Previous episode followed the Klipschorn from Hope, Arkansas to The Loft, then across the Atlantic through Lucky Cloud Sound System: not as a museum piece, but as part of a living practice. By the mid-2000s, those ideas had started to take root in London in more personal, improvised and local ways. The lineage no longer belonged to one room, one party or one sound system. It began moving through friendships, borrowed spaces, domestic rituals, hand-built equipment and nights where the dance floor was treated less as a transaction than a shared act of listening. This episode follows that movement through Beauty and the Beat, brilliant corners and a wider network of people who turned sound into culture by building rooms around care, pressure, warmth and attention.

Beauty and the Beat

Beauty and the Beat, or BATB, was one of the first places where that movement found its own London shape, though it was never simply an extension of Lucky Cloud. Cedric Lassonde had danced at The Loft in New York in the early 2000s. Jeremy Gilbert had been involved in Lucky Cloud from 2002. Along with Cyril Cornet, they were drawn together by those experiences and by a shared belief in the house party as an art form with far more potential than most clubs allowed. Their own homes were no longer big enough for what they wanted to do.

By the time Lucky Cloud acquired its full Klipschorn system in June 2005, BATB had become possible, and it launched that September, drawing heavily on that setup while building an identity of its own.

What made BATB decisive was not faithful imitation, but the way it opened the lineage outward. As David Mancuso insisted, the point was never to franchise The Loft, but to be original. Lucky Cloud made the Mancuso inheritance usable in London. BATB was among the first parties to push that inheritance somewhere more distinctly its own.

The emphasis on sound, intimacy and emotional pacing remained, but the music and feeling of the room shifted. London entered the picture more fully: bass weight, Caribbean influence, French sensibility, British rave and club culture, house-party looseness, and the legacy of places like Plastic People, which changed a generation’s understanding of what a dance floor could be.

What kept BATB alive over time was its refusal to let that inheritance harden into formula. Different venues came and went. Different generations of friends and volunteers gathered around it, helping carry, build, host and remake the night.

But the real key was musical. BATB never approached this culture as something to preserve in fixed form or replay as received wisdom.

The selections stayed responsive to the present: not a museum of New York in the 1970s, but a living social music shaped by geography, politics and the emotional texture of the moment.

That is why the party did not collapse into heritage.

It remained open, current and alive.

More than a Sound System

Those ideas also began to appear outside the structure of the party. When Brilliant Corners opened in Dalston in 2013, it put a Klipschorn-based system at the centre of a restaurant, bringing serious sound into a setting built around food, drink and hospitality.

Amit and Aneesh Patel have spoken about discovering both BATB and Lucky Cloud, seeing the labour behind those parties, and wondering why that kind of musical experience had no home outside the night itself. Others would later reach for the term “listening bar”, though the phrase feels too narrow for a place built as much around hospitality and atmosphere as sound.

What followed was less a chain of direct influence than a culture passed hand to hand. Sweet Apricots in Paris, Apricot Ballroom in Sheffield, All Our Friends and Rude Movements in London, Days in Nantes, Beija Flor in Lisbon and Pra Vida in Birmingham grew through people visiting parties, hearing systems, forming friendships and deciding to build something of their own.

Lucky Cloud and Mancuso remained part of the deeper reference point, but BATB helped show how the inheritance could travel, change accent and stay alive. Their growth was organic: carried by labour, trust and repeated nights rather than branding or institutional backing.

Some of that next generation took things further. They did not stop at admiration. They began building the speakers themselves. Slym Bouzavitch from Sweet Apricots built two pairs of Klipschorns. Josh Beauchamp and Jonny Craven from Rude Movements followed, modifying and extending the designs. Along with Rob Hall, they then went further by building Klipsch’s later and larger lineage Jubilee systems of their own. That matters because it shows the culture deepening rather than merely spreading. The speakers are no longer only revered objects passed down from an earlier era.

They have become part of a living craft, carried forward by people willing to learn the physical logic behind the sound and rebuild it for their own rooms, cities and communities.

That wider culture took other shapes too. Last Note in Perugia, Cloud 9 in Barcelona, and Precious Energy and Musical Fruits in Bristol also belong to that wider story.

Japan followed a different path again: through David Mancuso’s visits and Satoru Ogawa’s work at Precious Hall, where the Prince Street sound philosophy was pursued with exceptional seriousness. That lineage deserves an essay of its own rather than a hurried summary here.

Across those nights, certain features keep returning: Klipschorns at the corners of the dance floor, a house-party mentality scaled up without losing intimacy, and a commitment to openness, patience and emotional range.

What matters, finally, is that the story was never singular, and Klipschorn culture did not travel along only one route.

Beyond those direct lineages, Klipschorns have also begun appearing more widely in recent years across venues, parties and record shops internationally, as more people search for listening environments with scale, depth and physical presence.

By that point, the Klipschorn had travelled a long way from Hope, Arkansas. It had become part of how people in different cities learned to gather, listen and build worlds together.

Why the Klipschorn endured

“Whatever you feed it, it will reply. If you feed it correctly it will respond correctly. An honest speaker which reflects the person who made them.”
— David Mancuso

The Klipschorn has lasted because the original idea was strong enough to outlive fashion: high efficiency, wide dynamic range and low distortion, combined with a corner-horn design that makes the room part of the instrument.

That is why the speaker could move from Hope, Arkansas into David Mancuso’s The Loft, then on through London into parties, venues and listening spaces that carried the lineage forward in their own way.

Text: Kay Suzuki
Special thanks to Matt Sommers, Tim Lawrence and Jonny Craven
Photos: Klipsch Museum of Audio History, Guillaume Chottin, Matt Cheetham, Tim Lawrence, Miguel Echeverria, Silvia Gin, Jan Vaceanu-Staicov

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The Shape of the Room

A Klipschorn changes the room before it changes the sound.

Its cabinet sits into the corner with the certainty of something structural, as if the speaker and the building were made for each other. Then the record starts and the room seems to grow around it. The low end has contour. Voices carry height and presence. Rhythm arrives with unusual ease. The sound does not push at the space so much as reorganise it.

That sensation helps explain why the Klipschorn has held its place for eighty years. First put into production in 1946, it is still being made today: the longest-running speaker in continuous production, rooted in the same principles Paul W. Klipsch established in Hope, Arkansas.

Its design used a folded low-frequency horn and treated the walls, floor and ceiling of the listening room as part of the acoustic system, which is why it has always felt closer to architecture than furniture. Low frequencies demand size.

A straight bass horn able to reach properly into the lower registers takes up too much space for ordinary domestic life. Klipsch’s answer was to fold the horn path inside the cabinet, then use the room boundaries as the final part of the horn. That is why the Klipschorn has always had to live in or near a corner: the room itself completes the design.

That was the breakthrough.

Paul W. Klipsch found a way to bring the force, scale and ease of horn-loaded sound into the home without losing the physical authority that made horns so compelling in the first place. Just as importantly, he did it with an efficiency that would later make the Klipschorn unusually usable in party settings as well as domestic ones.

Plenty of loudspeakers have been revised out of recognition or turned into heritage branding exercises. The Klipschorn survived because the original acoustic idea was strong enough to keep working.

New York: David Mancuso & the Social Life of Fidelity

The Klipschorn’s cultural life changed in New York. In the mid-1960s, David Mancuso first heard a pair of Klipschorns while visiting his friend Jimmy Miller in Brooklyn Heights. Miller had a connection to Hope, Arkansas, and the encounter stayed with him. A few years later, on Valentine’s Day 1970, Mancuso held a party in his own loft at 647 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. That night became the beginning of what would later be known simply as The Loft. Tim Lawrence’s first interview with Mancuso, in 1997, began a much longer engagement that would eventually lead to Love Saves the Day, the book that helped frame The Loft as one of the deep foundations of 1970s dance-floor culture.

The point of The Loft was never just superior sound. The system served a larger idea of what a party could be. Records were selected with unusual patience and emotional intelligence. The room was organised around hospitality rather than spectacle. Food, balloons, the absence of booth-centred ego, the care given to atmosphere: these were part of the method. The focus was the dance floor, not the person selecting records, and the party aspired to a communal experience shaped by top-notch sound and a friendly crowd.

At the Loft, the Klipschorn took on a second life. Mancuso bought his first Klipschorns from Richard Long, later acquired further Klipsch speakers through Alex Rosner, and at Prince Street used Paul W. Klipsch’s published guidance to build false corners and larger arrays in his own space.

The speaker was no longer just a domestic object prized by hi-fi obsessives. It became part of a collective technique, using sound to shape the room itself and the relationships inside it.

Before Love Saves the Day, the story often seemed to begin with the later landmarks: Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage, Frankie Knuckles and the Warehouse. Lawrence helped push it back to its source, restoring The Loft to the beginning of that lineage and showing it as one of the places where the modern art of the dance floor first took shape.

This is also why the Klipschorn mattered so much once it left the living room. Its defining quality was efficiency. That gave it a rare ability to hold scale, clarity and force in a social space without strain.

In a party, that difference is not abstract. It affects how long people can stay with the music without fatigue, how fully they can trust the room, and how far a dance floor can open out without losing intimacy.

From New York to London: How the lineage travelled

The Loft did not spread through simple imitation. For years, knowledge of Mancuso’s world travelled in fragments: dancers’ testimony, New York stories, certain records. By the time Tim Lawrence first interviewed Mancuso in 1997, very few people outside a relatively small New York circle knew who he was. Love Saves the Day changed that. It gave readers in London and elsewhere a way to understand The Loft not as disco folklore, but as one of the deep foundations of modern dance culture.

London’s connection became more direct in 2002, when David Mancuso began developing the idea of London parties with Tim Lawrence, Jeremy Gilbert, Colleen Murphy, Adrian Fillary and Nikki Lucas. The first party took place in June 2003.

Lucky Cloud Sound System emerged first as a team and a practice built around hosting David in London and carrying the spirit of The Loft into a local context. Sound mattered deeply, but people came first. For the earliest parties, regular PA was hired while the analogue front end and, later, the full Klipschorn-based system were assembled over time.

By June 2005, the full Klipschorn setup was in place for what Tim Lawrence describes as the first all-Klipschorn party in the UK.

The whole process was intensely collective. Components were stored in different homes, carried in by volunteers, assembled for the night, then taken back again afterwards. That labour also echoed a deeper British-Caribbean sound system culture, where the act of building, carrying and sounding the system became part of how a community forms.

By then, the story was no longer only about a remarkable loudspeaker, or even about The Loft arriving in London.

The Klipschorn had become a way of organising people around sound: who carried it, who listened through it, who understood that a room could be built with care rather than spectacle.

From that labour, another kind of party became possible. One that would take the Mancuso inheritance seriously, but refuse to leave it untouched.

To be continued…

Text: Kay Suzuki
Special thanks to Matt Sommers and Tim Lawrence.

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Picking up from the studio sessions behind ‘Riot in Lagos’, Nick Dwyer and Dennis Bovell move closer to the day-to-day reality of working with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Bovell recalls first impressions, the rhythm of the sessions, and the small moments that shaped the track as it developed.

Along the way, he reflects on hearing the record out in the world for the first time, his early trips to Japan, and the relationships that followed in the years after B-2 Unit. What comes through is a more personal view of the process behind the music, and of Sakamoto himself.

Nick Dwyer: Let’s go back to the sessions. The truck shows up with all the gear and few days later Ryuichi Sakamoto arrives. What were your first impressions of him as a person?

Dennis Bovell: He was a funny man, he liked jokes and to muck about. He brought a translator because he wasn’t confident in his English, even though I knew he understood me. When I later went to meet him in Shibuya at a club called Red Shoes, I couldn’t recognise him at first because there were so many people who looked similar to my eyes then. A girl came up and said, “I’m a singer, I want you to produce me.” Hold on, I’m not that famous in Japan… it’s my first time here! Then I knew, because Ryuichi was a practical joker he had sent her to see my reaction. I spotted him in a corner, buckled over laughing. He told me, “You passed. You saw me”.

Nick Dwyer: When you had finally wrapped up the sessions, how did the music you had created sound to you? Did it sound as alien as it did when other people heard it for the first time?

Dennis Bovell: Well, for me, it sounded like if I cracked open a nut and inside was something so sweet that it had to be a first. Then I realised later on that what this album was destined to do was to open the Japanese public’s ears to dub music, echoes, lots of echoes. And in Japanese classical music or in the cinema, or on the stage, there are lots of these effects just like in the old westerns with the bad guy going through the creek. Ryu was wondering how to do that within his music and I made it happen.

Nick Dwyer: Did you get a sense that throughout the sessions he was responding to you and what you were doing to the music?

Dennis Bovell: He had given me license to thrill. I treated it like a dub record I’d make for Burning Spear or Johnny Clarke. A lot of the stopping and starting was my decision. It was hung around a snare track, and everything followed the drums, including me.

Nick Dwyer: Everyone here knows the name of the track is ‘Riot in Lagos’, in that moment when he was recording it did he tell you what the name of the song is or the concept he had behind it?

Dennis Bovell: He had a little trouble with the English L and R. He kept calling it “Liot in Regos.” I had to explain, “Riot in Lagos, just put the L where the R should be!” The track was inspired by Fela Kuti, he wanted to recreate his sound with machines. I had worked with Fela on about twenty tracks. I even replayed a bass part for him on a live album, and Fela was amazed that I understood where the notes went. I think Ryu had heard my playing on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s records, of which he was a fan, and wanted that same feeling. He wanted someone to translate music they didn’t write into something the writer understands, which I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson.

After he said “Do what you’ve got to do now.” I had been listening and watching him all day and was following what he wanted, so I went and did it to his, and my, satisfaction.

Nick Dwyer: Do you remember the first time you heard it on the radio and how did it make you feel?

Dennis Bovell: I was driving on the Westway between Marylebone and Shepherd’s Bush. Suddenly it came on Radio 1, I had to pull over and groove. I was alone in the car, so I couldn’t tell anyone, “That’s me! I did that!”. I never expected to hear that, It was a moment of pure honor.

Nick Dwyer: Have you ever heard in a club over a serious soundsystem?

Dennis Bovell: Yeah I have, and I’ve played it myself!

Nick Dwyer: I heard you went to Tokyo for the first time in 1983, what was the experience like coming from London?

Dennis Bovell: It was cold because it was November. We went with Linton to Nakano Sun Plaza to play with a group called Mute Beat. Their drummer, Gota Yashiki, ended up in Simply Red. Their guitar player, Kenji, worked with Bomb the Bass.

