A 2004 Amsterdam deep house record that sat in the secondhand bins for twenty years, now unearthed by Anacalypto. D’Onorio’s approach is patient and synth-heavy in that old Dutch manner—four-on-the-floor propulsion softened by analog warmth, designed for 4am rather than peak time. The kind of thing that was always there if you knew where to look, now back where it belongs: on turntables that understand the difference between house and movement.

Snippets: tinyurl.com/4tbfmhez

Originally released in 2004, Because Of My Dream is a quietly overlooked gem from the early-2000s Dutch underground. Produced by Amsterdam DJ and producer Angelo D’Onorio, a longtime presence in the city’s club circuit including Mazzo, Roxy and Paradiso, the record blends rolling House rhythms with analog synth textures to create a deep, late-night atmosphere.

Though it circulated among a small circle of DJs at the time, the release never reached the wider audience it deserved. Its patient grooves and dreamy progression reflect D’Onorio’s hardware-driven approach to production and the understated emotional pull of Dutch House from that era.

Two decades later, Anacalypto Records brings Because Of My Dream back into circulation, rediscovering and reintroducing this forgotten dancefloor moment for a new generation of DJs, dancers and selectors.

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Tar instrumentals recorded across two decades by an Armenian virtuoso who spent his career shuttling between Paris, New York, and the diaspora circuit—sparse, focused performances that sit somewhere between classical study piece and living tradition. These 78s capture a musician working in the margins of the American recording industry, playing for audiences that actually knew what a tar was, which meant something very different then than it does now.

Tar, the Persian word for string/wire, is the root of the names of the European instrument guitar and the Indian instrument sitar. The instrument named the tar is a long-necked lute with a mulberry wood body carved into two chambers and covered in a skin membrane. For several centuries, it has been among the primary instruments of Iran and the Caucasus.

Armenian tarist George Shah-Baronian was born Feb. 25, 1897, in Tabriz, northwestern Iran, with the name Georges Chahparaniantz, and spent some period of his childhood in Tiflis (Tblisi), Georgia. In Sofia, Bulgaria, on Feb. 18, 1924, he married Genia Aznavourian, who had been born Dec. 25, 1906, in Constantinople-Istanbul. The couple settled in Paris, France, where Shah-Baronian studied and performed. For most of a decade, from 1926 to 1937, they traveled back and forth between Paris and New York.

In the late ’20s he performed on records in New York for the small Armenian-owned independent labels Sohag and Pharos, accompanying Armenian singers including the Constantinople-Istanbul-born singer-actor-comedian Edward Boghosian (b. 1900; see the Canary album Very Sweet), the Russian-Caucasian soprano Masha Sourapian (b. 1896) and her husband Setrak (b. 1894), and Georgian singer Rouben Tigranian (b. 1890; see the Canary album A Diamond Ring). Notable among them, Shah Baronian accompanied the singer Haroot Maroot (b. 1877), whose sole disc on the Pharos label is the only record in Persian made in New York City in the first half of the 20th century. (Four discs in a combination of languages including Persian were made by Columbia in Chicago in late 1929 by tarist J. Alexander and singer Muresa Daniels who, we suspect, were members of the city’s Assyrian community and were likely from Urmia in the far northwest of Iran; see the Canary Anniversary Sampler: Ottoman-American Recordings Since TWSP.) During that period, Shah-Baronian made only two discs under his own name — two performances of traditional repertoire for Sohag (one of which, "Ouzoon Dara," he subsequently re-recorded) and a western-influenced disc of a “romance” and a “foxtrot” for Pharos.

George and Genia Shah-Baronian apparently went back to Paris before returning to New York in June 1934 on a six-month visa. They were in the U.S. on May 9, 1936, for a Red Cross benefit concert in Brooklyn, NY on a program with performers from Germany, Russia, Ireland, Scotland, Slovakia, Ukraine, etc. They then went back to Paris for a few months before finally immigrating on Oct. 1, 1937. They remained in New York City until, at least, 1942. By January 1947, they had moved to Los Angeles, where they played “A Unique Persian-Armenian Concert” at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. The next several years saw a flurry of musical activity and increasing notoriety in LA. Reporter Charles D. Parlee of the Pasadena Star News saw them play at the Penthouse of the Crown Hotel and described Shah-Baronian’s playing as “some of the most exciting music I’ve ever heard.” It was around that time that George and Genia Shah-Baronian released a four-disc set of their music, cut at Radio Recorders studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, although one side, the “Bayatti Shiraz,” is clearly a dub made from a disc made much earlier — who knows where, who knows when.

