The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2020

“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.

to those who have drawn down the moon, joined in darkness in worlds without end, BLACK CURSE unfolds its evil. Combining ripping, violent rhythms with razor sharp riffing and trancelike pulses, BLACK CURSE creates true malevolence. The band rips open holy portals to times when Black and Death Metal shared the same principles, the same aesthetics, and the same diabolical wrath. Produced with the heaviest sound possible -Endless Wound- crushes into the world like the spawn of primordial chaos. Herein BLACK CURSE crawl on the darkest lava fields of Doom, revel in the infernal storms of Death, and levitate in the utmost Black.

Confrontation Seven Storey Mountain was born of two confrontations. The first is between myself as an active user of machines and the trumpet as the passive machine that I use. Anyone who has practiced an instrument understands this friction and frustration but—given my personal history of being misinformed, partially educated, and brought up off beat—my concept of technical mastery has been less than traditional. Over the years, I’ve tried to understand the trumpet by breaking it down, reconstructing it, screaming into it, whispering near it, doing it (and myself) grievous bodily harm and, as heard on this recording, electrocuting it. I’ve done this, not for novelty, but in hopes of finding its humanity: drawing its technique away from the traditional goal of reproducing the singing voice and toward a technique of sighing, shrieking, and mumbling. The second confrontation is more abstract, but similarly embedded in how the song cycle has unfolded. In the same sense of testing the capabilities of the trumpet-as-machine, I wanted to locate the limits of my own self-as-spirit. These terms are difficult. They carry a certain kind of weight and a feeling of the vaguely religious. This kind of language, as well as the title of this work, culled from Thomas Merton’s autobiographical writing, has overlaid a sense of the “sacred” on the series that should have been disavowed by me long ago, but I’ve yet to find terms that fit SSM as naturally and poetically. Religious dogma holds little interest for me. Instead, what I’m drawn to in Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain—and what I mean by self-as-spirit—is a secular practice of self-questioning and evolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it self-reliance. Seven Storey Mountain is not an attempt to reach a spiritual plane. It is an example of how we take part as humans in the cycle of trying, failing, recognizing, evaluating, regrouping, and trying again; an exercise in the transcendent human process of failure. Mutual Aid Music Building Seven Storey Mountain is a practical process of reverse-engineering. The score is compiled from a dozen differently-articulated sets of instructions to the musicians rather than being preset and articulated in standardized score notation. Each iteration of the cycle begins with a list of individual personalities with different strengths and ways of engaging with music. Some of the musicians don’t want to read traditional notation. Others are more comfortable performing from a score. Still others can do both but are most comfortable somewhere on a spectrum between the two. Seven Storey Mountain presents each musician with a score that is specific to their orientation. They can be free from self-consciousness and redirect all of their energy into an explosion of musical energy. Composing Seven Storey Mountain begins with the pre-recorded sounds that occur simultaneously with the live performance. I take the sound file from the immediately preceding version and strip any sounds from it that feel non-essential. Then, I add elements to this landscape to build a distinct aural topography while still feeling grounded in the earlier versions of the piece. For example, in the middle of SSM6, there are a number of drum samples: a Paul Lytton clip first used in SSM4; a heavily manipulated Chris Corsano loop added to SSM5; and, unique to this version, the overlaid crescendo of Will Guthrie’s “Breaking Bones.” In each sound file since SSM4, some version of the “Lytton Loop”—a short gesture ending in a sustained high bell tone—has been included. Although it has been manipulated in one way or another from one version to the next, that loop has become a through-line in the subsequent pieces. Once finished, this sound file acts as a timeline for the musicians. Their gestures are laid out as timings on a printed temporal score and also correspond to pre-recorded sonic events. The individual parts may be made up of textual instructions with timings, aleatoric notation, jazz chord changes, or fully notated traditional scores. Regardless of the different ways of articulating what, when, and how to add to the performance, the end result is the same: a unified organism of sound—something larger than the individual. To achieve this, we work together. This approach to writing is something I call Mutual Aid Music. And, it has been a central tenet of my compositional and improvisational philosophy for the last ten years in projects from Seven Storey Mountain to Battle Pieces and knknighgh. This form of composing doesn’t aim to reproduce a score coming from a central source (me) but relies on individual and group decision-making as ways of taking musicians out of their preconceived technical or aesthetic languages to create a communal music. Concentrating on how the decisions of each performer affect the overall music (and how those decisions can push the music in unfamiliar directions) asks the player to work beyond their licks and tics, and prods them to express something original and spontaneous to the collective. This approach creates a highly-complex music that is heartbreakingly human in its inevitable failure. Virtuosity is the possibility of collapse. This music demands that the players put themselves in a position of sounding foolish, uncool, bad. It is the willingness to take this risk that raises us, as artists, above mere reproduction. It is terrifying to tempt failure in a solo setting, but the act of throwing yourself off a musical cliff within an ensemble takes on a singular dimension: you have to consider that the people around you are doing the same thing. The best way to avoid failure is to embrace those that jumped with you in an attempt to create something buoyant, something beyond simultaneously hurtling individuals. When it doesn’t work and failure wins, at least the attempt is noble. When it does work (as it does on this recording) the result is a rare form of musical intricacy and intimacy. Ecstaticism, Family, Voice There are a few elements of SSM that are less easily definable, but are vital, and so they should be mentioned. The first is Ecstaticism—a term I may have inadvertently coined in a 2014 interview. Seven Storey Mountain is meant to make you feel something. The live performances of these pieces make people react. They smile, shiver, cry, run for the door to compose their angry emails. The ensemble is there, playing this music, for people to remember that feeling and to take it home with them. We seek to imprint a moment on you. The best part of Seven Storey Mountain is the “We.” Every person who has performed a portion of the cycle has given something to the piece, and some part of the piece has remained with them. Each SSM is written so that everyone can give a little more of themselves than they feel comfortable giving without causing too much strain. Seven Storey Mountain is a chance for the performers to turn themselves inside out in a way that feels safe. Together! Everyone in every ensemble, from the first trio with David Grubbs and Paul Lytton (SSM) to those who have signed on in Germany (SSM5) or Belgium (SSM6) have given something deep and personal. This is especially true of the huge force that came together to perform and record the music on this disc. I call them ‘the family’ with no sense of irony. These are my people and I’m happy to have them in my life. Vibrations When we get ready to rehearse a version of SSM for the first time, I remind the ensemble that our goal is to make the room vibrate in a different way, and to make that room continue to vibrate long after we’re gone. In the past, we’ve achieved this through a variable concoction of volume and a certain feeling of power. When I was preparing this version of Seven Storey Mountain, I found that this kind of energy wasn’t at my fingertips any longer. For the first time, I was angry. I was truly angry as I watched what people do to each other: how some make decisions about peoples’ lives as if they were objects. I was fucking angry watching the government attempt to wrest control of women’s bodies and angry watching Black people be incarcerated and killed with impunity. This anger manifested as the desire to sing loud, but not just with my voice. I didn’t trust my strength alone. Instead, I put my trust in the voices of the women around me. They have a different kind of power that I can’t explain. At the end of the premiere—after much gnashing of teeth and feedback sculpting by the instrumentalists—a choir of twenty-one women led by Megan Schubert stood up in the back rows of a church and, with no amplification, made its walls shake with Peggy Seeger’s words. I hope they are still vibrating and will continue to do so for a long time. To share a room with those voices moved me and, for a moment, I felt whole. - Nate Wooley, June 2020 About the Text The composition of Seven Storey Mountain VI came into focus when I first heard Peggy Seeger’s recording of “Reclaim the Night” from her album Different Therefore Equal. I listened to it over and over again, concentrating on the power of her words and the clarity of her voice. SSM6 uses the first few lines of “Reclaim the Night” as a kind of mantra. The hope was that those leaving the performance—or coming to the end of this recording—would not just remember the melody but also, through its repetition, be able to retain some of Peggy’s words. The phrase “You can’t scare me” that dovetails with the last repetitions of Seeger’s lyrics was inspired by Bobbie McGee’s “Union Maid.” I initially tried to combine the lyrics and melodies of both songs but the result felt too ‘clever’ and drained the power of both songs. Instead, I just set the words, “You can’t scare me”—not an elemental feature of McGee’s original song—to my own melody and let them act as the piece’s final affirmation; the words that I hope the listener takes with them into their daily life. “Reclaim the Night” by Peggy Seeger Though Eve was made from Adam's rib Nine months he lay within her crib How can a man of woman born Thereafter use her sex with scorn? For though we bear the human race To us is given but second place And some men place us lower still By using us against our will If we choose to walk alone For us there is no safety zone If we're attacked we bear the blame They say that we began the game And though you prove your injury The judge may set the rapist free Therefore the victim is to blame Call it nature, but rape's the name Chorus: Reclaim the night and win the day We want the right that should be our own A freedom women have seldom known The right to live, the right to walk alone without fear A husband has his lawful rights Can take his wife whene'er he likes And courts uphold time after time That rape in marriage is no crime The choice is hers and hers alone Submit or lose your kids and home When love becomes a legal claim Call it duty, but rape's the name And if a man should rape a child It's not because his spirit's wild Our system gives the prize to all Who trample on the weak and small When fathers rape, they surely know Their kids have nowhere else to go Try to forget, don't ask us to Forgive them—they know what they do Chorus When exploitation is the norm Rape is found in many forms Lower wages, meaner tasks Poorer schooling, second class We serve our own, and, like the men We serve employers—it follows then That bodies raped is nothing new But just a servant's final due We've raised our voices in the past And this time will not be the last Our bodies' gift is ours to give Not payment for the right to live Since we've outgrown the status quo We claim the right to answer "No!" If without consent he stake a claim Call it rape, for rape's the name Chorus

