Masaaki Yoshida - There Will Come Soft Rains Phantom Limb 2020-05-19 | phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/imaginal-soundtracking-1-there-will-come-soft-rainsPhantom Limb’s soundtrack imprint Geist im Kino continues with the launch of new series Imaginal Soundtracking, in which contemporary musicians are invited to re-score existing film pieces.Designed to reframe overlooked or forgotten works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The first release in the series sees a quartet of highly inventive, wildly varying takes on award-winning animation There Will Come Soft Rains, created in 1984 by Uzbek filmmaker Nazim Tulyakhodzayev. The film is based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury, itself a reference to a 1918 work by US poet Sara Teasdale, which foretells the danger of mankind’s extinction by war, predating many such fears by some decades.Characteristic of Soviet filmmaking of the time, Tulyakhodzayev’s adaptation is abstracted by layers of allegory and interpretive meaning, rendering it bizarre, sometimes lysergic, but nonetheless arrestingly powerful. The story - hauntingly relevant today - portrays a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland in which no human survivors remain, and the preciousness of life is a heartbreaking memory. A bird, desperate and exhausted, accidentally triggers the future technology and sets off a chain reaction of destruction and despair.Though musicians Masaaki Yoshida (aka anchorsong), Lakker, Rully Shabara (of Indonesian experimentalists Senyawa) and Dylan Henner all began with the same source material, their respective new soundtracks are strikingly different.
Sander De Keere - Pt. 4 [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-08-25 | Taken from Sander De Keere - "The Manual Stop" (album, 23rd October 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: sanderdekeere.bandcamp.com/track/pt-4Buy album: sanderdekeere.bandcamp.com/album/the-manual-stop Follow Sander De Keere: instagram.com/sanderdekeere---------Brussels composer and organist Sander De Keere debuts on Phantom Limb with evocative, elegant new works for solo church organ The Manual Stop, mosaicking patterns of minimalism, IDM, electronic, and sacred music with utmost symbiosis and reverence for the instrument.Recorded entirely on a centuries-old Contius baroque organ at the historic St. Catharina Church in the town of Wondelgem (Ghent, Belgium), The Manual Stop is described by Sander De Keere as “an homage to the organ’s ancient craftsmanship and sonic experiment in itself.” While remaining in keen veneration to the instrument, its heritage, and its spiritual gravitas, De Keere’s works employ the church organ as the centrepiece of a broad compositional superstructure coloured by the influence of many contrasting musics.“Pt. 4” is built from staccato chords of triumphant grandeur, their tempo and the pauses between defined by the natural reverberation of the church. Over the chords, single, breathy melodies rise and fall. The organ’s deep, rich bass frequencies rumble and roll in holistic harmonic synergy with the majestic glory of the bellowing high tones. Gradually the space between the chords becomes so filled with seraphic radiance that the sudden dissolution at its end reveals how sensitively De Keere had developed the piece, never overplaying a hand.Originally from Ghent and now based in Brussels, De Keere has established himself as one of Belgium's most distinctive contemporary musical voices. Alongside composing, he has spent more than a decade as a radio and podcast host for the classical music station Klara (VRT). He also lectures on classical music at Ancienne Belgique and is a regular host for the Brussels Philharmonic and Flemish Radio Choir. His work has also encompassed award-winning podcast soundtracks, theatre productions, contemporary art commissions and new choral composition, consistently placing historical traditions in dialogue with contemporary sound.
Hans P. Kjorstad - Ost [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-08-18 | Taken from Hans P. Kjorstad - "Inn" (album, 18th September 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: hanskjorstad.bandcamp.com/track/ostBuy album: hanskjorstad.bandcamp.com/album/inn Follow Hans P. Kjorstad: instagram.com/hanskjorstad ---------Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Hans P. Kjorstad debuts on Phantom Limb (following works with Sam Gendel and Ernst Reijseger) with new album Inn, a nuanced, lower case, orchestra-in-miniature full of curiosity, charm, and sensitive mastery of its form.Kjorstad - a resident of Lillehammer, Norway - grew up playing folk music, adopting the fiddle from an early age and later finding his way to jazz, experimental music, and beyond. And despite offering a broad palette, the ghost of folk music, in its verisimilitude and organic hues, remains within the compositional framework of Inn. Here it is reduced to its bare elements by the alchemic introduction of microtonal synthesis, wonky looping, and playful oddities that shift in tonal personality over the duration of a piece.Though a deeply subtle record, Inn is not as unassuming as its raw ingredients might imply. Kjorstad speaks of the record’s philosophy as “personal, but not self-conscious; hazy but not lazy; better to do it than to talk about it.” This curious modesty abounds throughout. Simple melodic lines lay and overlay in multicoloured combinations like the meeting of different waters, each a sweet trickle, sometimes cool like a Scandinavian forest stream and sometimes warm like spring air. Deep listening reveals a secret world of beauty, poetry, and colour."Ost" is an adjacent study of delicate form centred in Kjorstad’s highly accomplished violin playing. The imagery it conjures is charmingly storytelling, an elfen craftsman building toys that animate to jig and make mischief and fish in the placid river of the track’s blissful instrumentation.Hans P. Kjorstad is a musician and composer informed by Norwegian traditional music and experimental improvised music. His main artistic interest is to work towards an increased sensitivity to the sensual potential in subtle tonality changes: how do different tonalities influence what we see when we hear sound and what we hear when we see something? He performs solo, with ensembles, and for film and other audio-visual projects. Kjorstad has performed in some 30 countries, and has contributed to records issued by labels such as Leaving Records, Motvind Records, Talik, Hubro, SOFA, Drag City and others. He has toured and recorded with Sam Gendel, Ernst Reijseger, and Alasdair Roberts among others.
Ibukun Sunday - Edge [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-07-29 | Taken from Ibukun sunday - "Olùsìn [Worshippers]" (album, 28th August 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: ibukunsunday.bandcamp.com/track/edgeBuy album: ibukunsunday.bandcamp.com/album/ol-s-n-worshippers Follow bukun sunday: instagram.com/ibukun_sunday_ ---------The record, writes Sunday, “draws inspiration from African devotional traditions, blending percussion, vocal harmony, and ambient soundscapes to create ‘a soundtrack of praise,’ centering on the idea that faith has its own music: the drumbeat of hearts, the chorus of voices, and the silence between notes.”A native of Lagos and now based in north London, Ibukun Sunday has carved himself an essential niche in African music, uniting long-practiced traditions with the gauzy synthesis of contemporary ambient music, weaving his compositions with field recordings from his homeland and deeply considered philosophies of existence, humanity, and faith. Olúsín [Worshippers] builds on a sound he has cultivated over a series of releases for Phantom Limb and, earlier, its digital-only imprint Spirituals. Elegant repeating motifs, ghostly choral drones, subtly emerging rhythms, and fizzing sonics coalesce into a drawn-out devotional experience that highlights isolation even in communal worship.Unsurprisingly, Sunday is a keenly trained musician. He has studied the viola since childhood and performed in numerous ensembles ranging from chamber to orchestral over years of close symbiosis with the instrument. This depth of rigorous knowledge underpins a refined ear for melody, harmonic architecture, and songcraft, his compositions achieving profound emotional redolence even from their small palettes.“Edge” is built from Karplus-Strong pizzicati that lay and overlay against a shimmering and slowly growing backdrop, sunlight gently illuminating a celestial stained glass window. “I wanted to honour the way music carries prayer, the way a drum can feel like a heartbeat shared by a whole community,” writes Sunday. While the piece is generated from rhythm, it is characterised by subtlety and nuance, the habitat never outshining the inhabitants.Ibukun Sunday is a solo electronic musician and violist from Lagos, Nigeria. He released two albums with Phantom Limb’s digital-only imprint Spirituals, and 2024 debut album Harmony / Balance, which enjoyed acclaim as unique and powerful works of experimental ambient music. Onstage, he has performed alongside Richard Skelton, Dylan Henner, Tunde Jegede, Gabriel Prokofiev, and others
Sander De Keere - Pt. 6 [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-07-24 | Sander De Keere - "Pt. 6" (single, 24th July, 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: sanderdekeere.bandcamp.com/album/pt-6Follow Sander De Keere: instagram.com/sanderdekeere---------The Belgian composer, organist and musicologist Sander De Keere joins Phantom Limb with "Pt. 6", an evocative new work for solo church organ, mosaicking patterns of minimalism, experimental electronic music and sacred music with reverence for the instrument. Recorded entirely on a centuries-old Contius baroque organ at the historic St. Catharina Church in Wondelgem (Ghent, Belgium), the piece offers a first look into De Keere's exploration of the church organ as both an homage to its ancient craftsmanship and a sonic experiment in itself, the church organ becoming an ancient synthesiser in his hands."Pt. 6" begins with an insistent pulse, tracing a lineage from ancient church music via Reichian syncopation to contemporary electronic music. Floating between two chords in liturgical repetition, it lives within the cathedral as a resonant chamber of solemnity while leaning into the organ's most stubborn physical trait: the hard, mechanical resistance of its wooden keys. Rather than working against the instrument, De Keere embraces its physical demands until performer and instrument unite, becoming what he describes as "a kind of alchemy". Pipes and wind begin to behave like oscillating waveforms, transforming the church organ into an organic sequencer.Originally from Ghent and now based in Brussels, De Keere has established himself as one of Belgium's most distinctive contemporary musical voices. Alongside composing, he has spent more than a decade as a radio and podcast host for the classical music station Klara (VRT). He also lectures on classical music at Ancienne Belgique and is a regular host for the Brussels Philharmonic and Flemish Radio Choir. His work has also encompassed award-winning podcast soundtracks, theatre productions, contemporary art commissions and new choral composition, consistently placing historical traditions in dialogue with contemporary sound.With "Pt. 6", Phantom Limb welcomes an extraordinary new artist to the label. It marks the beginning of an exciting new partnership, with Sander De Keere's debut album to follow later this year.
Hans P. Kjorstad - Dis [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-07-21 | Taken from Hans P. Kjorstad - "Inn" (album, 18th September 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: hanskjorstad.bandcamp.com/track/disBuy album: hanskjorstad.bandcamp.com/album/inn Follow Hans P. Kjorstad: instagram.com/hanskjorstad ---------Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Hans P. Kjorstad debuts on Phantom Limb (following works with Sam Gendel and Ernst Reijseger) with new album Inn, a nuanced, lower case, orchestra-in-miniature full of curiosity, charm, and sensitive mastery of its form.Kjorstad - a resident of Lillehammer, Norway - grew up playing folk music, adopting the fiddle from an early age and later finding his way to jazz, experimental music, and beyond. And despite offering a broad palette, the ghost of folk music, in its verisimilitude and organic hues, remains within the compositional framework of Inn. Here it is reduced to its bare elements by the alchemic introduction of microtonal synthesis, wonky looping, and playful oddities that shift in tonal personality over the duration of a piece.Though a deeply subtle record, Inn is not as unassuming as its raw ingredients might imply. Kjorstad speaks of the record’s philosophy as “personal, but not self-conscious; hazy but not lazy; better to do it than to talk about it.” This curious modesty abounds throughout. Simple melodic lines lay and overlay in multicoloured combinations like the meeting of different waters, each a sweet trickle, sometimes cool like a Scandinavian forest stream and sometimes warm like spring air. Deep listening reveals a secret world of beauty, poetry, and colour.Opening track and first single “Dis” begins with that understated thing in Inn: percussion. A gently rolling, woody shake-and-thump syncopation underpins two interplaying woodwind-mimicking synths - one begins warm and rich, the other reedlike and languorous, but as the piece develops their tones become buzzing, drifting in and out of gentle discordance.Hans P. Kjorstad is a musician and composer informed by Norwegian traditional music and experimental improvised music. His main artistic interest is to work towards an increased sensitivity to the sensual potential in subtle tonality changes: how do different tonalities influence what we see when we hear sound and what we hear when we see something? He performs solo, with ensembles, and for film and other audio-visual projects. Kjorstad has performed in some 30 countries, and has contributed to records issued by labels such as Leaving Records, Motvind Records, Talik, Hubro, SOFA, Drag City and others. He has toured and recorded with Sam Gendel, Ernst Reijseger, and Alasdair Roberts among others.