A man came up to me with a new guitar called a Tokai. He asked me to try it. I plugged it in and it was booming. He asked if I wanted to play it that night. I said, “If I play it, can I keep it?” He said yes, and the next day, there was a big billboard outside the hotel saying: “Dennis Bovell plays Tokai”.

Nick Dwyer: You’ve been going back for over forty years now. What keeps that connection with Japan so strong?

Dennis Bovell: I worked with a bunch of Japanese artist, like Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Dub Sense Mania, Sandii, and Little Tempo. Tico from Little Tempo is a special guy. He plays the steel pan and goes to Trinidad every year for Carnival. You see that dedication everywhere in Japan. Whether it’s in Sapporo or Tokyo, if a Japanese person is into something, they go deep.

Don Letts made a film called Dancehall Queen, and the lady who won was a Japanese woman named Junko Kudo. She was the only non-Jamaican to ever win that competition. Respect.

Nick Dwyer: After 1983 how did your relationship with Ryuichi Sakamoto continue?

Dennis Bovell: Yeah, we met in New York and London. There was one time in Soho when he was producing Aztec Camera. He’d had quite a lot of whiskey, leapt onto a table, lowered his pants, and treated us to a “Sakamoto dance.” Everyone was shouting, “Stop, you’ll get arrested!” But he was just comical.

Nick Dwyer: All the YMO guys had an incredible sense of humor. They could make the most groundbreaking music but never take themselves too seriously.

Dennis Bovell: Some of the horn players in Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra were actually comedy actors on TV too.

Nick Dwyer: What do you think makes “Riot in Lagos” sound timeless, still today it sounds like it’s from the far future?

Dennis Bovell: Because it was groundbreaking and earth-shattering. Listening back tonight, I thought the kick drum could have been quieter, but the whole thing about the rhythm is that he played it without a metronome. It had a human touch - even using machines. Seeing Ryuichi do that was incredible, he let it sway. When the chorus comes, it gets a bit faster; when the verse comes, it sits back. I always say you only get out of machines what you put in.

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During the UK premiere of A Century in Sound, director Nick Dwyer hosted a series of events across London’s emerging listening spaces. The setting for one of these nights was in South London’s Jumbi, where Nick was joined by legendary producer and engineer Dennis Bovell. The evening centred on Ryuichi Sakamoto, specifically his 1980 outlier ‘B-2 Unit’ and its defining track ‘Riot in Lagos’.

Retrospectively framed as a blueprint for techno and hip-hop amongst others, the sessions provided a new challenge for Dennis, whose production work up until that point mostly revolved around reggae artists. During his conversation with Nick, Dennis reflects on how the collaboration with Sakamoto came about, the creative process in the sessions, and the unexpectedly playful side of Sakamoto’s character.

Nick Dwyer: I first found your music through Linton Kwesi Johnson when I was 14 and working at a radio station in New Zealand. The first time I ever heard New Zealand shouted out on a record was on a track called ‘Reggae Fi Peach’, can you tell us a little bit about this?

Dennis Bovell: I was fearful at the time, though I’m grateful now. Blair Peach was a school teacher from New Zealand who came to this country and lost his life on an anti-fascist march in Southall. It turned out a member of the constabulary had struck him with a baton. Linton wrote those lyrics: “Everywhere me go hear people say that the SPG them is murderer.” The SPG were the paramilitary section of the Metropolitan Police, the guys in big vans with guns.

I told Linton, “When you put this record out, you should take all the credit because I’m certain someone’s going to knock on your door and we won’t hear of you again.” When the record came out with my name on it as the producer, I was like, “I told you to leave me out!” He said, “Nah, we did this together and the world should know.” Fifteen years later, the police paid compensation to Blair’s wife, which was an admission of guilt. I called Linton and he just said, “I told you that fifteen years ago”.

Nick Dwyer: It must be incredible being in the position that you are in, having had your hand in so much music across the board. Some of the albums make a ripple, others make a wave, and some are still felt all around the world still today. We’re here to talk about one of those records, ‘Riot in Lagos’. How does it feel to have a hand in track that has such a huge legacy all these years later?

Dennis Bovell: I’m honored and grateful. A friend of mine, Don Letts, had gone to Japan with The Clash. Someone there asked for my number, and Don came back saying, “Dennis, I’ve met this man, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and he wants your number.” I told him “Yeah! I’m a YMO fan, I was into Yellow Magic big time”

Nick Dwyer: How did you first hear YMO?

Dennis Bovell: I first heard YMO when Chris Blackwell of Island Records asked if I liked Japanese electronic music. “Yeah” I told him, then he gave me the album with “Firecracker” on it. My young son used to play a game with that sound in it, and every time he didn’t win, the song would start again, so I knew every note... On their first album cover, they were dressed as restaurant waiters with patch leads across their arms. They were serving electronics. It sounded like the future.

Nick Dwyer: Is it true Sakamoto wanted to use your studio before you even finished building it?

Dennis Bovell: Yes! I was building a brand new studio and word got out. Sakamoto said, “I want to use your studio before you do. I want to be the first person to use it.” He said he was sending equipment over from Germany. I thought someone was having me on. Why Germany and not Japan? Years later, I realised he had been at Kraftwerk’s studio in Cologne and left his gear there. Then, one day an Arctic truck pulled up and the driver said, “Dennis Bovell? Sign here.” I had to get the studio finished real quick because Ryuichi was coming.

Nick Dwyer: Some of the gear that was in that truck, famously had not yet been released to the public

Dennis Bovell: Or seen in this country… He had a brand new drum machine called a 909. We were accustomed to the 808, but he had a 909. [Note: While Dennis recalls a 909, the TR-909 was released in 1983. In 1980, Sakamoto was likely using a prototype or the newly released TR-808 for the B-2 Unit sessions].

The keyboard he was using was a Sequential Circuits Prophet. Now, we’d only ever seen a Prophet-5 before - a friend of mine had one, and I thought it was an amazing piece of equipment. The sounds you could get out of that thing were futuristic. Then Ryuichi turns up with a Prophet-10. It was double-manual, like a pipe organ in a church. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since then.

During the session, he sat there and tapped out a kick drum pattern by itself. Then he pulled out manuscript paper and started jotting things down. Every time I rolled the track back, he was writing in real time. That was the thing that got me! Because of his musical ability, he could listen to it once, write it down, then go straight to the keyboard and play exactly what he’d written for the next track. I was just standing there with my mouth open. Then when he’d finished, he turned to me and said, ‘I’ve done what I’ve got to do. Do what you’ve got to do.

Nick Dwyer: How does it feel listening back to that track 47 years later?

Dennis Bovell: Pretty much like it did when we finished the mix. Ryu said “Are you happy with that?” I said, “Pretty much.” He was overjoyed with it and we moved onto the next track.

Nick Dwyer: Obviously there was a particular studio science he wanted, that’s why he made the trip all the way from Japan to London. He wanted that dub.

Dennis Bovell: He wanted echos, he wanted it to resemble music he heard in reggae.

I know for a fact the first reggae tune out of Japan was actually produced by Yukihiro Takahashi, the drummer of YMO, for a singer called Sandii. I met her after a concert in Fulham. She asked for my autograph and said her name was Sandii. I said, “Drip Dry Eyes?” and she was shocked I knew her music. She was familiar with mine and wanted to do a Japanese version of a song I had just released with Janet Kay ‘Silly Games’. I said “Sandii I know you sing high but we have to bring the bar down a bit…” We reconnected again in 2017 whilst I was in Japan, and finally collaborated in 2018 after she had overcome some health problems, on an album called Hula Dub.

To be continued to Part.2
This night was held thanks to Audio-Technica and Suntory.

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The first half of this conversation is about foundations: how MAP Charity took shape, how Cosmic Slop emerged from the same logic, and why sound was never separate from education in the first place. The second half moves closer to the room itself. Once Tom steps away, the perspective shifts. What follows is less about origin and more about maintenance, growth and pressure.

If you missed Part 1, you can read it here first:

By the time Tom has to run, the picture is already clear enough: Cosmic Slop is not a side project. It is one of the public faces of MAP Charity’s wider ecosystem, where education, sound, design, print, records and nightlife all feed one another. What happens after Tom leaves is just as revealing, because Will and Al start to talk about the place from the inside: how they came in, how the space has grown since they have, and what it means to keep a venue like this alive while a residential development edges up against it.

Both arrived first as dancers, then as helpers, then as part of the structure itself.

Al traces it back to lockdown, when Hope House needed practical help. “The roof was leaking,” he says. “So we just came to help Tom out.” Friendship turned into involvement. One of the first things he and Will took on was Leeds Producers Forum, giving local producers and music-makers a chance to hear work on the system in the gallery.

Will remembers the building in a rougher, wetter state: old furniture upstairs, clearing rooms, trying to keep the place from filling with water. From there came event work, studio activity, more responsibility and, eventually, a role in opening Hope House as a venue outward.

That last part matters. For years, the system and the space remained relatively closed. Some of that was practical. MAP Charity was smaller. The building was shared in different ways. The team had to balance education, maintenance and events with limited capacity. But Will and Al describe a gradual shift over the years to let more people use the room, play on the system and bring their own communities into Hope House.

He is quick to point out the obvious social dimension. Not just more DJs, but a broader mix of people, scenes and backgrounds. “Different communities come in through different promoters. Artists who were once simply guests become participants. The venue becomes more porous without losing its own identity.”

Will describes those nights with real affection. Outside promoters who care about the space bring in “amazing crowds”, and the exchange goes both ways. MAP gets support. The promoter’s community gets access to a room that does not feel like a generic club hire. People encounter the charity through the party, but also the party through the charity.

That atmosphere, both of them insist, is central to why Hope House and Cosmic Slop feel different.

“A lot of people who work at MAP also volunteer at MAP,” Al says, or have helped in some other way before they ever end up working at a bar, box office or events. That means the staff on a night out are not just temporary event labour. They know why the party exists. They can explain it. They can speak about the education work, the building, the records, the workshops. People arriving at the door are not being sold a concept. They are being welcomed into a place with a real function.

“It helps create a nice atmosphere,” he says, though “nice” is almost too soft for what he means. Respectful is closer. People understand that the ticket is not floating free of consequence. Cosmic Slop’s own materials are clear that the events raise funds for the education project, and MAP Charity presents the venue, workspace and youth provision as one joined-up operation.

That idea of a joined-up operation becomes even clearer when Al starts describing the crossover between students and the working spaces upstairs. He runs studio workshops, MPC sessions, music-making sessions, T-shirt-making and label-related projects. Students who know plug-ins from computers get shown the physical machines behind the language. Kids who know 808 samples get to see an actual 808. Workshops are not locked to a classroom logic. They spill into the real tools and real labour of the building.

MAP’s official description of Hope Foundry talks about bringing more creative businesses into direct contact with the education programme. That ambition is exactly what comes through here: less “industry exposure” as a careers-office slogan, more daily proximity to people making things for real.

The record label adds another loop to that. Cosmic Slop Records exists as more than merch-adjacent output. It is another way that artists, the venue and the charity feed one another. The label has issued music and artefacts connected to the wider Cosmic Slop orbit, with proceeds feeding back into MAP Charity’s work.

Since setting up Cosmic Record Studio, they have been trying to pull artists deeper into the building’s orbit: not just to play, but to make things on site. Jam a session out, record something properly, cut it to disc on the lathe if time allows, then maybe hear it back on the dancefloor that same night. That possibility - made here today, cut here, played here - says a lot about how Cosmic Slop works. It shortens the distance between artist and room, process and party. When I tell them it changes the whole idea of what a youth charity can be, neither of them argues.

You can hear why that appeals to audiophile ears as much as to anyone interested in social practice. Cosmic Slop is not fetishising sound for its own sake. But it does take sound seriously enough to build a whole civic space around it.

Then comes the harder part of the conversation: what happens when a room like this is threatened by the logic of development next door.

The issue is stark. The neighbouring building has been sold for residential redevelopment. Flats are expected to look directly over parts of Hope House, including areas used by MAP Charity and by partygoers during events. The fear is simple and familiar: residents move in, complaints start, licence pressure follows. MAP and its supporters ran a campaign arguing that the development should at least include serious mitigation, and that incoming tenants should be explicitly informed about the presence of a long-running music venue and charity next door. The petition itself makes that argument in blunt terms, warning against “balconies for luxury flats” being prioritised over an existing cultural and educational space.

Listening to Will talk about it, what comes through is not abstract planning language but fatigue mixed with determination. They were never pretending development could be stopped outright. What they asked for was basic protection: proper soundproofing, sensible design, and a formal requirement that future residents be told they were moving next to a long-running music venue and charity. None of that was firmly secured in writing.

The sense of grievance only deepened when several of the committee members who approved the scheme were later removed in a corruption case, including one connected to the application. The point is not only scandal, but injury. They asked for reasonable safeguards around an existing cultural space and did not get them.

So the response, characteristically, has been to keep building. One route is to strengthen daytime and early-evening use of another room in the building: a hi-fi listening space, quieter than the main dancefloor but full of possibility. Somewhere people can come during the week, hear records properly, and support the charity outside late-night hours. Not a retreat, exactly. More widening of the ecosystem again.

That instinct to widen rather than shrink may be the thread that runs through everything Will and Al say. Open the booth to more people. Bring in different promoters. Connect studio work to students. Let artists move between workshop, jam, cut and dancefloor. Build more reasons for people to enter the building and understand what it does.

What matters, finally, is not only the atmosphere of the room but the texture of it. Cosmic Slop can do the mystique of a proper dancefloor, no question, but its deeper character sits in the visible details: the speaker stacks, the back room, the print work, the records in people’s hands, the workshop clutter, the pieces of infrastructure that never make it into slick nightlife imagery. Seen clearly, the place looks exactly like what it is - hand-built, shared and worked on. What gives the place its charge is not only the vibe, but the structure behind it.

What Will and Al make clear is that Cosmic Slop is alive because it has stayed permeable. It is not a shrine to a golden era of sound system culture, and not a heritage object preserved behind glass. It is a working room in a working building, tied to young people, artists, volunteers, teachers, organisers, record obsessives and local dancers. Upstairs and downstairs. Weekday and weekend. Education and pleasure. A party with a purpose, yes, but also something tougher and more unusual than that phrase usually implies.

A room that still does things.

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There are parties that trade on scarcity, parties that trade on hype, and parties that live or die on the room itself. Cosmic Slop, in Leeds, belongs to a rarer category. It is a fundraiser, a community infrastructure, a sound system project built over many years, and an extension of MAP(Music, Arts Production) Charity’s work with young people who have fallen out of step with mainstream education.

