The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2021

Artist: Jap Kasai
 Album: OWN ℃
 Format: Digital / Tape
 Cat.No: CHI028
 Master: Jap Kasai
 Artwork: Saphy Vong
 Release Date: 10th May 2021 Japanese folk, Juke and Footwork meet in a joyful, hook-filled union on Jap Kasai’s newest album, OWN ℃. Using the Japanese concept of 温故知新 (onko-chishin), meaning "developing new ideas based on study of the past," Jap Kasai finds a totally unique expression of Japanese Ondo and Minyo folk music infused with a hypnotic and exuberant modernity. Jap Kasai has been experimenting with ancient folk styles since 2015. He later discovered Footwork and juke. “They created a new groove by sampling old soul music. They use soulful voices effectively,” explains the Kyoto-based producer. “So, I decided to replace [the vocals] with Japanese Monyo folk songs, because it was said that Minyo was the soul music of the country where I was born. At first it was half a joke. But, I gradually felt the depth of Minyo.”
 The marriage of Minyo and footwork isn’t as strange as it might sound on paper. On OWN ℃, the rhythmic, distended vocal style of Minyo singers (often backed by Jap Kasai’s own vocals) and the skittish, loose architecture of footwork creates a compelling new style that honours both musical traditions. Tracks such as 酔鴨 yoi kamo build in a grooving, circular loop, driven onwards by a ramshackle undercurrent of complex beats. “Juke is a relatively new rhythm, but somehow ancient,” says Jap Kasai. “And fast rhythms make you feel slow in a way. Curiously, I got the same feeling when listening to Japanese folk songs. It's often a mix of slow drum rhythms and fast, metallic rhythms. Voices are also used differently from the West. I found this very interesting.”
 The title OWN ℃ combines a number of his concerns as an artist. It is a nod to his grandmother, ヲウン or Woun. Also, as he explains, "OWN ℃ can be read as "Ondo" in Japanese. And also OWN ℃ means "own body temperature". It is important in coronavirus disasters. Therefore, a simple wordplay gets a strange meaning.” Despite sampling music from the recent and distant past, OWN ℃ addresses some very timely concerns. “Now the division of labour is very advanced,” he says. “We often feel as if our mind and body have become separate by internet. There are positive aspects to these systems. But I also think it has become more difficult to empathize deeply with things and to feel raw realisation. We need to change our lifestyles based on a real sense of mind and body.” A jubilant, danceable record, OWN ℃ reminds us of our own warm materiality.

 "OWN ℃ is easy to love, shot through with a joyful energy and sense of play" The Wire Magazine About Jap Kasai: Based in Kyoto, Daisuke Iijima has been making music since 2015. He runs the cassette label hoge tapes.

