Japanese beatmaker, producer and composer Fumitake Tamura is gearing up to release his new album Mijin. Arriving on April 10th through Leaving Records, Mijin is a collection of mesmerizing environmental music and beats, that takes inspiration from the natural world and humanism. Tamura shared some insight into the record:
“The title Mijin comes from a Japanese word meaning very fine particles. The album gathers particle-like sounds and lets them resonate in space. As I watch the movements that arise between them a balance gradually takes shape. Within those relationships and the quiet tension between them I explored how silence can resonate with sound.
The album begins with the most minimal piano chords then develops by reconstructing fragments of voice and percussion, Rhodes and synths along with traces of jazz and soul. Each sound exists like a particle drifting in air gently resonating with the others to form the structure.
I hope that the spaces and silences created by this placement will appear with a presence equal to the sounds themselves.”
Ahead of the album’s release, Tamura has shared the beautiful and alluring ‘Ostinato’, featuring multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Gendel. Take a listen below.
There’s wonderful news from Bristol-based trio Tara Clerkin Trio who have announced the release of their long-awaited new album. Entitled Somewhere Good, the record marks their first new music since 2023’s widely acclaimed On The Turning Ground mini-album. Somewhere Good is described as the band’s most expansive work so far, stretching across more than 40 minutes of immersive compositions that see the trio continue to explore their idiosyncratic and magnetic musical world. Musician Ryan Davis (of Ryan Davis and the Roundhouse Band) was inspired to write about the album and its effect on him:
“If – in some parallel universe (or perhaps a not-so-distant-future version of the one we’re already sentenced to living in) – the evil overloads of artificial intelligence were actually successful in their attempts to create convincingly enjoyable “original music,” more specifically tasked with wholly encapsulating my own personal tastes by data-chugging some cocktail of – oh, I don’t know – the posters on my wall, the records in my “most listened to” pile, the mixtapes I made for others, intensive physical scans of my auditory cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, heart strings, whatever else they have splayed out on their autopsy table with the intention of generating one all-encompassing “perfect band” based on the fruitful sum of their findings – that band, for me, would be (or would at least sound exactly like) the Tara Clerkin Trio. It is, quite simply, without exception, the music I wish to hear.”
Somewhere Good will see the light of day on June 5th through World of Echo. Ahead of it, Tara Clerkin Trio have shared the whimsical, gentle and mesmerizing title track. Here it is.
Kenyan folk icon Ogoya Nengo has joined forces with experimental duo Odd Okoddo for a new collaborative album titled Palagoma. The record arrives on June 5th through From Cool Waters, bringing together artists from different generations and musical backgrounds in one striking project. Now 83, Nengo is one of the most distinctive voices in Kenyan folk music, and Odd Okoddo is the project of drummer and producer Sven Kacirek and singer, songwriter and instrument builder Olith Ratego. Palagoma is the first time all three artists come together for a full project but they are no strangers to one another. Nengo first met Kacirek in 2009 whilst recording The Kenya Sessions, and credits him as influential getting her career started. “That is why I like Sven, because Sven lift me up. I took him like my son, and Sven took me like his mother,” she says. Kacirek had also previously worked with Nengo on her 2014 debut Rang’ala, and he and Ratego launched Odd Okoddo in 2018 and have performed internationally since then, including at Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Festival.
Palagoma blends folk traditions, rhythm experiments, and minimal electronic production. On the album, Kacirek builds atmospheric foundations with percussion, modular synths and marimba textures, and the vocals draw from the Luo community’s dodo singing tradition. Singing in Dholuo, Ratego describes his style as “dodo blues,” a personal interpretation of the tradition he learned from his mother. Alongside him, Nengo’s powerful vocals bring decades of experience and emotional weight. Across the record, the trio explore themes of love, struggle, identity and resilience.
Ahead of the album’s release, Ogoya Nengo & Odd Okoddo have shared the first single from the album, ‘Bara’, an energetic and rhythmic track, driven by call-and-response vocals inspired by dodo music. The single is offered with a live video, offering a first glimpse at the trio performing the new material together. Watch it below.