Cosmic Slop sits inside Hope House Gallery, part of MAP Charity’s Hope Foundry site in Mabgate, and the money raised feeds directly back into the charity’s education programme.

When I sat down with Tom Smith, one of MAP Charity’s founders, what emerged was not a neat origin story so much as a chain reaction: youth work, house music, Fela Kuti, Jamaican sound system culture, New York dancefloor mythology, a long campaign to secure a building, and a deep belief that music is not an accessory to social life but one of its sharpest tools.

Tom is matter-of-fact about the start of it. “I’m one of the founders,” he says. “Charlie, who still works at MAP, founded it as well. At the time I was doing youth work, online radio kind of stuff, and music production with kids.”

The first idea was simpler, and smaller. Set up a music venue. Use it for events. When the room was empty, use the equipment for the community. But the idea shifted as soon as it touched reality. The centre of gravity moved away from nightlife as a business and towards education, young people and the charity itself.

“That change made sense,” Tom says. “And I’m really glad, because it gave everything a focus. Not just purpose, but clarity. Everyone could see the reason for it.”

MAP Charity began in 2007. Cosmic Slop followed in 2009. For years, the parties helped cover the rent while the education work grew around them. What matters in Tom’s telling is that the two were never separate worlds awkwardly stapled together. They came from the same root.

“For me, music’s the root of this,” he says. “From being about seventeen, getting into house music, then discovering Fela Kuti and music from around the world, hearing political ideas, hearing how other people think about their communities and societies. That really informed why music exists for me. And by extension, why art exists. As a communicator.”

It is a good answer, because it does not reduce music to therapy, nor to branding, nor to vague social good. He means communication in the full sense of the word: ideas travelling between people, across scenes, classes and languages, fast and intact.

“Music’s always been communication,” he says. “You can get ideas across cultural barriers really quickly. It’s a communication and sharing tool.”

That line helps explain why Cosmic Slop does not feel like a bolt-on fundraiser with better records. It also helps explain why Tom talks about acoustics, speaker design and education with the same seriousness. In his mind, they are part of one thing. If music matters, then the conditions under which people encounter it matter too.

His own route into sound was formed by a set of reference points that still shape Cosmic Slop now: Jamaican and British-Jamaican sound system culture on one side, New York loft and disco listening culture on the other.

He speaks about dub sessions, Body & Soul, Joe Claussell, David Mancuso, Richard Long, Paradise Garage, the half-seen mysteries in old photographs of speaker stacks and turntable positions. He speaks as someone who learned partly through listening, partly through reading, and partly through staring at grainy images and imagining what the room must have felt like.

“I romanticised it completely,” he says, laughing at himself a little. “Looking at old photos and thinking, what’s that? What’s that in the back? How good was this?”

That leap of imagination became practical very early. The Cosmic Slop sound system, he explains, predates MAP Charity itself. He already knew he needed it. But crucially, this was never a case of buying an off-the-shelf system and installing it. The whole thing was built gradually, around Tom’s own research into sound system history: reading about places like The Loft and Paradise Garage, studying old photographs, learning from Jamaican and New York traditions, and then working out, piece by piece, what kinds of drivers, boxes and combinations might make sense in their own room.

The first speaker he ever built, made when he was still barely out of his teens, is apparently still in the system. There have been additions, substitutions, rebuilds and refinements, but no hard reset. “There was never really a version 2.0,” he says. “We’re on version 1.11 or something.”

That continuity matters. Too much contemporary audio talk mistakes novelty for seriousness. Tom’s account is closer to craft: not the pursuit of a finished, branded object, but the long, cumulative work of reading, building, listening, adjusting and keeping what proves itself over time.

What he loves in Jamaican sound system culture is its force and unruliness. “It’s punkier,” he says. “Rougher, readier. A lot more heavyweight. It just goes on and goes on and gets more and more bassy.” What he values in the New York lineage is another kind of discipline: scale, elegance, placement, full-range listening, the room as a total instrument. Cosmic Slop, in his description, became a fusion of the two. Not a pastiche. A working synthesis.

That alone would make for an interesting room. What gives it real weight is the way it sits inside MAP Charity’s wider model.

Tom describes the education side plainly. Mainstream secondary school does not fit every young person. MAP works with teenagers who are struggling to access that system, offering an alternative provision built around music, arts, functional skills, maths and English. Some students have not been in school for years. Some are in school every day but in constant conflict. Some have been pushed out. Some have pushed others out. The point is that one structure does not fit everyone.

“Everybody needs a different plan,” he says. “That’s really what it is.”

The reason MAP feels distinctive is not simply that it offers small-group teaching in a creative setting. It is the ecosystem around that teaching. Students are not in an abstract educational box, cut off from adult practice. They are in a building where people make things, print things, record things, throw parties, cut records, run workshops, repair rooms, build infrastructure. The professionals are not wheeled in as visiting motivational speakers. They are already there, working.

Tom puts it well. “It took us a while to figure out that that’s what we were doing,” he says. “But the professionals come to them. It’s an ecosystem.”

That ecosystem extends right through Cosmic Slop. International artists donate time. Local selectors play alongside bigger names. The room carries the energy of a functioning scene rather than a staged “community outreach” exercise. The result, Tom suggests, works both ways. Young people see that music and art can connect to real forms of labour, commitment and identity. Visiting artists see that their work can feed into something tangible.

For Tom, that is where the conversation circles back to the question sitting behind so much youth withdrawal now: what is the point. He does not dress it up. “That’s what the kids would say,” he says. “What’s the fucking point?”

His answer is not a slogan. It is a building, a room, a party, a workshop, a system, a timetable, a set of adult relationships that are not purely transactional. It is also a defence of analogue processes at a moment when more and more life is flattened into screens.

That is part of what he means by “analogue processes” here: not nostalgia for old equipment, but a way of working - building rather than buying, testing rather than branding, and learning through physical materials, rooms and repeated listening.

He returns to that near the end of our conversation. “I’ve always been keen on these analogue processes,” he says. “Analogue electronics, analogue screen printing, real life things, real tools. I used to think that was just me being a bit of a weirdo. But now, as we move forward in time, it’s becoming clearer why this is important.”

The line lands because it avoids nostalgia. He is not claiming the old ways were morally pure. He is saying that as physical, shared, tactile experiences become rarer, they become more necessary.

“These real-life occurrences,” he says, “they’re kind of the antidote.”

That may be the cleanest way to understand Cosmic Slop. Not as escapism. Not as a heritage audio fetish. Not as charity branding with a dance floor attached. More like a working antidote: built speaker by speaker, session by session, student by student, with a belief that music heard properly can still reorganise the room around it.

And that the room, in turn, can do some real good.

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Continued to part.2

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For many listeners outside Japan, Geinoh Yamashirogumi first appears as an enigma: a collective best known for its connection to AKIRA, its Balinese-inspired vocal rituals, and one of the strangest and most ambitious bodies of work in modern Japanese music. But the deeper you look, the clearer it becomes that this was never just a band. Geinoh Yamashirogumi brought together musicians, scientists, anthropologists, students and researchers in pursuit of something far beyond conventional performance: a new way of listening that connected ritual, ecology, the human body and the hidden possibilities of sound itself.

To understand why Ecophony Rinne still feels so singular even four decades later, you have to begin not in the studio, but in the middle of Tokyo’s concrete landscape.

If you wander through the glass and steel canyons of West Shinjuku in midsummer, you may encounter a sound that feels out of place, yet fundamentally right. A rhythmic, multi-layered vocal barrage. A 16-beat interlocking pulse of “cha-cha-cha” vibrating through the pavement itself.

This is Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Kecak Festival, a West Shinjuku open-air gathering that has continued for more than fifty years. Less a single performance than a temporary world, it unfolds through Balinese kecak, gamelan and jegog, polyphonic choral traditions, Japanese folk performance and moments of direct audience participation, gradually turning an office plaza into a shared festival ground.

For the dedicated crate-digger, Geinoh Yamashirogumi is often the “final boss” of Japanese discographies. Their records, found in the same intellectual orbits as the most ambitious ethnomusicological deep dives and ambient excavations, defy the convenient bins of Western retail.

Are they a choir, a communal experiment or a scientific research institute? The answer is simply all of the above.

At the heart of this sprawl is Shoji Yamashiro, a man who has lived a life without belonging to any single field. In the academic world, he is Dr. Tsutomu Oohashi, a celebrated scientist and professor who has received prestigious international honours across both the life sciences and cultural arts. He is the author of landmark texts, such as Sound and Civilization, which explore the deep links between sound environments and human civilization. Yet, his musical authority is not merely that of a producer or a theorist. While studying microbiology at university, he was simultaneously a student of a master conductor, learning a precision-based method of Western conducting usually reserved for the elite echelons of the classical world. Using this rigorous training, he began his journey as a conductor for the Hato no Kai student choir in the late 1960s, a period where he first began to question the limitations of Western choral traditions.

Yamashiro’s philosophy is built on a radical critique of Western modernism. He argues that our civilization’s obsession with specialization has atrophied our “living brains,” reducing our once-all-encompassing genetic potential to narrow, single-function silos. To combat this, he founded Geinoh Yamashirogumi in 1974 as a “multi-performance community” made up not of trained musicians, but of scientists, engineers, journalists and students. Their only qualification is their status as amateurs, people who “act, play, and enjoy” music as a primal, communal necessity rather than a career.

The group’s scope is staggering, a vast catalogue of over 80 distinct musical systems gathered from across the globe. They treat these traditions not as museum pieces, but as essential human information to be embodied. Their repertoire traces a wide arc along the Silk Road, moving from the vocal layers of Russia to the traditional sounds of Bengal. This deep dive began with their early mastery of Bulgarian polyphony, where they moved beyond the constraints of Western harmony to capture the complex, overtone-rich vocal qualities and dissonant harmonies that define that tradition.

In 1983, Yamashiro trekked 100 kilometres into the Ituri rainforest to live with the Mbuti Pygmies, an encounter he credits with completely reorganising his thinking. He discovered an improvised polyphony of such sophistication that it mirrored the Renaissance structures of Palestrina, yet it was achieved entirely without scores, rehearsals, or conductors. This “primordial germination” of sound - an extremity of human achievement also explored by the academic / musician Francis Bebey and famously referenced by Herbie Hancock provided the opening movement and the spiritual core of the 1986 masterwork, Ecophony Rinne.

For many Western listeners, the gateway into this world was the 1988 cult anime masterpiece AKIRA. Yamashiro was given total creative freedom and an unlimited budget by director Katsuhiro Otomo to construct a “sonic architecture” for Neo-Tokyo. AKIRA took the “Ecophony” style of its predecessor and added modern electronic elements and Noh theatre vocals to create its enervating, iconic sound.

But Ecophony Rinne remains the summit of human tradition reimagined. This is not “world music” in the sense of a tourist’s souvenir. It is a meticulously researched reimagining of human tradition. When you listen to the album, you are hearing a community attempting to re-enact the “essential information” that once defined human life in the tropical rainforest. It is a four-part song cycle based on the eternal loops of birth, death, and reincarnation, featuring over 200 performers using everything from sampled Tibetan horns to thundering Japanese drums and synthesizers.

It was during the original release of Ecophony Rinne that Yamashiro made the discovery that would cement his legacy in audiophile circles: the Hypersonic Effect. While comparing the test pressings for the LP and the then-new CD format, Yamashiro was struck by a profound difference. Though the audible frequencies were identical, the CD felt “lifeless,” while the vinyl remained “deeply satisfying”. As a scientist, he began to measure the brain activity of listeners using EEGs and PET scans.

He discovered that sounds containing ultra-high frequencies, specifically those above 20kHz, trigger a significant increase in blood flow to the deep brain, including the thalamus and prefrontal cortex. These “inaudible” frequencies, which abound in the natural soundscapes of rainforests and in the overtones of traditional instruments like the Gamelan, actually strengthen alpha brainwaves and improve our physical well-being. Standard CDs are historically capped at a sampling rate that limits the frequency response to 22.05kHz. Yamashiro argued that this effectively “starves” the brain of essential nutrients of sound, suggesting that our bodies receive sound not just through our ears, but through our entire skin surface, vibrating in sympathy with the environment.

To capture these frequencies, Yamashiro established Studio Terra, a temple of high-fidelity research. The studio features an AMEK 9098i console, which was customized by the founder Rupert Neve himself to achieve a frequency response reaching an astounding 200kHz. To translate these signals into air vibrations, Yamashiro developed original monitor speakers capable of playing back sound at that same 200kHz threshold.

While recreating such a setup in a consumer living room is a monumental task, the group encourages listeners to get as close as possible to this wide-bandwidth experience. This isn’t just theory: Yamashiro’s team has tested the new Time Capsule test pressings and confirmed that the Hypersonic Audio is definitively captured in the grooves of this release.

Now, four decades since its inception, Time Capsule is revisiting Ecophony Rinne with a definitive reissue. This release is half-speed mastered at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell. In this process, both the master source and the cutting lathe are run at half their normal speed, giving the cutting stylus twice as much time and precision to carve the intricate high-frequency information into the lacquer. It is the most precise way to ensure the hypersonic overtones are preserved.

Listening to Geinoh Yamashirogumi is an act of unlearning. It asks us to set aside our Western distinctions of genre, to stop trying to file the music and instead give it our undivided attention. It is music built on ecological principles, where the listener is part of the ecosystem rather than a spectator.

In an era increasingly defined by the efficiency of AI and the isolation of digital consumption, the Yamashirogumi project feels more radical than ever. It is a reminder that music was once, and can be again, a primal force of kizuna (bonds), a way to sync our living brains to the pulse of the planet.

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The Serpentine South Gallery is not a space designed for extended listening. People pass through, pause briefly, then move on. During House of Music, that pattern changed. Visitors sat down. Conversations dropped in volume. Time stretched.

House of Music, which ran at the Serpentine from 10 October 2025 until 8 February 2026, was an exhibition by Peter Doig, one of the most significant painters working today. Instead of treating sound as a supplement to the visual programme, the exhibition placed music at its centre. Paintings were shown alongside seating, records were played at volume, and the gallery hosted regular Sound Service sessions, where invited guests, often artists, writers, and musicians, selected music to be heard collectively in the space.

We visited on a Sunday afternoon when Jarvis Cocker was hosting, and the room shifted quickly from gallery to listening environment.

