CD

Tracklist
1. Bo Harwood & John Cassavetes - No One Around To Hear It
2. Chen Ming Chang - Rainwater
3. Bhairavi Raman & Nanthesh Sivarajah - Bittersweet Reflections
4. The King Of Luxembourg - Poptones
5. Slapp Happy - Is It You
6. O.G. Jigg - Jesus Is My Jam
7. Klang - As It Is
8. Scala - Fuser
9. Soft Location - Let The Moon Get Into It
10. Gyeongsu - YZOBEL (feat. CROCHE)
11. Omertà - Moments In Love
12. Kasumi Trio - Cabbage Butterfly
13. Un - Fast Money Blues
14. Delphine Dora - V
15. Harry Plunket-Greene - The Hurdy-Gurdy Man

Short info:

Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022.


Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora.


Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.


Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule, ensorcelled storytelling.


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LP

Tracklist:

1. Awakening
2. Elemental
3. Unfolding
4. Thunbam Nergayil
5. Seven
6. Guardian
7. Kindling


Short info:

Syncretic marks the debut full-length from Australian duo Bhairavi Raman, a Western and Carnatic violinist, and Nanthesh Sivarajah, a mridangam player and versatile percussionist. Both artists share a Tamil heritage, a current that hums across the album. Raman, from South India, and Sivarajah, from Sri Lanka, draw lines that connect Western practice and Carnatic tradition. This hybrid is central to Raman’s approach as a violinist, an instrument itself caught between East and West since the late 18th century. Her playing folds history, lineage and experimentation into music that acknowledges inheritance while gently rewiring its circuitry.

Expanding on traditional music can be a precarious practice, but Syncretic never feels heavy-handed. Raman and Sivarajah exercise measured restraint, letting the Carnatic framework breathe even as it is refracted through contemporary tools. Delays, looping, subtle layering and synthesized harmonies tilt tradition into a new light without disguising it.

Even within a contemporary framework, Raman’s rigorous Carnatic training under gurus Sri S. Varadarajan (India), Sri Murali Kumar (Australia) and Sri Gopinath Iyer (Australia) is unmistakable. She captures the spiritual and emotional essence of each raga: on Seven, the playful raga Bahudari becomes both centrepiece and conduit, while on the traditional piece Thunbam Nergayil, drawn from a Tamil poem, we hear a deeply personal iteration, a weeping euphony of mixed emotions hitting all at once. Tradition here is absorbed, expanded and reframed.

Sivarajah’s command of the mridangam, honed by his gurus Sri Jambunathan (Sri Lanka), Sri Balasri Rasiah (Australia) and Sri T. R. Sundaresan (India), is central to his original composition Guardian. He sustains tradition while extending it through layering and sound-spatialisation. The mridangam here functions as both a structural and ornamental force, mapping continuity between inherited form and contemporary sonic architecture.

Syncretic resonates as a space where Tamil heritage, diasporic memory and contemporary practice coalesce. Culture, like sound, circulates, transforms and persists. Tradition is not an archive but living material, a soundworld that lingers in the ears and the imagination.



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LP

Tracklist:

1. Frame
2. Unseen
3. Liquid Sky
4. Blue Air
5. Iglu
6. Flickering Wall
7. Die Lustigen Sedruner
8. Unveil
9. All Of A Sudden
10. To Jane Borki
11. Titnuts
12. Moonchild



Short info:

Reintroducing Soar - the alias of Christian Aebi, serial DIY taper and one-man orchestra from Langenthal, a fog-shrouded town in the Swiss provinces. Krautophobia, ambient lo-fi agriculture, analogue soul balm and slowspeed psych gelati-blitz cardboard pop only gesture towards the sound world he coaxed from his broken Tascam four-track recorder, in attics, churches, junkyards and at the kitchen table.

The spark for Soar was likely time and space, somewhere in the autumn of 1994. Armed with a cable salad of Sixties guitar/bass, fairground drums, mould-speckled organs and toy instruments, Aebi coaxed five albums, an unverified run of 25 cassettes, and a handful of gigs. Mostly issued through Zurich label Corazoo, the records arrived in hand-pasted sleeves, rough-cut reproductions of his teddy bear-fixated artwork that carried the same imperfect immediacy as the music. With Rudi Steiner, performances in galleries, clubs and halls bent into live sound-image happenings - part installation, part film, part flea-market-instrument theatre - invariably leaving the house engineers bewildered.

At the time of his untimely death in 2021, Aebi remained a village secret, his music passed quietly between friends and local ears. Now, Swiss graphic designer and Ghost Riders compiler Ivan Liechti has pieced together a portrait from the afterglow, gathering tangled audio formats, paintings, illustrations, photographs and notebooks with his family, former label and peers. What emerges is a first glimpse of Soar's intimate cosmos - brushing against Füxa, Spectrum, Dump, Stereolab and King Crimson, but orbiting a dimension entirely his own.





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LP

Tracklist:

1. Houdini's Plane
2. Incident at Westall
3. Aspen Blues
4. On the Mountain
5. Solar Flare
6. Valley of Sorrows
7. The Loneliest Astronaut
8. To the Lighthouse
9. I've Got a Buzz


Short info:

A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is the new album by Australian atmospheric pop trio Hydroplane, the storied 'offshoot' formed by three quarters of independent pop group, The Cat's Miaow. On this, their first music after two decades plus of radio silence, Andrew Withycombe, Kerrie Bolton and Bart Cummings return to the gentle, close-quarters musical world they shared around the turn of the century.

Recorded during 2024 in Melbourne and Ballarat, A Place In My Memory… picks up the thread Hydroplane set down with its precursor, 2001's The Sound Of Changing Places, though you can hear echoes of their other releases, too, with Withycombe noting a through-line from the group's 1998 "Failed Adventure" single. There's little quite like A Place In My Memory…, then or now, though. Maybe you can draw some connections between Hydroplane and their sister group, The Cat's Miaow, while fellow travellers might include Empress, The Ah Club, and further back, Young Marble Giants, Veronique Vincent (the muffled, ticking drum machine also makes me think of Robin Gibb's Robin's Reign).

There's also an umbilical to the bedroom-crafted electronica doing the rounds in the late nineties and early noughties. Hydroplane hint at this through their approach to songwriting, which often builds creatively around loops as structural devices. Through all this, the trio achieve an effortless, organic weightlessness across these nine lovely songs. Many feature Bolton's clear singing voice, drifting along, while guitars, keyboards, drum machines and loops tickertape away. The constituent parts fit together, but they also have a curiously detached quality - think of abstract cloud formations sharing the same sky.

