Vinyl: that mystical black circle where music still dares to breathe slowly. And Cie, the Cologne-based producer and sonic geographer, knows this very well. "Adventures II" isn’t just another neatly cut slab of club-ready tech - it’s a topographic map pressed into wax, the kind you don't read so much as "feel" under your sneakers at 4 a.m., in that moment when bass and dew both cling to your skin.

This sequel to 2022’s "Adventures I" doesn't just pick up where the first journey ended - it starts higher up, like someone who took the mountain trail instead of the shuttle bus. You drop the needle and "Reichenstein" rises immediately from the fog, all fortress, and voltage. The beat structure feels geological: a percussive landslide carved into shape by synth winds, with layer upon layer of rhythm like sedimentary grooves built for ascent.

Then comes "Der Turm", a spiral staircase of a track, spinning upward with hypnotic determination. Synths echo like footsteps in stone corridors, the kind of sound that suggests torchlight and maybe a distant ritual - yes, it’s club music, but of the candlelit underground temple variety. There’s reverence here. A meditative darkness, not menacing but watchful, like it knows you’ve got some stuff you need to sweat out.

Flip the record, and "Stenzelberg" appears - a track so percussively organic you can practically smell the moss. This one moves with the stubbornness of roots breaking concrete. It grooves, yes, but also listens - to itself, to the silence between the kicks, to your heartbeat as you wonder whether you’re dancing or hiking.

And then comes the remix. "Stenzelberg (Mar io Remix)" is not so much a rework as a cartographer’s dream: the same terrain, but with hidden paths illuminated. Mar io adds subtle mutations, shifting the weight of the track from foot to head, from bones to neurons. It’s less “peak-time” and more “golden hour,” like watching a rave dissolve into birdsong through the trees.

The fact that this EP is vinyl-only makes perfect sense. These are not disposable files - they are tactile artifacts, pressed to endure the dust and sweat of real floors, handled with fingers that still believe in the ceremony of listening.

And perhaps that's the real charm of "Adventures II": it’s not about reinventing techno, or reinventing you - it’s about reminding both that the journey is ongoing, and the climb is worth it. This is not music that slaps you in the face. It takes your hand, leads you up a ridge, and lets you look down at the glow of the dancefloor far below, twinkling like a secret you’re not ready to share.

Some records invite you to dance. Others ask you to think. Rare are those that command both - wielding basslines like sledgehammers while whispering philosophy in your ear. "Don't Become The Thing You Hated" is precisely that kind of album: a beautifully sculpted paradox, dressed in combat boots and existential dread.

Rotersand, the Hamburg-based duo of Rascal Nikov and Krischan Jan-Eric Wesenberg, return after what feels like a decade-long stare into the void. But instead of just gazing, they took notes, wrote verses, and built kick drums that sound like they were forged in a collapsing star. The result is not just a collection of songs but a cautionary fable masquerading as an industrial-electro album.

From the first beat of "All Tomorrows", you're thrown into a maelstrom of mechanical precision and lyrical intimacy. Rotersand have never been about cheap thrills, and here they double down - this is music that seduces with restraint, beats that bruise but also caress, synths that shimmer like city lights seen from a train you never meant to board. There's propulsion, yes - but also pause. The floor-filling power of "Sexiness of Slow" is balanced by the eerily contemplative "Private Firmament", a track that feels like late-night doomscrolling rendered in sound: seductive, melancholic, and oddly comforting.

Lyrically, the album does what very few in this genre dare: it asks questions that hurt. What happens when your rebellion begins to resemble the very authority it resisted? What are we becoming in the algorithmic reflection of our worst instincts? There’s rage here, but it's tempered - like a Molotov with a handwritten apology taped to the bottle.

And yet, it never loses the beat. These songs are built for the club, but not the club of clichés; more like a future cathedral where the faithful sweat, doubt, and dance. "Don't Stop Believing" isn't ironic - it’s wounded but earnest, like a final flare fired into a poisoned sky.

