LP:
Recycled vinyl (random color mix)
Recycled textured paper jackets offset printed full CMYK
Recycled paper obi strip
Recycled felt paper insert printed full CMYK
Edition of 300

“A synapse-popping electro-acoustic soundwalk around Western Europe's cathedrals, chapels and churches, Campana Sonans skews recognizable sacred soundscapes, proposing a contemporary mythology that muddles the past, present and future. Following on from his critically-acclaimed Bathhouse Blues full-length, American sound artist Jake Muir familiarizes himself with German and British sonic architecture by studying some of the medieval shadows that still hang over Europe's streets, even as they continue to evolve. Manipulating environmental recordings captured in Germany and England, Muir presents an impressionistic juxtaposition of parallel cultures: the UK's distinctive "change ringing" technique, where a team of bell-ringers play long varied sequences on a set of tuned bells; and Germany's more sober style, with monotonous peals that add rhythm to daily life.

When Muir moved from Los Angeles to Berlin back in 2019, it wasn't just the German capital's damp weather and long, dark winters that came as a surprise. He was immediately struck by the city's anomalous acoustics, and one particular element stood out: the resonant church bells that echo around Berlin throughout the day to mark time, and for 10 minutes on Sundays as a call for mass. Gathering his field recording equipment, Muir acquainted himself with his new home by following the sonorous clangs, wandering from kiez to kiez to capture each church's distinct auditory flavor. And the more material he collected, the more engrossed he became in the history of bell ringing, prompting a deep dive that would shuttle him across Germany and into Italy, Belgium and the UK.

On Campana Sonans, Muir trains his focus on Berlin, where his journey began, and on England, where he encountered the most elaborate bell ringing practice. Erzklang is a hypnotic lattice of sounds recorded all over the German capital: at Parochialkirche, a reformed church in Mitte; at evangelical church St. Matthäus, at Sophienkirche, another Mitte landmark; and at St. Mathias, a Roman Catholic church just in front of the Potsdam Gate. By fusing the liturgical chimes with snippets of local ambiance - traffic, chattering tourists and birdsong, for example - Muir takes a blurry snapshot of the city, queering its idiosyncratic color spectrum with his various digital processes. Using reverb to replicate the acoustic properties of both the streets and the church interiors, he subtly disturbs the timeline, stretching out brief peals into long, mesmerizing drones and turning garbled voices into ghostly babble.

The environment alters considerably on Changes; Muir uses the same technique and applies it to recordings made at the 1000-year-old St. Oswald church in Oswestry, St. Bartholomew's, Edgbaston and Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, home to Shakespeare’s final resting place. Here, Muir methodically untangles the change-ringing process, linking back to Erzklang with a single bell tone before moving inside the church itself and documenting the ringers' shouted instructions, blending the calls with the bells' mathematical cyclic patterns. Muir memorializes what in 2025 is a dying art-form - a community skill that's disappearing worryingly quickly as young Brits lose interest in the church and its rituals. Unsettling distortions bite into the undulating sequences and underneath the noise, Muir highlights the music's latent euphoria, drawing out its most celestial tonalities.

File under: devotional music.”

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Germany
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Repress!

Since he started producing music, Berlin-based American sound artist Jake Muir has been obsessed with sampling. His 2018 album "Lady's Mantle" was based on manipulated chunks of vintage Californian surf rock, and its follow-up, 2020's midnight symphony "The Hum Of Your Veiled Voice" was sourced from a wide variety of old records, and inspired by the work of experimental turntablists like Marina Rosenfeld, Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck.

On "Mana", Muir looks back to a misunderstood musical movement. Around 1995, a group of New York producers and DJs - including DJ Olive, DJ Spooky and Spectre - pioneered a genre-dissolving sound by unifying hip-hop techniques with ideas pulled from dub, jungle, ambient music and industrial noise. Badged "illbient", it was a short-lived genre that felt like a high-minded psychedelic cousin of the UK's trip-hop.

Muir uses illbient as the springboard for "Mana", utilizing a selection of samples to inform his frothy drones and foreboding atmospheres. He ushers the material into 2021 by diverting it through his own contemporary worldview, attempting to recreate the hyperreal fantasy histories of Japanese RPGs (think "Dark Souls" and "Final Fantasy") and nod to sensual, tactile soundscapes of European industrial labels Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The result is a magickal, sensory journey that's as physical as it is representational.

