"As I’ve tried to understand what is happening now without judgement––a collapse of systems, boundaries, and symbols that crumble faster with each forcible attempt to reinstate them––I am finding equal failure in streamlined, singular methodologies for both comprehension and composition. Outside, reason and rationale wane in heft and clarity. Representation in a world that refuses fact is uncertain and deceptive. Time is complicated by the failure of the linear. Inside, what we see is not what we hear, what we hear is not what we think, what we think is not what we feel, and so on.

The dread incited by this precarity is difficult to interpret without announcing failure: the anxiety of watching our own hourglass is palpable and demanding. I feel existence in this moment has required a move away from my own humanity in order to simply live in it, live through it, live with it while refusing to release the idea of environmental recovery. It is to request your humanity to unwillingly shift, to mutate toward something sharply resilient and relentless. The sounds on this record embody this sense of mutant consciousness. It is, for me, a representation of a vigorous sprint towards complexity, towards the interdependencies that serve as stop-gaps, towards freaky, slippery, compounded stacks of reality.

The title, A Parallel Array of Horses, is derived from a geologic phenomenon in which a block of a specific type of rock has been completely separated by mineral veins from its counterpart within another body of rock, and then stacked upon multiples of others like it. Sounds on this record are both recorded and produced: the album opens with recordings of a Mojave wind storm and closes with the world’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats departing their cave to roam the summer night air of Southeast Texas. Both scenes are landscapes of precarity, politically or meteorologically or otherwise. Interspersed are a variety of electronic instruments and processes, and compositional techniques that are variously clear-cut or intentionally buried by digital processing. Tracks three and four are composed entirely with my own voice––my own body as the original playback mechanism for experiencing the world, but manipulated, elaborated upon, and layered to express a more complex interpretation of that subjective reality.

Through listening, I find myself able to retrace my steps back to a sense of decentered, porous presence––the present is still here, with all of its shifts and confusion and valuable interdependencies. No matter is created or destroyed, only new forms arise."

>-Geneva Skeen

More information can be found here.

As audacious as the sleeve it comes housed in, the UK’s most eccentric audio malefactor returns with his eighth studio album, Practical Electronics.  Unique in the Thighpaulsandra oeuvre, this one eschews the usual group-based recordings, consisting of electronics and vocals only.

Hovering between haunted narratives and extended instrumental sequences, Practical Electronics is an eccentric excursion into playful pop and fearless electronic experimentation.  Simultaneously intimidating and accessible, the energy of this untamed mind unleashes an artefact where high art unfolds as an oblique electronic cabaret.

Having cut is teeth amongst such legendary outfits such as Coil and Spiritualized, Thighpaulsandra has constantly catapulted himself further and further into a musical landscape utterly of his own devising.  Practical Electronics is the latest exemplary installment of a voice that is uncompromising as it is outlandish.

More information can be found here.

"Imagine Richard Youngs as the junior member of a cabal of prolific and puritanical English musician-mystics, including The Fall's Mark E Smith, Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill, Martin Carthy and The Clangers composer Vernon Elliot, and still his nature will elude you."

-Stewart Lee, Sunday Times.

Dissident is a hallucination of a legendary lost Samizdat-style recording of the legendary lost Richard Youngs Band. It's not clear to me that it is against anything in particular, and as such it is not literally dissident. In fact, I'm a little lost how or why it is dissident, save for being informed by the imagined provisional recordings of pre-Glasnost protest. Perhaps the wordless scratch vocals are voicing dissent, but I remember having fun. So much so, I couldn’t stop myself from fleshing out the rough nylon guitar songs to a full band arrangement, recorded in multiple spaces.  Which is as far from the Samizdat spirit as you could care to go.

More information can be found here.

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio, Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July 1980), Dome 2 (October 1980) and Dome 3 (October 1981).  A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.

These albums represent some of the most beautifuly stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.

Previously issued in the out-of-print Dome 1-4+5 boxed set in 2011.  Now available as standalone LP with download card.

More information can be found here.

Martina Lussi's second album fuses together disparate sound sources with a disorienting quality that reflects the modern climate of dispersion and distraction. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based sound artist released her debut album Selected Ambient on Hallow Ground in 2017, and now comes to Latency with a bold new set of themes and processes.