" l'Inattingible" in Top 10 albums of the decade (2010-2020) by Julia Holter. ***** MOJO June 2020 "L’inattingible, is arguably her most ambitious and highly orchestrated statement yet, marking a major creative leap forward for her as a songwriter and composer. It’s one of our favorite albums of 2020 so far." (David Perron, Free Form Freakout) "L'Inattingible est une œuvre à part dans la discographie de Delphine Dora. Nous n'avons pu résister à l'intégrer à la présentation des deux précédentes... Très beau titre, ce n'est pas l'intangible que l'on ne peut pas toucher, le mot enjambe la marque infamante de notre inaptitude, de notre incomplétude, il nous porte dans cette chose qui nous est inatteignable, nous transporte dans sa nature même, dans sa constituvité même, qui est justement d'être inattingible. Pochette : puits d'ombre encadré de blanc. Trois cercles concentriques, en cœur de cible Delphine Dora au piano, deux margelles exentriques, jeu de l'oie de photographies, cases d'affects et de symboles, séparées d'un mince trait blanc. Elle est de Marie-Douce St Jacques. Artiste canadienne multidisciplinaire. Une démarche formelle qui interroge la perfection à laquelle, selon différents médiums artistiques, elle peut atteindre, le pronom ''elle'' représentant autant elle-même, que la démarche elle-même, que la perfection elle-même. Plus abstraitement je dirais qu'elle cherche à transformer le signe qui ne peut-être entrevu que par certains en une forme que tout un chacun peut percevoir. Ce qui ne signifie pas comprendre. Question instrumentation, ce n'est plus le piano dépouillé d'Eudaimon, l'orchestration oscille entre classique évanescent et noise discret. (...) L'Inattingible est une œuvre cime dans la discographie de Delphine Dora. L'opus reste marqué par la poésie de Katleen Raine, il est à lire en tant que réponse doranienne à la vision poétique rainienne. Cela est davantage visible dans les morceaux du début, ce n'est qu'après que Dora développe ses propres vues. Ce n'est pas un hasard si Dora s'est chargée de l'écriture des textes... quant à la musique elle est l'aboutissement de tout un parcours créatif. Il est le fruit d'un long désir. C'est un chef-d'œuvre qui reste difficile d'accès. D'une richesse musicale extrême que nous n'avons qu'à peine évoquée dans notre chronique, nous contentant d'en définir un parcours idéographique. Qu'il soit clair que nous avons essayé d'en donner une sorte de transcription nôtre, qui ne vise à aucune objectivité critique, réservée à notre propre usage. La composition et l'enregistrement, fragmentés sur une dizaine de pays, s'étalent sur près d’un an, ils oscillent sans cesse entre improvisation et fixation, entre écriture solitaire et mise en forme collective. Elle risque de désarçonner les fans de rock purs et durs et d'intriguer les amateurs de jazz. Elle emprunte au classique, au noise et à l'électro. Ce n'est ni du rock, ni du jazz, mais elle possède à sa manière la virulence du premier et la subtilité du second. Quoi qu'il en soit pour voler un mot à Baudelaire, nous affirmons qu'il s'agit d'une œuvre phare." (les chroniques du pourpre, Damie Chad.) "Trop d’amis (dont Sylvia Hallett, Le fruit vert, Lau Nau) pour tous les nommer, trop d’instruments pour tous les énumérer colorent cette épopée fantomatique signée Delphine Dora. Cordes, vents, synthétiseurs analogiques, sons électroniques, accordéon, bruits divers : c’est un véritable orchestre là-dedans. Mais tout en retenue. La Française invoque avec ce disque en français une spiritualité éthérée ancrée dans les éléments, prenant son essence dans un passé païen et gothique. Demi-incantations, les mots de Dora sont faits d’une poésie du mystère et de l’émerveillement. Les courtes pièces de L’inattingible (déjà, ce titre, c’est beau, non ?) sont une illusion psychédélique collectivement assemblée sous la commande d’un cerveau rêveur. La beauté du geste collectif, c’est qu’il tisse un enchevêtrement anonyme. À qui appartient cette voix, cette note, ce râle ? Qu’importe." Sophie Chartier, Le Devoir, Fevrier 2020 "(...) L'Inattingible has the feel of a big statement – for starters, Dora has taken collaboration much further than in the past and the cast of contributors is extensive. The fourteen contributors include vocalists Jackie McDowell, Laura Naukkarinen and Caity Shaffer, several multi-instrumentalists including Gayle Brogan on e-bowed zither, guitar, hammered dulcimer and aeolian chimes, and she’s even integrated Québecquois duo Le Fruit Vert. Those familiar with Dora’s work will know about the melodically and emotionally indeterminate spaces she inhabits but there’s plenty that is new here: she sings entirely in French for the first time, and the process of crafting (writing and editing) the 21 pieces has been more involved than the spontaneous approach she has previously favoured. Without becoming overburdened, Dora’s voice and piano are richly embellished – the gorgeous ‘Loin’ floats on a bed of keyboard, strings, flute and a gathering cloud of vocals, while the brief ‘Métamorphose Déracinée’ brings together spoken word, distant, beguiling oboe, running water, piano and creaking, fluttering and rattling noises. Each track is like another glimpse into an abandoned ornamental garden; vegetation grown wild, water still flowing through cracked fountains, echoes of voices carried on the breeze." David McKenna, The Quietus "Exciting and varied record at the intersection of new music, pop / chanson and post rock. A fascinating melting pot / collage of instruments, acoustic sounds, vocals and electronics. It varies between song- and melody-based pieces and more abstract new music. It feels organic and improvised, and it is often vibrant and beautiful. Released in February on Three: Four Records." Oslo Public Library Music Blog - Best album of 2020 ********** With L’Inattingible, Delphine Dora’s music unfolds by drawing upon a new palette of colors. It will not escape anyone, that after having sung, in foreign, invented languages, or through extended vocal techniques, the musician resorts for the first time, to solely using the French language; and that after having often set texts and poems by other authors to music, she authorizes herself here to sing her own texts and fragments. But beyond these formal enrichments, the new musical ambitions developed through L'Inattingible are to be found in the very fabric of the record. If the previous albums had been conceived through improvisations or spontaneous compositions, the new pieces have found their definitive incarnations through a lengthy process of collation, rewriting, and a multitude of transformations. Moreover, the composition process now involves a complex montage of texts, sounds and instruments. If the keyboard remains the inextinguishable lung of the record, it is no longer rare to come upon Delphine's sung lines and have them echo into a lush instrumentation - where in voices and instruments create a language, and develop dialogues that have never been heard before. The new charm of her music seems to lie in the many participations that punctuate the album, giving her pieces their very particular colourations. We can hear no less than thirty instruments with configurations that differ from one piece to another: wind and string instruments, electronic instruments, a multitude of keyboard sounds, unusual instruments and all kinds of incongruous sonorities. Among them are Aby Vulliamy’s viola, accordion and musical saw (Nalle, The One Ensemble...), Adam Cadell’s violin, Susan Matthews’ harmonium, Taralie Peterson’s saxophone (Spires That In The Sunset Rise), Le Fruit Vert’s analog synthesizers, Valérie Leclercq’s percussion and flute (Half Asleep), Paulo Chagas' oboe and clarinet, the voices of Laura Naukkkarinen (Lau Nau), Caity Shaffer (Olden Yolk) and Jackie McDowell, Tom James Scott's ghostly piano, Sylvia Hallett's bicycle wheel or hurdy-gurdy, or Gayle Brogan's sculpted sounds (Pefkin). That is: a constellation of musicians who have never ceased to expand their sonic territories, experimenting throughout the years since the 2000s, drawing inspiration from folk or psychedelic music as well as from the field of improvised or experimental music. It must be highlighted, the extent to which this record could only come into being through the presence of these different participants. Incidentally, all of its strength lies in a paradox that gives shape to this "inattingible”, which is all the more elusive because it seems to only assert itself only through a series of actions engaged in a continual flux between presence and absence. Constantly brushing against each other, these sound bodies come to trace, as we listen, the contours of an "other" space that is both familiar and foreign to us. Thus, and contrary to what might be suggested by the participation of such a large number of musicians in the elaboration of the album, it finds its energy in this constantly renewed capacity to make the absent heard. This absence is certainly not played, but acts as a presence, a kind of “horizon inconnu” (unknown horizon) situated at the edge of our perception, abounding in unpredictable potentialities. "How to describe what has never appeared to us," Delphine asks herself on the piece entitled "Loin" (Far). There is, of course, no definitive answer to this question. Perhaps only the belief in a collective that is in the process of becoming, that, through the forms of engagement requires that everyone (musicians and listeners) unearths all of the “sensations enfouies” (buried sensations) that allow us to catch a glimpse of other forms of life that are all the more fascinating, because they remain on the threshold of the “l’inexplicable". crédits