Hydroplane and The Cat's Miaow often dealt in emotional ambiguity and uncertainty, and the uncertainty of the nostalgic. This was always one of the most appealing facets of their music, and A Place In My Memory… is thus named perfectly. I couldn't dream up a better title for the album and its reflections on history, lived experience, and the inevitable tangle between these two phenomena. These reflections variously address such concerns as human cruelty, flight, space travel, adventurism and spiritualism. There's also "To the Lighthouse", not a direct reference to the Virginia Woolf book, but a great title, nonetheless. (They've always had excellent titles, often borrowed, for songs and albums.)

A beautiful collection of drowsy, sleepy pop, humble and quiet, but resolute in its craft, A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is dream work in practice; a lovely reintroduction. Welcome back, then.





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LP. 2025 RE PRESS
Vital Sales Points:
Boiler Room Collections video feature to premiere the week of release
Companion piece to András and Instant Peterson's cult all-Australian mix series


Tracklist

A1. Maria Kozic and the MK Sound - Trust Me
A2. Whadya Want? - Open Spaces
A3. Poets of the Machine - Arabs
A4. The Couch - Full Treatment
A5. ??? - Sedation
B1. The Igniters - Hakka Suru
B2. Mumbo Jumbo - Wind It Up
B3. Mix - Do You Do It?
B4. Cameron Allen and Graham Bidstrup - Bikini Atoll
B5. Foot and Mouth - I Want My Mummy

On Midnite Spares, Australian music devotees András and Instant Peterson hold a candle to overlooked avant-pop and electronic works by antipodean artists and outsiders working through the 80s and 90s. Through co-presenting weekly radio show Strange Holiday, the duo slowly upturned their locale for inspiration - archives, country bookstores, private collections and convenience stores, searching for a place to anchor their own identities in the oceans of the island continent. The 10 tracks acknowledge a minor history, passed on via a network of friends, friends of friends, the libraries of radio station 3RRR and more often than not, the artists themselves.

Renowned mixed media artist Maria Kozic enters with the mysterious downbeat of Trust Me, her partner Philip Brophy responsible for digital and analogue sonic construction. A recurring character in András and Instant Peterson's investigations, Brophy reappears with a score piece from his divisive feature film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, recorded as ??? (pronounced "Tch Tch Tch").

Other links are thread under the surface. Melbourne inner north experimentalist David Chesworth explores his Australiana songcraft leading Whadya Want?. The short lived project also featured Philip Jackson, whose duo The Couch is restored from Fast Forward's dance issue - a pioneering cassette fanzine published by early-80s 3RRR personality Bruce Milne.

The collection binds a certain musicianship that's indifferent to fame or chart success, although some artists unwittingly experienced this before and after. Poets of the Machine's Grace Jones techno-wave was a modest moment for Coral Island and Red Stripe, an English migrant who once celebrated a #1 UK Christmas single with an acapella cover of Yazoo, while the morbid coming of age electronics of Foot and Mouth is a lesser known prologue to Sean Greenway and Matty Whittle's rise as legendary teen punks heroes God. Quickly becoming a modern dancefloor hit, Mumbo Jumbo's sole release Wind It Up is only now basking in it's brilliance.

The remaining figures shape the diversity further. There's Sydney dub addicts The Igniters, Mix's groovy synth song about masturbation and the Cameron Allen/Graham Bidstrup soundtrack for petrol headed ozploitation film, Midnite Spares - the compilation's namesake.




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2025 Repress, LP

Short info:
Wilson Tanner’s 69 returns to Australian soil for a new season. A uniquely provincial take on ambient music, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) assembled their prized debut over a shared love of seafood, wine and LPG. Recorded in a Perth backyard, these two new friends reached for the tools at hand and made the best of the fine weather. Instrument and implement combine in a languorous bricolage of synthesizer, clarinet and building materials - interrupted only by the occasional flutter of pigeon wings or a call to lunch. Back in print for the first time since 2017, Wilson Tanner hop into Efficient Space’s expanding pot.

Tracklist:

1. Sun Room
2. Long Water
3. Before Lotus
4. Keith
5. Further Than Your Headlights
6. Pilot
7. Tray Tail
8. Odd Low




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12” with picture sleeve

Tracklist:

1. Sisters Underground - In The Neighbourhood (Sisters On The Boulevarde Dub)
2. Boxcar - Lelore (World Dub Mix)
3. Sexing the Cherry - This Is A Dream
4. Single Gun Theory - Fall (Voyage To The Bottom Of The Dub Remix)


Short info:

Efficient Space honours trailblazing Australian imprint Volition Records with Volition Cuts Vol. 1. Evolving from Andrew Penhallow’s time at GAP Records, which smuggled Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall and the Factory catalogue into the region, Volition shifted focus to homegrown talent over imported sounds. Echoing its precursor’s blend of indie friction and electronic curiosity, the label wired itself into the pulse of club and rave culture, linking city scenes and amplifying them for the mainstream. With retina-scorching design, uncompromising packaging and top-tier remixes, Volition consistently bent the major label machine to its will.

No Volition retrospective would be complete without Sisters Underground’s intergenerational anthem ‘In the Neighbourhood’. Otara teenagers Brenda Makamoeafi and Hassanah Iroegbu brought their Pasifika perspective to Proud (An Urban-Pacific Streetsoul Compilation), a commercial success that platformed NZ rap and R&B with a clarity that outshone its overseas counterparts. The quiet architect of Volition’s sound, producer prodigy Robert Racic flipped the classic as a hip-house dub before his untimely passing in 1996.

Its A-side companion comes from Brisbane synth-pop unit Boxcar, who signed to Volition after frontman Dave Smith handed a cassette to Tom Ellard of Severed Heads during a school newspaper interview. That unlikely handoff led to their 1990 debut Vertigo. Here, their ritual-laced, body-jacking industrial is retooled by Miami freestyle maverick Tony Garcia.

Further cherry-picking from the VOLT vaults, Sexing The Cherry unleash a bleep-addled meltdown from Brisbane’s Edwin Morrow and Cherryn Lomas. ‘This Is A Dream’ was recorded exclusively for High (A Dance Compilation), the first all-Australian V/A to top the ARIA charts, propelling the local movement into national consciousness.

Closing the sampler, Sydney’s Single Gun Theory joined Volition as they moved from post-punk abstraction and electronic collage toward downtempo, sample-based mysticism. Their 1994 ambient-pop reverie ‘Fall’ is reimagined by Stuart Crichton and Apollo 440’s Norman Fisher-Jones as full-throttle Goa trance, a final surge that channels the label’s relentless push into new terrain.

Volition Cuts Vol. 1 is dedicated to the loving memory of Volition’s visionary founder Andrew Penhallow, and key contributors Robert Racic and Edwin Morrow.






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7” with picture sleeve

A. Place Where I Go
B. Kapi Ngalyananni


Short info:

Luritja artist Keanu Nelson traces the afterglow of Wilurarrakutu with a two-track 7”, cut from the same home-studio haze with producer Yuta Matsumura. The pair continue their singular weave of community-rooted storytelling and elemental electronics, shaped with the gear at hand.

