Resident Advisor's Best Albums of 2019

For the next release on SVBKVLT we are proud to present ‘Arthropods’, the new album by 33EMYBW. 7 new tracks plus remixes from Hakuna Kulala’s Don Zilla, Hyperdub’s Ikonika and NAAFI’s Lechuga Zafiro. Arthropods will be released on Friday 11th October 2019. 33EMYBW will be premiering her new live show for the album at Unsound Krakow on the same date. About Arthropods The soul is a fragment of a dream, the seed of future and past, evolving infinitely on the Arthropods* Continent. We seek out dreams and catch them, to scrape together the new Adam. *1 ARTHROPODS： Arthropods is the alienation form of GOLEM*, and there is a soul in each metamere. They can upload, download, and link to each other. *2 GOLEM：A golem is mythical humanlike figure made from clay and magically able to move on its own. In the Bible, Golem is an unfinished human being, without a soul. Through the process of its own evolution and its makers' experiments, a Golem can contain or generate its own soul. It can appear in different interconnected forms and reproduce itself at will. A golem with a soul, in order to speed up its own evolution, will sometimes supersede or devour the original form of life. The album Golem is inspired from this source.

Sam Barker is a resident DJ at Berghain, Berlin’s celebrated temple of techno, and as one half of the duo Barker & Baumecker, he has crafted plenty of hard-hitting tracks perfectly calibrated for the club’s cavernous post-industrial interior. On his debut solo album, though, Barker takes a different tack, excising the drums and other outward attributes of conventional techno until all that’s left is a billowing swirl of richly colored synths. Yet for all the music’s resemblance to the ambient techno of the mid-’90s, *Utility* isn’t really ambient music, save for the ethereal “Wireheading” and the downbeat closer “Die-Hards of the Darwinian Order.” Pulsing and flickering, filled up with pumping chords reminiscent of the Chain Reaction label’s dubby drift, the end result is a kind of techno by another means, where all the hard surfaces have melted away. Like rushing floodwaters, it carries real force beneath its fluid exterior.

“We all dance away our lives to the tune of the sovereign pleasure-pain axis.” – David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative Pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance as a rave metaphor fits the music of Sam Barker. The Berghain resident and Leisure System co-founder has spent the last few years exploring the euphoric potential of altering key variables in dance music formulas. This was especially true on his 2018 Ostgut Ton debut EP ‘Debiasing’, which was flush with unconventional rhythmic chord stabs, melody and percussion but devoid of kickdrums. Now, on his debut solo LP ‘Utility’, he turns his focus toward melding experimentation and dancefloor pragmatism with the psychology behind the musical decision making process. ‘Utility’ is a playful but non-ironic musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanist ideas: from models for quantifying pleasure and “gradients of bliss” to abolishing suffering for sentient beings (not just people) through the ethical use of drugs and nanotechnology. Over nine tracks his vision ebbs and flows through waves of deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; free-floating and futuristic melodies and rhythms as targeted brain stimulation. The sound draws heavily on modular synthesis, as well as self-built mechanical instruments and plate reverbs to create atmospheres that are at once alien and emotionally recognizable, functional and utopian.

Disciples follow up the raid on the archives of Black Lodge with Rave 'Till You Cry by enigmatic producer Bogdan Raczynski, a collection of unreleased tracks and versions. Raczynski arrived on the scene in 1999 with not one but three albums released in quick succession that year alone on Rephlex Records, a unique operator even by Braindance standards, rumoured to have been discovered by Aphex Twin whilst sleeping rough in Tokyo. A steady stream of records followed, hyperactive broadsides of percussion set off by a winning knack for the buried earworm melody, much like his mentor RDJ. He also memorably collaborated with Björk and remixed Autechre for Warp's 10+3 compilation, but things have been quiet since the release of his last studio album Alright! arrived in 2007. Rave 'Till You Cry signals a return across 18 tracks selected and sequenced by Disciples, joining the dots between the outsider junglizm of the '96 Drum n Bass Classixxx “compilation” and his earliest rephlexions on hallucinatory, bassbin-rattling IDM with Boku Mo Wakaran. Across four sides of vinyl, the joyous sugar-rush tunes of classic 90s Nintendo games meet drill-like breaks, ambient drone and slabs of bit-crushed noise. It also showcases a more introspective side to the Bogdan sound, the soundtrack to a labyrinth of tunnels loaded up with gurners starting to feel unwell as the early hours begin to dissipate into the harsh rays of morning light. Much like the recent resurgence of Digital Hardcore's Christoph De Babalon and the off-kilter time signature of recent records by Demdike Stare and Rian Treanor, Bogdan Raczynski's return is a timely reminder of the menace and beauty contained within irregular rhythm science.

