SOS is the upcoming second studio album by American singer-songwriter SZA. The album is scheduled to be released on December 9, 2022, through Top Dawg Entertainment and RCA Records. It features guest appearances from Don Toliver, Phoebe Bridgers, Travis Scott, and Ol' Dirty Bastard.

碩果僅存的女聲搖滾，揮舞女力搖滾旗幟的Paramore，超過15年的搖滾征程，入圍過葛萊美獎「最佳新人」，最終以〈Ain`t It Fun〉拿下象徵搖滾本色的歌曲加冕！由頭髮染五顏六色，爆發力十足嗓音嗆出搖滾悍勁的Hayley Williams領軍，讓各領域藝人著迷不已，陸續受邀與饒舌才子B.o.B和電舞DJ Zedd合作，拱出「Airplanes」、「Stay The Night」兩首叱?排行的大紅歌。偕同Paramore樂團征服國際版圖，大破全球千萬銷售量，替【暮光之城：無懼的愛】、【變形金剛3】兩大好萊塢賣座電影演唱配樂「Decode」、「Monster」，全部保送流行榜TOP40之林中，還是許多電玩配樂最愛的樂團之一！

PJ Harvey’s tenth studio album ‘I Inside the Old Year Dying’ marks her first release in seven years, following UK #1 album ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’. On this album, which was recorded with long-time creative collaborators John Parish and Flood, PJ Harvey builds a sonic universe somehow located in a space between life’s opposites, and between recent history and the ancient past. Scattered with biblical imagery and references to Shakespeare, all of these distinctions ultimately dissolve into something profoundly uplifting and redemptive.

The Record (stylised in lowercase) is the upcoming debut studio album by American indie rock group Boygenius, composed of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus. It is set to be released on March 31, 2023, through Interscope.
After releasing their debut self-titled EP Boygenius in 2018, the trio had since been working on their solo projects and had all released their respective albums — Little Oblivions by Julien Baker, Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, and Home Video by Lucy Dacus — before performing as a group for the first time in 3 years on November 19, 2021.
The group was spotted doing a photoshoot together in November, 2022. On January 10, 2023, Boygenius was announced to be on the 2023 Coachella lineup. There had been rumors about their new project since the two incidents.
On January 18, 2023, Boygenius announced the album, along with the three lead singles, "$20", "Emily I'm Sorry", and "True Blue".

[ TAO 13 ]


James Brandon Lewis: tenor saxophone, arrangements
Kirk Knuffke: cornet
William Parker: bass
Chad Taylor: drums
Chris Hoffman: cello


'For Mahalia, With Love' is the highly anticipated new album by award-winning tenor saxophonist-composer James Brandon Lewis & his Red Lily Quintet, following on their groundbreaking and poll-sweeping 'Jesup Wagon'. This powerful work reimagines songs made famous by the gospel icon who galvanized a nation with her voice.

Whereas Lewis used his transformative talents to newly illuminate renaissance man George Washington Carver on Jesup Wagon, the saxophonist does the same here for gospel-music force of nature Mahalia Jackson. And this time it’s personal, because Lewis lived her music growing up, nurtured by a grandmother who had received Mahalia’s singing like a bolt from above. Much more than a tribute, this work is “really a three-way conversation between Mahalia, my grandmother and me.”

The challenge was to turn these songs into jazz, the 21st century variety. What James and the band [ William Parker-bass, Chad Taylor-drums, Kirk Knuffke-cornet, Chris Hoffman-cello ] conjure with this music is miraculous.

[ * The CD & LP first editions of 'For Mahalia, With Love' also exclusively include the contemporaneous suite, 'These Are Soulful Days', JBL’s first composition for strings; performed with the Lutosławski Quartet in its world premiere at Jazztopad Festival in Wrocław, Poland. ]

*Digital download includes pdf booklet of Jorge Velez illustrations (available exclusively via Bandcamp)*

“I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.”

The New Age traveller lifestyle may have ultimately eluded Holden, as by the time he was old enough to actually go to raves the UK’s infamous Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 had long since clamped down on the traveller free party circuit, and instead in 1999, when he was just nineteen years old, he fell into a professional career in the more commercialised end of dance music after an early 12” ('Horizons') was picked up by a Sony Music-backed trance imprint. But here and now, with this latest album offering that tops off a musical career spanning over twenty years, Holden is seeking to recapture that feeling of hope, freedom and possibility (both musical and otherwise) that characterised those venerated earliest days of dance music, when the boundaries of the distinct genres as we now know them had yet to crystallise, and a starry-eyed teenage Holden was still dreaming in the bedroom of his Leicestershire village.