If the illbient producers were encouraging a burgeoning experimental music landscape to emphasize the tactile feeling of turntablism and sample manipulation, Muir is doing the same with "Mana". Each track heaves and breathes not just with his cultural reference points, but with layered, complicated emotions. We can hear joy, sadness, desire and anguish, obscured by disintegrating noise, hallucinogenic harmonies and sub-aquatic bass. It's electronic music that's rooted not in technology, but in touch.

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Germany
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“Joe Fujinoki centered the compositions of his latest album Glass Torso around the idea of the fragility of the human body. Fujinoki described the narrative thread of the album as that of “holding the shape of a human body as if it might shatter like glass”. The precariousness of the body, the essence of the body as defined by Fujinoki as the torso, and the object relations between the boundaries of dialectical exercises pack themselves into his creative process.

Fujinoki recorded Glass Torso exclusively with analog synthesizers, stumbling in and out of structural loops to find space for accidental discoveries. The ten pieces of recorded material feel somewhere on the edge of typified form, feeling like a vascular system pumping in and out its undulating liquidities. Maybe this is the hollowed space held together by Fujinoki’s notion of the torso where you hear a microscopic world, dubby and generative. Fujinoki is adept at organizing this realm of subtle sound sources, giving proper considerations of shared tonal space. Seemingly, this handling of the precarity of sonic material elucidates Fujinoki’s mature attention to detail.

Ambient music genre tropes often affirm the listeners vessel for escape and dissociation. It provides an intoxicating allure by respite from an overwhelming exterior reality far outside the listeners controls. Here this space becomes apolitical, or its protest vocabulary softer and subtle. Fujinoki does not aim to tackle hyperobject topics on how to course correct the world, but he does something increasingly rarer to come across. On ?????????? ?????????? an alternative space is created not as shelter, but as a meditation on negotiation and compromise. This twenty eight minutes of audio lays down a foundation for imagination, for imagining how to negotiate the fragility of the self. Zoomed out, the implications of his negotiative sonics can be a playground for broader reflections on distributive care and attention.

Fujinoki says he feels “alert” to his physicality and placement in the world amidst vast digital cultures creating impositions on him and his surroundings. On ?????????? ?????????? he creates a concretized space on a vinyl record, where the virtual and the tangible antagonize one another that create the spectacle of the listening experience. This spectacle is a soft one, a considered one, and an utmost enjoyable one. Fujinoki juggles opposing forces brilliantly, and formulates an exquisite palette of soft passing music so he can also help the listener with the exquisite burden of their own Glass Torso.”

- Nick Klein, January 2026

LP:
Recycled random colored vinyl by Donaldson Pressing
Bespoke recycled hemp paper jackets by Middle Press
Silkscreening by Goatmother Industrial
Edition of 100

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

LP:
Recycled vinyl (random color mix)
Recycled textured paper jackets offset printed full CMYK
Recycled paper obi strip
Recycled felt paper insert printed full CMYK
Edition of 300

“A synapse-popping electro-acoustic soundwalk around Western Europe's cathedrals, chapels and churches, Campana Sonans skews recognizable sacred soundscapes, proposing a contemporary mythology that muddles the past, present and future. Following on from his critically-acclaimed Bathhouse Blues full-length, American sound artist Jake Muir familiarizes himself with German and British sonic architecture by studying some of the medieval shadows that still hang over Europe's streets, even as they continue to evolve. Manipulating environmental recordings captured in Germany and England, Muir presents an impressionistic juxtaposition of parallel cultures: the UK's distinctive "change ringing" technique, where a team of bell-ringers play long varied sequences on a set of tuned bells; and Germany's more sober style, with monotonous peals that add rhythm to daily life.

When Muir moved from Los Angeles to Berlin back in 2019, it wasn't just the German capital's damp weather and long, dark winters that came as a surprise. He was immediately struck by the city's anomalous acoustics, and one particular element stood out: the resonant church bells that echo around Berlin throughout the day to mark time, and for 10 minutes on Sundays as a call for mass. Gathering his field recording equipment, Muir acquainted himself with his new home by following the sonorous clangs, wandering from kiez to kiez to capture each church's distinct auditory flavor. And the more material he collected, the more engrossed he became in the history of bell ringing, prompting a deep dive that would shuttle him across Germany and into Italy, Belgium and the UK.

