To Pimp a Butterfly is the third studio album by American hip hop recording artist Kendrick Lamar. The album was released on March 16, 2015, by Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath Entertainment, and distributed by Interscope Records.
The album, which features the songs 'The Blacker The Berry' and 'i', was originally due for release on March 23 but is available to stream and download now.
'To Pimp A Butterfly' is the follow-up to 2012's 'Good Kid, MAAD City'. Lamar's two most recent releases, 'i' and 'The Blacker The Berry', both feature on the album's 16-song tracklisting. The latter was produced by Boi-1da, and references the 2012 killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin. 'i' won Grammy Awards for Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance in February.
Speaking in a recent interview about the album, Lamar said the music ranges from "the intensely personal to the swaggeringly aggressive".

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Juana Molina is back with another masterpiece album, overflowing with emotions, musical ideas and mysterious atmospheres. With 'Halo', the Argentinian singer picks up where she left off with her previous acclaimed album 'Wed', and shows once more that she really is 'on an evolutionary journey of her own devising' (Pitchfork).
'Halo' is Juana's seventh album recorded in her home studio outside of Buenos Aires, and at Sonic Ranch Studio in Texas, with contributions by Odin Schwartz & Diego Lopez de Arcaute (who have both been playing live with Juana for a number of years), and Eduardo Bergallo (who has taken part in the mixing of her previous albums), with Deerhoof's John Dieterich making a guest appearance in a couple of tracks.

Last month, Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington shared "Golden Arrow," which was initially just described as the first 11 minutes of thei r album. Now, the details for that album have been unveiled.
The new record is called Psychic, and offers up eight compositions from the duo. A press release calls the album "a ritualistic song cycle," adding that it explores "rocks cosmic outer edges through the immersive, body-moving framework of 21st-century house and techno."
Psychic will be available on October 8 via Jaars own Other People label under license to Matador Records.

Since emerging onto the scene in 2014, Moses Sumney has ridden a wave of word-of-mouth praise, hushed recordings, and dynamic live performances. It's an organic, patient ascent all too rare in today's musical climate. In a voice both mellifluous and haunting, Sumney makes future music that transmogrifies classic tropes, like moon-colony choir reinterpretations of old jazz gems. His vocals narrate a personal journey through universal loneliness atop otherworldly compositional backdrops.
Following the self-release of his debut cassette EP, Mid-City Island, and 2015's 7", Seeds/Pleas, Sumney has performed around the world alongside forebears like David Byrne, Karen O, Sufjan Stevens, Solange, James Blake and more. With his 2016 Lamentations EP, The California and Ghana-raised troubadour widened the spectrum of his heretofore "bedroom" music, incorporating songs that feature more elaborate production and evocative songwriting. Now his inspired ascent continues.
His proper debut album, Aromanticism is a concept album about lovelessness as a sonic dreamscape. It seeks to interrogate the social constructions around romance. The debut will include the devastating, billowing synths of "Doomed,” which in a way serves as the album’s thesis statement, as well as new versions of standouts "Lonely World" and "Plastic.” It’s a deliberate, jaw-dropping statement that can leave you both enlightened and empty.

Shabazz Palaces is an American hip hop duo from Seattle composed of Ishmael Butler a.k.a. Palaceer Lazaro and multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire, son of mbira master Dumisani Maraire. Active since 2009, they have released four studio albums on Sub Pop.

