Name: Frankie Sparro • Hospitalville by Constellation Records
Duration: 4 min 13 s
Description: CST023: Frankie Sparo - Welcome Crummy Mystics (2002) TRACK 01

Aphex Twin is one of my musical heroes. #3 (Rhubarb) is an ambient masterpiece, and I did not take it’s arrangement lightly. After two separate attempts and some revisions to the score, I believe we were able to do the music justice. Let me know what you think.

Thanks as always to the musicians: 
Christine Tavolacci - flute
Henry Solomon - alto sax
Amber Wyman - bassoon
Andrew Conrad - bass clarinet
Eric McCann - electric bass

Therapy

#3 (Rhubarb) - Aphex Twin cover

Out on 2LP/CD/digital April 26, Someone Like Me is a humanity-reminding suite of miracle moments that unites real people in the pursuit of a meaningful connection. Taping their lived experience in economic studios in quiet English counties, Pacific Northwest woodland retreats and the big city bustle of Sydney and Los Angeles, these kindred spirits rendered sheer beauty in the process. Custom pressed folk songs of love, loss and the lord saviour. 

Illuminating minor works from seasoned players such as former Syndicate Of Sound chart-topper Sharkey and late-era Canned Heat lynchpin James Thornbury, the collection simultaneously honours the fleeting amateurism of hobby musicians. With their one shot at tangible vinyl, freshman Lynne Ann Kingan realised her loose bubblegum rocker on campus time, while U.S. Navy recruit Fred Potts cut his unconditionally serene ballad remotely stationed on a Spanish naval base. Spartan production continues to reign with Jon Betmead’s hair-raising gospel, howling into infinite space, and Goldrust’s stripped back garden hymn.

Throughout the hour-long reflection, faith has an intermittent yet revelatory presence, most overtly with the divine choral soul of Seventh-day Adventist quartet Remnant. More subtly, Gary Ramey and Jim Kennedy both turned to song in their spiritual quests, offering their all to a universal power. An irrefutable compilation cornerstone, the National Office For Black Catholics showcased Charles Murphy’s lionhearted account of the Black experience at a 1971 concert. Five years earlier, high school seniors The Superwomen would use their hauntingly angelic harmonies to address racial inequity with a breathless take on ‘Lowlands’.

Reaching the furthest corners, Someone Like Me secures the inaugural licence of three homespun masterpieces. Discovered by fluke in the digital haystacks of Youtube and Soundcloud, Jim Huxley’s bedroom pop earworm melds peacefully into Charlie Webster’s synthesized reverie. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s John Agostino introduces us to the bizarre world of tax scam records, with the artist only now learning that his tender psych-folk demos were leaked via a 1977 bootleg.

Compiled and lovingly restored by armchair digger Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring/The Green Child), Someone Like Me pays due service to seventeen rarefied journals of truth and devotion. Adorned with visual artist Chris Fallon’s figure and flora dream extractions, the uniting songbook is further detailed by expansive track-by-track liner notes and a forward from San Franciscan poet Rod Roland.

Charles Murphy - The Foot That's Holding Me Down (ES031)

Harold Budd ⧸ Brian Eno - The Pavilion Of Dreams (1978)

CST023: Frankie Sparo - Welcome Crummy Mystics (2002) TRACK 01

Frankie Sparro • Hospitalville

Written by Sandy Chamoun, Farah Kaddour, Antonio Hajj Moussa, Anthony Sahyoun, Pascal Semerdjian and Marwan Tohme between Beit Fares wa Lucia in Jbeil, Tunefork Studios in Beirut and La Frette Studios in Paris.
Lyrics by Sandy Chamoun.

Recorded by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh at La Frette Studios Paris, in August 2024. Additional recordings at Tunefork Studios in Beirut.
Mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh at Hotel2Tango, Montreal.

Produced by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and SANAM.
Mastered by Heba Kadry, New York.

SANAM • Harik

Ruth Maine - Nesting

From the album Solo Three, available January 23, 2026 on Western Vinyl
Pre-order / listen https://lnk.to/solothree

Erik Hall - "Music for a Large Ensemble" (Steve Reich)

I Miss The Way You Swim

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCg0eTu9Qg


I'm rolling up in my bmw 325
I've got some room in my
passenger seat if you wanna ride 
Oooo I drive a manual 
no automatic 
2nd to 3rd gear 
homebase in the back of my car, 
Beamer, 
you and me 
speed city to city
Revv it up
Punch the clutch
Burning fuel
Full speed take off
Beamer
you and me 
speed city to city
Oooo I drive a manual 
no automatic 
Oooo I drive a manual 
no automatic 
I'll drive you Frankfurt to Berlin, 
Vienna, Warsaw, and the Netherlands 
I'll take you through Brussels to Paris Bordeaux Marseille, 
then back to Germany yeah
Grip that 
drive shaft 
while we're driving fast
Or even 
slow
Cruise the autobahn 
Journey nice and long
Ya let's go
Clutch me baby 
Get that engine humming
If the road gets ahead of us
Ya we're coming
Oooo I drive a manual 
no automatic 
Oooo I drive a manual 
no automatic 
I've got a Q for you
If you wanna get in my ride
Beamer you and me
Speed city to city
Revv it up
Punch the clutch
Burning fuel
Full speed take off
Beamer 
you and me
Speed city to city
Hop in



This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the 70s.

https://www.aguirrerecords.com/collections/aguirre-records/products/terry-riley-persian-surgery-dervishes-2xlp

Californian composer Terry Riley’s In C, first issued on vinyl in 1968, is widely acknowledged as a Minimalist landmark that altered the course of twentieth-century music. His influential album A Rainbow In Curved Air, which appeared the following year, is a vivid fusion of rock and raga, jazz and psychedelia realised through overdubbing on an 8-track machine which had recently been installed at the studios of Columbia Records.  