The new space-rock album from Sun Araw is offered in a spirit of generosity and adventure. This music keeps moving, zooming in on funk and rock forms as a means of experiencing the granular nature of “feeling-without-articulating” in the best way possible. The first Sun Araw album recorded live-to-midi with the band, Rock Sutra is a new achievement!

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”

You would do well to understand as you try to plant your flags that from the dust you have come and so you will return. Returner is a work of Earth, and completes the 5-album elemental cycle begun with 2015's Breaker. Written and recorded as the World was shut down, its focus draws on the myriad pressures placed on the body, working through ghosts, violence, death, and how we can live with them. Amongst these themes, Ciudad Juárez highlights the femicides perpetrated in said city, now spread across Chihuahua state, as 'fictionalised' in Roberto Bolaño's 2666, and elucidated in the podcast Forgotten : Women Of Juárez. Blood Requiem speaks of the sacrifice of so many young lives in the fields of Europe in the Great War, as the soil rendered all in the same earth-tones. Omertà investigates the code of silence exemplified as honourable by the mafia and others, and whether it is possible to live with loss in an inherited system. And finally, Ithaca finishes the journey that began in Breaker's Heavy The Beat Of The Weary Waves, returning the voyager back to his home, still carrying the story with him, endless and repeating. But here the songs remain. And so we return, and begin again. IN FINITE RECORDS 010 With love and thanks to Violeta Page, Danny Lowe, Tom Sewell, Andy Holden, Andrew Anderson, Alkistis Dimech, Peter Grey, Autumn Richardson, Richard Skelton, Stephan Mathieu, Dale Cornish, and Chiara. For you

‘Scacco Matto’ is a continuation of Senni’s distinctive “pointillistic” style - where gated, taut sounds are arranged relentlessly as drumless rhythms and melody, which this time come in more song based structures. On this bold sonic ‘Rave-Voyeuristic’ statement, he takes the synthetic synapse manipulation of Trance and Computer Music, but intentionally encourages short circuits, resulting in unexpected signal paths moving in different directions, and making new fascinating shapes.

Forged alone in a cave on the island of Java, and recorded in a fortress in Poland, Antonina Nowacka’s “Lamunan” is an intimate exploration of a mysterious darkness and the earliest of musical forms. Nowacka has co-created raw electronics and audiovisuals as half of WIDT and the enigmatic Mentos Gulgendo, but her solo practice focuses solely on the voice’s inherent connection to mental states, its ability to speak wordlessly, and the apparatus of speech itself – leading her to a six-month trip to study traditional music in Indonesia. A day trip to visit a Javanese volcano turned into days of exploring, Nowacka eventually stumbling across a cave. “Rarely does anyone come there because Indonesians are afraid of the dark and the cave is poorly lit,” explains Nowacka. “I could sit there and sing for hours without feeling the passage of time.” Hours spent in the dizzying darkness and echoes of Seplawan Cave produced a series of unaccompanied vocal motifs. Moans, chants, hums, and wordless cries met with the multi-million year-old facades of the stone walls. The freely flowing compositions seem forged from the same natural material as that stone, carved into shape by nothing but water, time, and solitude. Upon returning to Poland, Nowacka recorded with Rafal Smoliński in the cave-like sonic conditions of the Modlin Fortress some 50km north of Warsaw. The intimate and surreal sound of the cave is recreated, Nowacka overlapping multiple vocal lines to create delicately interwoven chamber choral pieces, musically minimalist and emotionally maximalist. The album’s title – "Lamunan" – comes from the Indonesian word for ‘dreaming’ or ‘fantasy’.

Nídia shines in her new, more meditative album, showcasing a breadth of dance genres with a keen eye for emotion and turmoil THE GUARDIAN (4/5) Nídia's productions have become more polished over the years, and on the brief but beautiful Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes, every instrument feels gilded and glowing. RESIDENT ADVISOR Nídia’s approach to sound is efficient and elemental, taking recognizable material—hand claps, crash cymbals, plasticky brass—and creating complexity through arrangement rather than signal manipulation. She paints in bold, black lines before filling in the gaps with heavy pigments. PITCHFORK In just twenty-nine minutes, Nídia sustains, and effortlessly nods at, a wide range of sounds, creating a sensational album along the way. THE VINYL FACTORY + In typical Nídia fashion, we come in touch with a moody, unsettling tone over the first couple of minutes, successful in conveying an automatic sense of respect for the remainder of the album. And you might call it mature, reflective, contained, slow-paced. And we might call it individual, rich in songwriting ability (we call them songs), 2 steps forward or sideways from Nídia's body of work, Any way we approach it, it's a rich and emotive take on much loved afro styles, blended with Life guiding the producer's hand and a resolute sense of direction in a career already full of high points. Check the late acid on "Tarraxo Do Guetto" and the trilogy of "Rap"-titled songs, sounding like intimate moments in the bedroom, details maybe lost in the fog of memory but retaining all the passion. Fittingly, the last song is titled "Emotions", featuring an epic progression that makes it hard to decide if it's uplifting or profoundly melancholic.