George Shah-Baronian led a three-act comic operetta in Fresno and L.A. called One Purse - Four Weddings with a cast of twenty-five actors, mostly Armenians. He also contributed to the soundtracks of two Hollywood films released in 1951. Sirocco, starring Humphrey Bogart, was set in Damascus and included a soundtrack by the modernist composer George Antheil (b. 1900; d. 1959). Magic Carpet starred Lucille Ball. Then, on Nov. 18, 1951, Genia died at the age of 44. Seven months later, George filed his Declaration of Intent to become a U.S. citizen, having lived in the country as a resident alien for two decades. On April 14, 1956, he died at Rockhaven, the mental health sanitarium in Glendale, California.

Just five months before George Shah-Baronian died, the only other prominent tarist in the United States arrived in California. His name was Haig Ohanian. According to researcher Harry Kezelian, he was born in Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar) in the region of southern Russia between the Black and Caspian seas, about halfway between the northern border of Georgia and the southern border of eastern Ukraine. Kazelian and Jesse Kenas Collins of the Armenian Museum in Watertown, Massachusetts, believe that he arrived in the U.S. around 1924, but there is an amazing scarcity of documentation about Ohanian’s life available. It is clear that by the end of 1942, he had settled in Dearborn, Michigan, and begun a career as a professional musician. In June 1943, he started an Armenian radio program on WJLB that continues to this day. Through the 1940s and into the early ‘50s, he prolifically released discs on his own High Art label. Of his accompanists, we are only aware of his performances around Detroit in the mid-40s with pianist Melekian Byndrian, who was from Andana, Turkey. Kezelian notes that Ohanian often used non-Armenian performers among his accompanists. What is clear is that Ohanian performed around Southern California from 1955-59, basically picking up where Shah-Baronian left off as the area’s most prominent tarist until he moved to New York City around 1960. He seems to have still been alive and performing in New York and New Jersey in the early ‘80s and might have lived past 1988. We are, at present, without any further information about his life and career.

There is little comparison between Shah-Baronian and Ohanian as performers except that both were driven to make names for themselves as members of a minority-within-a-minority (the overwhelming majority of Armenian in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century having come from Turkey) and were dedicated to an instrument that was exotic both within their own community and to the larger English-speaking country, where the press likened it to balalaika or a banjo or both. But, for the time being, I would leave the question open that there might have been some relationship between the two and perhaps even a distant familial connection. For instance, Genia Shah-Baronian's maiden surname Azvavourian was, of course, the same as the famous Paris-born singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour (b. 1924) whose father was from Akhalsikhe, Georgia, and whose sister was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1923 before they settled in Paris — a path not so dissimilar from George Shah-Baronian's. And, it so happens, Aznavour had a cousin who wound up in Hollywood acting under the name Mike Connors but whose name when he was born in Fresno, California in 1925 was Krekor Ohanian. This coincidence, of course, may not mean anything more than the fact that both George Shah-Baronian and Haig Ohanian exhibited male pattern baldness in early middle age. Who knows?

As a footnote: Armenian-American record producer George Avakian (b. 1919; d. 2017), arguably the single most important figure in the origin of the popular reissue record, was also born in Krasnodar to a family with roots in Urmia, Iran.

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Kotai’s 2002 minimal techno oddity resurfaces on Kompakt, a track that split the difference between Berlin’s stripped-down rigor and Cologne’s more playful electro leanings. ‘Sucker DJ’ is exactly what the title promises: a boilerplate house groove gutted of pretense, all skeletal drums and a hook you can’t quite forget. The Highfish remix tilts it toward something breezier, less concerned with proving a point. Two decades later, it’s the kind of thing that sounds better in a basement at 4am than it does on headphones, which is probably the point.

Klaus Kotai, a Viennese who had made Berlin his home, found a receptive audience in Cologne as early as the mid-90s with his records on Elektro Music Department. This club and label conglomerate, run with co-producer and DJ Mo Loschelder and the artist Daniel Pflumm, was working towards a radical streamlining of techno. A certain kinship with the pre-Kompakt sound of Cologne could not be denied. They exchanged greetings from afar.

Then came the 2000s, an exciting era for club music, rich in innovation and characterised above all by the burgeoning genres of minimal and electro clash. In 2002, Kotai’s ‘Sucker DJ’ was released, featuring the brilliant remix by Marcin “Highfish” Kozlowski, on WMF Records – the label belonging to the eponymous cult Berlin club. A true hit that struck a perfect balance between both worlds and was played across genres by virtually every DJ.

Exactly 20 years after the last re-release on Elektro Music Department (also distributed by Kompakt at the time), it’s now time for ‘Sucker DJ’ to make a comeback. Judging by Marco Cariolaa’s ‘Cringe Vibes’, it’s needed more urgently than ever.

Remastered, with new artwork by Daniel Pflumm, and still “fucking up your place”.