Hints of YouTube hip-hop and emotionally charged piano ripple through ‘Place Where I Go’, a dubbed-out reflection on the daily realities of life in Papunya, Nelson’s desert home. ‘Kapi Ngalyananni’ finds Nelson singing in language, a mesmeric water song bridging the personal and ancestral, with elevating chords, clapsticks, and Matsumura’s parched melodica lines.

These remote dispatches carry a vital new voice from the heart of the desert, where tradition and sonic experimentation delicately converge.





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2025 Repress

Tracklist
A1 My Gull
A2 Loch and Key
A3 Perishable
A4 Killcord Pts I-III
B1 Idle
B2 All Hands Bury the Dead
B3 Safe. Bird
B4 Crossing The Bar


Short info:

Wilson Tanner come to shore with a new album of floating melodies, lightly salted. Throwing electroacoustic conventions overboard, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) recorded this new work aboard a 1950s riverboat with a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead. These eight compositions pull in a by-catch of maritime folklore; of Siren and Selkie, Seagull and engine oil slick. A change of course from their debut album 69 (Growing Bin Records, 2016), the ambient temperature drops as II casts out to sea in uncertain weather and returns to the safe harbours of Port Phillip Bay.

The seafarers head out to My Gull's poised optimism. The birds watch but do they listen? By the arrival of Loch and Key, the shoreline has dissolved completely, the boat floating in serene infinity as the rest of the world spins. Conditions soon take a treacherous turn on Killcord Pts I-III - a 12 minute odyssey that battens down the hatches as these sailors eye merciless waves and blinding ocean spray, jointly channelling Berlin-school electronics and sea legs. In the aftermath, the waterlogged bleeps of Idle survey the damage as our parched crew sound the distress signal and ultimately descend into delirium.

Known for navigating individual courses as solo musicians, Wilson and Tanner's collective storytelling is saturated in detail, buoying between tension and harmony. II modestly stands as some of both artists' most accomplished material.


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7” with silver pantone sleeve

Tracklist:

1. Dennis Harte - Summer’s Over
2. Harte Attack - Running Thru My Mind
3. Pure Madness - Freedom Rides
4. Dennis Harte - Treat Me Like A Man


Short info:

Efficient Space charts Ghost Riders’ North American roadmap, crashing into 1973 New York to ignite the unfiltered teen dreams of Dennis Harte.

In the late ’60s, 11-year-old prodigy Dennis Harte was handed a Sears-bought Silvertone 1448, its in-case amplifier primed for street-level incantations. Recruiting two neighbourhood friends, the trio hammered out raw rhythms, drawing in Brooklyn’s wandering bohemians, keen to glimpse a prepubescent Alex Chilton in the making.

Also jamming with his older brothers, Bart and John, a family friend introduced the siblings to budding music exec Carl Edelson, who had spent the better part of two decades hustling through a string of local labels. A father figure of sorts, Edelson backed them immediately, facilitating sessions at the famed A-1 Sound Studios and Sanders Recording Studio and pressing four 7”s on his newly minted Roundtable Records. To maximise his chances of courting major labels, he strategically assigned each release a different artist name - Dennis Harte, Pure Madness, Harte Brothers and the wryly titled Harte Attack.

Dennis’ emotional maturity and sheer talent bleed into the defining ‘Summer’s Over’, penned by Edelson and once recorded by mid-'60s New Jersey garage vocal group The Wouldsmen. Morphing into an unfathomably teenage, blue-eyed soul/psych lament, it aches for a season slipping away forever. Its Harte Attack edition counterpart - the candied ballad ‘Running Thru My Mind’ - delivers unison harmonies and kinetic guitar interplay with a streetwise punch, channeling the spirit of NYC-area icons The Rascals, The Lovin’ Spoonful, and The Youngbloods.

Roaring like the Spencer Davis Group, Pure Madness’ organ-driven bruiser ‘Freedom Rides’ screams of biker gangs, yet its true subject - ’60s civil rights activists the Freedom Riders - looms as another towering theme for an adolescent perspective. Meanwhile, the loose, bluesy ruckus ‘Treat Me Like a Man’ digs back into Edelson’s catalogue, covering the Beatles-inflected Levittown group The Shandels.

Though Dennis later found success touring with Wilson Pickett and now doubles as a piano tuner to the stars, these four snapshots frame ambition on its outer edge - a heartfelt homage to an unbreakable brotherhood.





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Tracklist:

1. Cherry
2. Blush
3. Grasshopper
4. Brown
5. Bubbles
6. Old Vine
7. Jaune
8. Summer Rot
9. Hogshead
10. Legends
11. Botrytis
12. Daddles


Short info:

Wilson Tanner return to dry land with Legends, a wine-soaked agricultural fantasy, made among the grapevines at Manon Farm in South Australia. Where their earlier works settled into the sun-struck torpor of a suburban Perth backyard (69) or drifted off-course on a riverboat on Port Phillip Bay (ii), Legends trades salt air for vineyard sweat, the scrape of boots on dry earth and workers’ radios humming with the summer test cricket season.

Through this agricultural haze an image of a working vineyard emerges - ducks, dogs and plovers intrude; tractors and quads fly-by; stainless steel gleams at the edges. Recorded without mains power, the Manon demos overflow with farmyard ingenuity. Wind, brass, balalaika, balloon, pipe and synth are trained onto the staff with wire, tape and string.

A caricature of Australian viticulture, Legends is packed to the horns with the mythology and manure of natural wine. Swigging and belching in camaraderie, Wilson Tanner press their surroundings into something raw and unfiltered, letting bum notes, leftovers and sediment linger in the bottle. A cornucopia of biodynamic sounds.




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Tracklist:

01. L'Último Sacrifacio (22:56)
02. Marcia, Baila, Suogna (09:30)
03. Suogna Piazzata (03:45)


Short info:

Pierre Bujeau is an expert at creating temporary escape zones—musical structures to evade the everyday. Sometimes he works collectively as part of the mysterious French groups Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz. But it’s when he’s on his own, performing as Megabasse, that he offers the most complete break from reality. His kit is simple: a few bottles of cheap lager, twin Fender amps, and his double-necked guitar. An instrument like this normally signals maximum rockist excess—think Jimmy Page, Geddy Lee, or that dude from the Eagles. In Pierre’s hands, it becomes more like a zither or a dulcimer, producing soft chiming patterns that build against themselves until the sound of the room, passed back and forth between his two amps, starts to blur everything, and we are away in another world. Wait, though—let down your yoga bun and don’t light the palo santo yet. The new space he creates has nothing to do with smug wellness. It’s a rough, do-it-yourself psychedelia, scuffed but hopeful. Not a perfect blank space to be your best self in, but instead a communal dreaming, an uncanny place where all are welcome.

