Award-winning Swiss producer, electro-innovator and cycling enthusiast, David Langhard celebrates the rhythmic rush of life on two wheels with the release of HOGOFOGO. A four-strong live band, a 15-date UK and European Tour, including a date at The Social, London is announced to coincide with the release.

Inevitable comparisons with Kraftwerk aren’t shyly rejected, but recognised and warmly embraced by Langhard, who cites the band’s 1981 album, ‘Computer World’ as one of the best albums to cycle to, alongside up-tempo tracks by Pixies, The Specials and the canon of classic 1950s rock and roll. Renowned and praised for his work underpinning the recordings of fellow Swiss export, Klaus Johann Grobe, Langhard’s work as an innovative producer is matched by his own, artistic restlessness. A diverse and energetic career has seen Langhard awarded the Winterthur Kulturpreis, acclaimed by city officials in September 2017 for being “an experienced, stylish and versatile musician, whose influence and charisma reaches far beyond Winterthur.”

Touring Europe as a member of Howlong Wolf and Admiral James T, Langhard’s work on the fifth studio album from Neutral Zone extends a trip into synthesised sound that started in 1995 with nothing more than classic Casio SA-5 and Intersound PK-380 keyboards and a tape recorder. The growth of his own DALA Studios in his home city, alongside an ever-developing collection of vintage, analogue recording equipment (alongside the racing bikes) has seen a personal side project take to the fast lane and now, 22 years later, he presents an underground masterpiece.

The second solo album by Adam Ross - a musician described by Folk Radio as "one of Scotland’s most talented singers and songwriters".

The album is produced by multiple Scottish Album Of The Year Award nominated composer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Wasylyk and released on London record label Fika Recordings. Arts bodies Creative Scotland and Help Musicians have supported and funded the album in recognition of what is shaping up to be one of the most exciting musical collaborations of 2024.

The album is a heavily lyrical collection of warped 70s-esque indie-folk ballads inspired by Adam’s relocation to the coast. The title, Littoral Zone, is a term used to define where the sea meets the land but also a nod to a style of direct, literary observations about the people, landscapes and states of mind Adam has discovered since moving there. The lyrics cover themes of nature, politics, faith, love and death and are surrounded by Andrew’s deft production featuring luscious string ensembles and brass.

The writing of the album saw Adam move away from guitar and onto piano, having bought a slightly battered upright piano from a local antiques warehouse as a first priority after moving house in 2021. Chords, melodies and musical ideas were recorded on Adam's phone before lyrics were slowly built up during his walks on the beach and clifftops around the village of St Cyrus where he now lives.

Songs like Free Will and Union Gary chart and exaggerate the at-times ridiculous minutiae of day-to-day life, with the latter musing on British foreign policy via the prism of an unkempt garden. The Going and I Get It Wrong pay tribute to the natural beauty and mystery of coastal landscapes while Brambles falls into the musical tradition of the murder ballad, with a story loosely based on an amalgamation of true events. The album's darker edges can also be discovered in Shrinking and Ego which dwell on aging and self-doubt, however Apogee looks to counterbalance such themes with a pure outpouring of love.

The album sees Adam at his most musically ambitious and precise. In contrast to his more lo-fi and DIY previous work, Littoral Zone is a painstakingly crafted record which celebrates collaboration. Andrew Wasylyk's production and multi-instrumentalist performances bring sonic sophistication which is further heightened by Pete Harvey's heart-stirring string arrangements. Gillian Fleetwood's yearning vocals are a constant highlight throughout the album, as is Rachel Simpson's exquisite brass playing. Ultimately, Littoral Zone is an album of stories and Adam's lyrical knack shines throughout.

Adam Ross is a songwriter based in north-east Scotland. He has led the cult indie band Randolph's Leap for over a decade, releasing music with independent labels Fika Recordings, Olive Grove Records and King Creosote and Pictish Trail’s Fence Records and Lost Map Records. He released his debut solo album 'Staring At Mountains' in 2022. He is known for his intricate, storytelling lyrical style which often blends humour and poignancy.

May 2024 will see the release of a brand-new solo album produced by multiple Scottish Album Of The Year Award nominated composer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Wasylyk and released on London label Fika Recordings. Arts bodies Creative Scotland and Help Musicians have supported and funded the album in recognition of what is shaping up to be one of the most exciting musical collaborations of 2024.

Adam has a track record of playing at venues and festivals across the country such as Green Man, Celtic Connections, Belladrum and The Edinburgh Fringe. His reputation as an engaging, witty, storytelling performer was further cemented by his role in ‘The Isle of Love’, a country-wide touring theatre show inspired by his songs.

