Rvng Int'l US Vinyl & CDs

Review: Black Decelerant, a collaboration between Khari Lucas (Contour) and Omari Jazz, explores spiritual jazz through modern tones, weaving sonic reflections on Black existence, life and grief, expansion and constraint, and the personal versus the collective. Their eponymous debut album fosters a serene refuge amidst societal turbulence and aims to transcend fleeting moments. Conceived from an intuitive process, the album emerged from remote sessions spanning six months in 2020, bridging South Carolina and Oregon. Improvised instrumentals and sampled productions became conduits for their inner dialogues and offered solace during existential crises amid lockdowns and social unrest in the US.

Review: Oliver Coates' Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time is an exploration of memory and emotion, blending the tactile with the ephemeral. This third album from the British cellist, producer, and composer, released through RVNG Intl., encapsulates six years of introspection and creative evolution. Following the atmospheric textures of his previous work, skins n slime, Coates delves deeper into the interplay of digital and analogue sound. The album's centerpiece, 'Shopping centre curfew,' reflects a surreal fusion of events from South London during the pandemic, manifesting a unique blend of temporal dissonance and vivid soundscapes. Tracks like 'Please be normal' and '90' showcase Coates' ability to weave misty tones and shifting frequencies into a cohesive auditory experience. Collaborations with Malibu and chrysanthemum bear, along with Faten Kanaan's synth textures, enhance the album's depth. Inspired by artist Sarah Sze's installations, Coates applies a sculptural approach to sound, creating a dynamic interplay between digital manipulation and live performance. The result is a rich experience that resists closure, with the final track 'Make it happen' embodying a defiant push against silence.

Review: Meeting in the wonderfully intimidating and disorienting - not to mention disorganised - chaos of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz struck up a lifelong partnership emotionally and creatively, sharing in a radical vision of what pop could be if it was allowed to break free from the shackles of major labels obsessed with commercial ambition. Together, people often cite them as both singular - certainly in Deyhim's approach to vocalisation - and yet resolutely abstract and varied, always moving into new territories and exploring the idea of musical languages being written rather than read back and repeated. This collection, pieced together with input from the two masterminds themselves, is wonderfully bizarre and beguiling introduction to their world.

Review: Andrew PM Hunt returns once again as Dialect with Atlas Of Green, determinedly expanding the artist's idea-oeuvre with a brand new concept album. The album imagines a young musician named Green, working in a "dawning future era where lost signals and enduring impulses are unearthed from the sediments of technology and time." Its description sounds at once illusive yet still rings out as meaningful, recalling the collective post-apocalyptic utopia outlined in Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home; both works deal in themes of recovery, of unearthing old technologies from sedimented layers of workable soil. Green's dozen tracks weave through malfunctioning but still usable scrap metals or "vaporware" of sampled sound, its chirrupy latent folkishness, its sound effects-laden lollops, making up the confluent, but still contingent, cochlear canards of lost - but non-linear and thus still salvageable - time.

Review: Isik Kural's Moon in Gemini is a captivating album that blends slow, evocative narratives with symbolic storytelling. While also combining environmental music with folk influences, Isik's vocals float over pastoral sounds, chamber instrumentation and archival recordings which trace a line back through his own diverse musical journey. The album's 14 tracks immerse you in a dreamy, liminal space - 'Moon in Gemini' for example reflects a multi-faceted and nostalgic exploration of Isik's past work by including recordings from Turkey, Miami, Helsinki, and Glasgow. Inspired by artists like Nina Simone and Aldous Harding, Isik experiments with new techniques of theirs to make this album a poetic, naturalistic experience with a portion of proceeds sent to benefit Mor cat? Women's Shelter Foundation.

Review: On her sixth full-length album, Tokyo's Satomimagae continues to refine her idiosyncratic fusion of folk, ambient and sound collage into something singular and quietly expansive. Hailing from Japan's acid-folk scene, Satomi's music often blurs the edges between the intimate and the cosmic, the rooted and the abstract. Taba floats beautifully in that liminal space. Rather than traditional song structures, she presents Taba as a series of open-ended vignettes, each radiating with a soft-focus clarity. The arrangements are centered around fingerpicked guitar, hushed vocals and ambient textures that are deceptively gentle. Closer listening reveals a rich interplay of glitchy electronics, subtle field recordings and haunted atmospheres. Tracks like 'Many' drift on echoing voices and vaporous folk melodies, while 'Tonbo' finds a summery sweetness in its fusion of pop and pastoral folk, complete with the sound of nature rustling at its back. 'Omajinai', perhaps the emotional core of the album, embraces traditional pop structure only to dissolve it into a haze of nostalgia and spectral warmth. Taba is not background music, it asks for deep listening, but rewards you with quiet truths and melancholic beauty.

Review: Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada steps out with his long awaited debut album, What Is Not Strange?, and a fine first solo outing it is too. It is by far his most ambitious and widescreen work to date and it comes laden with plenty of emotion as a result of the fact that it was written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the rather opposite feelings of experiencing the birth of his daughter. As such Wada reflects inward to explore various themes including being alive, mortality and finding one's place in the world. His unique song based expressionism goes from ecstatic to denser forms and starker contrasts. It is a wonderful experiment and immersive listen.