ‘Oasi Bar’; the gentle eco-system of ‘P.P.R.N’ reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s innovative synthesis of funk, space and synthesizers; the kaleidoscopic northern lights of ‘Emperor Penguin Lullaby’, where south-east Asian echoes reach icy shores; the Jon Hassell hyper-ambience of ‘Cuttlefish REM Phase’; the post-apocalyptic march of ‘The Drowned World, a jazz standard for an artificial civilization on the brink of self-destruction. Nothing feels out of place and it’s no coincidence that one of the most powerful messages on the record is delivered on centerpiece ‘Are We Dinos?’ via an interview conducted with two preschoolers. Radical optimism or sonic liberation?

Laura Agnusdei’s tenor sax cuts deep all across 'Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica', a laser baton raised up to the clouds, a conductor orchestrating devotional soundscapes for a three-eyed dolphin, guiding us through prismatic pastures and acidic oceans. Her tropicalized realm is pin-pointed with Miles-like sheer clarity, a bristling nakedness on the verge of exploding at any time, creating an album where ascension becomes the unifying code. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Ittiolalia
2. Cuttlefish REM Phase
3. The Drowned World
4. P.P.R.N (Physarum Polycephalum Rail Network)
5. Are We Dinos?
6. Oasi Bar
7. Solvay Beach
8. Emperor Penguin Lullaby

Maple Glider is Naarm/Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Tori Zietsch.

On her sophomore album 'I Get Into Trouble', Tori takes her songwriting to another level while she delves into her Christian childhood, exploring topics such as her relationship to her body, consent and shame, as well as the death of relationships, both romantic and familial. Heartbreaking at times, the songs ultimately paint a hopeful picture, shining a light on new life, new love, and the desire to find peace and connection with these experiences.

Ultimately, 'I Get Into Trouble' is the sound of alchemized pain. In each song, Zietsch transmutes tribulation and confusion into clarity and deep insight. She combines the infectious folk-pop hooks of her debut with a sense of scape and scope.

'I Get Into Trouble' follows Maple Glider's acclaimed 2021 debut 'To Enjoy is the Only Thing', a deeply personal project which earned her a performance on NPR's Tiny Desk, as well as praise from Pitchfork ("hypnotic"), Paper ("sublime"), Stereogum ("some voices in indie just hit home") and Rolling Stone (“one of the most accomplished debut albums in recent years.”).

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A superb return for Tori Zietsch, bringing the woozy off-kilter Americana sound we loved from her 2021 debut and broadening the horizons into a widescreen, majestic display. It's both hugely cinematic and unfalteringly relatable, a triumph of every sort. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1. Do You
2. Dinah
3. Two Years
4. FOMO
5. Don't Kiss Me
6. You At The Top Of The Driveway
7. You're Gonna Be A Daddy
8. For You And All The Songs We Loved
9. Surprises
10. Scream

Maple Glider is Naarm/Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Tori Zietsch. On debut album To Enjoy is the Only Thing, Zietsch's vocals melt into layers of plucked acoustic guitar and lulling piano, drawing on the sombre styles of folk contemporaries with a stark tenderness and introspection that assumes the listener is inside her bedroom as she plays for herself. Striking emotionality is at the centre of this performance, leaning into an intimacy that is achieved by way of deeply personal reflections and velvety melodic compositions.

In Tori's words: "To me, To Enjoy is the Only Thing feels like walking past tinsel-covered trees in mid-September, swimming along the calanques in the south of France, frost on the hood of a car, darkness at 4pm, lightness until 10pm, Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green, Devendra Banhart’s Ma, Adrianne Lenker’s a-sides, a muted feeling, the perpetual grey fog that swallows the Silver Coast in Portugal, an ugly green dress, the color red, red wine, red blood, red lips, the red of a cardinal’s robe, Switzerland, my mother’s diaries, a coroner’s report, the sun on my face, the end of love."

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'To Enjoy...' absolutely swims with a wealth of influences from tender 60's folk and country to more exuberant soulful moments that wouldn't feel out of place in a dimly lit club, smoke rising from the tables. It's evocative and brimming with beauty, a wonderfully realised gem.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 As Tradition
2 Swimming
3 View From This Side
4 Friend
5 Be Mean, It's Kinder Than Crying

Side B
6 Good Thing
7 Baby Tiger
8 Performer
9 Mama It's Christmas