Dylan Henner - July [official visualiser] Phantom Limb 2026-07-15 | Taken from Dylan Henner - "I'm Writing a New Song Every Month from One Birthday til the Next: July" (single, 15th July 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/track/im-writing-a-new-song-every-month-from-one-birthday-til-the-next-julyFollow Dylan Henner:facebook.com/dylanhennerinstagram.com/dylanhennertwitter.com/dylanhenner---------Acclaimed and mysterious UK producer Dylan Henner announces year-long project of monthly singles tracing the passage of a calendar year between two birthdays, uniting experimental-ambient bliss with minimalism, early sacred music, and processed voice.Devised to celebrate, and to unfold in, real time, I'm Writing a New Song Every Month from One Birthday til the Next sees Dylan Henner respond to true events as they occur, expressing the world, the cosmos, the mind, and all the strangeness that comes with living with his characteristically cerebral and philosophically considered bent on experimental ambient music. Having with past records tackled themes such as humanity’s relationship with technology, the passage of a single life from birth to death, the philosophies of late adolescence, and The Simpsons, Henner is commonly found exploring varied and unusual narratives in his music.“It’s difficult to understand time in its true essence," Henner writes of this new project. “We know that for us tangible time can only move forwards, but our experience of it, in memories and projections, in expansion and contraction, makes it feel fluid. Nagel (1986) wrote “The objective view of time is a view of a single history containing all events in a tensionless relation of before and after... But this view seems to leave out something essential about the nature of time: its flow, and the unique reality of the present.” We are often thinking of the past or imagining a future whilst living in the present. With this project I’m trying to anchor real moments as they occur by expressing them in musical form, a similarly linear experience.”First track “July” (every track in the collection will be named only by its month), begins with aqueous synthesis, warbled and garbled as if pulled from a waterlogged old cassette, before angelic aliens sing in strange and truthseeking splendour. Eventually, a thundering, rolling cloud of darkness billows out from the prettiness to become a dreamy, gauzy haze.While “July” only reveals one twelfth of the ongoing project, it perpetuates Henner’s enigmatic mythmaking through meticulously constructed human-not-human compositions. His immersive, storytelling range is broad, spanning from serene to desolate, from powerful to uncanny. Henner references ambient and experimental music, chamber composition, the human voice, sound design, and field recordings, and wraps everything in the core theme of experiencing time, in all its fluidity, contractions, and expansions, searching for truths about the human condition.
Ibukun Sunday - Amen [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-06-30 | Taken from Ibukun sunday - "Olùsìn [Worshippers]" (album, 28th August 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: ibukunsunday.bandcamp.com/track/amenBuy album: ibukunsunday.bandcamp.com/album/ol-s-n-worshippers Follow bukun sunday: instagram.com/ibukun_sunday_ ---------The record, writes Sunday, “draws inspiration from African devotional traditions, blending percussion, vocal harmony, and ambient soundscapes to create ‘a soundtrack of praise,’ centering on the idea that faith has its own music: the drumbeat of hearts, the chorus of voices, and the silence between notes.”A native of Lagos and now based in north London, Ibukun Sunday has carved himself an essential niche in African music, uniting long-practiced traditions with the gauzy synthesis of contemporary ambient music, weaving his compositions with field recordings from his homeland and deeply considered philosophies of existence, humanity, and faith. Olúsín [Worshippers] builds on a sound he has cultivated over a series of releases for Phantom Limb and, earlier, its digital-only imprint Spirituals. Elegant repeating motifs, ghostly choral drones, subtly emerging rhythms, and fizzing sonics coalesce into a drawn-out devotional experience that highlights isolation even in communal worship.Unsurprisingly, Sunday is a keenly trained musician. He has studied the viola since childhood and performed in numerous ensembles ranging from chamber to orchestral over years of close symbiosis with the instrument. This depth of rigorous knowledge underpins a refined ear for melody, harmonic architecture, and songcraft, his compositions achieving profound emotional redolence even from their small palettes.Opening single “Amen” begins with a skittering vocal sample in thick West African accent, its sibillants taking on an evolving rhythm as an angelic chorus of synths resemble church organ and heavenly voices to evoke “both the energy of gathered praise and the intimacy of personal devotion,” Sunday explains. It billows and swells at a thick and glacial pace until reaching a solemn cadence in reflection of its title.Ibukun Sunday is a solo electronic musician and violist from Lagos, Nigeria. He released two albums with Phantom Limb’s digital-only imprint Spirituals, and 2024 debut album Harmony / Balance, which enjoyed acclaim as unique and powerful works of experimental ambient music. Onstage, he has performed alongside Richard Skelton, Dylan Henner, Tunde Jegede, Gabriel Prokofiev, and others.
Holodec - reception [official video] Phantom Limb 2026-06-26 | Taken from Holodec - "TRU FOLK" (album, 17th April 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: holodec.bandcamp.com/track/receptionBuy album: holodec.bandcamp.com/album/tru-folkFollow Holodec: instagram.com/holodec---------‘reception’, directed by Alexander Girav and Jonathan Jayasinghe, is the second in a series of track-length visuals made to accompany Holodec's latest album, TRU FOLK.A little league game winds down as the sky moves from day to dusk. Parents watch from the sidelines. Kids shoot around on the basketball court. Floodlights turn on, helicopters pass overhead. The downtown skyline looms in the distance, everyday life in the shadow of the imaginary.Alexander Girav is a Chicago-based filmmaker, cinematographer and editor. With a background in experimental and documentary film his films have shown at The Chicago International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jeonju International Film Festival, and Edinburgh International Film Festival. His work as a cinematographer has shown at the Sundance film festival and earned a nomination for “National Geographic Award for Best Cinematography” at Millenium Docs in 2019.Jonathan Jayasinghe is a strategist, writer, and independent curator whose work connects contemporary art, emerging subcultures, and brand storytelling. With an educational background in fine art, his practice moves between critical inquiry and cultural production, creating experiences that resonate across creative, commercial, and civic contexts. He’s the curator of LA-based ambient / experimental performance series Deluge, and has worked with a broad range of brands and institutions including the Hammer Museum, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Highsnobiety, Porsche, Coca-Cola, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, among others.Directed by Alexander Girav & Jonathan Jayasinghe instagram.com/ata_girav instagram.com/jonathanjayasinghe
Brian Ennals & Blockhead - Let it Burn (like Usher) [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-06-23 | Taken from Brian Ennals & Blockhead - "Boatshoes" (album, 17th July 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: blockheadnyc.bandcamp.com/track/let-it-burn-like-usherBuy album: blockheadnyc.bandcamp.com/album/boatshoesFollow Brian Ennals:instagram.com/brianennalstwitter.com/brianennalsFollow Blockhead:instagram.com/blockheadnyc twitter.com/BlockheadNYC---------Veteran NYC producer Blockhead teams up with rising Baltimore MC Brian Ennals (usually seen in his acclaimed partnership with Infinity Knives) for vital, skillsharing new album Boatshoes, a canny and celebratory ride through irreverent and truth-telling bars alongside classy, master-level production.“Let It Burn (like Usher)” proves the pair have the agility to pin genre to disparate genre to captivating results. A deft jazz-inflected beat of double bass and dotted drums gives way to 70’s cartoon organ and Ennals sing-rapping his deceptively bleak imagery, delivered, as always, with an anarchic and knowing grin. As with the entirety of Boatshoes, Ennals and Blockhead’s middle ground makes for an intoxicating unison.“This is a dude that’s made albums with Aesop Rock and billy woods so I was aware there was a level of quality I had to reach,” writes Baltimore rapper Brian Ennals. “Not to toot my own horn, I think I did.” A debut collaboration between two heads of hip-hop - one established, one ascending - Boatshoes provided a creative challenge that the pair met head on with verve and confidence. Ennals is part of the irresistible Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals duo whose three records have attracted significant acclaim in rap music and beyond, but working with Blockhead meant a diversion from the incendiary, vitriolic, substance-loving stomp of his usual format. “It’s the most fun rapping I’ve had in a long time,” he tells us. “Block’s productions were funky as fuck, almost pop, but still totally totally rap. They didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard.”Blockhead - aka Manhattan’s Tony Simon - began his career in the late 90’s, a young producer able to keep pace with the breakneck rhymes of the era’s most exciting underground rap talents. Over the subsequent decades, his CV has expanded to include production for the likes of Aesop Rock, Illogic, Murs, Cage, Armand Hammer, and billy woods, as well as releasing music under his own name and with numerous collectives. And yet, Boatshoes is still a departure. More experimental and more centred in sound design than previous works, the collaboration and Brian’s influence pushed him to stylistic juxtaposition and timbral exploration. “Brian met the challenges of writing to beats like this at every turn,” he says. “We ended up with an album that sounds nothing like anything we have done before. And when you've been doing this as long as I have, that's a rare accomplishment.”
A Lily - Rosalie Sings [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-06-12 | Bonus track taken from A Lily - "wake:sleep [20th anniversary edition]" (album, 12th June 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: alily.bandcamp.com/track/rosalie-sings-bonus-trackBuy album: alily.bandcamp.com/album/wake-sleep-20th-anniversary-edition Follow A Lily:instagram.com/alilysingsfacebook.com/alilysings--------- 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,” 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 edition. 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.Three tracks are added to this special anniversary edition of the album: “On Writing”, “Rosalie Sings”, and “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.
Michael F. Hunt - Passage of Time (single edit) [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-05-27 | Taken from "Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt" (album, 19th June 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy full track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/passage-of-timeBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/passage-of-time-the-music-of-michael-f-hunt-------------The works of radical US composer Michael F. Hunt are commercially released for the first time on Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt, a missing link between New Age, American minimalism, and large scale ensemble composition.Written and recorded between 1980 and 1985, Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt marks the as yet unique release of three important works in the American compositional canon. Highly decorated in music academia, Professor Hunt (b. 1945) has taught composition, jazz history, orchestration, music theory, and several more demanding disciplines over a career that started in his preteens. His works have been performed the world over but his catalogue, remarkably, has long remained a hidden treasure, never before released.A yin-yang of quietude and potency shines through these compositions. Fluid and mellifluous melodies conjure an Edenic natural world of birdsong, trickling streams, dawnlight, and sky blue, echoing the New Age movement of the 1980s and their crystalline cassette serenity. But the cellular repetition of opener “Music for Multiple Keyboards” (1983) unfolds with a Rileyian shimmer (Hunt and Riley have been peers and contemporaries for much of their careers) and the gliding, aquiline viola of “Butterfly Dreams” (1985) graces the piano’s dark arpeggiation and resonant bass chords with all the austerity and conscientiousness of a conservatoire performance (belying the work’s decidedly outré oversized graphic scores). We point to Hunt’s work as a missing link between New Age, large-ensemble composition, and mid-century American minimalism: it is spiritual, wide-eyed, meticulously crafted, and astral in sensitive balance.Returning to civilian life after serving his draft period in the US military during the Vietnam War, he earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974, where he tested the limits of the era’s technology, experimenting with algae-prompted tone generation and programming Paul Hindemith’s extensive “rules of composition” into a 3,000-card IBM 360 deck. This pursuit of abstract timbre eventually led to “Music for Multiple Keyboards” and its many-layered ensemble of synthesisers.This compilation, Passage of Time: The Music of Michael Hunt, collects three key longform pieces from Hunt’s sizable collection, and finally introduces to the world a composer who threads together contrasting schools of music with unparalleled curiosity.