The sound systems are immediately striking. Large horn speakers, exposed amplifiers, unfamiliar scale. Many visitors assume they are sculptural additions to the exhibition. They are not.

They are here because of Laurence Passera, who has spent more than three decades locating, extracting, restoring, and living with early cinema sound systems, almost exclusively Western Electric. Not as historical artefacts, but as functioning machines. Everything in the Serpentine exhibition comes from cinemas. Nothing was built for display. Traces of whitewash remain on the horns, applied by projectionists to counteract years of tobacco smoke staining cinema screens. These marks were never meant to be seen. The speakers originally lived behind the screen.

A few days after our visit, I met Laurence over breakfast to talk through how this came together. The conversation moved from fashion and DJ culture to abandoned cinemas, electrical engineering, and the origins of amplified sound.

Kay Suzuki: Let’s start with your background and how you found yourself at the centre of this niche world of high-end vintage audio.

Laurence Passera: I’m a Londoner, half-Italian and half-Welsh, a second-generation immigrant. My career began in fashion, assisting the iconic stylist Ray Petri during the “Buffalo” era, but I was already DJing in London, Paris, and Hong Kong. Music and audio have always been a personal “weakness” - a passion I simply cannot live without.

I first became an owner of valve (vacuum tube) equipment after seeing it in specialist shops in Tokyo during the 1990s. In the UK at the time, the valve scene was very underground, mostly older men obsessed with military radio - it wasn’t a “cool” or youthful culture at all. But in Tokyo, shops like Western Sound Inc treated this vintage gear as high-end culture. I was initially sold purely on the aesthetic, a “form following function” industrial look that felt more modern and cooler than any contemporary high-end audio. I wanted that “time machine”.

I began to realise that when you reach a certain level of resolution with a high-end valve system and a masterful recording - like an ECM recording - you’re not listening to equipment anymore, you’re experiencing the art form, the voice of something deeper.

KS: How did you transition from an admirer to a technical expert and “rescuer” of these systems?

LP: A major turning point was meeting the actor and connoisseur Vincent Gallo at a party in New York in the late ’90s around the time of Buffalo 66. Gallo isn’t technical, but he has a serious eye. When I mentioned Western Sound in Tokyo, he sidelined the girls he was with and told me to get some paper, and started writing down Japanese phone numbers. He didn’t explain anything. Just numbers. 86, 124, 555, 4181… Then he looked at me and said, “Go and find them. Go to old cinemas.” which ignited my search-and-rescue mission.

I acquired these speakers by digging them out of derelict cinemas across the UK over 30 years. You couldn’t originally buy this gear; it was rented to cinemas at an immense cost. When leases ended, parent companies were methodical about destroying the equipment - smashing transformers and valves - to prevent a secondhand market from forming.

The survivors are usually found in the “middle of nowhere” - tiny towns in Wales or Ireland that couldn’t afford to upgrade to newer, cheaper systems in the 1950s. The recovery process was often a nightmare: breaking into boarded-up buildings at night, working with a torch in freezing conditions amongst dead rats, pigeons, and asbestos. I’ve spent over £200,000 on storage fees just to keep these rescued pieces in a warm, dry environment until they could be restored. Everything in the gallery is original; you can still see the white “whitewash” paint on the horns from when projectionists refreshed the screens to hide tobacco stains.

KS: For the uninitiated, what makes Western Electric the “great-grandfather” of high-end audio?

LP: Western Electric was founded by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The telephone receiver is essentially the world’s first loudspeaker - speech turned into electrical signal and back again. That’s where the word speaker comes from. Speaking, not music.

Bell was the “Elon Musk of the 1920s” - a billionaire with 1,500 of the world’s top physicists and mathematicians at his disposal. When Warner Brothers wanted to transition to “talking movies” in 1926, they collaborated with Bell to scale up telephone technology for cinema. The curved shapes aren’t for style, they are based on mathematical formulas for exponential growth to vibrate the air effectively using only a tiny diaphragm.

They didn’t cut corners; they had their own foundries and produced their own high-purity copper wire and transformers. They pioneered Class A Triode technology. Triodes are the “king of tubes” because they provide a “sparkle” and energy that modern designs often lack. The 300A and 300B tubes are the “mythical gods” of this world. Developed around 1934, they hit the perfect “sweet spot”: eight watts of power at a manageable voltage, unlike earlier tubes that ran at lethal voltages of over 1,000 volts. Modern remakes are often just replicas; you cannot replicate the specific materials used in the 1930s cathodes today.

KS: How did this collaboration with Peter Doig come to fruition, and what has the reaction been?

LP: My London studio came first. I’d returned from LA, found an industrial space, and finally assembled equipment I’d been storing for decades - things too large for a domestic house. Lockdown gave me time. Two years of building, tuning, listening.

It became a private listening space. I had mastering engineers, recording studio professionals, and musicians bringing over acetates to hear them on a 1930s system. It wasn’t a commercial venture; I’d just get some wine and pizzas and give a “TED talk” on the history of the gear. People were drawn to it because it was a “time machine” - you are hearing the same “Voice of God” quality that audiences experienced in 1929.

I didn’t know who Peter was previously and he came down with some people to my studio and spent time listening. Then some time after he got back in touch and asked if I could help him with some of his equipment in his own studio.

I should say I’m not really from the art world. So when I went to see him, I walked into his studio and saw an Allen Jones painting on the wall and mentioned it, just casually. There were other paintings in the room I didn’t recognise at all, so I assumed they belonged to someone else. He looked at me and said, “Those are mine.”

Peter is one of the most significant painters working today - Turner Prize nominee, Praemium Imperiale laureate - right at the top level artist of our time. But what mattered to me wasn’t that. It was that he listens properly. He’s not technical, but he understands sound emotionally and culturally.

For the House of Music exhibition, we placed systems in different rooms to create a multi-sensory environment. Sound changes the emotional state of the gallery.

I had a journalist early on who asked me, “Why are you doing this?” So I said, “Give me ten minutes.” I turned the music off. Within five or six minutes, people who had been talking normally started lowering their voices. They became more self-aware. The room took on this church-like feeling. People stiffened up. They didn’t know where to stand. After a few more minutes, I slowly brought the music back up. And you could feel it immediately - the room softened. People relaxed again. Conversations changed. People stayed.

That’s what I mean when I talk about “gallery anxiety”. Without sound, people feel like they’re being watched, like they need to understand something intellectually. With sound, they let go of that. They become receptive rather than analytical.

What’s also been fascinating are those who come in with absolutely no reference point. I’d say at least half the visitors ask me if the speakers are sculptures. They ask if I built them. Or if they’re new works made to look old. I have to explain, “No, these are real survivors. They’re cinema sound systems from the late 1920s and ’30s.” And you can see the shift when that lands.

They suddenly realise they’re standing in front of something that was never meant to be seen, only heard. Some people from the cinema industry were shocked by this. They’d spent their lives working with sound and had no idea this history existed, even though modern sound culture starts here. But the old engineers, mastering people, musicians - people who’ve spent their lives listening - they get it straight away. We’ve had everyone from David Byrne,Brian Eno, to Max Richer and many more come to come to experience it.

There were many challenging aspects to this presentation that most would never be aware of, one was the Gallery lighting. The 25 year old halogen lights and switch-mode power supplies (like those for Macs and iPhones) can dump massive amounts of noise into the mains and the earth ‘Ground’ which can feedback into connected equipment.. Original cinemas solved this by using rooms full of batteries; they never used street power during a screening to ensure an absolutely clean, stable supply.

I’ve been a “mono guy” for 20 years because stereo is often a gimmick. In a cinema or concert, you don’t want a “sweet spot”; you want a “wall of sound” that hits everyone. The systems at the Serpentine - the Western Electric and the 1950s Klangfilm Euronor (once owned by Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) - are configured to create that immersive, singular presence.

KS: There is a lot of noise in the modern “listening bar” and “boutique audio” scene. How do you view the current trend?

LP: The modern boutique audio scene often prioritises marketing over technical depth. Many systems are built for the 90% who don’t know the difference. They use basic circuits, passive preamps, and budget cartridges, which results in a flatter sound compared to the energy of original engineering.

It’s great that younger people are getting into audio because it looks cool. That part is genuinely positive. But a lot of modern brands trade off an extraordinary history without carrying over the same level of quality or understanding.

Hi-fi magazines haven’t helped either. They’ve always been uncool and intimidating, and they create a sense that there’s a right and wrong way to listen. What I’ve noticed at the gallery is the opposite. Younger people, especially independent women, feel allowed to be curious because the equipment is so extreme. They don’t feel stupid asking questions, because no one really knows what 1930s cinema gear is. Not even the so-called “technical boyfriends”. That levels the room. It creates a shared focus, almost subconscious, where people connect through listening rather than knowledge. Everyone relaxes into it.

What remains after the exhibition is not just the memory of rare equipment in a white room, but the reminder that listening itself is a discipline.

The systems at the Serpentine were never designed to be admired. They were built to fill spaces with sound, reliably, every day. Seen up close, they remind you that good engineering is not about spectacle. It is about function.

And when it functions properly, people stay

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Part I traced how Underflow Record Store & Art Gallery came into being, shaped by the decisions and working relationship of its founders, Vasilis and Yiannis, and by the years that followed. This second part stays with the room, but shifts focus to how it functions now.

Here, the emphasis is not on origins but on practice. The artistic programme that has taken shape over time. The basement, where much of the space’s musical life continues to unfold. The label, the listening sessions, and the quieter work of maintaining continuity. Taken together, these elements form the working core of Underflow today.

What follows looks at how a small group of people are keeping the space active in the present tense: not through reinvention, but through use. Through programming, listening, and the daily decisions that allow the room to remain open.

Q: How would you define Underflow’s artistic programme today? Where does it sit in the wider Athens scene?

Yiorgos: Underflow has always been tightly focused: avant-garde jazz, experimental sound, contemporary classical, electronic. We sit between the “big institutions” and the very small DIY corners of the city. Vasilis and Yiannis wanted to create something that felt larger than its square metres - a space that could connect Greek musicians with artists from abroad.

The basement venue is central to this. It hosts everything from improvised sessions - like the Ostomachion session series - to contemporary folk, noise sets, and art-rock performances. It’s become a meeting point for musicians, video artists, and cultural workers.

Q: Underflow also runs a label. What purpose does it serve?

Yiorgos: Vasilis started the label a couple of years after opening, around 2017 or 2018. The idea was to support the local scene by giving improvisational and experimental projects a place on vinyl. Because the space has hosted so many renowned improvisers over the years, collaborations naturally happen here. Many of these musicians play for almost nothing because they want to see the shop survive.

Our next release is a collaboration between a Greek modular synthesiser artist and a well-known Norwegian trumpet player. It’s exactly the kind of cross-pollination the founders wanted.

Q: The shop has an art gallery and a strong visual identity. What were the deeper cultural intentions behind that?

Filippos: Yiannis, who studied architecture, was heavily involved in documentary and visual work. One of the pieces he worked on was a film about retired donkeys in Patmos. He had a gentle eye for unusual stories.

Yiorgos: Vasilis built the gallery into the space from the very beginning. At one point, we hosted a collection of African masks collected by a former UNESCO president in Greece.

Linked to that collection was something extraordinary: a huge archive of field recordings on tape, recordings of communities and tribes across Africa, a bit like Alan Lomax but from a different vantage point. This archive is not accessible right now for various reasons, but the fact that it exists tells you how deep the founders’ cultural vision ran.

Q: What are the main challenges now, and how do you plan to keep Underflow alive and evolving?

Yiorgos: The biggest challenge is simply capacity. We’re running five demanding segments: the record shop, the bar/café, the gallery, the concert venue, and the label. None of us has the financial cushioning that the founder once had, so we have to build momentum ourselves.

Alexis: There is more focus on the listening experience as Underflow has an unusually attentive, audiophile audience - people who come specifically for the sound.

This makes the listening sessions not just social gatherings but focused sonic events, where high-end equipment, carefully chosen vinyl, and the room itself become part of the experience.

It’s a format that connects naturally with the jazz kissa tradition, and it’s something we intend to explore further through collaborations with independent labels.

People often compare the atmosphere here to the Japanese jazz kissa - spaces built for concentrated listening, where you go alone to hear records played from beginning to end. That’s the “human touch” we want to honour.

Filippos: We’re also starting to look at audio gear - collaborating with DIY makers and focusing on hi-fi because many listeners here seek a deeper listening experience.

Yiorgos: The 10-year anniversary concert showed how powerful the community can be. The love built over a decade is real, and it’s carrying us. We are working on funding options and EU connections, but ultimately the thing keeping this place alive is the collective belief in the founders’ “dream life.”

Underflow Records is a story of vision, interruption, and persistence, a space carried forward not by business logic but by a community unwilling to let it disappear.

Vasilis’s “ideal record shop” was never about retail; it was about building a home for radical sound. After losing both founders within four years, its survival rests on the people who grew up around it and refuse to let their castle collapse.

As the new team strengthens its footing - pushing active listening, nurturing experimental work, reconnecting local and international artists, Underflow continues to be one of Athens’s most vital cultural organisms.

A shop built on fragile timelines, held up by collective will.

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Underflow Record Store & Art Gallery sits in Koukaki like a place that has already made its decisions. The ceilings are high, the floors are marble, the walls are bare concrete. Sound carries. Movement slows. Nothing feels provisional.

It opened in 2015, at a point when Athens was still recalibrating after the financial crisis, and much of the city’s cultural life had shifted into small, self-organised rooms built by hand. Underflow emerged from that moment, with a clarity of intent that remains legible today.

That sense of permanence doesn’t last long. Over the past decade, the life inside Underflow has been anything but static. The room has been shaped by constant adjustment, long nights of improvisation, and events that arrived without warning and altered its course.

What remains is not a concept or a programme, but a room that continues to be used. Played in. Listened to. Returned to.

This piece draws on conversations with Yiorgos, who first came to Underflow as a musician and later became involved in booking and shaping parts of the programme in the basement; Filippos, a close friend of the late co-owner Yiannis, who stood alongside him during the shop’s most difficult period and now works day to day to keep the space running; and Alexis, a long-time supporter and collaborator through Scenius, an Athens-based platform connecting experimental music and listening culture.

Q: The physical space of Underflow immediately suggests a very precise vision. Who was the founder, and what did he imagine when he built it?