“This album started as a means of expressing my personal healing, but as it progressed, I had an epiphany,” LA-based producer Mndsgn, aka Ringgo Ancheta, tells Apple Music. “I realized it was such a rare opportunity just to be able to share the gift of music, and that it’s such a pleasure to be making music together. That’s where the title came from, as a celebration of that creativity.” Since his 2014 debut, *Yawn Zen*, Ancheta has established himself as one of the West Coast’s most distinctive producers, laying down head-nodding rhythms and woozy, crate-digging vocal soul for the likes of Danny Brown, Doja Cat, and Tyler, The Creator. Although he began writing *Rare Pleasure* in 2018, the ensuing years brought new meaning to his evolving compositions: The interjection of the pandemic heightened the rarity of making music collaboratively. The result is 13 tracks that feature his singing voice more prominently than ever before, crooning on the love ballad “Slowdance,” exploring family difficulties on the tentatively optimistic “Hope You’re Doin’ Better,” and channeling ethereal soundtrack jazz on “Medium Rare.” “I was thinking, ‘What kind of record would I make if this was the last one I made?’” he says. “If I died or if I just stopped making music altogether, what would I want to get out in this project? So, that was what made the cut.” Here, he talks about each of the tracks that did. **Rare Pleasure I** “I’m really inspired by soundtrack music, and one of my favorite composers in that world is Piero Piccioni, an Italian composer from the 1970s. That’s what inspired me to have different versions of the same song threaded through the record. This ‘Rare Pleasure’ theme was just an idea of getting the band to play the same progression in numerous ways when we were in the studio. This first version just sets it out for the rest to come.” **Truth Interlude** “This is a cover of a Brazilian radio jingle from the 1970s. A while back, someone shared with me this mix of different jingles from this one Brazilian radio station. And ever since then, I’ve been really fascinated with them. The harmonies are always crazy since you have to get so much feeling in such a short amount of time and really capture a specific mood on a jingle. It’s a great exercise in composition.” **3Hands/Divine Hand I** “This song was inspired by a time I was FaceTiming my partner, and while she was talking to me, she had this mannequin hand that she was playing with. After we got off the phone, I wanted to write about it, and the track ended up being about the hand representing God and that unseen guidance we can feel throughout life. Having a connection with that gives you such an upper hand in navigating through life. It’s better than just your two physical hands—you need the unseen force.” **Hope You’re Doin’ Better** “My dad was going through a really tough time when I was writing this, and he was just pushing everybody away. He was in a state of isolation and not willing to allow people in. Eventually, I found myself having to access whatever non-physical connection that I had with him to send love his way. That’s why I wrote this song for him, and I’m talking about picking up your phone because we would call him and he wouldn’t answer. This was my way of communicating my care.” **Rare Pleasure II** “I wanted to have the presence of recurring themes and motifs, because that’s just how life works—sometimes you have to experience certain things over and over again, but in different circumstances. This version has a mellow, downbeat vibe to it with the backing vocals holding the melody.” **Slowdance** “‘Slowdance’ is a ballad about really taking your time to get to know your partner and also taking the time to develop your connection with your craft and your community. It was mostly inspired by meeting my partner and savoring those initial stages of getting to know each other, when I feel like there’s so much gold in being patient and allowing things to unfold in a natural and non-contrived way.” **Abundance** “‘Abundance’ ties in with the soundtrack vibe I’m influenced by. There’s spaghetti Westerns revolving around characters named Ringgo, and this feels like a track for a Western Ringgo. This was one of the first tunes that I wrote for the record, inspired by going through certain library music or jazz records that I have and trying to transcribe the songs, and then trying to rearrange the transcription in an original way. I was going to write vocals to it, but I felt like it served a better purpose as an interlude piece. It does a good job of gluing together the first side into the second side of the record.” **Masque** “This trips me out the most because it was written way before the pandemic. I was concerned that it would come out at the wrong time, and people would think that I was trying to tell you not to wear masks or something. But all of that aside, it has nothing to do with an actual mask. It’s really a song about being transparent and trying to transcend from that persona that we wear and use on a day-to-day basis, and really letting your core self shine instead.” **Rare Pleasure III** “I thought it would be fun to do a version of the theme as slowly as possible when we were all fired up in the studio—something to really sink into as a break from the progression of the surrounding tracks.” **Medium Rare** “That was one of the earliest cuts that I wrote for the record. I wrote it in its entirety, as the lyrics just flowed out of me. It’s more of a letter to myself than anything else, telling me to take care of myself. It’s mostly me singing on the track, too, which is such a milestone compared to previous works. It was a good feeling to get this one out early, because it really set the tone for what the rest of the record was going to sound like.” **Rare Pleasure IV** “By the time we got to recording this version, everyone was warmed up in the studio and really having fun. All the musicians on the record killed it, especially the core trio of Swarvy on bass and guitar, Kiefer on keys, and Will Logan on drums—they’re all at the top of their game, and I had to give hardly any direction at all. We just ran with it.\" **Colours of the Sunset** “This is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It was the only one written during the pandemic, when I was just sitting in my studio, listening to the instrumental over and over again, waiting until the lyrics came to me. I was looking out of my window and could see the sunset—LA gets such crazy sunsets, all pinks and purples and cotton candy textures—and it felt like I was channeling that, like it was cowritten by the sky.” **Divine Hand II** “This is the outro for ‘3Hands,’ which was too long to keep as one piece. I decided to split it in half, and it ended up wrapping up the record very nicely, because it reaches an apex and then you break through into this ethereal space. I wanted to convey going from darkness to light.”

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Shelter Press is happy to announce the release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit’s latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by - and dedicated to - the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer. Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s. In the piece, Ankersmit explores different “modes” of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up loud, the material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener’s head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as “ear tones”. The title is a reference to Amacher’s essay “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography”, and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. “Ear tone” stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener’s head reveals changes. For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion. The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher. This is a digital-only release (CD and download) because the “ear tone” material can’t be adequately transferred to vinyl. Please play loud and use speakers, not headphones.

For athletes of both the professional and amateur ranks, the time between seasons is an opportunity to recuperate and to sharpen their tool set for the next run. Superstar MC J. Cole, whose career has long been informed by both basketball metaphor and actual basketball playing (in May 2021, ESPN reported that Cole had joined the Basketball Africa League\'s Rwanda Patriots BBC), has crafted his *The Off-Season* mixtape in the same mold, affirming that if he’s done anything in the time since 2018’s *KOD* album, it’s get even better at what he does. The 12-track tape is at once a testament to his actual rhyme skill and the reverence he’s earned within hip-hop. He’s sourced production from Boi-1da, Timbaland, Jake One, and T-Minus, among others, and has words—but not verses—from Cam’ron, Damian Lillard, and a man he admits to having once had an actual physical alteration with, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. Though he takes time to shout out both Chief Keef and Dave East—conspicuously opposite forces in the realm of contemporary rap—proper features here come from fellow Fayetteville native Morray and “a lot” collaborator 21 Savage. Over the course of his career, Cole’s been known as something of a lone wolf—J CoLe wEnT pLaTiNuM WiTh nO fEaTuReS. But in the scope of the energy we get from him on *The Off-Season*, it’s less likely that he’s been avoiding other rappers than that he\'s just left them all behind.

