Kirik
Dance Of Confusion

LANK002 by LANKLANK002 is a compilation that gives a future listen of what’s to come for the new Belgian label. Side A starts out slowly whilst side B highlights the up-tempo vision of the label. The release focusses on different electronic styles but it also takes a look beyond. Every track, put aside the exception, is performed and recorded in one take. The cassette is numbered, limited to 50 copies and comes with a download code, including some extra bonus tracks.

The Clearing is the debut album by the late Los Angeles-based musician Barry Craig aka A Produce. As co-founder of the underground cassette imprint Trance Port Tapes, Craig managed to assemble local artists who were working within the realms of DIY electronics and rhythmic, spacious sound. Incubated over a three year period, '88 release The Clearing draws on the roster of TPT associates such as Scott Fraser (Kronos Quartet), Daniel Voznick (Afterimage) and guitarist Scott Marc Becker resulting an 'an album of conceptual space', owing equally to the guitar-based new-wave releases of the imprint prior as to the later, and deeper ambient trance sound that would follow. Coming at this intersection of styles, there are moments of deep introspection and sulking, minimal drum machines followed by pieces of more outward expression only to be plunged back into tense, oppressive atmospheres. Yet despite these shifts in style, the sense of mood and cohesion throughout is ever-present, giving a true sense of inhabiting a unique space - or 'The Clearing'. Stockport-based store All Night Flight Records is proud to present this official reissue, with the blessing of Craig's estate and artwork replicated by the original artist - renown designer Bruce Licher of Independent Project Recordings.

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says. Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains. Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition. Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

Giorgio GIordano and Giorgio Dolce originally produced ''KKK." back in 1983, and the track was taken into the hearts of the blossoming Balearic scene hovering around DJ Alfredo at Amnesia. It's as gentle and sweet natured as Italo disco can be, and of course it makes perfect sense that Best Record would dig it out of the archives and give it the shiny new reissue it deserves. The ''Club Mix'' of ''KKK'' is a feast of simple, charming programmed melodies and crisp drum machine rhythms with the innocence of the early 80s in its heart. The ''Dub Mix'' and ''Bonus Beats'' on the flip are handy for the technical DJs out there, but the ''Club Mix'' is where it's at for the lovers.

Banoffee Pies Records, in its eighth year of operating, hit the 20th release milestone in their Original Series. Joining the roster, Cairo based producer Hassan Abou Alam steps up with a 4 track solo EP entitled "Fasla".A decisive selection of attitude packed wormhole bass lines and dark basement jams.

High Diamond / Snake Bomb by Chandeliers