Standing in contrast to the expanded band and live take recordings of its predecessor 'The Animal Spirits' (“Dramatic, colourful and Holden’s fullest-sounding work yet” 9/10 Loud And Quiet), Holden’s fourth solo artist album is more of a continuous sound collage, artfully juxtaposing audio worlds in his own inimitable manner, with a respectful hat tip to the pastoral classics of his early nineties youth (notable mentions to The KLF’s timeless 'Chill Out', and the sprawling radio soundscapes of Future Sound of London). But where his first wave forebears pilfered freely from the history of recorded music to date, Holden’s sample sources are custom generated, drawn from recordings of his own performances on the modular synth, keyboard, organ and piano plus the lesser explored drones of his childhood violin, cut-up bass guitar, overblown recorder, all manner of percussive trinkets and the serendipity of the odd field recording, as well as guest contributions from various members of the wider Animal Spirits live family: long-time touring companion drummer Tom Page, tabla-championing percussionist Camilo Tirado, multi-instrumentalist for hire Marcus Hamblett (here, on double bass and guitar) and saxophonist Christopher Duffin (on loan from Xam Duo and Virginia Wing).

Some of the references here undeniably draw from the past: 'Trust Your Feet' is dominated by the most unashamedly ravey stabs Holden has ever played, yet by the end has seamlessly unfurled into a hand-drum-and-flute campfire singalong, whilst the more Balearic 'Common Land'’s pairing of percussive bird samples with the evocative reverberating saxophone of Christopher Duffin casts it as a distant cousin of 808 State’s 'Pacific State'. But this anything goes approach also welcomes contributions from the left of field: the bold piano flourishes and trembling violin which emerge seamlessly in the middle of jolly Sabres of Paradise-esque tabla jamboree 'Contains Multitudes'; an unexpected dalliance with the slap bass on the fantasy alliance between John Cale and Simple Minds that is the audacious 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form'; the overblown recorder that heralds beatific mellotron, squealing synths and soaring guitars on ceremonial march in the style of Popol Vuh 'The Answer Is Yes'; and to close proceedings, the expressive pitched tabla motifs which punctuate melancholy outro 'You Can Never Go Back', as played by Camilo Tirado.

Holden is an artist who has traditionally found it difficult to settle, no sooner finding himself momentarily aligned with one musical milieu before he is off onto the next thing. But 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities' also seems to represent a coming-to-terms with his own musical past, with subtle nods and callbacks to notable moments in Holden’s twenty year long sonic history: the undulating dancefloor melancholy of 'In The End You’ll Know' and the spiralling kinetic pixie arpeggios and hazy vocals of 'Trust Your Feet' and 'Continuous Revolution' awaken the distant memory of his erstwhile career as an international DJ and remixer to the stars, whilst the driving synth and drum, pagan thud, synthesized strings and woozy shimmering nostalgia of his landmark 'The Inheritors' era (Resident Advisor ‘Album of the Year’) remains omnipresent ('Continuous Revolution', 'Worlds Collide Mountains Form', 'The Answer Is Yes', 'Infinite Fadeout'), albeit with a somewhat lighter and brighter sheen.

“It’s full of things I’ve come to terms with – I’ve always hated the call of a woodpigeon, synonymous with unending suburban weekend boredom for me, but they’re in there ['Four Ways Down The Valley']. Or, despite learning both piano and violin I never used either on my records, ashamed of my playing and turned off by their connotations but I’m happy they’re both in there too ['Contains Multitudes']. And for a while in the mid 2010s I couldn’t hear dance music anymore, a single kick drum had me lunging for the skip button, but I’ve found my way back to that – reclaiming the bits I liked (the hypnotism, the utopianism, the wide ranging cross cultural freedom) and leaving behind what I don’t need.” And as if to prove he means business, after a prolonged absence of almost ten years Holden has recently dipped his toe back into the remixing culture where he built his name, with XAM Duo (Sonic Cathedral), GoGo Penguin (Blue Note) and Lost Souls of Saturn (R&S) the latest blessed recipients of a Holden rework.