On Campana Sonans, Muir trains his focus on Berlin, where his journey began, and on England, where he encountered the most elaborate bell ringing practice. Erzklang is a hypnotic lattice of sounds recorded all over the German capital: at Parochialkirche, a reformed church in Mitte; at evangelical church St. Matthäus, at Sophienkirche, another Mitte landmark; and at St. Mathias, a Roman Catholic church just in front of the Potsdam Gate. By fusing the liturgical chimes with snippets of local ambiance - traffic, chattering tourists and birdsong, for example - Muir takes a blurry snapshot of the city, queering its idiosyncratic color spectrum with his various digital processes. Using reverb to replicate the acoustic properties of both the streets and the church interiors, he subtly disturbs the timeline, stretching out brief peals into long, mesmerizing drones and turning garbled voices into ghostly babble.

The environment alters considerably on Changes; Muir uses the same technique and applies it to recordings made at the 1000-year-old St. Oswald church in Oswestry, St. Bartholomew's, Edgbaston and Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, home to Shakespeare’s final resting place. Here, Muir methodically untangles the change-ringing process, linking back to Erzklang with a single bell tone before moving inside the church itself and documenting the ringers' shouted instructions, blending the calls with the bells' mathematical cyclic patterns. Muir memorializes what in 2025 is a dying art-form - a community skill that's disappearing worryingly quickly as young Brits lose interest in the church and its rituals. Unsettling distortions bite into the undulating sequences and underneath the noise, Muir highlights the music's latent euphoria, drawing out its most celestial tonalities.

File under: devotional music.”

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

In Sheep’s Clothing announces the long-awaited vinyl pressing of Marc Leclair’s beloved 2005 album Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes. The album will also be available on streaming for the first time via Community Music Group.

For years after Marc Leclair released Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes, he heard from listeners who had lived with the record in an unusually intimate way. Many described how the music became part of the emotional landscape of the months leading to birth. “I never expected that,” Leclair says. “Many women told me they listened to the record throughout their pregnancies. They said it made a real difference, that it helped them. It became more than just a record.”

First issued on CD in the early 2000s, Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes (Music for Three Pregnant Women) now returns in a new edition from In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi, appearing on vinyl for the first time as a double LP. The record is being pressed in Detroit at Archer Record Pressing, the historic plant behind deep-groove classics by Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Underground Resistance, UR’s Jeff Mills, and J Dilla.

Listeners who know the Montreal-based Leclair through his better-known work as Akufen might be surprised by the tone here. During the same years he was shaping the intricate micro-sampling tracks that made Akufen a cult figure on labels including Perlon, Force Inc. and Trapez, Leclair was quietly developing this far more personal project. The meticulous craftsmanship remained the same, though the focus shifted from the hyper-detailed cut-up rhythms of his dance records toward something slower and more atmospheric. “I always compare my work to a jeweler,” Leclair says. “It’s really very precise. I’m a bit of a detail freak. I can spend hours or days on just one phrase in one song. Everything has to be perfectly put together.”

The project began almost accidentally. A few members of Leclair’s circle became pregnant nearly simultaneously, including one who had long believed she couldn’t conceive. The first track he recorded for the project wasn’t meant to advance a larger concept, he says. “It was meant to highlight the fact that three of my closest friends became pregnant at exactly the same time.”

Leclair was already a father with a three-year-old daughter, so the emotional terrain of early parenthood was familiar. Gradually the idea expanded. “I began thinking, why not make a whole album that celebrates this and also follows the entire pregnancy, the nine months,” he says. The music developed piece by piece, including a track originally commissioned by the Berlin experimental duo Rechenzentrum that would later become the album’s opening movement.

Nearly seven years passed between the first composition and the finished album, and the music mirrors the strange arithmetic of pregnancy itself. What begins as a single idea multiplies outward, sounds layering and branching until the album feels less like a sequence of compositions than a living process unfolding in time. “I work very slowly,” Leclair says. “Everything has to be something I’m completely behind. I never want to rush anything. I want things to come naturally.” Across its 72 minutes, the album blossoms with the patience of a long meditation on time, growth and emergence.

When Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes first appeared via Mutek, it circulated quietly but steadily. Critics who discovered it later recognized its unusual scope. In a 2006 Pitchfork review, Mark Richardson gave the record an 8.1, calling “150e Jour” “an unfailingly gorgeous and tightly sequenced quilt of guitar and piano samples reminiscent of Tangerine Dream,” and describing “85e Jour” as infused with “viscous pop ambient drift, the gauzy synth pads ebbing and flowing with rhythm.” Boomkat described the album as “a majestic opus from a producer that's always promised so much — here delving into a panoramic construction of almost visibly radiant music that works so beautifully through each and every second of its 72 minute lifespan.”