The range of tools at her disposal spans field recordings, processed instrumentation, synthesized elements and snatches of human expression.  The guitar is a recurring figure, subjected to a variety of treatments from heavy, sustained distortion to clean, pealing notes. Elsewhere the sound of sports crowds and choral singing merge, and patient beds of drones and noise melt into the sounds of industry and mechanics.  The track titles manifest as a compositional game of deception complete with innuendos, empty phrases and claims – flirtations with perfume names and ironic assertions.

From the volatile geopolitical climate to the changing nature of music consumption in the face of streaming and digital access, Diffusion is a Force is a reflection on fractured times where familiar modes and models change their meaning with the ever-quickening pace of communication.

More information can be found here.

On Epitaph things are different - Jay's voice croons crystalline over goth futurism for the first time on record (if you haven't heard of Ku….) - he sings one of the oldest Greek songs ever written and has spent the last year doing impromptu vocal covers of Tricky tracks in Cambridge pubs. And did you notice the tracks don't have dub in the title any more?

This his first proper proper solo LP from Jay Glass Dubs - a widescreen vision of 4AD nightmares, ballads for River Styx crossings and echoes that never end. It's This Mortal Coil if they knew about dungeon synth and Metalheadz and still thought dub techno was boring as fuck.

Epitaph follows his 2LP retrospective of Dubs on Not Waving's Ecstatic Recordings; and his 12” mini-LP with Leslie Winer on Bokeh early in 2018.  It's his 5th and no way final release for Bokeh (do you remember BKV 002, the slowest dancehall mixtape ever made?).  Realized with help of Greek vocalist and performing artist Yorgia Karidi and a special saxophone guest spot from Ben Vince (Curl, Where To Now, Hessle Audio).  Bokeh graphic visionary Patrick Savile's sensually airbrushed and peeled lemon closes this funeral casket of all the things you thought you knew about Jay Glass Dubs.

More information can be found here.

"Heart-rending shoegaze entries from the master of rose-tinted but thorny ambient pop hymns, landing smart on the heels of his nostalgic pangs collected in the recent Songs of Remembrance / Songs of Forgiveness LP reissues. The struggle is beautiful.

Accompanied by the languorous basslines of Drew Piraino on the record's broadest and most affective pieces, Jefre's chiming guitars and muffled drums form hymns to rare feels, with the distancing effect of distortion connoting the effect of age, as serene moments appear move ever farther out of reach.

That effect is felt most strongly in the transition of "Love’s Refrain" from something like a crumpled tape recording of shimmering yacht rock thru to its coruscating, noisy finale, and the dense weight of humid air and featherlight chirrups in "Little Dear Isle," while the other side pushes off from the sore synth chorale of "In Summer" and into the slackened drums of "Blue Nudes (I-IV)," again underlined by Drew Piraino’s murmuring bassline, with Jefre pushing the upper registers into the red, before collapsing into the tape noise and lone piano refrain of his "Prelude.""

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here.

Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remixed [Touch, 2014] and Bécs [Editions Mego, 2014].  Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story.  I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first, but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s.  In the end it was inspiring.  I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal.  I just used what was to hand."

Agora will be released March 29, 2019 on Touch.

"Michael O’Shea’s sole, breathtaking album ranks among our favourite of all time - yet hardly anyone seems to have heard of it.  Produced by Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis at the Dome studio in 1982, it's an utterly singular work of magick, meshing myriad, worldly modes into music that rarely fails to reduce us to tears.  It's one of those albums that basically sounds like nothing else - the only record we can draw some parallels to is Dariush Dolat-Shahi's life-changing Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, despite it coming from the other end of the world.

First brought to our attention by Blackest Ever Black at the start of this decade, we've gradually developed an obsessive fascination with its sublime, rapid dervishes and warbling rhythmelodies, so it’s a pleasure to see it finally made easily available to everyone who we’ve ranted about it over the years (2nd hand copies have been historically pricey and hard to come by!), and especially replete with its enlightening new sleeve notes by archivist and writer Failed Bohemian.

A busker among other trades, O'Shea was an itinerant soul who, after a childhood and formative years spent between Northern Ireland and Kerry in the south of the country, and extensive travel between Europe, Turkey and Bangladesh, created his own instrument - an electrified dulcimer known as Mó Cará (Irish for 'My Friend') - which he performed on at Ronnie Scott's, before later playing on bills with everyone from Ravi Shankar to Don Cherry, and also recording with The The's Matt and Tom Johnson.

