Pregnant Mannequin

Metabolisms

Magic Of The Sale

Holy Water

Ride Or Die w/ Lydia

Vital UK auteur-songwriter Milo Korbenski returns with new album Sex Angel, a masterfully crafted suite of slacker-dream-pop whose irresistible and addictive earworming reveals a deceptively deep songcraft.

Following the singles “Ratworm” and “Six Angle”, “Bedrock” shifts the pace with a stirring indie-slacker ballad, channelling the raw emotion of an early U2 demo tape reimagined through a modern, experimental lens. Shimmering synth lines build toward a magnetic chorus, where vocals drift in and out of focus beneath layers of lush effects, producing an atmosphere that’s both haunting and unforgettable.

“It was the last song I recorded for the album, over two consecutive days,” Korbenski explained. “After the first day of recording, I dreamed I was listening to the song, it was really strange, soupy, distorted, the vocals stretched and weird. I woke up remembering that sound and wanted to get it on the track, so I added synths, pushed the distortion, and shifted all the vocals down. I loved it, and it fit the glitchy, dusty feel of the other tracks on the record. The lyrics in the second verse are my favourite on the whole album. Tbh, I think it’s probably my favourite track.”

Korbenski’s deeply expressive take on lo-fi art-pop indie invokes this optimism in an unexpectedly emotional way. Throughout the record, catchy-as-hell hooks and canny lyrical wordplay sing straight to the soul. Moments of boxy, torn-cone distortion and octave-dropped vocals coalesce with the sweetest synth and vocal interplay. The record crosses references points as broadly spread as Kurt Vile, Helado Negro, Black Sabbath, The xx, The Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie Sioux, Jagwar Ma and Calvin Johnson while retaining a crucially singular energy: Milo’s underlying unreality is more haunted than the indie-leaning acts mentioned here, and the blown-out cassette grit lends an intimacy beyond the prettified sheen of his pop influences.

“It's an optimistic album, an album of positive realisations,” writes Milo Korbenski, a shadowy, Brighton-based solo musician only publicly seen in a featureless white mask, Stetson and denim jacket. “The narrator of each song is having a 'light at the end of the tunnel' moment. You have to go through something to get to where you are and you'll hopefully be better for it.”

“I wanted it to sound like an album you found on a floppy disk in a puddle and then you took it home, put it on your iPod, and it became the soundtrack to your summer of fun and debauchery. I don't know if people will feel that way about it, but who knows. I'm optimistic.”

Incorrigibly prolific, Korbenski wrote Sex Angel in a flurry of activity after the release of 2024’s acclaimed debut When You Gonna Tell ‘Em The Truth, Aaron? Following the wholesale scrapping of an earlier version, he has created a deft, weird, and lean record that balances shades of light and dark. It represents a flourishing songwriting confidence and, naturally, is uniquely characteristic to Milo Korbenski.

“Interestingly, it was definitely the most difficult album that I've ever made. I had a big moment of thinking I'd lost it. But this record made me realise that, if that feeling of failure creeps up again, it will probably never affect me as deeply.” Light and darkness, together as one, just as the record plays out.

Milo Korbenski - Bedrock

Enigmatic UK producer Dylan Henner announces new album of deeply considered and choral-laced experimental ambient music Star Dream FM, said to be taped from a mysterious radio broadcast that plays his favourite memories from adolescence.

“Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen. Some of the most formative and important moments of my life, alive on the air,” Dylan Henner’s self-penned mythology begins. “I called some friends and asked if they could find the same frequency, but no-one did. So, quickly as I could, I stuck a blank tape into my hi-fi and hit record. At some point I heard the jingle and the name of the station: Star Dream FM.”

Though (clearly) fictional, the backdrop to new album Star Dream FM represents a tactile canvas on which the record’s true meaning is painted. It is, through Henner’s now-characteristic employment of ambient-textured synthesis, marimba, digital choir, and processed voice, a study of late adolescence and the experience of being seventeen.

“Why seventeen? Because (in Western, 21st century culture at least) it is a unique time of fragility and self-realisation. A gateway between the joy and wonder of childhood and the heavy realities of adult life. A seventeen year old has almost formed their outlook, mindset, purpose, drive, but only as a hop away from childhood. It’s a challenging period, sure, but also a time of optimism, of excitement for a new life to begin in your own image.”

The result of this examination is a collection of meticulously constructed human-not-human compositions built from Henner’s mesmeric brand of desolate beauty. His immersive, storytelling range is broad, spanning from serene to cerebral, from powerful to uncanny. Henner references ambient and experimental music, chamber composition, the human voice, sound design, and field recordings, and wraps everything in the myth of his imaginary radio station Star Dream FM.

Dylan Henner - We Walked all the Way to the Lake and The Water Was So Still We Jumped in Naked

Dylan Henner - I Used To See Her On The Way Home from School and She Lit Up The Sky with her Beauty

Sickness

Hide-A-Lullaby

Phantom Limb’s noted filmscore series Imaginal Soundtracking returns after a short hiatus, uniting Iranian filmmaker Somayeh’s three-minute work The Wound Where The Light Enters with five contemporary musicians to be re-scored in five different ways.

Designed to reframe underexposed works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The third release in the series sees a quintet of highly inventive, fascinatingly varied takes on The Wound Where The Light Enters, a powerful and affecting study of intimacy and tension written and directed by Iranian director Somayeh. The film’s language and gaze are markedly feminine, its choreography raw and potent, uniting Somayeh’s Iranian heritage and its traditions with western influences.

Its two roles - performed by Pippa Melody and Tyler Conti - entangle into a push and pull of love, familiarity, and acrimony, as their relationship begins to fracture. Their tactile interactions could be perceived both as romantic or hostile, but in both cases charged with effervescent, teeming emotion.

Musicians Siavash Amini, Saint Abdullah, Roxanna Albayati, Nesa Azadikhah, and sohme all began with the same source material, but - not hearing each other’s work until the project was completed - their respective new soundtracks are strikingly different.

Saint Abdullah is the moniker of Iranian-Canadian brothers currently based between Tehran and London. Their practice is rooted in sonic storytelling that seamlessly blends geo-politics, religion, and social behavior. The brothers have developed a studio practice exploring improvisation, electronics, plunderphonics, and sampling. Their soundtrack begins with squealing string harmonics and an insistently rhythmic strum that maintains a high pace, until a barrage of noise splits the piece in two, and an unheimlich singing voice walks through fire over wagon circle guitar. Reflecting the love and acrimony of Somayeh’s film, its two halves are cohesive only in their disparity.

The Wound Where The Light Enters is the third in Phantom Limb’s Imaginal Soundtracking series, following a re-score of 1984 Soviet animation There Will Come Soft Rains (which was delightedly received by its director Nazim Tulyakhodzayev) and another of Japanese puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto’s 1972 bunraku stop motion piece 鬼 [eng: The Demon]. To date, the series has comprised musical contributions by Ami Dang, Midori Hirano, 食品まつり a.k.a foodman, Sabiwa, Tori Kudo, Masaaki Yoshida, Lakker, Rully Shabara, and Dylan Henner.

Saint Abdullah - The Wound Where The Light Enters

World Standard - Komorevia (Album Trailer)

Save Your Tears (The Weeknd cover)

Metabolisms

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