​A wonderful pan-Arabic meeting of multi-disciplinary minds enabled by the altruistic Mophradat organisation, who have brought together some amazing musicians with childrens book authors to put inspiring, imagination sparking and loving messages to music. Start them young and love will come.

أغاني مفردات للأطفال، العدد الأول: عفرتة 

دعت مفردات في عام ٢٠٢١ الكاتبات أحلام بشارات (فلسطين) وهديل غنيم (مصر) ويسرا سلطان (مصر) والموسيقيات والموسيقيين آية متولّي (مصر) ورحاب الحزقي (تونس) وسام شلبي (مصر/كندا) وعالم واصف (مصر) وموريس لوقا (مصر) وهدى عصفور (فلسطين) للتعاون على إنتاج ألبوم من الأغاني للأطفال صغار السن. نسق الفريق عدداً من اللقاءات عبر الإنترنت نتج عنها «عفرتة» وهو ألبوم للأطفال مكون من ست أغنيات عربية بلهجات مصرية وشامية للأطفال من سن الرابعة حتى السادسة، وهي المرحلة العمرية التي يتبلور فيها اكتساب اللغة وفهمها كأداة ومعاني. 

إيماناً من مفردات بالدور الهام الذي تلعبه الموسيقى في تعليم الأطفال التعبير عن المشاعر واستيعاب القصص وسردِها، بدأت مشروع «أغاني للأطفال» للبحث عن طرق لتقديم موسيقى مبهجة تحفز الأطفال على التفكير وحب الطبيعة والخيال وتنمي فيهم صفات الطيبة والفضول وحس المغامرة. 
تدرك مفردات محدودية الإنتاج الموسيقي للأطفال في العالم العربي ولذلك سعت من خلال هذا المشروع لإشراك موسيقيين مجددين ومبدعين من المنطقة في إنتاج موسيقى للصغار. 

مزج الألبوم رضوان غازي مومنة وأتقنته كيتي تافيني. 
غلاف الألبوم من رسم جمانة إميل عبود وتصميم جود طعمة. 

تم تنفيذ ملتقى «أغاني للأطفال» بفضل التعاون مع مؤسسة أليانز الثقافية.

In 2021, Mophradat invited children’s writers Ahlam Bsharat, Hadil Ghoniem, and Yosra Sultan, along with musicians Huda Asfour, Rehab Hazgui, Maurice Louca, Aya Metwalli, Sam Shalabi, and Aalam Wassef, to collaborate on producing an album of progressive songs for young children. The music is made for children around the ages of four to six, the moment where their acquisition and understanding of language as form and meaning starts to take shape. The process, which took place online across countries, led to Affratta, an album of children’s music comprising six tracks.

Mophradat Songs for Kids is a project that is looking for ways for children to be offered joyful, nature-loving, non-patriarchal, imaginative, and evocative music that encourages them to be kind, curious, adventurous, and loving. Music and song are one way children learn, express emotions, hear and tell stories, and get to know their bodies. The Arab world, unfortunately, has limited offerings of musical production for children, and this project is one of Mophradat’s first attempts to engage some of the region’s most exciting musicians with this genre.

Mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Hotel2Tango, Jerusalem in my Heart)
Mastered by Katie Tavini (Emeli Sandé, Nadine Shah, We Are Scientists)
Artwork by visual artist Jumana Emil Abboud and designer Joud Toamah
​
Release management & PR: Simsara Music
The Songs for Kids retreat was made possible in cooperation with the Allianz Kulturstiftung.

Link to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

​I didn't think I'd be repping a Celine Dion related project anytime soon but here I am urging you to go and check her pleasingly opiated, deballadified & sun warped beyond all recognition vocals float around Romance's wispiest ambient world yet for Ecstatic. It's got lazy Sunday written all over it.

Romance pen an extended love note to Celine Dion, re-imagining the Canadian icon's cultural locked grooves as a set of post-vaporwave crybient zoners that are part OPN's timeless "Eccojams", part "Disintegration Loops” Basinski and part Malibu/DJ Lostboi on ice. Stunnnning, really. 

