This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Benny Thomas, Gavin Senaratne and Irfan Ayaan.
Each Friday at Twistedsoul, we showcase a small selection of new releases that have caught our collective ears. We search Between The Cracks to bring you new music overlooked by the mainstream. This week, we’re highlighting releases from Shabaka, PILLBERT, Booker Stardrum and more. Lend an ear to the music, and if it strikes a chord, show some love to the artists and labels by supporting them.
Albums
Shabaka – Of The Earth
With ‘Of the Earth’. ever-evolving British jazz visionary Shabaka Hutchings returns with one of the most personal and exploratory releases of his career. Now performing mononymously as Shabaka, he steps further into a new artistic identity: producer, multi-instrumentalist, and sonic architect. This album blends jazz improvisation with electronics, hip-hop beats, nature-inspired spiritual motifs, and even his own rapping. The Earth is largely defined by flutes, loops, and electronic textures. The sound palette blends diasporic rhythms drawn from African and Caribbean traditions with experimental electronic production. Standout tracks include the opener, ‘A Future Untold,’ which sets the album’s tone with ethereal textures and a lyrical saxophone line that drifts through the ambience. ‘Step Lightly’ is one of the album’s most dynamic pieces, with its hypnotic synth arpeggios giving way to an infectious beat. ‘Eyes Lowered’ brings the album to a reflective conclusion, with Shabaka’s spoken-word musings creating a subdued, contemplative tone. Of the Earth is a creative manifesto for an artist redefining his relationship with sound. By merging flute-led improvisation, electronic beat-making, and vocals, Shabaka expands the boundaries of contemporary jazz while offering a deeply personal statement of artistic freedom. –GS
PILLBERT – Memoria
Somewhere between a car-boot-sale egg and a pile of collected bones, Lilian Mikorey built herself a home and then recorded it. Memoria, her debut LP under the alias PILLBERT, is the sound of a twenty-something Bavarian quietly refusing to unpack her suitcase while also somehow redecorating the walls. She arrived in London not yet twenty, started hoarding sticks, stones, and pebbles, and then decided the aching feeling of displacement could be solved by constructing an entire dream house inside her head. Luckily for us, it couldn’t. So, we get to enjoy the ten tracks she wrung out of that doomed architectural project, all bendy folk guitars, field recordings of who-knows-what rattling on a windowsill, and vocals, so airy, breathy, and haunting. Across tracks like Tiny Dancer, Room Full of Doubt and the achingly beautiful Picture of a House, PILLBERT traces three phases of homesickness, building the dream, realising it’s a lie, and growing sideways out of the rubble, with the patience of someone who isn’t in a hurry to arrive anywhere. Memoria doesn’t resolve much, and by the time it’s over, you’ll find yourself oddly nostalgic for a house you’ve never been to. – BT
Booker Stardrum – Close-up On The Outside
Close-up On The Outside feels intimate without ever shrinking. Booker Stardrum builds the record from field recordings, handmade percussion, and MIDI manipulations, yet nothing sounds sterile. The electronics breathe. The acoustic textures flicker and sweat. What gives the album its weight is the way it dissolves boundaries. Stardrum isn’t fusing opposites for effect; he’s revealing how human touch and circuitry already coexist. Insects hum beside wooden strikes, loops evolve like weather systems, and rhythms feel grown rather than programmed. The contrast becomes clear as soon as you click play. The title track and the short ‘Minturn’ capture Stardrum’s solo music in the stillness of a late summer farm, featuring field recordings of local insects and birds. Wooden balafon-like strokes are looped into the closer, ‘Inside Sounds’, blending plaintive and direct elements. ‘Telluric’ stretches over eight minutes, slowly building from grounded pulses into a dense, trance-like swirl. It’s hypnotic but never static. The teetering, driving ‘Third Nature’ explores the theme of connection to the natural world. It’s a standout in its engaging musical dialogue. ‘Dusk’ is more restrained, letting space and texture speak louder than volume. What lingers most is the tactility. You feel hands shaping sound, even when circuits are involved. Stardrum makes the outside world sound close enough to touch. – WBS
Ragini Trio – 3
Thirteen years after their debut, Ragini Trio return with 3, and it genuinely feels like a reset. Released via W.E.R.F. Records, the album doesn’t treat Indian raga and Western jazz as exotic opposites. It treats them as equals in conversation. The trio avoids fusion cliches. Instead of layering surface-level “world” textures over jazz forms, they dig into structure. Raga becomes the skeleton; improvisation becomes the bloodstream. Nathan Daems’ tenor sax moves with lyrical restraint. At the same time, Lander Gyselinck’s drums constantly reshape the rhythmic ground beneath Marco Bardoscia’s elastic bass lines. The opening two tracks show the range. ‘Chandrakauns’ is concise and hypnotic, building tension through repetition before opening into freer phrasing. It feels meditative but never static. ‘Abheri’ carries more lift, with brighter melodic contours and a pulse that leans closer to jazz swing while still honouring its raga roots. Elsewhere, the intimate and meditative ‘Nigira’ uses minimalist instrumentation to explore the subtleties of rhythm and melody. The closing number, ‘Shivaranjani’, evokes a sense of spiritual connection, emphasising the raga’s beauty. 3 isn’t about proving a concept. It’s about inhabiting that in-between space fully and making it sound alive. – WBS
Neue Grafik – Rachael
Rachael is Neue Grafik’s Blade Runner-inspired suite. Jazz harmony, broken beat, house, and hip-hop flicker like neon through rain-streaked glass. Rachael Pt. I sets the scene with analog warmth and noir-leaning chord voicings. The theme returns later in an altered form on Rachael Pt. 2. Narcissus 909 and Voight Kampff 808 build entire environments from drum-machine grids and Rhodes clusters. They evoke rain-slick streets and anxious internal monologues. Bold with Jerome Thomas pulls the concept into a more soulful lane. His vocal glides over head-nod drums and flickering synth pads. 1200 Prophecy and Romantic Chlamydia lean toward club momentum. Their grooves feel edgy but strangely tender. Childhood Memories opens a softer aperture and works like a memory fragment interlude. It leads into the bruised lullaby of Lullaby For Crackheads. Closer Rise Of A. feels like closing credits. It stays unresolved and slightly ominous, carried by a beat that keeps moving forward. The LP is dense and cinematic. It treats rhythm programming and live improvisation as equals. – IA
EP’s
Caminauta – A collection of Light – Part I
The Uruguayan sound artist and composer Caminauta offers this three-track EP as the first instalment of a promised series. She narrows her ambient compositions to their barest essential question: what does it feel like to be inside your own mind, undistracted? The opening ‘This Constant, Distant Hum of Self’ answers in two minutes flat. It’s the shortest track here, and deliberately so; it reads like a dedication, or a breath taken before a long sentence. What follows are two expansive pieces, the seven-minute ‘Sky’ and the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘The Solitude Between Two Thoughts’, that do not so much build as dilate, stretching interior space the way light does when it enters a room at a low angle and suddenly makes everything longer than it is. ‘The Solitude Between Two Thoughts’, easily the EP’s best moment, carries the specific weight of a mind that has learned to sit with itself without flinching; it is music for the pause after the hard thing, not the hard thing itself. Caminauta’s mission is to “make the world a more beautiful place through sound”, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. – BT
Caminauta will release a new album, Unseen Dimensions, on March 20th via Wayside & Woodland Recordings.