Carla dal Forno announces her second full-length album, ​Look Up Sharp​, on her own Kallista Records. The London-based artist enters a new era in her peerless output pushing her dub-damaged DIY dispatches to the limits of flawless dream-pop. In a transformative move towards crystal clear vocals and sharpened production, Look Up Sharp is an evolutionary leap from the thick fog and pastoral stillness of her Blackest Ever Black missives, You Know What It’s Like (2016) and The Garden EP (2017). Three years since her plain-speaking debut album, the Melbourne-via-Berlin artist finds herself absorbed in London’s sprawling mess. The small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied dal Forno’s first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces. Look Up Sharp is the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar. Dal Forno connects with kindred spirits and finds refuge in darkened alleys, secret gardens and wherever else she dares to look. In her own territory between plaintive pop, folk and post-punk dal Forno conjures the ghosts of AC Marias, Virginia Astley and Broadcast through her brushwork of art-damaged fx and spectral atmospheres. The first half of the record is filled with dubbed-out humid bass lines, which tether stoned hazes of psychedelic synth work as on ‘Took A Long Time’ and ‘No Trace.’ These are contrasted with songs like ‘I’m Conscious and ‘So Much better’ that channel the lilting power of YMG and are clear sequels-in-waiting to dead-eyed classics like ‘Fast Moving Cars.’ The B-side begins with the feverish bass and meandering melody of ‘Don’t Follow Me,’ which takes The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ as its conceptual springboard. It’s the clearest lyrical example since ‘The Garden’ of dal Forno’s unmatched ability to unpick the masculine void of post-punk and new wave nostalgia to reflect contemporary nuance. Look Up Sharp reaches its satisfying conclusion with ‘Push On’ - dal Forno’s most explicit foray into an undiscovered trip hop universe between Massive Attack and Tracey Thorn. The album’s last gasp finds personal validation in fragility: ‘I push on / I’m the Place I’m Going,’ a self discovery lifted by reverberant broken beats and glass-blown vocals. Adding further depth to Look Up Sharp are the instrumentals, which flow seamlessly between the vocal-led pieces. ‘Hype Sleep’ and ‘Heart of Hearts’ drink from the same stream as The Flying Lizard’s dubbed-out madness and the vivid purple sunsets of Eno’s Another Green World. While ‘Creep Out of Bed’ and ‘Leaving for Japan’ funnel the fourth-world psychedelia of Cyclobe’s industrial-folk into the vortex of Nico’s The Marble Index. Conceived as a whole, Look Up Sharp is a singular prism in which light, sound and concept bend at all angles. A deeply personal but infinitely relatable album its many surfaces are complex but authentic, enduring but imperfect, hard-edged but delicate. A diamond. Look up sharp or you’ll miss it.

Following 2017’s acclaimed 2LP “Patterns of Consciousness”, “Ecstatic Computation” is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged. Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand. For vinyl orders please go here: editionsmego.bandcamp.com/album/ecstatic-computation

Whether you make out the boast “Nigga Fox na maior” as “the illest” or “the chillest,” depending on your translation of Portuguese street slang, Brandão still sounds far out there, inviting the rest of us into his headspace. PITCHFORK + While touring extensively for the past few years, Nigga Fox never neglected reaching inside his mind for unheard of signature tunes. Four years since his last EP on Príncipe, a year or so after "Crânio" on Warp Records, pressure could be mounting, but he kept his chill. What does in fact amount to an album can be seen as the proverbial show of maturity, if you will, but to us it's definite proof of vitality and personality in this game. As before, way beyond notions of African music, something definitely coming from the street but taking form in a collective headspace. More than dance music (which it obviously is), "Cartas Na Manga" offers introspective joy in our effort to connect many loose dots inside the groove of each track.. There's more piano in there, but what does that mean? Just as much as the expressive dancefloor anthem "Talanzele" or the offbeat bassline in "Pão de Cada Dia". Nigga Fox is following a strong intuition and still maintaining his flow within the grid: while some moves are clearly venturing into the future, this is a celebration of present times. We hear him say "Nigga Fox na maior" in the closing track and THAT keeps us smiling long after the sound expires.  And Márcio Matos came up with some interactive artwork. This one's for all us human artifacts free enough to change a cover any time we feel it :) :(

The wicked intensity of Toronto's E-Saggila takes on novel limits for her new album for Northern Electronics. Constructed out of her live works, there's a lack of restraint on 'My World My Way' that could only be forged in the moment. Following on from last year's album for BANK Records NYC, E-Saggila has put together something that addresses the club and the headphones in equal measure. Taking the approach of a documentarian of our virtual landscape, there's a deep motive that underpins the heavy digital signal processing. With plenty of storming mechanical rhythms that embark from gabber's chaotic neighborhood, the samples of voices, conversations, and phone calls, all wind the listener around the desperation that's embedded in the digital world's seamless mediation of our lives. Owing as much to power violence and industrial as to Rotterdam, E-Saggila's affinity for the extremes is as conceptually critical as it is stylistically present. Riding the BPMs high, and binding this all together with ambient music's sensibilities, 'My World My Way' moves in sharp strides between a political statement and a dancefloor assault.

