Conclusio
On Conclusio, Asmus Tietchens bends back toward his industrial roots, folding corroded pulses, cold drones and acerbic detail into a suite that feels like “German Angst” hammered into stark, sculptural sound.
Paradise Mountain
Brussels-based Maloca presents Paradise Mountain, the new EP from Katatonic Silentio, DJ and production moniker of Italian sound artist Mariachiara Troianiello. Positioned in counterpoint to her darker, more visceral work, the record delicately folds Detroit electro and techno drum structures into a softened New Age glow, generating environments that breathe, shimmer, and slowly coalesce.
Across the EP, tracks unfold gently, rife with wet modular tones, chromatic arpeggiations, and light-touch p…
Slow, Slow Spectres
Following his sonorous debut on the label with Magnetically Yours in 2024, Andrew Hargreaves returns with a solemn suite of vaporous, ambient and choral ennui, unfolding across two sides.
Microliths and Momentary Drifts
*250 copies limited edition* Microliths and Momentary Drifts is the first full-length collaboration from the trio of zakè (Zach Frizzell), Ossa (Kaiton Slusher), and ASC (James Clements), where rolling analog synth lines, chest-rattling bass, and otherworldly atmospherics evoke and build on the timeless qualities of peak-era 90s ambient. Each artist has released solo and collaborative works for Zakè Drone Recordings and Past Inside The Present over the last half-decade, but in this combination, …
Issue 136 (Magazine + 7", Orange)
For acclaimed composer Hannah Peel, the momentum just keeps building. A superb new album with virtuoso percussionist Beibei Wang, her continuing ‘night tracks’ show on BBC radio 3, and an ambitious ballet inspired by her Mary Casio alter ego, all point to 2026 being the year she makes another major leap forward.
Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun
*350 copies limited edition* In spring 2025, Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri created the source material for their second album, Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun, during a three-day residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin. Functioning as both recording studio and performance venue, the space has no stage, with the audience gathered around the performers. Working within an open framework, the duo reshaped the music each evening while recording the performances live to multitrack. R…
Behind the Great Curve
*200 copies limited edition* L. Jacobs releases his second album, Behind the Great Curve, on the Belgian label blickwinkel. Featuring contributions from Milan W., Sarah Yu Zeebroek, and Joachim Badenhorst, the follow-up to the surprising debut Enthusiasm was initially composed and recorded in Jacobs’ small attic room and later refined at Milan W.’s Van den Nest Studio, where W. also handled production and mixing. A line or outline which gradually deviates from being straight for some or all of i…
Aftermath and Transitions (Traces Of The Ukrainian Underground in Cologne (1994-1996))
All profits of this album will be given to Svitlana Nianio!
Up With The Sun
"Up With The Sun is ronja’s latest cycle of songs: themes first met in wistful dreams, sounding dreamlike all the while, with voice and acoustic guitar as the main vehicle, and a company of Berlin and Copenhagen musicians close behind. Following For Annette (2023), it is the second ronja record on Berlin’s Unguarded, this time to appear as a co-release between Unguarded and Lucerne-based Präsens Editionen. In a kindred spirit to its predecessor, the writing here is less concerned with naming abs…
Recordings 83 - 88
Huge tip! It was a cold winter's night in late 1978 when Chris Connelly, fourteen years old, lay in bed with his radio and heard Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady for the first time. It changed his life permanently. He had already been making sounds at home on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, building loops and feedback, using shortwave radio in the middle of the night, with no instruments and no desire for any. He had also been obsessively scouring record shops guided by a copy of Zig Zag magazin…
Situation Modulaire
Local Distorsion is a French duo formed in 2012 consisting of Cyril (vocals, lyrics, synthesizer) and Caroline (vocals, lyrics). Explicitly described as an "illusory collective concept," the project draws on surrealist and nihilist literature, metaphysics, and the aesthetics of the 1980s DIY scene as filtered through a contemporary sensibility. Rather than claiming a fixed identity, Local Distorsion operates across different group names and tonal approaches to move freely between coldwave, minim…
Pointless
Greg Horn started out in West Lafayette, Indiana as guitarist and vocalist of Dow Jones and the Industrials, a punk and new wave band with a wiry, keyboard-inflected sound that earned them a split LP with the Gizmos in 1980 before the group dissolved in 1981. Horn relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where he found work at the PBS station KAET and met synthesist Galen Herod. Together they formed Tone Set, the minimal synth-pop duo that released Cal's Ranch and Calibrate and earned rare praise from Mar…
Park Holme Recordings 1983-89
On Synth Pop Art, The Toy Shop turn Paul Klein’s one‑man Leeds project into a sharp, neon‑lit partnership with Philip Walsh, distilling early‑80s UK minimal synth, big‑chorus ambition and nearly‑was pop history into a tight set of lost singles.
