"Word Origins consists of improvisations recorded in my house during the current lockdown. Each one was recorded at around 17.00-18.00 pm. I allowed myself to just get my cello, sit, start the record button and play, just once, each day. I wanted to make concise, stream of consciousness music, in some ways it relates to a lot of the paintings I have been making recently, but also the poetry I have been reading. The titles of each track are taken from words in The Sonnets by American poet Ted Berrigan, which were written in the 60’s and constructed by chance operations." - Anton Lukoszevieze -- All music by Anton Lukoszevieze. Recorded by Anton Lukoszevieze. Artwork by Oliver Barrett.

Featuring material recorded & assembled from November 2019 until deep in quarantine, Tim Parkinson's 'Here Comes A Monster' captures the fear and foreboding atmosphere of the UK's capital city, scribing diaristic post-punk scenes through a twisted lens. Holding a mirror to the city's inner topography, Tim assembles images from the underground and overground; fragments of eavesdrops, moments and moods that have burrowed into his conscience. 'They've Got A Good View Of The Shard' repeats a mantra-like overheard phrase about the tower corporate skyscraper, a building Tim describes like "big sleeping monster from another planet that looks as if it might shoot a laser into the sky and ignite the atmosphere". 'Everything Is OK' composes mechanised denial and the sound of people playing candy crush in a breeze of ice-cold industrial cycles. The counterbalance of dealing with the world by staring into the headlights (“Get Me Out Of Here”) while also using filters of denial (“HeadPhoneHead”), is a theme that haunts the album. The idea of Monsters of mythology included Behemoths and Leviathans - the monsters Tim is coming to terms with are not just physical, but everywhere. --- Written and performed byTim Parkinson - voice, guitars, midi synths, midi drums, field recordings, midi piano, reed organ, percussion with The GBSR Duo (George Barton & Siwan Rhys) - vocals (track 1, 3, 6)Angharad Davies - vocals (track 1, 4, 6), violas & percussion (track 6)Nouvelle Ensemble Contemporain - vocals (track 1)Year 10 drama students from Ashmole Academy - vocals (track 1)Emma Harrison, John Lely, Juliet Fraser, Luke Nickel, Brian Lee, Angharad Davies, Rori, Gerry Summers, Gwenno Saunders, Sarah Hughes, Marjolaine Charbin, Alex Ward, Dominic Lash, Lutfi Abu Aun, Mark Knoop, Rick Pushinsky, Laurence Crane, Ros Bailey, Markus Trunk, Alex Nikiporenko, Matteo Fargion, Rachael MacArthur, Mira Benjamin, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Benedict Drew, Steve Beresford, Onyee Lo, Xenia Pestova-Bennett, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Closs Stephens, Travis Just, Kara Feely, Gilbert Linley, Thierry Madiot, Silvia Tarozzi, James Saunders, Marianne Schuppe, JG Thirlwell, Dora Blount, Richard Dawson, Jessica Cox, Ruth Sanderson, Rachel Steadman, Leo Chadburn, Laura Steenberge - vocals (track 4) October 2019-April 2020 Cover art by Rick Pushinsky. Arranged by Oliver Barrett.

Swedish-Finnish composer/sound artist Marja Ahti and Australian cellist/composer Judith Hamann developed Portals collaboratively from their respective lockdown spaces in Finland, sending recordings back and forth across the eastern most arm of the Baltic sea from Turku to Suomenlinna. Their lines of acoustic & electronic sound pull each other through different composite terrains, revealing imaginary scenery and creating a palimpsest of geographies and time. Akin to film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky's focus “on the pressure of time", Marja and Judith give weight to each frame of sound’s internal narrative, letting each move slowly from land to island, sea to forest, mundane to remarkable, domestic to public, as if caught in dream motion. As the title suggests, the release offers frames, or windows into Marja and Judith's combined hearing, into spaces they've created together during this time: simultaneously near and distanced. Marja Ahti / electronics, magnetic tape, field recordingsJudith Hamann / cello, field recordings With thanks to HIAP Suomenlinna for providing Judith with safe harbour this spring. Cover design by Oli Barrett