Production-wise, it’s meticulous. Nothing is accidental. The synths hum with ghost electricity. The beats snap with martial clarity. There’s a sense of architecture in the sequencing: "Heaven" doesn’t come to rescue you, but to make you wonder why you thought you needed saving.

If there’s a flaw, it’s only that this record demands your attention in a way that club-goers might not be used to. It doesn’t just want your body - it wants your ethics, your unease, your contradictions. Some might call that pretentious. Others might call it art.

By the time the closer "Forgotten Daydreams (They Live At Night)" fades, you’re left somewhere between elation and reckoning. It’s a kind of sonic aftermath - the emotional equivalent of the walk home from a protest that almost turned ugly, but didn’t. Or did it?

Rotersand have not just made a great album - they’ve made a necessary one. And in times like these, that’s rarer than bass drops and anti-capitalist slogans in four-four time.

Some label anniversaries feel like retirement notices. Not so with Echo Beach. Their 30th year is marked not by folded hands but by a double-decker sonic celebration: "King Size Dub - Hamburg", a cityscoped anthology that marries local flavor with global echo. In short: this is dub regionally reimagined - and it groans, saunters, theorizes, and courts the dancefloor all at once.

This isn’t a throwback to dub’s analog origins. It’s a remix sermon for the postinternet age. The compilation spans legends and the next wave: DJ Koze’s remix of "Himmel Über Hamburg" kicks off a ride through cosmic reggae, satirical steppers, punkdub hybrids, and remix artistry so sharp it could double as protest art.

What sets it apart is the generational mashup. You’ve got Lee Scratch Perry coexisting with Deichkind; Fettes Brot stepping into dub’s echo chamber; Jan Delay’s urban poetics washed in bass; local heroes like Chassy or Pensi anchoring deep underground takes; and cheeky speechbubble titles like “Die Mieten Sind Zu Hoch (Rent Too High?)” that carry humor and bite. Each track feels like part of a larger conversation: sonic activism, party, lament, critique, and community all layered within the echo.

Production is rooftop clean yet streetwise gritty - with signal splinters and echo decay adding character. Remixers don’t fix what’s broken - they amplify the fractures, turning them into features. Think church sound system where the mic is sometimes feedback, the bass sometimes sermon, and every subkick carries social commentary.

As a portrait of Hamburg dub DNA, it’s rich. But more surprising is the attitude. Not nostalgic, not retro, and definitely not livesample kitschy. This is dub as territorial claim and open invitation. It’s unapologetically local, yet wired into a club network in Leeds, Lagos, Berlin, and beyond. Every song pulses with the unspoken city in motion: the telecom towers, the harbor wind, the slogan graffitied on a crumbling wall.

On the second disc, newcomers like Turtle Bay Country Club and Sufi Dub Brothers bring sonic worlds of their own - drawing from reggae fundamentals but reshaping them via Hamburg’s unique feedback network. Tracks like "Maschinenland" feel like dub’s manifesto for industrial modernity, while Erobique’s "Verkackt Dub" (loosely: “Dub That Messed Up”) is punk energy tightly distilled into dub logic.

What ties all this together is Echo Beach’s steadfast curatorial vision - 30 years of proof that the best “niche” labels don’t nichein; they amplify. This city edition isn’t archive dust - it’s living signal, a locational soundtrack for those who refuse monotone, who love history with a heartbeat.

A tripledeck sound system built for Hamburg’s skyline and beyond. Whether you’re a veteran dub historian or a curious listener wanting danceable ideas in highdefinition echo, "King Size Dub - Hamburg" exceeds the hype: dub, discovery, dissent - with the bass always turned upward.

There are records you play. And there are worlds you enter. "Suite blanche / Angelica" is one of the latter - two discs that aren’t just music, but listening architectures. In the first, "Suite blanche", Genthon’s violin and Marchetti’s electronics don’t so much play together as fuse, crafting soundscapes where spatial projection matters as much as pitch and rhythm. In the second, "Angelica", a live recording from Bologna, that same fusion hints at ritual rather than performance - echoes in the room as pointed as those in the ear.