The art of Kammerflimmer Kollektief is deception. It is a persuasive and seductive art, resulting in incorrect assessments and doubtful perceptions. It is an art of disorientation and misdirection. In the Kollektief’s current production Désarroi (disorientation), their 10th and wildest album, they do it again: Welcome to the Kammerflimmery!
Right from first track, the Kollektief leaves its referential indicators. Heike Aumüller's free, unsentimental Harmonium played with a Sehnsucht (like a Free Jazz counterpart to Reggae producer and Melodica master Augustus Pablo), followed by Johannes Frisch’s magic double-bass, creaking and free-wheeling. Shortly after a dash of Swedish Biker-Rock passion, that makes you forget the benedictions of modernity – for a moment at least – until we come to the end of Désarroi, where we are brought back into the blessings of concrete- solid realities.
Clear articulated comprehensibility is definitively not one of the aims of the Kollektief’s sign systems. Rather, it masters the ancient art of secret-keeping, and it does it in times in which everyone reveals all of their intimacies without asking the rest of humanity whether or not we’d like to know them. The Kollektief clips musical and cultural fragments out of their cultural frameworks and pieces them enigmatically together. They have worked on this amalgam of FX-Cultures, Psychedelica, Free Form, Dub, Improv, and ritual activities for a long time. These elements are gradually connected and placed in an opaque, vertical system, about as (non-)coherent as the constitutional laws of an alchemistic proto-science can be. The Kollektief takes only what is of use. And what is of use has usually a mythical crux. What was once a bass becomes a creak. What was once a voice becomes a phoneme. What was once a guitar becomes a gnarly notion of “something strummed”. At the same time, the special effects that guitarist Thomas Weber extracts from his strange apparati, he masks as unidentifiable. Rather, they are incorporated as the seemingly "familiar" in the singular tone continuum of the Kammerflimmery. The strange, unreal impressions lurking as soundtrack behind these psych, improv, and editing wars might be regarded by the complete outsider as seemingly strange events.
Like the shaman, who in the morning simply hangs up his magic roots for drying to prepare them for his nightly ecstatic routines, the Kollektief adds something ordinary and familiar to its rituals. Maybe that’s why they cover Zurück zum Beton (Back to Concrete), the 1978 hit by West-German punk legends S.Y.P.H. Here Zurück zum Beton is not interpreted as a grim punk anthem, but as an erotic celebration of a life in order, of Alltag and Künstlichkeit – familiarity and artificiality. A tender embrace of the art of sculpting concrete – the technique to shape public spheres. Over there “pure nature”. Over here “mankind”. In between the magic pragmatism of the Kollektief. On Désarroi, in a fashion perhaps even more pronounced than on previous works, the Kollektief is working with a delicate, tender sensibility (And particularly delicate and disorienting is the singing of Heike Aumüller, which has never been heard like this on record before). If tenderness becomes maximally tender, it is also a maximality of radical tenderness. And because of this, Désarroi is possibly the Kollektief’s most radical album to date.

Composer, performer, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's new album EARS is an immersive listening experience in which dizzying swirls of organic and synthesized sounds work together to create a sense of three-dimensional space and propulsion. Dense and carefully crafted, each of the songs on EARS unfolds with a fluid elegance, while maintaining a spontaneous energy, and a sprightly sense of discovery. Listeners familiar with her previous album Euclid (an album that prompted Dazed to call her “…one of the most pioneering musicians in the world.”) will no doubt notice her heavier use of vocals on EARS. On all but one song, her gently ecstatic swells of vocals emerge to soar over a dense jungle of synths and woodwinds.
Much of the album's warmth and energy stems from Smith's use of the versatile analog synthesizer, the Buchla Music Easel. According to Smith, “…nothing compares to the sound of a Buchla. In my mind a Buchla synthesizer has the most human sound in it. I wanted to show the Easel’s versatility and range of motion within a live set. I also wanted to spend as little time as possible in front of the computer during the creation.” After initially composing on the Buchla, she wrote arrangements for a woodwind quintet, added vocals, and further refined the pieces with granular synthesis techniques she developed in her sound design work (she contributed sound design to Panda Bear's “Boys Latin” video, and handled sound design and original compositions for Brasilia co-written by and starring Reggie Watts).
Though the pallet of sounds Smith employs on EARS is darker than the ebullient tenor we heard on Euclid, she's careful to let in just enough light to covey a feeling of cosmic bliss and transcendence. Kinetic arpeggios of synths pulse, often buoying her graceful vocal mantras, while woodwinds breathe and flutter, emulating the wildlife Smith observed while growing up on the West Coast (she even studied recordings of slowed down bird calls prior to composing these pieces). Though some of her gestures echo the musical tropes used by early minimalist composers, the world she creates on EARS is uniquely hypnotic and full of life, not unlike Miyzaki's film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which she cites as an inspiration.
EARS is a masterful articulation of Smith's vision, which she achieved in part by spending time preparing her mind prior to composing the album. As she explains, “I am very intentional about the months leading up to when I am going to compose something new. I really trust the subconscious and try and feed it only information I want it to feed back to me. I make playlists that I listen to nonstop, or have images I look at daily, or I go to places I want to be inspired by…I do all this prep work and then try and forget it when I am writing.” Listening to EARS, it's clear that her approach paid off, and that the seeds she planted within have born a vibrant and hyper-natural world that's as joyful to experience as the flora and fauna that inspired it.

