We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” This line from Patti Smith was going round and round Felix Manuel’s head as he gradually constructed Under Tangled Silence, his first album in six years and a record of a literal creative rebirth. Felix originally began it in earnest in 2020 Covid lockdown, but a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown destroyed almost all his work and sent him close to psychic collapse himself. However, ultimately this pushed him to rebuild from scratch and in so doing to confront and reassess every part of his musical and psychological processes. The result is utterly extraordinary. Felix was a child prodigy as an instrumentalist and his advanced musicality has always been prominent in his music, but here he has put himself front and centre as pianist, harpist and more. And this sense of exposure as a performer interweaves with an unflinching emotional openness too. Where sometimes electronic production as advanced as this can use intellect and techniques as shields from soul-baring, this is the sound of someone who can boldly say “I feel things, I cry all the time, and I'm not afraid to say it or show it in the music.” But this doesn’t mean there’s a move away from the soundsystems and dancefloors where Felix made his name as a uniquely innovative vinyl DJ. Even just in the opening track “A Tune for Us”, minimalist piano ripples and jazz drumming flow into the breaks of vintage jungle – and as the structure of the LP unfolds, a deep ambient meditation like “Hold” can sit very naturally in between the futurist dancehall of “L’Ancienne” and the high-definition acid house mind movie of “Galaxy in Silence”. In fact, as with the hands-on musicianship, that gutsy big-speaker electronic impact is delivered with more certainty, more expertise, more personal flourishes than ever. And all of those elements are more integrated than ever too: the sound of a total musical personality emerging afresh is truly something to behold. An already remarkable talent has been refreshed, reborn and is making the music of his life.

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Repress!

The latest by Chicago trio Purelink unspools an alchemical suite of fractal ambient, dusted dub tech, and interstitial electronica, born from a spirit of unity and flux: “All hands on the mixer, forever finding the sound.” Since forming in 2020, Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka Kindtree), and Akeem Asani (aka Millia) have convened regularly in a shared studio to workshop, swap samples, and hone their collective muse via “the endless possibilities of a laptop,” seeking “something different than we would make on our own.”

Distilled from extended compositions prepared and performed across 2022 in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Los Angeles, Signs captures their chemistry at its most liquid and immaterial, mapped in mutating systems of glitch, glass, rhythm, and space. It’s music alternately subdued and subterranean, elevated and remote, attuned to the flickering sentience of outer spheres.

Cover art by Ezra Miller.

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Sailing beyond the boundaries of electronic music, Purelink embrace liquidity on their second album, washing live instrumentation and exposed vocals over their patented cascade of dubbed ambience and ebbing rhythmic experimentation. Since 2020, Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka kindtree) and Akeem Asani (aka Millia) have channeled their most euphoric musical whims into the Purelink project. Drifting between brittle '90s drum 'n bass and dub techno on their cult debut 12" 'Bliss / Swivel' and vaporizing Windy City jazz and post-rock motifs with muggy soundscapes on 2023's critically revered first full-length 'Signs', the trio have managed to define a painterly signature sound that's reflective but not reverent. Sure, Purelink's music can be graceful and bucolic, but it's powered by their innate devotion to the dancefloor's soundsystem.

'Faith' illustrates a period of upheaval for the three friends; relocating from Chicago to New York City, they found themselves surrounded by new scenery and fresh inspirations that permeated their compositions as they adapted to the change. On their previous records, the production process was relatively simple, just three laptops jacked into an interface in Paslaski's living room. Here, they augment the intermixed electronics with acoustic and electric timbres, opening up space for vocal contributions from Hyperdub luminary Loraine James and poet Angelina Nonaj. "Always time for rest," James ponders candidly on 'Rookie', "we settle." Her voice floats like smoke over the trio's familiar pattering rhythms and light-headed synths, now enhanced by capsized guitar motifs and subtle bass plucks.

On 'First Iota' meanwhile, Nonaj's deadpan narration grounds Purelink's dissociated echoes, sub swells and delicate improvisations. "Not everything beautiful has to be real," Nonaj repeats as organic and digital sounds sublime into a lysergic haze. And the softly propulsive 4/4 thuds that steered 'Signs' haven't disappeared entirely, either. On 'Kite Scene' a heartbeat-like pulse underpins Purelink's balmy pads and acidic synths, tactfully disrupted by hollow live percussion, and 'Yoke' muffles its chugging, broken beat sequences with swaddled trance hallucinations, gesturing cautiously towards euphoria. Each element falls into place on the album's final track, 'Circle of Dust', when Paslaski, Paulson and Asani find a fertile middle ground, ornamenting the kinetic, reverberating beats with evaporating whispers, evocative instrumental scrapes and hopeful, ecstatic harmonies.

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The first full vinyl pressing of Patrick Holland's (fka Project Pablo) 2015 album "I Want To Believe".

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Strut proudly reintroduces a sought after independent disco gem from the Topomic catalogue: Beckie Bell’s ‘In Need Of...’, reissued in full for the first time. Originally released in 1980, In Need Of... quickly became a cult classic of the French disco scene

TRACKLIST
A1. SUPER QUEEN
A2. SO MANY WAYS
A3. MAGIC LADY
B1. JOHNNIE'S HOME
B2. IN THE RIGHT PLACE
B3. MUSIC MADNESS
B4. WHAT YOU NEED I CAN BRIN

Listen: listen.k7.com/74dff3c8-1fe1-4ae3-abac-5262a8d2afc6

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: gpsr@wordandsound.netMore