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LP
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SN 009LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/28/2025
Subaerial is the latest and most sophisticated transmission from the long musical partnership of cellist Lucy Railton and keyboardist Kit Downes, a collaborative history that stretches back thirteen years. From the beginning, the pair bridged musical worlds, with the former emerging from classical and contemporary music and the latter steeped in jazz tradition. This phenomenal new album captures the musicians erasing lines between approaches and traditions. While improvisation has always been a part of their alliance, Subaerial marks the first time that the duo have used recorded improvisations as the core material for a release. The cello and organ, beautifully recorded by Alex Bonney at Skáholt Cathedral, blend in richly striated harmonies, with phrases and cadences that stretch back centuries while sounding unerringly contemporary. The pair first crossed paths whilst studying in London and spent the following decade collaborating in various groups whilst cutting their own distinct paths. By the time they rendezvoused in Iceland in the fall of 2017 to create Subaerial, Railton had moved to Berlin, where her embrace of electronics was leading her in new directions, exploring microtonality, psychoacoustics, and synthesis, an evolution captured on shape-shifting albums released by experimental imprints like Editions Mego, PAN, and Takuroku. Her debut solo album Paradise 94 released on Modern Love features Downes on organ. Around the same time, Downes had been signed to ECM and was directing much of his focus on the organ -- his original instrument -- on the two recordings he's made for the hallowed imprint, including the 2019 album Dreamlife of Debris, which features the cellist.
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LP
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SN 007LP
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$16.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/28/2025
Oliver Leith's Balloon was originally commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as an acoustic piece, and first performed at the Southbank centre's Sound Unbound festival in 2019. "This is an arrangement for synthesizers of many tunings. I called it Balloon because I had this image of thrashing a balloon with a baseball bat or something, rather than breaking or bursting it just sort of floats off -- unhurt, even if you absolutely pelted it. 'Slide' is old and one of my first purely electronic pieces and really was me doing a hack job with computers. On my aged software you could make parameters and automation dance around by using a mouse and track pad at the same time, that doesn't work anymore because my computer tries to be sensible so I'm back to shifting tiny notes all the time which is about as slow as pencilling in acoustic music. It felt like quite an analogue way to play with notes so that's a shame."
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