Darcy Spidle (chik white) explores the fugitive spaces in and around his home in Chezzetcook (Nova Scotia), mapping a multi-faceted aural topography with his mouth and various objects. In the old outhouse in his shed he plays some mouth harp, regurgitating his emotions in a series of spasms and tightly controlled muscle flexes. Over in the humble cold porch he treats us to a bit of yodelling that borders both the beautiful and the absurd. Along by the mailboxes down the street a little strip of cove becomes a temporary space for some bird nose flute recordings, whilst back on his property he picks up electronic magnet field recordings using a handy Soma Ether V2. Recordings of the utility box in his driveway and the fuse box in his basement seem to be haunted by the ghost of Merzbow, but we'll leave that problem to Nova Scotia's parapsychologists. In short, in Darcy's own words... "if I can't leave home, I figure I can at least expand my limited location by exploring the multiple realms of sound all around me. All this to say, the album is really a meditation on place..." ... All music written & recorded by Chik White   --- Mastered by Oliver Barrett '207' was originally commissioned by Kraak Records for their Spring Brakers video series. 

A saxophone quietly: whistling, squealing, breathing in and out. A drum rolling: tracing lines on its skin and occasionally tripping over itself. Seymour & Crystabel collect, lay-out and thread together selections of 'night music'; circling motifs and little events that render the quotidian lock-down experience. As night rumbles on and sounds that fade in and out of one another, the creaking cork and concrete of their flat slowly unfolds itself to the ear, revealing through a half-closed blind a peep into their own intimate rituals. --- Crystabel Riley / drums Seymour Wright / saxophone --- Recorded by @xcrswx. 

"In May 2017 I went on a madly anticipated trip to Japan. Being an anime and manga nerd for years and a big fan of the Japanese kitchen, it truly was a dream come true. I played 12 shows there as red brut in about three weeks, with spare time in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa and even the sunny beaches of Okinawa. It was one of the best travels I ever did and upon arrival back home I immediately knew I wanted to go back as fast as possible. Then of course life got in the way, but when I finished the material for my second lp in december 2019 I knew the time had come to start planning my return to Japan. My second record is scheduled for July 3rd on Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal and the idea was to tour Japan in October. Then in March 2020 just as I was writing my first e-mails to my friends in Japan covid-19 struck the world and after some weeks of fearing and not knowing what to do I decided to postpone the tour to yet unknown dates somewhere in 2021 or 2022. When I made this decision my partner Michiel (also part of Goldblum and Sweat Tongue) started digging through the live recordings of my performances he made during the tour 2017 tour in Japan. We never listened back to these recordings. actually, I never listen back to these kind of live recordings and even while working on my albums I find it a struggle to listen back to the recordings I made myself in my homestudio. Michiel is better at this and he found beautiful passages tucked away in these live sets. during that tour I was working with the material that ended up on my first record, the one that came out on Kraak in 2018, and I was still figuring out different combinations of tapes, sound-wise energy-wise, sometimes with good, sometimes with bad results. “Not live in Japan" is a montage Michiel created out of live recordings made in Nagoya, Matsumoto, Oita and Kanazawa. It's not a live registration, but a new entity, a distorted memory if you will, but also a gaze into the future, in anticipation of my return to my beloved Japan."- Red Brut Cover design and mastered by Oliver Barrett.

