Label Description: Bay Area based experimental metal entities Sutekh Hexen and Seattle’s Hissing unveil SH:HS, a long-awaited collaborative release capturing the raw intensity of their joint improvisational project, SH:HS (Sutekh Hissing Arkestra).
Originally conceived as a live convergence of both bands’ full lineups, SH:HS documents two volatile and distinct performances recorded in 2017 and 2019. These recordings, born from spontaneous interaction and unrestrained sonic exploration, have since undergone an extensive transformation. Across 2024–2025, both groups meticulously revisited the material, cleaning, mixing, and reshaping the source recordings with a careful balance of restraint and intervention, preserving the immediacy of the performances while expanding their depth and dimensionality.
The result is a work that embodies abstract metal improvisation at its most feral and unfiltered. SH:HS channels dissonant textures, unstable rhythmic forms, and raw sonic collisions unfolding in real time. What emerges is a dense and unpredictable soundscape, oscillating between chaos and intention, where structure feels simultaneously eroded and reconstituted in the moment.
This release stands as both a document and a reconstruction, capturing not only the ephemeral nature of live improvisation, but also the evolving dialogue between two of of the west coast’s most uncompromising experimental acts.
CD co-released with Phage Tapes.
Edition of 300 copies in 6 panel Digisleeve. 2 Tracks. Running Time 29:45
Live recordings by James Livingston and Joy Von Spain Mastered by James Plotkin Illustrations by Eric Radey Layout and design by Kevin Gan Yuen and Zach Wise
Label Description: Estonian producer TigerMort joins Body Musick with ‘Trip To Vatican’ EP, a hard stomper 4 tracker of bass electronics and industrial electro.
Label Description: “Nostalgic…dreamy. The sweet sound of teenage dreams made real.” Electronic Sound
“Stunning, oneiric, and otherworldly.” Bandcamp Daily
British-Maltese musician James Vella – founder of Phantom Limb – reissues his 2006 debut solo album of gentle, autumnal ambient-electronica wake:sleep for a special 20th anniversary edition featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the same period.
“I was overjoyed to sign my first ever record deal, back in 2006,” Vella reminisces. “I was a dorky teenager, writing songs in my bedroom and, later, university halls when this record came to be. I had published a few tracks on early music platforms like MySpace and mp3 dot com but when Dynamophone Records (a label! with a website!) told me they were listening, I was ecstatic.”
Created on a laptop part-purchased with his small salary as a clerk in a local record store (and with help from his parents, on the promise of using it for school and university work), wake:sleep is a surprisingly developed body of work. Over a gently diminishing palette, the record expresses the passage of falling asleep, opening with organic and flickering textures and ending with amniotic washes of ambient bliss. It was dedicated in full to Vella’s girlfriend at the time: “these songs are love songs” reads the inscription on the (long sold out) original CD. Catching the ear of nascent but momentarily prosperous San Francisco label Dynamophone Records, the album was released in June 2006, Vella still then a teenager, and garnered some recognition in music press at the time. A year later, Vella’s band yndi halda released their debut album and both projects became significantly more visible.
Opening “I Am To You” is made from dulcet synthesis, recordings of real-life moments, clicky IDM-inspired beat programming, and sweetly melodic acoustic instrumentation and voice. It sits alongside early electronica in its delicate micro-beats and blurring of organic with digital. Spotify hit “Leanna is a Quiet Meow” centres on a repeated harmonium motif and a voice pedal. Its combination of serenity and unexpected timbral playfulness has earned over a million plays on everyone’s favourite DSP.
Later in the record, “The Sleepers” acts as a pivot. Beginning with acoustic guitar, angelic pads, and home-recorded drumkit, it eventually gives way to a fizzing deconstruction of the same raw materials, now made hypnagogic and transportive where it was rhythmic before. After this, the album changes dynamic. It lulls, softly, into near silence with the gargantuan 34-minute closer “The Shipwreck” and newly added companion piece “The Lighthouse”.
Three tracks are added to this special anniversary edition of the album: “On Writing”, “Rosalie Sings”, and the aforementioned “The Lighthouse”. These works were composed at the same time as the remainder of the album, but not included in its original track sequence. They have remained unreleased until now.