Dan Leavers, better known as Danalogue, has spent years shaping the UK’s adventurous jazz and electronic underground. Known as one the driving forces behind The Comet Is Coming, as well as one half of Soccer96 and a member of Flock, the trailblazing synthesist, collaborator and producer is a core figure of East London’s Total Refreshment Centre community, and has worked with artists such as Sarathy Korwar, Snapped Ankles, Alabaster DePlume, Momoko Gill and Rozi Plain, amongst many others.
Back in November, Danalogue shared his debut solo single, ‘Sonic Hypnosis’ and hinted at a new album. Now, details of his debut solo album have finally emerged. Entitled Teleportations, the record was entirely performed by him, using mostly vintage analogue gear, including instruments such as the Roland Juno-60, SH-09 and Jupiter-4, alongside Oberheim synths and old samplers. According to the press release, Danalogue embraced the limitations and tactility of older machines as a way of forging a “time bridge” with earlier eras of electronic experimentation, not to recreate the past, but to imagine “travelling back with modern sensibilities and telling the future through old machines”. Science fiction plays a central role in the album, with Danalogue drawing inspiration from ideas around astral travel, theta brainwaves and collective consciousness, as well as from the work of figures like Jean Giraud, Ernst Bloch and Hayao Miyazaki. The mythology extends further through a short story written alongside the record, imagining an advanced lifeform capable of converging brainwaves into a shared stream of consciousness and travelling across space. Danlogue’s idea was to invite listeners to a “teleportation programme”, where sound and motion guide them through shifting emotional states. Teleportations is described as “a warm, playful and immersive album that transforms endings, grief and personal upheaval into a vivid science-fictional voyage of escape, healing and renewal.”
Musically, the upcoming record draws from celestial ambience, kosmische electronics, space disco, jazz-funk and deep Detroit house, and Danalogue cites artists such as Joe Meek, Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita, Laurie Spiegel, Mort Garson and Terry Riley, and groups like Harmonia and Kluster, as influences.
We’ll have to wait until May 29th for Teleportations to be out through Castles in Space but we can already hear the first single, ‘Far Beyond The Sun’, a sensual and hypnotic space-age ballad about crossing the galaxy to meet a loved one in the afterlife. The single comes with accompanying visuals made by Charles Prest. Watch it now.
Free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements are back with their fifth studio album, Future Present Past, due out on March 27th through Impulse! Records. The follow-up to 2023’s Protect Your Light was mostly recorded at the historic Van Gelder Studio in October 2024, where the quintet of Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), Luke Stewart, Aquiles Navarro, Keir Neuringer, and Tcheser Holmes captured their signature blend of free jazz, diasporic liberation music, global rhythms, and spoken word. The record features longtime collaborator MOTHERBOARD, as well as guest appearances from Helado Negro.
In a statement, Irreversible Entanglements described the spirit behind the album:
“The weight of a certain world can feel cruel and unusual. Another world uplifts. We form as five and transform into billions. Billions of us on this planet sharing this journey through existence—futures full of possibility and potential, the present with all its anxieties and uncertainties, pasts as wellsprings of ancestral wisdom and histories’ warnings.
This album is five standing on the shoulders of legions. The healers, the alchemists, the rebels, the mothers and fathers who have fought and weaved and invented new ways of being, seeing, and balancing the frequencies of this planet towards trans-dimensional liberation and universal understanding.
We assume our role in this music as messengers, continuing in the tradition’s long march along the arc of the universe. Freedom fighters telling us not to lose our heads amidst imposed chaos. It is our duty to vibrate higher, beyond the noise, above the hype, away from the novelty, over the walls, across the borders: to keep going.
The spirit moves us to sing these fight songs, to sing fight songs, we overcome. To hold on, to keep going, together we overcome.”
The quintet had previously shared a couple of singles, ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ and ‘Vibrate Higher’, both featuring MOTHERBOARD, and last week they dropped a third cut from the upcoming Future Present Past titled ‘Juntos Vencemos’, featuring Helado Negro. All three tracks are paired with visualizers. Check them all out below for a taste of what’s coming.
Last month, Belgian producer, multi-instrumentalist and composer Dijf Sanders announced the release of his much anticipated new album Tangkoa II, due out on May 8th through Unday Records. Alongside the announcement, Sanders teased the album with the entrancing and enthralling lead single ‘Mooning‘. Now he’s raising thebar of excitement with the bewitching ‘Mountain On The Hill’, described by Sanders as “a soothing electro acoustic jazz track that meanders through its own existence”. Take a listen below.