Yiorgos: Underflow was created by Vasilis Filippakopoulos. Before this, he ran a construction business, but at some point he decided to walk away from that life completely. His dream was to build the ideal record shop, and he finally realised it about ten years ago. Everything you see - the concrete walls, the high ceilings, the basement built for sound - he designed and constructed himself. He was incredibly sensitive to detail. For him, it was never just a shop. It was always meant to be a place where music, art, and people could mix naturally: a bar, a gallery, a venue, and eventually a label.

Q: Vasilis didn’t build it alone. Tell us about Yiannis, who later took over.

Yiorgos: There’s a parallel story here. Vasilis and Yiannis were best friends - “partners in crime” for years. They grew up together and travelled constantly, going to concerts around the world. Yiannis studied architecture and supported Vasilis from day one. He was an innocent giant, a big soul, a quiet lover of obscure Japanese music. The two of them shaped the atmosphere of Underflow together. Vasilis ran the space for about six years, but Yiannis shaped the vibe. He helped musicians find each other. He created the gallery’s early direction. People gathered because they felt the warmth of those two personalities combined.

Q: The shop’s story is also marked by unimaginable loss. What happened to Vasilis, and how did the shop survive that first transition?

Filippos: Vasilis was diagnosed with cancer and passed away very suddenly, within one or two months in 2021. After that, Yiannis took over and ran the shop for around four years.

The challenge wasn’t only emotional; it was financial. While Vasilis was alive, he could cushion losses thanks to his previous construction work. Yiannis didn’t have that safety net. He was deeply loved, and he continued to build a strong network around the shop, but it was incredibly difficult to manage all five parts of the business without that financial buffer. And then, tragically, Yiannis developed the same type of cancer - intestine, spreading to the liver - and he passed away in April 2025.

Q: With the loss of both founders, how is Underflow surviving now? How is the community responding?

Yiorgos: After Yiannis’s passing, the shop legally belongs to his brother, Isidoros, but we are a very small team working to keep it alive. The priority is simple: protect the space, keep the founders’ dream moving. The community’s response has been overwhelming.

For the 10-year anniversary recently, we organised a marathon event that wasn’t even planned properly at first. In the end, 45 musicians and 11 concerts happened in a single day. Around 500 people passed through the space in six hours. Musicians who had been part of Underflow for years showed up — some played together for the first time. The energy was incredible. Everyone wanted to support the continuation of this place.

You could feel the ten years of love in the room. It reminded us that “pieces of the castle” are still there; they’re coming back together through the community’s hands.

Underflow was built by two people who believed a room could be organised around music and the community it gathers. Not efficiency, not scale, not longevity. Just sound, space, and the relationships that form when people return to the same place over time.

After the deaths of both founders, the question was never whether the shop would grow or change. It was whether it could remain present at all. What became clear is that Underflow had already moved beyond the hands that built it. Its daily life was being carried by musicians, listeners, and collaborators who understood how the space worked, and why it mattered.

Today, Underflow continues not because it is owned or managed, but because it is used. Played in. Listened to. Returned to.

Part II looks at what happens next: the programme, the practices, and the small group now keeping the room open.

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SUNDAY’s ground floor may function as a restaurant, but the building behaves like a hand-tuned instrument: three levels shaped over years, each carrying a specific role in the space’s sonic ecology. In this second chapter, we move from the origin story to the operating logic. Tsu→san outlines why SUNDAY refuses the category of “club”, how its acoustic decisions were built piece by piece, and how its community grew through people who approached the space on their own terms rather than through programmed nightlife cycles.

It’s a structure that stands apart from Tokyo’s increasingly tourist-fed club economy, offering a local, self-sustaining model where food, sound, and neighbourly trust form the foundation.

Q: You often emphasize that SUNDAY is not a club. Why is this distinction so vital to the operation?

Tsu→san: When Miwa-chan ran Apakabar by the station, the stress from noise complaints was immense. Police were constantly telling us to lower the volume. We wanted to eliminate that stress. The current location is secluded, fronting a national route and backed by the JR line, and we have never had police interference.

However, the main distinction is financial and philosophical. A club must derive its profits solely from the club business. SUNDAY is a restaurant that runs parties about once a week as an “extra feature”. Our stable foundation is the restaurant operation. This allows us to keep the threshold low for guests and, importantly, ensure we properly compensate the DJs. As a DJ myself, paying a proper guarantee is paramount.

When we opened during the COVID-19 pandemic, we initially operated strictly as a restaurant to avoid the stigma of being labeled a club. We focused on Miwa-chan’s menu, which features dishes like Jerk Chicken, informed by her passion for Reggae and her 16 trips to Jamaica.

Q: The focus on audio fidelity is a hallmark of SUNDAY. What drives your specific choices regarding sound equipment?

Tsu→san: I learned a lot about audio systems and settings at SHeLTeR. Over the four years since opening, we have perfected the sound, one piece at a time. There were few places in Yokohama doing sound like this, and it has resonated deeply; many locals have told me they appreciate that such a venue exists here.

We utilize specific, high-quality audio choices. For instance, one of the Klipsch La Scala on the 2F was acquired during the pandemic from a friend who needed to sell it. Recently, we replaced the basement sound system, installing JBL speakers sourced from Blue Note Tokyo. This makes the audio setup excellent across both the basement and the top floor.

We also employ obsessive acoustic measures. We try to eliminate electromagnetic waves and static electricity. We apply Kiyo-seki - a special stone found in the mountains of Gunma used by Acoustic Revive - to our electrical panels. This stone is highly effective at suppressing static electricity. This level of detail in audio engineering, particularly concerning anti-static and anti-electromagnetic treatment, ensures optimal sound quality.

Q: How has the community developed since opening four years ago, and what is SUNDAY’s philosophy regarding participation?

Tsu→san: The underlying philosophy of SUNDAY is that “everyone is connected by fate (go-en)”. We don’t actively organize every party; instead, we welcome people who approach us saying, “I want to do something here”. This organic growth has been spread purely by word of mouth.

We now host parties led by younger people - DJs in their late twenties and thirties are the mainstream in Yokohama now. The diversity is huge: we have Reggae parties and can accommodate both DJ culture and band culture. A musician named Motoharu (saxophonist from Soil & “Pimp” Sessions) uses the space for lessons and acts as a central figure in spreading the community.

We also deeply value our local roots. Miwa-chan is a leader in the local town association, and even the town association head has come to our parties. It took time to shake off the initial rumor that a “club” had opened here, but by valuing the local community, we have become an open space.

One unique aspect that guests love is the ability to change floors. Guests can enjoy the main event downstairs and then transition to the upstairs space for an “after-party”.

SUNDAY stands as a crucial cultural nucleus in Yokohama. It exists in a time when Tokyo’s larger clubs are shrinking and becoming dominated by foreign clientele, but SUNDAY focuses on nurturing a local, diverse community built on connection and sonic excellence. It operates not on strict business logic, but on a collective belief in creating a space for music to flourish - a restaurant built on a foundation of fate, serving culture on the side.

SUNDAY operates like a highly tuned musical instrument; its exterior is welcoming and practical (the restaurant), but its inner workings (the custom, multi-layered sound system and culture) are engineered with monastic devotion, serving as a dedicated amplifier for community and art.

Tsu→’s Top 10 Records of 2025

Over the past year, these records were in regular rotation at SUNDAY - tested on the floor, played for long stretches, and trusted to hold the room without pushing too hard. Some worked immediately, others revealed themselves over time, but all of them stayed.

This list collects the ten records that mattered most in 2025. Not peak-time weapons, but tracks that shaped the atmosphere across whole nights.

Below the paywall, Tsu→ explains why each record earned its place.

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Yokohama’s multi-layered cultural hub, SUNDAY, is more than a restaurant; it is a vision built upon decades of dedication to sound system culture and fateful partnerships. Located in Kanagawa Ward, near Koyasu Station, the space is an adult hideaway for those who love music and art.

For this piece, we sat down with Tsu→san, co-owner and DJ, to explore the origins of a venue defined by destiny and its commitment to audio fidelity.

Q: Your journey into music began long before SUNDAY. What shaped your early relationship with sound and DJ culture?

Tsu→: Music found me when I was in my second year of junior high. The first place I went was Hot Point in Shibuya Center-gai - a disco where the Teamer gathered. The culture then was deeply influenced by American fashion, like double denim and engineer boots, worn by young people who idolized American delinquents.

That disco played everything, Eurobeat, Beastie Boys, and Doobie Brothers. Everyone had specific moves for specific songs, like “Long Train Running” or “Bamboo”. I saw a serious culture there, but the person who seemed the coolest was the DJ playing the records. From that moment, I became immersed in this world.

My career carried on through venues like Aoyama Zero(ex. Loop) and Hachioji SHeLTeR, and I maintained a regular schedule. In Yokohama, I helped run the booking at a large five-story club called Seven Third Yokohama (73 Yokohama). That place was incredible; the sound system featured different legendary speakers on each floor: Taguchi on the second, Klipsch Horn on the third, and JBL Everest on the fourth. Working there for three years greatly expanded my network in Yokohama, hosting all genres from Hip Hop and Trance to Techno and House.

Q: The story of how you found the SUNDAY location is often described as fateful. What were you originally looking for?

Tsu→: Before SUNDAY, I was working in my family business - wholesale construction materials and gardening supplies. The idea to open a shop was never really in my mind. I was actually looking for a warehouse because I had to shut down my family business and needed somewhere to store my records. I already had a private “Oto-beya” (sound room) set up at the company office with a DJ booth and a mirror ball.

I found the current SUNDAY building completely by chance. I was driving back from a public bath and stopped at a traffic light. I looked over, almost feeling called to the building, and saw the sign: “All Tenants Available”. I realized it was the ideal shape - it even had a car park. The name SUNDAY itself came from the fact that the property has windows on both sides, meaning the sun shines on it constantly from rise to set, even in winter.

Q: How did the partnership with Miwa-chan (Miwako Nagayoshi) formalize the vision for SUNDAY?

Tsu→: Miwa-chan is an incredible chef and partner, like an older sister to me. She had run her own place, Apakabar, for 22 years, but lost it due to eviction. I had worked as a part-timer at Apakabar. On her final night there, I told her, “Let’s do something together someday”.

For four years, that dream was just a concept. During that time, she stored all her previous establishment’s furniture, appliances, and kitchen items—the refrigerator, air conditioner, doors, and even the chairs and counter tiles that are now in SUNDAY.

I was just about to tell her I couldn’t keep her stuff in my company warehouse anymore when she suddenly contacted me, saying she had some money and wanted to start something. I had just found the building. It was destiny; if I hadn’t found the whole building, only I might have rented the upper floor, leaving the lower floor to someone else.

Q: The space is built over three levels. Can you describe its function, particularly the sonic architecture?

Tsu→: The entire building was derelict and needed a complete overhaul—floor, ceiling, walls. We had no formal blueprints; we worked side-by-side with the carpenters every day for four months, making decisions based on feeling and imagination.

The structure is multi-layered:

• 1F (Restaurant/Gallery): This floor features the restaurant and serves as a space for galleries or pop-up events. Black music, primarily Reggae, House, and Hip-Hop, plays here daily.

• B1 (OTOBAKO): A small event space that can hold about 30-40 people, fully equipped with audio equipment. This is where we host DJ events and live music.

• 2F (OTOBEYA): This is usually a private space, rented out for specialized uses like shooting or streaming.

Crucially, we discovered after renting it that the building had been a music studio, called Gambo Studio, since the late 1980s. Numerous Yokohama musicians had recorded and rehearsed in the basement. This confirmed my feeling: the god of sound resides in this building...

Part II continues the story inside SUNDAY’s operating philosophy, the sound engineering, the way people gather, and why the space refuses the logic of a club. Paid subscribers will also receive Tsu→san’s Top 10 Records of 2025, selected exclusive for our readers.

As always, thank you for supporting the work

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Despite what the name suggests, Gabrielle Roth was not a musician, per se. Instead, she played the role of elastic muse – a “guide and catalyst” who would tear up scores, evoke atmospheres, and invite musicians to read notation in the movement of her body.

To that end, The Mirrors were not really a band either. Rooted in the drum patterns of Gabrielle’s husband Robert Ansell, they were a shape-shifting entity, an energy source refracted through Roth’s ecstatic dance practice, 5Rhythms.

In unison, they made music that was meant to be felt rather than listened to; music to induce altered states of consciousness.

As Roth once quipped, “You didn’t think this was about dancing, did you?”

For a spiritual polyglot like Gabrielle Roth, movement was a means through which to channel a wide spectrum of teaching, from experimental and transpersonal psychology to psychedelic counter-culture and Zen Buddhism.

A passionate dancer whose professional career was cut short by injury, it was at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California that Roth found her calling. Immersed in the world of Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, she became fascinated by Abraham Maslow’s theories of “self-actualization”, and was influenced by Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, for whom she led movement classes. She taught free dance to schizophrenics, and propagated its remedial benefits:

“If you set the psyche in motion, it will heal itself.”

In New York, she met and worked with Óscar Ichazo, the founder of the Arica School, whose maps of consciousness provided a theoretical framework for her own thinking.

“Movement is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor and my method,” she famously said. Learning was fuel for the fire.

Drawn to Native American shamanic traditions, Roth began inviting live drummers to her workshops, laying the foundations for the holistic practice of 5Rhythms that would become her life’s work.

A secular, percussion-led ecstasy with precedence in the religious rituals of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and the “reasoning sessions” of a Rastafarian Nyabinghi.

Focussed intently on the self, Roth devised 5Rhythms as a movement meditation for human potential, underpinned by the idea that all life is energy, and moves in waves, patterns and rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. She was “a cartographer of the spirit,” and music was just another tool to help with navigation.

Perhaps nothing speaks more of Roth’s mystic power than the transformation of her future husband Robert Ansell from successful criminal defence lawyer to lead drummer and percussion ethnomusicologist.

By his own admission not much of a singer, dancer or actor, Robert threw himself whole-heartedly into the group’s workshops:

“Gabrielle guided us in the exploration of our egos, the structure and patterns of our psyches we place between our vulnerable essence and the world “out there”,” he writes in his 2014 book, Gabrielle.

It must have come as some surprise to the suited Robert Ansell of early 1977 that his truth lay not at the bar but behind a tom-tom drum.

Based in New Jersey, Roth and Ansell existed adjacent to the downtown scene embracing the potential of multi-disciplinary expression. So it was then that The Mirrors began life as a theatre company, described by Gabrielle as “a lab - a place to research my obsession with what it really means to be a human being, a whole one. We turned our lives into art, into dances, into songs, into poems, into theatre — and this was the healing.”