The hefty album title ('Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities') meanwhile is suitably suggestive of the utopian sense of hope, freedom and transformative potential that resonated throughout early rave culture, but it was actually discovered scrawled in Holden’s own notebook after a long night of delirious hyper-focussed coding, as a message to his future self. Holden is a long-time advocate of Cycling74’s Max/MSP programming language, and most recently he has used it to build an ambitious custom modular sequencing and synthesis environment to facilitate his live performances, which he also (in keeping with his collectivist impulses) plans to make available to other budding music makers via his website. “A song isn’t the recording that starts at 0:00 and finishes at 4:32 or whatever,” he explains. “It’s the system, the rules, the limits, the relationships contained in it, and it could’ve turned out so many other ways. If a song had only two midi controls to play the whole thing you could map it to a walk around a 2D map, but a real song is a journey in some kind of high dimensional space, and also the knowledge of all the other journeys it could’ve been. Probably a metaphor for life, I dunno.”

'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities' will be released via Holden’s own proudly DIY Border Community label on 31st March 2023, on double vinyl, CD, digital download and streaming. For the album’s distinctive hand drawn artwork and accompanying twelve page comic booklet insert, Holden called upon Amsterdam-based illustrator and musician Jorge Velez to help flesh out the visual component of the immersive fantasy world that is conjured up in 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities'. The result is a twelve panel storyboard (one per track) documenting the rave rituals of an alternative reality populated by magical creatures, which owes much to the pair’s shared love of the soothing retro-futurist colour palettes of the late and truly great French cartoonist Moebius (included in pdf form exclusively with Bandcamp downloads).

Geoff Dyer’s Book ‘Working the Room’
"(The Necks) are sometimes categorised as a jazz trio - which is fine as long as this is immediately qualified by adding that they've completely re-conceived the idea of the jazz trio."

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|o o o o o o o o /
~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~'`~

Travel, the 19th studio album by Australian improvisational trio The Necks, documents their recent practice of starting each day in the studio with a 20-minute trio improvisation. The recordings offer some of their most ecstatic and captivating music cut to tape.

As bassist Lloyd Swanton puts it: “It’s a really nice communal activity to bring us together in focus each day, and some lovely music has resulted from it.” Although a straight “live” improvisation has never been recorded in the studio by the band, these tracks (save for some light overdubs and post-production) feel closest to their 30 years of celebrated live performances.

In 2017 Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label released the band’s lauded Unfold, which first offered up this uncharacteristic studio work: four sub-20-minute pieces - instead of the typical 60+ minute arc for which the band is known - along with an obfuscated track list which leaves play order to the listener’s hand. The album quickly sold out, and persists as a treasure in collections or as a high-priced ‘Want’ on Discogs.

Travel marks a return to this double-LP format, offered in a beautiful gatefold package that features photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and impeccable mastering by Doug Henderson.

'𝐌𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐅𝐌' - the 1st album made from text-to-audio AI samples. Out April 14th via 555-5555.

«𝘾𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙙𝙞𝙜𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙣 𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚»

555/008

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On April 14th the electronic musician, visual artist, designer, and cultural researcher Damien Roach - aka patten - releases his first new album in three years, ‘Mirage FM’. A historic milestone, being the first longplayer of its kind, made entirely from text-to-audio AI-generated sound sources, the record is an emotion-drenched, trippy joyride through contemporary music, and a radical glimpse into the near future and beyond.

After working with AI for years in his visual output, long before DALL-E 2 came on the scene, Roach heard about a new tool for music creation over the recent winter holidays, and immediately started experimenting in one epic all-day and all-nighter, capturing hours of recordings. The system he found, ‘Riffusion’, works by inputting written descriptions of what you’d like to hear, the AI creating a new 'imagined' spectrogram image based on the text, and then turning that into sound – utilising what it's learnt from its vast dataset of recorded music history.

Like a crate digger in latent space, patten scoured hours of lo-fi recordings from these sessions for tiny sections that resonated, and used these as building blocks to assemble ‘Mirage FM’. With countless hours of chopping, sequencing, layering, EQ, repitching and fx, it started to take shape.

Across its 21 beat-tape-meets-Musique-concrète style tracks, genres from pop to techno, R&B to opera, hip-hop and grime to ambient, are distilled into half- remembered fragmented forms. Low fidelity and weird, with an aptly spectral quality, sonically the results are like something dialled in from a parallel universe, recalling the degraded sound of early low bitrate MP3s and dial-up audio streaming.

Everything from heartfelt AM radio ballads, out-there jazz excursions, peak time dance breakdowns and stargazing electronics collide with a stuttering, half-collapsing form, like a failing WhatsApp call or podcast stream. But, somehow, in all its wrongness, it works, like the vinyl crackle or warped cassette of our times. This is the ghost in the machine, singing back broken songs of love and loss, hopes and dreams, things to come; Whether a warning or a celebration, or somewhere in-between, only time will tell.