Efdemin (Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann) is among minimal techno’s most sensuous producers: No matter how reduced his arrangements, his sounds are unusually sumptuous. That fullness of tone comes to the fore on *New Atlantis*, his first album for Ostgut Ton, the label arm of Berlin’s iconic Berghain nightclub. Unlike that club’s famously austere, industrial vibe, *New Atlantis* is more inspired by Indian ragas—that’s a hurdy-gurdy in the opening track—and 1960s minimalists like Terry Riley and La Monte Young, along with Sollmann’s electroacoustic experiments in improvisation and installation art. *New Atlantis* can go hard: “A Land Unknown” is a driving cut that weds microtonal drones to the rigid pulse of classic trance, while “Black Sun” plays Detroit techno’s plush synths off a stern, thumping kick drum. But cuts like “At the Stranger’s House” and “The Sound House” step away from the dance floor to explore shimmering fields of pure texture, and “Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death” even incorporates an 18th-century Methodist hymn about the divine beauty of mortality—making *New Atlantis* an example of minimal techno that’s as heartfelt as it is heady.

Over eight tracks, New Atlantis oscillates between fast, kaleidoscopic techno, multilayered drones and acoustic instrumentation, fusing for the first time Sollmann’s deep dancefloor productions as Efdemin with his sound art and experimental music projects. The latter include 2017’s Harry Partch- inspired Monophonie performance and 2018’s Panama / Suez EP with Oren Ambarchi and Konrad Sprenger. Long drawn to utopian musical traditions, Sollmann took inspiration for New Atlantis from Francis Bacon’s unfinished 17th century novel of the same name, which describes a fictional island devoted to social progress through the synthesis of art, science, technology and fashion. In the story, Bacon imagines futuristic ‘sound houses’, which contain musical instruments capable of recreating the entirety of the sounds of the universe; a 400-year-old prophesy of today’s digital sonic reality. Through Sollmann’s lens, Bacon’s vision ebbs and flows over 50 minutes in varying speeds and colors, emerging as a tapestry of different utopian musical traditions – through billowing synth lines, early Detroit techno, resonant wooden percussion, trance, droning organs, dulcimer, electric guitars, hurdy-gurdy, just intonation, poetry, hymns and murmuring voices.

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date. The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain. Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album. Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating." His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says. Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".