The new In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi edition finally presents the record in the format Leclair long imagined. “I always thought that record deserved a vinyl edition,” he says. Spread across two LPs, the music now has room to unfold at its natural pace. More than twenty years after it first appeared, Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes remains what it was from the start: a carefully shaped meditation on transformation and the quiet miracle of life beginning.

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"Music, like love, surprises you, makes your heart race, gives you new eyes with which to look at yourself in the mirror..." (Gigi Masin)With an exclusive presentation by GIGI MASIN, UP TO 23 release their second album, now with an expanded three-member lineup following the permanent addition of ENRICO CONIGLIO over the founder members MARCO BUFFETTI and FRANCESCO FINCATO. The album draws inspiration from the 1980s, evoking atmospheres reminiscent of sci-fi soundtracks. Partly romantic, partly doom ambient, the work unfolds as a requiem for our planet. Liquid and enveloping atmospheres drift between melodic ambient territories — explored through processed guitars and synthesizers — and soberly electronic paths traveled to the rhythm of sequencer-driven patterns and programmed structures.Dramatic and evocative moments emerge throughout this succession of varied yet perfectly integrated and fluid soundscapes, where sounds and progressions combine with ever-shifting solutions, following a descriptive thread that remains consistent as it continuously unravels through encompassing and emotionally engaging textures. AN APPLE A DAY YOU DIE ANYWAY is the perfect soundtrack to these dark times that UP TO 23 want to color in order to continue to hope, to live without having to survive.

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Sometimes the title of an album tells you everything you need to know. Laurence Pike’s Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet is like that: The music within represents a search for freedom, potentiality—liberatory strategies that transcend the ego and the solitary, atomized figure.

But in this case, the album title is also a red herring, because there is no jazz quintet here—just Pike, his drums, and his machines, not so much an ersatz ensemble as a purely notional one, a thought experiment equipped with drumsticks, circuitry, and the desire to go beyond hardwired limits.

And the results, strictly speaking, aren’t really jazz, though they incorporate the vocabulary of jazz, along with that of ambient, electronica, and post-rock. They are some other thing, cognizant of genre but never beholden to it. Again, we’re talking about a search for freedom here.

The Sydney-based musician has a long history of coloring outside the lines, not just in his solo recordings—including four albums for the Leaf label between 2018 and 2024—but also in the trio Pivot (later PVT); Szun Waves (alongside saxophonist Jack Wyllie and Border Community’s Luke Abbott); Triosk, which recorded an album with Jan Jelinek in 2003; and even post-punk titans Liars, whom he joined in late 2018.

Of his first album for Balmat, Pike says, “My loose concept was: What does music sound like when the expectations of late capitalism are removed from it? How might a jazz musician from an idealised culture of the future, or even another world, utilise musical language when the conventions of style and marketing are no longer a factor in music making?”

That inquiry, he says, connects to his “guiding principle: that the purpose of music is to access something bigger than the individual, and reveal a sense of possibility and freedom in the world to the listener. To create an understanding that the future can be something other than what we imagined or expect, even unconsciously.”

Heady ideas, but plug into his stream-of-metaconsciousness flow and you may start to intuit what motivates him. There is a deeply lyrical expression in these pieces—in the ruminative piano of opener “Guardians of Memory,” for example—but also a sense of exploded perspective, of ideas approached from more angles than any one mind could dream up. Of a collectivized consciousness, of mycelial networks branching across tone and rhythm and timbre, of ideas articulated in distributed fashion, nodal points dancing across drum heads.

Pike’s imaginary quintet is hardly without precedent; it’s a continuation of concepts floated across Jan Jelinek’s Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Burnt Friedman’s many guises, and much of the recombinant improv of the International Anthem roster, not to mention the far corners of ECM’s catalog in the late 1970s and 1980s, which Pike says have been integral to his development since he was a teenager. Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet is a point in a continuum, a voice in a conversation, a question with no obvious answer: How can the search for otherness in music manifest something true about ourselves?

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Landmark collaboration between two electronic pioneers. A first-time meeting between Suzanne Ciani and Actress — bridging generations of experimental electronic music, from Buchla synthesis to contemporary abstract club forms. First official release of a previously exclusive live work. Concrète Waves is a groundbreaking live collaboration between two titans of avant-garde electronic music, co-commissioned by, and performed at, The Barbican, London and Barcelona’s renowned Sónar. Now, for the first time it is available to stream and download via Werkdiscs, Actress’ newly relaunched record label.

