Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - The Sport of Love 
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 134
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/TheSportofLove

In the late 18th century, reason and rational thought was idealized and viewed as the most progressive way to comprehend a rapidly industrializing society. The snap reaction was Romanticism, an artistic movement that prioritized emotion, imagination and intuition - things that can't be quantified but have sustained culture for millennia. Now in a digitally accelerated age where our lives are not only measured but distributed in binary, a similarly hot-blooded creative response is long overdue. On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.

“I know my musical collaborators on an arguably more intimate level than many of the friendships that are exclusively born of word-based language,” says Belaga. The cellist and composer has been developing a relationship with Los Angeles-based DJ-producer Maroof (also known as Asmara) and Svosve, a Swiss saxophonist and electro-acoustic musician, for many years; the three are all part of Moved by the Motion, a "roving band" that also includes artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, performer and dancer Tosh Basco and dancer Josh Johnson. As a three-piece ensemble, their interaction is fluid and physical, and with Svosve and Belaga on sax, flute, piano and cello, Maroof sculpts the sounds into textured, effervescent fantasies. “A lot of the songs were improvised and then I made sense of the madness," she explains.

The music emerged like smoke from the embers of soundtrack work they collaborated on in 2021. After finishing scores for Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton A/W 2021 collection film, Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light and Bafic’s documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds, the trio were left with unanswered questions and excess energy. They considered the idea of creating an imaginary score to a romantic movie, using love to dictate its movement and narrative. So opening track 'G Major Kind of Love' is the intoxicating first blush, characterized by a drowned sax solo that sounds like a siren call from beneath the ocean. 'Delicate Distance Between Boulders' is quivering and hesitant, using gentle piano motifs against reverberating flute sounds and subtle, goosebump inducing electronic treatments.

Everything comes into sharp focus on the album's lengthy central piece 'The Stranger', that brings in additional instrumentation from harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward. The three friends saw this particular composition as a journey within itself, charting the anxiety, harmony and uncertainty of love. Shifting from gooey freeform jazz into gurgling noise and bleak ambient drone, it connects the dots between Dorothy Ashby, Arve Henriksen, Jon Hassell and Hildur Guðnadóttir while voyaging into parts unknown. It's a finale of sorts that wrestles with the complexity of the album's themes, returning to earlier refrains and prolonging their tension.

Fittingly, the record is tied together by artwork from the trio's friend Tosh Basco, and several tracks have already been used by Wu Tsang in a piece for SFMoMa. The Sport of Love is powered by physical connection in a digital world, and breathes a mysterious allure that's never been more urgent.

The Sport of Love 

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - Delicate Distance Between Boulders (PAN 134)

For seven months Russia has been waging a disgusting war in Ukraine. Constantly, we learn new horrific truths about what the occupiers have done on the land, that they proclaim is theirs. We believe Ukraine will be free again and rightful judgement will be brought upon those, who hide their violent, genocidal intentions behind the mask of lies.

With our first compilation - ‘Soteria’ - we want to aid the fight for freedom, that is still ongoing. We at Xpone stand strongly in support of the Ukranian people and against the Russian terrorist regime. We don’t acknowledge the new territories annexed by the occupier, nor the old, and condemn the blatantly fake "referendums" that took place from 23-27 September 2022 on the territories of self-proclaimed “DNR”, “LNR”, and the occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

All proceeds from this release will go to Livyj Bereh — a volunteer organisation, which helps to rebuild the homes of those affected by the Russian invasion, as well as provides constant aid for the Ukranian military.

We thank everybody, who participated and all those, who are willing to support the cause.

Design by lovvlifer
Mastering by qwqwqwqwa

XCOMP01

mu tate - Almost Loosing Control

Jiyoung Wi is a multi-faceted artist from Seoul, Korea currently residing in The Hague, Netherlands. Jiyoung’s work can be situated within fictional literature, improvised music, field recording, with an interest in juxtaposing or disjointing these fields of practice through her sonic and literary methodologies. Jiyoung’s debut album 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔, is a concise body of work that punctuates a beginning point to her work within the 12” LP format. The recording serves as one of the two releases concluding the three year sonic endeavor that is the ENXPL (Enmossed X Psychic Liberation) series.

Having previously released recordings on compilations for labels like Mirae Arts, Eastern Nurseries, and Psychic Liberation, here Jiyoung hones a cinematic-like structure that exemplifies the biome within her craft. While presently Jiyoung is performing the systematic dismantling of a violin in her live improvisations paired with approachable boutique synthesizers, 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔 is a pairing of the inimitable Korg MS-20 and field recordings staged or captured by Jiyoung in Seoul and Busan, South Korea.

With three scenes per side, Jiyoung walks us through different geographical and spatial intimacies. Public spaces and intimate conversations are obscured and reconstructed. Glass elevators, an unknown hotel lobby piano recital, office toilet rants, windowside night bus travels, and multiple languages interplay with staged and unstaged conversations to transmogrify themselves into a world of Jiyoung’s view. Money, sex, relationships, and cultural parameters are at once idiosyncratic as well as disorientingly familiar to the listener.

As an extension of the series coined by Jiyoung as 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, the album feels crisp, pressurized, and at times funny, at other times melancholic. As language, space, and viewing perspective shift, Jiyoung’s succinct album invites the listener to an aural world uniquely of her own viewpoint. While collecting source material relying on the outside world (conversations, elders, the closing track featuring Sungeun Lee), we have a listening experience that deeply illustrates Jiyoung’s perspective. The disjointed experience of someone maneuvering internationally to further develop a practice is encapsulated brilliantly here by Jiyoung with 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔. Alongside Makoto Oshiro’s 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅, it is a perfect bookend to the ENXPL series.