[CENTERING 1020–1029] 10 Albums – 91 total tracks – 594 minutes (10 hours) of all new music created expressly for this collection. MUSICIANS William Parker: compositions, bass & addt’l instruments Featuring: an international, inter-generational array of singers & musicians, drawn from both long-standing colleagues and a new generation of devoted artists. That William Parker is a bassist, composer and bandleader of extraordinary spirit and imaginative drive is common knowledge among any with an interest in the progressive jazz scene of the past 25 years or more. What’s become increasingly apparent, though, is Parker’s stature as a visionary of sound and song – an artist of melody and poetry who works beyond category, to use the Ellingtonian phrase. The latest multi-disc boxed set from Centering Records/AUM Fidelity devoted to Parker’s expansive creativity underscores his virtually peerless achievement in recent years. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World (Volumes 1–10) is a 10-album collection of vocal and instrumental suites all recorded expressly for this set between late 2018 and early 2020, with women’s voices at its core. This is music as empathetic as it is intrepid, as philosophical as it is visceral, as resolutely modernist as it is attuned to tradition. Parker’s art not only draws from the deepest well of African-American culture; it breathes in inspiration from across the globe, with sounds drawn from Africa, Asia and Indonesia as well as Europe and the Americas; there is free improvisation and re-imagined sonic collage; there are album-length explorations of solo piano and solo voice, along with string ensembles and ancient wind instruments. There are dedications to jazz heroes, Native Americans and Mexican migrants, plus tributes to the great African-American culture of Harlem and the mix of passion and compassion Parker found in vintage Italian cinema. Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World conjures a vast world of music and feeling, and its creation is a feat that ranks with that of the most ambitious talents in any genre.

M’berra is the sound, the story, of a collective of Malian musicians from the M’berra Refugee Camp in southeast Mauritania and Italian producer and electro-shaman Khalab. In a sprawling tent city rising out of the desert, out of nothingness, at the border with Mali in West Africa, brought together by spirit and circumstance, the group’s Arab and Tuareg members find solace and beauty in music and song.

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

As a band with dozens and dozens of strange, catchy, and experimental releases under their collective belt—and an ever-shifting lineup beyond the core duo of guitarist/vocalist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover—the Melvins can always be relied upon to keep it interesting. *Working With God* is the second album from their “Melvins 1983” lineup—Osborne, Crover (on bass), and original drummer Mike Dillard—which recalls the band’s 1983 origins in rural Washington. In that sense, it’s very much a follow-up to 2013’s *Tres Cabrones*, which featured the same power trio. “I knew I wanted a title that had something ‘with God’ in it,” Osborne tells Apple Music. “Cursing With God, Killing With God, Joking With God—*Working With God* seemed to fit best.” Below, Osborne details the songs on this decidedly non-religious album. **I F\*\*k Around** “This came out of soundcheck. They’d go, ‘Can you do your vocal check?’ and I’d start in with ‘Round, round, fuck around, I fuck around,’ to the tune of the Beach Boys song. It always got a laugh out of people. And then we eventually thought we gotta record it. So I sat down and wrote lyrics for it. Melvins 1983 is where that kind of stuff really comes to light, because we all have the same kind of sense of humor, which my wife says is perpetually stuck in eighth grade. Which is true.” **Negative No No** “I wrote these lyrics while driving around in the car, listening to the demo. What I\'ll do is I have my notebook with me and when I come upon something, I\'ll pull over and just write it out, right there on the side of the road. I do that all the time. You couldn’t work that way on public transpo. Sitting on the bus singing out loud is not really going to work. You’d be beaten up or considered insane, which is probably not far from the truth.” **Bouncing Rick** “This was the nickname we had for our high school biology teacher. Me and Dillard had all kinds of names for people at the high school. This guy bounced around when he talked—I think it was out of nervousness—so we called him Bouncing Rick. But we’re the only ones who called him that. So as soon as I said, ‘Bouncing Rick,’ Dillard knew who I was talking about. I don’t know that the song is really about him, though. I think it would be more about the challenges of a second date.” **Caddy Daddy** “People think this is a golf reference, but it’s actually not. It’s Cadillacs. I wouldn\'t write a song about a golf caddy—I\'ve never had one. But I\'ve never had a Cadillac, either. When I lived in San Francisco, I saw a guy walking through the Fillmore District with a baseball hat on that said ‘Caddy Daddy’ on it, and I wrote it down. That was probably 30 years ago, and I\'ve had it ever since. But the song isn’t about that. It’s more about thinking you’re smarter than you really are.” **Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon** “The first part is a song that we came up with a long time ago. We used to sing it exactly like that—‘Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon,’ trying to imitate Ethel Merman. So we’ve had that version for years and years. And then the second one is about a Florida kid shooting dope in a hurricane. Dale wrote the music for that one, which is the new song. The hardest part was figuring out how I was going to fit the phrase ‘Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon’ into the lyrics, which I did.” **Boy Mike** “This might be one of my favorites. The way it started out and the way it ended up was tremendously different. And I really like the ending on that song—I think it\'s really fucking cool. I think it sounds really weird and creepy. I couldn\'t say exactly what that one\'s about, but Boy Mike is not a real person. At first I was thinking it could be about a microphone, but I don’t think it is. It’s one of those songs that ends up far surpassing your expectations. I love when that happens.” **F\*\*k You** “This is our Harry Nilsson cover, which was a no-brainer. His song was called ‘You’re Breakin’ My Heart.’ According to the documentary about him, he wrote it about his ex-wife. Nilsson was a strange cat—he never played live. This was a song that I\'ve wanted to cover for a long time, and I changed the lyrics to be as offensive as possible. We really liked the beginning with us screaming, ‘Fuck you!’ so we decided to isolate that for the second song. If you take the two ‘Brian’ tracks, ‘Boy Mike,’ and the two ‘F\*\*k Yous,’ it’s like a nice little EP in the middle of the album.” **The Great Good Place** “I think this is Dale\'s favorite song on the record. I might be wrong, but I think the title is a reference to the freaks at Andy Warhol’s Factory who thought that they’d found a place where they could do whatever they wanted, but then Warhol ends up getting blasted. I might have had that in mind, but it’s not directly about that. And then there’s that saying along the lines of ‘If you let everyone in, you let in madness, too.’ So you’ve got to be more specific about your guest list.” **Hot Fish** “The music for this one was written by Trevor Dunn, and I wrote the lyrics. We actually wrote this song for Flipper. We did a limited-edition EP with those guys playing on it, but we decided to redo the song and put it on this record. I can’t think of a band that has had a bigger impact on us than Flipper. The title comes from seeing them at a club in San Francisco in the ’80s called the Covered Wagon. In the back, there was a kitchen with a deep fryer. Those guys had this fish made out of metal that was about the size of a bowling ball. They’d drop it in the fryer until it was red hot and then throw water on it and carry it onstage screaming, ‘Hot fish! Hot fish!’ I never forgot that. The funny thing is, when I brought it up to those guys, they didn’t remember it.” **Hund** “This is a song that I wrote for \[Buzz and Dale’s side project\] Crystal Fairy, but we never got to record it. So we revamped it and did it with Melvins 1983. It has some pretty hard guitar-playing on it, as far as the soloing goes—that\'s about as hard a guitar solo as I\'ll ever do. But the song is kind of a multifaceted nightmare—it\'s got a lot of parts to it. Mike and Dale did a really good job working this out.” **Goodnight Sweet Heart** “We’ve been wanting to do this on an album forever. We used to do this song with the Big Business guys—we’d do it as the last song of the night. Then I met one of the guys from Sha Na Na when I was golfing at one of the little par-three courses I play. He was there all the time, so I got to be friends with him. He told me the reason they loved doing that song last is because it was the shortest song they did in their whole set. So we open the record with a Beach Boys song and close it with a ’50s doo-wop song. It just seems right.”

