Eric Hilton – A Sky So Close (Monserrat House)

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Label Description: INTERNATIONAL ORDERS

((PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU INCLUDE YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR ORDERS> CUSTOMS REQUIRES IT.))

<< A Sky So Close >>

In these times of anxiety and deprivation, journey to a place of sensual attainment on A Sky So Close, the elegantly erotic new album from producer Eric Hilton.

A Sky So Close delivers classic trip-hop sounds over 12 tracks of pure sensory indulgence. “This record is an atmosphere, a state of mind. I indulge myself by making music that I want to listen to,” says Hilton. “It’s a more solitary record than some of my other work, there is not a big list of guest performers on this one. It’s really like my stream of consciousness.”

Hilton’s luxurious production skills are on full display here, as well as the deep grooves that he’s been delivering since the early days of Thievery Corporation, the legendary downtempo combo he co-founded in the mid-90’s. But on A Sky So Close, there is a hedonic weightlessness to this music that verges on the tantric, with no climactic finish to bring the listener back down to earth. Hilton keeps you floating in an extended, delicious haze.&nbsp;

The album opener “Akasha” at first sounds like a band coming onstage to perform, with tentative bass licks and distant synth that quickly morph into a percolating sidewalk rhythm. The yearning whispers of the follow up track “The Dharma Lovers” make it clear that the destination is an assignation. “Breathe Me In” chases the dragon into a smoke-filled room, bathed in pink light.&nbsp;

A Sky So Close follows Hilton’s well-honed production methodology of layering samples and live playing to deliver a more organic sound, with the added punch and feel that only a performance can bring. “I’m really a bassline designer,” says Hilton. “I mean, I’m a passable bass player, but if a lick is a little too tricky for me, I’ll bring in a friend to play it. And I also really like to weave bass samples and live playing together, so you can get new kinds of grooves that one person couldn’t really play.” Drop the needle on “Kali” or “Ghatam” to settle into two of the album’s deepest bass grooves.

“Lalita” is a truly standout track on A Sky So Close, a passive-pop concoction of sitar and Hindi chanting delivered by longtime Hilton and Thievery Corporation vocal collaborator Natalia Clavier. “Natalia is so special – she understands what I’m trying to do, understands my influences and can translate that into a beautiful performance every time,” enthuses Hilton. “She’s Brazilian, but she dialed in a totally different voice for this track. She also sings on “Kali” – she is endlessly talented.”

The title track “A Sky So Close” delivers the album’s most widescreen elegance. Finger tipped tabla hits, string flourishes, wah guitar and a cooking bassline create an empyrean expanse filled with exotic birds, ancient aliens, and beckoning goddesses. Perhaps the most surprising piece on the album is “The Emerald Door”, a desi-meets-drum and bass exploration that sounds somewhat adjacent to the Asian Underground music scene of the late 1990’s.&nbsp;

For the final two tracks on the album, Hilton gently leads the listener back out of the haze. “Behind My Eyes (reprise)” has a laid back but tough groove; the goddess slides your jacket on, kisses your cheek and gently pushes you out her door, back on to the street. “The Lotus Gate” is a mysterious closer, with Ipcress File dramatics that seem to be leading somewhere explosive……..but where to next? Eric Hilton is full of musical surprises.

In the meantime, let go, and fall into the sky. It is…..so…..close.

A Sky So Close by Eric Hilton will be released by Monserrat House on February 20th, 2026 on vinyl, CD, download and streaming platforms.

Dan Moore – Kielder Water Music (Self-Released)

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Label Description:

Named Bandcamp New & Notable, March 2026.

Built for an industrial expansion that never came, Kielder Dam in Northumberland is a monument to a forgotten future. Kielder Water Music explores this engineered landscape through field recordings, electronics, and string quartet.

The four pieces draw on sounds from the valve tower, reservoir, and surrounding forest, alongside interviews with those who live and work at the site. These recordings are woven together with strings, samplers, and analogue and digital synthesizers to create a dream-like sonic portrait of this unique post-industrial space.

Supported by Arts Council England.

Jo Silverston – Cello
Drew Morgan – Cello and Bowed Electric Guitar
Laura Wilson – Viola
Caelia Lunniss – Violin
Hugh Blogg – Violin

Mike Roberts – Words

Dan Moore – Fender Rhodes Electric Piano, Field Recordings, Samples and Synthesizers

Strings recorded and engineered by Luke Cawthra

Mixed by TJ Allen

Mastered by Shawn Joseph at Optimum Mastering

Cover Design by Oliver Batho

Thanks to Dan Jones, Andy Sheppard, Jonty Hall, Mike Roberts, Northumbrian Water, Alison Freeman, Hilary Ashton and the estate of Ernest Tomlinson, Riaan Vosloo, Jennifer Bell, Seb Reynolds, James Hester, Ned Rush, Jaqueline Ewers and Jenny Lindfors.

