Adam Bohman / amplified objects and stringsSue Lynch / tenor sax, clarinet, fluteCrystabel Efemena Riley / drums, metallics --- Recorded and mixed by Billy Steiger on 31st January, 2025. Mastered by Taku Unami. Artwork by Adam Bohman. Liner notes by Seymour Wright. Photographs by Crystabel Efemena Riley. Layout by Jeroen Wille.  ‘Me, you and Sue’ - the triangulation of improvisers Adam Bohman, Sue Lynch and Crystabel Riley, and the original name for the hand-picked three way of drums, wind and amplified objects responsible for Lynboril Lisinopril. The informality of their original name belies the groups origins - three players naturally drawn to each other via London’s longstanding Horse Improvised Music Club, each of them more concerned with the action of playing than the naming of their sounds.  However, the occasion of their first trio release forced a title, and Lynboril Lisinopril works perfectly - a play on the words Lyn(ch), Bo(hman) and Ril(ey), searched for and spat back at you. “The second word is what you get if you Google the made-up first word” remarks Seymour Wright in the liner notes - the second word being the name of a drug taken for lowering your blood pressure. And although probably not prescribable for hypertension, the music on Lynboril is approached with such a generosity and tenderness that it feels properly airy and light; as equally positive and playful as it is eccentric and uninhibited. Riley’s bouncy drums keep the trio in a state of permanent uplift, as if being buffeted along by a pleasant tailwind, each player perfectly unhurried in their turning over of a new sound. Alternating between tenor saxophone and clarinet, Sue Lynch is crystalline calm, blowing beautiful lines across the metallics of Riley and Bohman. When the trio dials up for their second half, the intensity lifts but the clarity remains - swirling skin patterns subverted with precision by each scratch and scrawl of the table and the punctuation of the saxophone. Grounding tonic from some of the best free musicians we know.

Sotto le Nuvole arrives as a limited edition one sided LP with artwork by Gianfranco Rosi. Designed by Maja Larrson. Produced, recorded and mixed by Daniel Blumberg. Recorded at Daniel’s flat, London and underwater in Baia, Italy. Additional recording by Alberto Landolfi. Mixed at Timeline Studio, Rome. Additional mixing by Stefano Grosso. Mixing Assistant: Giancarlo Rutigliano. Mastered and cut by Loop-O.In Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of Naples, Sotto le Nuvole (Pompei: Below The Clouds), the ground shakes periodically. Between Mount Vesuvius and theTyrrhenian Sea, the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields hiss volcanic gas and steam. Below the sleeping volcano, modern day Naples emerges in black and white and fills with voices, with lives. From the traces of history and the concerns of the present, Rosi documents a city immersed in its continuous past, with Daniel Blumberg’s minimal soundscape hovering in a sonic space between liquid and air. Tasked with creating a soundscape that would suspend space within Rosi’s film, Blumberg called upon the extended technique of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to create a gossamer fabric of traces and sounds abstracted from their instruments. Having transitioned from theoretical physics to the saxophone, John Butcher has always deeply considered space in the context of his playing. His concerns are with flow, density and how the saxophone is situated in the living world. Zeroing in on the core sonic properties of the mechanical and acoustic components of the saxophone, Seymour Wright has integrated its every breath, reed vibration, keypad clatter and hissed microtone of his alto into his own, unique improvisational language. In his work with these two seminal players, Blumberg makes his most concentrated soundtrack to date - reinforcing the film's sense of overlapping time and space, and pushing at the limits of experimentation. Initially recorded in Daniel’s flat in London, Butcher and Wright centre themselves around long, consistent tones, so soft that it seems breath is being gently pulled from the saxophone's bell by an invisible hand. Blumberg himself adds haunting bass harmonica, and recordings of Wright’s launeddas - a traditional and ancient triple pipe polyphonic reed instrument from Sardinia, Italy. Blumberg then travelled to the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii. Once a flourishing classical Roman city loved by Nero, Baia slowly sank under hydrothermal pressure, leaving the city in a kind of geological purgatory. Using specialised geophones and hydrophones, Blumberg took those initial recordings and amplified them underwater, sending them calling out across the ruins of Baia’s mosaics, Nymphaeum statues and villas.  “It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”   What emerges is deeply melancholic, tender, subtle and right at the edges of audio technology. Submerged in an aquarian mausoleum, the mysterious vibrations of the saxophone and its bell become an echo of an echo, wading from the future into the past.  --- Seymour Wright / alto saxophone, launeddasJohn Butcher / soprano & tenor saxophoneDaniel Blumberg / bass harmonica

