Trauma, the first Banco album since 2016's The 9th of Nine Hearts, is an expression of stress and of suffering while also a celebration of overcoming and of hope.

The trio project, led by guitarist and producer 林孟萱, alongside wind player 胡哲睿 and percussionist 曹昌玄, began on the streets. Their ensemble combines percussion, wind instruments, and stringed instruments, each contributing their own bodily sensations to create and synchronize their compositions. Their improvisational approach embraces spontaneity, with poetic notes meandering freely, transcending the boundaries of conventional performances. They also present meticulously arranged pieces that reflect deeper contemplation.

In full aural/metaphysical alignment, Shackleton’s bass heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs’ ritual folksong revel and delight in their massed collage as they become Jinxed By Being. Unfolding small details into a massive space, and then into further lines of dimensional space, they transit at will through our hemispheres with enervating motility, reearranging the definitions of our psychedelic/ritual/transcendental music libraries.

A playfully eccentric, pulsating mass of precarious polyrhythms and DIY drones, Takkak Takkak is a brand new project from prolific Berlin-based Japanese producer Shigeru Ishihara (aka Scotch Rolex) and Vilnius-based Indonesian composer and instrument builder Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi, best known as one half of Raja Kirik. The duo found common ground with their borderless enthusiasm for rhythm - hence their tongue-in-cheek, onomatopoeic moniker - and tasked themselves with hacking contemporary and traditional musics, fusing eardrum-piercing club sounds with wiry Asian traditional patterns and howling vocals. And although there are discernible fingerprints from across the musical map, Ishihara and Pribadi debut a sound that's doggedly unconventional.

GNOD, the ever-transient psychedelic musical unit from northern England with over 15 years and dozens of releases under their belt, return in 2024 with a recalibrated sound and a new sense of freedom. Spot Land’s five songs are tender and detailed, unfolding slowly with wistful guitar textures, brushed drums and interjections of lap steel, piano and kalimba.

A founder member of Uganda's rebellious ANTI-MASS collective (alongside Authentically Plastic and Turkana), Nsasi has built up a reputation with subversive DJ sets, smashing together slowed-down dance anthems and glossy R&B with propulsive fringe club experiments. His debut album is a dynamic, industrial rasp that draws on his expertise behind the decks, expertly meshing rhythms from across the musical spectrum into a coarse, dancefloor-ready frame. With the safety of queer people in Uganda compromised by a conservative, intolerant administration, 'Coinage' acts as a rallying cry for like-minded outsiders that mischievously perverts East African traditional sounds, considering their revolutionary potential within a new context.

Nine-piece West Africa-via-Melbourne ensemble Ausecuma Beats and improvised collective Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange, also known as Z*F*E*X, reveal a new collaborative EP out August 19 via Music in Exile.

Recorded live and mixed by none other than Brian Eno, 'The Surgeon…' is one of Fourth World inaugurator Hassell's most breathtaking full-lengths, capturing the physicality of his performance and matching his lopsided trumpet work with hypnotic synths and ghostly, muted percussion. If you've not jumped into his catalog before, this is the perfect starting point!

Unique tribal dub-trance music influenced by arabic culture with a touch of post-industrial. Hypnotic rhythms mixed with with eastern vibes.

Singer, songwriter and author Ali Sethi had been entranced by Jaar’s music long before they began collaborating. He’d absorbed the sounds over a number of years, listening casually and taking in their subtleties in bars and rooftop parties across Lahore and London. “It felt familiar to me, that sense of adventure you have when you hear his music, like a tale that teases you and plays with your expectations as it unfolds,” says Sethi. “In that sense it resembled the leisurely improvised ghazals and qawwalis I grew up hearing in Pakistan.”

Acts of Light is a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges. Vulnerability, majesty, and candour elicited with drone, double bass, field recordings and sacred choral chant compose its private ritual. Born out of excavations and explorations in feeling, intuition and physicality through sound which culminated in her 2021 EP Feral Hymns, Acts of Light is a disquiet personal offering to wilderness, loss, absence, mystery and love supreme.

One of the most renowned and uncompromising entities working in 21st century avant-garde Arab-Levantine art and music, Jerusalem In My Heart presents a new album of vital and haunting electronics and electroacoustics, framed by founder and producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s spoken and sung Arabic, buzuk-playing and sound design. Qalaq is the most distilled, variegated and finely wrought Jerusalem In My Heart album to date – featuring a different guest/collaborator on every track, yet as cohesive, emotionally resonant, sonically adventurous and narratively powerful as any release in JIMH’s celebrated discography. Guests across the album's 13 tracks include Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Beirut, Alanis Obomsawin, Rabih Beaini and many more.

Mong Tong's latest album, "Tao Fire 道火", not only continues the idea behind their previous work, "Indies 印", but also incorporates more local elements such as gamelan music, phin guitar, tabla drums, and Taiwan sisomi. While sampling more sounds from the street of Southeast Asia, including weddings, funerals, and traditional celebrations, Mong Tong again explores different folk sounds around Austronesia.

“Nzinga Mbande” is the new album by the African Imperial Wizard collective. It is the soundtrack of the armed liberation from the imperialistic oppression that our continent has endured for far too long.

After the not-quite-reissue of 'Prince of Parrot Shooters/The Aqueducts of Cannel Island', wide-eyed mystic and tireless searcher of the netherworld Spencer Clark returns to the Discrepant fold with 'Barbados Wild Horses' under his Monopoly Child Star Searchers moniker. Recorded while Clark was living in the Canary Island's by Tupperware and Lagoss' Dani Tupper, 'Barbados Wild Horses' brims with insular romanticism and escapist bliss, with sunkissed synth-lines interwoven around his trademark hand percussion bouncy rhythms reflecting the scenery of the islands as a liberating utopia.