Passenger Pigeon – Another New Low (Self-Released)

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Improvised and recorded by Levi at home, April–September 2025. Mastered by Andrew Weathers. Cover photo: Pacific Bobtail Squid (Rossia pacifica) by Bill Horist, Salish Sea, 2024.

Thank you: Meghan and Rowan, Eric Acosta, Bill Horist, Leanna Keith, Kate Olson, Scott Schaffer.

Crystal Voyager & UFOm – Universe People (Moon Glyph)

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There isn’t much known about Crystal Voyager & UFOm, the two musicians that created “Universe People.” We do know that it’s an album of deep ambience and weirdo sonic exploration; simultaneously harnessing lulling sounds and celestial vibrations alongside more visceral sonic encounters that exist somewhere else entirely.

As previously reported from last year’s “Aliens Are Real” by UFOm, the artist has ties to a low-profile religious organization which necessitates their secrecy. Thankfully, we do have a message from the duo to accompany this release: “From the far recesses of deep space, messages have been telepathically received and interpreted into aural vibrations used to open the pathways of communication between mankind and beings that exist outside our observable universe.” Due to the privacy requested by these two artists, this is all we are able to share with you for now, so continue to widen your mind, open your ears and keep watching the skies.

Music by Crystal Voyager & UFOm
Produced by Myles Byrne-Dunhill
Recorded West of the Mississippi River, USA, Earth

Haptic – Ambivalence (Ash International)

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Performed by Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, Adam Sonderberg
with
Mark Wastell (1)
and
Linda Jankowska, Sarah Hughes, Seth Cooke (2)

Late Work I
Recorded by Billy Steiger (London)
Mixed by Olivia Block and Adam Sonderberg

Late Work II
Recorded by Thomas Carroll (Leeds), Will Montgomery (Brighton), Kathy Hinde (Bristol), and Haptic
Mixed by Joseph Clayton Mills

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Across two decades of restless exploration, the Chicago trio Haptic has earned a reputation for meticulously assembled recordings complemented by unpredictable, often riveting live performances that veer from rigorous minimalism to densely textured, immersive sonic environments. Consistently blurring the lines between different genres and disciplines, their experimental practice has expanded to include installations, soundtracks, and unique site-specific performances at venues such as Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Lincoln Park Conservatory, and Hyde Park Art Center, as well as collaborations with dancers, filmmakers, and institutions such as the Chicago Film Archive and the Art Institute of Chicago. Their recorded output has been marked by a similar breadth and eclecticism, ranging from the intricacies of Scilens (2011) to the almost monochromatic hush of Abeyance (2014) and slow-motion dissolution of Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (2024).

Research and development: Thanks to Mike Reed and Josh Berman (Chicago), Thomas Carroll (Leeds), Will Montgomery and Paul Khimasia Morgan (Brighton), Dan Linn-Pearl (Hay-on-Wye), Seth Cooke (Bristol), and Fielding Hope (London) for hosting; Sarah Hughes and Mark Wastell for logistical support; Linda Jankowska, Sarah Hughes, Seth Cooke, and Mark Wastell + Tim Daisy (Chicago) and Rose Linn-Pearl (Hay-on-Wye) for performing; Arts Council England and Arts Council Wales for financial support.

Ambivalence 2025: 28 September, Hungry Brain, Chicago; 2 October, Wharf Chambers, Leeds; 3 October, Coach House, Brighton; 4 October, The Old Electric Shop, Hay-on-Wye; 6 October, The Cube, Bristol; 7 October, Cafe OTO, London.



This is Haptic recording number seventeen.

You can read a review here: salt-peanuts.eu/record/haptic/ and also in Chain D.L.K.: www.chaindlk.com/reviews/13493

Dusted also – dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/814796017101914112/dust-volume-12-number-4-part-2

Russell Haswell – LET IT GO (Editions Mego)

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Label Description:

It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001—when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry’s sonic insurgent Russell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997–2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: “Science Fiction is now!”

In the face of this darkening reality, LET IT GO arrives as both acknowledgment and antidote. This new full length on Editions Mego extends an olive branch through defiant sonic diversity—an unpredictable mosaic that embraces everything from propulsive rhythms to radical abstraction and enveloping ambience. True to Haswell’s core practice, the material draws from the same tactile, free-improvised electroacoustic framework that powers his live sets: immediate, powerful and unscripted.

The album weaves reverent echoes of 1990s Detroit techno’s hypnotic pulse and the abrasive, metallic edge of the Birmingham sound into fractured generative territories. Haswell returns to his computer-generated origins while integrating his recent modular-synthesis experiments. During a residency at the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) in Norway, he harnessed the latest GRM Tools suite to conjure the volatile, “rapidly fluctuating pitched sounds” that characterized Iannis Xenakis’ late electronic works—resulting in pieces such as Fall 3 and Fall 2, where instability becomes a form of vitality. The tracks Exit Downwards and The Anxieties Of Our Time whilst reflecting the currents of the release also offer surprisingly melodic patterns over jagged rhythms. The wryly titled Thu 25 Dec 2025, (recorded in Glasgow after a solitary post-Christmas-lunch walk home) is a vast drone which evolves according to the random walk model—known more evocatively as the drunken walk—each sonic step veering unpredictably, mirroring the disoriented lens of contemporary existence.