“In a concert, I show something with a beginning, a middle and an end. But, there is no end. Of course, there is no end. Because I am the music, and I am still here.” - Sophie Agnel  ‘Learning’ - Sophie Agnel’s first solo LP, feels like the dark, physical inversion of her excellent ‘Song’ which came out on Relative Pitch earlier this year. Sinking her unique sound into vinyl for the first time, the LP arrives as Agnel recovers from a brain tumour - a shocking discovery that will require Agnel to start again with the piano. It’s a terrifying prospect, but Agnel has been here before, having reorientated herself almost entirely away from her early classical training over the last 4 decades of her work.  ‘When I was young I had very good ears, oriole absolute. Then later I began to make strange sounds with my piano, to do different kinds of music. I was more interested in the sounds than the melody, for example. I remember once I sat down in a shop to try to read the scores of Schubert and there was a light [emitting] a very strong bzzzzzzz. And I couldn't listen to my oriole internal - I couldn't read the score. I was entirely subjugated by the sound of the light. And I understood that something had changed. Ten years before I could read and not hear the light. Now I understood that my ears were completely different. I was more open to the sounds of life.”  Born in Paris in the 60’s and playing her parents piano as soon as she could stand up, Agnel quickly grew tired of the classical world. What frustrated her was the strange disconnect between the frame of the piano and its keyboard - a weird boundary that seemed to form some hushed code of etiquette. “The first thing I put inside the piano was a plastic goblet. I’d seen a few pianists do it: Fred Van Hove, for example, put rubber balls inside his. But what didn’t appeal to me was that there seemed to be no link between the pianos outside and inside.”If you see Agnel play now, the body of her piano is littered with fish tins, ping pong balls, wooden blocks - not that you’d recognize their sounds. Having absorbed the language of the European avant-garde, Agnel is known for pulling the piano’s interior outside of itself by tipping her handbag into it. But these ‘strange sounds’ don’t just come from Cage - they also share the poetic force of Cecil Taylor and ‘Learning’ demonstrates that Agnel’s work on the piano's keyboard is just as important as what she’s littered on its strings. The record lets loose her ability to unleash a formidable sound mass and then rope it back to one single, clarifying note. With one hand, Agnel plays 88 tuned drums and on the other an enormous guitar - with the LP rotating through oncoming trains, and blues harmonica and feedback. It’s single minded stuff, borne out of a dedication to a wholly personal language of gesture, accumulation and deft reduction. “Maybe when I’m 80 I will not need anything,” Agnel says in a recent film made at her home. “I will do the same but with one note, and one finger. Maybe it's enough.” — ‘Learning’ arrives in a reverse board sleeve designed by Jereon Wille. Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Billy Steiger on 6th June 2023 and 4th June 2024. Mixed by James Dunn and Benjamin Pagier. Side B edited by Benjamin Pagier. Mastered and cut by Loop-O. Front photograph by Aimé Agnel. Typography and layout by Jeroen Wille.