Antwood (a.k.a. Canada's Tristan Douglas) returns to Planet Mu with his second album 'Sponsored Content'. The album is more reflective than his debut, last year's 'Virtuous.scr'. The relentless mood of the first album has given way to a more melodic, stripped out sound. It still shakes with speed and energy, but with more space, more moments of delicate sadness and strange cyborg pop. What comes to the fore in 'Sponsored Content' is Tristan's gift for melody, coupled with the uncanny feeling that somehow his strange music is an entire ecosystem of it’s own. It's best explained by Tristan himself:
"This record was made during a very challenging year. Some of these challenges were for the best, some were not, most were both, others were neither. The music is inextricably tied to these events, whether I like it or not, and I’ve begun peeking out from behind my self-imposed veil of heavy conceptualization; revealing things about myself that my previous album Virtuous.scr didn’t."

"In the past year, I found that ASMR, which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. I’d been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed."
"Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. It’s obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasn’t so much a “concept record” about advertisement; it’s as much about intentionally devaluing the things I’ve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass."
"I collaborated with El Popo Sangre (a.k.a. Paulin Rogues) for the visuals after he showed me his short film “Fantasy” which used several tracks from Virtuous.scr. He and his team at UNICORN added a depth to the project I could never have done on my own."

Big Fish Theory is the second studio album by American rapper Vince Staples. It was released on June 23, 2017, by Def Jam Recordings, ARTium Recordings and Blacksmith Records. The album was supported by three singles: "BagBak", "Big Fish" and "Rain Come Down".

Simply put, Tortoise has spent nearly 25 years making music that defies description. While the Chicago-based instrumental quintet has nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica and minimalism throughout its revered and influential six-album discography, the resulting sounds have always been distinctly, even stubbornly, their own.
It’s a fact that remains true on “The Catastrophist,” Tortoise’s first studio album in nearly seven years. And it’s an album where moody, synth-swept jams like the opening title track cozy up next to hypnotic, bass-and-beat missives like “Shake Hands With Danger” and a downright strange cover of David Essex’s 1973 radio smash sung by U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittmann. Throughout, the songs transcend expectations as often as they delight the eardrums.
Tortoise, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, has always thrived on sudden bursts of inspiration. And for “The Catastrophist,” the spark came in 2010 when the group was commissioned by the City of Chicago to compose a suite of music rooted in its ties to the area’s noted jazz and improvised music communities.
Tortoise then performed those five loose themes at a handful of concerts, and “when we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” says McEntire, at whose Soma Studios the band recorded the new album. “It turned out that for them to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They’re all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they’re orchestrated and complex.”
“All of the songs went through a pretty intensive process of restructuring,” adds Parker. “We actually had quite a lot of material that we ended up giving up on. Oftentimes, we’ll shelve ideas and come back to them years later.”
The album’s single “Gesceap” embodies the transformation of the original suite commissions, as it morphs from two gently intersecting synth lines into a pounding, frenzied full-band finish. “To a certain extent it’s more of a reflection of how we actually sound when we play live,” says McEntire of Tortoise’s heavier side. “That hasn’t always been captured as well on past albums.”
Elsewhere, “Hot Coffee” resurrects an idea abandoned from the band’s 2004 album “It’s All Around You,” gliding through only-on-a- Tortoise-album sections of funktastic bass lines, straight-up dance beats and Parker’s fusion-flecked guitar bursts. “It’s progressive experimental music with pop sensibilities,” says Parker.
“Rock On,” which McEntire says he and McCombs simultaneously had the idea to cover after having remembered hearing it on the radio all the time as kids, isn’t the only vocal moment on “The Catastrophist.” Also included is the bittersweet, honest-to-goodness soul ballad “Yonder Blue,” sung by Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley. “We’d finished the track and decided it would be good to have vocals on it,” recalls McEntire. “Robert Wyatt was our first choice, but he had just retired and politely said no. We were discussing asking Georgia to do something, but not that track in particular. Then we realized it would totally work.”
Tortoise is planning an extensive world tour in support of “The Catastrophist.” Admits McEntire, “figuring out how to reproduce these songs live will be a bit of a challenge. But I also feel like it might be time to dip into the back catalog a bit. The pool we draw from has been really consistent for quite awhile.
As ever, Tortoise has conjured sounds on “The Catastrophist” that aren’t being purveyed anywhere else in music today. There’s a deeply intuitive interplay between the group members that comes only from two decades of experimentation, revision and improvisation. And at a time when our brains are constantly bombarded by myriad distractions, “The Catastrophist” reminds us that there’s something much greater out there. All we have to do is listen.