In the middle of writing his sixth album *Flamagra*, Steven Ellison—the experimental electronic producer known as Flying Lotus—took up piano lessons. “It’s never too late!” the 35-year-old tells Apple Music. “It\'s always nice to have someone checking your technique and calling you on your bullshit.” For the past decade, Ellison’s primary tool has been his laptop, but for this album, he committed to learning each instrument. “It actually made me faster,” says the artist, who is a product of LA’s beat scene and the grandnephew of John and Alice Coltrane. “Suddenly, I could hear every part.” Inspired by the destructive wildfires that swept California\'s coastline and the deadly 2016 Ghost Ship fire, which broke out at a warehouse in Oakland, *Flamagra*—a jazzy, psychedelic concept album that spans 27 tracks—imagines a world in which Los Angeles was lit by an eternal flame. “One that was contained, and good,” he says. “How would we *use* it?\'\" To explore that heady framework, he tapped some of pop culture\'s most out-of-the-box thinkers, including George Clinton, David Lynch, Anderson .Paak, and Solange—all visionary artists with specific points of view who, Ellison knows, rarely do guest features. \"The fact is, most of these artists are my friends,\" he says. \"I like to do things organically. That\'s the only way it feels right.\" Read on for the story behind each collaboration. **Anderson .Paak, \"More\"** \"I first met Andy a long time ago. He\'s a drummer and grew up around Thundercat and Ronald Bruner Jr., two amazing musicians Andy was probably inspired by. So I chased him down and we recorded the demo to \'More.\' It was dope, but it was never done. There were things both of us wanted to change. For years I\'d run into him at parties where he\'d be like, \'What\'s up with the song, man? Is it done yet? Why ain\'t it done yet?\' It became this running joke with his big ol\' toothy smile. Then, finally, we got it done. And now we don\'t have nothin\' to talk about.\" **George Clinton, \"Burning Down the House\"** \"I made this beat while I was in a big Parliament phase. One day, George came through and I threw it on. We sat next to each other working on it—the lyrics, the arrangements. And even though he\'s so brilliant, I was able to help fill in little gaps that made it work with the album\'s concept, so it was truly collaborative. It also gave me more confidence writing lyrics, which isn\'t something I normally do that often.\" **Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon, \"Spontaneous\"** \"I\'d been trying to work with Little Dragon for forever. We\'ve always been playing similar shows, passing each other at festivals, being like, \'We gotta do something! We gotta do something!\' Finally I was like, \'I\'ma reach out and get this poppin\'.\' The song was actually one of the last to get added onto the album.\" **Tierra Whack, \"Yellow Belly\"** \"Honestly, I was just a fan of hers from SoundCloud. Then, one day, Lil Dicky came over to play some music and brought her along. He didn\'t really give her the proper introduction. He was just like, \'This is my friend Tierra, she makes music.\' She didn\'t say much, but she was cool and we were vibing out. A couple hours later, Dicky was like, \'Okay, wanna listen to some of this Tierra Whack music?\' I was like, \'Wait a second, you mean, you\'re the—oh my god! I know all your songs. I mean, you\'ve only got two of them, but I know \'em both!\' I super-fanned out.\" **Denzel Curry, \"Black Balloons\"** \"The thing I love about Denzel is that he\'s got so much to prove. He\'s got a fiery spirit. He wants to show the world that he\'s the greatest rapper right now. I love that. But the difference is that he actually comes back better every time I hear him. He\'s putting in the work, not just talking shit. He cares about the craft and is such a thoughtful human. So there\'s an interesting duality there. He\'s got the turn-up spirit, but he\'s very conscious and very smart.\" **David Lynch, \"Fire Is Coming\"** \"This album has a middle point—like a chapter break moment—and David Lynch couldn\'t have been more perfect to introduce it. You know, initially I thought it should be a sound design thing, something weird and narrative and unexpected. I wasn\'t thinking about chopping David Lynch on the beat. But when I sent them a version that was basically atonal jazz—you know, weird sounds—they hit me back like, \'Hey, so we think this would be so cool if it had that Flying Lotus beat!\' I was like, \'Oh, all right, okay, I got you.\'\" **Shabazz Palaces, \"Actually Virtual\"** \"This one is special to me. He came out to my house, stayed in my guest room, and we worked on songs for three days straight. And the truth is, we made so much stuff that we forgot about this track. When I found it later, randomly, I was like, \'What the fuck is this? It needs a little TLC, but man, it could really be something.\' After I spent some time on it and sent it back over to him, he just goes, \'That\'s hardbody.\' Such an East Coast line.\" **Thundercat, \"The Climb\"** \"The thing is, Thundercat is on every track. He\'s pretty much playing on 90 percent of the album. But this is the only one he\'s singing on. We started this song the way we start everything: frustrated and depressed about the world, knowing we want to make something that reminds people that most of the chaos out there is just noise. Be above all that shit. Be above the bullshit.\" **Toro y Moi, \"9 Carrots\"** \"Toro is the person I always wind up in vans with at festivals. Somehow, I always wind up in the van with Toro. We play a lot of the same shows, we get picked up from the same hotels, and he\'s just always in the van, or on the plane, things like that. Over time, I guess I started to feel a kindred spirit thing, even though he\'s someone I don\'t know too well. But finally we were like, \'We gotta make something happen.\'\" **Solange, \"Land of Honey\"** \"I\'d been trying to make this song happen for a long time. We initially started it for a documentary film that didn\'t pan out. But I really loved the song and always thought it was special, so I kept on it. I kept working on it, kept to trying to figure out how to tie it into the universe that I was building. Eventually, we recorded it here at the house and just felt really organic, really natural. She\'s someone I\'d definitely like to keep working with.\" **Honorable Mention: Mac Miller** \"A couple songs on the album, like \'Find Your Own Way Home\' and \'Thank U Malcolm,\' were inspired by Mac. \'Thank U Malcolm\' is special to me because it\'s my way of thanking him for all the inspiration he left behind in his passing, and for all the fire he inspired in me, Thundercat, and all of our friends. He made us want to be better, to let go of the bullshit. And now, you know, none of us are out here experimenting with drugs or anything. That\'s largely because of him. After he left us, everyone was like, \'You know what? Fuck all that shit.\' In a way, in his passing, he\'s got friends of mine clean. He\'ll always mean a lot to me.\"

After the billowing, nearly gothic pop of 2016’s *Blood Bitch*—which included a song constructed entirely from feral panting—Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval makes the unlikely pivot into brightly colored synth-pop on *The Practice of Love*. Rarely has music so experimental been quite this graceful, so deeply invested in the kinds of immediate pleasure at which pop music excels. Conceptually and sometimes formally, the album can be as challenging as Hval’s thorniest work. The title track layers together a spoken-word soliloquy by Vivian Wang, the album’s chief vocalist, with an unrelated conversation between Hval and the Australian musician Laura Jean, so that resonant details—about hatred of love, the fragility of the ego, the decision not to have children—drift free of their original contexts and intertwine over a bed of ambient synths. But the bulk of the record is built atop a shimmering foundation of buoyant synths and sleek dance beats, with memories of ’90s trance and dream pop seeping into cryptic lyrics about vampires, thumbsuckers, and nuclear families. In “Six Red Cannas,” Hval makes a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch in New Mexico, citing Joni Mitchell and Amelia Earhart as she meditates on the endless skies above. Her invocation of such feminist pioneers is fitting. Refusing to take even the most well-worn categories as a given, Hval reinvents the very nature of pop music.