LET IT GO is liberation. Amid the cacophony of crumbling certainties, Haswell deploys a full arsenal of resistance: kinetic drive, disorienting rupture, quiet refuge, raw aggression, and tentative hope. In an age where dystopia has shifted from fiction to lived fact, this music asserts that possibility endures. 

Used = Acid Rain Technology, ADDAC System, ALM/Busy Circuits, Apple, Audiofile Engineering, Beautiful Pieces of Outdated Technology, Composers Desktop Project, Cwejman, Epoch Modular, FANCYYYYY Synthesis, FORGE-TME, Future Sound Systems, ina/GRM, iZotope, MOTU, Neutrik, SnazzyFX, Super Synthesis, Tip-Top Audio, Waves, Zynaptiq …

Produced, Edited & Mastered by Russell Haswell in Glasgow, 2025-2026.

Mammal Hands – Circadia (ACT)

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Label Description:

Nick Smart – Piano
Jordan Smart – Saxophone
Rob Turner – Drums

Recorded March 20th to March 24th 2025 at Giant Wafer Studios, Wales
Recorded by Ben Capp
Mixed by Ben Capp
Mastered by Shawn Joseph
Composed by Mammal Hands
Produced by Mammal Hands and Ben Capp
Portrait photos by Tania Blanco Rubio
Cover art by Cecily Eno

Lasse Marhaug / Bruce Russell – Re-Make Re-Model (Self-Released)

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“Re-Make Re-Model” is the result of a five-year dialogue between Norway and New Zealand sound artists Lasse Marhaug and Bruce Russell. What first started as a friendly challenge during the Covid19-lockdown to re-work selected works from each other’s catalogue – using different techniques and experimental approaches, challenging each other to go to extremes – extended to what is now a double-CD and a 100-page book package of writings and photos. Each CDs has eight tracks, a total of 100 minutes of music. The book has extensive notes to each track (often with comments by the corresponding artist). In addition there’s a lengthy essay by Bruce Russell on the project’s origins and the nature of collaboration and noise making; a photo series by Lasse Marhaug; a series of stills by Bruce Russell taken from a video piece; as well as cover artwork and biographical notes.

“It quickly became apparent to me that the distinguishing aspect of this collaboration was that it was a competitive exchange, an ongoing game of ‘one-upmanship’ in which we each sought to outdo the other in terms of the inventiveness; the baroque and pointless complexity; or the sheer bloody-mindedness of the studio processes which we were inventing to transform the other’s work into something ‘rich and strange’”
– Bruce Russell from his essay

Digital album comes with the book in PDF format.

Growth – Under The Under (Wild Thing Records)

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Below rock bottom under the weight of truth. Yet in facing truth there is a spark that reveals there’s more to you than your darkest place. Over half a decade on from the release of their debut album, The Smothering Arms of Mercy, Melbourne progressive-death metal outfit Growth have re-emerged with Under The Under, the long-awaited second chapter of their planned trilogy aimed at going beyond expressing emotion, illustrating pathways of recovery while acknowledging the most dread-filled aspects of it.

The gap between releases has been deliberate….and necessary. Where The Smothering Arms of Mercy was written from within collapse, sickness and isolation, Under the Under exists in the far more uncomfortable space that follows: what happens when survival is no longer the question and you’re forced to confront who you are once the wreckage settles. In the bands own words, healing, is not gentle. It is an ugly process. Chaotic, disorienting and often more confronting than the pain that preceded it. Growth began in 2017 as a reflective space for brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) and Nelson Barnes(drums), and vocalist LF, later joined by Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar), to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising them. The project was never intended as catharsis for its own sake, but as a way to illustrate recovery in all its brutality. not as linear progress, but as something fractured, cyclical and deeply human. Under the Under is an album that documents six stages of recovery not as levels to be celebrated, but as thresholds to be endured. Across the record, Growth interrogates the dignity we attach to suffering, the comfort of identifying solely with trauma and the terrifying possibility that we might be more than the stories that have kept us alive.

If The Smothering Arms of Mercy was a document of total spiritual collapse, Under the Under is about the ugliness of its reconstruction. Shame, fear, memory and the quiet violence of choosing to move forward regardless. Growth does not offer solutions but instead offer honesty and an invitation to sit with the questions most of us spend our lives avoiding. Under The Under is planned for release on March 27 via Wild Thing Records and available for pre-order now.

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Tristan Barnes at Underland Recordings in Melbourne, Australia