This residency was produced in partnership with Professor Paul Hegarty as part of the funded project on Innovative music in Japan, with thanks to University of Nottingham and the AHRC impact ‘accelerator’ fund for support. Huge thanks to Paul Hegarty and Sam Thorne. “Chwalfa” (Welsh for “dispersal, rout, upheaval, upset, or a confused or chaotic state”) documents the first return of Incapacitants to the UK since 2016. With the windows boarded up and the subs doubled, two ordinary looking blokes Toshiji Mikawa's and Fumio Kosaka obliterate OTO’s usual whisper hush with clipped out, scorched earth tape loops and pedal chains - creating such an excoriating din it transports the room to the planet’s furnace core and back again. It’s all music, all at once -  a whorling vortex delivered at time bending velocity.  For Vymethoxy Redspiders, who writes the release’s extensive liners, “[the music] is a transcendental outpouring of raw consciousness and firmamental emotion, more in line with the “fire music” of free jazz players like Albert Ayler and Dave Burrell or Sun Ra in his most apocalyptic moments of Moog sorcery than most of the things I long came to associate with the practice of Noise. Incapacitants’ unholy racket morphs from vista of tormented glitch shimmer to crater of obliterated tape loop to deafening light pouring down on disaster fathoms. I'm struck by how Modal or Raga-like it sounds at points, where a deep tremor drone burrs like a wide open plain; for a “pure” noise that is often considered “not musical” it sure hits me where music hits most affectingly and more so than most sounds daring to call themselves music!”  “Chwalfa” contains two tracks, one from each night of the residency. It arrives as a glass mastered CD in a digipak. Edition of 500 with liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 6th and 7th of September, 2024 by Billy Steiger. Mixed by Oli Barrett. Deemed best left unmastered. Cover photo by Paul Watson. Layout by Abby Thomas.

"The seemingly irreverent approach to the instruments, the repetitive repeats of certain motifs; ‘institutional music’ could be something that comes to mind for the listener. The inmate, free of all musical convention, behaving childishly, almost manically. The result is a polyphonic counterpoint that comes close to falling apart and leaves the impression of being something new." - SAJ, 10-10-24 "The first major document of Johansson’s music since his passing, two days at cafe oto is a reminder of his galvanizing presence, his conceptual range, and his skill set as an instrumentalist. It deserves more than a passing mention in the commentariat’s attempts to cement his legacy." –Bill Shoemaker, PoDDrummer, visual artist and one of the original European free jazz players, Sven-Åke Johansson was never willing to settle for a single route of exploration. As a musician and composer he appeared on key recordings for the legendary FMP, delivered marine weather reports for Edition Telemark, crooned love songs for Ultra Eczema and was at the heart of the recent free music revival in Berlin via Umlaut alongside Joel Grip and Axel Dörner. “My work is not actually jazz, but rather the exploration of sounds,” he said. “In that sense, my music defies some categorizations. Jazz is only a small part of what I do”. When asked to play at OTO last year, Johansson proposed two nights with four musicians half his age - alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, his fellow [Ahmed] member and double bassist Joel Grip, and French alto saxophonist Pierre Borel. Grip and Borel both played alongside Johansson in Stumps; Wright had previously recorded a trio with  Johansson and Grip almost a year earlier in Johansson’s Berlin studio - due to be released later in the year via We Jazz as The Jazzy Stork. A quartet of two saxophones, bass and drums sounds like jazz, but all four players perpetually reach outside of the genre for inspiration. Opening disc one, Grip’s and Wright’s staccato melodies are drawn delicately together with the lightest of threads, little playful buzzrolls and tom taps: if this is jazz it's the gentlest sort we’ve heard in some time. Grip and Wright stretch a handful of notes over a trickle of toms, the room thick with listening.  For his next act, Johansson changes tack, bringing out his accordion. Like his frequent collaborator Rüdiger Carl, Johansson's work on the accordion is full of expression and humor - his sometimes short, pointillistic improvisations suddenly cohering into brief melodies that flicker with nostalgia. Grip picks up a swing, and the quartet head out on a warm adventure before the saxophones and accordion satisfyingly drift out of the room together.  It feels important to mention Sven-Åke Johansson dressed sharply.  He was a man of intention with a touch of melodrama and it kept his music from drying out. Amidst the great volume of German Free Music in the 1970s, Johannson's first solo LP ‘Schlingerland’ (1972) swishes cymbal and snare, tom and hi-hat, sometimes almost imperceptibly. Skin, metal, plastic and wood, always in a tank of developer; quite melodic, beautifully concentrated. Fifty years on, Borel, Grip and Wright continue this gradual investigation of music and there are no better collaborators for Johannson. All three can shred jazz into its microparts, can swing, can groove and shriek. Over Two Days at Cafe OTO, buoyed by Johannason’s light touch, a sort of minimalist bebop emerges - the last track dividing and multiplying melodic fragments until its motifs print the inside of your skull. It’s totally luxury music - full freedom, full commitment. If it doesn't hit the first time, you’re sure to come back for it. We’re blessed it was recorded and grateful to have shared in this music. Thank you, Sven-Åke Johansson. — Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Rory Salter on 8th & 9th April, 2025. Mixed and mastered by Werner Dafeldecker. Photos by Dawid Laskowski.