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.” Prompted by an urge to find a different kind of language to express what she was feeling, the songs on Love unfurl like an interior dialogue involving several voices. Friends and collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Felicia Atkinson surface on various tracks, via contributed vocals or through bits of recorded conversation, which further posits the record itself as a kind of ongoing discourse. “The last thing I wrote, which was my new book (forthcoming), had quite an angry voice,” says Hval, “The voice of an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies. Perhaps this album rediscovers that same voice 20 years later. Not so angry anymore, but still feeling apart from the mainstream, trying to find their place and their community. With that voice, I wanted to push my writing practice further, writing something that was multilayered, a community of voices, stories about both myself and others simultaneously, or about someone’s place in the world and within art history at the same time. I wanted to develop this new multi-tracked writing voice and take it to a positive, beautiful pop song place... A place which also sounds like a huge pile of earth that I’m about to bury my coffin in.” Opening track “Lions” sets the tone for the record, both thematically and aesthetically, offering both a directive and a question: “Look at these trees / Look at this grass / Look at those clouds / Look at them now / Study this and ask yourself: Where is God?” The idea of placing ourselves in context to the earth and to others bubbles up throughout the record. On “Accident” two friends video chat on the topic of childlessness, considering their own ambivalence about motherhood and the curiosity of having been born at all. “She is an accident,” Hval sings, “She is made for other things / Born for cubist yearnings / Born to Write. Born to Burn / She is an accident / Flesh in dissent.” What does it mean to be in the world? What does it mean to participate in the culture of what it means to be human? To parent (or not)? To live and die? To practice love and care? What must we do to feel validated as living beings? Such questions are baked into the DNA of Love, wrapped up in layers of gauzy synthesizers and syncopated beats. Even when circling issues of mortality, there is a kind of humane delight at play. “Put two fingers in the earth,” Hval intones on “Ashes to Ashes”— “I am digging my own grave / in the honeypot / ashes to ashes / dust to dust.” Balanced against these ruminations on love, care and being, Hval employs sounds that are both sentimental and more than a little nostalgic. “I kept coming back to trashy, mainstream trance music from the ’90s,” she says, “It’s a sound that was kind of hiding in the back of my mind for a long time. I don’t mean trashy in a bad sense, but in a beautiful one. The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and too scared to attend, they were the sounds I associated with the people who were always driving around the two streets in the town where I grew up, the guys with the big stereo in the car that was always just pumping away. I liked the idea of playing with trance music in the true transcendental sense, those washy synths have lightness and clarity to them. I think I’m always looking for what sounds can bring me to write, and these synths made me write very open, honest lyrics.” Though The Practice of Love was, in some sense, inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name, for Hval the concept of love as a practice—as an ongoing, sustained, multivalent activity—provided a way to broaden and expand her own writing practice. Lyrically, the 8 tracks present here, particularly the title track, hew more closely to poetic forms than anything Hval has made before. (As evidenced by the record’s liner notes, which assume the form of a poetry chapbook.) Rather than shrink from the subject or try to overly obfuscate in some way, Love considers the notion of intimacy from all sides, whether it be positing the notion of art in conversation with other artists (“Six Red Cannas”) or playing with clichés around what it means to be a woman who makes art (“High Alice”), Hval’s songs attempt to make sense of what love and care actually mean—love as a practice, a vocation that one must continually work at. “This sounds like something that should be stitched on a pillow, but intimacy really is a lifelong journey,” she explains, “And I am someone who is interested in what ideas or practices of love and intimacy can be. These practices have for me been deeply tied to the practice of otherness, of expressing myself differently from what I’ve seen as the norm. Maybe that's why I've mostly avoided love as a topic of my work. The theme of love in art has been the domain of the mainstream for me. Love is one of those major subjects, like death and the ocean, and I’m a minor character. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at otherness, this fragile performance, to explore how it expresses love, intimacy, and kindness. I've wanted to explore how otherness deals with the big, broad themes. I've wanted to ask big questions, like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”  It’s a crazy ambition, perhaps, to think that something as simple as a pop song can manage, over the course of two or three minutes, to chisel away at some extant human truth. Still, it’s hard to listen to the songs on The Practice of Love and not feel as if you are listening in on a private conversation, an examination that is, for lack of a better word, truly intimate. Tucked between the beats and washy synths, the record spills over with slippery truths about what it is to be a human being trying to move through the world and the ways—both expected and unexpected—we relate to each other. “Outside again, the chaos / and I wonder what is lost,” Hval sings on “Ordinary,” the album’s closing track, “We don’t always get to choose / when we are close / and when we are not.”

When producers Blawan and Pariah kicked off their Karenn project in 2011, the idea of UK bass musicians busting out industrial-strength techno was still relatively novel. Eight years later, it’s practically de rigueur. Yet on *Grapefruit Regret*, the duo’s debut album together, Karenn demonstrates what separates them from so many of their fellow dungeon-dwellers. For all the severity of their music, they’ve long since bowed out of the harder/faster/meaner arms race; these tracks, all of them floor fillers, are plenty powerful, but there’s a sense of restraint to even their most walloping beats. The menace of the growling “Lemon Dribble” is more implied than overt; “Strawbs” barrels along at a fearsome clip, but moves with lithe, slippery grace; “Peel Me Easy” foregrounds the nuance of its all-hardware production, served up in such exacting detail it could almost pass for vintage minimal techno. The thrills come fast and thick, but even at their most intense, all that space between the beats leaves plenty of room for armchair dancers to catch their breath.