With Robert at the helm, these songs first made it to record in 1982. A self-styled rock ‘n’ roll outfit, Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors’ debut album, Dancing Toward The One / Sacred Rock, set out to map the 5Rhythms structure directly onto the music. “Gabrielle wanted an uninterrupted wave through the 5 rhythms, 5 minutes of each,” recalls Robert. “We were going live – a 24-track recording, 25 minutes, 6 musicians and 3 vocalists.

This was a prodigious undertaking. We all worked on this for a week or two prior to the recording session, and developed and rehearsed charts to pull this off. Five minutes before we started to record, Gabrielle walked into the studio, tore up the charts and told us she would dance while we recorded. “Play me,” she said. We did.”

The result sounds much like you might expect - a slightly disjointed prog rock odyssey that flipped through the five modes of movement all too literally. On their second LP, Pray Body, the hints of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and ‘80s NYC post-punk in the jaunty opener, ‘Hiroshima / Nagasaki’, are undermined by a series of spoken word nursery rhymes. Derivative lyrics like “I say rock ‘n’ roll prayers to a dancing god” blight much of the album, which confirmed that traditional song-writing was not necessarily their strong suit. Something about Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors as a rock band didn’t sit right. Too much ego, too didactic. They needed to take a little bit of Roth’s own teaching to heart in order to fulfil their true potential.

In order to understand Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors as they are presented here, you need to go back to the drum.

In 1960, Nigerian master percussionist Babatunde Olatunji released Drums of Passion – a collection of Yoruba rhythms which struck the USA right between the eyes. In the years that followed, Olatunji became a pivotal figure, playing on numerous defining jazz albums. As a Civil Rights’ activist, he toured the South with Martin Luther King Jr., and with the help of John Coltrane he founded the Olatunji Center for African Culture in Harlem.

Teaching thousands of drum workshops along the way, Olatunji’s sound provided a fresh context for African music in the Unites States, so maligned and misrepresented by white America. For those ready to listen, it was nothing short of a revelation.

As the ‘world music’ phenomenon unfolded around him, Olatunji passed into Roth’s sphere, teaching at both Esalen and the Omega Institute in New York City. Through his protégés Gordy Ryan and Sanga Of The Valley, who both toured in his band, and who would both go on to join Robert as the sole fixed points of The Mirrors, Olatunji’s pulse would be felt in The Mirrors’ music for the next thirty years.

In a fascinating parallel, it was a combination of traditional Jamaican Kumina drumming and the recordings of Babatunde Olatunji that are also said to have inspired Count Ossie’s foundational Nyabinghi rhythms.

Brian Eno and Jon Hassell’s Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics was already five years old by the time Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors released their third album, Totem. Focussed on capturing the ambient instrumental explorations of the 5Rhythms workshops, there is little to suggest it registered.

For Robert, the task was right in front of him.

“My job was to create the foundation of an energy that Gabrielle needed in the moment to help the dancers get to where she wanted to help them go,” he explains.

As such, the albums made from 1985 onwards - from which the tracks on this compilation are taken - proposed a different way of making music, one which felt much closer to the essence of Roth’s ideas.

“In my experience, a beautiful aspect of recording with Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors was that the music originated in the dance,” recalls Gordy Ryan.

“We’d work it up, then go to the studio and play the groove with Gabrielle dancing, going into the infinite moment where the dance and the music are one. This was our method for creating the rhythm grooves that were at the heart of the compositions that would evolve during the recording process.”

Describing himself as the ‘bottom’ drummer, “the lowest in the musical food chain”, Robert would set the foundational beat from a Sioux pony drum named Bertha, which he was given by Gabrielle in the early ‘80s.

Despite also using a wide range of instruments, including Native American taos drums, Yoruba and Igbo batá, East African kihembe, Japanese Kabuki drums, or concerts toms, it is Bertha that has appeared on practically every Mirrors recording since.

“Gabrielle and I built the songs from these butt-moving bottoms up, deciding what bass player to add to the drums, what vocalist, or violinist,” he explains.

Robert’s in-house rhythm section was completed initially by Gordy Ryan and then subsequently Sanga Of The Valley. Finally, each iteration of The Mirrors was then assembled from a rotating cast of friends and professional musicians whose individual sounds and influences shaped the recordings.

“The secret of everything we’ve done is that we never told anybody what to play,” Robert shares. “Gabrielle would occasionally talk to musicians in metaphor. Like, [imagine you are] “standing on top of the mountain and wind is blowing.” Every artist was free to take themselves to the limit and make their contribution.”

You had established jazz musicians like bassist Alex Blake, whose credits included Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and The Last Poets, providing wiry virtuosity on ‘Eliana’. There are synth parts from Gil Evans collaborator Delmar Brown, that lend a Cluster-like cosmic feel to ‘Seducing Hades’. At times, the dotara of Jai Uttal would set the tone, at others it was the dumbek of Hearn Gadbois. The melancholy ‘Stefania’s Song’ even features the unlikely union of Eurovision alumnus Sara Carlson and session drummer Joe Bonadio, who once recorded with Avril Lavigne. A broad church indeed. There are almost forty musicians and just as many instruments on this compilation alone.

“Instead of our albums being a musical vision of one person like me or Gabrielle, they were the musical vision of a whole bunch of people”, Robert describes. The effect was one of a hall of mirrors, a kaleidoscope of influences, sounds and musical lives that collided in Roth’s orbit to stir the body and free the mind.

In practice, the task of synthesising these different elements fell to Scott Ansell, Robert’s son – then a budding recording engineer who already had an apprenticeship at NYC’s Skyline Studios and a job in the live booth at CBGB’s under his belt. Scott’s credits now read like a who’s who of ‘80s glam (Nile Rogers, Duran Duran, Grace Jones), but at the time he was learning on the job.

The integral third point of Gabrielle and Robert’s unlikely production triangle, Scott’s role went beyond that of studio engineer. Embodying Robert’s adage that “the space you leave is just as important as the space you take,” he experimented with mic choice and placement to capture the dynamic energy of each drum, carving depth between instruments to translate and enhance the emotion behind the music onto record.

Already attractive to gigging musicians for the freedom they were afforded, The Mirrors’ sessions became known for their production values – a masterclass of “space music”, in the purest sense of the word. With access to the best studios in New York, The Mirrors sparkled.

And yet, when it came to releasing the music, The Mirrors’ hypnotic, drum-driven sound found no kinship in the ‘80s New Age market, where synth swells, pipes and gongs held sway. Like so many independent ventures, Raven Recording, the label on which their music was subsequently released, made a virtue of necessity. The label has sold hundreds of thousands of albums since, yet a cursory glance at the artwork should leave no doubt that these albums were never designed to cross-over.

When compiler Pol Valls heard Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors’ “psychedelic, trippy, floaty” opus Endless Wave: Vol. 1 (reissued by Time Capsule on TIME008) through a muffled phone speaker on an empty dancefloor in 2019, he couldn’t help but take notice. It wasn’t long before the extent of their output was revealed. Sixteen albums over thirty years, all conceived to spur ecstasy in the dance.

With repetition and meditation in mind, the full albums come with their own internal logic, “each rooted in one or all of the 5Rhythms”. That they may transcend their audience for the first time is a testament to the work Pol has put in to curating this compilation. Cut from an initial shortlist of sixty-six tracks, he describes the selection as “a variety of genres, styles, and vibes within their catalogue, whether it is emotional, esoteric, spiritual, melancholic, hypnotic, dark, or at times a combination of these elements together.” Music for immersive and intimate environments, Raven’s recordings were born from the dance. In the hands of the right DJ, at the right time, in the right place, they might just return there.

In an interview with Mirrors musician Arthur Hull, who now runs his own community of drum circles, Babatunde Olatunji articulates a paradox that is at the essence of his sound:

“the spirit of the drum is something that you feel, but you cannot put your hands on.”

The spirit of The Mirrors is the same. This is music to be felt, ineffable sound, sound which - much like Brian Eno would profess on Ambient 1 – should not be the object of your attention, but the means to a state of being.

It should have no sharp edges, no dissonance. It should be gestalt, a unified whole, greater than the sum of its parts. It should be at one with the dance, so that, to the ears of those in the room, it ceases to exist at all. It is a mirror, reflecting just that which enters its field.

“There is emotion in the music,” Pol muses,

“but what it makes you feel, might be something different. I can say, “this is so beautiful,” but you might say, “this is actually very sad.” I think it depends on the person and how they perceive it.”

To paraphrase Gabrielle, and end where we began,

“You didn’t really think this was about music, did you?”

Written by Anton Spice (2020)

(Thank you to Pol Valls and Kay Suzuki, whose research and knowledge has underpinned much of the information shared in these liner notes.)

This edition is dedicated to Robert Ansell (1939–2022), whose heartbeat was the pulse of The Mirrors, and whose life’s rhythm continues to move through this music.

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Time Capsule first reissued(and now sold out) Endless Wave Vol. 1 in 2020, introducing new listeners to the extraordinary world of Gabrielle Roth - dancer, teacher, and cartographer of the spirit.

With this new repress of Selected Works 1985–2005, we return to the source of that world: the story of how one woman turned movement into medicine and music into prayer.

This record celebrates Gabrielle’s belief that rhythm is a force of healing and transformation. It also honours her lifelong partnership with Robert Ansell (1939–2022), whose pulse became the heartbeat of The Mirrors and whose devotion carried her vision into sound.

The Path to Ecstasy

Gabrielle Roth was born in San Francisco in 1941. Her father worked in insurance; her mother, a devout Catholic, instilled discipline and faith. From an early age she felt drawn to dance, not as performance, but as necessity.

“When I danced,” she once said, “I could slip into trance and sense what others were feeling. Movement opened a door to the unseen.”

At seven, she glimpsed a ballerina through a studio window and decided that would be her path. But her early lessons were harsh. Catholic school nuns barked corrections, rulers in hand; her dance instructor punished missteps with a stick.

She learned perfection before joy, form before feeling. By adolescence, the strain of control and shame manifested as anorexia — a starvation of spirit as much as body.

To pay for college, she taught dance and drama to children and elderly students in local community centres. Three hundred kids in a gym. Fifty seniors moving in their own rhythms. She realised that when she stopped trying to control people and started following their energy, something opened.

“They were my first Zen masters,”

she wrote in her autobiography Maps to Ecstasy. Improvisation became her real education, the body’s way of teaching what the intellect could not.

After graduation, she travelled through Europe, studying theatre, philosophy, and folk traditions. In Spain, she saw the flamenco legend La Chunga, whose performance was raw, trance-like, and unfiltered.

“La Chunga ripped me open,” Roth wrote. “She burned away my guilt-ridden, diminished self.”

That night, Gabrielle dreamt of her hero.

“I want to dance like you,” she said.

La Chunga laughed and replied,

“Then dance like you, fool!”

A moment of rebirth. Technique no longer mattered - only truth. From then on, Roth danced not to display beauty but to reveal it, movement as surrender.

Movement as Medicine

Returning to California in the mid-1960s, Roth found herself drawn to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur — a cliffside retreat where the Pacific crashed below and incense drifted through redwoods.

Esalen had become the centre of the Human Potential Movement, a gathering place for seekers, psychologists, and artists exploring the frontier between mind and body. Among them were Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, and Timothy Leary.

There, Roth met Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. He saw in her an intuitive gift - the ability to bring physical movement into psychological healing, and invited her to teach his patients.

Her first class was chaos: catatonic patients rocking in silence, one man umpiring an imaginary baseball game, another hula dancing alone. Roth realised she couldn’t “teach” them to dance. Instead, she joined them — mirroring their gestures, following their rhythm, moving energy from one body to another.

Gradually, something shifted. Laughter, contact, release.

“If you set the psyche in motion,” she later said, “it will heal itself.”

Her workshops became rituals of catharsis. Musicians played live drums; participants cried, shouted, trembled. Therapy blurred with theatre, religion, and art. Roth discovered that movement itself, not the story behind it, was the medicine.

THE MAP OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In search of deeper understanding, Roth left Esalen to study with Oscar Ichazo, founder of the Arica School in New York. Ichazo’s work on the Enneagram and “maps of consciousness” sought to chart the structure of the human psyche. His rigorous training gave Roth language for what she had been intuiting: that all human behaviour is patterned energy. “With Oscar’s guidance,” she said, “I learned to recognise my own patterns inside and out, and to find my true self.”

While in New York she met the Chilean filmmaker and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, El Topo, Dune), whose theatre rituals blurred art and magic. He urged her to abandon imitation entirely.

“Cut your father’s balls off”, he told her, not literally, but as a metaphor for freeing herself from patriarchal authority. The encounter shocked and liberated her in equal measure.

When she returned to Esalen in the 1970s, she was no longer a student. She brought a new synthesis of movement, psychology, and spiritual philosophy, guided by her intuition and informed by her studies. There she befriended anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who encouraged her to formalise her discoveries. The result became the moving meditation called 5Rhythms — Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness, a structure that mirrored the cycles of life and emotion.

Each rhythm represented a state of being:

Flowing (birth, surrender)
Staccato (action, boundary)
Chaos (change, release)
Lyrical (freedom, lightness)
Stillness (death, renewal)

Moving through them became a meditation in motion, a path from fragmentation to wholeness.

The Mirrors: from stage to studio

Together they founded The Moving Center in 1977: a working base for Roth’s workshops, a place to refine the practice, and eventually a school that would train and support 5Rhythms teachers.

New York also gave Roth and Robert Ansell room to set up The Mirrors — first as an experimental theatre company, a platform where she could dig deeper into an expanding philosophy of body, psyche, and ritual.

With Robert stepping into a new role as actor, Roth wrote and directed a dynamic series of works, including a piece in which performers and audience could witness each other with humour and compassion. It ran for three years. The stage became a lab: ego on the table, patterns of the psyche under the light, every performance an ever-changing reflection of the life experience and concerns of the people inside it.

The Mirrors and the Sound of Practice

The Mirrors then evolved into a musical collective - a band devoted to what Roth called “trance” music. Produced by Robert under Gabrielle’s direction, the recordings were lengthy exercises in rhythm: no lyrics, no verses, no choruses. It wasn’t pop, rock, classical, or jazz.

Ambient had barely named itself (Brian Eno’s early signals were still settling), and underground dance music - the culture that would later share many of these tropes - hadn’t yet been born. Even the emerging New Age market turned them away because they used live percussion; in the early ’80s, drums weren’t considered “spiritual.”

No one knew where to file this music. Distributors shrugged.

