Àlááfíà
Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The…
Ephimeral
SOFA is proud to have discovered a great jewel in Spanish music. The Madrid based soundartist and composer Miguel Angel Tolosa has during the last five years become a special member of the SOFA family, having contributed on several SOFA albums both as an artist and as a recording and mastering engineer. Now, on "Ephimeral" we hear him all alone. Tolosa says about his music that it's not meant to convey extramusical contents, such as philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda or adver…
Neuromancer
"It’s hard to imagine that this year William Gibson’s Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural spectres he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was…
Radials
For AI-38 Italian duo LF58 (Giuseppe Tillieci and Filippo Scorcucchi) present ‘Radials’. A site-specific concept piece that was recorded live on location in Venice, Radials showcases the powerful and transportive sound world which LF58 have become known for. Radials takes its name from the homonymous exhibition created by the Roman artist group Sbagliato, for the 2023 Biennale Architettura of Venice.
Following a landmark renovation of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koo…
Enmixed
*50 copies limited edition* Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s enmixed, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.”
In Bat…
Electronygen
*300 copies limited edition*
recorded and mixed by seiji morimoto, berlin 2022mastered by kris limbach (emitter19 studio)cover work: takuya kurihara
Constants
*2024 stock* UK-based artist Chris Herbert is a man of intermittent communications. Over the past decade he has published a select oeuvre of crushingly lush and elegant records. Fittingly then, Constants, his new edition for Room40 is a transmission from an overtly private realm. Working in a relative vacuum, beyond the reach of contemporary electronic music trends, Herbert has focussed his interest in intuitive composition. Drawing on a mixed musical palette and interweaving sounds sourced from…
Dry Routine
*200 copies limited edition with hand-stamped coffee stained sleeves and insert* 5 decided and minimal arrangements of raw organic waste, tired motors, and idling electronic signals. Sound sources that are unmistakably worldly, spun into Ochu’s signature malaise, making them impossible to place. A continuation of the trajectory established on his preceding albums Unproduktiw and Lähmung des Wartens, this time while a slightly noisier edge.
Figures of Speech
Oval Angle is the moniker of Geran Knol, a Dutch multidisciplinary visual artist and musician based in Antwerp, Belgium. His instrumental electronic music blends mellow and playful tones, characterized by plucky, offbeat sound design and wavering, askew melodies. Geran’s composition process is akin to a sketch on paper, slowly evolving and mutating as elements are added, subtracted, and altered. His debut LP for Moon Glyph, “Figures of Speech”, utilizes circular, melodic repetition found in mini…
Tropismi
Tip! Gabriele Gasparotti’s second full length album, Tropismi, is a collection of mesmerizing compositions with masterful polyrhythmical textures and harmonies, strings, prepared piano, magnetic tape and field recordings. Gasparotti's unique style uses classical composition techniques such as counterpoint, canone inverso and serialism to create morphing expanding harmonies continuously. Tropismi features stunning cellotronics by Benedetta Dazzi, cellist and sound designer with which Gasparotti e…
The Play-Back
Lovingly packaged Lebanese CD of skillful turntablism from Dj Sniff on Annihaya.
Micromegas
Seeing Matthew Erickson perform live is an impressive experience. The sound he gets by blasting his saxophone through his Fender Twin literally shakes you to the core. Erickson has a great ear for experimental music; exercising tasteful timing and restraint, which I am finding to be more and more important. Whether performing in the sax-guitar duo Sudden Oak, or solo as Radiant Husk, his sonic presence has earned the respect of many.
Hearing Smoke
Polido has been fantasizing with the idea of free music throughout his artistic career. Free from restraints, logos, musical genres, but also from this modern obsession with narratives, plans, business plans, algorithms and bubble wrapped ideas for comfort of those of you that can’t breathe without everything making sense. “Hearing Smoke” has nothing of that. It has been four years since Holuzam released the double album “A Casa e os Cães / Sabor a Terra” and for four years I have been daydreami…
Zgamoniums
File under early Russian industrial rock/art; Harry Partch, incorporating primitive analogue electronics. A legend in art and industrial music circles, ZGA was formed under the old regime in Riga, Lavia, in 1984, by Nick Sudnik and Valery Dudkhin. Unable to rehearse acoustically because of the neighbours, they invented their own instruments from scrap and springs and shaped metal fitted with contact microphones; these were not just noise instruments, but ways of accessing complex pitches, strang…
Argonautika
A sound drama for tuba and electronics that constructs its own rich, twilit, rather alien, world. Only the sound of the tuba (sometimes), a few waves and a little thunder sound familiar, everything else is a mysterious presence; the electronics are not at all conventional and though much of the sound is clearly derived somehow from the tuba, it offers no foothold in a familiar place. If landscape were ever an appropriate metaphor for the product of a congeries of sounds, it would be applicable h…
Honeyed Crest
Beautiful tape from Mike Shiflet on NNA Tapes. Modular synthesizer abuse, 2019-2021. No tapes were harmed in the making of these recordings.
Unsounds And Domo Live
Derek Gedalecia’s latest creation brings us mutated electronic music from the extreme far out. A seemingly endless stream of synthetic gurgles, gulping, and goop in chaotic bursts of unpredictability. Includes a live audience/soundboard recording that delivers in the masterful live HB style.
Harmonizer
Harmonizer is the new duo of Burlington, Vermont residents Greg Davis (Kranky, Carpark, Autumn Records) and Toby Aronson (NNA Tapes, RATS COPS). Future world sample-driven electronic synthesis, heavy rhythms, and total harmonizer worship.
Split
2024 stock Split tape from Magnetic North Duo and Grey Park, one of the first Ikuisuus releases.
STUK
Simon Scott is a sound ecologist and multi-instrumentalist from Cambridge, England. His work explores the creative process of actively listening, the implications of recording the natural world using technology and the manipulation of natural sounds used for musical composition. He plays the drums in Slowdive and has recently collaborated with artists James Blackshaw, Spire (with Fennesz and Philip Jeck), Taylor Deupree (Between), Isan and many more. “STUK is dedicated to the victims of 13.11.15…