BAG - Vessel Diaspora [official video] Phantom Limb 2026-05-19 | Taken from "This House is a Body" (album, 22nd May 2026, Phantom Limb)Concept by Jody DeSchutter and Dan AllisonVideography and Editing by Matt DearyArtistic Direction by Liz GormanTechnical Assistance by James Alec HardyPiano on track and appearance on video by Angèle David-GuillouBuy track: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/track/vessel-diasporaBuy album: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/album/this-house-is-a-bodyFollow BAG: instagram.com/bagbagbagsound-------------London experimental spoken word and electronics duo BAG (Canadian artist and poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Daniel Allison) land on Phantom Limb with mesmerising new album This House is a Body, marrying visceral poetry with exploratory production to achieve beguiling, occasionally screwy and occasionally dreamy sonics.Formed from Allison’s headspinning, depth-mining production for synthesis, field recording, and acoustic instrumentation, and DeSchutter’s lysergic and prophetic spoken word, the palette of This House is a Body can turn on a dime from claustrophobia and dread to hyperreal dream sequence, illuminated in sunstreamed glory in places and dripping with basement effluvia in others. Throughout, words, meaning, and imagery all dissolve into an architecture of alternately familiar and unknowable sound.“Vessel Diaspora” is built on angelic, reverberant piano chords performed by auxiliary member Angèle David-Guillou, the track draws the listener into DeSchutter’s dreamlike world. Every syllable is captured in close, intimate detail, evoking a voice from within the body, while subtle vocal treatments mimic its shifting chambers and resonances - the rattle of the BAG formed in London 2020 beginning as an art project consisting of members Jody DeSchutter (Canada) and Dan Allison (UK) and has developed into a live and recorded sonic entity including Angèle David-Guillou. DeShutter and Allison both studied as painters and approach sound through that lens: composition, layers, application and content. 2020 release Mapping Azure was selected by The Quietus as one of the year’s top ten albums released on cassette. In 2023 BAG collaborated with producer and label Charlie Behrens (Collapsing Drums) for the release of new album Momentary Lapses. This House is a Body is their third release.
Brian Ennals & Blockhead - Aldente [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-05-13 | Taken from Brian Ennals & Blockhead - "Boatshoes" (album, 17th July 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: blockheadnyc.bandcamp.com/track/aldenteBuy album: blockheadnyc.bandcamp.com/album/boatshoesFollow Brian Ennals:instagram.com/brianennalstwitter.com/brianennalsFollow Blockhead:instagram.com/blockheadnyc twitter.com/BlockheadNYC--------- Veteran NYC producer Blockhead teams up with rising Baltimore MC Brian Ennals (usually seen in his acclaimed partnership with Infinity Knives) for vital, skillsharing new album Boatshoes, a canny and celebratory ride through irreverent and truth-telling bars alongside classy, master-level production.Opening track “Aldente” begins with funk-inspired synclavier as Ennals lets loose with the kind of nihilistically comic swagger that characterises his flow, a cohesive and narrative battery that references cocaine, blues, impenetrable Baltimore street slang, alcoholism, MF Doom, and anything else that crosses a widely tuned radar. Testing Blockhead to match this omnivorous range, the production is deep and heavy-hitting, at its crescendo sultry sax giving way to a swampy harmonica solo that soars above the mix.“This is a dude that’s made albums with Aesop Rock and billy woods so I was aware there was a level of quality I had to reach,” writes Baltimore rapper Brian Ennals. “Not to toot my own horn, I think I did.” A debut collaboration between two heads of hip-hop - one established, one ascending - Boatshoes provided a creative challenge that the pair met head on with verve and confidence. Ennals is part of the irresistible Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals duo whose three records have attracted significant acclaim in rap music and beyond, but working with Blockhead meant a diversion from the incendiary, vitriolic, substance-loving stomp of his usual format. “It’s the most fun rapping I’ve had in a long time,” he tells us. “Block’s productions were funky as fuck, almost pop, but still totally totally rap. They didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard.”Blockhead - aka Manhattan’s Tony Simon - began his career in the late 90’s, a young producer able to keep pace with the breakneck rhymes of the era’s most exciting underground rap talents. Over the subsequent decades, his CV has expanded to include production for the likes of Aesop Rock, Illogic, Murs, Cage, Armand Hammer, and billy woods, as well as releasing music under his own name and with numerous collectives. And yet, Boatshoes is still a departure. More experimental and more centred in sound design than previous works, the collaboration and Brian’s influence pushed him to stylistic juxtaposition and timbral exploration. “Brian met the challenges of writing to beats like this at every turn,” he says. “We ended up with an album that sounds nothing like anything we have done before. And when you've been doing this as long as I have, that's a rare accomplishment.”
Michael F. Hunt - Music for Multiple Keyboards (single edit) [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-04-28 | Taken from "Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt" (album, 19th June 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/music-for-multiple-keyboards-single-editBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/passage-of-time-the-music-of-michael-f-hunt -------------The works of radical US composer Michael F. Hunt are commercially released for the first time on Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt, a missing link between New Age, American minimalism, and large scale ensemble composition.Written and recorded between 1980 and 1985, Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt marks the as yet unique release of three important works in the American compositional canon. Highly decorated in music academia, Professor Hunt (b. 1945) has taught composition, jazz history, orchestration, music theory, and several more demanding disciplines over a career that started in his preteens. His works have been performed the world over but his catalogue, remarkably, has long remained a hidden treasure, never before released.A yin-yang of quietude and potency shines through these compositions. Fluid and mellifluous melodies conjure an Edenic natural world of birdsong, trickling streams, dawnlight, and sky blue, echoing the New Age movement of the 1980s and their crystalline cassette serenity. But the cellular repetition of opener “Music for Multiple Keyboards” (1983) unfolds with a Rileyian shimmer (Hunt and Riley have been peers and contemporaries for much of their careers) and the gliding, aquiline viola of “Butterfly Dreams” (1985) graces the piano’s dark arpeggiation and resonant bass chords with all the austerity and conscientiousness of a conservatoire performance (belying the work’s decidedly outré oversized graphic scores). We point to Hunt’s work as a missing link between New Age, large-ensemble composition, and mid-century American minimalism: it is spiritual, wide-eyed, meticulously crafted, and astral in sensitive balance.Returning to civilian life after serving his draft period in the US military during the Vietnam War, he earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974, where he tested the limits of the era’s technology, experimenting with algae-prompted tone generation and programming Paul Hindemith’s extensive “rules of composition” into a 3,000-card IBM 360 deck. This pursuit of abstract timbre eventually led to “Music for Multiple Keyboards” and its many-layered ensemble of synthesisers.This compilation, Passage of Time: The Music of Michael Hunt, collects three key longform pieces from Hunt’s sizable collection, and finally introduces to the world a composer who threads together contrasting schools of music with unparalleled curiosity.
Holodec - quiet water, loud water [official video] Phantom Limb 2026-04-22 | Taken from Holodec - "TRU FOLK" (album, 17th April 2026, Phantom Limb).Buy track: holodec.bandcamp.com/track/quiet-water-loud-waterBuy album: holodec.bandcamp.com/album/tru-folkFollow Holodec: instagram.com/holodec---------quiet water, loud water is the first in a series of track-length visuals made to accompany Holodec’s latest album, TRU FOLK. Together, the collected visuals form an impressionistic, observational view of LA, capturing moments and spaces in which the everyday gives way to the sublime. quiet water, loud water captures a microcosm of LA’s unique intersection of the natural and built environment. The 5 freeway cuts through the edge of a once-bucolic public park in Boyle Heights, a manmade lake and palm fronds pressed against concrete infrastructure. Everyday life persists in the shadow of the monolithic form; people exercising, fishing, passing through. At a certain time of day, the morning light reflects off the water and casts scintillant patterns on the underside of the overpass. For a few brief minutes, every day, the monolith melts back into the beguiling light of the city.Directed by Alexander Girav & Jonathan Jayasingheinstagram.com/ata_giravinstagram.com/jonathanjayasinghe
BAG - Moth Ball [official video] Phantom Limb 2026-04-21 | Taken from "This House is a Body" (album, 22nd May 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy track: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/track/moth-ballBuy album: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/album/this-house-is-a-bodyFollow BAG: instagram.com/bagbagbagsound-------------London experimental spoken word and electronics duo BAG (Canadian artist and poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Daniel Allison) land on Phantom Limb with mesmerising new album This House is a Body, marrying visceral poetry with exploratory production to achieve beguiling, occasionally screwy and occasionally dreamy sonics.“Moth Ball” is steeped in disorienting sound design, as if drifting in from a delirious room next door. Its poetry arrives spliced and stuttered, never settling and always in motion. BAG draws from the outer edges of avant performance and the ecstatic spoken word of New York’s fertile early experimental scene, à la Laurie Anderson. As vocalist DeSchutter pushes into the rolling, roaring coda, traces of earlier morphemes re-emerge, skittering in crescendo through a haze of woozy string synthesis.The video for “Moth Ball” was produced by James Alec Hardy, whose practice spans 25 years of collecting, hacking, and performing with analogue video hardware. When BAG came to Hardy’s studio, they agreed to a live, analogue dialogue. Using video feedback and glitch hardware, DeSchutter and Allison performed into the system as Hardy warped their images in real time. Across multiple takes, DeSchutter’s words appear conjured through analogue decay, while Allison becomes a devouring presence… consuming the forms as they materialise. The video emerges as a collaboration between performers and machine, shaped by Hardy’s hand.BAG formed in London in 2020, initially as an art project by Canadian artist & poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Dan Allison, and later evolving into a live & recording outfit with the addition of Angèle David-Guillou. Both trained as painters, DeSchutter and Allison approach sound through a visual lens, focusing on composition, layering, texture and content. Their 2020 release Mapping Azure was named one of the year’s top ten cassette albums by The Quietus. In 2023, BAG collaborated with producer and label head Charlie Behrens (Collapsing Drums) on the album Momentary Lapses. The upcoming This House is a Body marks their third release on their new label home, Phantom Limb.