Vella’s A Lily project was most recently seen with early 2024’s acclaimed Phantom Limb debut Saru l-Qamar, in which he married archival recordings from his native Malta with dulcet new arrangements for hardware synthesis. Twin releases Sleep Through the Storm and Nocturne Thunder were released on The Ransom Note’s Bytes label in 2020 and 2022 respectively. These two releases – and Saru l-Qamar – see Vella return to synthesis and electronic instrumentation following his band-orientated previous album of 2018. Vella is also a founding member of the highly recognised six-piece yndi halda, and has run the Phantom Limb label since its inception in 2017.
Label Description: Manchester, UK native Tom Collingburn, who records as Unruly Disturbance, has put together a varied and emotional record entitled ‘Frisson’ designed to elicit this very effect. From sweeping ambient work, dripping with gorgeous sound design to beat-driven workouts, the album delivers this physical response to music in spades.
Featuring a few tunes with poetry recitations by featured artist Mat Riches, these pieces act as an anchor on an otherwise instrumental recording that explores different facets of mood, texture, melody, groove, and the human psyche itself. Rife with a mix of analog drift paired with precise programming and sequencing, meticulous around-the-house sampling, and stellar live-take performances, this seasoned electronic music veteran has returned to the fray after a long hiatus…and the wait was worthwhile. Certainly one not to be missed…a treat for the ear-bones.
The album releases 6/12/2026. Anyone who preorders this album will also receive free codes to two of Tom’s previous Unruly Disturbance albums, ‘Music for Scenes,’ and ‘Melodic Drone.’
Label Description: Waiting Music unfolds as a series of evolving musical environments. The opening title track establishes the album’s tone with a haunting two-chord guitar riff that gradually mutates before returning like a ghost at the end of the piece. Elsewhere, the anarchic punk energy of God’s Little Prefect sits alongside the gentle, sunlit circularity of From the Deck. Pieces such as Pocket Rocket, Travelling Home, and Prince of Spoons move fluidly between folk-like lyricism, driving grooves and dreamlike abstraction. Other tracks, like Egg on the Escalator explore the use of rhythmic unison and polytonality inspired by the music and musings of Captain Beefheart. Elsewhere, angular unison lines dissolve into psychedelic solos, delicate miniatures nod to Erik Satie, and extended pieces like Sumud use odd-meter rhythms and electro-acoustic textures to propel the listener through shifting musical terrains. With Waiting Music, Open Thread presents a work that reflects our current moment: restless, searching, and resilient, offering space to pause, attend, and move forward together.
Julien Wilson – tenor saxophone/electronics Peggy Lee – cello Theo Carbo – guitars Dylan van der Schyff – drums/percussion
Tracks 1,2,5 by Theo Carbo Tracks 3,4,8,9 by Peggy Lee (SOCAN) Tracks 7, 10, 11 by Julien Wilson Track 6 by van der Schyff, Carbo, Lee, Wilson
Artwork by Leigh van der Schyff
Recorded on June 30th, 2025, at the Warehouse Studio, Vancouver. Tracking by Sheldon Zaharko Mixing by Theo Carbo and Dylan van der Schyff. Mastering by Joe Talia Design by Brodie Mcallister
The music was recorded on the unceded ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people.
Thanks to Jeremy Rose at Earshift Music, The Coastal Jazz and Blues Society, and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Label Description: Dogs Versus Shadows & Nicholas Langley return with a follow up to 2024’s ‘Salt Coast’, this time with a much deeper, double album-length dive into their sometimes unsettling brand of radiophonic acid, or “exploratory electronic music that lurks in mental doorways.”
16mm is the soundtrack to the type of dreams where you find dusty old reels of film from your past containing partially hidden memories, or long forgotten excerpts of you and your friends’ abandoned surrealist movies. Possibly you’ll remember it from a dream when you hear it for the first time.
Dog Versus Shadows has released music on Subexotic Records, Third Kind, Woodford Halse, Anticipating Nowhere, Miracle Pond, Human Geography Recordings and Flaming Pines.
Nicholas Langley has released music on Third Kind, Spun Out Of Control, Strategic Tape Reserve, Cruel Nature, Mortality Tables, Muzan Editions and Falt.
Label Description: 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.
Music For The Rest Of Us 