This duo - and high priests of sound - build music from space itself. Marchetti rigs up arrays of loudspeakers; Genthon’s violin melts into the synthetic, becoming less instrument and more material. The compositional logic is akin to sound as geological process: "Le sol prend feu" grows with volcanic insistence over seventeen minutes, while "Verticale de l’Est" ascends like a spiral of light through cavernous heights. By the time you reach "Nuit (le temps se défait)", time has dissolved like mist.

Yet this is far from forbidding. Instead, the textures feel like soft watches belonging to ancient clocks - electronics that breathe, strings that fracture, and a delicate honoring of ambient silence. Genthon’s Tuareg-rooted sense of time gives the sound a gentle dilation; Marchetti’s concrete music knowledge ensures every speaker becomes a voice. Their shared background - research in sonic propagation, poetics, and materiality - makes the work feel earnest, not cerebral.

"Angelica", by contrast, is less scientific and more spiritual: one long stream-of-consciousness concert where the listener is invited to drift through quasi-architectural rhythms, glitchy resonance, and violin lines that feel like prayers uttered into reverberant stone. There’s no beat. There’s no melody. Only presence. The violin crosses the sound field; the speakers return its call. A duet not bound by phrasing, but by field.

The language of silence takes center stage. The gaps in "Suite blanche" are as important as the tones; in "Angelica", the space between notes becomes a shrine. One senses these tracks are drawn from walks through caves, reflections in water, or filtered dreams. Yet the album avoids anything New Age. Its restraint is rigorous, its emotion contained, its beauty slow-moving.

If you listen expecting structure, you’ll find form; if you listen for lyrics, you’ll hear landscapes. If you listen for calm, you’ll find stillness - but not sedation. This music demands presence, and rewards it with vertigo, wonder, or something near silence’s own echo.

Acclaimed director and musician Jim Jarmusch and experimental lute player and composer Jozef van Wissem met nearly 20 years ago, forming a close bond after they ran into each other on the streets of New York City. In 2011, they began performing and producing records together. The follow up to 'American Landscapes ' entitled 'The Day The Angels Cried' releases June 6 and coincides with a world tour. The duo weaves an intricate lute and guitar string tapestry of droning, minimal free-folk compositions destined to captivate listeners with their dark hypnosis. This time vocals and electronics are added as well. Van Wissem’s work comes from a tradition of avant-garde minimalism and lends itself well to the director’s stark cinematic works. Jarmusch has played guitar in bands on and off since the late ‘70s. Van Wissem’s compositional style involves hypnotic circular musical phrases that allow for a lot of contemplative space between the note

Well, that's the promo text, but here's the review. 'The Day The Angels Cried' is a brief album of 7 tracks, barely 35 minutes. Beginning with "Concerning Celestial Hierarchy," a stylized atmospheric lute instrumental, it sets up a Gothy neo-folk ambience. Next, the title track has heavily chambered speak-sung vocals plucked strings, kind of a Current 93/Death in June vibe. If there was such a thing as doom-liute playing, "The First Language" would be a prime example. Lower string chords and scrappy electronics gives this track a folk-industrial bent. Sounds like there's some Tibetan horns in there too, but likely a combo of other similar sounds. Mournful, for sure. "She Burns in Devotion, Her Virtue Sweet Like Honey" is the most melodic track so far; lute and ambient bass riff on a chord progression. Not bad, but it repeats too many times and doesn't evolve. Something different with "There Is No Answer" - experimental light noise ambient drone, then, later on, a lengthy (film) dialogue sample. The longest track (8:17), "To Those Who Mourn" is very slow psychedelia that might sound like the Grateful Dead at 16 rpm. Final track "Concerning The Law Of Angels" has processed vocals over guitar and lute, acoustic and electric, atmosphere over compositional concessions, abstract and amorphous in content. I'm sure there will be many who love this album for its dark, murky ambience, but I was hoping for a bit more substance. I think Jarmusch's name may be its strongest selling point considering his following. Limited to 1,000 vinyl, 500 CD.