“Late contender for the best of the year lists...brilliantly unusual, unexpected tracks, you never know what
she`s going to do next” - LAUREN LAVERNE, BBC 6Music

“I really really like that...we`ll be having more of Rachael on the show” - GUY GARVEY, BBC 6Music

“Bold art folk...accomplished fusion of words, acoustic strumming and wild percussive textures.” - UNCUT
7/10

“brims with ideas…refreshingly original…endlessly rewarding…a warm yet progressive addition to the alt.folk catalogue” ROCK`N`REEL 4/5

“Experimental folk multi-instrumentalist Dadd is one of the quirkiest singer songwriters on earth but
she`s also one of the best....a richly eclectic sonic treat.” - HIFI NEWS 9/10

“Boasting a vocal which echoes Beth Orton and a melody which reminds of Rotary Connection’s ‘I Am the
Black Gold of the Sun.” - THE LIST 4/5

“We Resonate is a wonderful quiet treat full of memory and kindness.” - DRUNKEN WEREWOLF

“Breaks the conventions of pop to reassemble a sound of raw, jagged beauty.” - AESTHETICA

“Whistful and wonderful, We Resonate emphasizes how magical freak folk can be.” - DIVA

“Rachael Dadd is a musician and textile artist who creates surprisingly accessible poly-rhythmic, acoustic
art-pop; utilising voice, ukulele, prepared piano, clarinet, and a plethora of percussive objects both musical
and mundane. An intriguing and really rather lovely record.” - fROOTS

“Rachael Dadd is our most celebrated female artist on Folk Radio UK.” - FRUK

“Rachael Dadd’s 4th LP sees her revelling in untrodden ground alongside fellow leftfield folk guests as
she combines pop with experimentation bringing both excitement and surprise.” - FRUK - Album Review

“An undoubtedly interesting, intriguing and entirely charming track, from a musician who is only going to
continue gaining momentum.” - CULTURED VULTURES [SINGLE OF THE WEEK]

“Creating a truly unique sound is no mean feat, but Rachael Dadd is someone who is managing it
beautifully.” GOLDFLAKEPAINT

Bounce the ball

Flow | 流れ  coming february 10th 2023 through Aguirre Records
PRE-ORDER digital here: https://dedren.bandcamp.com/album/flow
12" Vinyl available here: https://www.aguirrerecords.com/collections/aguirre-records/products/david-edren-h-takahashi-flow-lp

Music By H.Takahashi and David Edren.
 Recorded 2020-2021 Tokyo|Antwerp.
 Mixed & Edited by David Edren at LittleForest, Antwerp. 
Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering. 
Artwork by Vica Pacheco | Sleeve Design by Yudai Osawa.

Flow | 流れ

David Edren & H.Takahashi - Shift Register | シフトレジスタ

HIMOROGI is the tenth album by ironomi. Divining Japanese mythology and its relationship with nature, the new album is an aural pastorale that fosters deeper territory in the realm of spiritual searching through dreamy, drifting piano, 17-string koto (jūshichi-gensō) and new form electronic processing. 

ironomi’s desire to commune with mother Earth and its season’s colors has always served as a continual inspiration for their music. In HIMOROGI, the duo delves into a more spiritual focus in their journey towards musical impressionism. Japanese culture has long held the idea that heavenly spirits live in many elements of the natural world, such as mountains, rocks, trees, and the sea. The album title comes from the Japanese word Himorogi (神籬), which in Shinto terminology is translated as "divine fence," which refers to sacred areas that a celestial spirit enters.

Six songs were created in chronological order, ama-saki (Bloom in the Sky), yume-asobi (Playing in Dream), sakura-ame (Cherry Blossom Rain), hibiki-sora (Echoing Sky), ama-yadori (Rain Shelter), chumu (Abstract Nil Space). On each, they move organically in the nature they were recorded, as rain connects the sky with the Earth, giving life to it with blossoming flowers. Once the hues of autumn bid their farewell, another life cycle begins. Rather than arriving at a state of tranquility, the idea is to reach a state of ‘nothingness’ as suggested in the zazen-inspired chumu. 

Junya Yanagidaira’s sublime, elegant phrasing of subtle polyphony and melodic piano lines fall like rain through a picturesque blue horizon over calming koto sways by multi-instrumentalist Yu Isobe. Flashes of sunlight momentarily refract through the water’s surface in the form of bright starlit keyboards, at times weaving child-like melodies of enchantment. The lightest touch of koto strings seems to hover and balance the murmur of a garden stream. It beckons you closer as the gentle caress of the music awakens your inner senses. HIMOROGI will remain timeless because the duo created music that absconded with time and place with their endless visions of beauty. 

ironomi releases HIMOROGI on 24 February 2023 via KITCHEN. LABEL. Available on clear vinyl LP, CD and digital formats, with artwork by Japanese photographer Kisei Kobayashi and design by KITCHEN. LABEL founder Ricks Ang. Katsunori Fukuoka mastered this record at Flysound in Japan.

ironomi - 桜雨 (himorogi, 2023)

Fire of Love

Pedagogic

Vinyl + tapes on Bandcamp: https://tatsuromurakami.bandcamp.com/album/mita-koyama-cho

Streaming Links: https://lnk.dmsmusic.co/tatsuromurakami_mitakoyamacho

'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.