Let Them Eat Chaos, Kate Tempest's new long poem written for live performance and heard on the album release of the same name, is both a powerful sermon and a moving play for voices. Seven neighbors inhabit the same London street, but are all unknown to each other. The clock freezes in the small hours, and one by one we see directly into their lives: lives that are damaged, disenfranchised, lonely, broken, addicted, and all, apparently, without hope. Then a great storm breaks over London, and brings them out into the night to face each other--and their own last chance to connect.
Tempest argues that our alienation from one another has bred a terrible indifference to our own fate, but she counters this with a plea to challenge the forces of greed which have conspired to divide us, and mend the broken home of our own planet while we still have time. Let Them Eat Chaos is a cri de cœur and a call to action, and, both on the page and in Tempest's electric performance, one of the most powerful poetic statements of the year.

Mazy Fly, the second full-length by the Bay Area artist SPELLLING, explores the tension between the thrill of exploring the unknown and the terror of imminent destruction. Chrystia Cabral spent the summer of 2018 in her Berkeley studio reflecting on the thresholds of human progress and longing for a new and better tomorrow. She was struck by the way the same technologies that have given humans the ability to achieve utopian dreams of discovery have also brought the world to the precipice of dystopic global devastation. Despite the darkness of this reality, Mazy Fly is defiantly optimistic. It is a celestial voyage into the unknown, piloted by Cabral.
Each song on Mazy Fly enshrines distinct sentiments within this imagined voyage, from the deeply personal (“Hard to Please Reprise”) to the cosmic (aliens travel to Earth to hear music on “Real Fun”). “Haunted Water” is an intensely heavy song about the memories of colonial violence that haunt the historical slave ship routes of the Middle Passage. “Under the Sun” is a cosmic prayer for good fortune that sees the potential for radical newness in our own lives in the births of stars.
Mazy Fly musically traverses the spaces between languid, honey-soaked vocals and distant angelic whispers, from thumping 808 club beats to crunching tape loops, and from silky, smooth R&B to whirling organ sonatas. Cabral became enamored by the idea of flight as a harbinger of both progress and apocalypse, and that was expressed in the textures and compositional techniques she utilized. Swarms, flocks, flies, angels, spaceships, flying saucers – all are represented sonically by Cabral and her Juno-106 synthesizer.
“Secret Thread” is the key to this motif, and the heart of Mazy Fly. When Cabral saw her puppy Cooper running gracefully around an open field, she imagined a winged spirit moving through her new music. She named the spirit, and the album, Mazy Fly.
SPELLLING’s 2017 debut Pantheon of Me was Bandcamp’s #4 album of the year, and they raved: “Cabral has it, from her careful sense of composition to her charismatic presence to her ability to communicate with her music straight through to the listener’s heart.” Her first release on Sacred Bones, the “Hard to Please” single, was named a Best Track by The Guardian, who said the song was “like Solange looking in a haunted mirror.”

A Man Alive is Thao & The Get Down Stay Down’s fourth album. It is another amazing sonic next step for the band following up on the success of We The Common (2013), which was largely inspired by Thao’s volunteer work with the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners, A Man Alive is an evolution in both subject matter and sound. Thao says: “I wanted A Man Alive to be beat- and bass-driven—rather than guitar-based – expanding upon the hip-hop influences of the previous record. A Man Alive is more instrumental, more riff- and loop-centric, and has more manipulated sounds.” The Get Down Stay Down are at their best on this record, and Thao herself experimented with programming beats for several tracks complementing the live drums played on every song.

Plays the Music of Twin Peaks is a tribute album by American experimental band Xiu Xiu. Composed of cover versions of the music from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, it was released exclusively as a Record Store Day release on April 16, 2016 by Polyvinyl in the United States and Bella Union in Europe