BAG - Floor Phlegm Hue [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-03-18 | Taken from "This House is a Body" (album, 22nd May 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy track: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/track/floor-phlegm-hueBuy album: bagbagbagsound.bandcamp.com/album/this-house-is-a-bodyFollow BAG:instagram.com/bagbagbagsound-------------London experimental spoken word and electronics duo BAG (Canadian artist and poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Daniel Allison) land on Phantom Limb with mesmerising new album This House is a Body, marrying visceral poetry with exploratory production to achieve beguiling, occasionally screwy and occasionally dreamy sonics.Formed from Allison’s headspinning, depth-mining production for synthesis, field recording, and acoustic instrumentation, and DeSchutter’s lysergic and prophetic spoken word, the palette of This House is a Body can turn on a dime from claustrophobia and dread to hyperreal dream sequence, illuminated in sunstreamed glory in places and dripping with basement effluvia in others. Throughout, words, meaning, and imagery all dissolve into an architecture of alternately familiar and unknowable sound.Key track “Floor Phlegm Hue” is built from wonky and stabbing bass synthesis, over which DeSchutter’s spellbound storytelling quivers between songform and witchcraft. Fried and freaked out saxophone from Gallon Drunk and PJ Harvey collaborator Terry Edwards heightens the anxiety and raises the goosebumps, allowed to stack the bassline or wriggle around it as the track develops. The track, and record, heavily features famed Brazilian percussionist Iggor Cavalera, and was recorded and produced by his wife and frequent collaborator Laima Leyton. BAG formed in London 2020 beginning as an art project consisting of members Jody DeSchutter (Canada) and Dan Allison (UK) and has developed into a live and recorded sonic entity including Angèle David-Guillou. DeShutter and Allison both studied as painters and approach sound through that lens: composition, layers, application and content. 2020 release Mapping Azure was selected by The Quietus as one of the year’s top ten albums released on cassette. In 2023 BAG collaborated with producer and label Charlie Behrens (Collapsing Drums) for the release of new album Momentary Lapses. This House is a Body is their third release.
Holodec - volk rays [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-03-11 | Taken from Holodec - "TRU FOLK" (album, 17th April 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: holodec.bandcamp.com/track/volk-raysPre-order album: holodec.bandcamp.com/album/tru-folkFollow Holodec: instagram.com/holodec_---------Electronic artist Holodec makes his Phantom Limb debut with TRU FOLK, a hypnotic album that transforms distant synthesis, interwoven field recordings, and urban haze into a subtle, environmentally attuned document of everyday life.Described as “both a folk record and an audio document” by Holodec (aka West Coast producer Jieh), the album reframes folk tradition through electronic sound, acting as a street-level “audio archive” of everyday human presence, survival, and shared environments rather than a polished or transcendent ambient escape. Drawing from 15 years of field recordings, TRU FOLK captures a range of environments from city life to the domestic everyday.These audio narratives form the foundation of the album’s considerately textured rendering of the spaces it inhabits, including footsteps, car horns, a drawer sliding shut, wind chimes, family voices, street corners, bus stops, and parks, as well as a dog barking, a fight on TV… all captured across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Taipei, Oakland, Keelung, the San Gabriel Valley, and South City. From this lived-in collage emerges a palette of earthen, grounding synthesis, semi-present melodies, and smog-softened tones, occupying a space between the tangible and the dreamlike, and treating sound as “evidence of living rather than an escape from it.”“volk rays” is ghostly, aching and ruminative. Its spiritualist choral murmurings evoke both memory and its erosion, decaying as though the playback itself has aged through years of recall. The music feels uncannily familiar, yet formed from strange, weightless elemental ores. “The album emerged after a long period of personal upheaval,” Jieh explains. “It was written following years of family crisis and recovery, during a time of reset and reflection.” The result is the sound of a record born from rupture and reflection.TRU FOLK follows Holodec‘s well-received 2022 debut album All Dogs Come from Wolves, released by Kelman Duran’s Scorpio Red label. Over the years, Jieh has worked alongside such contemporaries as Nosaj Thing, Main Attrakionz, Kelman Duran, and acclaimed Taiwanese film composer Lim Giong (Millennium Mambo, The Assassin, Still Life).
Marnie Weber - Nude in Solitude [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-02-25 | Taken from "Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber" (album, 27th March 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/nude-in-solitudeBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/returning-home-the-music-of-marnie-weberFollow Marnie Weber:instagram.com/marnieweberstudio facebook.com/marnieweberstudio-------------LA-based multidisciplinary artist and musician Marnie Weber compiles highlights from a long and storied career on Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber, released via the Phantom Limb label on 27th March. It’s a collection of neo-goth art-pop that straddles kankyō ongaku pop songs, noise-rock, and haunted fairytale darkness.“Nude in Solitude” bristles with intent, jagged melodies slicing through a roughly overdriven bassline carved from pure fuzz and grit, recalling the abrasive edges of Sonic Youth and Swans at their most unrelenting. Yet beneath the distortion lies an undeniable hook, landing with the force of long-promised vengeance even as a sheen of yearning melancholia glows across its surface. As Weber entwines painting and panting in the lyrics, her voice breaking and shuddering, milk-bottle percussion clatters into a raw, driving rhythm.Marnie Weber’s career began in 1977 with beer-paid gigs at an LA trucker bar. Her band, Party Boys, formed when she was just 19, and by the early 1980s became a fixture at LA’s fabled Al’s Bar, sharing the stage with generational talents that passed over its beer-drenched floors like Hüsker Dü, L7, Beck, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, The Fall, and playing to audiences that included Bret Easton Ellis, Steve Buscemi, Bill Murray, and Chloë Sevigny.After the breakup of Party Boys, Weber began performing alone, booking early shows under her own name. In late 1987, while working at Bruce Licher’s legendary Independent Project Records and Press, she was persuaded into the recording studio by another UCLA art student, Philip Drucker, of the influential LA post-punk acts 17 Pygmies and Savage Republic. With this encouragement, Weber sewed her experience in visual arts and her theatrical characterisations into 1989’s Songs Hurt Me, an astonishingly confident debut record, featuring the “The Passionate One”, a dark and despairing track with influences of Einstürzende Neubauten, Jane Austen, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bauhaus all clashing together.Next came 1991’s Woman With Bass album, on which “Tiger, Tiger” and “Nude in Solitude” from the upcoming compilation originated. Weber’s songwriting had become stronger still, keenly feminist, its imagery bolder and sharper.In the mid 1990s came a key turning point for Weber’s career. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore attended a New York exhibition of Weber’s visual work. Introduced through a mutual friend (the late artist Mike Kelley), Gordon and Moore fell in love with Weber’s work, and a new kinship was born. Weber’s 1996 album Cry For Happy (represented on the compilation with “Moans” and “In The Meadow”) was released on Thurston Moore’s own Ecstatic Peace! label and shot Weber into the awareness of avid Sonic Youth fans. Becoming yet more closely creatively aligned, Sonic Youth invited Weber to create the artwork for their next album, 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Weber’s relationship with Sonic Youth confirmed what her fanbase already knew: Weber was already capable of marrying beguiling and instantaneous songcraft with dissonance and exploratory sonics, and now the torchbearers of that school had taken notice.Returning Home is a collection of material from that era, a gateway into those fully formed imaginary worlds conjured from instrumentation and voice by Marnie Weber. It follows the early performative works, the formation of Weber’s conceptual art band The Spirit Girls, and the decades of worldwide exhibition of Weber’s visual art, film works, installations, and countless more stories to add to an already eclectic tome. “Together with my history in performance, this record has a very unique resonance,” Weber writes. She is right.
Gloved Hands - Plants In A Bathtub [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-02-20 | Taken from Gloved Hands - "Tempers" (EP, 20th February 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: glovedhands.bandcamp.com/track/plants-in-a-bathtub Buy EP album: glovedhands.bandcamp.com/album/tempers Follow Gloved Hands: instagram.com/glovedhands---------Multi-talented LA musician Morgan Fox brings his Gloved Hands solo project to Phantom Limb with the darkly sonorous EP Tempers, wiring eclectic and beguiling songcraft into bionic machinery to hint at industrial, new wave, goth, and noise pop.A highly experienced LA mainstay, Morgan Fox has worked with labels as broadly spread as The Flenser and Kompakt, hitting punk, ambient, acid house, and lots in between. And while Gloved Hands began life as a home-produced house and techno project shortly before the Covid pandemic, releasing a handful of sides in over a couple of years, Tempers marks the first time it has been centred in songwriting.“Much of the music I make is gentle and ambient, but coming from a background in punk and hardcore, I still sometimes have an itch to make something a bit uglier,” Fox writes. “I feel that these songs help scratch that weird itch in my brain while still retaining some sort of warped pop sensibility.” The deceptively earworming songcraft present in Tempers reveals itself through a bruised and distorted timbral palette, fuzzed out 808’s and busted-cone synthesis underpinning confessional lyrical hooks.The record partly responds to Fox’s experience of a period of social isolation and the relief of it lifting. “I wanted very little to do with other people. I didn't want to be around people or get attention from them, good or bad. I felt as though I was building walls around myself and it felt good to be isolated. I think that was just what I needed at the time. It was a celebration of intentional solitude.”Opener “Plants In A Bathtub” begins with a thumping bassline that reveals the practiced dance producer behind the mixing desk. Neutronic arpeggiated melodies pitter patter around the pull of the bass nucleus, before Fox’s voice drags us into the body of a creeping and mutated songform that pulses with charged electrical impulse.
Holodec - under heavens weight [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-02-11 | Taken from Holodec - "TRU FOLK" (album, 17th April 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: holodec.bandcamp.com/track/under-heavens-weightPre-order album: holodec.bandcamp.com/album/tru-folkFollow Holodec: instagram.com/holodec_---------Electronic artist Holodec makes his Phantom Limb debut with TRU FOLK, a hypnotic album that transforms distant synthesis, interwoven field recordings, and urban haze into a subtle, environmentally attuned document of everyday life.Described as “both a folk record and an audio document” by Holodec (aka West Coast producer Jieh), the album reframes folk tradition through electronic sound, acting as a street-level “audio archive” of everyday human presence, survival, and shared environments rather than a polished or transcendent ambient escape. Drawing from 15 years of field recordings, TRU FOLK captures a range of environments from city life to the domestic everyday.These audio narratives form the foundation of the album’s considerately textured rendering of the spaces it inhabits, including footsteps, car horns, a drawer sliding shut, wind chimes, family voices, street corners, bus stops, and parks, as well as a dog barking, a fight on TV… all captured across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Taipei, Oakland, Keelung, the San Gabriel Valley, and South City. From this lived-in collage emerges a palette of earthen, grounding synthesis, semi-present melodies, and smog-softened tones, occupying a space between the tangible and the dreamlike, and treating sound as “evidence of living rather than an escape from it.”“under heaven’s weight” distills the record’s central ethos. A point taken from TRU FOLK’s sizable accompanying manifesto describes “everyday sound functioning both as record and memory, grounding the music in lived experience.” Surf washes over glimmering arpeggiation that flares and fractures like sunlight over waves lapping at the beach. Decaying echoes reverberate in a sky of cloudless reverie and lifegiving sunrays. Around it all, passersby move through loosely shared spaces, occasionally intersecting, more often apart, captured in a quiet study of presence and place.TRU FOLK follows Holodec‘s well-received 2022 debut album All Dogs Come from Wolves, released by Kelman Duran’s Scorpio Red label. Over the years, Jieh has worked alongside such contemporaries as Nosaj Thing, Main Attrakionz, Kelman Duran, and acclaimed Taiwanese film composer Lim Giong (Millennium Mambo, The Assassin, Still Life).
kent watari - the experience of margin [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-01-28 | Taken from kent watari - "subtraction in spiral" (album, 27th February 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: kentwatari.bandcamp.com/track/the-experience-of-marginPre-order album: kentwatari.bandcamp.com/album/subtraction-in-spiral Follow kent watari: instagram.com/qura_kw twitter.com/kent_watari---------Japanese experimental sound artist kent watari debuts on Phantom Limb with new album subtraction in spiral, coding deep sonics to quantum-percussion and collapsing, post-IDM glitchscapes based on a meticulously constructed metaphysical thought experiment."This work is centred around a very personal philosophical model," writes kent watari (b. Tokyo, 1993). "I have constructed a metaphysical model of thought, employing concepts from philosophy and science. This thought model centres on a recursive structure. The infinite is compressed into the finite world of reality, beginning with a scene where "something happens or has happened". Thought then unfolds through every possible development before scattering once more into the infinite beyond. Then, it returns once more to the juncture where “something happens or has happened."With this deep conceptual investment in their compositional work, watari employs information-overload polyrhythm and nano-particles of electrical impulse to mimic minute neuro-existential events. New album subtraction in spiral is the result of months of developmental practice, echoing a thought cluster stretched out into a compositional narrative. Its sound design crackles with percussive clamour and reverberates in soft granulation across a tour of metaphysical chambers, sometimes intense and at others dreamy."the experience of margin" begins in a 3D-rendered memory cave, dripping with psychoactive fragments and populated by whispering psychogenic beings speaking in shards of glitching language. A strange, disembodied rhythm takes hold, as if the hardware has reset, before, deep within the cave and in total darkness, the growling voice of an outsider heralds monastic bellsong unfolding in twisted, reversing loops.