Aside from his two contributions to the Stano album, "Content To Dine In I Dine Weathercraft" (also recently reissued by Dublin’s Allchival), O'Shea's first and only album is the main point of reference for this unique artist.  Like some eccentric expression of ancient Indo-European voices channeled thru a Celtic body, Michael O'Shea's improvised acousto-electric music intuitively distills a world of styles into singularly hypnotic works.  Using his self-built instrument; a hybrid of a zelochord and a sitar, made on a wooden door salvaged in Munich, and with the crucial addition of electric pick-ups and the "Black Hole Space Box," O'Shea would absorb sounds from his travels like a sponge, and relay them back thru the instrument with effortlessly freeform and achingly lush results as elaborate as a Celtic knot or elegant as Sanskrit text.

The mercurial flow of syncretised styles in 15 minute opener "No Journey’s End" catches your breath and doesn’t give it back, leaving us utterly light-headed and feeling something akin to religious experience, before his "Kerry" vignette most beautifully limns the epic coastline he hails from.  The plasmic swirl and phasing of "Guitar No. 1" is perhaps the one piece that time dates the LP to the post-punk era, even if it could have come from ancient Mesopotamia, while the album and artist's underlying metaphysics bleed thru most hauntingly in the timbral shadowplay of "Voices," and the rapidly tremulous, animist voodoo of "Anfa Dásachtach."

Noted in his lifetime, not least by himself as: "…joker, transvestite, inventor, psychonaut, actor, catalyst, community worker, musician, traveler, instrument maker," Michael O'Shea's life was, by all accounts, every bit as colourful as his music, which only makes his untimely death in 1991 all that more tragic, as we’d practically give an arm to hear what he could have made in the early techno era, as he was purportedly getting heavy into London's rave scene before he was taken.

Honestly no other record has cast such a strong spell over us in recent memory - to the extent of sending us on wild goose chases on the wrong peninsula in Kerry - so please pardon the gush 'cos we can’t help but share love for this life-affirming disc and Michael O'Shea's beautifully transcendent music."

-via Boomkat

Out now on Ireland's Allchival label.

With Voices is the newest recording by Dutch composer Rutger Zuydervelt under the moniker Machinefabriek.  True to its title, the album’s eight pieces exhibit Zuydervelt's use of cassette recorders, tone generators, radios, synths, and other hifi curios to construct bewildering aural architecture around vocal work from Peter Broderick, Marissa Nadler, Richard Youngs, Chantal Acda, Terence Hannum (of Locrian) and others.  These human voices are featured as musical instruments rather than mere vehicles of lyrical content, resulting in a sub-linguistic mosaic of primordially stirring moods.

The initial spark of With Voices was kindled while Zuydervelt was in Taipei creating music for a dance company.  In the final days of his trip, a dancer named Wei-Yun Chen caught Zuydervelt's ear with an instagram video featuring a voice that turned out to be Wei-Yun's own (she would end up on the album’s seventh movement, a piece that features dissected bits of Taiwanese poetry amid low-pitched murmurs and whispering fogbanks of static).  The encounter stirred Zuydervelt to create a single 35 minute soundscape upon which each vocalist on With Voices was encouraged to improvise, be it talking, reading, singing, or wordless, guttural intoning. Such vocal smatterings were then used to determine how the other tonal elements should be arranged, dictating where each musical passage would ultimately lead.  "The idea was for everyone to just do what came naturally" he recalls, "the element of unpredictability was important to me."

Indicative of this approach "III" (the tracks are simply titled with Roman numerals) slowly winds like ivy through staccato phrases spoken by Zuydervelt's peer Peter Broderick, whose micro-incantations skip along mechanically only to telescope into monastic grandeur at the track's midpoint; the vibrations of vocal cords are often stretched to a seismic hum to form the heavy implements in Zuydervelt's toolkit.  On "V," tape recordings of Berlin electronic artist Zero Years Kid (aka Joachim Badenhorst) sputter with their own apparent intelligence like a faulty AI attempting to interpret reels of human speech in some ruinous library of the distant future.  Finally, a Siren-like Marissa Nadler leads the suite to its lullabic endpoint with overlapping wisps of harmony devoid of accompaniment ending the album on an angelic note.

In these moments, like much of With Voices, warm-blooded arteries seem to have grown around bits of well-designed artifice to form something warmly alien, soberly futuristic, and inherently satisfying.  More than simply an album of collaborative features, With Voices is a mutating collage of modern minimalism that challenges as often as it comforts. There is an alchemical, metallurgical quality that arises from Zuydervelt's unique way of merging humanness with abstraction, harshness with beauty, and unintelligibility with familiarity on what may be the most affecting Machinefabriek release to date.