With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.

Sax on track 1 by Hikaru Yamada
Mastering by Chihei Hatakeyama
Design by Yudai Osawa
Obi text by Masaaki Hara
Photography by Anais-karenin
Insert photography by Tanaka Ueno

1-11-5 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo

In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory, invited to create Onsen (hot spring) music commemorating the city’s 100th anniversary through sound. Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which weave together vanished eras with the ambient residue of the past, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched near the bay.

Over two weeks, Meitei listened to steam, stone, and history. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the spirit of onsen culture. Like water seeking its path, the music unfolded with natural inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep reverence for place. Equipped with a microphone, he ventured into Beppu’s famed sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou — capturing bubbling earth, hissing vents, wind over bamboo, and the voices of regular visitors. These field recordings became the bones of the composition, an attempt to sonify even the rising mist and subtle temperature shifts felt on the skin.

Sen’nyū unfolds as a single, continuous piece. Meitei’s score moves like fog through sulfur and stone, traversing the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral hum of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the voices and atmosphere of Takegawara Onsen. At its heart is a gesture of quiet reverence — for water’s patience, for the land’s memory, and for the hands that have bathed here across generations.

Meitei has always expressed his own views on things and events that are self-evident to the Japanese people but are now perceived as subtle impressions. On this occasion, however, he does not create music based on his own unique themes of Japan. Instead, he launches music into the world that has been created in actual places of Japan, music that can be felt with the hands.

During the project, Meitei also conceived a two-day public sound installation at Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance on the final day. Bathers immersed themselves in hot spring water while listening to the piece through speakers embedded inside the bathhouse — a ritual fusion of body, place, and sound.

The album marks Meitei’s first work centered entirely on onsen, and also introduces a new phase of his Lost Japan project under the title “失日本百景” (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan) — a series focused on existing places of longing, still breathing within contemporary Japan. Alongside the album, Meitei will release his first-ever photo book, a visual documentation of this journey. A new layer is added to the world he has built through sound alone until now.

Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.

The album will be released on 25 July 2025 on 180g LP and CD, with mastering by Stephan Mathieu.


Sen'nyū - Ni-no-yu

Warm acoustic ensembles blending Mediterranean and Hebrew folk motifs with Western chamber jazz harmony. That's a mouthful- and by design... a pleasant EARFUL too! Enjoy :)

Selah 22

To Have and To Hold is not a biography, a lecture, or a historical reconstruction. It is an imagined world — one you step into to feel your way around an idea rather than to learn it.

The album takes place loosely in early-20th-century Cambridge, at the moment when Western thought was beginning to strain under its own certainty. Science had proved astonishingly powerful at breaking reality into parts, explaining mechanisms, and producing results — yet at the same time it was encountering problems it could no longer fully contain. Probability was replacing certainty. Events mattered as much as objects. Meaning no longer sat still.

Out of this tension emerged process philosophy: the idea that reality is not made of finished things, but of ongoing happenings — that love, time, marriage, and even truth itself are not states you reach, but activities you keep participating in.

The album imagines this moment through a human lens. A mathematician trying to complete a system of logic. A thinker insisting that nothing important is ever truly finished. Proofs accumulating. Years passing. A marriage understood first as a statement, then slowly revealed as a practice. Love appearing not as romance in the foreground, but as something quietly unfolding elsewhere — happening whether it is attended to or not.

Rather than explaining these ideas directly, the songs allow you to inhabit them. You hear bells ring. You feel evenings close in. You sense the weight of unfinished work and the relief of letting something continue without control. The philosophy is not taught; it is lived.

This is a soft documentary in sound — an audio quantum leap into a world. Its purpose is not accuracy, quotation, or instruction, but immersion. By the time the album ends, you may not be able to define process philosophy in a sentence — but you may feel why it arose, what problem it was answering, and why it still matters.

To Have and To Hold is an exploration of commitment not as possession, but as attention.
Of marriage not as a conclusion, but as renewal.
Of understanding not as something you arrive at — but something that keeps happening.

If you listen closely, nothing here ever quite resolves.
But something continues.

What Continues

“I want to revive the soul of Japan that still sleeps in the darkness”
- Meitei / 冥丁 @meiteijapan

On Maboroshi, the second track release from Komachi, the forthcoming album from Meitei, we're taken on a mysterious journey into the rural darkness of Japanese forests. Inspired by the spooky Japanese manga series from author Shigeru Mizuki, Maboroshi also draws from lo-fi hip hop, sounding like Dilla reimagined through the wet sounds of the Hiroshima countryside.

We're happy to announce that due to the amazing response to this record we have upped the initial pressing numbers from 300 to 500, that includes a small number of additional copies of the Special Edition with printed booklet.  You can still cop the pre-order here:

https://metronrecords.bandcamp.com/album/komachi
https://www.seance-centre.com/shop/meitei-komachi?category=Other%20Releases

Bounce the ball

RachaelDadd