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His first full-length since 2020, ‘Mirage FM’ follows the 2019 LP of UK club excursions ‘FLEX’, the ‘Burner’ EP from 2021 (featuring Antipop Consortium’s Beans), and his trilogy of 2020 albums; the beatless ‘GLOW’, its melted down cybernetic metal counterpart ‘GLO)))’ and the collapsing techno of ‘Aegis’. In 2022 came the ‘Desire Path’ EP, which graced Bleep’s top tracks of the year with ‘Kiss U’.

In addition to the above, Roach’s CV includes numerous soundtracks, live commissions, cutting edge visual art projects, and creative direction/design under the moniker 555-5555. He recently created the visual world behind Dan Snaith’s Daphni releases, and the live visual show for Caribou.

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2nd pressing now available!

The next chapter of the Natural Information Society is here. Since Time Is Gravity, credited to Natural Information Society Community Ensemble with Ari Brown, presents a newly expanded manifestation of acclaimed composer & multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams' nearly 15 year, 7 albums-&-counting mainest ensemble. Joining the core NIS of Abrams (guimbri & bass), Lisa Alvarado (harmonium) Mikel Patrick Avery (drums) & Jason Stein (bass clarinet) are Hamid Drake (conga, tabla, tar), Josh Berman & Ben Lamar Gay (cornets), Nick Mazzarella & Mai Sugimoto (alto saxophones & flute), Kara Bershad (harp) & Chicago living legend of the tenor saxophone Ari Brown. Recorded live to tape at Electrical Audio & The Graham Foundation, cover painting Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla, by Lisa Alvarado. 2023-04-14 release date. eremite edition pressed on premium audiophile-quality 120 gram vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Helge Sten, Audio Virus, Oslo. First eremite edition of 1799 copies. First 400 direct order LPs come with eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Alan Sherry, Siwa Studios, northern New Mexico. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our EU partner, Aguirre records, Belgium.

liner notes

Since first developing Natural Information Society in 2010, Joshua Abrams has been gradually expanding the group’s conceptual underpinnings, its musical references & the sheer number of the group’s members. Its music is, in a sense, an expansive form of minimalism, based in repeated & overlaid rhythmic patterns, ostinatos & modality. Its roots, its scale & its meaning become clearer in time. If time is gravity, it also allows us to carry more. Having begun as fundamentally a rhythm section with Abrams’ guimbri at its core, the version here can stretch to a tentet, including six horns.

Abrams has been expanding his minimalism gradually, but he has long understood a key to minimalism’s potential: the breadth of its roots in the late 1950s & early 1960s, ranging from the dissatisfaction of young European-stream composers with the limitations of serialism to the simultaneous dissatisfaction of jazz musicians with the dense harmonic vocabulary of bop & hard bop. The former began exploring rhythmic complexity & narrow tonal palates in place of harmonic abstraction (Steve Reich’s Drumming, Philip Glass’ Music with Changing Parts; perhaps above all Terry Riley’s In C & his late ‘60s all-night organ & loop concerts); the later reduced dense chord changes to scales (signally with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, but rapidly expanding with John Coltrane’s vast project). In the 1950s the LP record opened the world with documentation of Asian & African musics, key influences on both minimalists & jazz musicians. If John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone suggested the keening shehnai of Bismillah Khan, the instrument was rapidly taken up by two key minimalists, LaMonte Young & Riley, similarly appreciative of its flexible intonation, the same thing that kept it out of big bands.

If the guimbri, the North African hide-covered lute that Abrams plays with NIS, involves a rich tradition of hypnotic healing music associated with the Gnawa people, Abrams’ music also touches on other musics as well —other depths, memories & healings, different drones, rhythms & modes. As the group expands on Since Time Is Gravity, he has made certain jazz traditions in the same stream more explicit as well. If there is a mystical & elastic quality involved in the experience of time, both in direction & duration, you will catch it here. The parts for the choir of winds expand on the roles of Abrams’ guimbri, Mikel Patrick Avery & Hamid Drake’s percussion & Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium: at times, the winds are almost looping in the tentet version, each hitting a repeating note in turn, at once drone & distinct inflection on temporal sequence. The brilliance of the work resides in Abrams’ compositions, the NIS’ intuitive execution & in Ari Brown’s singular embodiment of the great tenor saxophone tradition, including the oracular genius of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, & Yusef Lateef.