More information can be found here.

Laurie Spiegel's second full-length album, Unseen Worlds, arrived just over ten years after her debut album. Having realized the pieces found on The Expanding Universe (1980) on an instrument no longer available to her, the GROOVE System at Bell Laboratories, Spiegel moved on to composing and developing for the Alles Machine, alphaSyntauri, McLeyvier and various other instruments before creating an instrument entirely her own. Spiegel created "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" on a Macintosh 512k so that she could have an instrument that was not general purpose, but a small, specialized, and well-defined musical instrument for and by her that she did not have to compromise on or risk losing access to it. While it was a very personal instrument for Spiegel, demand among friends and colleagues nevertheless grew until "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" became a commercial product for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari personal computers with a devoted popular following that continues to this day, despite the obsoletion of those platforms.  At the time of her Unseen Worlds album's original release in 1991, the issuing record label turned out to be going out of business, dissolved and disappeared, sending the album immediately into obscurity.  Outside of a private CD edition issued by Spiegel on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994, this new edition represents the first proper commercial release of Unseen Worlds.

"Unseen Worlds is not so much based on melody and rhythm as it is on textures, pulses, and sonic environments. Sometimes dark, sometimes light, its drama pulls in the adventurous listener who wants to take a musical journey.  Using computer software she wrote in order to implement a unique musical vision, Unseen Worlds blends the artistic and the technical, the cerebral and the sensual, and revives the virtually abandoned tradition of electronic music.  Unseen Worlds is the work of a sonic explorer whose music can both challenge and caress.  Those looking for other worlds of sound can put on headphones and find them here." - Craig Anderton

More information can be found here.

The Threats Of Memories 2LP reissue, on United Dirter, by Steven Stapleton and David Tibet features three side-long tracks, newly edited by Andrew Liles, from their albums The Sadness Of Things and Musical Pumpkin Cottage. The fourth side is a previously unreleased version, titled "DreamBreath," from the Musical Pumpkin Cottage recording sessions. It comes in a gatefold sleeve, reproducing Babs Santini's artwork from the original releases and a photograph of Steven and David by Ruth Bayer, as well as an insert containing all lyrics and credits, and with HandWriting by David Tibet. The 2LP was mastered by Andrew Liles, and the cover was designed by Ania Goszczyńska.  Photography by Andrew Thomas.

The Threat Of Memory 5CD boxed set, on United Dirter, by Steven Stapleton and David Tibet features all of Steven and David's previously-issued recordings, made under their "Steven Stapleton & David Tibet" faces, on the first four of the CDs, as well as a fifth CD with previously unissued out-takes from the Musical Pumpkin Cottage recording sessions. It does not include the unissued out-take on Side 4 on Side 4 of The Threats of Memories 2LP.

It comes in a hinged box, with new artwork by Babs Santini on the CDs' individual sleeves, as well as on the box's cover with a booklet containing all credits and lyrics, and with HandWriting by David Tibet.  The CDs were mastered by Andrew Liles and the cover was designed by Ania Goszczyńska.  Photography by Sarah Stapleton.

More information can be found here, as well as information on the related Dead Memory LP.

Phill Niblock's Music For Cello collects three pieces from the '70s and early '80s, performed by cellist David Gibson.

This CD includes a 16-page unpublished interview with Phill Niblock.

Since the late sixties, Phill Niblock has been composing long-form acoustic drones with a focus on the rhythms and overtones that rise from closely tuned instruments. His highly original and influential music is an exploration of timbre, microtonality, stability, duration and psychoacoustic phenomenon.

"'3 to 7 - 196' is very direct, aggressive, and gritty. The overtone patterns that are produced by the proximal pitches become more prominent with louder volume. So please, play this piece very loud. This was the first piece of mine in which the musician was precisely tuned, in which I chose exact pitches in hertz. We used a sine wave oscillator and frequency counter for the tuning.

'Descent Plus' has four cello tones descending one octave over twenty-two minutes, from 300 hertz to 150 hertz. David Gibson played these tones without lifting his bow from the strings, constantly retuning. I made four different scores, manually changing an oscillator to which he was tuning, for each track's recording. For the revision, we added six more tracks, with David playing long tones which were not descending. The second part of the recording was made nearly twenty years later.

'Summing II' (one of four parts) is mellow and sonorous. David plays two strings simultaneously, one of which is retuned for each successive recording of that pair of tones. This is a mix of an eight track tape. It's better played loud also."