Digital will become available 31st OctoberSLIP is Paul Abbott’s response to his 3 day residency at OTO in 2023. It’s a continued exploration of the acoustic-digital hybrid drum setup Abbott has been developing for some time, which involves drum kit and synthetic sounds combined closely—through an entanglement of limbs and cables—in an intimate but strange relationship with each other. Paul Abbott hasn’t had any formal musical training, but has a long history of making music, having collaborated for years with Seymour Wright, Pat Thomas, Michael Speers, Cara Tolmie, Anne Gillis and many others. Eventually, led by a profound suspicion of what is fixed or limited, Abbott began finding other ways to organise sound - or what he calls ‘material’: “I wanted a way to 'persuade' or guide the possibility of something happening - my activity or the events of an algorithmic composition - for example, but without certainty or formalism. It felt to me, during playing, that certain ideas had a particular sort of shape, but more than the form of a line. I began to write alongside (before/after) playing the drums, and ‘characters’ began to enter the scene as a more wobbly, and therefore appropriate option [to notation]. Working with these characters allowed me to simultaneously approach body, imagination, language and music: without dividing things up or separating these aspects from each other. It allowed me to leave things messy and entangled, whilst trying to deal with form and specificity: wanting to have some things feel or respond differently to other things at other times.”  In approaching his residency, Abbott developed a fixed cast of characters - crystal, lleaf, reiy.F, reiy.C, strike, nee, qosel, sphu and aahn. They each communicate using different kinds of movement and drum kit/s, and Abbott choreographed them as ‘dances’ based on different feelings, or outlines of behaviours suggestive of ways of moving (body, drums, sounds). He then arranged these characters into ‘compositions’: one for each performance day, with each composition featuring multi-layered activity - options for behaviours, ways to move around the rooms, play drums, develop synthetic sounds, change the lights or re-distribute the sound in the space. After the performances, Abbott took home 9 hours of recordings split into up to 28 multitrack channels for each day, and re-organised his cast once more into a performance for 2LP, CD and digital. It’s an enormous amount of work - but Abbott is activated by the process. For him, the pleasure of unstable edges, possibilities, slippages, is the vital attraction. Like all living organisms, Abbott’s characters have malleability and responsivity.  They stimulate a bundle of possible behaviours, a tendency to act a certain way, a temperament, a boundary of respective limits or affordances. It’s an affective way of working, inclusive of Roscoe Mitchell, Sun Ra, Nathaniel Mackey and Milford Graves. In ‘Pulseology’(2022), Milford Graves reminds us, ‘Breath varies, so cardiac rhythm never has that (metronomic) tempo. It’s always changing. All the alignments of the heart are determined based on the needs of the cells, specifically tissues and organs. The heart knows if it needs to speed up.’ In SLIP, to slip, in a heartbeat, is to descend not into the grid of the even metre accorded to the heartbeat, but into a play of mutability and modality. To change is the condition of the heart.