A Celebration of iDeath
Funeral Danceparty began in 1979 in Newcastle. Their debut cassette, The Curiosity Shop (1980), was advertised in the national weekly music paper Sounds in the established DIY fashion of the era: interested parties were requested to send a blank cassette and a self-addressed envelope. Approximately 100 copies reached destinations worldwide. A national fanzine review compared the music to Cabaret Voltaire, Faust, and The Residents. Their second cassette, The Attractions of Fixed Interest, was als…
Recordings 1979-1983
Everfriend was the project of New Jersey-based keyboardist Bill Rhodes (real surname Rupprecht), operating with drummer Mike Jacoby and bassist Paul Kozub, all previously connected through a band called the All Night Flyers. Rhodes self-released Everfriend's recordings between 1980 and 1983 on his own Jazzical Records label in very limited vinyl editions: Tropicsphere (1980), Sphere of Influence (1981), and Shoot to Kill (1983), the latter first released as a tape. The project sits in an unusual…
We Are Young And Stupid
On 29th April 1982, the final year degree show at the Royal College of Art in London gave birth to a project that had no clear precedent. The Death and Beauty Foundation, initiated that day by Val Denham alongside Mike Wells, Nick Coombe, Stuart Jane, Elita Denham, and Antal Nemeth, began as a performance/action group with experimental sound. The first recordings — the "Darlington Tapes" — were made by Denham and Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio in 1982, establishing a connection to the wider …
Applied Synthesis
Bill Rhodes was a Florida-based synthesist and composer who spent the 1980s building an idiosyncratic body of work across a series of self-released cassettes and limited vinyl pressings, entirely outside the commercial music industry and largely unknown beyond the tape-trading network he plugged into through South Florida connections and fanzine advertisements. His music was described by Boomkat as spanning "lounge jazz flair to doomy John Carpenter feels," evoking a library's worth of themes an…
Thealonian Music
Ash Wednesday is an Australian musician from Adelaide who arrived at the late 1970s Melbourne post-punk scene via the proto-punk group JAB, whose tracks appeared on the Suicide Records compilation Lethal Weapons, and then via The Models, a band he co-founded with Sean Kelly that would later become a chart-topping pop group while Wednesday himself moved in a very different direction. His experimental work from the early 1980s unfolded across several parallel projects: solo electronic pieces; Mode…
Recordings 1979-83
Malcolm Brown is a Scottish electronics and minimal synth artist who has been active since the late 1970s, working from council flats in West Lothian with whatever equipment he could assemble: a Casio VL Tone, electric guitar, bass, piano, a Shinei Fuzzbox, a Dual Octave Box, a WEM Copycat echo unit, a Dr. Rhythm drum machine, electronic percussion pads, an Akai GX 4000D reel-to-reel recorder, and a Hitachi stereo tape deck. His early collaborations with Robert Lawrence of Quick Stab Products in…
The Blackwing Sessions | Demos 1982 / 83
On The Blackwing Sessions, Demos 1982/83, Robert Marlow opens the vault on his pre‑Peter Pan Effect sketches, capturing Basildon synth‑pop at source: raw Vince Clarke sequences, Eric Radcliffe grit, and songs caught mid‑mutation between bedroom dream and major‑label mirage.