- Phill Niblock from liner notes

More information can be found here.

The recently composed “Ricochet Lady” (2016) is the only work for solo acoustic glockenspiel by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Following in the manner of his pieces "I Am Sitting In A Room" and "Vespers," "Ricochet Lady" embodies Lucier's approach toward sound's individual function and mobility within space. This CD defines this approach through four realizations recorded in four dissimilar spaces, ranging from the standard to extraordinary: a university rehearsal hall with walls of drywall and glass, a chapel made of oak and stone, an empty forge and foundry warehouse for steel railway wheels, and a 36-meter tall dilapidated cement grain elevator.

Never one to shy away from convention, Lucier intensifies each performance by instructing that the glockenspiel be placed against a wall or other reflective surface where the soloist systematically traverses the entire range of the instrument in rapid, repetitive patterns, actively disseminating the glockenspiel’s sustain, clicks, and interferences throughout the space. In doing so, the glockenspiel maps the unique acoustical characters of each space as each space helps to compose the piece. Created in close collaboration with Trevor Saint, a rare (if not the only) specialist of experimental music for glockenspiel, Lucier has further enhanced the sophistication of this re-imagined instrument while maintaining his devotion to letting spaces speak.

So You … (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour-long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her.

So You … (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) was originally commissioned by Documenta 14 and first performed as part of Documenta in Athens in 2017. Two key, and formerly distinct, aspects of Lucier's practice come together in this piece: the exploration of interference patterns in closely tuned intervals, and the exploration of resonant chambers. From speakers mounted inside amphorae a constantly turning braid of beating sine waves trace the descent into the depths of hell, and then the doomed attempt to climb back into life. Singer Jessika Kenney and long-time Lucier collaborators Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis embody the three title characters in deeply focused performances that assert themselves against the process of the sweep, or become enfolded in it. The electronics were mixed in real time by programmer and equipment designer Tom Erbe. This record has all of the mind-bending acoustic effects expected from a Lucier piece, but also features a strong sense of narrative drama and flashes of raw emotion that are unexpected and deeply affecting.

More information on both albums can be found here.

This record documents music made by two women — one American and one Korean — who have both made a profound impact within experimental music. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument has been a long-term life-work of incredible ambition and dedication. The result is immediate, exciting and inspirational. Okkyung Lee has completed rewritten the possibilities for the cello in solo and group improvisation whilst maintaining a steadfast defiance to the many attempts to contain her work within pre-defined genres.

The Air Around Her was recorded on February 20th, 2016 during the First Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm, Sweden at Kronobageriet — the former bakery to Swedish Royalty that dates back to the 17th Century and is now the site of the city’s Performing Arts Museum. The Edition Festival was given access to the space while renovations took place and Fullman allowed the requisite time to install and tune her long string instrument along the full 26 meter length of the room.

More information can be found here.

Geelriandre/Arthesis is named for the pieces that fill its two sides.  "Geelriandre," realized on an ARP 2500 synthesizer in 1972, features Gérard Fremy on prepared piano, for whom the piece was originally composed.  "Arthesis," realized using the University of Iowa's Moog in 1973, comprises the full duration of side B.

Eliane Radigue has received much deserved praise for her transcendent compositions for tape, synthesizers and acoustic instruments.  Her work is deep, slowly changing and timelessly resonant with timbre so dense you can listen through the sound to find infinity.  Accute physicality, overtones and psychoacoustic activity fills your space, follows you, grounds you, pulls you in or lets you go.  It's all here/hear.

More information can be found here.

Front Variations (December 2018)

Music for the retreating ice-sheets of Iceland, produced in Seyðisfjörður, Eastern Iceland, in 2016.

Front Variations is composed from sine waves subjected to increasing amounts of feedback in order to simulate the so-called 'ice-albedo' feedback mechanism.

This is the process whereby the action of melting glaciers reduces the global surface area of ice, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that glaciers reflect, which in turn increases global temperatures and causes further glacial melting.

Ring modulation and distortion were also used to further deteriorate the sound signal.

A Great Body Rising and Falling and Another Hand (January 2019)

Two new works to add to the catalog of music that Richard Skelton has produced for the landscapes of northern England, including Marking Time (2008), Landings (2009), Limnology (2012), Succession (2013), Belated Movements (2015) and Scaleby (2017).