SKEEN was composed entirely under lockdown and is meant to be performed live. Using one Technics SL-1200 Mk5 and one Vestax Controller One turntable, the album manipulates each sound through a myriad of turntablist techniques, pushing the limitations of two hands on two decks with only two sounds to the brink. The album ruminates over the semantics and etymology of language used around and by people identifying with multiple ethnicities. It depicts the frighteningly casual attitude of racist right-wing politics in 2020 Britain and the nuances of white privilege coupled with regressive feminism found in everyday ‘lefty' online writing. Stop. Listen. Apologise. Learn. This is not the time for you. This is the time for community. This is the time for us all to learn. 'Denying these empirical realities is its own kind of violence, even when our intentions are good.’ - Tressie McMillan Cottom Insight is all that matters; The rest is just fat and flesh, A weft and warp of bones and muscle. - Rumi All monies made by the artist from this release will be donated to Gateshead Food Bank. #TOPH4LYF

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

15 Song 7" EP of studio recordings from 1993. "Somewhere between the first and second Harry Pussy singles, Adris and I worked up a set's worth of 30-second 'songs.' I doubt we ever played the whole thing live, but we did record it over a couple of nights at Rat's studio around the corner from our Michigan Ave apartment on Miami Beach. Our occasional bandmate, Ian Steinberg, a teenage accordionist whose mom dropped him off for the session, showed up on the second night to contribute vocals and fuzz accordion on several tracks. Of all the songs recorded, only 'HP Superstar' was ever released, on 1995's 'What Was Music?' compilation, though 'No Hey', 'Youth Problem' and 'Prelude' appeared in other versions elsewhere. Live renditions of some of this set are also captured on the 'Live in Chapel Hill, 1993' single."

“The End of Their World is Coming!” is the debut album by Ryan Mahan (ALGIERS, Nun Gun). Set and recorded in the deep woods of Southern Appalachia and in the burning streets of Atlanta 2020, “The End of Their World is Coming!” chronicles a series of last rites rituals to the grotesque and decomposed corpse politic of the USA and its colonies. The record channels weird and eerie fiction, anti-capitalist theoretics and decolonial hauntology into a different form of ghost storytelling, a mostly wordless anti-fascist occult body music in the service of planetary liberation. It takes its inspiration from the spectral electronics of Wendy Carlos and Caroline K, the grisly boom bap of Havoc/Prodigy and Geto Boys, the punk machinations of Screamers and Big Black, the mutant doom dub of Scientist and Jah Shaka and slivers of EBM, techno, noise and horror soundtracks. The record is accompanied by a collection of artworks by Ukraine-based artist Oksana Demidova, depicting a large bestiary of eerie happenings, liberation ideologies, millenarian promises and infernal returns.

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---

World Serpent is the fourth album from London producer and composer Misha Hering, under the Memnon Sa banner, and the debut release on Hering’s own Holy Mountain imprint, a new label dedicated to very special productions from Misha’s now reputable studio of the same name in East London. It is released in partnership with specialist Metal record shop and label Crypt Of The Wizard. World Serpent is an album in the classic sense of the word, a 40 minute, psychedelic document of deep exploration, high drama and gleaming production. Misha Hering has used the last decade forming Memnon Sa into a psychomagical Black Metal and Prog studio project trawling forgotten lore and legend, using his Holy Mountain HQ to slowly grow his ritualistic membership to form an otherworldly orchestra, which this time features members of experimental art-pop group Virginia Wing, sludge veterans Ghold and Wren, with appropriately cosmic cover art designed by another Holy Mountain alumni: Alexander Tucker. Mythology “The myth of Apophis is what inspired the record. Apophis, or Apep in ancient Egypt, is a snake deity made out of stone. It is the god/goddess (its gender is fluid, changes depending on the myth) of chaos and destruction but also rebirth. It lives in a parallel dimension to earth, in an endless ocean of black water, the sole inhabitant. If we had the ability to peel back the veil between our dimensions, wherever we are on earth, we would peer into a world of perpetual darkness and solitude. A truly terrifying myth, and yet, Apophis was venerated. This made me think of the juxtaposition between ecstasy and horror. I thought it was very fascinating, the idea of making music that on the surface sounded triumphant and uplifting, but had a very sinister subtext, almost like cheering for the bad guy. I enjoyed this tension so much that I tried to write an album around the concept. That is how world serpent was born.” - Misha Hering Methodology Recalling the acid and occult-soaked aesthetic glory days of Aphrodite’s Child, David Axelrod, The Vertigo label and Popol Vuh, World Serpent seemingly consolidates a creative journey that has seen at points, collaboration with musicians as, broad and esoteric as Alexander Tucker, Spiritualized, Virginia Wing, Puppy, and Ghold, Hering has been able to assemble a group of performers to assist him invoke this most grandiose vision within World Serpent, The album was entirely recorded by Misha at Holy Mountain in London. All synthesisers are analogue, and it was recorded and mixed without any plugins, using the acclaimed API1604 desk. Guest performers include most notably Merida Richards (Virginia Wing) on vocals (“she plays the role of a grecian choir almost”), Chris Duffin (James Holden, Xam Duo, Virginia Wing) on saxophone (“summoning pure Pharaoh Sanders witchcraft on golden Ram Of The Sun”), Seb J Tull (Wren) playing drums and Oliver Martin from Ghold returns to conjure other-worldly throat singing and terrifying Minoan chants. Hering has placed himself at the centre of a handpicked coven of artists, and with World Serpent has produced the ultimate sonic mythical evocation for the 21st century

Baltimore-based pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn has taken her instrument well beyond its expected idiomatic confines to develop one of the most distinctive voices in improvised music. On *Pedernal*, she leads a quintet made up entirely of strings, save for drummer Ryan Sawyer. Accompanied by violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and bassist Michael Formanek, she weaves an unusual ensemble fabric with her dark and warm pedal steel tone at the center. This unique instrument allows her to create lyrical legato through lines even in highly abstract contexts, as well as surpassingly strange harmonies and sonic textures—all with an approach to phrasing and articulation that is identifiably pedal steel through and through. The players take up challenging written passages with poise and dig into the varied improvised scenarios that Alcorn cooks up. The elements all coalesce with particular clarity on “Circular Ruins.” On the final track, “Northeast Rising Sun,” the mood of cloudy mystery lifts: The band can be heard laughing as they rehearse a section with handclaps, then jump into an infectious melody that wouldn’t be out of character for Pat Metheny.

After a series of solo, duo, and trio recordings, Baltimore-based pedal steel maven Susan Alcorn steps out on her own as a bandleader with Pedernal. Enlisting a top-flight band (frequent collaborators Mary Halvorson and Michael Formanek, Mark Feldman, and Ryan Sawyer), Alcorn debuts five wide-ranging original tunes that draw from the many musical worlds she’s passed through, touching on jazz swing, improvisatory exploration, and pedal-steel twang. The title track and the suite-like “Circular Ruins,” both written during a month off the grid in a cabin in New Mexico, display both her gift for melody and her appetite for following where improvisation leads. “Night in Gdansk,” long a staple of her solo sets, and the hand-clap-driven “Northeast Rising Sun” bookend the emotional extremes of the music, from brooding to buoyant. Animated by her compositions and fantastic ensemble and solo performances, Pedernal paints a comprehensive musical self-portrait of an artist reaching a peak.