Agnes Hvizdalek's abstracted vocal works experiment with textures and tones that teeter the line between both human and non-human sound. Here, her voice meets the cold humming sounds of single-room domesticity, as if all her surroundings are being held in frozen motion. Occasionally her voice is met with a single reflective piano softly floating in the air. The spareness (or lack) of sounds around her lets her voice take centre stage and unfold in all its complex fragility, unearthing the sort of personal subjectivity that's hard to describe in a crisis. Towards the end we hear the sound of the world outside, sounds of other humans, and the snapshot of the real world again. --- Agnes Hvizdalek / voice --- Cover design by Oli Barrett Recorded at HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts. Mixed and mastered by Daniel Lercher

French composer Melaine Dalibert has before quoted Deleuze, referring to his own compositional practice as working on (and with) the behaviour or "space-time blocks". Here his philosophy unravels specific to the covid-19 pandemic; a beautifully spare and minimalist solo piano work, taking the form of a 20-minute long rallentendo which reflects the drop in tension that we are experiencing. --- Tracklisting: 1 - 'Un Long Ralentissement' (20.26) --- Music written & performed by Melaine Dalibert. Recording and mastering by Hervé Jegaden & David Launay. Cover design by Oli Barrett

James Rushford's work fascinates with its ability to gently straddle the worlds of new music composition, electro-acoustic music and haunting domestic musique concrete. Here he locks his focus and his fingers firmly to his Rhodes organs, but loses none of the complex shading and narrativism at the core of his practice. Each note, chord and small progression feels like opening a new door and a new set of co-ordinates, before another door opens slightly tilted to a new axis. Then another, then another. A 37 minute-long maze very much worth getting lost in. --- James Rushford / rhodes organ --- Recorded, mixed and mastered by James Rushford.  Cover design by Oli Barrett.

"This music is dedicated to all sisters around, to all womXn and particularly to Virginie Despentes. Lock down means confinement. Behind closed doors some women are suffering hell and we want to show our empathy for them in their ordeal, and to ask questions of the image of woman in society - how is she seen and how does she see herself?" - Harrga --- Dali De Saint Paul / voice Miguel Prado / electronics --- Recorded by HARRGA, Bristol, April-May 2020. Cover design by Oliver Barrett.

When the covid-19 pandemic started, in a mixture of distress and concern, it was hard to block out the imagination and its ability to dream up how far things could go. In what feels like a lost tape from a field trip in nuclear fallen-out land, Malvern Brume paints a world seemingly abated. Occasional muffled dictaphone note-taking punctuates caustic interruptions, cryptic utterances, the hollow chime of steel panelling, the movement of 'something' under the gravelly surface. When the journey comes to an end, a crescendo of static noise comes to fore and we hear the splash of water, it becomes apparent that wherever we are is fairly similar to where we are right now. --- All sounds recorded in London between April and March 2020 during lockdown. Made using various instruments, devices, field recordings and objects including; a synthesiser, modified violin and penny whistle, balloons, tape recorders, bird whistles, bells, a sampler, gardening tools, E3 dawn chorus and other materials found around the house. Both poems were written in response to walks through Victoria park during lockdown. All music recorded, mixed & mastered by Malvern Brume. Cover design by Oliver Barrett.

Recorded in his apartment in Brooklyn, Steve Gunn's offers up a delightful selection of refrains from solo guitar, spinning a tapestry of wandering phrases that slowly burrow into vast dream states. Along with subtle breaths of synth washes, the sound of cars passing and dogs barking outside, Steve's refreshingly human tracks pierce little glimmers of light in the opaque global situation. A real treat for old and new Steve Gunn fans alike. --- Steve Gunn / guitar --- Cover design by Oliver Barrett.

Lock-down playtime gets fun in Ashley Paul's living room with her daughter Cora, partner Ben and a whole host of keyboards, saxophones and miscellaneous objects. Like Ashley's own music, all three weave melodic earworms seemingly out of nowhere, gently bumping them together with little jolts of atonality and playbox percussion. The domestic ramshackle unravels over 10 tracks, but could have gone for hours. Luckily things are kept short, sweet and beautiful by Cora, who cuts the proceedings with the firm announcement: "finished!" --- Ashley Paul / drums, alto saxophone, clarinet, keyboard, voice, bells Cora Ray / drums, voice, toy saxophone, melodica Ben Pritchard / percussion, voice --- All songs by Ashley based on percussion jamz by Cora, Ben and Ashley, except 'Window Flower' and 'Diamonds and Peaches' - all Ashley.  Mastering and cover design by Oliver Barrett.