TRIM is an improvising quartet brought together by Dominic Lash (guitar) with Phil Durrant (modular synth), Steve Noble (percussion) and Rachel Musson (saxophones). After Musson was unable to make this show, Colin Webster was recruited on saxophone duties, resulting in two absolutely barnstorming sets under the freshly coined banner of TROM. You know how it is. Times are hard, things get stressful. Sometimes you’ve just got to blow off steam by blasting the doors off an unassuming Hackney music venue and sending the audience barreling down the street. Such was the case at OTO on 5th April this year, when Lash, Durrant, Noble and Webster summoned up the kind of utterly cathartic sonic scree that made a wonderful irrelevance of this having been their first ever performance as a quartet. Make no mistake, this is no one-note performance - the group cover a hugely varied amount of terrain over the two sets' combined near-80 minute run-time - but the sheer sense of exuberance on display here is hard to ignore. A rapidly rotating interplay sees all four musicians trading shapes that mutate and evolve with an almost breathless momentum. There's an exhilarating sense of new forms being created in realtime, forms that seem to blur and shift depending on your vantage point. Whatever angle you come at it, however, this one doesn't let up for a second. On this basis we look forward to welcoming back both TRIM and TROM here, with hopes for TRAM, TREM and TRUM too at some point in the future. -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

Release #200 of our live digital series! After over a decade and so many incredible sets, we knew that the 200th release had to be something special, and it really doesn't get much more special than this. Where to start? Joe and John have provided so many incredible moments at OTO from the beginning that it's an impossible task to summarise them all. Some of these performances have been released on the label before - whether with Decoy or Joe and John's quartet alongside Lol Coxhill and Chris Corsano - but remarkably this is the first time that we've ever hosted a duo performance from them. Boy oh boy was it worth the wait. This first duo performance from these two took place in the Austrian mountains at the festival Artacts in Tirol, in the afternoon with snowy mountains glimmering through the windows. One of those magical moments in music, where the audience sat there completely moved - with tears in the eyes, tears of happiness. You might be thinking that a response like that might be hard to top. Well, dig in... -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

On Pleading Light, Berlin-based Egyptian musician Assyouti reworks the score to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s seminal 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Matching the heightened expressivity of Dreyer's masterpiece is no easy feat, but Assyouti's skilful adaptation manages it, becoming less an alternative soundtrack than a heartfelt evocation of the film's astonishingly memorably imagery. Voices and orchestral fragments are slowed, looped and eroded to the point of rupture, shifting from accompaniment to textural matter that flares and falls to ash as distortion and decay quietly overtake the image. Throughout, a richly expansive chorus teeters on the precipice between the spiritual and the sepulchral, the human and the synthetic. It's hard not to get swept away with it all; this is music to get lost in. The set's near 40-minute runtime stretches from featherlight, angelic tones to a coruscating density. At times we sense things straining at the limits of the speakers themselves - not so much a matter of volume as an abundance of scope. This is sound-craft on a very broad sonic canvas. -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

Wonderfully visceral, deeply trippy set from Berlin-based polymath, Eleni Poulou, recorded at OTO as part of a bill with longtime friend Dave Huismans and Scottish artist, Fergus Jones in May 2026. Sometimes live performance can bring a new meaning to the present, sometimes it can elevate that present to a whole new level. And sometimes, perhaps more rarely, a performance can bring you through into a new reality entirely. Such is the case here. "It will be" proclaims Poulou at the start of this 37-minute long set, and straight away we're slipping through the cracks to some other place.. Tape loops warble and a ravelling tangle of synth notes growl and thrum, whilst in the background some seemingly mechanical apparatus ticks and flickers to an unknown purpose. Through the murk and hiss, Poulou's voice exhorts the audience as if with some vital knowledge to share, yet the meanings seem warped and distorted in the telling, with fragmented phrases repeating and circling back on themselves. There's a clear sense of urgency, an almost subconscious understanding that something profound is being shared, but the logic is that of a dream. Whatever the parameters of this dreamscape - and it is a dream that Poulou always deftly manages to keep tethered both to the room and the audience within - it's clear that the rules of this reality are subtly askew. The effect is deeply hypnotic and strangely transcendent. To get the most from a dream we must meet it on its own terms, surrendering ourselves to what it has to offer. It is no easy task, yet if we can do this the hidden messages contained within can seem not only revelatory but inevitable. It can be. It shall be. It will be. -- Thanks from Eleni to Dave Huismans, Fergus Jones and Felt Records for the invite, plus Tara Clerkin, Beth Arzy, Egidija Circaite, Mo, Thea, Dave and Oli. -- Recorded by Kevin ShoemakerMixed and masterd by Oli BarrettCover photo by Eleni Poulou