Across 10 songs and a handful of instrumentals, Melbourne's GELD demonstrate a concerted progression from their previous work; raging incendiary hardcore collides with nightmarish bad trip wanderings in a swirling maelstrom of tightly marshaled chaos. The fast parts are faster, the slow parts slower, the weird parts weirder. The vicious thrashing punk of songs like "Invader" and "Infra" come in at a little over a minute; a wild joyride reminiscent of the Japanese Burning Spirits bands alongside Cleveland’s infamous ‘90s hardcore scene. Meandering hallucinogenic badness meanwhile emanates from "Gedankenfleisch", "Forces At Work" and "L.O.W.A.G. II", injecting the record with a terrifying sense of drug paranoia and psychological dissolution bringing to mind STICKMEN WITH RAYGUNS, FLIPPER or POISON IDEA. Purportedly undertaken as something of an exorcism, the writing and recording of ‘Beyond The Floor’ was characterized by “pills, meth, booze, weed, DMT, hate, betrayal, fear, love, depression, addiction, denial and broken bones”. 150 copies on Gold vinyl with black smoke and 350 copies on Black housed in a full color 350gsm sleeve kissed by metallic silver ink with an insert and no download card included. Recorded at Goat Sound by Jason Fuller. Mastered at Noise Room (Shige). Art & inlay by Makoto Nigorikawa. This is a joint release with the dynamic and lovely Iron Lung Recording Company. Please order from them if you are in America. The first 100 copies come with a bonus "Chick tract" style wee mag with art by Will Long.

If their debut Youth Hunt marked The Homesick’s tryst with faith and pastoral life, the band’s upcoming second album The Big Exercise brings them to more grounded, tangible pastures. With its title ripped from a passage in the Scott Walker-biography Deep Shade Of Blue, the record is a concentrated effort by Jaap van der Velde, Erik Woudwijk and Elias Elgersma to explore the physicality of their music in fresh ways. “When we were on tour in 2018, I bought Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music in Switzerland,” Van der Velde recalls, “Elias and I have been completely immersed in her music ever since. But also the work of Joan La Barbara for example, who also did things with extended vocal techniques, that was also quite vital to us. We discovered that the human voice offers so many beautiful elements that can still feel very physical and intrusive.” During those formative years, the Dutch trio was often typecast as your resident tricksters. Hailing from the backwater Frisian municipality of Dokkum, Van der Velde, Woudwijk and Elgersma shrewdly courted spirituality under their own nonconformist whims, even if that wasn’t immediately obvious to outsiders. For those on the outside looking in, it was hard to tell whether the band was taking the piss or genuinely unraveling themselves as starry-eyed romantics. The Homesick relished and thrived in that very schism on Youth Hunt. When not ruminating on their environment under the guise of Dark Age Christianity, they wrapped their ambivalence into sure-fire pop earworms. Even the album’s production values were undeniably quixotic: the exuberant vocal retorts of Elgersma and Van der Velde drenched in reverb, as warped synths and distorted guitars launched skyward with the glee of a firework spectacle. As an inverse to that mindset, The Big Exercise finds the band keenly second-guessing their core chemistry as a live unit, imbuing their angular post-punk workouts with baroque elements such as piano, acoustic guitar, percussion, and even clarinet. “It’s the opposite of trying to translate recorded music to the stage,” Elgersma comments. “We were already playing these songs live for quite some time, so for this album, we wanted to unlock the potential of these songs further in the studio.” Opening track “What’s In Store” was in part inspired by Van der Velde’s unprompted deep dive into the world of National Anthems, making his own attempt to conjure a similarly timeless melody. The song seamlessly bleeds into the chivalrous prance of “Children’s Day” and the fragmented “Pawing,” righteously encouraging Erik Woudwijk’s nimble, cerebral drumming to become the band’s driving force. The headstrong wanderlust of The Big Exercise is very fitting, given The Homesick’s exodus as a small-town Dutch band ready to trot the world. Contrary to Youth Hunt’s quest for belonging, roots, and provenance, however, the band’s creative trajectory is now dictated by a sense of otherness and imagination. The sharp contrasts are nevertheless ever-present; the music’s new sonorous depth is underpinned by wry meditations on family ties, alternate realities, and commonplace encounters. As the band’s chief lyricists, Elgersma and Van der Velde deliberately keep each other in the dark, allowing the syntax of words and music to entangle in surprising – sometimes delightfully absurd – ways. “I Celebrate My Fantasy,” for example, summons a mirage of creeping pianos, sylvan clarinet flourishes and cartoonish sprawls with mock-paranoia, as Elgersma documents a macabre vision he had during a mild case of sleep paralysis. True to the band’s method of holding the more mundane, fleeting moments under a magnifying glass, capricious closing track “Male Bonding” pulls a wide range of movements out of the top hat: the album’s rare heavy burst is promptly mediated by almost medieval-sounding prog rock-flirtations. With aplomb, The Homesick made a record impregnated with impressions which – when superimposed – still fit neatly under the pop umbrella. That obvious nod to Scott Walker isn’t an aberration either: straddling pop sonority and the cacophonous fringes is something well worth aspiring. “That’s also a phenomenal aspect of the position we’re now in as a band,” Van der Velde enthuses. “I consider The Homesick a pop band first and foremost. If you’d introduce a late-era Scott Walker-record to a layman, it would likely fall on flat ears. But put it in the right scene of a good movie, and that person may finally understand its potential. The Homesick is allowed to play around in that pop framework, and the goal is to explore what’s possible within it. You can do super radical and weird things, and at the same time convey it all as straightforward pop music. With this album, I hope people will hear things anew after multiple listens.”

$hit & $hine – Malibu Liquor Store So, what have you been doing in 2020? Tensions have mounted, turmoil has reigned and work emails have forever rung out with boilerplate platitudes as the world has ushered in a new decade in more uncomfortable and disquieting fashion than anyone could have imagined in January. Nonetheless, amidst such mental tumult Craig Clouse - the Austin-based sage of the aurally unclean also known as Shit & Shine – has been busily channelling the interface between the surroundings and his own wayward muse into ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ – a lockdown-birthed psychic landscape mapped out in the first half of this turbulent year. The only expectation any relatively well-adjusted person should have of Shit & Shine remains the unexpected at this stage, with Clouse having released well over thirty records on multiple labels in a storied, questing and uniformly invigorating catalogue – just as comfortable with both bloody-minded electronic assaults and noiserock-driven dirge, as adept at kraut-hammered rhythmic mantras as dancefloor-friendly abstraction. ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ is none of these things exactly yet simultaneously flirts cheerily and irreverently with all of them. Always shot through with gleeful humour, this is a sonic world that recognises neither boundaries nor common sense. Craig Clouse cares not for your definitions of psych or dance music, and he’s never more comfortable than when transcending and annihilating both generic headspaces with casual ease and cheerful panache. Instead, these heat-damaged jams mark a spectral collision course between infectious glitch-heavy groove and an appropriately Texan acid-flashback aesthetic - a world in the last fifty years of culture are reflected and refracted back ad absurdum. Co-ordinates and reliable audial landmarks are rendered meaningless as the title cut comes on like a ‘60s Morricone chase sequence reassembled in new electronic shapes like lysergically-assisted Meccano. ‘Rat Snake’ sees the humid grooves of Can’s ‘Soon Over Babaluma’ bludgeoned into delirious submission. ‘Devil’s Backbone’ witnesses Buttholes-esque transgressions of the ‘80s beamed forward Terminator-style to a cyborg-ridden dystopia, and the glorious skeletal groove of album centrepiece ‘Hillbilly Moonshine’ meanwhile is nothing less than workout music for the damned – a relentless and pulsating soundtrack for a generation of ghouls mounting a legion of rowing machines along a metaphysical river Styx. The creation of ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ may just have helped Craig Clouse keep his sanity in 2020, even if it appears custom designed to help us lose our own. ---

The title of Lucrecia Dalt’s *No Era Sólida* translates as “it was not solid”—a fitting image for an artist who trained as a geologist but whose experimental music often sounds like a series of transformations from liquid to gas and back again. The Colombian musician started out in the 2000s making increasingly avant-leaning electro-pop as Lucrecia, then took a hard left for 2018’s vaporous *Anticlines*; on *No Era Sólida*, she gives her typically wispy electronic sound an unusually haunted cast, as though channeling frequencies from the beyond. Occasionally, she’ll intone eerie, chanted vocals (“Disuelta”) or flirt with industrially tinged post-punk (“Endiendo”); at its spookiest, as in the creepy backmasked voices and low-decibel rattle of “Espesa,” you could swear that she’d caught actual traces of ghosts on tape. Somewhere between the suggestive hush of ASMR and the pin-drop dread of a séance, it’s a spell-binding record that will leave the hairs on your neck standing on end.