Bloody Head Any interpretation of these two words, collectively, leads to a singular conclusion: Something has gone wrong. This is the essence of Bloody Head; the acceptance, reflection, celebration and battle against things (mind/body/spirit) going very wrong. It is the manifestation of things getting wonky and breaking, revelry in destruction and decay. Broken (brain/dick/mind) blues. Bleak party bangers as a soundtrack to our collective slow motion apocalypse. What does the future hold for Bloody Head? Fuck knows! Everything. Nothing. More/less of the same, whatever that is.... The Temple Pillars Disappear Into the Clouds The Temple Pillars Disappear Into the Clouds is the title of the new record from Bloody Head. Recorded mostly live at Stuck on a Name Studios by St. Ian Boult. Both wilder and more restrained than previous efforts. Punk? Noise rock? Psych? Sludge? All/none of the above, but the keen eared seeker of the weird may detect snippets of Les Rallizes Denudes, Kilslug, Brainbombs, Rudimentary Peni, Mainliner, Hawkwind, Donovan amongst the sonic morass. Lyrically it deals with big concepts, tumbling down. Dualism? Taoism? A beautiful garden or a broken jaw? Human endeavours losing track of themselves and getting lost in the clouds of their own creation. Ascend to Nirvana or fall into the Abyss. As above, so below....

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

HARD COPIES ONLY! For digital download, please visit punktvrtplastikintakt.bandcamp.com/album/somit Intakt CD 353 Following their acclaimed 2018 debut album, the band Punkt.Vrt.Plastik, which brings together Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh and Christian Lillinger, three of the most exciting, profound and versatile musicians on the European jazz scene, presents another stroke of genius. With Somit they take their urgent ensemble playing to new heights, creating a highly individual sound aesthetic with unusual instrumentation (Kaja Draksler plays two different upright pianos) and sophisticated post-production, culminating in a deceptive puzzle of acoustic and manipulated sounds. "Punkt.Vrt.Plastik have an amazing sound and a unique vision," writes Alexander Hawkins in the liner notes. REVIEWS: www.intaktrec.ch/rev353.htm

Acclaimed UK electronic musician Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound) releases a stunningly powerful rescore of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal 1972 movie Solaris on Phantom Limb. In May 2020, British musician Kevin Martin was invited by the Vooruit arts centre in Gent, Belgium to compose a new score for a film of his choice. Having been long inspired by pioneering Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Martin tells us that his 1972 masterpiece Solaris was the “natural choice”. The film is an unattested giant, not only of science fiction and Soviet film, but also in the annals cinematic history. And its original score, composed by regular Tarkovsky collaborator and early Soviet electronic musician Eduard Artemyev, is a magnificent work of haunting majesty, a key element to the film’s brilliance. Martin’s challenge was great: “it was with a certain amount of trepidation I stepped into such large footprints,” he writes. The results - Return to Solaris - are breathtaking. The film is intense, psychologically devastating and bleakly compelling. Interweaving themes of love, horror, sorrow, nostalgia, memory and dystopia, Martin’s score expertly mirrors this expansive breadth of psychic weight, from existential dread to heartbreaking poignancy, with immense emotional gravity. Drawn to its “narrative struggle between organic, pastoral memories of a lost past, and the harsh, dystopian realities of a futuristic hell,” Martin employs atonal noise, simmering waves of distorted synthesis, undulating drones and otherworldly, astronomic sound-design to crushing effect. Subtly submerged recurring motifs - reflections of individual characters - rise and fall amidst the fog, occasionally illuminating the doom like motes of starlight, before settling back into the density of space. Tarkovsky’s Solaris won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was screened for an incredible fifteen years uninterrupted in the Soviet Union. It is placed highly in “greatest movies of all time” lists published by Empire and the BBC, among others. Steven Soderburgh directed a Hollywood remake in 2002, starring George Clooney, and scored by Cliff Martinez.