Smelting the iconic singer’s power ballad jewels to a hazed and glistening agenda, ‘Once Upon A Time’ sees Romance dial up the sonic dry ice to enveloping levels that trigger nostalgic senses like the whiff of a former lover’s perfume or Body Shop pot pourri on a saturday afternoon. In slowing Celine to a sizzurpy haze, it feels as though we’re melded deeper into her soft-focus airbrushed fantasias, homing in on eternal moments and finding new 3D depths that lurk in her Athena glossy 2D portraits.  

"Have you ever been in love?" Celine asks over the weightless granular clouds of the opener -  a loving erosion of memory spiraling familiarity and alienness; the sounds have a chilly Proustian effect - false nostalgia, carefully engineered. Dion's voice is pushed into slightly irregular registers - either just too low or just too high - a piano riff is padded out with reverb to edge it into a Budd-esque slo-mo dream sequence. 

Each track excavates another emotion, from euphoria ('Just A Moment') and love ('Somewhere In The Silence') to heartbreaking melancholy ('Remember', 'Crying Is The Only Thing That Gets Me Through'), often smearing them into each other like oil paint. It's the AOR power ballad rendered as ambient music - relentlessly clever when you think about it, cuz both genres are often considered musical wallpaper. 

'Just A Moment' is a torch'd 'n screwed nod to ye olde vaporwave classic Floral Shoppe, swapping out slippery funk and blue-eyed soul for the hi-budget sky-punching histrionics of Dion's 2002 hit 'A New Day Has Come'. 'Remember' blurs its source material to little more than throbs and syrupy waves of sibilant noise, sounding like a mid-point between Malibu/DJ Lostboi's "One Life" and Pinkcourtesyphone most glacial material. Led by campfire-warm subs and cavernous vocal snips, 'I've Been Blown by the Wind' embodies cloud rap's humid bump, coming off like a beatless approximation of Clams Casino's early run. 

But it's the closer 'Crying Is The Only Thing That Gets Me Through' that has us curled up in a ball. Looping a gentle baroque refrain, Romance signals to The Caretaker's memory experiments, but views it thru a sparkling gauze of Disneyfied magic. In the wrong hands this would all have been tragically irony-pilled nonsense, but Romance are Celine Dion devotees, and their passion oozes thru the album's every pore. There's a generous quality to these treatments that isolates the most magical moments from Dion's canon, and presents it completely without cynicism. It's a sprinkle of fairy dust we didn't realise we needed, for real. ​

Links to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

The new LP from Soda Lite sounds like it was recorded in a hammock on a deserted Indian Ocean island in between foraging for coconuts & grilling freshly caught lobster. The sounds of the island's fauna mingling with the lazy soundtrack to the never ending views of turquoise sea, blue sky & tropical flora. Another winner from Not Not Fun Records.

Tasmania-based gardener and composer Alex Last aka Soda Lite specializes in an elusive, ethnographical mode of outer reaches ambient, alternately immersive and immaterial, uninhabited and uninhibited. Their latest collection, Aqua Solar Cura, is a meditation on “relationships to land,” triangulating its titular elements – water, sun, care – within a woozy, warbling palette of keys, haze, and field recordings. Trills of birds and the gurgling of creeks murmur from windswept peripheries; dawn light shimmers in dewdrops and emerald ponds. Each piece feels excerpted from a vaster ongoing ecosystem, teeming with lifeways and hidden cellular harmony. 

Much of the source material, from commingling waterfowl to screeching Tasmanian Devils, was tracked at Trowunna, a progressive wildlife sanctuary that rehabilitates species to be returned to the wilderness – a prime expression of ‘cura.’ Together these tracks evoke a protean harmony, panoramic and indivisible, suffused with the synergy of seasons and seedlings adrift on fragrant air. It’s music of reverie and regeneration, glimpsed mid-bloom, in league with the brave mysteries of nature unveiled.

Credits
​Design by Alex Last. 
Mastered by Hunter P. Thompson. 
Released with Not Not Fun Records

You can check the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

Far out & freaky ambient jazz from New York trippers Yai for Not Not Fun, who machine warp their earthly sounds through time & space to an outer dimensional primordial soup where they swirl & curl into new musical forms for the sonic benefit of whatever evolves.

Storied NY multi-instrumentalists John Thayer and David Lackner join forces as YAI to transmute world-building into new digital frontiers. “Flowers From Home,” their debut, embraces improvisation and manipulation within a laptop jazz palette of warped percussion, horns, electric bass, electronics, keys and tactile atmospherics. 