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The debut full- length album from Lafawndah, ​ANCESTOR BOY,​ announced today and releasing on 22nd March 2019 via her own label imprint CONCORDIA, is a bracing statement of intent, heralding an artist unbound in scope, scale, and intensity. She opens 2019 with bold single DADDY, plotting new territory onto her own highly personalized map of influence – a map drawing the club, composition, and pop into thrillingly unresolved, ultramodern erotics. Lafawndah’s 2018 was filled with myriad musical highlights and successes - including a celebrated performance featuring peers Tirzah, Kelsey Lu and more at London’s South Bank in December, growing from her acclaimed HONEY COLONY mixtapes. Meanwhile her heart-stopping inter-generational music & film collaboration with japanese ambient legend Midori Takada in Le Renard Bleu (with KENZO and Partel Oliva) continues to echo into new forms, with a full production performance titled ‘Ceremonial Blue’ premiering at the Barbican, London in April. And streaming now, her achingly beautiful self-directed video for JOSEPH - a lullaby and an ode to newborn life co-written with Jamie Woon and also featuring on ANCESTOR BOY - has set Lafawndah apart as an independent director with a singular vision spanning multiple media and artforms. Having in her prior self-titled and TAN EPs upturned geography, in ANCESTOR BOY Lafawndah digs deep to unravel geology, mining emotions of the deep past and future. The album’s physicality is elemental; its memory, mineral. It is a becoming- of- age story for a people yet to come, created out of a need to find the others. In the middle of the album’s sonic and lyrical onslaught is the desire to share the uncertainties of growing up when you don’t belong anywhere. Crafted with the aid of fellow travelers Nick Weiss, Aaron David Ross, and James Connolly, ANCESTOR BOY’s maximalism- it’s overflow of detail, of feeling, of ideas- serves to amplify a frequent lyrical motif: the sensation that one body, one lifetime, isn’t big enough for what you’re feeling. The record is pregnant with memories shared across more than one mind, recalling the storytelling antagonisms of Nina Simone at her most strident and unpredictable. In response, the rhythmic aggressions of her music have grown even more determined and psychedelic, drawing a line in fire between Jimmy Jam’s turnt industrialism on Control ​and the furious unease of ​Red Mecca-​era Cabaret Voltaire. With a palate equal parts chrome and dirt, ice and depth, Lafawndah’s finesse with song architecture imbues the LP with an uncanny addictiveness: anthems loaded with trap doors. ANCESTOR BOY imagines a pop music that is neither imperial nor local, but a freedom of movement; a residue, perhaps, from the album’s nomadic creation between Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, London, and Paris.

Loraine James was enticed into the world of music making through her mother, who would go from playing the steel pans to blaring out music from Metallica to Calypso. Having grown up in Enfield, London, she credits the multiculturalism in the city for “broadening my mind and ears”, having listened to jazz, electronica, uk drill and grime, and the results of this exposure can be heard on the mix-up of For You And I. Part of For You and I explores the complexities of being in a queer relationship in London, and the ups and downs that come with that. “I’m in love and wanted to share that in some way. I wanted to make songs that reflect layers of my relationship. Reflected in the song titles and mood of songs like So Scared and Hand Drops she says "A lot of the time I’m really scared in displaying any kind of affection in public…This album is more about feeling than about using certain production skills.” Of her process, James says she aimed to make something that wasn’t overthought. For You and I is rhythmically free flowing and sprawling, with melodies that evolve into rippling keys. It feels like a live jam session with a jazz mentality, contrasting the delicate and abrasive. She also says “The other half of the album is about me, and I wanted it to be about only me.” On three tracks, guest vocals from rapper Le3 bLACK and singer Theo brilliantly articulate Loraine's emotional feelings. The artwork, which features a photo of James holding a photo of her estate from ten years ago is a tribute to her upbringing. “I started making music in those flats, news of my Dad and Uncle passing away happened in that flat, I came out to my mum crying in that flat. Most of my life has been there and in so many years time this area will no longer exist.” This album is a deeply intimate and personal offering, expressing happiness, anxiety, joy, sensuality and fear through a vivid sound palette and an experimental sense of rhythm.

This album was recorded between 2016 - 2019 and features some wild edits and some big tunes to party to until the end of time. take great care with these. they go. special shout out to my brother Mitchell Tuckette W. for his beautiful work on the keys. shoutout to my brother Acemo and shout out to HAUS of ALTR and Weapons+ the cover art was shot by photographer Ciro Paoillo 2019 - infinity.

