Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto
Vrioon

"Direction Lyon pour partir à la rencontre d’un talent brut du nom de Lucie dans le Ciel. Il s’agit d’une artiste pluridisciplinaire qui suffit à nous enivrer avec son univers musical aussi bien mystique qu’attrayant, surtout avec l’arrivée de son premier album nommé Ombres.Composé de dix titres, Lucie dans le Ciel nous transporte dans l’au-delà. Et c’est avec des morceaux renversants à l’image de « Éternité » en guise d’ouverture ou bien encore « Allons de l’avant » et « How Many » aux boucles hypnotiques qu’elle compte s’imposer.Faisant le grand écart entre le chaos et l’harmonie, le déstructuré et le réglo, Ombres est l’occasion idéale pour Lucie dans le Ciel de se dévoiler sans pudeur. Que ce soit sur « Peut-être » ou bien encore sur « Solitaire » et « L’âge lyrique », la musicienne lyonnaise réussit à arpenter des chemins un brin cosmiques avant de prendre de l’ampleur avec « Prélude » et « Fugue » en guise de clôture. Le premier album de l’artiste est un véritable manifesto regroupant touted les facettes de son talent."Les Oreilles Curieuses

Sit back, relax, and sink into a faraway world thanks to the evocative sounds of Jura Soundsystem. It is an idyllic place with the sound of distant bird calls, humid jungle atmospheres and life-affirming melodies. Everything from ambient house to new age, Balearic bliss to downtempo corpus the perfectly escapist grooves with the gentle patter of 'Linn Fun' an early highlight. There is a playful sense of boogie funk to 'King Of Aldinga' while 'Freediving In The Tropical Zone' has a 90s feel with its scuffed-up and lazy drums and seductive bassline. A lovely album indeed.

Dark Fields stands out from the barrage or recent Spanish experimental-industrial underground re-issues as one of the most obscure and surrounded by mysticism.One massive track with no cuts, recorded in 1979 under the motto "a silence that makes dogs bark" and released by Klamm in 1983 in a tiny edition of 300, the trio disbanded shortly after finishing the recording and never looked back.Darker than tar atmospheres with Resident's like vocals, this is the brainchild of Caballero T's obsessions with Brian Eno's work, who found the perfect partners in Tres' psychotic vocals and the studio wizardry of Señor Nada. Reissued by Madrid's Equilibrio, who already gave us Randomize's ¿Como se divertirán los insectos? Not for the faint of heart. [info sheet from distr.]

Beauty !

Ulla roots her style in improvised jazz and blues on a very welcome follow-up to her entry for our Documenting Sound series, and the sublime ‘Tumbling Towards A Wall’ LPUlla offers more precious room to breathe and space to think on ‘Limitless Frame’, dispensing a broader palette of instrumentation to evoke finer, ephemeral feels with a more timeless appeal. Her sound appears more porous to influence from strains of wistful jazz and blues here, vacillating and morphing her dreamlike ambient purview between parts of signature, aleatoric ambient pads and rustling room recordings, along with more classicist or traditionalist turns of guitars, sax and keys that call to mind K. Leimer via The Remote Viewer. It’s a perhaps surprising change in the winds of her music, and one we’re very happy to follow.In the artist’s own words “I made this music as a way to hug myself” and listeners can trust that hug will extend to them, too. She spends the first half of the record wrapping us up in clouds of pads, processed strums and fractured melodies, whisked to a gentle peak in the keening swoon of ‘Chest of Drawers’ around the middle, while the second half unravels into gorgeous loner arrangements. She captures the most wistful sensations akin to Annie Hogan’s parlour keys on ‘Something Inside My Body’, and crystalline trickles of guitars in ‘Clearly The Memory’, with the softly pealing wind of ‘Walk Alone’ calling to mind Loren Connors and Daniel Carter’s ‘The Departing of A Dream.’

International Anthem has become one of the contemporary jazz scenes most crucial labels. It deals in the most cutting edge sounds in the genre as well as offering up fantastic fusions with sounds from the world's hip-hop, R&B and broken beat. Here they look to Charles Stepney for an album that he recorded back in the 1960s in his Chicago basement. He played all the instruments himself and across four sides of vinyl he serves up his so-called and signature "baroque soul" sound with widescreen arrangements, innocent melodies and curious rhythms.