A gatefold double LP, bringing cult Scottish sound artist and composer Kay Logan's alchemic neo-classical project, Time Binding Ensemble, to vinyl for the first time. 'Nothing New Under the Sun' arrives in 24 parts of equal length, the collection cycling through each key of the musical scale before returning to its starting point, like a sundial etching sound from shadows cast throughout a day and night. Inspired by the crumbling brutalism of St. Peter's Roman Catholic seminary in her native Scotland, Logan employs traditional instruments (french horn, bassoon, clarinet, oboe, violin, viola, and cello) fed through otherworldly machines to imbue them with a heavy-lidded, sacred geometry. An Escherian stairwell of a record. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsRAA0RUJDs&ab_channel=KitRecords ⛪ 'Stunning, perfectly zonked and secretive drone visions' - Boomkat 'an intimate, deep-listening experience that will utterly absorb you if you let it' - Bandcamp

"The journey of self-discovery, communing with the eternal sound. A musician steeped in multiple worlds; oceans apart yet closely connected in ancestral memory. Musicians such as Ahmed Abdul-Malik were able to experience the global community of sound warriors, drawing inspiration from ancient cultures to support personal investigation. The connection was made clear, the music of Africa would certainly influence the African in America despite the atrocities of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and continued racist violence that sought to sever any connection to the continent. The beauty of Malik’s investigation is this original fusion of new music (Jazz) of the African in America with ancient music of Africa. It is a shining example of collaboration in culture, where the music is allowed to shine for itself. This is the inspiration that is being tapped, being explored in this collaboration where rhythm is the basis for the sound. Just like Malik, they allow the spirit of the collective push the sound as the music develops into exalted chaos. Joy Be Upon Us!" - Luke Stewart

Cassette still in stock at Rwdfwd: rwdfwd.com/products/leather-rats-no-live-til-leather-98/ Sweet rat infested tape gold rescued from the cosmic dust bin & handed to us without comment from Sir Revsalot (lead vox?), here's what our ears tell us: Leather Rats were seemingly a late 90s punkish psychobilly act blessed with a huge-sounding Japanese following. Their mix of Cramps-esque trash sensibilities, Munster Records kinda psychobilly disease and garage mod (with a hint of Creedance) might not be that unusual. But then the first track clocks into it's second half wooooooooosh someone flips the switch and the mixing desk takes a solo; blasting back out twisted versions of the band with steppas-grade bass distortions and spiralling drums right back at the audience. The crowd goes wild, really for all of it. Even the lyrical rat caricatures and tales of fast bikes and 'hydroponic rat food' injected knife fights. I can't even see that they ever entered a studio, they lived live in Leather and nowhere else besides. Retrobeat loving Osaka clearly had their band that night, so wild for this punk/rockabilly/extended live dub version fusion (we've not heard it many other places). How could Bokeh resist? And if anyone can put us onto more psychodubilly we'll start a dedicated outlet.

In collaboration with Exist Festival; a compilation that is constantly growing, with more tracks to be added before the final release on 4th June 2021. 100% of all profits will go to Palestinian Medical Relief Society. <<<< £5,371 raised so far!!! >>>> www.pmrs.ps "As long as poverty, injustice & inequality persist, none of us can truly rest. Help PMRS continue to provide much needed health services to Palestinians" If you'd prefer to donate directly to avoid Bandcamp/Paypal fees you can screenshot your donation and we'll send you a download of the album. Please also listen and support all the artists involved: instagram.com/existfestival.ps/ drownedbylocals.com www.tzii.tk 00970.bandcamp.com djdiesoon.bandcamp.com asifeh.bandcamp.com badtrackinguk.bandcamp.com soundcloud.com/abdallah-dabbas erorrist.bandcamp.com avonterrorcorps.bandcamp.com/track/princess-difficult-symphony-of-emotions bedouindrone.bandcamp.com antstechno.bandcamp.com/album/land-of-a-loss-ep xquisitereleasess.bandcamp.com/album/skyla-el-wa7l-xqu009 albayan.bandcamp.com burdenimprint.bandcamp.com harrga.bandcamp.com maltash.bandcamp.com ethniquepunch.bandcamp.com abuama.bandcamp.com tbceditions.bandcamp.com/track/jordan-martin thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/an-audio-introduction-to-dali-de-saint-paul salac-music.bandcamp.com avonterrorcorps.bandcamp.com/track/kekuasaan-3 straysignals.bandcamp.com/album/middle soundcloud.com/pispalhas bipedbiped.bandcamp.com dhangsha.bandcamp.com instrumentsofdiscipline.bandcamp.com/album/rogue-undercover onlynow.bandcamp.com concentrationconcentration.bandcamp.com soundcloud.com/dakn-1 syrphe.bandcamp.com meiraasher.bandcamp.com nickvander.bandcamp.com theonugraha.bandcamp.com rayhansudrajat.bandcamp.com ossia.bandcamp.com

During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”