Until now, without catching him live, the Megabasse experience has been difficult to find: CD-Rs, short-run tapes, and one blink-and-you-missed-it LP. Thankfully, this record on Efficient Space, a reissue of some pieces that were previously only available on a small cassette edition, will put that right. Here are two long, intricate pieces, and something new—a shorter track that hints at a move toward beautiful, burnt-out guitar soli.

Unless you are very lucky, wise, or rich, life imposes its structures on you. Maybe a record of shimmering, tranced guitar is all you need to get out from underneath?


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2LP, 2025 Repress

Tracklist
1. Bo Harwood & John Cassavetes - No One Around To Hear It
2. Chen Ming Chang - Rainwater
3. Bhairavi Raman & Nanthesh Sivarajah - Bittersweet Reflections
4. The King Of Luxembourg - Poptones
5. Slapp Happy - Is It You
6. O.G. Jigg - Jesus Is My Jam
7. Klang - As It Is
8. Scala - Fuser
9. Soft Location - Let The Moon Get Into It
10. Gyeongsu - YZOBEL (feat. CROCHE)
11. Omertà - Moments In Love
12. Kasumi Trio - Cabbage Butterfly
13. Un - Fast Money Blues
14. Delphine Dora - V
15. Harry Plunket-Greene - The Hurdy-Gurdy Man

Short info:

Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022.


Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora.


Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.


Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule, ensorcelled storytelling.







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LP, 2025 Repress

Tracklist

A1 Wurlitzer Jukebox
A2 Piano Movement With Percussion
A3 Song For The Meek
A4 I Hear A New World
A5 New Monotonic FM
A6 House Warming
A7 14th July
B1 Reprise
B2 Beloved Invader
B3 Interlude
B4 New Monotonic FM (Acoustic)
B5 LDR
B6 Send In The Clowns
B7 Completed Extract From The Previous 7"

Short info:

Hydroplane reinstate their formidable 1997 debut of sublime guitar atmospherics, fragile lyricism and droning incidentals with an overdue vinyl and digital reissue.

An offshoot of the now-féted The Cat’s Miaow, the trio formed after drummer Cameron Smith decamped to London, charting new territory with tape loops, manipulated samples and a borrowed Jupiter 4 in the wake of Endtroducing. Adopting a handle that Dean Wareham once considered calling Luna, Hydroplane intended to only ever release Excerpts From Forthcoming LP, a single-sided 7” sonic collage, before imploding in mystery. Their label however insisted they deliver their taunted album. From the comfort of a Brunswick flat, they continued to record soaring melodies and restrained song structures to 4-track, sculpting dramatic Radiophonic Workshop cues weighted in reverb and near-perfect dream pop lead by Kerrie Bolton’s empyrean vocals.

Bored of industry expectation and largely ignored by local audiences, the reluctant performers followed the way of The Cannanes and formed meaningful overseas alliances by mail and phone, securing releases on Michigan outpost Drive-In and Broadcast launching pad Wurlitzer Jukebox. Championed by John Peel with twenty spins on his converted Radio One slot and even polling in Festive Fifty of 1997, the humble three-piece still walked to their neighbourhood shops undetected.

Previously only available as a US-issued CD, this reminiscent late-night suite establishes Hydroplane as an everlasting ember in Australia’s beloved indie nexus.






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Tracklist:

01. Hashish
02. The Last Straw
03. Nu Stone Groove
04. On Release
05. Poor Man Beggar Man Thief (Feat Kye)
06. Suicide Bomber
07. Roll Up
08. For Love's Sake


Short info:

Efficient Space honours the memory of producer and MC Ali Omar with Hashish Hits, a posthumous selection from the dub rebel’s self-released discography.
One of ten children in working-class Liverpool, Omar drew deep influence from his father's Arabic heritage—a thread central to his identity and sample origins. After art school and a spell clubbing during Manchester's halcyon days, he relocated to Sydney, where he co-founded the blunted downbeat duo Atone with fellow British expatriate Andy Fitzgerald. As an MC, he infiltrated the city’s house, dub, jungle, and bass circuits, becoming a regular fixture at the Bentley Bar, where he commanded the mic with his versatile, rumbling baritone and charisma.
Freakishly talented in the studio, Omar was a pioneer of the Akai sampler and Atari, deftly recording live sessions straight to DAT. Drawing on industry insights from his sister, Merseybeat firebrand Beryl Marsden—who supported The Beatles on their final UK tour and was signed to Decca and Columbia—the non-conformist sought to build a self-sufficient business model. Between 1998 and 2004, he independently issued four albums on CD through his Hashish Studios imprint, hustling copies directly to local record stores and live shows for instant returns, even hand-sewing screen-printed hessian sleeves for his final release.
Uncompromising in his principles and refusing to suffer fools or charlatans, Omar relished the opportunity to collaborate with those who embodied the same spirit. Hashish Hits offers a snapshot of his inner sanctum—Fitzgerald on the opening track's billowing smoke stacks, the serpentine vocals of Gina Mitchell and the magic hands of mixer Louis Mitchell on 'On Release,' and Wicked Beat Sound System’s Kye on 'Poor Man Beggar Man Thief'. Meanwhile, 'Suicide Bomber' smoulders with the tension of a lost Muslimgauze relic, as the instructional 'Roll Up' and 'The Last Straw' spiral deeper into Omar’s signature production vortex—where space stretches in slow motion and walls reverberate with ricocheting delay.
A true icon of Sydney’s underground scene, the larger-than-life Omar passed away on 23 June 2009 after a valiant battle with cancer. He is remembered for his assertive spirit, larrikin humour, wild anarchic personality, and enduring mantra: “Love and live your life”.


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Tracklist:
1. Alone Tonight
2. Brief Call
3. Young Girls
4. Avril In The Alps
5. Conscious Effort
6. I Was Never Told
7. Left on the Shelf
8. Song of Love

Short info:

Simple Reality cements the short lived legacy of Coventry DIY group Skeet.

Emerging from a scene of first-generation punks and 2 Tone kids, Skeet was instigated by Gary and Nigel Meffen in 1981, fusing tightrope instrumentals with a Roland CR-8000 under the glow of projected visuals. After a cassette of their debut performance found its way to Kay Booth who worked at Inferno Records, the unsuspecting frontwoman took the liberty of adding her own vocals. Instantly embraced as a permanent member, Booth’s shy delivery and open-diary expressions of social alienation and romantic rejection hovered over the brothers’ scratchy guitar and agitated bass.

Playing as few as 10 shows, their unnerving minimalism was recorded in a suburban home studio, borrowing a reel-to-reel from Toby Lyons (The Colourfield) and a mixer from Jerry Dammers (The Specials). Record labels gestured interest until one day they were no more - no arguments, no official split, just a silent parting of the ways and three people taking journeys in different directions. Unheard and unloved in the vaults for nearly four decades, 'Brief Call' finally resurfaced via the Coventry Music Museum compendium Alternative Sounds Volume 1, followed by a micro pressing of the full suite on Chris Long’s Almost Unknown imprint in 2023.