Both represent different variants in the development of what Peter Meanwell described in The Wire as 'land music,' an endeavor informed by archaeology, ecology, folklore and myth. The first, A Great Body Rising and Falling, explores the idea of agency and sentience within the apparently inanimate, and the second, Another Hand, takes as its inspiration a line from a gloss on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to explore the relationship between the natural and the supernatural.

More information can be found here.

Light In The Attic's Japan Archival Series continues with Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, an unprecedented overview of the country’s vital minimal, ambient, avant-garde, and New Age music – what can collectively be described as kankyō ongaku, or environmental music. The collection features internationally acclaimed artists such as Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Joe Hisaishi, as well as other pioneers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima and Satoshi Ashikawa, who deserve a place alongside the indisputable giants of these genres.

In the 1970s, the concepts of Brian Eno's "ambient" and Erik Satie's "furniture music" began to take hold in the minds of artists and musicians around Tokyo. Emerging fields like soundscape design and architectural acoustics opened up new ways in which sound and music could be consumed. For artists like Yoshimura, Ojima and Ashikawa, these ideas became the foundation for their musical works, which were heard not only on records and in live performances, but also within public and private spaces where they intermingled with the sounds and environments of everyday life. The bubble economy of 1980s Japan also had a hand in the advancement of kankyō ongaku. In an attempt to cultivate an image of sophisticated lifestyle, corporations with expendable income bankrolled various art and music initiatives, which opened up new and unorthodox ways in which artists could integrate their avant-garde musical forms into everyday life: in-store music for Muji, promo LP for a Sanyo AC unit, a Seiko watch advert, among others that can be heard in this collection.

Kankyō Ongaku is expertly compiled by Spencer Doran (Visible Cloaks) who, with a series of revelatory mixtapes as well as his label Empire of Signs (Music For Nine Postcards), has been instrumental in shepherding interest in this music outside of Japan. Together with Light In The Attic's celebrated anthologies I Am The Center and The Microcosm, Kankyō Ongaku helps to broaden our understanding of this quietly profound music, regardless of the environment in which it is heard.

Out February 2019 on Light in the Attic.

In 2019 Croatian Amor returns with a new album, Isa.

Copenhagen's Loke Rahbek works in a wide variety of forms. His prolific rate of activity is best viewed through his and Christian Stadgaard's Posh Isolation label. Of Rahbek's many projects, his most eloquent and gentle is Croatian Amor.

2017’s single "Finding People" bloomed from Croatian Amor's previous album, the widely acclaimed Love Means Taking Action. These melancholic transmissions presented a kind of alien pop. For Isa, he has drawn on an impressive list of guests to realize a nauseating narrative of virtual communication and eschatological programming. The album's title invokes a messianic entity, and though it's hard to tell what's imagined or remembered anymore, the play that Croatian Amor is known for feels far more vivid today.

"Enhance photo to reveal a picture of Bird caught mid-flight; enhance again, the bird has a human face screaming."

Never pessimistic, Croatian Amor circles themes of tragedy and comfort to animate a sense of hope. His accomplices pluck details from his graphic scenes like a searchlight drifting over a starlit surface. Alto Aria, Soho Rezanejad, and Jonnine Standish of HTRK, each contribute vocals across the album, cloaked and kerned on Croatian Amor's inimitable stage. "Eden 1.1" and its accompaniment "Eden 1.2" feature the voices of Frederikke Hoffmeier and Yves Tumor, respectively. These are some of album's most delicate pieces, and where one may find respite from the helix of damaged rhythms that eddy across 'Isa'. Familiar faces from Copenhagen are solicited throughout, and perhaps the album's most endearing quality is the space for volatility that all of the collaboration has invited. 

All the signals and timelines lead everywhere and back. Maybe it's only the myths that get us?

More information can be found here.

Hekla's music exists singularly. A one-off talent, emerging from no particular scene, ascribing to no particular rules.

As a creative tool, the theremin - bizarre, unique, and rarely heard - can be expressive, intuitive and highly adaptable. In Hekla's hands, her instrument covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of high frequency chirrups and chirps, to grinding, tectonic sub-bass. We are given the throbbing, apocalyptic dread of "Muddle" and the baroque beauty of traditional Icelandic hymn "Heyr Himna Smi∂ur" in sequential tracks on the album's A-Side.  Appropriately, she also writes that the album title - Á - is similarly multifaceted in her native Icelandic: "a river is an á and also it means ouch like when you hurt yourself, and also when you put something on top of something you put it á (on) something."

More information can be found here.