Various
Someone Like Me

Pierre Bujeau is an expert at creating temporary escape zones - musical structures to evade the everyday. Sometimes he works collectively as part of the mysterious French groups Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz. But it’s when he’s on his own, performing as Megabasse, that he offers the most complete break from reality.His kit is simple: a few bottles of cheap lager, twin Fender amps, and his double-necked guitar. An instrument like this normally signals maximum rockist excess - think Jimmy Page, Geddy Lee, or that dude from the Eagles. In Pierre’s hands, it becomes more like a zither or a dulcimer, producing soft chiming patterns that build against themselves until the sound of the room, passed back and forth between his two amps, starts to blur everything, and we are away in another world. Wait, though - let down your yoga bun and don’t light the palo santo yet. The new space he creates has nothing to do with smug wellness. It’s a rough, do-it-yourself psychedelia, scuffed but hopeful. Not a perfect blank space to be your best self in, but instead a communal dreaming, an uncanny place where all are welcome.Until now, without catching him live, the Megabasse experience has been difficult to find: CD-Rs, short-run tapes, and one blink-and-you-missed-it LP. Thankfully, this record on Efficient Space, a... morecreditsreleased March 28, 2025Recorded in November 2023 with D'Incise at the Pacheco' Chapel,BrusselsTracks originally released on cassette via MascarponeDiscos, 2024Mixed by Guilhem LacrouxMastered by Mikey YoungOriginal woodcut by Valentin CaponyDesign by Steele Bonus

Singing Dust: ...One of Australia’s most mysterious jazz long players, the eponymous creation of Queensland pianist Robert Welsh. Originally released in 1986, Singing Dust offers a dynamic collection of songs rich in expressive performance and compositional fluidity. Inspired by the sounds of Indian devotional song, the jazz piano styles of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, English folk music and Debussey’s tonal impressions, this is a work of true dedication and posterity that will appeal to many serious music lovers. Restored from original master tapes by Fresh Hold Releases & @efficientspace.Singing Dust - Singing DustRobert Welsh - Vocals, Vocal Harmonies, Bosendorfer, Grand Piano, Rhodes Electric Piano, Korg Synthesizer, Recorders, Percussion, Conga Drum and Xylophone.Raine Mormon - Vocals and Vocal Harmonies.Ewan McKenzie - Guitar.

Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022.
Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora.
Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule and ensorcelled storytelling.

EM Records: ...Imagine being a punk rocker before there were any others, or a hippie whose message of peace was infused with a sardonic whimsy. That’s what it must have been like to be Pip Proud, in Sydney in the late 1960s, railing against the media and its hypocrisies, making a music that cut through all lies. — David NicholsPip Proud, sui generis, could be considered an Australian outsider, with his untutored and uninhibited singing style, his primal guitar playing, his resolutely personal vision captured on recordings from 1967 to the early 70s - except that, unlike most outsiders, he was loved and accepted, with two of his three album releases on a major label, with frequent television appearances and coverage in music magazines. Heralded in his native land though he was, he maintained a low profile from the early 70s, never made an impact overseas, and his recordings have been difficult to access.This collection has been selected by Proud's biographer David Nichols and will engender a new appreciation of Proud's music. Considered by some as a sort of Antipodean Syd Barrett, listeners will hear that Pip was clearing his own private and primal path, more poet than pop star, despite the media attention. Other than one Velvets-style band track, all songs here feature Pip solo, some with appealingly primitive overdubs. Fans of ramshackle oddball weirdo portastudio lofi bedroom pop of the 80s, 90s and beyond, whether of the NZ, UK or US varieties, will find a precursor here.