Delano Smith Norm Talley
Straight Up No Chaser

Habitat by Leon Louder / Scattered EnsembleMontreal-based composer Leon Louder spent the 2020-21 lockdown period in remote collaboration with four fellow musicians, exploring tones from homemade and traditional instruments and percussion, using a mixture of live sampling and improvisation to create aleatoric tonal landscapes. Inspired by a stay on a remote island in the St-Lawrence River estuary, where the weather can shift dramatically from serene to turbulent at any moment and the dialogue of birds, insects, and seals is omnipresent, Habitat is a sequence of restless sound worlds, an impressionistic depiction of a constantly changing ecosystem that had its parallel in the emotional turmoil of pandemic time.Like the phenomena they approximate, the pieces exist in a continual state of composition and recomposition. Populated with melodic fragments that call and respond, break apart and ricochet, they ask the listener to live in the music as much as to listen to it, accepting discord as equal to harmony, chaos as part of the order.The individual tracks are strikingly varied, not only in their vocabularies of sound but in the moods they create and the hints of environment they evoke. They range from "Full of Light", in which mesmerizing bell and woodwind tones interweave in melodic counterpoint, building to a gently driving train-like rhythm that conjures some sort of Celestial Express -- to "Underpass", whose low dark sounds and simple repeated rhythms carry us down through subterranean strata bored out by primeval life forms, into what feels like a maze of subway tunnels on another planet.The recordings bring into play double bass, vibraphone, homemade zithers, piano, modular synthesizer, and found percussion, and feature collaborators from the Montreal experimental music community: radio artist Martin Rodriguez, multi disciplinary artist Gabrielle Godbout, drummer and electroacoustic composer Samuel Bobony, and multi instrumentalist Rodney Sothmann.

Reunion's major musical genre, Maloya, becomes "gazé" (crazy) through the sounds composed by Grèn Sémé for this new EP.A gassed maloya that combines direct inspiration from the purest line of this traditional réunionese music with the highly contemporary evolution that is the Grèn Sémé group's signature.Composed during the studio sessions for their latest album, "Zamroza", the first three tracks on this new EP reveal the sunny side of the Creole band.

Burial lands on XL Recordings with the new single Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above. Outside of a handful of collabs and singles, Burial has been a bastion of Hyperdub’s impressive roster since its 2005 inception, so what better way to shake up the 2024 news cycle than a surprise drop on XL Recordings and bring back the hazy club soundscapes.Dreamfear is a tag team of sample-suffused dancefloor quakers: the invigorating beats of the title track thump at breakneck pace, with lightning charged rave synths and breakbeats contorted to match that epic cinematic feel, while ‘Boy Sent From Above’ is a club panacea of jittery vocal samples, electro-adjacent rhythms, and stuttering synth wizardry.A welcome return from the nocturnal hero of the south london boroughs, kicking off 2024 in style.

Heavy hitting SNES-Funk album from Tapes, returning to Jahtari for his first full length LP with eight solid 16bit Slap Crackers! TIP!Constructed with data rips from Super-Nintendo ROMs, a Sequential Circuits Drum Tracks and a heavy dose of Kawai K1, each of these gems unfold into epic compositional mastery reminiscent of 1980s Japanese kids TV, with sparkly sprinkles of synth wizardry thrown on top.‘Funk Plates Vol. 1’ sees Tapes depart as a riddim driven Digi-Dub contributor with a sharp handbrake U-turn on the Neo high way to funky-town. A perfect soundtrack for a spaced out Sunday morning and just as potent on the club hifi! (Quack!)

Hot on the heels of last year’s new era e.p., Marco Repetto returns with the second installment in the planet love trilogy.Adamha e.p. consists of three tracks, conceived at axodya during the winter of ‘91-‘92, that reveal a more obscure side of the young producer’s mind.Miraculously, not one of these compositions has seen the light of day before; they were unearthed during a painstaking transfer of Repetto's extensive ‘88-‘04 DAT-archives.Thirty-one years after instrumentation, return_backspace proudly presents to the world the definitive sound of the future!