New York's shape shifting, extreme metal quartet, PYRRHON announce their landmark full length album titled, Abscess Time to be released on June 26, 2020 via Willowtip Records. The 12 song album - running nearly 60 minutes - follows the bands 2017, critically acclaimed release of What Passes For Survival, and shows the band at their most sophisticated, alluring, and inventive. Poised with perpetual evolution, PYRRHON reveal how fearless, sonically explosive, and triumphant experimental death metal can be.

“I see we’re letting thugs into the concert hall…” Eleven tracks about the reconstruction of club music, Nag Nag Nag, masculinity, Finland and Vatican Shadow memes.

Where Jam City’s 2013 album *Club Constructions, Vol. 6* helped define the futuristic sound of the UK’s Night Slugs label, his 2015 follow-up, *Dream a Garden*, looked backward, swapping club music’s shuddering kicks and chrome-plated textures for an ’80s-inspired palette of flanged guitars and LinnDrum thwacks. Swathed in ambient synths and Jam City’s airy vocals, it sounded like a chopped-and-screwed take on vintage electro-funk, and with *Pillowland*, he takes that woozily retro aesthetic even further. Equal parts Prince and shoegaze, the album is a strawberry-flavored whirlwind of contrasting textures, pouring sticky-sweet Rhodes keys into brittle synth drums and blistering distortion, and topping it all off with his own quavering falsetto. Along the way, he touches on reference points a world away from his roots in Chicago house and Jersey club. The title track drips slow-motion funk from a reflecting pool of Steely Dan-inspired keys; the hi-def psych of “Cartwheel” could almost be Tame Impala. And while “They Eat the Young” is swaggering glam pop with spangles to spare—imagine Scritti Politti on a sugar bender—“Baby Desert Nobody” dials back to spare guitar and murmured voice. Somewhere in between those two poles lies “I Don’t Want to Dream About It Anymore,” perhaps the crux of the whole project—a pastel-streaked take on indie pop that wraps sotto-voce sincerity in gloriously over-the-top trappings.

After a tumultuous 5-year absence, Jam City returns with his long awaited third full length album, Pillowland. Written under the influence of living in America, Pillowland lounges spreadeagle between the plaintive, bit-crushed psychedelia of Dream A Garden, and the bass-heavy, slow motion productions of the beloved Earthly mixtapes, bringing you 10 scorch’d, carnival-esque hallucinations of Pop-Rock Fantasy that make up his strongest work to date. Channeling a period of doubt, pain, confusion and change in the artists personal life, Pillowland seeks refuge in the sugar-sweet amphetamine rush of the Pop dreamscape. It explores those starry fantasies which are promised but never fulfilled; the glistening, celluloid fantasies of a life filled with glamour, meaning and purpose that hover permanently on our ever-shrinking horizon. Desire itself is ingested like an illicit substance, then excavated with a perverse glee and a knowing sensitivity that mark a huge leap forward for the artist. From the sunny, intoxicating thrills of Sweetjoy to the narcotic, 12-string dream-pop of Cartwheel, the gaudy, crunching Future-Glam of They Eat The Young, to the heart-felt, dopamine-depleted I Don’t Wanna Dream About it Anymore, Jam City joyfully drowns in sounds somewhere between 1972 and 2020, gleefully playing with genre conventions like a child in a makeup box. Playing the part of the crooning, fake-Rock dreamer, he gazes over the rainbow but is barely able to look outside the window. Pretty, pleading melodies ache for some un-nameable fix to smother that awful reality: that the dream is truly dead. But these songs come not so much from the squandered expectations of generations, but rather a deep, gut-level belief in something more than this life... Back in the smoggy metropolis, far from Pillowlands golden gates, the spectral post-2008 shopping center that haunted Classical Curves makes its return:“ I was back in my old haunt, escaping an unseasonably hot day in there, and I passed an old man wearing a Brian Jones T-shirt and looked sad. Over the tannoy Chicago’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ echo’d and it moved me close to tears. I had never heard a dream so convincing, and so out of reach”. As the sweeping, Giallo-drenched synth strings of Cherry play out the end credits, Pillowland finally finds it’s bitter-sweet salvation; the gates of the palace swing open, and you are invited finally step inside. The cool air-conditioning licks your face. Doomed to spend eternity behind the gates, you find yourself quarantined in Heaven itself, forever.