So Robert formed Raven Recording, their own label, and the work went directly from practice to tape to the hands that needed it.

The third release, Totem (1985), finally cut through. Sales accelerated on the following albums for the same reason the project had struggled: They were a world unto themselves.

Soon other musicians began making similar pieces as the fast-emerging dance music underground and new currents within New Age brought forth long, percussion-heavy works meant for dancing, meditation, and massage. What once had no shelf became its own aisle.

Legacy and Resonance

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Gabrielle Roth’s practice spread across Europe, Japan, and the Americas, first through underground dance studios and spiritual centres, then through a growing constellation of certified teachers carrying the 5Rhythms into their own languages, bodies, and cultures.

By the mid-1990s, workshops were being held on five continents, from New York to Kyoto, from Reykjavik to Buenos Aires. The method became both a healing art and a social movement, drawing musicians, therapists, artists, and spiritual seekers into the same room.

Her 1989 book Maps to Ecstasy distilled her philosophy into words, while The Wave - a 1998 film which sound track was reissued by Time Capsule - revealed how dance could awaken the body’s intelligence and release emotion without story or script.

As her fame grew, the practice deepened.

“Dance is my medicine, my meditation, my metaphor, and my method,”

she often said.

By the 2000s, The Moving Center, the school she founded in New York, had become the headquarters of a global network. Every year, hundreds applied for teacher training, but only a small group - around 40 to 50 dancers per cycle - were selected for the two-year certification program. To this day, becoming a 5Rhythms teacher requires an apprenticeship of presence: hundreds of hours of dancing, witnessing, and study under senior guides.

Today, there are over 400 certified teachers in more than 50 countries, with thousands of weekly classes held from Berlin to Buenos Aires, Tokyo to Tel Aviv. What began as one woman’s method has become a living lineage, passed not through dogma, but through movement.

Workshops became pilgrimages - spaces where thousands moved together, rediscovering rhythm as a form of prayer.

Gabrielle Roth passed away in 2012, leaving behind a global community of 5Rhythms teachers who continue her work.

Robert Ansell safeguarded her legacy, producing new releases, preserving the archives, ensuring the sound lived on.

His death in 2022 closed an extraordinary partnership: one where love, spirit, and sound moved as one.

And yet, the rhythm continues in every dance floor where a body finds its own wave.

Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors – Selected Works 1985–2005
2025 Repress Edition (TIME010R) available from 10th November

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For nearly three decades, Zen Records sat quietly on Broad Lane in Tottenham, North London — a small shop with a deep pull: reggae 45s, rare groove, soul and R&B, jazz, garage, and the stray house cut you didn’t expect but somehow needed. Regulars knew Robert, a.k.a. Mr. Zen, as the man behind the counter: plain-spoken, sharp-eared, and generous with a tip-off if you were listening.

In July 2025, his family announced that Zen would close, citing health reasons. The shutters finally came down on 30 September 2025.

Zen’s place in North London’s ecosystem was simple and vital — a local, independent room where reggae heads, soul collectors and rare-groove diggers crossed paths; where pirate-radio lore met Saturday-market hustle; where a “just popped in for a look” often turned into a story you told friends for years.

A few weeks before closing, Sara El Harrak sat down with Robert for her Voices Radio show, broadcasted on 13 September 2025. With her blessing, we share their conversation here in full.

What follows is the voice of the shop, the man behind the counter, and the community he built.

📻 Sara: …so the last track was Herbie Hancock’s I Thought It Was You off a 45 which I got at Zen Records. And before that, another Zen find - The Crusaders with The Hustler. And up next, I want to get straight into the interview.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert, a.k.a. Mr. Zen, who doesn’t often do interviews, so I felt very lucky.

It’s a grave shame that Zen Records in Tottenham will soon be closing, but it’s important to support your local independent record shops and make the most of the next couple of weeks. He’s still trading until the end of this month, and will then be selling on Discogs — you can find him at discogs.com/user/spinbak.

I really wanted to immortalise this conversation. He’s such an important figure in the local and wider music community.

Without further ado, this was recorded at his last in-store.

Sara: It’s a pleasure to finally talk on the record. I’ve been coming to your shop for about eight or nine years. But tell me - when did Zen Records first come to life?

Robert: Oh, you caught me on the first question. I think it’s been about thirty years now. Yeah, somebody said thirty.

Sara: And have you always been based in Tottenham?

Robert: Yeah. I used to live on Ferry Lane, walking distance from the shop. Those were good days.

Sara: What inspired you to open your own record shop?

Robert: Well, I was made unemployed twice in a row, couldn’t find a job, so I started selling records down at Roman Road Market¹ on a stall. Then a shop became available and I decided to, as they say, push the boat out, took out a lease for four years, and just kept it going.

¹ Roman Road Market in East London was one of the city’s busiest for music traders during the 1980s and ’90s, alongside Ridley Road and Camden Market.

Sara: Would you say this became your life’s work, sharing music with others?

Robert: I don’t think my passion was - pardon the phrase - to share the music. My passion was to make a living, you know? But what I did enjoy was turning customers onto something they didn’t expect to walk out with. That part I liked. Especially when someone gave me an idea of what they were after and I could find it.

Sara: I’ll always remember when I came in asking about Make It Last. Within 24 hours you called me back and said, “I’ve got it.” It was one of the Midnight Music compilations.

Robert: That was just luck — it happened to be on that LP, and I probably only had one copy.

Sara: I’ve bought so many records there over the years - for myself and for friends, and they’ve all treasured them. You’re definitely the go-to for rare groove and soul, but also reggae. What would you say are your strongest areas?

Robert: When I was growing up, I was a reggae man - probably ninety percent reggae. In my mid-twenties I started to appreciate soul a lot more. So as much as I’ve got more reggae in my house than soul, if I was going to go deaf, I’d like to hear a soul tune².

² London’s “soul boy” generation often moved between reggae sound systems and the jazz-funk scene — these listening cultures blended into what became the rare-groove era.

Sara: Didn’t you grow up south of the river, where the rare-groove scene first emerged?

Robert: Yeah, I was around when rare-groove started. A lot of DJs - I won’t drop names - used to come into the shop looking for those tunes. For a while I became known for selling rare groove.

Sara: Do you still see that crowd today?

Robert: Not really. The clientele’s changed. These days I sell a lot of jazz, a bit of house - never thought I’d say that, and even some ragga. The shop’s always followed the people, you know?

Sara: And you’re open until the 26th (September 2025)?

Robert: Yeah, the last day’s the 26th. Then that’s it, landlord gets his shop back.

Sara: What happens after that?

Robert: I was going to make a joke and say I’m becoming a farmer. But truthfully, I don’t know, I’ve never been in this position before. I’ll still be selling records online though.

Sara: On Discogs.

Robert: On Discogs, yes. Username’s Spinbak — S-P-I-N-B-A-K. Just an abbreviation.

Sara: I really want to know a bit more about rare groove. Do you think it’s a bit of an umbrella term? It seems to mean all sorts, jazz, funk, different genres. Maybe in your opinion it’s a broad term that gets used a lot.

Robert: Rare groove to me started when I was in Tottenham. When I was living in Battersea, I don’t think the term ‘rare groove’ was being mentioned. It was while I was in Tottenham, in the ’90s.

Sara: Okay. I thought because you know some of the records as well that date back to the ’70s, some of them are considered rare-groove.

Robert: Oh no, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sara: But was it mainly that the tunes from decades before would be played at parties in the ’80s and ’90s and then it became known as rare-groove because they were like white labels or releases from independents?

Robert: It wasn’t even white labels. You had guys going over to America, spending their money in shops, looking for records to bring over to England and sell. Most of the records - this is my understanding - were LPs with one or two tracks. They’d bring them back to England. It was a guy on a pirate radio station who termed ‘rare-groove’.³ But just going back, the guys who would go to America, pick up deleted records… they were cheap, and they’d bring them over, put money on top, and they did very well from it.

³ The phrase “rare groove” is widely credited to Norman Jay MBE and Gordon Mac MBE of Kiss FM, who used it in the mid-1980s to describe rediscovered funk, soul and jazz records that fuelled London’s underground club culture.

Sara: How have the last few weeks been? You’ve had DJs coming in for in-stores and send-offs.

Robert: It’s been good. I appreciate everyone who came down — most of them were customers who became friends.

Sara: A bit bittersweet though, I imagine.

Robert: Yeah… if I had my way, I wouldn’t be closing.

Sara: But you’ll still be there online.

Robert: Yeah, Discogs is going to be my second best friend.

Sara: Thank you, Robert, for such a beautiful chat, and for everything you’ve built.

Robert: Thank you, darling. It’s been a pleasure.

Sara: I’ve been going to Zen for almost ten years. Thank you for all the memories, the great finds, the gifts I’ve been able to share with friends — and for the wonderful music. It’s sad, but long live Zen Records. Like Robert said, he’s not going anywhere. You’ll still find him on Discogs → spinbak.

And to close this out, here’s a final Zen selection — Take 6 – Come Unto Me. A tune I’ve loved for years, but the copy I found at Zen made it feel even more special.

❤️ Thank you, Sara and Robert, for letting us share this moment — a true piece of North London record-shop history.

🎧 Hear the original Voices Radio broadcast

📻 Sara El Harrak → @elha.sara

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When Classic Album Sundays began, it was simply Colleen telling the story of a record before playing it in full. Then artists started to join her, first tentatively, later as the defining feature of the project.

“Now it usually starts with a conversation,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s the artist, sometimes a producer, engineer or fan. I love hearing how differently they all experience the same record.”

She mentions Ken Scott, Bowie’s long-time producer and a regular collaborator. “Ken and I have travelled everywhere together - India, Germany, the States. His perspective is completely different from the artist’s. Musicians think about inspiration and songs. Engineers talk about sound. Ken will explain why a tiny noise at the end of a track is there, what mic was used, what take it was. It changes how you hear it.”

Other interviews bring in musicians inspired by the albums themselves: harpist Alina Bzhezhinska for Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda and Dorothy Ashby’s Afro Harping. “I wanted to hear how a harpist would interpret those records. She gave people an entirely new way of listening. And I always make sure the guests get their shine - I love Alina’s own records. She’s a brilliant artist.”

Sometimes the emotion is closer to home. “After Marianne Faithfull passed away, I spoke to Ed Harcourt, who’d worked with her for years. It was really moving, hearing someone talk about her not just as an icon, but as a person.”

What makes a “classic”

When asked what defines a classic album, Colleen resists fixed answers. “It’s not just about chart success or nostalgia. Some records are cult, others become classics decades later. For me it’s about cultural resonance, how a record continues to reveal itself.”

She credits the community around Classic Album Sundays for broadening her scope. “People would suggest albums on a noticeboard at Brilliant Corners. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon came from that. Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children wasn’t even on my radar when it came out. I discovered it through someone in the audience.”

In the same breath she talks about Dub Factor by Black Uhuru. “One of my all-time favourites. I met Paul ‘Groucho’ Smykle recently. He mixed that record, and so many Grace Jones and Gregory Isaacs cuts. I’d love to do a session with him. His engineering is art.”

Reclaiming how we listen

Colleen’s mission has always been to slow people down. “When I started, it was the iPod era, shuffle culture. People were skipping through music like a slot machine. I wanted to bring back the ritual of listening all the way through, together, on a proper system.”

She laughs remembering the early crowds. “In London I had to remind people not to talk. In Japan you say it once and that’s it. They just sit quietly. But once word spread, audiences understood. It became part of etiquette.”

She believes the act itself is therapeutic. “If you spend an hour fully immersed in sound, your blood pressure drops. People cry sometimes. Music heals. David (Mancuso) used to say it raises your life energy and I see that at every session.”

During lockdown she launched an online version “like a book club for records.” Listeners joined via Patreon, listened in real time, and discussed afterwards. “People said they just wanted to learn more about music. That curiosity keeps me going.”

Sound, systems and subjectivity

Hi-fi has always been central, but Colleen treats gear as a medium, not a fetish. “When Classic Album Sundays took off, every audio brand wanted me to go exclusive. I said no. I stay brand-agnostic. Systems are subjective, like records, they have personalities. Horns, solid-state, valves, each brings its own colour.”

She rejects the language of competition. “I never say we have the best sound system. There’s no such thing. People hear differently. Women, for instance, often perceive higher frequencies more sharply, so a super-transparent speaker can sound harsh to me while someone else thinks it’s perfect.”

Her only rule is simplicity: no EQ, no compression, clean signal path. “I’ve used everything - Klipschorns, KEF Blades, Wilson Sophias, Audio Note UK’s AN-Es. The goal is consistency so that everyone hears the record as openly as possible. You can tweak forever, but at some point you just have to say, “this is good enough.”

The current London sessions take place at Hidden Grooves Hi-Fi, a new listening bar in Shoreditch. “I’m focusing on music I’d naturally play myself. Smaller capacity, more intimate. Tomorrow it’s Da Lata; next Mark de Clive-Lowe and then Greg Wilson. I’d love to get Groucho in too,.”

And future dreams? “There are more bucket-list interviews than albums,” she admits. “Paul McCartney would be the ultimate, especially his experimental early-’80s stuff. Robert Smith too. I did a remix for The Cure this year at his request - I still can’t quite believe it. If he ever wants to talk in front of an audience, I would love to explore one of The Cure albums with him..”

She pauses before adding what feels like a quiet manifesto. “People sometimes say, ‘They don’t make great albums anymore.’ Of course they do. There’s always good music being made, you just have to listen harder. That’s my job really: to help people listen and discover music from the past and present.. Whether it’s DJing, radio or Classic Album Sundays, I feel my vocation is a curator and an educator. Music’s infinite. My curiosity hasn’t stopped since I was a kid behind a record-shop counter.”

Read Part.1 from below

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In the front room of her East London home, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy is surrounded by records, audio equipment, and a lifetime of stories. She speaks quickly, with warmth and precision, the voice of someone who has lived inside music for four decades.

“I started working in record shops in 1984,” she says. “I’d already been on the radio for a couple of years. I interviewed hundreds of bands through the late ’80s and ’90s, produced syndicated shows, told stories about music and collected records obsessively. Classic Album Sundays came out of all those things at once.”

Founded in 2010, Classic Album Sundays began as an intimate listening event that has since grown into an international movement. Each session centres on one record, introduced through stories, context, and conversation, then played in full on an audiophile system, phones off, lights low, no talking. The idea is simple: to restore the ritual of listening deeply, together. Fifteen years on, it has reached major cultural venues from the V&A and Royal Albert Hall to festivals and listening bars around the world.