The duo cite fidelity as a central facet of their sound, utilizing rack mount FX and multi-phonic strategies to splinter and smear instruments into altered state harmonics, simultaneously intimate and estranged. Their chemistry slips between softness and shadow, wind-woven but cybernetic, attuned to the moods of futures as yet unrealized.

CreditsYAI is John Thayer and David Lackner. 
JT - tape echo, laptop, percussion, electric bass, Moog Matriarch, Electron Digitakt, Casio SK1, Lexicon Primetime, contact mics, field recordings. 
DL - saxophone, flute, EWI, clarinet, Yamaha MOX6, Korg Monologue, Moog Matriarch, piano, Rhodes. 
All songs composed and recorded by YAI. 
Mixed and mastered by JT at Thump Studios, BK. 
Design by Britt Brown.

The Japanese music scene is still ridiculously reclusive & even in today's hyper connected world hard to navigate. One place to start would be this lovely compilation from musical dream purveyors PURRE GOOHN & their latest mellowtronic label showcase.

Links to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

A new Biosphere LP is always a cause for celebration. Here he digs out some vintage synths as a homage to some musical heroes, teleporting the vintage sounds through time & space into rhythmic, bass pulsing ambient soundscapes with attitude, fit for modern purpose.

Iconic Norwegian producer and composer Biosphere follows up his evocative 'Angel's Flight' release with a new album set for release early in 2022. Shortwave Memories is an album inspired by the post-punk electronic music of the late 70's and early 80's, especially the productions of figures like Martin Hannett and Daniel Miller. 

"The last few Biosphere albums have all been made using samples and software, but Shortwave Memories is a return to vintage analog hardware from the late 70s and early 80s. Most of these instruments do not have any presets or memory storage, so all the sounds were programmed from scratch. The idea was not so much to make music that sounds like it was written in the same period. It's more like what would happen if I had the chance to use the same instruments, and applied the same meticulous attention to detail as the producers mentioned above." 

Presented as a continuous sonic journey, this stunning record unequivocally manifests a world of it's own and already feels like a timeless addition to the rest of the Biosphere catalogue.

The playlist is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

I've been really enjoying this laid back funk fueled, Afro Brazilian, nu-jazz journey from long time Washington DC stalwart Fachada for Electric Cowbell the last few days. It's pleasingly unpolished, subtly fusion soaked, reassuringly familiar yet somehow fresh. Well recommended.

Fachada's debut full-length "Mundos Secretos" is an album of groove-heavy experimentalism from the diasporic streets of Washington DC. The music is a wildly hybridized meld of instrumental afro-noir, jazz-funk, and neo-psychedelia. 

Fachada is the musical persona of autodidact, visionary artist Rob Smith. Immersed in the sounds of the local 70s radio stations, Fachada was under the influence of funk, R&B, jazz, hip hop, and the city’s most recognizable trademark sound of Go-go music. By the late 70s and early 80s Fachada found himself at the center of DC’s punk scene with the norms-shattering Bad Brains and the emergence of a vibrant DIY music scene that’s now recognized internationally for its influence. Fachada is the sonic intersection of the best of DC. Going to shows, drumming in bands, and being an artist in this milieu puts Fachada’s conception at the ground zero of the city’s zeitgeist in the mid 80s. Fachada’s artistic journey is measured by literally “being there.” A chance discovery of a stack of discarded Brazilian records at the city dump one day proved to be another seminal influence, offering him a fortuitous portal to a “secret world” of rhythm and sound. Even though he did not understand Portuguese and the vast array of styles and rhythms, he began an immersive process of teaching himself to articulate the music he was growing to love. 

Through decades of articulation and emulation, “Mundos Secretos” is the culmination and collection of humble interpretations, personal innovations, and late night recording sessions with select collaborators who move and groove in the margins of the DC underground arts scene. Mundos Secretos is the DIY remnant of an obscure and exotic vision that celebrates a love affair with Brazilian music, progressive jazz, and unfiltered free expression. Mundos Secretos is infused with 70s-era MPB (Música popular brasileira), jazz and the organic sounds and rhythms of Brazil. Tastefully placed sprinkles of synthesizers, keyboards, and electric guitar weave themselves through a mosaic of grooves focused by funk and the sounds of Brazil, swung with influences from across the African diaspora, pushing them all through a mighty cool psych-styled filter.  

