Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with »The Dream Island of Birds«. Neither documentary nor abstraction, »The Dream Island of Birds« sits between field recording, memory, and invention — an island heard through time and circuitry.

In the early 1990s, Cooper met illustrator and writer Charles van Sandwyk while walking on a small island in Fiji. Van Sandwyk was living there quietly, working from a modest bamboo house near the beach. Years later, Cooper learned that following a serious car accident, van Sandwyk experienced vivid dreams during his recovery — one of which became a small illustrated book titled The Dream Island of Birds. A signed postcard from that book still hangs in Cooper’s studio. In 2012, Cooper spent a month as artist-in-residence on Pulau Ubin, a small island between Singapore and Malaysia, recording birds and insects across the island. Home to more than 300 resident and migratory bird species, Pulau Ubin provided the source material for this album, later combined with electronics and digital processing. The track titles reference some of the island’s more evocatively named birds, though the sounds themselves are not literal representations. One piece is not derived from live birds at all, but imagined entirely through electronic means.

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One of the longest standing figures amidst the Discrepant wolfpack, the unstoppable alias of sound collector Laurent Jeanneau returns to the fold 2 years after 'Tanzania II' with this 2.0 update of the elebrated 'The Lisu' sort-of-mixtape released way back in 2014.

Based on recordings of music from the Lisu communities in China and Thailand captured on site, this mix shows Gong more like a selector or dj, restricting electronic processing to a bare minimum in order to convey different histories, places and timeframes within the same mesmerising continuum. A respectful and deeply vivid evocation of all the richness and diversity found among the different strands of lisu music, from ceremonial vocal incantations through a chibeu string instrument "processed" in loco through saturated street speakers to moments of pure poetic radiance, 'The Lisu' flows gracefully with the keen sense of wonder and knowledge of one of this century's most thoughtful and insightful sonic travellers.

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Between innocence and anger, a record of witness.

Pharoah Chromium is the project of German-Palestinian musician and sonic performer Ghazi Barakat. With Chronicles from the Arab Cold War Pharoah Chromium continues his long-standing engagement with the Palestinian cause, following Gaza (LP, self-released 2015) and Jean Genet à Chatila (7”, self-released 2018).

In the summer of 2023, new material began to take shape from a session with flutes, EWI (an analogue synth played like a wind instrument), and belly dancing beats. At first these were instrumentals, waiting for their context. That frame appeared unexpectedly, through the discovery of Chants Révolutionnaires d’Oman on the French label Expression Spontanée — a record that connected seamlessly with the material at hand.

As you listen, Side A reveals its dedication to the children of Gaza. Without exploiting recordings from an ongoing genocide, the music instead channels hope through the voices of Omani children, offering a vision of resilience and possibility in the Middle East.

Side B grows darker, more funerary, reflecting the escalation of the conflict after October 7. Trumpeter Philipp Selalmazidis, a recent collaborator, appears throughout these sessions, adding weight and urgency. Over time, the adolescent voices of the A side give way to adult voices, filling the space with anger and ideological rhetoric — a stark progression from innocence to confrontation.

This is a record that refuses detachment: a work of mourning, resistance, and improbable connections that insists on listening as an act of witness.

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After the conceptual depth of "Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice" (2021), dj sni? returns to Discrepant with a more direct and visceral document: Turntable Solos.

Composed from live recordings made during the latter half of 2024, Turntable Solos captures dj sni?’s improvised performances in their rawest form. At the core of his setup is Cut ’n’ Play, a software sampler he originally built in Max / MSP in 2007. Since then, he has continued developing custom tools and instruments that extend what Derek Bailey called the “instrumental impulse” — the tactile, responsive relationship between musician and machine that defines improvisation.

Following a summer 2024 tour of Japan with Gonçalo Cardoso, sni? was encouraged to document and release a selection of his live sets. Not long after, a performance at 20a (Alpha) in Hong Kong would become the emotional and conceptual anchor for the project.

In the liner notes, sni? reflects on the eerie parallels between recent footage of protestors in Los Angeles — assaulted by police using so-called “less-lethal” weapons, and civilians being abducted into detention centers — and the 2019 Hong Kong protests. A place once filled with personal nostalgia began to feel like a grim foreshadowing of what might unfold in Western societies.

In this turbulent context, 20a stands out as a space of resistance and renewal — a beacon for a new generation of experimental musicians, growing in defiance of increasing censorship and surveillance. "Turntable Solos" is both a personal statement and a public act of sonic resilience.

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Música para Plátanos takes its name — and much of its inspiration — from the group’s recording studio, situated in the heart of a banana plantation on the humid north shore of Tenerife, Canary Islands. The ever-present sight of the green, sun-drenched fields surrounding their weekly sessions seeped directly into the music: improvised jams that are playful, layered, and deeply connected to place.

This release gathers a distilled selection from those sessions — a kind of “greatest rotten hits” distinct from their ongoing Imaginary Island Music volumes. The album functions as a living archive bringing together a distilled selection of recordings spanning more than five years: from dusty, long-forgotten sessions to evolving tunes that have become staples of the band's live sets but have never before been committed to record. These long-form sessions served as a petri dish for the Lagoss sound, allowing their experiments to putrefy into their chaotic signature strain of cyber-exotica, unstable kosmische or heavily- corroded dub.

The title obvs nods to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, but the logic is inverted. Instead of clean, ambient drift, the record inhabits a dense and fertile environment: polyrhythmic structures, Latin-infused electronics, and shifting counter-tempos that feel weighted by the local humidity. Ultimately, Música para Plátanos is as much about the process as it is the place. Like the plantation outside, the music is subject to the elements; the tracks change shape depending on the heat of the day, what we drank, what we ate. It’s an unstable, honest harvest of sound—shaped by the weather and the state(s) of mind alike.

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