Mari Kalkun - Ilmamotsan - VINYL LP

With a voice that seems to speak to us from the heart of the Estonian forest, Mari Kalkun's music is at once of a place and deeply personal. Rooted in ancient Estonian and Võru traditions, but beautifully fresh and contemporary, Stories of Stonia reaches back to very old layers of tradition to imagine what Mari's ancestors would have thought and sung about the world in an era of skyscraper, steel and metal. Throughout the album's nine songs, Mari explores humanity's controversial relationship with nature with powerfully emotive musical backdrops. One of Northern Europe's most important folk singers Mari has created a mysterious and magical album.

'Nekkuja' is a place for Herlop's warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through the topsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it's undoubtedly her brightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished 'Pripyat' are still present, but blessed with a level of positivity that's rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness and melancholy.

Vinyl LP pressing. 2022 . For his Shelter Press debut, Thomas Bonvalet aka L'ocelle Mare presents an album that's considerably more than the sum of it's conceptual parts, constructing Inchanti-compositionsInch that are - on the face of it - utilitarian rotations through an array of instruments, with a tracklisting that reads like nothing more than a basic gear list. Through some sort of alchemy, the recordings transform into a poetic body of work, an engrossing sleight of hand that lands somewhere between Pierre Bastien's mechanical installations and the oblique mysticism of sacred music, buried between the notes.