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A 70-minute meditation on pagan winter rituals that moves through drone and granular texture like smoke through a shuttered room. Hexeneiche treats the seasonal calendar as compositional material—each side a gradual accumulation of low frequencies, field recordings of nothing much, and the kind of patient abstraction that rewards the kind of listener who doesn’t need things to happen. Not grimly atavistic, not New Age kitsch; just cold, methodical, and oddly grounding.

SIDE A:

December 21: Modranecht (Mother's Night / Winter Solstice)

The longest night of the year and the official beginning of the Yule season. Traditionally, this night marked the rebirth of the sun. It was dedicated to female deities and protective spirits who watched over the household and the fertility of the coming year.

December 22–24: Die Vorbereitungstage (The Preparation Days)

In the days immediately following the solstice, the sun appears to stand still on the horizon before the days noticeably begin to lengthen again. These were days of deep rest, silence, and inner preparation within the home. All heavy labor had to cease so as not to disturb the cosmic order.

December 24: Julabend (Yule Eve)

The preparation culminates this evening. The great feast was prepared, and the Yule log was ritually lit in the hearth. This fire had to burn throughout the entire night to offer protection against the darkness and the malevolent spirits outside.

SIDE B:

December 25: Mittwinterstag (Midwinter Day / Yule)

The central feast day. The return of the light and the triumph of the sun over darkness were celebrated with communal feasting, ritual sacrifices, and the drinking of ceremonial mead or ale to toast to a fruitful new year.

December 26 to January 6: Die Rauhnächte (The Rough Smoke Nights)

The night of December 25 to 26 traditionally marks the beginning of the Rauhnächte. This period falls outside of normal timekeeping, representing the discrepancy between the lunar and solar calendars. To protect homes and stables from the restless spirits, chambers were ritually smudged and fumigated with cleansing herbs like juniper and frankincense.

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NEOBORIS sounds like what happens when someone raises wave records and acid house in the same apartment, then insists on singing through it all. Recorded between rave comedowns and café existentialism in late-90s southwest France, Hélas catches a duo operating in that narrow bandwidth where new wave’s melodrama meets minimal synth’s cold shoulder, never quite sure which side of the dancefloor they belong on. A memorial that works better as time machine: less about nostalgia than about documenting how provincial France was making something genuinely strange from borrowed forms.

Hélas collects 15 songs from the repertoire of NEOBORIS, an infamous Bordeaux/Pau duo highly active in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Drawing on direct Punk, Wave, Rave Culture and “Variété Française” influences, Hélas functions as a perfect time capsule of a very specific era and mood: a boy-and-girl duo celebrating their love for boys, in melancholy and beauty.

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I met Boris in the early '90s. I was a hardcore raver and sang in various punk bands in Bordeaux. Boris was more romantic and had grown up with New Wave and Goth. He was a natural-born singer-songwriter. We shared a deep passion for Elli et Jacno, Taxi Girl, or Mathematiques Modernes. We started giving wild concerts across our region in the South West of France and gradually playing everywhere all the way to Paris. Boris' untimely death in 2008 was a shock. Today, I still perform Boris' songs everywhere I can because I just want to preserve his spirit. Singing with him then, now, and forever.

Eve Dequidt

Pau, France

Summer 2025

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ROMsets’ UmJak lands in that familiar zone where lofi house beats curdle into something stranger, less concerned with groove than with the particular texture of a damaged signal. Manchester’s outsider production lineage runs deep, but this feels less interested in inherited coldwave romance than in the specific acoustics of decay—what happens when your sampler’s having a bad morning. Worthwhile if you’re past the point of needing your experimental electronics to justify themselves with structure.

Le Motel’s latest treats water sounds and passing train noise with the gravity of melody—which is to say, not much gravity at all, just patient observation. Pozo de Agua drifts somewhere between field recording devotion and late-night ambient programming, built from recordings made in motion, neither quite documentary nor quite composition. It’s the sound of someone listening very carefully to the space between stations, and honestly, there’s something to that.

Brussels-based producer, composer, and field recordist Le Motel has developed a distinct body of work rooted in environmental sound, collage, and immersive electronic composition. Across releases, collaborations, and audiovisual projects, his music blends ambient textures, rhythmic experimentation, field recordings, and downtempo electronics into transportive listening experiences.

Le Motel is also the founder of the Brussels label Maloca Records and has become known for projects that incorporate recordings gathered through travel and collaboration. His acclaimed release Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ drew from recordings made in Vietnam and explored the intersection of ambient composition, documentary sound, and experimental electronic music.