Manslaughter 777 is the new collaboration of drummer/percussionist Lee Buford (The Body) and drummer Zac Jones (Braveyoung/MSC). Debut album World Vision Perfect Harmony follows a decade of collaborations starting with The Body and Braveyoung’s Nothing Passes. For their debut as a duo, Buford and Jones blend bracing and imaginative takes on rhythmic-centric forms from dub, breakbeats, hip hop and beyond for a phantasmagoria of bristling drumscapes. Manslaughter 777 pulls together a vast array of disparate percussive traditions and patterns into a veil of dark, propulsive energy. Recorded and mixed by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets, the album’s mélange of live and sampled beats fizzle, splat and rupture with an edge. While there are sounds that could be at home on a record by The Body, Manslaughter 777 inhabits much more open spaces. The duo’s music is based primarily on drums and eclectic samples, shifting melodic ideas to the overtones and resonances of their respective percussive thuds or clicks. Buford and Jones incorporate hybridizations of live, sampled, and electronic percussion obscuring their boundaries while highlighting their specific tonal and timbral qualities. The repetitive amen break of “ARC” creates a hypnotic stasis before being broken wide open by bending and grizzly distorted hits. “Gainax” and “Mag Tech” both utilize a rolling tom pattern as a tonal drone that interplays with pitched bass drums to startlingly contrasting effects. Elysian vocal snippets and laidback tempos spin pieces like “I Can Not Tell You How I Feel” and “Do You Know Who Loves You” into more contemplative and ecstatic atmospheres. An alchemical balance of detailed and dynamic production guides each element to the fore in steady waves of relentless momentum. Taken as a whole, World Vision Perfect Harmony is a cornucopia of rhythmic texture. Manslaughter 777 channels a deluge of kineticism into a web of syncopated grooves that are equally entrancing and provocative. Audacious sound architects, Buford and Jones built an album that passionately revels in the world of rhythm. Manslaughter 777’s constructs glide as gracefully as they rumble. Together, they are a monument to the power of percussion.