By the early 70s Riley had come to feel that scores were a distraction. Faithful interpretation of an already written piece was a deviation from the true purpose of making music, which was spiritual quest. Fortunately, some of those live performances, personal journeys towards a state of transcendence, were captured on tape. Persian Surgery Dervishes, issued initially on the French label Shandar, features two such concerts for electric organ and reel-to-reel delay, one recorded in Los Angeles on 18th April 1971, the other in Paris on 24th May 1972.

At the start of that decade Riley became a dedicated student of the great Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Looking into North Indian classical tradition he found correspondences to modal and cyclic ideas that he was already working on. In 1971, as a way to learn more, Riley himself started teaching Indian music at Mills College, in Oakland. That experience fed directly into his solo keyboard performances, but other influences were also shaping the music heard on Persian Surgery Dervishes. Personal research into ancient Persian culture and the poetry of Rumi lit up his imagination, while the repetitive swirling of Sufi devotional music from North Africa, which Riley had first encountered in Europe during the early 60s, reverberates through these performances. Jazz, as conceived by such masters such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane, is also present as an enduring source of inspiration. 

The Californian version of Persian Surgery Dervishes starts with low dark tones, dense and brooding like a huddled human figure, deep in introspection. But as the improvisation unfolds Riley’s buoyant spirit asserts itself, spiralling out in ecstatic coils, as though liberated from the grip of body consciousness. The Parisian concert conveys a different mood, brighter and more open in texture, more relaxed from the outset and breathing with greater freedom as it takes flight. 

Echoes of Terry Riley’s inspired music have spread far and wide - into progressive rock, New Age and ambient soundings, film soundtracks, blissed-out electronica and dance-floor trance. His fluent and hypnotic keyboard playing can be heard as part of a continuum, transmitting energies from ancient and distant musical sources into the living here and now. Persian Surgery Dervishes is a significant part of that picture, a mesmerising record of a vital stage in Riley’s ongoing quest for connection with the universal mind and the sublime music that flows ceaselessly from it. 

“Music is my spiritual path. It’s my way of finding out who I am.”  Terry Riley, in 1976

Terry Riley - Persian Surgery Dervishes - Performance 02 Part 1

Despite his status as a key figure in the history of Japanese ambient music, Hiroshi Yoshimura's music remains tragically under-known outside of his home country. Empire of Signs – a new imprint co-helmed by Maxwell August Croy and Spencer Doran – is proud to reissue Yoshimura's debut Music for Nine Postcards for the first time outside Japan in collaboration with Hiroshi's widow Yoko Yoshimura, with more fully licensed reissues of Hiroshi's work to follow in the future.

Working initially as a conceptual artist, the musical side of Yoshimura's artistic practice came to prominence in the post-Fluxus scene of late 1970s Tokyo alongside Akio Suzuki and Takehisa Kosugi, taking many subsequent turns within Japan’s bubble economy afterward. His sound works took on many forms - commissioned fashion runway scores, soundtracking perfume, soundscapes for pre-fab houses, train station sound design - all existing not as side work but as logical extensions of his philosophy of sound. His work strived for serenity as an ideal, and this approach can be felt strongly on Music for Nine Postcards.

Home recorded on a minimal setup of keyboard and Fender Rhodes, Music for Nine Postcards was Yoshimura’s first concrete collection of music, initially a demo recording given to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art to be played within the building's architecture. This was not mere background music in the prior Japanese “BGM” sense of the word, but “environmental” music, the literal translation of the Japanese term kankyō ongaku [環境音楽] given to Brian Eno’s “ambient” music when it arrived in late 70's Japan. Yoshimura, along with his musical co-traveler Satoshi Ashikawa, searched for a new dialog between sound and space, a new way of listening: sound not as an absolute, but as something that interlocks with a physical environment and shifts the listener’s experience within it. Erik Satie's furniture music, R. Murray Schafer's concept of the soundscape and Eno’s ambience all greatly informed their work,  but the specific form of tranquil stasis presented on releases like Nine Postcards is still difficult to place within a specific tradition, remaining elusive and idiosyncratic despite the economy of it's construction. This record offers the perfect introduction to Hiroshi's unique and beautiful worldview: it's one that can be listened to - and lived in - endlessly.

Music for Nine Post Cards

Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘) - "Dream" from Music for Nine Post Cards (EOS01) OUT 11/17/2017

We are an independent record label based in Montréal, releasing experimental music we care about in the most careful ways we can.

Frankie Sparro • Hospitalville

Constellation Records

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