“When you hear the music, I think the title explains itself,” Nines tells Apple Music of his third album *Crabs in a Bucket*. “I just felt like when I look back on recent situations I had, they all made me feel that way.” An artist who has always depicted the transition from life on the road (2015 mixtape *One Foot In*) to being a high-profile rapper and entrepreneur (2017’s *One Foot Out*), his absence from the forefront of the music scene since his acclaimed 2018 album *Crop Circle* has brought around a slew of online rumors, as well as heightened anticipation for his next release. On *Crabs in a Bucket*, Nines—born Courtney Freckleton—explains where he’s been, exploring the impact of his stabbing in the summer of 2019, during a time when he was also supporting his father through cancer. The incident left the North-West Londoner requiring surgery and a recovery period abroad—time away that allowed him to find solace, and regain a passion for music. All of which ignited his ambition to put together his most polished work yet. “I was in different countries—Spain, Paris, Dubai—when I was making this album. That’s why it took a bit of time. I would go sometimes three months without recording. But you know what they say: When you’re uninspired, the best thing is to do other things.” Over 52 minutes, and with guest spots from Nafe Smallz, NSG, and Headie One to name a few, Nines relights his fire by doubling down on witty rap references, big-time boasts, and smooth trap talk. Elsewhere, he hones his storytelling prowess—and allows himself the room to be more introspective than ever (see “Intro” and “NIC” especially). Walk with Nines as he breaks down *Crabs in a Bucket*, one track at a time. **Intro** “I didn’t intend for this to be the intro to the album, but everyone I’ve played the album to said this was the one. Normally you hear me get busy with the trap talk, the flavors, just popping that fly shit, but I went deeper and addressed a lot. It set the tone for the album; when the fans ask ‘Where has Nines been?’ you can listen to this and connect the dots. When I made this, I was bored on a plane. I’ve been flying a lot in the last year and I’ve been going through beats on YouTube. I heard this beat on there by an American producer, and once I played it, I had to track him down. At the end that’s me chatting to \[UK producer\] Quincy. I poured out my pain and just let it flow.” **Energy (feat. Skrapz)** “This was produced by Beatfreakz. I made it when I was driving around in my car—it just sounds like one of those tracks you can cruise to. I phoned up Skrapz and told him that I’ve got some fire that I need him on; that’s family so it was really that simple.” **Clout** “I consider ‘Airplane Mode’ to be the lead single, but it came out after ‘Clout.’ This wasn’t even meant to be a single. When I was playing tracks to the young guns, they said this was the one. My guy 1st Born produced this. You already know what I’m about when I make a song, you hear the wordplay—I can’t call really call it bragging, because I live it. The inspiration for the video was just some of the albums that have influenced me when I was growing up. When I get an idea, my guy \[director\] Charlie Di Placido helps me bring it to life. We directed the video together and I feel like we did it justice.” **Realist (feat. Nafe Smallz and Fundz)** “Come on, man, this one was inevitable! Nafe has been family for a minute, so it was only right that we linked up properly on a track. On *One Foot In*, he was only on a bonus track, but this time we just had to make it happen for real. On this song I kinda stepped into his world with the instrumental. We were at a coffee shop in Amsterdam and the guy who owns the shop has a studio in there, so Quincy hit me up and was like, ‘Yo, I’ve got something that was made for you,’ and we just took it from there. Quincy is family as well, I’ve been fucking with him for a while now. This was one of the most organic sessions I had for the album.” **Monster** “1st Born produced this also. He’s got a few joints on here. He laced me with this eerie-sounding beat so it was easy to get into that mindset when I was recording. ‘I swear these streets turned me to a monster, I swear these streets turned me to a—’ This track explains itself, you know what I come from already. I was in Dubai when I made this.” **Airplane Mode (feat. NSG)** “Shout out KZ and Rudimental. When I was making the album, I was thinking about the clubs for real, and I wanted a club song. Before COVID stopped everything, I would hit the clubs and DJs would play \[Nines’ 2017 track\] ‘Trapper of the Year.’ I know they wouldn’t play that if I wasn’t here. It’s homage, but it’s not a club song, you get me? So I feel like I needed an ‘Airplane Mode’ on the album. I fuck with NSG, I reached out to them, invited them to the studio, and the rest was history. We all played PlayStation, blew trees, it was a good time! We actually made three songs in that session, but ‘Airplane Mode’ was the one for me because I had my eye on the commercial side.” **NIC (feat. Tiggs Da Author)** “Tiggs has been on all of my studio albums, he’s a natural with it. Whenever I say I’m working on an album, he’ll always come around like, ‘I’ve got something for your album, bro.’ \[Producer\] Show N Prove is the same too. He’s actually produced all the songs that me and Tiggs have done together. When I heard the beat, I already knew I wanted to go into story mode. It has that vintage feel to it. Some of my inspiration comes from how 50 Cent, Hov, and those guys used to tell stories. I feel like you can hear it here, just the come-up story from my school days. That influence is why there\'s three verses. I felt like it was too long, but when I play it to people, they would beg me not to cut it to two.” **Don’t Change (feat. Northsidebenji)** “This is definitely one for the ladies, so I had to get \[Canadian rapper\] Benji on here. Carlos produced this one–he’s my go-to engineer, but he’s been getting in his bag lately with production. He’ll chop up samples for me that I’ll take to him. Here it was the ‘Don’t Change’ sample that I wanted someone to sing over. I hit up Benji and he laid his melodies and done his thing on it. I really enjoy helping to develop artists. Looking after other artists as the head of an imprint when you’re an artist as well is tricky; your natural instinct is to protect your own interests. With Benji, I co-manage him and I wanted to help him out.” **Lights (feat. Louis Rei)** “Again, that is me and Carlos in collab mode. I would say we both produced it, but it’s more him because he chopped the sample. Shout out to the boy Louis, man, people always try to take him out of the rapper conversation because he’s the vibes guy. But even when Akelle went away, he stepped up and held it down for WSTRN. People act like LB is not the guy, but it was good to get a joint with him where we’re both rapping nice.” **Money Ain’t a Thing (feat. Roy Woods)** “I think this one was worked on by three different producers: Quincy, Steel Banglez, and my guy Sean. Shout out to my OVO family Roy Woods, he’s good peoples. He wanted to be on the hook rather than drop a verse, and he came through with that. Since before I signed the deal, I could say money weren’t a thing. Could’ve been in *Top Boy* but I turned it down. Come on: *Crop Circle*, baby! It would have been a good look but off-brand given the fact I’m doing my own thing with *Crop Circle*.” **Ringaling (feat. Headie One and Odeal)** “Headie has been one of my favorites for a while now. Headie and K-Trap go in on drill. And M1llionz is trying to run away with it right now, too. He’s been on a good run, but those three are killing it. The Elements and Steel Banglez co-produced ‘Ringaling’—it doesn’t sound like any song I’ve done before. Again, this track was done with an eye on the club. You can’t be playing ‘Trapper of the Year’ in the clubs, we all know what that is. You thought that ‘Don’t Change’ was the girl song, but this is it for me. I talk about the love I have for bae, but I let her know that I gotta leave her when the money calls!” **Flavours** “You know I’ve been the tree guy from early, from the beginning, so I had to make a weed song. My favorite strains right now are Skittles, or Biscotti—that’s that good Cali right there. Billy Kimber as well—all the others don’t compare. We only keep exotic flavors around here, bro!” **Flex (feat. Northsidebenji and REID B2WN)** “This was produced by my guy, the young Nav Michael, who produced Drake’s ‘Back to Back.’ He’s the same as Show N Prove with me—when I’m trying to make an album he’ll always come through with something for me. Benji wrapped up his part effortlessly and I tried to match his energy with a smooth flow and flex a little.” **Stalker Interlude (feat. Cherrie)** “True stories: I really had stalkers following me at one point—ringing my phone, showing up at random shows. One time we were in Croatia for a festival and this girl showed up there and hit me up. Cherrie is a Swedish singer that I met through a mutual friend. She came through to the studio and I played her a few beats and she took to this one the most. When I was writing this one, I was influenced by my Fire in the Booth and also JAY-Z’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’” **Movie Knights** “I had to hop on a hometown beat, so I hollered at my guy MK, a young producer from the ends. The reason for this is because when I go to my studio I see all the plaques I have, but the studio in ends doesn’t have a single plaque in there. So hopefully we get a plaque for this one. You know I’m about my films—throughout the song you hear me reference some of my favorites. Funnily enough, I was with Leon \[Palmer, the creative behind the Movie Knights brand\] in the studio when I made that and had some fun with it. Leon is a cool guy. I’ll never forget when he came to the ends on his ones just to meet me. I thought he was mad! But we’re alike—we see something we want and go for it.” **All Stars 2 (feat. Clavish, Frosty, Q2T and Chappo CSB)** “I had to show the young Gs some love on the album, let them get their shine on. Clavish picked the beat, and I don’t usually rap on beats at this tempo, but that’s what the youngers were doing. We done our thing, and I’m not dissing the song… I just wish Clavish picked a different beat.” **Outro** “Just like the intro, this one came from the heart. I rapped from the heart and poured my pain over the beat. By the time you get to the end of the album, what I want people—especially the youngers—to take from this is that you can be in the hood, and born into it, but do see other things in life. I’m not saying leave the hood, but there’s levels to life. I was turning down festivals and not doing shows so I can stand around in the hood—that doesn’t make any sense. Start thinking about the long game, you have to.”

'Prole Art Threat' is producer Anthoney Hart's second LP for Planet Mu under his East Man alias, after 2018's well received debut 'Red White & Zero'. It brings together a set of MCs from all over London, Darkos and Eklipse from East London and Lyrical Strally from near Feltham who were on the first album, Ny Ny and Mic Ty also from East London, Streema and 'Vision Crew' member Whack Eye from Lewisham plus Fernando Kep, an MC from the burgeoning Brazil grime scene. They work across a cohesive set of tight riddims forged from thoughtful amalgams of grime, dancehall and drum & bass. The album takes its name from a Fall song/mission statement of the same title, the band being self-consciously working class and led by a brilliant autodidact in Mark E Smith. East Man relates that the title is to be taken as “a reflection of working-class creativity and how the establishment marginalise us and (perhaps on a subconscious level) see us as a threat.” Les Back, author of 'The Art of Listening' and 'Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (with Vron Ware)' contributes liner notes to the record: East Man understands the force and the democracy of the mic. Listening to Prole Art Threat is like being at a dance. As the mic is passed between each of the MCs, a different tale is ‘elevated... off the map’ as Ny Ny puts it. We hear instalments from Forest Gate, Lee, Lewisham and Manor Park as these ‘lyrical gaffers’ and ’top boys and girls’ tell tough stories of life under the scrutiny of the ‘Feds’ in a brutal and divided city. The bars and rhymes document what it means to live here; from the double standards applied to the sexuality of young girls and boys to the corrosive violence of everyday life. All this is dissected without compromise. This is not just a London story though, the inclusion of Fernando Kep from the burgeoning Grime scene in Brazil is evidence of the outernational reach of the music. The tracks on East Man’s album explode the wilful ignorance of those who see ‘the working class’ in contemporary London as code for whiteness. This is the sound of a proletarian urban multiculture, made from Caribbean and African influences, sound system culture, pirate radio and the inexorable rhythms of Grime, Drum & Bass, Techno and Dancehall. It is the stirring of the "white" & "black" working classes who are living together and coming together on their own terms in sound. ‘Making music because you love it... what the fuck else could you do?’ as East Man says. The tracks and voices you are holding in your hands are, as a result urgent, vital, as hard nails and twice as sharp.