A deeply atmospheric set from multifaceted Irish artist, Vivienne Griffin, accompanied by cellist Oona Lowther and recorded as part of a bill co-curated with Nyahh Records at OTO in April 2026. From the coiling smoke of the mirrored incense burners on the cover (an image adapted from a sculpture created by Griffin themselves) the tone is immediately set for something ritualistic, and the scrape-struck clusters of clarsach harp notes that begin the recording seem to lean into this feeling of a rite being initiated. The lines between ancient ritual and modern realities are instantly blurred however, by the fact that these notes are in fact coming from a purpose-built, self-playing harp, with a 3D-printed metal motorised armature drawing sounds from the instrument. This shifting between ancient and modern - myth and technology - is something something that Griffin builds on to thrilling effect. Shortly after the initial harp notes are established, a heavily distorted kick drum booms into life - seeming to not so much hit the listener's chest as somehow erupt from inside it - and it is clear that we're immersed in a very special sound world indeed. Soon the harp settles into an insistent pulse and Oona Lowther's languorous cello notes rise up to meet it, providing the water for Griffin's seeking, questing vocals to sail across. All the while that jagged kick drum thrums and thuds, never letting anything quite settle, pushing everything ever onwards. This sense of restless momentum never flags across the set's 26 minutes, with Griffin constantly changing and mutating each new sound as if constantly seeking something that always remains tantalisingly just ahead. Cello notes snag and distort, biting tones dart and flicker, until the whole assemblage seems to spiral in on itself. We are left back with the single, unadorned notes of that mechanised harp, but we are not where we started out. As Griffin sings in the stark, haunting middle section, "nothing was ever meant to be this way". We live in an imperfect world, yet by immersing ourselves within it as openly and honestly as is apparent here, we may still emerge with something precious. -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

Bumper pack of mind-frying, fuzzed out psychedelics from three masters of the medium, with Neil Campbell (Vibracathedral Orchestra), Noel Meek (End of the Alphabet) and Alexander Tucker (Grumbling Fur) performing solo and in a very special trio set.  --- Tracklisting: 1. Alexander Tucker Solo - 18:58 2. Neil Campbell Solo - 14.41 3. Noel Meek Solo - 21:56 4. Trio - 29.34 --- Recorded on Sunday 24th April 2016 by Shaun Crook. Mixed by James Dunn, Abby Thomas & Noel Meek. Mastered by James Dunn.

Lament in Three Parts was improvised and recorded on April 30th in the quiet bunker-esque venue, Ausland, just 20 doors down from where I live in Berlin. Additional processes and editing were completed on May 1st 2020. Special thanks to Cafe Oto, Ausland, Billy Steiger and Petter Eldh for their part in the making of this release, and especially to Sophie Fetokaki for her generous writing in response to the music. Her foreword and Billy Steiger's artwork accompany this release. I would also like to acknowledge Catherine Lamb, Rebecca Lane and Johnny Chang whose music, playing and friendship has made a significant mark on my own meanderings in to new musical territories in recent years. Extract from the foreword, 'Thoughts for Lucy: a foreword to Lament in Three Parts' - by Sophie Fetokaki: "...What is it about the telling that provides comfort or consolation? Perhaps it's partly in the curative power of naming, an act that can bring our experience into relief and ward off the depressive forces of nothingness, formlessness, and monstrous plasticity. There are also other forms of telling that are not lexical, and our too-easy separation of sound and speech, music and words, belies the existence of something deeply healing and transformational that grounds and unifies them both." - read the full text here (pdf). www.lucyrailton.comwww.sophiefetokaki.comwww.billysteiger.com