Simple Reality now offers a definitive snapshot of these must-hear neurotic post-punks. Mastered by Skeet fanatic Mikey Young, newly discovered instrumental multitracks are restored alongside a live recording of their final stand. Performed atop of a trailer in a pub beer garden, the release-worthy desk tape adds three new tracks and a more energised swing at ‘Left On the Shelf’s apathetic techno-pop.

RIYL: Fire Engines, 23 Skidoo, A Certain Ratio, Young Marble Giants, pel mel



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Tracklist:

1. Enchancity
2. Do You Bless It?
3. No Know
4. Elixa
5. Knuckledust
6. Esk
7. Umbrah
8. E v E

Short info:

Efficient Space welcomes Th Blisks to the fold with their mutant strain of melodica dub, torched hip hop breaks, post-punk and procession song.

Th Blisks' members have many notches on their collective belt. Amelia Besseny and Altered States Tapes’ founder Cooper Bowman are prolific in their ritualistic ambient-pop duo Troth, while Yuta Matsumura holds a formidable Sydney punk band pedigree on top of his Low Company-backed solo work. A reward for those who took the time to dig it out, Th Blisks’ 2022 debut How So? was a DIY creation that fully embraced its outsider roots, revelling in opportunities for connection through pop flourishes. Feeling like it might have been a one-off, we proclaim their return with Elixa.

With an unseen clarity of vision, Elixa conjures its meticulously fleshed out world. Those familiar pieces are all there - the mystery, the patience, a cheeky pop hook - however this time there's an intentionality to it all. A blurred dialogue stretching across Australia, it was largely recorded remotely with tracks bouncing between Bowman and Besseny in Muloobinba (Newcastle) and Nipaluna (Hobart), and Matsumura stationed in Warumpi (Papunya). Every element is carefully considered, stemming from their individual time spent as lifers in the local DIY scenes. Through these tracks you can feel that history; echoes of Castings and Vincent Over The Sink in ‘Do You Bless It?’, Bowman's distinctive submerged tape loops gurgling away under boom bap and *that* Sydney guitar tone in ‘Esk’.

Elixa attempts to bottle some pinged-eye wonder at the magic surrounding, whether in the city or the bush. Informed by the old but drug into The New, it is a begrudgingly current Australien record that respectively nods at the UK’s sound history.


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Genres: Rock / Folk / Psych

2LP

Tracklist:

1. Sharkey - Someone Like Me
2. Lynne Ann Kingan - If You Love Me - Hate Me
3. James Thornbury - So Tan
4. Jim Huxley - Only A Song
5. Charlie Webster - Snodland
6. The Bob Hughes Band - You Broke My Heart
7. Goldrust - Going Yesterday
8. Jim Kennedy - You Are The Reason
9. Jon Betmead - Marie Elene
10. Charles Murphy - The Foot That's Holding Me Down
11. Remnant - I Will Set You Free
12. Fred Potts - Following Rainbows
13. The Superwomen - Lowlands
14. Robison Kaplan Ltd. - Don't Say Goodbye
15. Gary Ramey - You Are His
16. John Agostino - Loss of Love
17. Ritchie Tierney - Please Stop Breaking Me Down

Short info:

A humanity-reminding suite of miracle moments, Someone Like Me unites a geographically unbound cast of real people in pursuit of a meaningful connection. Taping their lived experience in economic studios in quiet English counties, Pacific Northwest woodland retreats and the big city bustle of Sydney and Los Angeles, these kindred spirits rendered sheer beauty in the process. Custom pressed folk songs of love, loss and the lord saviour.

Illuminating minor works from seasoned players such as former Syndicate Of Sound chart-topper Sharkey and late-era Canned Heat lynchpin James Thornbury, the collection simultaneously honours the fleeting amateurism of hobby musicians. With their one shot at tangible vinyl, freshman Lynne Ann Kingan realised her loose bubblegum rocker on campus time, while U.S. Navy recruit Fred Potts cut his unconditionally serene ballad remotely stationed on a Spanish naval base. Spartan production continues to reign with Jon Betmead’s hair-raising gospel, howling into infinite space, and Goldrust’s stripped back garden hymn.

Throughout the hour-long reflection, faith has an intermittent yet revelatory presence, most overtly with the divine choral soul of Seventh-day Adventist quartet Remnant. More subtly, Gary Ramey and Jim Kennedy both turned to song in their spiritual quests, offering their all to a universal power. An irrefutable compilation cornerstone, the National Office For Black Catholics showcased Charles Murphy’s lionhearted account of the Black experience at a 1971 concert. Five years earlier, high school seniors The Superwomen would use their hauntingly angelic harmonies to address racial inequity with a breathless take on ‘Lowlands’.

Reaching the furthest corners, Someone Like Me secures the inaugural licence of three homespun masterpieces. Discovered by fluke in the digital haystacks of Youtube and Soundcloud, Jim Huxley’s bedroom pop earworm melds peacefully into Charlie Webster’s synthesized reverie. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s John Agostino introduces us to the bizarre world of tax scam records, with the artist only now learning that his tender psych-folk demos were leaked via a 1977 bootleg.

Compiled and lovingly restored by armchair digger Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring/The Green Child), Someone Like Me pays due service to seventeen rarefied journals of truth and devotion. Adorned with visual artist Chris Fallon’s figure and flora dream extractions, the uniting songbook is further detailed by expansive track-by-track liner notes and a forward from San Franciscan poet Rod Roland.


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Genres: Rock / Folk / Psych

Digipack CD

Tracklist:

1. Sharkey - Someone Like Me
2. Lynne Ann Kingan - If You Love Me - Hate Me
3. James Thornbury - So Tan
4. Jim Huxley - Only A Song
5. Charlie Webster - Snodland
6. The Bob Hughes Band - You Broke My Heart
7. Goldrust - Going Yesterday
8. Jim Kennedy - You Are The Reason
9. Jon Betmead - Marie Elene
10. Charles Murphy - The Foot That's Holding Me Down
11. Remnant - I Will Set You Free
12. Fred Potts - Following Rainbows
13. The Superwomen - Lowlands
14. Robison Kaplan Ltd. - Don't Say Goodbye
15. Gary Ramey - You Are His
16. John Agostino - Loss of Love
17. Ritchie Tierney - Please Stop Breaking Me Down

Short info:

A humanity-reminding suite of miracle moments, Someone Like Me unites a geographically unbound cast of real people in pursuit of a meaningful connection. Taping their lived experience in economic studios in quiet English counties, Pacific Northwest woodland retreats and the big city bustle of Sydney and Los Angeles, these kindred spirits rendered sheer beauty in the process. Custom pressed folk songs of love, loss and the lord saviour.