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(Limited Clear Vinyl Edition. Expanded edition with unissued bonus material, reassembled as a standalone suite, with new text by Danny Hyde and original artwork by Trevor Brown) Key long-term collaborators and Coil's "secret third member" Danny Hyde located the original Hellraiser studio session tapes, and the bonus material recovered from them is presented here as an "expanded ritual" edition.
For fans of pain & pleasure, Throbbing Gristle, lost horror soundtracks & haunted electronics.
Back in 1987, Clive Barker's supernatural body-horror classic Hellraiser hit cinemas worldwide and introduced audiences to the demonic Cenobites. Barker was a devoted COIL fan (Peter Christopherson and John Balance), and he famously said they were the only band he'd ever heard on record whose music he'd had to take off because, in his words, "theymade his bowels churn.". He initially invited them to compose the film's music, and the group began recording cues. But the producers at New World Pictures ultimately rejected the material in favor of a more traditional approach, bringing in Christopher Young, whose final score remains excellent, if less experimental. What remains from Coil is an unfinished soundtrack with surviving fragments and rough ideas, abruptly left behind mid-process, a glimpse into an alternate Hellraiser movie, one we can only fantasize into existence.
Nearly 40 years later, key long-term collaborators and Coil's "secret third member" Danny Hyde located the original Hellraiser studio session tapes, and the bonus material recovered from them is presented here as an "expanded ritual" edition, reassembled into a standalone, possibly definitive and strangely beautiful nightmare suite. Play it in the dark and experience the consequences of raising hell...

Tracklist

A1. Coil - Attack Of The Senmapods
A2. Coil - The Box Theme (Mix 2)
A3. Coil - The Main Title
A4. Coil - Zither Theme
A5. Coil - The Hellbound Heart (Mix 1)
A6. Coil - No New World
A7. Coil - The Box Theme (Mix 1)
B1. Coil - Arcade Sound
B2. Coil - Cardinal Points
B3. Coil - Atmospheric Stuff
B4. Coil - Hellraiser Theme (Mix 2)
B5. Coil - Flutey Theme
B6. Coil - Unearthly Hell


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Tracklist:
1.Bed on Mars
2.Lost 05:26
3.The Age of Sampling
4.Movement
5.UMI
6.Golden
7.Deception Dance
8.Azimuth (John Taylor)
9.Fifteen

Following the jazzy library vibes of 2023’s collaborative Dolphin LP with Greg Foat and Moses Boyd, the venetian maestro Gigi Masin returns to the ambience for which he is renowned, with Movement - his first solo full-length since 2020’s Calypso, and his Sacred Bones Records debut. Fuelled by creative reinvention and rhythmic motion, he moves seamlessly between melancholy electronic notes, technoid robotics, groovy liminal cloudscapes, and fathoms-deep ambient aquatics.

Since early beginnings in obscurity, his 1986 debut album Wind slowly built an organic following on late night radio, later bolstered when “Clouds” was sampled by artists like Björk, Post Malone, and more. He now counts Oneohtrix Point Never, Devendra Banhart, Caroline Polachek, and the late Kenny Wheeler as fans.

The new album Movement reflects on Masin’s place within the pantheon of ambient masters, his ongoing artistic ambitions, and his aspirations for a scene which he’s seen grow exponentially from humble beginnings. The LP is also an ode to literal movement, both in nature, and in human physical expressions to sound. Masin strived to make ambient music for movement, not in the standard dance music sense, but “dynamic music, with a beating heart full of love.” Reconfiguring ambient’s association with solitary listening and cold academia, Gigi went outwards, channeling something somatic that connects with the body, not just the mind.

“Bed on Mars” sets the titular tone for Masin’s renewed curiosity, with cosmic atmospherics evoking the sensation of waking up on a new planet unafraid, whilst the poignant synthesized trumpet and suspended liminal limbo of “Lost” feels like floating adrift in an unknown sea. Delving further into off-centre beats is the celestial techno funk of “Deception Dance,” which sounds like Sun Electric jamming with Carl Craig and Kraftwerk. The bright beaming light of “Golden” radiates warmth, sounding like the bossa nova brother of Göttsching’s Balearic classic E2 E4.

Despite the passing of his wife after a long illness, and losing his musical archive in a flood, Gigi remains pure-at-heart and positive, pouring his soul into the pursuit of beauty. The latest in a slow starting but steadily building career, Movement sees Masin continue to secure his seat at the table of true ambient greats.

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