“My biggest fear with this album is that people consume it like a compilation,” Justin Clarke—better known as Ghetts—tells Apple Music. “Just looking at the tracklist and spotting features, thinking that they can jump the tracks. This is a journey. It makes complete sense when you listen to it the way it’s supposed to be listened to.” For the east London rhymer—whose early story was one of countless pirate radio sets, sticky rave rooms and viral freestyles—the fight to be heard and respected on his own terms is nothing new. *Conflict of Interest* dropped with Ghetts aged 36 and is only his third studio album in a career that burst into life through cult early 2000s DVD series Risky Roadz. But this is one of grime’s most prolific, impactful and interesting artists. The teenage Ghetts (originally performing under “Ghetto”) helped embody the new scene and its infectious, unpredictable energy. A member of two seminal grime collectives (NASTY Crew and The Movement), Ghetts sharpened himself into a supremely versatile rhyming juggernaut, but somehow missed the mainstream acclaim afforded former teammates including Kano and Wretch 32 in the late 2000s. But as controversy, commercial limitation and censorship caught up with grime’s first wave, Ghetts was compelled to reclaim authorship of his story. “Tupac was a conflicted individual,” he says. “I felt that way for so long, too. I didn’t even understand my ting. I’m a black sheep in my family.” On *Conflict Of Interest*, all sides that make the man are laid bare for the first time. It’s an exhaustive-and-exhilarating cycle through the cavernous reaches of the MC’s mind. “Where I’m at now is that everything has to sound amazing,” he says. Whether it’s warm, throwback flows on garage tempos (“Good Hearts”), brutally honest chronicling of a past life in petty crime (“Hop Out”), crossover hits-in-waiting (the Ed Sheeran-starring “10,000 Tears”) or long-awaited reunions with former adversaries (“IC3” with Skepta)), this is the complete record Ghetts has been threatening to pull together for two decades. “I’m not here to compete with people that just want to make microwave music,” he says. “I want to be taken in on a worldwide level.” Below, Ghetts walks us through its story, track by track. **Fine Wine** “Wretch 32 titled this for me, I originally had it as ‘Intro’. I brought him by the studio as I was wrapping up the project: he’s someone whose opinion I rate and he’s got a great ear. This one stood out to him immediately, and at the end he said to me: ‘You know what? Your ting is like just like fine wine...and that should be the title!’” **Mozambique (feat. Jaykae & Moonchild Sanelly)** “This is a little different to the single version—we added some strings on at the beginning here to give a more special feel to the sound, and get some flow to the sequencing. When you listen to this album—particularly the flow and feel of the first few tracks, it’s meant to feel continuous, like a set.” **Fire and Brimstone** “In a way I guess this track is about my PTSD. In some situations it still comes to me, like when I’m in the car and the feds pull in behind me. I’m moving nervous. I’m fully insured and there’s nothing in the car; I have a license, but still, a bit nervous!” **Hop Out** “Writing this track was fun, running through my past life and all of my adventures. I’ve been noticing for a while now that nobody was really talking about other kinds of moves you could do on the roads. It wasn’t all about trapping in my days. Even though it’s all in my past, I’m being *very* real here, I’ll say that.” **IC3 (feat. Skepta)** “The fans have been asking me for this one for years! They really, really wanted me and Skepta to get one off together, after so long. I’m especially happy because we’re talking some real substance on this too. The clip at the end is taken from a set with Kano and Skepta on Logan’s \[Kiss FM\] show back in 2008. We’re all older, and Skepta and I are now fathers—but I always reflect on how we have such a long and deep history in this game together.” **Autobiography** “‘I know you’ve been through hell so I’ve got heaven for you/If you don’t tell your story they gon’ tell it for you.’ One thing about me: when I’m writing, I’ll just go with it and tell the whole story. It’s is the longest track \[on the album\] but the length is never that important to me. I had a lot to say here, so I said it all.” **Good Hearts (feat. Aida Lae)** “I had to have Mighty Moe \[from Heartless Crew\] open this track and he was kind enough to do so. I still remember seeing Heartless shut down Ive Farm—my first festival experience. It was just a tent in Leyton. It wasn’t even massive, but to a 15 year old, it kinda was. I saw Heartless going crazy in this tent in patterned Moschino outfits. They looked great and I remember the vibes in this place was like no other. I had this overwhelming feeling like *this* is what I want to do. Now, whenever I see or hear Heartless Crew—I’m not Ghetts—I’m that little boy.” **Dead To Me** “This song came about from an Insta live session I had. I was messing around at first, trying to get people to understand the levels. I asked someone to throw me a concept and I’d return in an hour, with the song done. People were telling me it was impossible but I came back in an hour with a finished track. The blogs started posting it up and eventually people pressed for it to make the album.” **10,000 Tears (feat. Ed Sheeran)** “Let’s be real: Ed is top three in the world. It’s Drizzy, Beyoncé, Ed. So when I wrote this track, I reached out to him and he turned around a verse in no time for me—that meant a lot. He loved what I was on and, honestly, to have one of the biggest artists in the world singing a chorus that I wrote is no small feat. I’m sure to the average, surface-level listener, they won’t believe it was me that wrote this song at first.” **Sonya (feat. Emeli Sandé)** “I wanted to write a song about escorts, but not from a male, judgmental perspective. I understand that in this life I’ve done things that can be judged harshly, so I’m not sitting here judging anybody. Are some of the things I’ve done for money in my life any better than escorting? In whose eyes? Who’s judging? That’s the perspective; I wanted to touch on subjects people are not speaking about on this album. And this is one of them.” **Proud Family** “When you’re putting together a solid body of work, I feel like you have to paint the *full* picture and that includes my family. This was one of the last tunes made for this album and it was the missing piece to the puzzle. I’m really tight with my family and making them proud means so much to me, on the day of filming this video with my them: my nan died. I had to shoot a block of videos the whole day and that was the hardest day of shooting I’ve had. I’ve never lost somebody as important to me as my nan, and my head was in such a weird space, but I was zoning in and found the strength to pull through. Now that I’m having my own children, I’m thinking about what I can do today that will affect my great-grandchildren—just experiencing a whole new range of feelings about family.” Skengman (feat. Stormzy) “Stormzy and I first worked together on \[2017 album\] *Gang Signs & Prayer* \[for ‘Bad Boys’\] but we also recorded another track for \[2018 album\] *Ghetto Gospel: The New Testament*. It just wasn’t leveling with ‘Bad Boys’ though, and I couldn’t bring myself to release it. It was sub-par. This time, I could feel I had something different. I was writing the track and forming the whole concept of the video in mind. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is crazy. And Stormz owes me a verse. Where’s Big Mike at?’ So, he’s come through, done the verse, and \[album producer\] TJ’s gone to work on post-production. If you listen carefully when Stormzy comes in, there’s a note going through it playing \[2018 freestyle\] ‘WICKEDSKENGMAN’.” **No Mercy (feat. Pa Salieu & BackRoad Gee)** “The studio session on this day was crazy, I’ve not had many sessions like that. The energy was wild. Pa is a lovely soul—he’s just one of those man you want to see win. As soon as I bucked him, it was like something that was meant to be. He told me that his friend was a big fan of mine, and once, when I was doing an open video shoot, they both pulled up. That was maybe three years ago. And that friend has now passed, but that’s something that I wasn’t even aware of and a nice moment for it came back full circle, for me and him.” **Crud (feat. Giggs)** “This was recorded in lockdown and, as soon as I made it, I could hear Giggs on it. He’s a man that loves music as much I do. We’re both so passionate about the art form of MCing. And we both gas our own ting equally! ‘I murdered that’: that energy. This might be our sixth or seventh track together. I’ve been working with the bro for at least 15 years now. And every time, we’ll argue about whose verse won on the riddim. For years and years after.” **Squeeze (feat. Miraa May)** “I’ll be honest. I couldn’t get from ‘Crud’ to ‘Little Bo Peep’ and make it make sense! Sonically, concept wise, I didn’t know how. For all of us involved in this album, we look at ‘Squeeze’ as an interlude—a long interlude—just to paint the picture and get us to the next track.” **Little Bo Peep (feat. Dave, Hamzaa & Wretch 32)** “I went round to my mum’s house and heard something playing from upstairs. It was my brother making a loop. It was kinda crazy and I was impressed. So I ran upstairs, laid down a quick idea and we slept on it for ages. After we made \[Hamzaa’s 2019 single\] ‘Breathing, Pt. 2,’ I knew this was the right track to call on Hamzaa and Wretch 32. I wanted my own version, or something in that vein and they absolutely smashed it. The track’s about being led astray. You might be addicted to something and that’s your Little Bo Peep. You’re a sheep to that, whatever it is.”