Illuminating minor works from seasoned players such as former Syndicate Of Sound chart-topper Sharkey and late-era Canned Heat lynchpin James Thornbury, the collection simultaneously honours the fleeting amateurism of hobby musicians. With their one shot at tangible vinyl, freshman Lynne Ann Kingan realised her loose bubblegum rocker on campus time, while U.S. Navy recruit Fred Potts cut his unconditionally serene ballad remotely stationed on a Spanish naval base. Spartan production continues to reign with Jon Betmead’s hair-raising gospel, howling into infinite space, and Goldrust’s stripped back garden hymn.

Throughout the hour-long reflection, faith has an intermittent yet revelatory presence, most overtly with the divine choral soul of Seventh-day Adventist quartet Remnant. More subtly, Gary Ramey and Jim Kennedy both turned to song in their spiritual quests, offering their all to a universal power. An irrefutable compilation cornerstone, the National Office For Black Catholics showcased Charles Murphy’s lionhearted account of the Black experience at a 1971 concert. Five years earlier, high school seniors The Superwomen would use their hauntingly angelic harmonies to address racial inequity with a breathless take on ‘Lowlands’.

Reaching the furthest corners, Someone Like Me secures the inaugural licence of three homespun masterpieces. Discovered by fluke in the digital haystacks of Youtube and Soundcloud, Jim Huxley’s bedroom pop earworm melds peacefully into Charlie Webster’s synthesized reverie. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s John Agostino introduces us to the bizarre world of tax scam records, with the artist only now learning that his tender psych-folk demos were leaked via a 1977 bootleg.

Compiled and lovingly restored by armchair digger Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring/The Green Child), Someone Like Me pays due service to seventeen rarefied journals of truth and devotion. Adorned with visual artist Chris Fallon’s figure and flora dream extractions, the uniting songbook is further detailed by expansive track-by-track liner notes and a forward from San Franciscan poet Rod Roland.




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Tracklist
1. Digeridoo
2. Flaphead
3. Phloam
4. Isopropanol
5. Polynomial-C
6. Tamphex (Hedphuq Mix)
7. Phlange Phace
8. Dodeccaheedron
9. Analogue Bubblebath 1
10. Metaphaestic
11. We have arrived (Aphex Twin QQT Mix)
12. We have arrived (Aphex Twin TTQ Mix)
13. Didgeridoo (Live in Cornwall 1990)

Undoubtedly one of the most important and influential electronic artists to have emerged in popular music, the sonic misfit from Cornwall, Aphex Twin, released a breathtaking slew of early singles and albums from 1991 onwards (and continues to present day). The first clutch of groundbreaking works came on the legendary Belgium label R&S Records and were collected on a compilation album ‘Classics’, released in 1995, and followed the global success of the timeless album ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’.

‘Classics’ receives a long overdue vinyl & CD re-press for 2025, with a fresh vinyl cut by acclaimed mastering engineer Beau Thomas, and a R&S Records sticker sheet inserted into the LP sleeves including cover artwork of the two singles ‘Digeridoo’ and ‘Xylem Tube’ EP which are both featured on this compilation album.

Key Sales Notes
- 30 Years Since first pressing in 1995
- R&S Records sticker sheet inserted into the LP Sleeves
- Fresh vinyl cut by acclaimed mastering engineer Beau Thomas

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Tracklist:

01. L'Último Sacrifacio (22:56)
02. Marcia, Baila, Suogna (09:30)
03. Suogna Piazzata (03:45)


Short info:

Pierre Bujeau is an expert at creating temporary escape zones—musical structures to evade the everyday. Sometimes he works collectively as part of the mysterious French groups Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz. But it’s when he’s on his own, performing as Megabasse, that he offers the most complete break from reality. His kit is simple: a few bottles of cheap lager, twin Fender amps, and his double-necked guitar. An instrument like this normally signals maximum rockist excess—think Jimmy Page, Geddy Lee, or that dude from the Eagles. In Pierre’s hands, it becomes more like a zither or a dulcimer, producing soft chiming patterns that build against themselves until the sound of the room, passed back and forth between his two amps, starts to blur everything, and we are away in another world. Wait, though—let down your yoga bun and don’t light the palo santo yet. The new space he creates has nothing to do with smug wellness. It’s a rough, do-it-yourself psychedelia, scuffed but hopeful. Not a perfect blank space to be your best self in, but instead a communal dreaming, an uncanny place where all are welcome.

Until now, without catching him live, the Megabasse experience has been difficult to find: CD-Rs, short-run tapes, and one blink-and-you-missed-it LP. Thankfully, this record on Efficient Space, a reissue of some pieces that were previously only available on a small cassette edition, will put that right. Here are two long, intricate pieces, and something new—a shorter track that hints at a move toward beautiful, burnt-out guitar soli.

Unless you are very lucky, wise, or rich, life imposes its structures on you. Maybe a record of shimmering, tranced guitar is all you need to get out from underneath?


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LP

Special remarks : Full-colour reverse-card sleeve with lyric sheet

Tracklist
A1. The Reds, Pinks and Purples - Upside Down in an Empty Room (Slow Version)
A2. The Gabys - Your Spell
A3. The Hobknobs - Dictionary
A4. Who Cares? - Wax and Wane
A5. The Sprigs - Leagues of Marsh to Swallow Towers
A6. Chateau - How Long on the Platform
A7. I Can I Can't - Personal Favourite
B1. Drunk Elk - Euros
B2. Rat Columns - Fruit and Nuts
B3. The Lewers - I Can't Sleep (But I've Been Trying)
B4. Daily Toll - Time
B5. Carla dal Forno - Veselka City Lights

Shortinfo:
Going back to sleep… a lovingly gathered suite of windswept, heart-bursting contemporary DIY indie-pop and folk including new songs by Carla dal Forno, The Reds, Pinks and Purples, Lewsberg-related duo The Hobknobs and Rat Columns, next to luminaries and newcomers Daily Toll, Who Cares?, The Lewers, The Sprigs, Drunk Elk, I Can I Can't, The Gabys and Chateau. A beautiful contemporary companion of I Won't Have To Think About You (A Colourful Storm, 2017).

Focused on Australian artists predominantly recording and performing in intimate spaces, the compilation's sentiment extends to likeminded artists around the world. A feeling of introspection that seems impossible to achieve when recording for anyone but yourself. A trip through the wonderfully diverse international pop underground, or more simply, a group of music makers performing on A Colourful Storm's imaginary stage.