​Credits
Pessoal 
Fachada - bateria, congas, percussões, baixo, pára-choques, piano elétrico, sintetizador 
Ty Hussell - guitarra 
Adrian Baxter - flauta 
Swamp Guinee - conga em ‘do lixo ao luxo’

Links to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud

WHAT YOUR EARS SAY & THE COVER LOOKS LIKE

WHAT WE SAY

​There's a very real synergy between Wil Bolton and Francis Gri on their new ambient duet for Gri's Krysalisound label. It's a magical electroacoustic wonderland where the soundscape is verdant, the sonic aesthetic is warm and the natives are naked, unashamed and smiling. 

WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY

Imaginary Tales is the first collaboration between Wil Bolton and Francis Gri. Recorded last year between London and Milan, this album signals a wonderful start to 2022 for Krysalisound. 

These six tracks are the perfect sum of the individual sounds of Wil and Francis and their natural propensity to delicate and intimate sonorities. They are rendered with a broad sonic palette that includes modular synth, acoustic and electric guitars, sansula, electric piano, mellotron, found sounds and field recordings. 

Imaginary Tales is an exploration of dreaming landscapes and lonely moments. Each song could be a story, a story without words. Each title is just the beginning of where your imagination may take you if you just close your eyes.

CreditsAll music by Wil Bolton and Francis Gri 
Composed and recorded between London and Milan in 2021 
Mixed by Wil Bolton 
Mastered by Wil Bolton (CD version) and Francis Gri (Digital audio version) 
Artwork and design by KSND 

Sound equipment: 
- Wil Bolton: modular synthesizers, mellotron, field recording, effects pedals 
- Francis Gri: acoustic and e-bow guitar, electric piano, OP-1, sansula, effects pedals, found objects​

IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS

Links to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube and Soundcloud

WHAT YOUR EARS SAY & THE COVER LOOKS LIKE

WHAT WE SAY

The benefits of having a creative outlet & using art as therapy during the pandemic lockdowns is still sadly understated, but music listeners continue to reap the benefits. Here Maria Moles uses maternal inspiration & her percussive skills sparingly to create sprawling ritualistic ambient soundscapes with an Asiatic leaning, & thanks to Room40 they're now available to help us all.

WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY

A Note from Maria Moles
 

'For Leolanda' was created during the lockdown in Melbourne 2020. Listening to and making music was healing and I'm very grateful I was able to create during that time. 

Most of the pieces are inspired by listening to Kulintang music of the Philippines; some of the compositional techniques are applied to the combination of synthesizer, percussion, tape loops, and drum kit. 

The name 'In Pan-as' refers to my grandfather's farm in Pilar that my mum regularly played at. The drum kit part is adapted from a rhythm I heard on a beautiful album 'Muranao Kakolintang - Philippine Gong Music'. The initial inspiration for this track struck me after a conversation on the phone with my mum, during which, out of the blue, she requested I spread her ashes on the farm Pan-as after she passed. 
I realised I would never really know how that would feel until it happened, and I wondered what kind of ritual I would perform to help me celebrate the life of one of the dearest people to me. I thought that perhaps dancing to rhythms similar to this one would feel right.  

The track 'Mansaka' was inspired by the Mansaka tribe in Compostela Valley, I fell in love with the music I heard from them. The piece developed into something entirely different, something that felt like me. Being a drummer, I usually compose from the drum kit as a starting point, but this album was an attempt at composing on the synthesizer and harmonically matching the overtones from singing bowls, bowed cymbals, and bells. 

The album is dedicated to my mother, Leolanda.
  
Credits
​Composed, performed and mixed by Maria Moles in Fitzroy, Australia 2020 
Drum kit in 'In Pan-as' recorded/mixed by Timothy Harvey 
Kulintang in 'Distant Hills' recorded by Maria Moles at The Music Archive of Monash University, Melbourne 
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space 
Commissioned by the APRA Art Music Fund 2020​

IF YOU LIKE THAT YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS

Links to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube & Soundcloud