Ten years and a couple hundred shows after their beginnings, Grenoble's SATAN remains one of the most elusive acts of the french underground. With a primitive yet idiosyncratic approach of extreme music, the band is no stranger to varied bills, playing everywhere from punk squats to noisier, artier crowds. Following 2017's "Un Deuil Indien", the band returns with "Toutes Ces Horreurs", their third full-length. On these twelve tracks, SATAN continues to pursue their path on the fringes of punk and metal, departing more and more from their grindcore roots in favor of their trance-inducing, black metal obsessions. All of this with their now trademark surrealist lyrical style, and played with no other concerns than urgency.

The legendary experimental pop outfit returns with a brand-new record entitled Figures, written, conceived and produced over the last couple of years by Marc Hollander (founder of Aksak Maboul and of the Crammed label) and Véronique Vincent (former singer with The Honeymoon Killers). Figures is a double album containing 22 tracks and interludes, resulting from the flow of creative ideas which arose after a gap of over thirty years (see the Aksak story overleaf). Drawing again from the multiple sources which have always inspired the band (from electronic music and pop to experimentation, jazz, minimalism, contemporary classical etc), Aksak Maboul transcends and reconfigures them with its inimitable style, to create an impressive, rich and unclassifiable piece of work. Seamlessly weaving electronic and acoustic instrumentation, improvisation and programming, songs, beats, found objects and sound collages, the album works as a labyrinth, full of secret passages and interconnections. Figures clocks in at 75 minutes, thus deliberately shunning the laws of instant gratification and the myth of today’s reduced attention span: the Aksak Maboul aficionados will surely be happy to engage in an immersive session of deep listening (in two halves), in order to enjoy the album’s many layers and details. Véronique Vincent & Marc Hollander wrote the album together, by following parallel courses with their own respective internal logic, while remaining closely connected. Enigmatic and finely chiseled, feeding on her love for painting and literature, Véronique’s texts form a dense fabric which mirrors the sonic kaleidoscope assembled by Marc, who wrote and arranged all the music (aside from a track co-written and sung by Véronique and Julien Gasc). Véronique also made the drawings and paintings which illustrate the cover and inserts. The two protagonists recorded most of the album in their own studio, with contributions by the young members of Aksak Maboul’s current live line-up: Faustine Hollander (bass, vocals, co-production), guitarist Lucien Fraipont and drummer Erik Heestermans. Also featured are performances by several friends and guests, including revered improvisor Fred Frith, Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown, members of Aquaserge (Julien Gasc, Audrey Ginestet & Benjamin Glibert), former band members (including Michel Berckmans and Sebastiaan Van den Branden), and several others

The planets align as the mighty Sun Ra Arkestra, under the direction of the maestro Marshall Allen, are releasing their first studio album in over twenty years, ‘Swirling’. “We truly hope that this recording brings much joy to a planet which is so deeply in need of a spirit sound and vibration,” states saxophonist Knoel Scott. “We hope it contributes to a change in the ominous direction of man’s journey through the cosmos.” “This new release is the Arkestra’s love offering to the world,” concludes Marshall Allen. “Beta music for a better world.” Recorded at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, the new recording represents the continuation of a heartfelt rebirth of the Arkestra under Allen’s guidance since Sun Ra left the planet in 1993, gaining new generations of followers from their regular touring across the globe. With a big band line-up featuring long-standing Arkestra members including Danny Ray Thompson (RIP), Michael Ray, Vincent Chancey, Knoel Scott, Cecil Brooks, Atakatune (RIP), Elson Nascimento and Tyler Mitchell, the album is a full-blooded celebration of Sun Ra’s legacy.

Luminous Bodies are a psychedelic stupor group based in London featuring members of Terminal Cheesecake, Part Chimp, We Wild Blood, MGF, Melting Hand and Gum Takes Tooth. They specialise in creating a scumbag lysergic racket and are the vanguard of the UK underground noise rock and psychedelic scene. You want to feel like a million bucks? Listen to Luminous Bodies. We think this band personify the blueprint of Box Records. We're unsure if we can put any such philosophy into coherent prose but if we did, we’d probably use words like exuberant, celebratory, passionate and liberating. This is Luminous Bodies and this is their new album Nah Nah Nah Yeh Yeh Yeh. It's going to make the world a better place.

Meet Nyx Nott, the new guise of Aidan Moffatt... “I’d work on it when everyone else at home was in bed,” says Aidan Moffat of his latest musical project as Nyx Nótt. “I don't sleep very well and I'm very much a nighthawk, so the music I made was naturally nocturnal.” The essence of night and Moffat’s moonlit tinkerings became such a prominent role in the creative process that his new alias had to reflect this too. “I originally planned to release the album anonymously and tried to think of a convincing, exotic name that suited the nocturnal themes of the album. Nyx and Nótt are two mythical goddesses of night, Nyx from the Greek and Nótt from old Norse.” The album title translates as "At the Feet of Night", so this is an album not simply of, or from, the night, but an ode to it - a sonic worshipping of the night’s pull and allure. Crepuscular music. The result is an album that pulses like the quiet hum of night; the production is clear and crisp with every movement, note and sound augmented with stark clarity - like the amplified sound of a creaking floorboard as you move through the house in darkness. It’s a deeply percussive album, resulting in gentle rhythms that often give way to moments of real stillness and tenderness that stem from the rich orchestration and composition - one that glides from strings to brass to quietly purring electronics. The album moves through jazz, ambient and electronic to result in something that sounds like it might be a score to Moffat’s dreams. “It’s made with samples, sound effects, keyboards, and the occasional toy,” says Moffat. “All but one of the tracks started with drums – I'd been collecting jazz drum samples and sessions for a while and I would layer a few kits on top of each other to create rhythms, then add music and samples from there.” When Moffat says “the occasional toy” he means it quite literally. “For ‘Mickey Mouse Strut’ the music began with a recording of a singing Mickey Mouse toy I bought in Japan,” he says. “Its mouth opens when you squeeze its belly and it's quite sinister.” Elsewhere there’s references to Edgar Allen Poe on ‘Long Intervals of Horrible Sanity’, a haunting tribute to the horror writer Shirley Jackson via ‘Shirley Jackson on Drums’ and ‘Theme From’ is a track that Moffat plucked from another project which was going to be an album of twenty 90-second theme tunes for imaginary Netflix shows. However, for someone as revered a lyricist as Moffat - be it with his own solo work, Arab Strap or when working with Bill Wells and RM Hubbert - he’s in entirely instrumental mode here, much like he was with his now defunct L.Pierre alter ego. It results in a fundamental shift in creative approach for Moffat when operating in this format. “For me, making instrumental music is like working with your favourite tool missing,” he suggests. “It's more of a challenge and a bit more risky. It relies more on instinct than songwriting does, or at least it does for me. It requires a bit more trust in yourself when there's no-one to bounce ideas off – in that way, these sorts of records are probably more personal than those with my voice.” Also, given the album was made in such a personal and intimate way by Moffat as the world was catching z’s, it also succeeds in being a transformative experience for him. “There's an element of escapism in this album – there are no crickets in Glasgow, for instance, but I couldn't resist using recordings of them, I've always loved the way they sound.” Those nighttime sessions and plucking albums from experiments are not an anomaly in Moffat’s life however. “I'm always working on something to varying degrees,” he says. “Right now, I'm working on another three albums that will appear over the coming years. It keeps me sane and happy. I'm very lucky to have a job that's not only enjoyable but is actually a way of winding down too. I live in a sort of backwards world these days where work functions as a stress reliever.”