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2LP, limited edition vinyl + booklet

Tracklist:
A1. HYbr:ID Ectopia Environment
A2. HYbr:ID Ectopia Elastic 1

B1. HYbr:ID Ectopia Quarks Minus
B2. HYbr:ID Ectopia Removing Infinities
B3. HYbr:ID Ectopia Elastic 2

C1. HYbr:ID Ectopia Interacting
C2. HYbr:ID Ectopia Radiation Mechanics

D1. HYbr:ID Ectopia Field 1
D2. HYbr:ID Ectopia Singularity
D3. HYbr:ID Ectopia Gravitation

Info:
HYbr:ID Vol. 2 is the second installment of Alva Noto’sHYbr:IDseries initiated in 2021. The new album captures the music commissioned to score RichardSiegal's Ectopia performed in 2021 by Tanztheater Pina Bausch with Shooting into the Corner (2008-09) by Anish Kapoor. Building upon the captivating blend of immersive dub and electronica from the first installment, HYbr:ID Vol. 2 takes the listener on a journey into the realm of intricately manipulated digital production. These ten compositions delve into infinity, drawing inspiration from resonance and elasticity, concepts rooted in Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime model. Throughout the album, Carsten Nicolai summons precise rhythmic patterns that gracefully hover, reminiscent of celestial bodies orbiting in perfect cosmic unison. The sonic landscape gradually unfolds with somber and brooding tones, incorporating spacious sound design, ethereal atmospheres, and cascading metallic percussions. These elements are delicately crafted with artistic finesse, set against a backdrop of expansive dub textures. At times, the music takes unforeseen turns, as melancholic chords skitter and meander through a digital haze, evoking an atmosphere of introspection and emotion. The ten compositions are accompanied by graphic notations informed by the album’s sonic and acoustic codes.

Album art designed by Carsten Nicolai / Nibo
Mastering by Bo @ Calyx


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Special remarks : 2LP, 2022 Repress Edition

Vital Sales Points:
- Released by popular NTS show Noise In My Head
- Liner notes from Ivan Smagghe and artwork from Misha Hollenbach (Perks and Mini)
- Features many rarities reissued for the first time ever (Karen Marks' most wanted Australian cold wave single last sold for 290€ while Once traded for 170€)
- All tracks officially licensed, sourcing original masters when available
- Includes digital download

Tracklist
A1. Linda Smith - I So Liked Spring , A2. Karen Marks - Cold Café , A3. Bruce Langhorne - Leaving Del Norte , A4. The Seraphims - Conciousness of Happening
B1. Garry Davenport - Sarra , B2. Some of My Best Friends Are Canadians - Feeling Sheepish , B3. The Rising Storm - Frozen Laughter
C1. Warfield Spillers - Daddy's Little Girl , C2. Joyce Heath - I Wouldn't Dream Of It , C3. Joe Tossini and Friends - Wild Dream , C4. Scott Seskind - I Remember
D1. Angel - Driving (Down) , D2. Nini Raviolette and Hugo Weris - Slow , D3. Nora Guthrie - Home Before Dark , D4. Once - Joanna

Short info:
Sky Girl is a mysteriously unshakeable companion, a deeply melancholic and sentimental journey through folk-pop, new wave and art music micro presses that span 1961-1991. A seemingly disparate suite of selections of forgotten fables by more or less neverknowns, Sky Girl forms a beautifully coherent and utterly sublime whole deftly compiled by French collectors DJ Sundae and Julien Dechery.

From Scott Seskind's adolescent musical road movie to Karen Marks' icy Oz-wave, the charming DIY storytelling of Italian-American go-getter Joe Tossini and the ethereal slow dance themes of Parisian artists Nini Raviolette and Hugo Weris, Sky Girl resonates on a wide spectrum historically, geographically and stylistically. It unites in a singular, longing, almost intangible ambience.

If the names sound wholly unfamiliar that doesn't matter, the nature of the compositions swiftly nurtures an intimacy with these lonely, poignant, openhearted wanderers. Most were available in a very limited capacity at the time of their release, some were never really released at all - Gary Davenport declined to release Sarra after he split with the girl for whom the track is named - years later a friend convinced Davenport to allow him to put 100 copies online to sell and DJ Sundae was quick enough to snare one. Beyond their scarcity, these tracks are bound together by a certain raw beauty that's achievable when music is made and no one is listening.

Sky Girl comprises of fifteen officially licensed songs, a two year international scavenger hunt through long-folded home label operations, the depths of internet forums and traceless acetates. Both compilers are well trained record sleuths - DJ Sundae's labels Hollie and Idle Press have reissued Arthur Russell affiliate Nirosta Steel and DIY relic Pitch, while Julien Dechery previously compiled 'Fire Star', a retrospective on Tamil film composer Ilaiyaraaja, for Bombay Connection.

Released by Noise In My Head offshoot Efficient Space, Sky Girl is enriched with artwork from Perks and Mini mutant Misha Hollenbach and appropriately elegant sleeve notes courtesy of Ivan Smagghe.






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Special remarks : LP with download code

Tracklist

1. Title
2. Straight Thru
3. E Park
4. W/O Love
5. Stranger
6. When Yr Up There
7. Strobe Lite
8. Lucky
9. Prince S Version
10. Always In Jokes

Short info:

Initially conceived as a short-run cassette for Altered States Tapes, YL Hooi's nameless collection of textural apparitions oscillate between icy DIY minimalism, FX-drenched atmospherics and nang chamber dub. A ghost-like transmission, Hooi's voice serves to anchor an array of sonic abstractions and impressionistic melodic motifs as a sense of purgatorial ambience dominates throughout. Co-produced with alleged fellow Kallista Kult member Tarquin Manek (LST, M. Quake), Untitled's ultimate sensation is its halfway state, as if caught between worlds.

The album's final form speaks of its origins, recorded intermittently over a two year period (2017-2019). The extended time passage seeps into the song structures, spiralling and mutating from the same centre - the elegiac pulse of opener 'Title' presages the hymnal lilt of 'Straight Thru', before birthing the inverted bossa nova of 'W/O Love'. The result is a constantly shifting tableaux of shared liminal spaces. These songs seemingly emerge in plumes of smoke, magician's tricks conjured from the ether. It's a vision that ossifies at Untitled's midpoint with a cover of Love Joys' 'Stranger', the lovers rock original morphed into the transportive intimacy of Hooi's own hazy inner space, a totem of the LP's amorphous and ultimately sensuous qualities.

The sound from both down under and way out there in subspace, Untitled is an inspired masterstroke of experimental mystics. This 2021 Efficient Space edition is remastered and robed in new artwork that honours the Melbourne-based earth dragon's Chinese and Russian heritage.



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LP

Tracklist:

1. Houdini's Plane
2. Incident at Westall
3. Aspen Blues
4. On the Mountain
5. Solar Flare
6. Valley of Sorrows
7. The Loneliest Astronaut
8. To the Lighthouse
9. I've Got a Buzz


Short info:

A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is the new album by Australian atmospheric pop trio Hydroplane, the storied 'offshoot' formed by three quarters of independent pop group, The Cat's Miaow. On this, their first music after two decades plus of radio silence, Andrew Withycombe, Kerrie Bolton and Bart Cummings return to the gentle, close-quarters musical world they shared around the turn of the century.