His music has received regular airplay on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC 6 Music including various singles and albums of the week. He has also received excellent press in newspapers such as The Herald and The Scotsman.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Free Will
A2. Apogee
A3. Shrinking
A4. Caught The Sun
A5. Ego
B1. Union Gary
B2. I Get It Wrong
B3. Life Is Not A Competition
B4. Brambles
B5. The Going

Quantum Web is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of New York born, Berlin based musician and multi-media artist JJ Weihl. After the slow-building but undeniable fervor around Remote Control, Discovery Zone’s debut album, Quantum Web quite literally picks up where JJ left off. In what she considers an ongoing, process oriented continuum, Quantum Web is the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone– arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all.

Moving to Berlin from her native New York City in the early 2010s, the songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist developed her musical practice over four albums as a member of the beloved art rock band Fenster before introducing Discovery Zone with Remote Control in 2020. JJ named Discovery Zone after the chain of indoor, youth oriented entertainment facilities filled with mazes and climbing structures that shuttered shortly after the turn of the millennium — a space born of commercialism that she describes as a “glorified cage” which nonetheless offered her, and millions of other children, the freedom to explore. The music of Discovery Zone plays with a perception of inevitable corporate societal control, but finds its own power and liberation in sounds that obscure their institutional sources.

Inspired by the omnipresence of advertising and corporate culture as much as the potential of cybernetics and neural networks, Discovery Zone plunges into an uncanny valley with Quantum Web, where the distinctions between the earnest and the ironic blur in tandem with the border between the human and the post-human. JJ wrote a number of Quantum Web’s songs for Cybernetica, a multimedia performance she was commissioned in 2021. Cataloging her daily activities as data points to be analyzed, she broke her life down into statistics and presented them onstage to a live audience, depersonalizing her experience while claiming it for herself in all its mundane yet intimate detail. Quantum Web casts JJ in a concordant role: a pop star mediated by machines, just as willing to sink anonymously into her productions as she is to shine as their legible central figure.

On Quantum Web, Discovery Zone explores a widescreen pop sound speckled with luminous vocal performances and baroque instrumental flourishes. While JJ’s voice is focal and transfixing at the center of the composition, she contrasts moments of clarity with strategies of obfuscation through hi-definition synthesis and time-dilating ambience. Vocoded textures layer into dense choral networks. A.I. text-to-speech abruptly hits the mix like a loudspeaker announcement over a meditation session. Staccato samples of JJ’s disembodied voice pepper the arrangements, creating their own pointillist harmonic systems that play a role closer to synth patch than vocal take. Quantum Web draws power from this composite mosaic of inputs, as if to propose that all these forms still represent JJ’s core self no matter how far they might splinter from the sounds that came from her physical form.

Though delivered in the crisp fidelity of contemporary radio-ready pop, the production signifiers we encounter on Quantum Web seem more like they should reach us bearing the grain and warble of a VHS tape. Working with producer E.T., JJ dips into a pool of decades-spanning style, finding room for 80s sophisti-pop, modern hyper-digital bubblegum, and early electro. Flights of motorik momentum animate more bustling compositions while shades of downtempo and city pop dim the lights over more subdued moments. An otherwise electronic arrangement might suddenly host a crystalline guitar riff or a bumping electric bassline, calling back to JJ’s musical upbringing playing guitar and bass as a teen on through her decade spent in a more traditional “rock band” setting. Interspersed among the pieces of Quantum Web that code as some permutation of electronic pop songwriting, a series of minute-long interludes turns the dial toward lush textural sculpting and pure ambient drift — regularly scheduled programming punctuated by commercial breaks.

The Quantum Web is our web of personal connections, the world wide web, the web of lies we tell each other. It’s a trap, a figurative hologram that we see all around us, but one we participate in of our own free will. We acknowledge that to escape would be impossible. But we still find a simple joy, or at least the thrill of confronting prosaic ineffability, when we log back on, when we play a trivia game on a little screen attached to the backseat of a cab, when we walk through the mall and look up through the infinite ceiling or the sky.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Supernatural
A2. Pair A Dice
A3. Ur Eyes
A4. FYI
A5. Test
B1. Operating System
B2. Mall Of Luv
B3. Kite
B4. All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go
B5. Undressed
B6. Keep It Lite
B7. Xrystal

Heels & Souls Recordings roll into reissue number eight with a double dose of early '90s UK street soul magic, splitting the sides between two sought-after cuts from Elaine Vassell and 3rd Zone.

Step back to 1993, house music has hit, UK Soul is in full flow and its rawer, DIY street soul sibling is making its mark across the UK’s underground. Fuelled by accessible, affordable production gear and ignited through enthusiasm and an influx of ideas and sounds, two acts drew inspiration from a melting pot of genres they were exposed to, providing their take on soul as they saw it.