Marnie Weber - Tiger, Tiger [official audio] Phantom Limb 2026-01-21 | Taken from "Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber" (album, 27th March 2026, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/tiger-tiger Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/returning-home-the-music-of-marnie-weberFollow Marnie Weber:instagram.com/marnieweberstudio facebook.com/marnieweberstudio-------------LA-based multidisciplinary artist and musician Marnie Weber compiles highlights from a long and storied career on Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber, released via the Phantom Limb label on 27th March. It’s a collection of neo-goth art-pop that straddles kankyō ongaku pop songs, noise-rock, and haunted fairytale darkness.The compilation’s opener, “Tiger, Tiger”, was originally released on Weber’s 1991 album Woman With Bass. It’s a flirtatious love song, full of whispered coquettish intimacy, as squalling guitar coils around a melodious bassline and taiko-mimicking drums. Art-rock refined into songform and shoegaze made playful, it brings both together as one. Marnie Weber’s career began in 1977 with beer-paid gigs at an LA trucker bar. Her band, Party Boys, formed when she was just 19, and by the early 1980s became a fixture at LA’s fabled Al’s Bar, sharing the stage with generational talents that passed over its beer-drenched floors like Hüsker Dü, L7, Beck, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, The Fall, and playing to audiences that included Bret Easton Ellis, Steve Buscemi, Bill Murray, and Chloë Sevigny.After the breakup of Party Boys, Weber began performing alone, booking early shows under her own name. In late 1987, while working at Bruce Licher’s legendary Independent Project Records and Press, she was persuaded into the recording studio by another UCLA art student, Philip Drucker, of the influential LA post-punk acts 17 Pygmies and Savage Republic. With this encouragement, Weber sewed her experience in visual arts and her theatrical characterisations into 1989’s Songs Hurt Me, an astonishingly confident debut record, featuring the “The Passionate One”, a dark and despairing track with influences of Einstürzende Neubauten, Jane Austen, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bauhaus all clashing together.Next came 1991’s Woman With Bass album, on which “Tiger, Tiger” and “Nude in Solitude” from the upcoming compilation originated. Weber’s songwriting had become stronger still, keenly feminist, its imagery bolder and sharper.In the mid 1990s came a key turning point for Weber’s career. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore attended a New York exhibition of Weber’s visual work. Introduced through a mutual friend (the late artist Mike Kelley), Gordon and Moore fell in love with Weber’s work, and a new kinship was born. Weber’s 1996 album Cry For Happy (represented on the compilation with “Moans” and “In The Meadow”) was released on Thurston Moore’s own Ecstatic Peace! label and shot Weber into the awareness of avid Sonic Youth fans. Becoming yet more closely creatively aligned, Sonic Youth invited Weber to create the artwork for their next album, 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Weber’s relationship with Sonic Youth confirmed what her fanbase already knew: Weber was already capable of marrying beguiling and instantaneous songcraft with dissonance and exploratory sonics, and now the torchbearers of that school had taken notice.Returning Home is a collection of material from that era, a gateway into those fully formed imaginary worlds conjured from instrumentation and voice by Marnie Weber. It follows the early performative works, the formation of Weber’s conceptual art band The Spirit Girls, and the decades of worldwide exhibition of Weber’s visual art, film works, installations, and countless more stories to add to an already eclectic tome. “Together with my history in performance, this record has a very unique resonance,” Weber writes. She is right.
Hekla - Hinn Sýnilegi Heimur (feat. PBDY) [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-12-10 | Taken from "Gjá" (EP, 10th December 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: hekla.bandcamp.com/track/hinn-sy-nilegi-heimur-feat-pbdy Buy EP: hekla.bandcamp.com/album/gj Follow Hekla: instagram.com/heklahekla -------------Following the critical acclaim of her album Turnar earlier this year, theremin virtuoso Hekla returns with Gjá, a new EP that deepens her signature blend of heavy, spectral soundscapes and otherworldly songwriting. With these new works, she slips further into a sublime, paranormal realm… one where beauty and haunting dread coexist in equal measure.Now augmenting her virtuosic solo theremin work with cello, voice, and the sacred church organ of Icelandic master Kristján Hrannar, the evolution of Hekla’s unique magic summoned new worlds with her third album Turnar. The album and Gjá - a new collection of accompanying tracks - were both partly recorded in (and named after) a medieval castle tower in rural France, its ruinous black broken in spare beams of angelic stained-glass light. But, writes Hekla, “the sound of theremin kind of opens up a portal into a new realm that both looks into a dark old world and to the future.” As with the album, Gjá is an alternately beautiful and crushing space voyage into a glacial underworld cascading with phosphorescence and cave drip, conjuring ancient choral ritual just as readily as redolent sci-fi gloam.Co-produced with Brainfeeder artist and NTS Radio resident Paul “PBDY” Preston, the EP’s final track “Hinn Sýnilegi Heimur” is held in a shimmering, glistening fortress, hypnotic for its opening and eventually apocalyptic when bass tones force open the gates. Together, the three tracks form a vivid and immersive world, showcasing Hekla’s ability to channel beauty and dread in equal measure. Hekla Magnúsdóttir is a rare specialist of the theremin, a notoriously inscrutable electronic instrument, joining a minuscule group of musicians in mastery of its esoteric mysteries. Classically informed, her playing covers an enormous range, from the skittering birdsong of chirrups and chirps to tectonic sub-bass. Hekla’s fans in the wider music community - PJ Harvey, for example - describe her style alongside musicians such as Julia Holter, Colleen and the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.
kent watari - nervefield flickering [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-12-02 | Taken from kent watari - "subtraction in spiral" (album, 27th February 2026, Phantom Limb). Buy track: kentwatari.bandcamp.com/track/nervefield-flickeringPre-order album: kentwatari.bandcamp.com/album/subtraction-in-spiral Follow kent watari: instagram.com/qura_kw twitter.com/kent_watari ---------Japanese experimental sound artist kent watari debuts on Phantom Limb with new album subtraction in spiral, coding deep sonics to quantum-percussion and collapsing, post-IDM glitchscapes based on a meticulously constructed metaphysical thought experiment.“This work is centred around a very personal philosophical model,” writes kent watari (b. Tokyo, 1993). “I have constructed a metaphysical model of thought, employing concepts from philosophy and science. This thought model centres on a recursive structure. The infinite is compressed into the finite world of reality, beginning with a scene where “something happens or has happened”. Thought then unfolds through every possible development before scattering once more into the infinite beyond. Then, it returns once more to the juncture where “something happens or has happened”.With this deep conceptual investment in their compositional work, watari employs information-overload polyrhythm and nano-particles of electrical impulse to mimic minute neuro-existential events. New album subtraction in spiral is the result of months of developmental practice, echoing a thought cluster stretched out into a compositional narrative. Its sound design crackles with percussive clamour and reverberates in soft granulation across a tour of metaphysical chambers, sometimes intense and at others dreamy.Key moment “nervefield flickering” feels abstracted from the tangible in its complex matrix of interlaced simulacra. A metaphysical landscape machine-drawn from synaptic impulses and fragments of sonic imagery half-remembered from real life. An unexpectedly sonorous arpeggio eventually zones into the space, relentlessly pursued by a battering shudder that crushes every frequency into square wave discord. The piece is about the evolution of personal identity, both emotionally and structurally. “In my thought model, after something occurs, the world first acquires a foundation of matter. Then, when that matter forms a system open to the external environment, the mechanisms of life emerge within it.”
Nesa Azadikhah - The Wound Where The Light Enters Phantom Limb 2025-11-18 | The Wound Where The Light Enters with Nesa Azadikhah rescore.
Saint Abdullah - The Wound Where The Light Enters Phantom Limb 2025-11-18 | The Wound Where The Light Enters with Saint Abdullah rescore.
Nesa Azadikhah - The Wound Where The Light Enters [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-10-22 | Taken from "Imaginal Soundtracking 3: The Wound Where The Light Enters" (album, 7th November 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: imaginalsoundtracking.bandcamp.com/track/nesa-azadikhah-the-wound-where-the-light-entersPre-order album: imaginalsoundtracking.bandcamp.com/album/imaginal-soundtracking-3-the-wound-where-the-light-enters ---------Phantom Limb’s noted filmscore series Imaginal Soundtracking returns after a short hiatus, uniting Iranian filmmaker Somayeh’s three-minute work The Wound Where The Light Enters with five contemporary musicians to be re-scored in five different ways.Designed to reframe underexposed works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The third release in the series sees a quintet of highly inventive, fascinatingly varied takes on The Wound Where The Light Enters, a powerful and affecting study of intimacy and tension written and directed by Iranian director Somayeh. The film’s language and gaze are markedly feminine, its choreography raw and potent, uniting Somayeh’s Iranian heritage and its traditions with western influences.Its two roles - performed by Pippa Melody and Tyler Conti - entangle into a push and pull of love, familiarity, and acrimony, as their relationship begins to fracture. Their tactile interactions could be perceived both as romantic or hostile, but in both cases charged with effervescent, teeming emotion.Musicians Siavash Amini, Saint Abdullah, Roxanna Albayati, Nesa Azadikhah, and sohme all began with the same source material, but - not hearing each other’s work until the project was completed - their respective new soundtracks are strikingly different.Composer, DJ, and producer Nesa Azadikhah is recognised as one of Iran’s first female DJs and dance music producers. She has been organising underground events in Tehran since her adolescence, and is the founder of Deep House Tehran, a curational platform that hosts live events, publishes editorial essays, and features videos of Iranian dance producers. The deep, tectonic frequencies underpinning her composition for The Wound Where The Light Takes Us reflect a background in, and enlightened understanding of, dance musics, but here they are charged with intensity and power over groove. Eldritch voice snippets swirl and gather in windswept, barely-there dialogue as soft, dulcet pads begin to compete for prominence against a rumbling, foreboding distortion.The Wound Where The Light Enters is the third in Phantom Limb’s Imaginal Soundtracking series, following a re-score of 1984 Soviet animation There Will Come Soft Rains (which was delightedly received by its director Nazim Tulyakhodzayev) and another of Japanese puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto’s 1972 bunraku stop motion piece 鬼 [eng: The Demon]. To date, the series has comprised musical contributions by Ami Dang, Midori Hirano, 食品まつり a.k.a foodman, Sabiwa, Tori Kudo, Masaaki Yoshida, Lakker, Rully Shabara, and Dylan Henner.