In 2016 Nathan Micay released Capsule’s Pride: a mixtape in tribute to Akira. The release was premiered with NPR First Listen and downloaded over 40 thousand times. Coveted by fans and supported by a wide range of music press, the record won many best of year awards. The following year, streetwear giant Supreme created an official Akira capsule collection that echoed the design of our release. Capsule’s Pride vinyl bootlegs have become sought after records with discogs collectors. Three years later and Nathan has released a string of renowned dance releases for a range of great labels. He returns to LuckyMe for his debut album. Four tracks from the forthcoming Blue Spring have become viral videos on the private facebook group IOM (Identification Of Music). The group exists for young fans of new dance music to share videos of their favourite DJs playing out big records at clubs or festivals. The album was sent to a select handful of DJs in 2018 and without any public track IDs, the uncredited clips of this record have risen to over a million plays with thousands of comments speculating the names of the songs. We continue to share clips from Nathan’s friends playing out the release to close DJ sets every weekend in front of large audiences. We are proud to finally present them here, on Nathan Micay’s debut album, released May 3rd on double vinyl and CD. Orders of the first press made here come with a copt of an original 'Blue Spring' comic. The story sees a young data miner rebel by attending a rave in the woods with her friends, only for the event to be broken up by the ranks of a futuristic police state. ‘Blue Spring’ is the start of the revolution.

My body is resonant; it has the capacity to radiate power and love. My body is energy; it pulses every moment as it ebbs and flows. My body is forever; it has a form now and will hold new patterns in the future. “Resonant Body”, the third studio album by Octo Octa (Maya Bouldry-Morrison), is her most spiritual and nature--connected work. Maya recorded the songs at her cabin in New Hampshire inorder to channel the resonance of the forest, the beauty of the river, and the energy from the rituals she conducts within it. The album was written and produced at the end of December 2018—after a year of near constant touring—in order to process through art an intense and magical year of change. “Resonant Body” is the second release on T4T LUV NRG, the label co-run by Maya and her partner Eris Drew. It draws on the same themes of togetherness (“Power To The People”), embodiment (“Spin Girl, Let’s Activate!”), love (“Deep Connections”), healing (“My Body Is Power”) and survival (“Can You See Me?”) that animated her acclaimed “For Lover’s EP” (Technicolour, 2019). The album’s art was created by Maya’s partner Brooke, who painted two canvases after a magical day-trip Brooke, Eris, and Maya took earlier this year on the “Sweet Trail” in New Hampshire. Octo Octa’s live performances and DJ sets are known for calling the dancers to move their bodies to a message of love. The dancefloor can be for all of us. It is a communal space that can provide healing when respected, where the dancers can actualize if they can let go and embrace themselves and each other. When we engage with music that heals, through dance or deep listening, we use an ancient technology for its original purpose. Octo Octa believes in the healing power of her music. “Resonant Body” transforms her life and intentions into healing art. 50% of the profits from the album will be donated to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), which works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence.

Oli XL — Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer Bloom 01 Release Date: July 22nd, 2019 Format: CD / Digital Drawing by Roberto Ronzani “Can you be my ringtone... I Feel liquid Love!”. Debut album by Oli XL. Artwork drawn by Roberto Ronzani. 386 uncleared samples, twisted and patchworked into emotions (132 songs, 53 video games, 14 movies, 187 misc. found clips). Assembled in Johanneshov, Stockholm - from 2017 to 2019. ♔ Special thanks to Emilie, Zak, Lisa, Anton, Emilio & Robin. credits

** for the vinyl: head to Low Company or RwdFwd, or check your local dealer. ** Devil’s Dance – the debut album from Ossia. Heavy-weather, beyond-good-and-evil soundsystem poetics, channelling raw and rootical techno, Isolationist abstraction, and dub at its most turbulent and raw-nerved and space-time-warping. New worlds ahead… Equal parts tuff, tail-thrashing dancehall pressure – see ‘Hell Dub’ – and art-of-darkness ambience and introspection, culminating in the slow-burning, third-eye-opening 23-minute dreamweapon, ‘Vertigo’. Part of the Young Echo crew, Ossia embodies the best tradition of Bristol underground music in that he doesn’t pay much mind to tradition, just does his own thing. Yes, Devil’s Dance shares DNA with those sullen masterpieces we will always associate with the city, from blunted 90s street-soul/hip-hop to sub-loaded dubstep – but like his forebears Ossia is ultimately a mongrel breed, drawing from his own, very contemporary and idiosyncratic well of influences: grime, jazz, steppers, dub, post-punk and industrial abrasion, concrète minimalism… Devil’s Dance could easily be not just a forbidding, but a suffocating proposition. But even at its most angst-ridden it feels lithe and aerodynamic, its darker impulses both intensified, and offset, by a pure soundboy’s delight in detail and colour and higher dancefloor mechanics. The music pulses with energy, a fever to communicate…and Raki Singh (violin), Jasmine (vocals) and Ollie Moore (saxophone) add vivid flesh-tone to the punishing, plasmic electronics. The record was mixed at an infamous, subterranean Bristolian recording studio, using an arsenal of spring and plate reverbs, modded pedals, tape-delays and compressors: systems of black magic crucial to the album’s intense presence and physicality and carefully modulated dread. In the end what we are witnessing, and experiencing vicariously, is a purging, an exorcism: find the devil, dance with the devil… and then chase, chase, chase him out of the earth.