Bardo Pond guitarists, brothers John and Michael Gibbons revive their long-term sonic sparring side project Vapour Theories for a genre-shattering new release ‘Celestial Scuzz’. Six years after a split LP with Loren Connors, and 15 years after ‘Joint Chiefs’ the duo have assembled a brand new Vapour Theories album that sees their symbiotic union travel deeper, shaping and re-shaping itself as the harmonious power struggle unravels… Michael: “The balance of power definitely shifts. When the record is put together it is equal parts from me and my brother. The collaboration is complete and represents both sides of our taking the lead on material.” ‘Celestial Scuzz’ is a monumental sound piece created from hours of jam sessions and crafted into a cohesive mind-blowing trip. Featuring their take on Brian Eno’s ‘The Big Ship’ (‘Another Green World’, 1975), the album has a heavy ambience like Eno locked in a dark room with Sunn-O))))) rehearsing next door. “When we play together there’s a kind of connection to vibrations for us. When it happens, we become vehicles for some unknown forces that work through us to create the music. A kind of spiritual. Most of the time it leaves us stunned; the more stunned we are the better the jam.” While Bardo Pond’s trajectory takes them deep into rock music’s ever-imploding sound, the brothers Gibbons surf a more ethereal and eclectic plain; from a heady and consuming space, a “sanctuary; balm for the soul.” Released on limited edition gold vinyl, ‘Celestial Scuzz’ is available on 26th February on Fire Records.

"Finnish singer-songwriter and producer Eilien blends sleek, futuristic ambient with timeless folk and pop for a truly out-of-this-world LP." (Bandcamp Daily) "Digital Lovers is a 10-track trip through glowing ambience, mesmerising dream pop, musique concrète and deconstructed trance." (DJ Mag) "Eilien weaves a web of entrancing harmonies and deep frequencies, along with the angelic musicality of their voice, aligning the album somewhere on a 5th-dimension parallel with early electronic pioneers, with smatterings of folk songwriting influence dotted into the futuristic ambient production." (Inverted Audio) "It feels intimately connected to that imagined space [Cyberpunk Pioneer Bruce] Sterling described, an attempt to chart the network’s emotional coordinates and possibilities." (the Quietus) "Digital Lovers dovetails pop and ambient music, creating a contemplative listening experience which bursts with the rich quality of its materials, the flow of its fluid structure, and its delicate aesthetics." (Ma3azef) DIGITAL LOVERS (GEN045) by EILIEN is a captivating and perplexing articulation, dreamlike and intimate throughout yet uncompromising and enveloping in its realization. Entranced voices appear doubled, shifted, they take on a shimmering, cool quality. Through careful sparse arrangements, living, breathing, discrete music environments result, constructed using ruminating trance plucks; huge drifting synth washes and gliding, metallic pads. Incidental concrète material, crisp bass pulses and uncanny sound objects remind the listener of the digital root and conception of this music, in which stripped down computer music traces come to life as an animated whole. // Ellen Virman/Eilien (they/them) about the album "Emotional audio synthesis ~ SuperCollider pop music ~ Digital daydreaming. The music on Digital Lovers is a special mixture of self-coded synthetic sounds and timeless pop-music. It refers to existing genres and phenomena, but defies any specific category creating a strong style of its own. My main sound producing tool is SuperCollider, a text-based audio coding platform. I’ve coded my own sounds, instruments and structures with the means of audio synthesis, sample manipulation and input signal modification. The thematic sphere floats between digital and organic. Synthetic walls of sound are mirrored to the mediations of the “natural” world, in the shape of field recordings, acoustic instruments and my voice. Love is searching it’s place in this spectre of digital and organic reality: excitement of future love, grief over fading love, love’s force for creation and transformative power of love.” // Ellen Virman's bio Ellen Virman makes music with alias Eilien and works as a light and sound designer within performing arts. They are interested in the intersection of emotions and technology. Their work often combines documentary approach with personal narratives. Within Eilien project Ellen wants to challenge possibilities of creating sound and embrace the process of unknown discoveries. Ellen lives in Helsinki, Finland, and is currently studying Sound Design in the University of Arts Helsinki. // Eero Pulkkinen's bio Eero Pulkkinen is a sound artist and composer currently working between Eura and Helsinki. Lately they have specialised in contemporary performance and site-specific works, concerts and radiophonic works. Their work is influenced on the tradition of 'concrete music' and orientation towards the characteristics of physical terrain, where digital audio events pretend acoustic, as amend to contemporary view of our virtual landscape and surroundings. Programming composition often thrives to be freed from bodily, physical nature, inevitably it being impossible. Often the power is given to specified themes; errors, presage, luck, superstition and failure. Their works have been presented widely both in Finland and abroad. Currently they are composing under the alias W and being active in groups Running, New Sincerity, Breakup, and W. // Lenka Glisníková's bio Lenka Glisníková is a Czech artist who works on the intersection of photography and sculpture. Often combining various crafts with digital manipulation and post production resulting in sequences of actions in the processual body of work. Her work seems to be fascinated by the confrontation of minor physicalities - such as fingerprints - and immense size - for example the Internet. Glisníková expands this medium to create installations, where she questions the results of contemporary changes to human lifestyles that occur due to non-regulated technological progress.