Iztok Koren's introduction to ’Lonely Hymns and Pillars of Emptiness’: Since 2000 i've been active in several bands and projects (Širom, Škm banda, Hexenbrutal etc.), but this is the first time i’ve released any solo material. During spring lockdown 2020 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, I created six compositions for banjo, prepared 3-string banjo, acoustic guitar and field recordings. I carved material at home in my bathroom. That was the only place where I didn't bother my partner and two years old daughter during their sleep. Luckily the acoustics were great. The idea for a solo project matured over several years, but the final push to bring it into fruition was courtesy of my friend Raphael Roginski. His encouragement to take this step gave me faith and boosted my motivation.  The initial inspiration for the music came from contemplating the possibilities of overcoming my feelings of selfishness, stubbornness, anger, guilt, regret and envy, and reading ancient Chinese text Yi Jing. A big inspiration also came from the melancholic mysticism of flatland Prekmurje (northeast part of Slovenia, close to Hungary) where I was born and spent my childhood: a place which has always aroused feelings of nostalgia, homesickness and splitness for me. Lockdown in spring was crucial for finalizing my album. That period was very strange. I had a feeling that my life was shrinking into a small bubble. Different aspects of daily living started to coexist and influence one another. Feelings and moods shifted very fast: Job, family life, intimate partner life, free time, time to relax, time for music etc. All these different parts of daily life could take place in a period of just a half an hour. That was very new for me. With the creation process of this album I tried to grasp and hold onto feelings of being present, to be "here and now", to accept my new reality, but also to be away from the everyday pressure of bad news, worries about the future, and heaviness of emerging existential questions. I thought a lot about the insignificance of human existence and tried to inhabit a more non anthropocentric and holistic view on nature. Everything is part of nature - which will always find its balance - but this balance may not be good for humans. And perhaps it’s ok like this. When I learned this, I felt humility and humbleness emerge within me. When living space and movement is shrunken, one can start to see new life emerged in what before might have seemed rather boring or insignificant. For example, how daylight changes and paints different color shades on the wall at different time of the day. Or how certain weather influences on how plants in the garden and soil smell. Or how sounds of neighbours children playing resonates in some places differently depending also on the wind blowing and air pressure. Or seeing beauty in geometrical patterns in constellations of electric wires. Or echoing sound of lonely train in empty city, or smell of hair after long walk, or dissonant music of creaking stairs, or the special sound of a daughter's voice when she's just woken up. All those new sensations built for me new mental images, which filled my mind during the creation process, and also became material for the songs. As part of the album I included field recordings which were all taken during the spring and summer of 2020, except the excerpt of an interview with my uncle included in The Plain Does Not Give Way. My uncle lives in a small village in Prekmurje region, living a very ascetic life full of sacrifice, renunciation and deep faith. I talked with him about local folklore, myths and stories about witches and ghosts. During the conversation there was one very interesting part where he was talking about 10 signs which will announce forthcoming apocalypse. One of those signs started to appear recently in his dreams. That interview took place in beggining of 2019. Then spring lockdown in Slovenia was over and I was able to go into the studio. With Chris Eckman as a producer I recorded in one day (15th august 2020) six partly improvised compositions. That recording process was very intense for me. I felt a big emptiness after the session and I didn't touch my instruments for a month. Luckily my energy now came back and I'm looking forward to seeing how this material will shape itselves during live performances. November, 2020The debut release by Slovenian musical polymath Iztok Koren, best known for his work in avantefolk outfits Širom, Škm banda and Hexenbrutal. Made in the heat of 2020’s lockdown, Iztok transmutes the intensity of the period into 6 pieces that sensitively unfurl over time. With various stringed instruments and field recordings in hand, he weaves his interests in Slovenian mysticism, ancient Chinese divination texts, his family and his new found love of nature, revealing an intimate snapshot of life up-close. All compositions by Iztok Koren: banjo, prepared 3-string banjo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, field recordings Recorded and mixed by Chris Eckman, 15th august 2020Mastered by Dejan Lapanja Cover art by Tina KonecDesign Oli BarrettNovember, 2020 iztokkoren.si