Recorded during 2024 in Melbourne and Ballarat, A Place In My Memory… picks up the thread Hydroplane set down with its precursor, 2001's The Sound Of Changing Places, though you can hear echoes of their other releases, too, with Withycombe noting a through-line from the group's 1998 "Failed Adventure" single. There's little quite like A Place In My Memory…, then or now, though. Maybe you can draw some connections between Hydroplane and their sister group, The Cat's Miaow, while fellow travellers might include Empress, The Ah Club, and further back, Young Marble Giants, Veronique Vincent (the muffled, ticking drum machine also makes me think of Robin Gibb's Robin's Reign).

There's also an umbilical to the bedroom-crafted electronica doing the rounds in the late nineties and early noughties. Hydroplane hint at this through their approach to songwriting, which often builds creatively around loops as structural devices. Through all this, the trio achieve an effortless, organic weightlessness across these nine lovely songs. Many feature Bolton's clear singing voice, drifting along, while guitars, keyboards, drum machines and loops tickertape away. The constituent parts fit together, but they also have a curiously detached quality - think of abstract cloud formations sharing the same sky.

Hydroplane and The Cat's Miaow often dealt in emotional ambiguity and uncertainty, and the uncertainty of the nostalgic. This was always one of the most appealing facets of their music, and A Place In My Memory… is thus named perfectly. I couldn't dream up a better title for the album and its reflections on history, lived experience, and the inevitable tangle between these two phenomena. These reflections variously address such concerns as human cruelty, flight, space travel, adventurism and spiritualism. There's also "To the Lighthouse", not a direct reference to the Virginia Woolf book, but a great title, nonetheless. (They've always had excellent titles, often borrowed, for songs and albums.)

A beautiful collection of drowsy, sleepy pop, humble and quiet, but resolute in its craft, A Place In My Memory Is All I Have To Claim is dream work in practice; a lovely reintroduction. Welcome back, then.





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Format Notes: 2023 first time vinyl issue, 140g double vinyl, updated artwork

Track List:

A1 - Stoned Part I (4:51)
A2 - Positively Beautiful (4:24)
--
B1 - Lewis IV (3:53)
B2 - Send Me An Angel (4:36)
B3 - Til The Morning Light (4:08)
--
C1 - Shame (4:24)
C2 - When Will I Ever Learn - Part I (4:40)
C3 - Lovin’ U More (4:14)
--
D1 - From The Day We Met - Part II (4:43)
D2 - Lovelight (4:53)
D3 - Sheneverdid (4:49)

Release Notes:

Stoned Part I was the first self-released album from lost soul phenomenon Lewis Taylor. His third album proper, it was initially released on his own label Slow Reality in 2002 and it's been licensed to Be With for this long-awaited double LP release, its first ever vinyl edition. The songs are varied, hook filled and outstanding. Beloved by his legions of diehard fans, it's nothing short of a masterpiece.

After parting ways with Island, and without a label deal, Lewis went back to his home studio and began to record Stoned Part I in 2001. Co-written and co-produced with longtime collaborator Sabina Smyth, Lewis sings and plays all the instruments on this beautiful, emotional and very human album. It represents Lewis at his most accessible and finds him in the middle ground between his two Island releases. In some ways, Stoned Part I distills the best of his musical sensibilities. The flawless production is dense, layered and very early-2000s slick. The bottom end is thick, funky and sexy.

The complex, proggy-soul of title track "Stoned" opens the album and instantly captivates. Deep swinging funk with truly sweet soulful vocals, complemented by wah-wah guitar and swelling acidic synths. As Lewis himself told us, the ad libs at the end of the track were a nod to Paul McCartney at the end of "Hey Jude". Fan favourite "Positively Beautiful" has shades of Curtis and Marvin; its richly layered harmonies propelled by a simple, metronomic click-track that gives way to a more fully fleshed beat for the magnificent coda.

The slow, sweeping majesty of "Lewis IV" is all moody atmosphere, featuring dense, richly textured music and heavenly multi-tracked harmonies. The stop-you-in-your-tracks incredible "Send Me An Angel" could have been a huge AM radio hit, beautifully crafted sophisticated soul-pop songwriting in the vein of the very best Sade records. Yep! *That good* The smooth, psychedelia-lite "Til The Morning Light" is a gorgeous, sun-dappled love song, layered with Lewis' distinctive honey drenched vocals and, again, the type of record you could've easily heard all over the radio at the time of initial release.

The remarkable, wide-eyed "Shame" packs so many shifting styles into one song, it has to be heard to be believed. Opening in a laconic, breezy style, not unlike a Dallas Austin or Rodney Jerkins produced R&B hit of the day, it morphs into a heavy psych-soul Soulaquarians wig-out (the solo bearing an uncanny resemblance to Carlos Santana’s on "She’s Not There") before elegantly sliding into string-assisted symphonic soul and then back around again. And again. Sheer brilliance. The sublime, gentle head-nod funk-soul of "When Will I Ever Learn" (Part 1) is a strikingly well-turned-out tune, a neat, sweet bass-driven guitar-soul jam that ensures our jaw won't be leaving the floor anytime soon. "Lovin’ U More" sounds like a classic turn-of-the-century Neptunes production, the likes of which they'd lay on for JT BITD. A Latin-tinged groover with more than a little Nile Rodgers-driven slick funk stylings, it's yet another instant Lewis bomb with those gorgeous harmonies and chart-friendly irresistible key-changes to boot. Another indisputable (non-)HIT!

The funky seductive swagger of "From The Day We Met - Part II" opens the final side of wax, giving way to the gigantic buzzing synth-funk beast "Lovelight", a track so insouciantly mighty it should have been a massive hit for someone. Wait, what's that? Robbie Williams covered it? Ah, OK, well, I guess that says something about the effortless pop genius contained within. Containing a seemingly unnoticed nod to Kraftwerk’s "Computer World", it's Lewis's favourite song on the album. It's easy to hear why: "Sabina’s production totally nails it. I love the restraint and the subtlety, and that mixture of warmth and sweetness from the singing against the slightly cold, yet beautiful airy-ness of the backing track." To close this phenomenal album, the twisted electronic soul of "Sheneverdid" marries Lewis's beautiful falsetto to his virtuoso playing and an easy-cum-ominous musical backdrop. Stunning.

Simon Francis’s vinyl mastering, approved by Lewis himself, presents the eleven tracks over a double LP so, as ever, it sounds sensational. The records have been cut by Cicely Balston at Air Studios and pressed at Record Industry. Allow Lewis Taylor to get you Stoned.

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