The three pieces by the expanded NIS featuring Brown —the opening “Moontide Chorus” & “Is” & the ultimate “Gravity”— have an immediate impact, & togther might be considered a kind of concerto for tenor saxophone. Here Brown presses almost indistinguishably from composed melody to improvised speech, getting so close to language that he might have a text. Everything here is a sign. Note the tap of the Rhythm Ace that links “Moontide Chorus” to “Is”, the attentive heart always present, even when signed by a machine. There’s a link here to the methodologies & meanings of dub music & the linear & vertical collage of beats, textures & tongues: treated with reverence, a sample of a beat-box can be as soulful, as hypnotic, as a mbira or a tamboura. If those pieces with Brown are heard as a suspended concerto, the three embrace & enfold the other works, like the sepals of a flower. That placement will also touch on the mysteries of our perception of time.

Particularly in “Is”, but elsewhere as well, a phenomenon of transcendence arises in which time appears to be tripartite, at once moving backwards & forwards & standing still. This is an act of technical brilliance certainly, but also an illumination of music’s ability to represent temporal consciousness through polymetrics. This particular listener has only heard it before in a few places, including the horn shouts & bowed basses of Coltrane’s Africa, in moments of Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady, in certain pieces where tapes were literally running backwards, & earlier still in Dizzy Gillespie’s Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, in which the composer George Russell & conguero Chano Pozo found a music that spoke at once in the voices of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring & the vestigial rites, rhythms & songs of the Yoruba language & Santeria religion of inland Cuba.

In Joshua Abrams’ compositions & the realization of them by the NIS, in the time of one’s close listening & memory thereof, distinctions between the “natural” & the “social”, the “quotidian” & the “transcendent” are erased, suspended or perhaps irrelevant. Consider two of the ensemble pieces, one named for nature, the other social science. In “Murmuration” the repeated wind figures of flute & alto saxophone combine with the interlocking patterns of harp, guimbri & frame drum (tar) to create a perfect moving stillness, not an imitation but a witness to the miracle of the starlings’ astonishing collective art, a surfeit of beauty that might be the ultimate defense tactic.

“Stigmergy” takes its name & concept from the Occupy movement’s Heather Marsh, who proposes a social system based on a cooperative rather than competitive models, one in which ideas are freely contributed & developed as ideas rather than an individual’s property. In its form, Abrams’ “Stigmergy” is the closes thing to traditional jazz, a series of accompanied solos by each of the wind players. However, the composed accompaniment is a radically collectivist notion: a repeated rhythmic figure, call it ostinato or riff, in which the different winds each play only a note or two of the figure, a concept both more collectivist & individualistic in its conception than any typical unison figure. It suggests another of the underlying recognitions that propel the Natural Information Society, the group as social organism, the teleology of hypnotic anarchy, all parts in place, functioning systematically, evolving & expressing itself, its nature & society, as a transformative organism.

George Lewis has described music as “a space for reflection on the human condition”. This suggests that, rather than a “distraction”, at least some music might serve as a distraction from distraction. It’s a focus, a clarity, an awareness, an external invitation to interiority, as if music itself is a model for form & contemplation, an organism contemplating for us or as us. If that is a possibility, & I am sure I have heard such musics, than this music is among them. How many of our rhythms, melodies & harmonies (cultural, historical, biological, psychic) might such music carry, translate & transform in the particulate ecstasy of our own murmuration? Stuart Broomer, April 2022

"I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world."
William Bronk – The World

*****

SISTER TIME is a tape-work collaboration between Cutler now and herself as a child. All cassette samples are from mixtapes originally made by the artist in the late nineties on her first Hi-Fi (bought with the prize money from winning a children’s drawing competition). Between vaporwave and a child’s hyper-focus on a looped chorus, the album draws on growing up as a girl listening to a canon of male singers, bearing their souls against the ills of time. 
Cutler’s practice is not just in the tape-stretching and manipulation, but also in the original heavy listening patterns and fascinations which produced these muffled elegies. The mixtapes and their psychedelic idealism-slash-existentialism were also resonant to revisit during lockdown years of lost time and losing touch.
Instruments beside tape include synth, hourglass, and a run-down VHS of The Land Before Time. For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom.

Modern and Unique was made with instruments. The guitars were recorded on a phone whenever an idea happened and if I had sufficient coordination. Modern and Unique settles on a classical, acoustic guitar apart from the bonus track. Pianos and strings are played with a keyboard.
There are a few more albums that are going to be out after this one that have only more unhinged playing and others that are just electronic. But to start with, this is instruments.