An overview, 1958-2017: thirty-three works, including landmarks like Le Voyage, Messe Pour le Temps Présent, Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir, Messe De Liverpool, Apocalypse De Jean and Dracula; also including fourteen never before released, like La Note Seule, and Grand Tremblement, composed in 2017, the year of his death.
Discs in digi-sleeves, inside a box with a lift-off lid. 100-page booklet.

Brothers Evgeny and Mikhail Gavrilov from Novosibirsk in Siberia.
You might remember Mikhail’s excellent cassette, Roots, which came out on Hive Mind in 2022, under the name Misha Sultan.

‘A little bit like a collaboration between Metalheadz and Weather Report, to accompany a seventies cop thriller.’

‘Sublime, ethereal minimalism: the first drawing together of Onogawa’s soundtrack compositions, plotting a decade of music for films by cult filmmaker Gakuryū Ishii.
‘Sequenced into an album by Onogawa himself, this retrospective spans a fertile period of collaboration with Ishii, through soundtracks for three remarkable films — August in the
Water (1995), Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), and Mirrored Mind (2005) — where the cinema is texturally and sensually imbued with the spiritual, ambient, dreamlike quality of Onogawa’s music.
‘The sound Onogawa conjures for these films is elegant and patient, often spare or essential in form, but saturated in a strange and otherworldly, poetic emotion and atmosphere. Boundaries are crossed between New Age and science fiction, passing through blissfulness, melancholy, and paranoia, towards enchantments of mood and colour.
‘It’s notable that the compositions on this album straddle the millennium, with a fitting mix of divine and uncertain themes. New listeners might hear links to Mark Snow’s work for the X-Files and Millennium, or the soundtracks of certain future-facing and future-fearing Japanese anime or cyberpunk.
‘Onogawa’s music adds great depth and tenor to the sensory experience of the films themselves, but it stands just as strongly as a listening experience on its own terms; a virtuosic example of Ambient that changes in hue when turned in the light. Remarkably, like Ishii’s films, Onogawa’s work has never been widely available outside of fervid underground fan posts, usually sourced from extremely limited and private CDs limited to Japan.
‘This retrospective seeks to remedy that, presenting Onogawa as one of the great composers of the last three decades.’

Rough, trippy, live recordings made two years after The Truth. Raw mid-70s psych.

The French avant-garde quartet, four years in, improvising with instruments from Western, African, Middle-Eastern, and Far-Eastern cultures. Recorded for Futura in 1971, this is their sole album. “We just wanted the sound, the raw sound-texture, before being treated and shaped by any cultural code.”

2 CDs and a DVD from Trevor Jackson’s label: post-rock meets electro-punk, meets electronica, meets who knows. Killer cuts from Fridge, Four Tet, Sonovac, Playgroup, Gramme, Mu and the rest.

‘The debut album from this Berlin and Edinburgh-based duo is an intricate, robust, unique collection of songs, underpinned by intensely textured, interwoven guitars. It nods to Jim O’Rourke’s lounge numbers and the droll lyricism of Jonathan Richman; to Vini Reilly in its serpentine sparseness; to an unlikely confluence of Tortoise and Weather Report.
‘It opens in a flash of light, like a comet, with Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Passages of density rise up from stilled valleys. It’s easy to imagine the pair looking out over the rolling fields of their garden studio in East Lothian.
‘There is a similar crispness and precision to the percussion-work on A Certain Arrangement Of Atoms — where an old, slightly out of tune piano adds a few expressionist strokes to this pointillism, loosening the tension., till all we’re left with is the bass.
‘Although the album orbits around the pendulum sway of The Older I Get, it’s What Cats Think About that stands out most. It’s a Sun City Girls kind of curveball— warmly engaging, ramshackle, intimate, strange.’

1970s bottlings of the ‘crystal giggling energy’ of muse Vista, through a pioneering mix of one-stop synths, tape reversal, feedback and so on. Supposedly the kind of thing you hear during a near-death experience.

The 1982 NYC-post-punk classic, bundling together Can, DAF, PIL and Joy Division.
The sole album released by Factory US.

The exciting Cairo-based project of Alvarius B (Alan Bishop from Sun City Girls and Sublime Frequencies), with Cherif El Masri, Aya Hemeda and Sam Shalabi. Fully-fledged, dark, Middle-Eastern-flavoured psych-folk.

The A is a fully-orchestrated version of two Alvarius B. tracks (one from the Sun City Girls’ 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda LP); the B is a Morrocan folk cover sung in Arabic by Aya Hemeda.

‘J Spaceman recorded this strange record at his own Amazing Grace Studio in June 2005.
It’s hard to describe, but it contains elements of systems musics, with gamelan-like overtones. A perfect companion piece to the new Spiritualized LP.’

Ravishing jazz and electronics from the same stumbling, giddy reaches as La Monte Young and Terry Riley, recorded in Texas in 1981 on multi-tracked organ and synths (with tape loops of birds and wind-chimes), and acoustic guitar.
‘My music is designed to enhance deep meditative, or altered states, to allow the listener to personally connect to the Creator of All that exists in the Universe. My music style is to first create a foundation using cyclic, polyrhythmic music, then build several layers of improvised leads and rhythms that allows you to transcend time and space… We have Memories of Past Lives that reverberate in our hearts like Echoes From Ancient Caves.’

The Observer raved about a recent performance of this at the Wigmore Hall: ‘Solo for Cello (and fixed audio) was the highlight, an extensive, ghostly work played by Apartment House’s indefatigable artistic director, Anton Lukoszevieze. Imagine a baroque dance suite — with the familiar figurations of arpeggios, quick finger work and string crossing — played muted and whispered a few galaxies away, and you get the idea.’
The performer of this recording, Anton himself has written that Solo is ‘an extended exploration of the resonant body of the cello, but also a kind of flickering, glitchy and incessant ‘moto perpetuo’ of extreme intensity and a delicate beauty. The cello has a particular scordatura tuning, which creates an enigmatic harmonic ‘space’ to its sounding throughout the work. As the cellist constantly bows the heavily muted cello with varied arpeggiated freneticism, the instrument emits a particular halo of harmonic resonances creating a spectral and ghostly effect, deceptive and illusory. The work gradually morphs into different sections, each with their own particular motivic identity, at times accompanied by an audio playback of various densities. The latter sections of the work have a baroque-like lightness and ornamental quality, but do not allay the dramatic incisiveness of the the work, which ends with a final enigmatic spasm of sounds.’
And the composer Sheen advised the mastering engineer that ‘the cello is muted with a very heavy metal mute which thins out the sound massively, and Anton plays a super-light bow with extreme flautando, which creates a strange thin wispy sound. I’d like it to sound as distant and liminal as possible, with a lot of bow sound and strange resonances from the harmonics of the cello. With the exception of a few obvious spots where it gets louder and fuller, there should be as little ‘core’ to the sound as possible, but as many strange resonances as possible. The words we used a lot of in rehearsals were ‘baroque’ and ‘internal’ and ‘light’. I hope this helps.’

Transfixing, and good for ears; with luminous strands of Marin Marais, Derek Bailey, and Eliane Radigue.
Check it out!

Grieving, hushed, involving music for voices, field recordings, and white noise, performed by Kantos.