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Jiyoung Wi is a writer and musician based in Seoul and The Hague. She writes fiction in-between institutional and non-institutional contexts, and works with sounds in-between clubs and art museums. Her methodology involves building and breaking sonic narratives by arranging and re-contextualizing disparate sound sources ranging from field recordings to fragmented anonymous dialogue.

She approaches sound and text as invisible experiences and phenomena, and is interested in the narrative symptoms that emerge when both are juxtaposed on the same axis. In a series entitled 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, she explores these symptoms operating within and without the art space. She has been co-organizing an experimental/leftfield listening event 𝘚𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘊𝘭𝘶𝘣 𝘚𝘦𝘰𝘶𝘭 since 2019. 

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Voices by Windy Kim, Carl G., Schang09
Piano by Sungeun Lee
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Design by Dominique S

Accept All Cookies

Jiyoung Wi - Walking Tumor (ENXPL22)

“[....]
This record highlights the Secret Boyfriend that obscures didacticism by highlighting output that opens up for more challenging catharsis and emotive signal processing. It provides an entry to the materialism of a cultural field full of ecstatic complexity and beautiful inconsistency. In these muted moments Secret Boyfriend has given us over his career we have an argument for evolving languages that further challenge our notions of what is supposed to happen and how it is supposed to be presented. In his more song oriented expansiveness, we can punctuate the ability to think in new modalities. Listening to these recordings reminds me of the polarity of sitting in the record store as a kid and understanding that His Name Is Alive is on 4AD and (gasp!) timeSTEREO. This trite early impression that nothing is really as different as our imaginations might want them to be, and that we can do whatever we want mostly within the creative realms we work through is an important filter to look through Secret Boyfriend as a project and a vessel. If we can achieve abandon and vulnerability through our artistic endeavors, then we have a sound model for, 𝗺𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗲, new potentialities. If that’s too much projection, or just complete liberal bullshit, I am fine with that. Secret Boyfriend's oeuvre at best offers us moments of reprieve to ponder these complexities, or at least a moment to zone out on a drive through North Carolina Highway 54.

You have one pocket of life that you must do whatever you want to inside of. Secret Boyfriend does it affectionately, in a variety of forms, and always with deep sentimentality. These recordings are a wonderful set of songs to begin further investigation from. Thank you Ryan for allowing as many avenues as possible to continue a broad cultural exchange and conversation that intersect and refract while being the kind of artist that is brave enough to not phone in the effort.”

- excerpt of essay by Nick Klein, May 2024

Casio, guitars, bass, percussion, no-input mixer, synth, tapes, and voice by Ryan A Martin, recorded at Meadows of Dan & Cathedral II
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Artwork by Ryan A Martin

Listener's Guide

Secret Boyfriend - Treil (ENMB-16)

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet - Over
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 148S
Release Date: 17 July 2024
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Over

Amnesia Scanner drops a schitzo pop anthem to celebrate the neverending cycle of us being so back – it being so over; boom vs doom; hyperoptimism vs hyperpessimism.

Freeka Tet also interprets, or cancels, Amnesia Scanner’s original on FT Over, where an active noise cancelation script reveals a hidden dimension of lowercase ambient sublime.

Written and produced by Amnesia Scanner
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks

Freeka Tet - FT Over (Active noise cancelling script)

Montalvo - Colle [TRU008]

New York, NY – Colle, the creative alias of experimental musician Maya McGrory, debuts her solo album 'Montalvo' on urtruimage.

Inspired by her childhood memories of Montalvo Rd., this compelling collection of songs offers a profound exploration of McGrory's past, and presents a narrative of multiple lives lived at once. The contrasting landscapes of her life provide a backdrop for her music, allowing her to find solace in the innocence and simplicity of childhood. Emphasising the ephemeral nature of life, she embraces a flow that reflects the worries of her past and the allure of even the harshest conditions.

Her album invites listeners into immersive emotional landscapes; characterised by expansive glacial synths and strings, while trip-hop and shoegaze-inspired beats push her music into an experimental realm of electronic indie-rock, all enhanced by her sincere and captivating vocal delivery.

What began as a return to a specific time in her life evolved into a journey back to traditional songwriting, reimagined into an experimental vision during the production of Montalvo. For Colle, the process is less about distance and more about rediscovery—reclaiming the innocence and wonder that continue to influence her today.

Album Credits -

Mixed by Shane Lavers (Chanel Beads): Silent But For Joy, Green Edge, Day You Told Me, A Real Atone, Winter Garden

Mixed by Issac Eiger (Threshold): Held By You

Mastered by Rob Venning (DJ Pitch) excl. Winter Garden

Mastered by Ben Shirken: Winter Garden

Violin Credits to Zachary Paul: Winter Garden

urtruimage; run by Sophia Mannerfelt, Robert Venning (DJ Pitch)

Plea and Luck

‘When our women had all turned into cedar trees they would group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind.’

With Love and thanks to Lydia Davis. 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/timeisaway/episodes/timeisaway-25th-november-2024

Time Is Away - The Cedar Trees 251124

Early and foggy morning at the end of summer, quiet, a little bit cold but wonderfull. Take a deep breath and enjoy

Foggy Morning (M. Hausmann)

A Dream, A Vision, A Deja-vu

Solo Piano.  Created LIVE in Real-Time at the Enlightened Piano Concert at the Cottages of Carmel, Carmel-by-the-Sea CA.

Photo provided by Greg Carr, my brother.

Year of Music: September 2, 2025

Label based in Berlin, est. 2008. http://www.p-a-n.org

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - Delicate Distance Between Boulders (PAN 134)

PAN

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