Dylan Henner - I Used To See Her On The Way Home from School and She Lit Up The Sky with her Beauty Phantom Limb 2025-10-15 | Taken from Dylan Henner - "Star Dream FM" (album, 17th October 2025, Phantom Limb).Pre-order album: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/album/star-dream-fmFollow Dylan Henner:instagram.com/dylanhennerfacebook.com/dylanhennertwitter.com/dylanhenner---------Enigmatic UK producer Dylan Henner announces new album of deeply considered and choral-laced experimental ambient music Star Dream FM, said to be taped from a mysterious radio broadcast that plays his favourite memories from adolescence.“Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen. Some of the most formative and important moments of my life, alive on the air,” Dylan Henner’s self-penned mythology begins. “I called some friends and asked if they could find the same frequency, but no-one did. So, quickly as I could, I stuck a blank tape into my hi-fi and hit record. At some point I heard the jingle and the name of the station: Star Dream FM.”Though (clearly) fictional, the backdrop to new album Star Dream FM represents a tactile canvas on which the record’s true meaning is painted. It is, through Henner’s now-characteristic employment of ambient-textured synthesis, marimba, digital choir, and processed voice, a study of late adolescence and the experience of being seventeen.“Why seventeen? Because (in Western, 21st century culture at least) it is a unique time of fragility and self-realisation. A gateway between the joy and wonder of childhood and the heavy realities of adult life. A seventeen year old has almost formed their outlook, mindset, purpose, drive, but only as a hop away from childhood. It’s a challenging period, sure, but also a time of optimism, of excitement for a new life to begin in your own image.”The result of this examination is a collection of meticulously constructed human-not-human compositions built from Henner’s mesmeric brand of desolate beauty. His immersive, storytelling range is broad, spanning from serene to cerebral, from powerful to uncanny. Henner references ambient and experimental music, chamber composition, the human voice, sound design, and field recordings, and wraps everything in the myth of his imaginary radio station Star Dream FM.
Saint Abdullah - The Wound Where The Light Enters [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-09-24 | Taken from "Imaginal Soundtracking 3: The Wound Where The Light Enters" (album, 7th November 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: imaginalsoundtracking.bandcamp.com/track/saint-abdullah-the-wound-where-the-light-enters Pre-order album: imaginalsoundtracking.bandcamp.com/album/imaginal-soundtracking-3-the-wound-where-the-light-enters ---------Phantom Limb’s noted filmscore series Imaginal Soundtracking returns after a short hiatus, uniting Iranian filmmaker Somayeh’s three-minute work The Wound Where The Light Enters with five contemporary musicians to be re-scored in five different ways.Designed to reframe underexposed works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The third release in the series sees a quintet of highly inventive, fascinatingly varied takes on The Wound Where The Light Enters, a powerful and affecting study of intimacy and tension written and directed by Iranian director Somayeh. The film’s language and gaze are markedly feminine, its choreography raw and potent, uniting Somayeh’s Iranian heritage and its traditions with western influences.Its two roles - performed by Pippa Melody and Tyler Conti - entangle into a push and pull of love, familiarity, and acrimony, as their relationship begins to fracture. Their tactile interactions could be perceived both as romantic or hostile, but in both cases charged with effervescent, teeming emotion.Musicians Siavash Amini, Saint Abdullah, Roxanna Albayati, Nesa Azadikhah, and sohme all began with the same source material, but - not hearing each other’s work until the project was completed - their respective new soundtracks are strikingly different.Saint Abdullah is the moniker of Iranian-Canadian brothers currently based between Tehran and London. Their practice is rooted in sonic storytelling that seamlessly blends geo-politics, religion, and social behavior. The brothers have developed a studio practice exploring improvisation, electronics, plunderphonics, and sampling. Their soundtrack begins with squealing string harmonics and an insistently rhythmic strum that maintains a high pace, until a barrage of noise splits the piece in two, and an unheimlich singing voice walks through fire over wagon circle guitar. Reflecting the love and acrimony of Somayeh’s film, its two halves are cohesive only in their disparity.The Wound Where The Light Enters is the third in Phantom Limb’s Imaginal Soundtracking series, following a re-score of 1984 Soviet animation There Will Come Soft Rains (which was delightedly received by its director Nazim Tulyakhodzayev) and another of Japanese puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto’s 1972 bunraku stop motion piece 鬼 [eng: The Demon]. To date, the series has comprised musical contributions by Ami Dang, Midori Hirano, 食品まつり a.k.a foodman, Sabiwa, Tori Kudo, Masaaki Yoshida, Lakker, Rully Shabara, and Dylan Henner.
Dylan Henner - We Ditched School and Climbed Over the Neighbours Fence to Swim in their Pool All Day Phantom Limb 2025-09-10 | Taken from Dylan Henner - "Star Dream FM" (album, 17th October 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/track/we-ditched-school-and-climbed-over-the-neighbours-fence-to-swim-in-their-pool-all-dayPre-order album: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/album/star-dream-fmFollow Dylan Henner:instagram.com/dylanhennerfacebook.com/dylanhennertwitter.com/dylanhenner---------Enigmatic UK producer Dylan Henner announces new album of deeply considered and choral-laced experimental ambient music Star Dream FM, said to be taped from a mysterious radio broadcast that plays his favourite memories from adolescence.“Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen. Some of the most formative and important moments of my life, alive on the air,” Dylan Henner’s self-penned mythology begins. “I called some friends and asked if they could find the same frequency, but no-one did. So, quickly as I could, I stuck a blank tape into my hi-fi and hit record. At some point I heard the jingle and the name of the station: Star Dream FM.”Though (clearly) fictional, the backdrop to new album Star Dream FM represents a tactile canvas on which the record’s true meaning is painted. It is, through Henner’s now-characteristic employment of ambient-textured synthesis, marimba, digital choir, and processed voice, a study of late adolescence and the experience of being seventeen.“Why seventeen? Because (in Western, 21st century culture at least) it is a unique time of fragility and self-realisation. A gateway between the joy and wonder of childhood and the heavy realities of adult life. A seventeen year old has almost formed their outlook, mindset, purpose, drive, but only as a hop away from childhood. It’s a challenging period, sure, but also a time of optimism, of excitement for a new life to begin in your own image.”The result of this examination is a collection of meticulously constructed human-not-human compositions built from Henner’s mesmeric brand of desolate beauty. His immersive, storytelling range is broad, spanning from serene to cerebral, from powerful to uncanny. Henner references ambient and experimental music, chamber composition, the human voice, sound design, and field recordings, and wraps everything in the myth of his imaginary radio station Star Dream FM.
Milo Korbenski - Bedrock [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-09-04 | Taken from Milo Korbenski - "Sex Angel" (album, 19th September 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/track/bedrock Pre-order album: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/album/sex-angelFollow Milo Korbenski:instagram.com/milokorbenskiLyrics:Don't take my hand, you mightSet us both on fireDon't look at me like thatYou might make me dieSleeping sister I'll crawl in your bedrockI wont let you cut my hairOut of wedlockSleeping sister I'll crawl in your bedrockI wont let you come around hereOut of wedlockIn my dreams I dream thatI'm a driver at nightIn the dark I see itYou're a trick of the lightSleeping sister I'll crawl in your bedrockI wont let you cut my hairOut of wedlockSleeping sister I'll crawl in your bedrockI wont let you come around hereOut of wedlock
Dylan Henner - We Walked all the Way to the Lake and The Water Was So Still We Jumped in Naked Phantom Limb 2025-08-12 | Taken from Dylan Henner - "Star Dream FM" (album, 17th October 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/track/we-walked-all-the-way-to-the-lake-and-the-water-was-so-still-we-jumped-in-nakedPre-order album: dylanhenner.bandcamp.com/album/star-dream-fmFollow Dylan Henner:instagram.com/dylanhennerfacebook.com/dylanhennertwitter.com/dylanhenner---------Enigmatic UK producer Dylan Henner announces new album of deeply considered and choral-laced experimental ambient music Star Dream FM, said to be taped from a mysterious radio broadcast that plays his favourite memories from adolescence.“Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen. Some of the most formative and important moments of my life, alive on the air,” Dylan Henner’s self-penned mythology begins. “I called some friends and asked if they could find the same frequency, but no-one did. So, quickly as I could, I stuck a blank tape into my hi-fi and hit record. At some point I heard the jingle and the name of the station: Star Dream FM.”Though (clearly) fictional, the backdrop to new album Star Dream FM represents a tactile canvas on which the record’s true meaning is painted. It is, through Henner’s now-characteristic employment of ambient-textured synthesis, marimba, digital choir, and processed voice, a study of late adolescence and the experience of being seventeen.“Why seventeen? Because (in Western, 21st century culture at least) it is a unique time of fragility and self-realisation. A gateway between the joy and wonder of childhood and the heavy realities of adult life. A seventeen year old has almost formed their outlook, mindset, purpose, drive, but only as a hop away from childhood. It’s a challenging period, sure, but also a time of optimism, of excitement for a new life to begin in your own image.”The result of this examination is a collection of meticulously constructed human-not-human compositions built from Henner’s mesmeric brand of desolate beauty. His immersive, storytelling range is broad, spanning from serene to cerebral, from powerful to uncanny. Henner references ambient and experimental music, chamber composition, the human voice, sound design, and field recordings, and wraps everything in the myth of his imaginary radio station Star Dream FM.
K. Yoshimatsu - Pastel Nostalgia part 2 [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-08-08 | Taken from K. Yoshimatsu - "Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu [volume III]" (album, 8th August 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/pastel-nostalgia-part-2 Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/zentai-the-collected-works-of-k-yoshimatsu-volume-iiiFollowing the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.Zentai Vol. I bundles together Spherical Voyage (1982), Strawberry Secret, and Sepia Renaissance (both 1983) and focuses on Yoshimatsu’s pastoral and organic period. Vol II includes Life In The Water, Commercial Romanticists, and C’est La Vie (all 1983), records all in a (roughly) pop or songwriter vein. Vol III covers Curios (1982), Pastel Nostalgia, and Last Lizard (both 1983), leaning into Yoshimatsu’s most experimental collage recordings. “My musical interests were diverse, and I created works aiming to expand my musical worldview,” he tells us. “During the five years from 1981 to 1985, I was obsessed. It was a very magical experience.”Alongside 2024’s career retrospective album Fossil Cocoon, Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue now happily, newly sits in a neat collection, compressing his enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, a guide through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied collection of works, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy.