The seed, though, was planted a little earlier. Around the late 2000s, Colleen had stepped back from regular DJing to spend more time at home with her young daughter. Sundays became slower, cooking, cleaning, and listening. “Friends would come round. Adam would cook, he’s the chef; I’d say, ‘Pick an album you really want to hear. We’ll listen to it all the way through.’”

By then, Colleen and her husband had begun collecting serious audio equipment. “I’d been DJing and hosting events for years including with David Mancuso when he began coming to London around 2003,” she recalls. “That’s when we invested in a system based around Klipschorns, a few of which landed here at our house. Around the same time, we became close with Peter Qvortrup from Audio Note UK, who lent us different valve amplifiers to try, the Jinro among them. It was heaven.”

They played Another Green World by Brian Eno one afternoon. A friend, James, turned and said, “So this is like a classic album Sunday.” The name stuck.

Around the same time, Greg Wilson, another long-time friend, was running a blog encouraging people to listen to full albums at home and chat about them online. “Greg said, ‘You should do one, Colleen. The next album’s Dark Side of the Moon.’ ”

Colleen’s copy was the Mobile Fidelity’s pressing, mastered at half-speed by Stan Ricker, a gift from David Mancuso. “We turned the lights down, lit candles and incense, didn’t talk, just listened. Afterwards everyone online said, ‘Colleen, the album playback must have sounded amazing on that system.’ And I thought, not everyone gets to hear music in this way. It only seems fair to share it publicly. ”

The First Sessions

At a local playground she ran into her friend Declan Perkins, who owned a few pubs. “I told him the idea, and he said, ‘Use the Hanbury Arms on a Sunday.’ ” The first events were small but intense. Colleen and her team hauled Klipschorns and glowing valve amps up pub stairs, paid for a babysitter and van out of her own pocket, and lost money each time, but kept going.

Each evening opened with her playing records that framed the main album - earlier work, influences, or music from the same era, while people chatted and ate pizza. Then came the story: how the record was made, who played on it, why it mattered. Phones off, lights low, one full album start to finish.

When BBC Breakfast ran a feature on Ziggy Stardust at one of these nights, everything changed.

“For two weeks my phone didn’t stop ringing.

Every newspaper, every radio station wanted to talk. Some thought it was weird ‘Why is she treating albums like museum pieces?’ - but most loved it.”

From there, Classic Album Sundays travelled to festivals, museums, and institutions: Camp Bestival, the V&A, the Royal Albert Hall, the British Library. “I even interviewed Nick Mason for Dark Side of the Moon during the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A,” she smiles. “The record that started it all.”

It has since expanded globally, from London and Tokyo to Sydney, New York, and beyond.

A Parallel History

Colleen had lived in Japan in 1989 as a radio DJ in Nagoya, years before she discovered the country’s jazz kissa culture. “A few years after Classic Album Sundays began, my friend Darrel Sheinman from Gearbox said, ‘Have you been to any jazz kissa?’ So we went. I couldn’t believe the connection, people sitting quietly, not talking, listening to music on beautiful systems. It felt like the same spirit.”

She later wrote a long post about those Jazz Kissas Café Lion and Eagle in Tokyo, Jamaica in Sapporo which circulated widely online. “Aneesh Patel told me later that when they saw that post, that’s when they were opening Brilliant Corners and mentioned that’s how they first heard about listening bars.”

When Brilliant Corners opened, Colleen moved her sessions there. “I helped them with the Hackney Council letter and lent them two Klipschorns. It meant I could just bring my front-end, the Jinro amp from Audio Note, my Rega P9, moving-coil cartridges, and use the speakers I had installed there. That’s how I met Kay Suzuki,” she laughs.

Defining the “Classic”

Over the years Classic Album Sundays has grown from a personal experiment into a global series of events and interviews. Artists now join in - musicians, producers, engineers, or devoted fans of a record.

“What makes an album a classic?” she considers. “It isn’t just sales or canon status. Some are obvious, like Dark Side of the Moon, but others are cult records that shaped underground culture. I’ve always been into subgenres; punk, indie, funk, hip-hop. Working in record shops you hear everything. But I wanted Classic Album Sundays to be broader than the usual idea of ‘classic rock’ and ensured it would include women, global voices, jazz, soul, electronic music and more.”

Requests from audiences often shaped the programme: Nick Drake, Boards of Canada, and sometimes Colleen chose a personal favourite like Black Uhuru’s Dub Factor. “Sometimes people suggest records I’ve never really listened to. And that’s the best part - discovery.”

She’s too aware of the deeper shift the project represented in 2010. “It was right as streaming and shuffle culture were taking over. The CD era was ending, vinyl hadn’t fully come back. We were becoming more isolated in our listening. Classic Album Sundays was about connection - listening together, on a real high end sound system with phones turned off. That’s something we’d lost.”

She pauses. “I didn’t realise it then, but it’s good for your mental health too. Turning your phone off for an hour, listening deeply, it calms people down. Music can raise your life energy. David Mancuso gave me a book called The Life Energy in Music. That’s still at the core of everything I do.”

Part 2 to follow: on interviewing artists, live sessions, the global spread of listening culture, and the gear that shapes the sound.

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“My collection’s not the biggest or the rarest - but it’s alive,” Gilles says. “It’s grown alongside club culture, and I’ve never stopped buying. Every record has its own story, and every one is there to be shared.”

He calls it “organised confusion.” Records are spread across three addresses: Brownswood, his house, and the Green Ball. Some shelves are ordered, others chaotic. “People tell me, just get someone in to sort it out. But no one can touch my records. I need to find things myself. The surprises are part of it. Sometimes chaos leads you to the perfect connection.”

When news breaks of a passing - Hermeto Pascoal, for instance, Gilles becomes the one people expect to hear tributes from. That means diving through boxes, hunting for a stray 7-inch, spending hours tracing links. “Luckily, there’s Discogs. But you still need to find the object itself, the sleeve, the feel. It’s work, but I love it.”

How the shelves are stacked

On the main floor, the Green Ball holds an A–Z of American jazz, flanked by rows of vocal jazz and British players. French and German LPs spill across another wall; halfway along, the run turns Japanese. Lower boxes hold records currently in rotation, primed for gigs and radio.

Upstairs is hip-hop, Brownswood releases, and the labels Gilles has steered: Talkin’ Loud, Acid Jazz. Downstairs is a deep well of soul, Brazil, Latin, India, Colombia, Cuba, the Arab world. Drawers hold reggae LPs and 12s, Brit funk, UK street soul, Japanese 12s. Other drawers are marked by mood rather than geography: disco, boogie, Detroit techno, New York house. Still others are simply piles of recent arrivals — African LPs waiting to be heard.

The system may not be precise, but it reflects his life in sound: a map not just of genres but of scenes, friendships and movements. “Every record is there for a reason. I can tell you the story of why it’s here and how it connects.”

There are also personal corners: shelves of music he’s produced or released, acetates and test presses, boxes set aside for gigs. “It’s both archive and toolbox,” he says. “Things I can draw on for a BBC tribute, or pull out for a basement party.”

Dealers, shops and stories

For Gilles, records are inseparable from the people and stories behind them. “The best digging isn’t just pulling vinyl, it’s hearing how that Belarussian band ended up covering Fela’s Zombie. You need someone to tell you the story.” That’s where the private dealers matter: bespoke visits, hours of listening, context folded into each discovery.

Shops play a different role. In Japan, places like Disk Union and countless others don’t just put grail records on the wall, they add recommendations, context and stories that help you understand the music. “I keep telling Soul Jazz they should bring that approach back,” Gilles says.

In local London shops, the experience is different. Atlantis, Yo-Yo, Love Vinyl: spaces to spend hours flicking, talking, laughing. “I love Zaf at Love Vinyl. I always end up laughing there. I like Jelly Records on Chatsworth Road. Dave at The Little Record Shop is a character. Eldica has its own vibe too - that’s part of the character of the place. Shops where you get the personality along with the records.” Some he drops into quickly, others demand half a day. “Atlantis: John is brilliant. If I’ve got hours to spare, I’ll go there.” What matters most is the mix of curation and randomness: carefully chosen corners for rarities, cheap bins for discovery, and shops that combine both. “That’s why I like VDS London / Idle Moments. You can see the quality on the wall, but there are bargains down there too. That’s what makes a shop special.”

We Out Here and the festival of digging

At We Out Here Festival, the digging culture has become an event in itself. “People come prepared now. Everyone’s got incredible stocks every year! We had Human Head from New York last year, the Welsh crew - Diggers’ Club, the Dutch guys from Rotterdam Off Beat Record with the craziest selection. It’s a big feature of the festival. I didn’t think people would want to carry records around, but now you can even ship them home. It’s a dream.” Gilles himself buys early, before his radio slot. “I grabbed a nice Jean Adebambo album from Mr. Thing this year. That’s the joy.”

The marketplace atmosphere adds a new layer to the festival. “It’s like a mini-record fair built into the weekend. DJs come to play but also to shop. Collectors come for the music, but the digging is just as much a draw.” For Gilles, it’s proof that vinyl culture continues to thrive across generations.

The philosophy of records

In the end, what makes Gilles’ collection unique is not its size, but its vitality. “Every record here has a reason to be here. It’s all part of club culture, jazz and black music in all its forms, and all the strands that come with it. I’ve worked in the record business for forty years. There’s a strand for AOR, for pop, for emerging electronic scenes. All of it belongs.”

The Green Ball is the current vessel for this living archive. Chaotic, yes. Ordered in its own way, certainly. But alive. Constantly in dialogue with the clubs, radio shows and record shops that keep London’s music culture moving.

For Gilles, records are stories as much as sounds. “It’s not about the object as a fetish. It’s about what it connects to. A scene, a memory, a friendship, a night. That’s why it’s alive. That’s why it matters.”

The collection stays alive through use, records pulled for tributes, shows and nights that connect back to the city around it. The Green Ball is part archive, part workshop, always shifting with the music.

Read Part 1 to see where the story began.

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At the back of his North London garden stands a new structure - three levels of wood, glass and shelves of vinyl. This is Gilles Peterson’s Emerald Ballroom also known as The Green Ball: part private retreat, part radio lab, part live room. More than just a studio, it’s a space built to listen.

We visited on a late morning in September, the light falling through a high window onto stacks of LPs. Gilles spoke about how the place came together, why it matters, and what it means to design a room for listening rather than simply working.

From Nile Rodgers to Brownswood

The roots of this new building reach back to an awkward moment with Nile Rodgers. Nearly twenty years ago, Gilles was conducting an interview in a hired studio in Old Street. Rodgers had just published his biography and was recovering from cancer. The atmosphere was tense. Gilles, having only skimmed the opening chapter, admitted he hadn’t finished the book. “Twenty minutes of the interview were gone, just uncomfortable,” he recalls. “Then we finally got going and suddenly there was a knock on the window - time’s up.” The experience left a mark. “I thought: never again. I need my own place to do this properly.”

Brownswood, his Finsbury Park office, already existed as a home for the label and collection. But that moment made Gilles determined to turn it into a studio too - a place where he could host interviews and broadcasts on his own terms. Over the next three decades, Brownswood became a hub for musicians, DJs, producers and friends. Everyone passed through: Bobby Womack, Chaka Khan, Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, George Clinton (who famously didn’t want to leave), even Charlotte Gainsbourg, who turned up on a grey winter’s afternoon straight from a West End press junket and found herself in a cramped flat surrounded by records. “People expected a castle in Highgate. Instead they got a basement in Finsbury Park. It disarmed them and made the atmosphere real.”

Building a home for sound

The Green Ball took shape between 2020 and 2021. Gilles’ wife pushed the idea forward, and crucially, the design allowed a separate entrance - no intrusion into domestic life. “That was the game changer,” he says. “I can broadcast, have meetings, host sessions here, without crossing wires with home.”

Inside, the building itself was designed and developed by Emil Neumann of Paul Archer Design, who conceived the three levels as a three-dimensional space with distinct zones. Later, the Wilson Brothers (Ben and Oscar — DJs themselves and designers of Supreme’s stores) were brought in to shape the interior. Pull-out drawers and open bays make it feel part studio, part record shop. Boxes can be hidden away or pulled out to flick through like bins on Berwick Street. “They really understood how I needed it to work,” Gilles says. “A bit chaotic, but easy to store and shift. They gave it that balance between function and feeling.”

The shell had once been a garden shed. Now it rises three storeys, discreet from the street but expansive inside. “Since we built this, I’ve noticed neighbours doing the same — extensions going up, digging down. We were lucky to get so much space out of it.”

Three levels of listening

The studio is divided into three distinct atmospheres:

Upstairs — a light-filled office with a work desk, 7-inches, and a Fender Rhodes Mark 8. “It’s where I zip through 45s quickly. Musicians have done little sessions here too. Light changes the energy - very different to the basement.” The plan is to add a piano for more texture. “The Rhodes is beautiful, but everyone ends up using the same sounds. I want the imperfections of a real piano.”

Ground floor — the audiophile zone. Turntables, Isonoe mixer, a subwoofer, seating. “This is where I listen when I want something beautiful. It’s selector territory, a hi-fi space.” The sound here is tuned for depth and clarity — the kind of room where a Joe Henderson record can stop the air in its tracks.

Basement — The club. Racks of reggae, house, Brit funk, techno. A movable booth, Taruya needles, Pioneer rotary and Quested, UK-built monitors from Cornwall. “It’s digital downstairs, analogue upstairs,” Gilles laughs. “Bands use this space too — it’s another dimension of listening for them beyond the studio or headphones. Yussef Dayes, Kokoroko, Fruko — they’ve all played or tested music down here.”

The design encourages movement between moods. Gilles describes a dream broadcast: a live band upstairs, conversation on the ground floor, DJ set in the basement. “A four-hour journey, cut into pieces later. Like a tiny desk concert, but with levels.”

From Brownswood to the Green Ball

The new studio is both a continuation and an evolution of Brownswood. “Brownswood was madness for 30 years. Everyone came through. That place was the hub.” The Green Ball feels calmer, more intentional. “This is more my elder-wise years,” Gilles says with a smile. “Closer to home, more personal. But still about people and exchange. I can walk here in 30 seconds.”

The space is wired for flexibility: Thursday mornings he hosts a four-hour Worldwide FM show from here, free to experiment, test segues, and play tracks without context. “Here, it feels like I’m talking to a few friends. It’s freer. If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes those moments spark the best links.”