Movimiento Para Cambio, is the full-length and debut for PAN from Montreal based duo Pelada. Comprising of vocalist Chris Vargas and producer Tobias Rochman, they have gained international attention through the city’s underground warehouse rave scene. An urgent, headstrong body of work, the LP uses the music as a mechanism for delivering ideas central to the group’s moral and political ethos. Vargas explores themes of power, identity, surveillance and environmental justice atop Rochman’s raw mix of rave synths, acid basslines, breakbeats and dembow rhythms. While at times unpredictable, the album is unified in its fast and loose approach. A Mí Me Juzgan Por Ser Mujer (‘I Am Judged Because I’m a Woman’) is an anti-machista anthem, stylistically nodding to NY house. Though Vargas doesn’t identify as a woman themselves, they understand their experience as a woman in an imbalanced patriarchal society that excludes women, femmes and non-binary people. Habla Tu Verdad (‘Speak Your Truth’) emphasizes the need to overcome the stigma around discussing sexual harassment, offering courage and strength to those who may need it. Asegura (‘Secure’) deals with the unprecedented power of Big Data, which monetizes a surveillance based economy through its users' data and behaviours. These themes are set to fierce unrelenting bpms, nods to gabber, and samples of a reality show where young men compete in a prison fitness contest. Caderona (‘big hips’), features a hardline perreo-tinged beat that carries Vargas’ vocals with refreshing ferocity. Inspired by a cumbia song, Caderona offers a counterpoint to the male gaze, acting as an opportunity to demand space. Aquí describes the reality of a global corporate domination, where capitalist insatiability meets government inaction as we sit on the precipice of a mass extinction of our own making. Pelada hope to inspire critical self- reflexivity through engagement, building power, demanding space and action. Or as it is written in their liner notes: ‘ABRE TUS OJOS, LA BESTIA SE ALIMENTA DE LA EXPLOTACIÓN' which translates to ‘OPEN YOUR EYES, THE BEAST FEEDS ON EXPLOITATION’.

Nina Kraviz' TRIP presents the debut album Am I Who I Am by Alina Izolenta and Kamil Ea, the duo more formally known as PTU. Across twelve tracks PTU cut and chop their way through frenetic marching drums and spiralling acid leads, awakening an army of malfunctioning robots as they go. Whilst Am I Who I Am boasts a vast spectrum of bizarre ideas - often introduced at high velocity - each one is executed with a skillful dose of restraint, summoning energy from microscopically detailed arrangements. From the angular maximalism of 'Castor & Pollux' to the eerie polyrhythms of 'After Cities' and the relentless hammer drills of 'Sirocco', PTU find life in the most extraordinary of places. Vinyl: clone.nl/item56337.html

Released (LP) June 2019 by Superior Viaduct / W.25TH Composed, mixed, and produced by Sarah Davachi Recorded 24 & 25 August 2018 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, engineered by Jesse Nichols Performed by Sarah Davachi (electric organ, reed organ, piano), Fausto Dayap Daos (countertenor), Eric KM Clark (violin), and Laura Steenberge (viola da gamba) Mastered by Gary Hobish Design and layout by John Foster From Superior Viaduct: Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilizing everything from pipe and reed organs to analog synthesizers, this prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for a radiant work of quiet minimalism and poetic rumination. Recorded at Berkeley, California's famed Fantasy Studios, Pale Bloom is comprised of two delicately-arranged sides. The first – a three-part suite where Davachi's piano acts as conjurer, beckoning Hammond organ and stirring countertenor into a patiently unfolding congress – recalls Eduard Artemiev's majestic soundtrack for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. "Perfumes I-III" employs the harmonically rich music of Bach as a springboard for abstract, solemn pieces that sound as haunted as they are dreamlike. While the first half of Pale Bloom showcases Davachi's latent Romanticism, the sidelong "If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery" reveals the Mills College graduate's affinity for the work of avant-garde composers La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue. Softly vibrating strings rise and fall like complementary exhalations of breath. As the fluctuating pitches create overtones that pitter and pulse, the piece slowly and subtly evolves – suggesting a well-tempered stillness, yet without stasis.

Special Request returns from hibernation with four albums he made in his underpants. Of the new material, he tells us: "I had a right fucking doss making this. Fuck all that conceptual guff m888" Strictly bowel-evacuating bangers. Those of a nervous disposition should also watch out for incontinence. Many people think you can't do anything truly NEW in electronic music. Special request disagrees. He elaborates: "nah, that's bollocks" Upon playing some of the new tracks to a friend, the question "are u alright m8?" was asked. Now you, the avid listener, can answer for yourself.