Experimental electronic artist Kirk Barley unveils a split release between his two different monikers. Utilising a similar set of tools and reduced sound palette for each, he bridges the gap between the two approaches, while also allowing room for each to flourish in their own distinct forms. Under his own name, Kirk embraces floating four world motifs. Juiced-up keys spurt and twinkle in an algorithmic maze, sprouting swirling motifs and melodies before dissolving in a synthetic water bath. On the 'Church Andrews' flip he lets these tools slip out of free motion and lock themselves into distinct percussive patterns. Similar to the approach of the likes of SND, Kirk teases the temporality in house and footwork styles to scribe his own skittering dancefloor style. Over both sides Kirk's improvised approach to sound energises each note, bass and snare clap and wandering phrase. Listening to his music is like watching plant life blossom, winding itself in and around towering city concrete in real time. -- Written & recorded by Kirk Barley / Church Andrews -- Cover by Oli Barrett

Tracklisting:   1 - False Self plays music for six pianos I [13:27]2 - False Self plays music for six pianos II [13:35] 3 - False Self plays music for six pianos III [13:50] 4 - False Self plays music for six pianos IV [14:43]False Self* works are electronic music compositions that explore identity, authorship and the delineation between self and other. The series so far, comprises of three albums: False Self plays music for six pianos (2021) A false memory of a sports party (2018) False Self (2016) The first two albums were created in collaboration, and sometimes antagonization, with a self authored SuperCollider algorithm — that I named False Self. I envision this algorithm as a fractured version of myself. False Self plays music for six pianos was composed whilst undertaking lessons with Jim Denizen Simm. Jim kindly indoctrinated me into his own working methods and some of the methods of his friends, many of whom are ex-Scratch Orchestra members; such as Michael Parsons, John White, Christopher Hobbs and Howard Skempton. These lessons led me to abandon SuperCollider in favour of working with more flexible, and to my mind, more interesting systems designed on paper. The compositions are experimental, system based works for six pianos. They deploy integer tables to arrange cells of slow, jazzy piano music. Each piano has eight cells of music and one silent cell. The cells mobilize as hypnotic cyclones of repetition, that move in and out of sync, to create complexity from simplicity. As the compositions progress, the cells extinguish themselves in a languid, stuttering fashion — before the process begins anew. Rudi Arapahoe 2021 Composed, recorded and mixed by Rudi ArapahoePerformed by False SelfProduced by Jim Denizen Simm Artwork by Oli Barrett *The term False Self is lifted from the psychiatrist Ronald David Laing's writing. I use the term to imply that there is another self working on the compositions with me.

Following on from his preposterous 'MUJZIK MONSTRØSA SPEEDRUN', which was released in 2020 on Takuroku, Goodiepal returns with an all new radio-based experimental sound work. On 'The Pole Imposter & The Databar' he embraces his ongoing audio-based crypto-academic documentation of the strange sides of European computer music. As ever with Goodiepal's work, it's best for words to pare back and let the piece speak for itself. --- Cover design by Oli Barrett

Tracklisting:   1 - chit perc [06:57] 2 - due cani [06:27] 3 - carrubbe foglie voci [06:14] 4 - intervallo Ka [04:55] 5 - carrubbe chit Ka [07:58] 6 - quattro pioggia [13:08]Italian duo Rosso Polare treat us to their 2nd album, following the wonderful 'Lettere Animali' album, which was one of our highlights of 2020.   Cani Lenti is a collection of duels, some may say. As the two minds of Cesare Lopopolo and Annna Vezzosi converge, a dichotomy of harmonious and contrasting sounds ebb, swirl and clatter in and amongst themselves. Using techniques from call and response improvisation, tape manipulation, experimental music and free-form folk, their approach to music making feels both atypical and familiar, organised and free-flowing, rooted and landless. Like the films of fellow Italian film-maker Alice Rohrwacher, Rosso Polare's music feels grounded in the earth, but sprouts and spreads in strange and often anachronistic ways.   The duo describe this album as it’s a struggle – a skirmish – that strives to resemble filmic sonorisations and forgotten sounds. Together they lead us on a journey into the depths of Chthonian Music. Fans of the likes of Sun Araw, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and General Strike - dive in!   --   Written and performed by Cesare Lopopolo & Anna Vezzosi --   Recorded between Milan and Brescia in 2020-2021 Mixed and produced by Cesare Lopopolo Mastered by Alexander Pustynsky Album art by Anna Vezzosi