Milo Korbenski - Six Angle [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-07-31 | Taken from Milo Korbenski - "Sex Angel" (album, 19th September 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/track/six-angle Pre-order album: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/album/sex-angelFollow Milo Korbenski:instagram.com/milokorbenskiLyrics:I was all messed upSo I got mixed inI seen a lot of people going in the binFor what its worthI got to sayGod alive, ain't people strange? They've got it good but want to change'Cause its all messed upAnd I got mixed inI seen a lot of people doing stupid thingsAnd I know what's whatCause I'm the sameGod alive, I got to say, I've got it good but want it madeGot itAnd it's still messed upI seen a lot of people doing stupid stuffAnd its all messed upSo I feel I need to sayGod alive, ain't people strange? They've got it good but want it madeI was all messed upBut i got mixed inI seen a heap people go insane againAnd all their lifeFixate on fameGod alive, ain't people strange? They've got it good but want to change'Cause its all messed upAnd I got mixed inI seen a lot of people doing stupid thingsAnd I know what's whatCause I'm the sameGod alive, I got to say, I've got it good but want it madeGot itAnd it's still messed upI seen a lot of people doing stupid stuffAnd its all messed upSo I feel I need to sayGod alive, ain't people strange? They've got it good but want it made(Solo)'Cause its all messed upAnd I got mixed inI seen a lot of people doing stupid thingsAnd I know what's whatCause I'm the sameGod alive, I got to say, I've got it good but want it madeGot itAnd it's still messed upI seen a lot of people doing stupid stuffAnd its all messed upSo I feel I need to sayGod alive, ain't people strange? They've got it good but want it made
K. Yoshimatsu - Milky Way [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-07-25 | Taken from K. Yoshimatsu - "Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu [volume II]" (album, 25th July 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/milky-way Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/zentai-the-collected-works-of-k-yoshimatsu-volume-ii Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.Zentai Vol. I bundles together Spherical Voyage (1982), Strawberry Secret, and Sepia Renaissance (both 1983) and focuses on Yoshimatsu’s pastoral and organic period. Vol II includes Life In The Water, Commercial Romanticists, and C’est La Vie (all 1983), records all in a (roughly) pop or songwriter vein. Vol III covers Curios (1982), Pastel Nostalgia, and Last Lizard (both 1983), leaning into Yoshimatsu’s most experimental collage recordings. “My musical interests were diverse, and I created works aiming to expand my musical worldview,” he tells us. “During the five years from 1981 to 1985, I was obsessed. It was a very magical experience.”Alongside 2024’s career retrospective album Fossil Cocoon, Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue now happily, newly sits in a neat collection, compressing his enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, a guide through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied collection of works, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy.
K. Yoshimatsu - 1844 [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-07-11 | Taken from K. Yoshimatsu - "Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu [volume I]" (album, 11th July 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/1844 Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/zentai-the-collected-works-of-k-yoshimatsu-volume-i Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.Zentai Vol. I bundles together Spherical Voyage (1982), Strawberry Secret, and Sepia Renaissance (both 1983) and focuses on Yoshimatsu’s pastoral and organic period. Vol II includes Life In The Water, Commercial Romanticists, and C’est La Vie (all 1983), records all in a (roughly) pop or songwriter vein. Vol III covers Curios (1982), Pastel Nostalgia, and Last Lizard (both 1983), leaning into Yoshimatsu’s most experimental collage recordings. “My musical interests were diverse, and I created works aiming to expand my musical worldview,” he tells us. “During the five years from 1981 to 1985, I was obsessed. It was a very magical experience.”Alongside 2024’s career retrospective album Fossil Cocoon, Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue now happily, newly sits in a neat collection, compressing his enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, a guide through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied collection of works, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy.
Milo Korbenski - Ratworm [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-06-24 | Taken from Milo Korbenski - "Sex Angel" (album, 19th September 2025, Phantom Limb).Buy track: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/track/ratworm Pre-order album: milokorbenski.bandcamp.com/album/sex-angelFollow Milo Korbenski:instagram.com/milokorbenskiLyrics:I got a key chainI got when I was in SpainI wore it for like 10 yearsThen yesterday it brokeI got a shoelaceI got it the shoe placeI put it on my best shoeGuess now I need one moreI had some good friendsI'd love to introduce themBut they all think I hate themThey don't know I don'tI had a loverShe left me for no oneWish I could say that hurt moreBut I don't care at allI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through itOhI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through itI got a fish hookStuck inside my notebookIt's fishing all the feelings outOf all the things I wroteI got a heartacheIt's taken up in my brainI've asked it nice to move outBut I know that it won'tI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through itOhI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through itI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through itOhI know it's all so stupidI been through itI been through it
David Van Tieghem - Remote Viewing [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-04-29 | Taken from "Even As We Speak: The Music of David Van Tieghem" (album, 23rd May 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/remote-viewingBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/even-as-we-speak-the-music-of-david-van-tieghem-------------The American percussionist, composer, and songwriter David Van Tieghem (b. 1955) is something like a musical equivalent to astronomy’s “hypothetical astronomical object”: while evidence of an irresistible gravitational pull can be felt in deep reaches of the cosmos, its source is enshrouded in darkness, revealing glimpses of celestial power to astute observers. For David Van Tieghem, these observers include a dizzyingly impressive cast of landmark musicians with whom he has composed and performed. David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Debbie Harry are just a few from an exhaustive (and ongoing) list. He has also composed music for Pulitzer and Tony-winning dance and theatre, for productions starring Adam Driver, Christopher Walken, Molly Ringwald, Bradley Cooper, Keith Carradine, Orlando Bloom, among others. And he has even appeared, with toy raygun and kitchen utensils, on David Letterman and, in NASA labcoat and Egon Spengler glasses, in performance at the Guggenheim for German national television. And yet, his trio of (staggeringly beautiful, utterly unique) solo albums released from 1984-1989 remain out of print - the mysterious force behind a highly influential orbit. The above achievements notwithstanding, David Van Tieghem will likely be a discovery for a lot of listeners.The music of the new collection Even As We Speak began in a hotel room in Tokyo in the mid-80’s. Van Tieghem was at the time mid-tour with Ryuichi Sakamoto, newly flying solo and buoyed by a rush of YMO popularity. Alone in his hotel room, Van Tieghem asked Sakamoto’s tour crew if he would be permitted to borrow some equipment from the stage show - specifically, the Fairlight CMI, a $40,000 audio workstation comprised of three hefty machine parts as big as filing cabinets capable of producing some of the most powerful synthesis of the day. The request was granted, and Van Tieghem began composing music between Sakamoto concerts, saving his progress to 8” floppy discs that could be transported back home to New York and his rental space in the city’s legendary Battery Sound studio.David Van Tieghem was born in 1955 in Washington, D.C., the son of two visual artists. He studied percussion with Justin DiCioccio and at Manhattan School of Music, and, in 2007, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition. The stories he tells of these songs and the peers and personnel riding in their waves, so eye-catching extraordinary to the everyday listener, are commonplace to him. And it is in this skyhigh stratum that we begin to understand his work - it is luminous, remarkable, and just as gravitationally immense as a distant star that continues to shine, brightly as ever.
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals A City Drowned in Gods Black Tears [full album official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-04-03 | 00:00 The Iron Wall ft. FRANKI3 04:05 Live at the Chinese Buffett07:20 A City Drowning. God's Black Tears. ft. The Lil Black Oxen Émile Joseph Weeks, Nicolas Ratany14:57 BAGGY18:24 Soft Pack Shorty ft. Eze Jackson, Dale Rath21:56 Тревога/Trevoga ft. Vladlena Volodkevich, The Lil' Black Oxen24:45 Sometimes, Papi Chulo ft. Gabriela Bibiana28:10 Everyone I Love is Depressed31:41 Two Headed Buffalo ft. The Lil' Black Oxen, Boat Water, Randi Whithani, Marci Ray, Natalia De Oliveira39:03 Foggy (Live at The Voxel) ft. Mind on Fire Orchestra42:39 O Trouble ft. Allison Clendandielinfinityknives666.bandcamp.com/album/a-city-drowned-in-gods-black-tears"They thrive on the chaos of an unforgiving world."Pitchfork"The sound of Ice Cube blasting out of a boombox before the police show up"Loud and Quiet"The poster boys for alternative and experimental hip-hop."The QuietusAcclaimed Baltimore experimental hip-hop duo Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals return with vital new album A City Drowned in God's Black Tears, an incendiary, irresistible rap record that marries unflinching discourse with bold and unpredictable production.“The bitch that got Emmett Till killed just died, and I PRAY that it was painful as fuck.”Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals embody this ethos of cutting through pretence with their raw, unfiltered creativity and incisive commentary. Known for their boundary-pushing DIY approach, the duo has achieved a cult-level following in experimental hip-hop, blending chaotic, genre-defying production with unapologetic social critique and dark humour.Almost entirely fuelled by word of mouth, their 2022 album King Cobra earned Album of the Year from Loud and Quiet and landed among SPIN Magazine’s Top 5 Albums of the Year. The record, a fusion of ruthless lyrical indictments and omnivorous, experimental production, firmly established them as leaders in the underground hip-hop scene, proving that true innovation can thrive even in an industry rife with nepotism.Their latest collaborative album, A City Drowned in God's Black Tears, was a gruelling labour of frustration and chaos. Originally conceived as an EP, the project unexpectedly expanded into a fully realised album as setbacks piled up. The loss of critical sound files forced them to painstakingly recreate what they’d already built, a process that drained both time and morale. Add mental health struggles and the deaths of close friends to the mix, and the project felt less like a creative process and more like a fight to survive. The entire experience was marked by stress, exhaustion, and a palpable sense of frustration that hung over every session.Engineered by Infinity Knives, FRANKI3, and Griffin MurphyMastered by Infinity KnivesAdditional mastering by Mike Walls (A City Drowning. God's Black Tears""Sometimes, Papi Chulo" is an interpolation of Dan Hanrahan's "Three Waves" which is a song that means a lot to me (Tariq)You can get the album here:danhanrahan.bandcamp.com/album/three-wavesThe Lil’ Black Oxen are:Vocals by Frances Malvaiz (Live at the Chinese Buffet, The Iron Wall, Two Headed Buffalo).Vocals by Dale Rath (Live at the Chinese Buffet, Soft Pack Shorty).Vocals by Randi “Whithani” Roberts (Everyone I Love is Depressed, soprano).Vocals by Natalia De Oliveira (Two Headed Buffalo, tenor).Vocals by Marci Ray (Two Headed Buffalo, baritone/alto).Vocals by Émile Joseph Weeks (A City Drowning. God's Black Tears. tenor).Vocals and Russian translation by Vladneva Volodkevich (Trevoga).Guitar and vocals by Gabriela Bibiana (Sometimes, Papi Chulo).Guitar and vocals by Erik “Boat Water” Wagner.Keyboards by Troy Long (Trevoga).Drums by Griffin Murphy (Trevoga).Bass by Keith Decker (Trevoga).Vocals for A City Drowning and God’s Black Tears by Nicolas RatanyRandrianarivelo (Baritone).Additional creative advice by Eze Jackson.Additional samples by BlockheadSkits and voice acting performed by Eze Jackson (credited as Ezekiel Jackson).A big fucking thank you to the Rubys Artist Grant for providing the resources to plan and nurture the seeds for bigger projects to come.