Up first, Elaine Vassell - ‘Never Give Up’. A rough breakbeat-driven, mid-tempo groover from a North West London production triple threat, made up of Longsy D, Pinky and Murray. Utilising Pinky’s home studio with its DX7, Juno 106, LinnDrum and 808, they masterminded a track that sits at the intersection between soulful house, hip hop and R&B. Its crunching drum loop, chest-rattling low-end and serene synth lines, lay the foundation for Elaine’s powerful yet emotive voice to take centre stage. ‘Never Give Up’ should have been a future classic, but never quite found its feet.

On the flip side another 1993 gem, as Sansel Ali and twin brothers Mark and Stephen Anglin joined forces to form 3rd Zone. Conceived in Mark’s makeshift bedroom studio, the trio laid down their first foray into recorded music, ‘You Stole My Heart’. Originally promoed as a limited whitelabel in 1991, it officially landed on the group's one and only EP ‘No Real Reason' in '93.

Armed with a handful of synth modules, a drum machine and a Korg M1, Mark, Stephen and Sansel hit with a tough but tender, underground triumph. Part dance, part romance, layering synth strings, chunky breaks and M1 stabs underneath Sansel’s heartstrung vocals and Stephen’s hip house rap interlude, it provides another perfect example of house seen through the street soul prism.

Two timeless tracks that fly the flag for the fact that big studios and big budgets aren't necessary to create songs that really resonate. Each side also contains an alternate version, with the A housing a beatless reprise of ‘Never Give Up’ and the B a tougher, bassier remix of ‘You Stole My Heart’.

Licensed from Pinky Music and 3rd Zone respectively and remastered from the original DATs by Justin Drake.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Elaine Vassell - Never Give Up
A2. Elaine Vassell - Never Give Up (Chill Zone Mix)
B1. 3rd Zone - You Stole My Heart (Vinyl Mix)
B2. 3rd Zone - You Stole My Heart (Remix)

An uplifting, feel-good record that's deep, techy and insatiably groovy - exactly what we mean when we say GOOD TECH HOUSE! Zone+ is a DJ and producer from Bahrain who's released on Anjunadeep and All Day I Dream. This is a vinyl only release for WTR and demonstrates his rich, beautifully layered musical style perfectly. Whether its the rolling congas, deep bass plumes, hypnotic melodies or kinetic rhythms - its a sound that'll please the terraces and the basement clubs in equal measure. RIYL the Botanical Mind's label and Ted Amber's recent excursions; there's a certain Ibiza-centric engineering going on which we're well on board with. Don't sleep!  

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Liquid flowing, deep tech house business here. The kind of shit that Craig Richards and Jane Fitz used to hammer out. Love it.

TRACK LISTING

A1. A Star
A2. Forever
B1. Petra 

More digging in the gospel section... Possibly less obscure but definitely deeper. Made up of tracks that were started in Wyoming for Kanye/Sunday Service and then finished in LA and transposed to this project. Includes 7 tracks exclusive to the vinyl release.

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: Kanyes' Sunday service out-takes of gospel choir strikes, uplifting and excellent for samples this really has it all, this is an absolute must!

TRACK LISTING

1. Keep My Promise
2. Blessed
3. Want 2 Love U 2
4. The Same
5. 2 Your Will
6. Hold On
7. Thank U
8. The Building
9. Anything U Want
10. Heal The Land
11. Trust In God
12. There 4 U
13. Rescue Me
14. Time Goes By
15. Whatever U Need
16. Jesus Rock
17. God Will
18. Redeemed
19. Sungday
20. Streets Of Gold

Cardinal Fuzz and Lovers & Lollipops are proud to bring to you the new magnum opus from Black Bombaim titled 'Zone Of Resident Bodies'. Black Bombaim approached their latest creation with the mindset of pushing the boundaries of their musicianship by working with three different electronic composers in three unique recording settings -an old workers auditorium, a huge empty space on the postal office building and on a reverberation room on the university of engineering. Working with Jonathan Saldanha, Luís Fernandes, Pedro Augusto helped Black Bombaim break free of the constraints of a band in a recording studio as each new recording environment and composer brought new textures and ambiance to the music created. It really is rather special to hear.

“this is an amazing album of collaborations that I am sure has taken the participants outside of their respective comfort zones to produce a set that is innovative and explorative. You really will need to hear it all to fully appreciate its strength and breadth because it is outside those zones of familiarity where true expression can flourish… and flourish it certainly does here.” Psych Insight.