Pozo de Agua continues Le Motel’s exploration of atmosphere, texture, and place through a fluid palette of ambient electronics, organic detail, and layered sonic environments. Most of the tracks were created outdoors or in transit, primarily on trains, emerging from what Le Motel describes as “a very natural and emotional process” of translating feelings, memories, and passing thoughts into sound. The album treats environmental sounds — ripples, water drops, movement, and air — with the same importance as traditional instruments, allowing elements to drift in and out like ocean waves while forming subtle polyrhythms and overlapping textures.

Working at the intersection of ambient, experimental electronic music, balearic downtempo, and new age-inspired sound design, Le Motel creates music that feels both intimate and expansive. His approach combines processed acoustic elements, environmental recordings, and soft electronic structures into compositions that reward deep listening while maintaining an understated emotional pull.

For listeners drawn to exploratory ambient music, environmental sound collage, and contemporary downtempo electronics, Pozo de Agua presents another entry in Le Motel’s evolving sonic world.

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Zervas builds a phantom Mediterranean where crumbling rebetiko samples collide with cheap drum machines and unstable oscillators, less interested in authenticity than in the hallucinatory space where memory and fabrication become indistinguishable. It’s hauntology by way of regional specificity rather than British decay—fewer dusty vinyl ghosts, more the sense of eavesdropping on music that shouldn’t technically exist. The result sits uneasily between folk deconstruction and industrial collage, closer to Nurse With Wound’s source-mangling than anything in the drone or new wave tags actually suggest.

Continuing the saga that began with 2024's self-titled LP, a hazy deconstruction of Greek folk memories that acted as a prelude to the surreal Egyptian street rave experiment 'Hazlom', 'τρία' is enigmatic composer Aeson Zervas' most confounding set to date. He takes the opportunity to darken his shadowy autobiography; so far, all that's been revealed is that he's reclusive, based in Missolonghi in western Greece and can trace his ancestry back to North Africa - details get murky when examined further. On 'τρία', the contrast is intensified and the grain increased as Zervas stalks furtively through a moonlit fictionalized Mediterranean, rupturing his collection of gritty folk samples - remnants of rebetiko and ailing film soundtracks - with anachronistic drum machine loops and errant analog oscillations. If his debut was a hauntological artifact that addressed Europe's historical obsession with Greek culture, smearing tangible Hellenic soundscapes until they loosely fell into line with The Caretaker's reverberating flashbacks, Zervas' third chapter manufactures an unsettling fiction that hallucinates a parallel timeline.

The album follows a thread from the tekedes, semi-legal social clubs where workers, refugees, gangsters and pimps would gather to smoke hash and jam on bouzouki, through the tavernas and back streets of Greece and Anatolia where early synth music melt into the memories, shuttling the chanted choruses and santur chimes into back room dancefloors and sweaty beachside raves. Whether any of this did or didn't happen is beside the point; Zervas' cultural references stretch out through ancient Rome and the Ottoman Empire, affirming an identity that's more real than reality itself. It's not made from fragments of commercialized, Eurocentric Greek history, but the dreams of half-remembered histories of the various different peoples who have moved through the Balkans and Anatolia for centuries. Tonally warped piano stabs and West Asian vocal forms breeze across squashed, decelerated kicks and bleeps on 'Χωρίς τίτλο 20', while Zervas fashions a fantasy ecosystem on 'Χωρίς τίτλο 22', using evocative environmental recordings and chiming exotica organs to imagine a marooned island far from the Caribbean.

Busted beatbox rotations and detuned basslines follow lyra melodies and fragile vocals 'Χωρίς τίτλο 25' and when 'τρία' navigates towards its final stretch, hiccuping rhythms, blown-out acid squelches and slow, booming pulses shepherd the ornate traditional notes to their illogical conclusion. It's an album of divergences and contradictions that asks more questions than it answers, breaking apart the bright, white marble sculptures that lie behind glass in European museums and repainting the fragments in eldritch colors.

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ako strips the sheen off IDM-adjacent beat production with tape compression and hardware constraints: lo-fi synth funk that sounds like it was already halfway to degradation before it hit the recorder. The MT-50 four-track sessions feel less like an aesthetic choice and more like honest documentation of what these cheap drum machines and Yamahas actually sounded like in a room, which is messier and better than any polished version could manage.

Versions of ‘Home3D’ and ‘Basic Microwaving’ recorded on four track tape (FFO: Eyeliner, FM Skyline, Rustie). Out now on Spotify, BandCamp, YouTube and all other digital platforms, all formats here: linktr.ee/simeonsoden

The A-side was recorded on an Yamaha MT-50 four track with DX21 (bass, chords and FX), RX5 (drums) and some bits and pieces from a Novation Ultranova.

The B-side was recorded on an Yamaha MT-50four track with Casio CZ-1000 (bass), Roland TR-505 (drums) and a Yamaha PSS-60 (lead) and DX21 (chords).

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