David Van Tieghem - Volcano Diving [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-03-26 | Taken from "Even As We Speak: The Music of David Van Tieghem" (album, 23rd May 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/volcano-diving Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/even-as-we-speak-the-music-of-david-van-tieghem ------------- The American percussionist, composer, and songwriter David Van Tieghem (b. 1955) is something like a musical equivalent to astronomy’s “hypothetical astronomical object”: while evidence of an irresistible gravitational pull can be felt in deep reaches of the cosmos, its source is enshrouded in darkness, revealing glimpses of celestial power to astute observers. For David Van Tieghem, these observers include a dizzyingly impressive cast of landmark musicians with whom he has composed and performed. David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Debbie Harry are just a few from an exhaustive (and ongoing) list. He has also composed music for Pulitzer and Tony-winning dance and theatre, for productions starring Adam Driver, Christopher Walken, Molly Ringwald, Bradley Cooper, Keith Carradine, Orlando Bloom, among others. And he has even appeared, with toy raygun and kitchen utensils, on David Letterman and, in NASA labcoat and Egon Spengler glasses, in performance at the Guggenheim for German national television. And yet, his trio of (staggeringly beautiful, utterly unique) solo albums released from 1984-1989 remain out of print - the mysterious force behind a highly influential orbit. The above achievements notwithstanding, David Van Tieghem will likely be a discovery for a lot of listeners.The music of the new collection Even As We Speak began in a hotel room in Tokyo in the mid-80’s. Van Tieghem was at the time mid-tour with Ryuichi Sakamoto, newly flying solo and buoyed by a rush of YMO popularity. Alone in his hotel room, Van Tieghem asked Sakamoto’s tour crew if he would be permitted to borrow some equipment from the stage show - specifically, the Fairlight CMI, a $40,000 audio workstation comprised of three hefty machine parts as big as filing cabinets capable of producing some of the most powerful synthesis of the day. The request was granted, and Van Tieghem began composing music between Sakamoto concerts, saving his progress to 8” floppy discs that could be transported back home to New York and his rental space in the city’s legendary Battery Sound studio.David Van Tieghem was born in 1955 in Washington, D.C., the son of two visual artists. He studied percussion with Justin DiCioccio and at Manhattan School of Music, and, in 2007, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition. The stories he tells of these songs and the peers and personnel riding in their waves, so eyecatchingly extraordinary to the everyday listener, are commonplace to him. And it is in this skyhigh stratum that we begin to understand his work - it is luminous, remarkable, and just as gravitationally immense as a distant star that continues to shine, brightly as ever.
Y. Tabata - Summer Initiation [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-03-19 | Taken from "Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation" (album, 11th April 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/y-tabata-summer-initiation Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/disk-musik-a-dd-records-compilation ------------- Phantom Limb will reissue the vital 1985 compilation album by Japan’s half-forgotten, cult label DD. Records, featuring cuts from key outsider Japanese artists of the era. Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation encompasses a delightful treasure trove of avant-punk, cubist ambient, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and much more.DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time (from 1980 to 1985), they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their small social and creative circles. Each of their cassettes came with abstract, xerographic artwork of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more. The records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Indeed, only a single US retailer was engaged to carry their releases outside Japan. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.”An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl releases were rare. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish and productive years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second-hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices.“Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” secretive label founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.
Young Hormones - Egg [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-02-18 | Taken from "Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation" (album, 11th April 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/young-hormones-egg Buy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/disk-musik-a-dd-records-compilation------------- Phantom Limb will reissue the vital 1985 compilation album by Japan’s half-forgotten, cult label DD. Records, featuring cuts from key outsider Japanese artists of the era. Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation encompasses a delightful treasure trove of avant-punk, cubist ambient, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and much more.DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time (from 1980 to 1985), they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their small social and creative circles. Each of their cassettes came with abstract, xerographic artwork of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more. The records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Indeed, only a single US retailer was engaged to carry their releases outside Japan. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.”An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl releases were rare. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish and productive years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second-hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices.“Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” secretive label founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.
Hekla - Var [official visualizer] Phantom Limb 2025-02-11 | Taken from "Turnar" (album, 14th March 2025, Phantom Limb)Video edited by: Eeriee (@eeriee_____)Buy track: hekla.bandcamp.com/track/varBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/turnarFollow Hekla: instagram.com/heklahekla -------------Acclaimed Icelandic theremin musician Hekla returns with Turnar, her third album of devastatingly heavy, spectral soundscape-songwriting, entering a sublime paranormal plane of haunting dread.Now augmenting her virtuosic solo theremin work with cello, voice, and the sacred church organ of Icelandic master Kristján Hrannar, the evolution of Hekla’s unique magic summons new worlds with Turnar. The album was recorded partly in (and named after) a medieval castle tower in rural France, its ruinous black broken in spare beams of angelic stained-glass light. But, writes Hekla, “the sound of theremin kind of opens up a portal into a new realm that both looks into a dark old world and to the future.” The record is an alternately beautiful and crushing space voyage into a glacial underworld cascading with phosphorescence and cave drip, conjuring ancient choral ritual just as readily as redolent sci-fi gloam.“Var” delicately places sonic artefacts about a desolate negative space, creating a dense inverse gravity. As with the rest of the record, a claustrophobic gauze hangs over music that could otherwise be called subverted songwriting, aligning Hekla’s sonics with avant-garde, musique concréte and sound-art.Hekla is a rare specialist of the theremin, a notoriously inscrutable electronic instrument, joining a miniscule group of musicians in mastery of its esoteric mysteries. Classically informed, her playing covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of chirrups and chirps to tectonic sub-bass. Her fans in the wider music community - PJ Harvey, for example - describe her style alongside musicians such as Colleen, Julia Holter or the late Jóhann Jóhannsson.Turnar is Hekla’s third album, following 2018 debut Á, 2020 EP Sprungur, and 2022’s Xiuxiuejar.
Hekla - Gráminn [official audio] Phantom Limb 2025-01-08 | Taken from "Turnar" (album, 14th March 2025, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/gr-minnBuy album: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/turnar Follow Hekla - instagram.com/heklahekla -------------Acclaimed Icelandic theremin musician Hekla returns with Turnar, her third album of devastatingly heavy, spectral soundscape-songwriting, entering a sublime paranormal plane of haunting dread.Now augmenting her virtuosic solo theremin work with cello, voice, and the sacred church organ of Icelandic master Kristján Hrannar, the evolution of Hekla’s unique magic summons new worlds with Turnar. The album was recorded partly in (and named after) a medieval castle tower in rural France, its ruinous black broken in spare beams of angelic stained-glass light. But, writes Hekla, “the sound of theremin kind of opens up a portal into a new realm that both looks into a dark old world and to the future.” The record is an alternately beautiful and crushing space voyage into a glacial underworld cascading with phosphorescence and cave drip, conjuring ancient choral ritual just as readily as redolent sci-fi gloam.“Gráminn” wails with ghostly harmonics while distorted drones crash together in a stormy and blackened netherworld sea. It traces a neat progression from Hekla’s last album - the acclaimed Xiuxiuejar - while also welcoming an expanded timbral palette and flourishing compositional confidence. Hekla is a rare specialist of the theremin, a notoriously inscrutable electronic instrument, joining a miniscule group of musicians in mastery of its esoteric mysteries. Classically informed, her playing covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of chirrups and chirps to tectonic sub-bass. Her fans in the wider music community - PJ Harvey, for example - describe her style alongside musicians such as Colleen, Julia Holter or the late Jóhann Jóhannsson.Turnar is Hekla’s third album, following 2018 debut Á, 2020 EP Sprungur, and 2022’s Xiuxiuejar.
WaqWaq Kingdom & NYX - Doomed Ebisu [official audio] Phantom Limb 2024-12-11 | Taken from "Doomed Ebisu: BBC Late Junction (live from Maida Vale)" (EP, 11th December 2024, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/doomed-ebisuBuy EP: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/doomed-ebisu-bbc-late-junction-live-from-maida-valeFollow:WaqWaq Kingdom - instagram.com/waqwaqkingdom NYX - instagram.com/nyx.edc -----------Acclaimed Japan “minyo footwork” duo WaqWaq Kingdom - aka Shigeru Ishihara (DJ Scotch Egg / Seefeel) and Kiki Hitomi (ex-King Midas Sound) - connect with UK drone choir NYX for special one-off Christmas collaboration recorded live for BBC Radio 3’s flagship experimental show Late Junction at the legendary Maida Vale studio in London.Vividly coloured with the kind of SNES-incantation and cosmic gabba that we have come to expect from WaqWaq Kingdom, this mesmerising collaboration with UK experimental choral musician Sian O’Gorman (aka NYX) is afforded a uniquely haunted and ritualistic bent that dips unexpectedly into folk mythology and the uncanny with deft intentionality. The pair were invited to perform together - a debut meeting - for BBC radio’s legendary late-night experimental show Late Junction by the show’s producer and presenter, Kit Callin and Jennifer Lucy Allen.On the title track “Doomed Ebisu”, Kiki says “I am chanting the same words, but this time people have asked too much of Ebisu, and the god got doomed! Ebisu begins to question the greed and lure of money and big business, and the overwhelming number of people who come to pray solely for personal wealth and profit. True prosperity in business is supposed to be all about doing good for others.” This doom and darkness is expressed in a seething, grimy bassline that underpins bent bells and sacred monkey chanting, over which O’Gorman’s soaring tenor swoops and dives like mythical bird gods.“Although our theme was Christmas, I also wanted to bring the feeling of the New Year’s celebrations that I remember fondly from my childhood winter holidays in Osaka, Japan,” says Hitomi. “On December 31st, it’s a tradition to hear the hundred and eight bells from the temple, either in person or on TV—a sacred sound that purifies and inspires us to set New Year’s resolutions. With this spirit in mind, I prepared some lyrics for the session.”The session marked the first time WaqWaq Kingdom and O’Gorman had met. But magic occurred as soon as they began recording, creating this material in just a single hour of improvisation and refinement. “It felt like we were playing at a Japanese matsuri festival at a Shinto shrine deep in the forest, as if we had done this together in a past life hundreds of years ago,” write WaqWaq Kingdom.The session was recorded 21st November 2023 and broadcast 22nd December 2023 on BBC Radio 3.
KRM & KMRU - Other [official audio] Phantom Limb 2024-12-04 | Taken from "Otherness" (EP, 4th December 2024, Phantom Limb)Buy track: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/track/otherBuy EP: phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/otherness-epFollow:Kevin Richard Martin - instagram.com/bugmanldnKMRU - instagram.com/_kamaru_-------------Twin heavyweights Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) follow 2024’s acclaimed collaboration album Disconnect with EP of associated works Otherness, a new study of foreboding tension, hope, and profound sonics that marries depth-trawling dub with Kamaru’s voice, ambient sensibilities, and negative space."I think Otherness carries the whole weight and the complexities of Disconnect,” writes Joseph Kamaru. “It extends the album into spaces of the unknown while remaining opaque." Envisioned initially as a part of the album sequence, the “Otherness” tracks were approached just as the rest of KMRU and Kevin Martin’s debut collaboration Disconnect. A core track - “Otherness” - exists as a potent and simmering original, moulded with the meticulous and obsessive craft of two masters in complete control of their music; and then it is pulled to pieces, its fibres torn and ripped to form sibling tracks that occupy similar but complementary spaces. The constituent parts remain related, but have mutated and transformed, reconstructed into an entourage of phantasmic mirrors.Menacing, but not dark. Tense, but not harrowing. Mystic, but not obtuse. Otherness opens with a tectonic plucking, uneasy crackling and hissing in spectral rhythm, and Joseph Kamaru’s entrancing, reverberate voice telling us that black voices / and black bodies / have been silenced. Then Kevin Martin’s legendary dub-deconstruct riddim programming takes on its most minimal form, creeping and stealing through the shadows. Following, “Others” is more rhythmic still. Now a kick drum enters, pushing and pulling negative space into strange and haunting shapes as a staticky pirate station broadcasts a chorus of lost spirits. Finally, “Other” is drumless, but its bilious, regurgitant white noise takes on the same role with queasy and arresting seduction.Otherness is part of the first collaboration project by Joseph Kamaru and Kevin Richard Martin, released on Phantom Limb in December 2024. It follows June 2024’s acclaimed Disconnect album, created in the same sessions and exploring the same themes.
