Four Hungarian villagers, recorded on wax cylinders a century ago, get performer credits in 2026. 竇唯二〇二四年錄完，擱到今年才做，兩首曲子唱的都是別人的古文。

blah bruh — BLUE EVENING

Released發行

2026-07-01（一手：KAKUBARHYTHM 官網 release info「Release Date: 2026.7.1 Wed」；iTunes releaseDate 2026-07-01 一致）

Three Japanese session players — a guitarist from YOUR SONG IS GOOD, a bassist who scored the film Teki, a drummer who has held down the back of cero — formed a band and recorded it at the bassist's house in west Tokyo. The label prints the dates like a logbook: 18–19 June 2025, then 6–7 April 2026, nothing in between. Hiroki Chiba engineered, mixed and mastered the thing himself, and the guitarist painted the sleeve, which makes this about as small an operation as a record can be and still get a catalogue number. Seven originals, then two covers: a Hawaiian traditional, and Madonna's "Like a Virgin" opened out to six minutes and forty-three seconds of unhurried fingerpicking, the melody so slowed it takes a while to place. The opener runs 9:59 and is called "Time to Sleep." Everything here is exactly as advertised.

Alexandra Preucil & Antoine Tamestit — Bartók: 44 Duos & Original Field Recordings

Released發行

2026-07-17（一手：Presto 產品頁 Release date 17th Jul 2026 / Label Harmonia Mundi / Catalogue HMM902773；iTunes releaseDate 一致）

The forty-four duos were written for two violins; Preucil and Tamestit have made their own arrangement for violin and viola, which lowers the whole enterprise into a woodier register and, in the slower numbers, makes the two lines harder to tell apart. What lifts the disc past the usual is editorial. Seven of Bartók's own field cylinders are cut in as preludes, and each is credited to the person who sang it: Vörös, Ion Popovici, Milan Marković, Erină Vlad, and on cylinder Arab 83a a pair of names transliterated as Alli băn Charfalla and Hămmăstir bâl Äši. That last one lands immediately before No. 42, "Arabian Song," and the sequence quietly does what a footnote never could — the source is in the room, thin and hissing, before the polished version arrives. Elsewhere the two takes of No. 36, "Bagpipes," sit side by side at 1:05 and 1:06.

Robert Laidlow — Reality Eaters

Released發行

2026-07-17（一手：Presto 產品頁 Release date 17th Jul 2026 / Label NMC / Catalogue NMCD292；iTunes 一致）

Laidlow, born in 1994, has built a debut portrait disc around what he calls latent spaces, the hidden fields of possibility shared by machine-learning models and by physics. The centrepiece, Silicon, runs forty-two minutes in three movements titled Mind, Body and Soul, and its best idea is a spectral double of the BBC Philharmonic generated from the orchestra's own archive tapes, so that the players spend a good deal of the piece listening to a slightly wrong version of themselves. Gravity, for the Piatti Quartet, climbs from myth to Einstein and then collapses into a singularity that the notes describe as "active silence": eight minutes of a movement called "Curve" spent arriving at nothing. It could all be schematic. It isn't, mostly because Laidlow writes with a physical sense of pressure.

竇唯 (Dou Wei) — 三文語 下

Released發行

2026-07-09（一手：網易雲 API album 385720805，publishTime 換算北京時間 2026/7/9 00:00；系列「上」06-30、「中」07-03）

Two tracks, twenty-odd minutes, streaming on NetEase only. The first sets a rhapsody by Song Yu from the third century BC; the second runs two Tao Yuanming prose pieces together, including the self-written funeral oration he composed for his own death. Dou Wei plays piano and sings; around him are xiao flute, ruan, pipa, ambient guitar. The credit list includes a post I have never seen on a record before: literary advisor. The dates are the other oddity. Recorded in two Beijing studios in 2024, produced in Shanghai in 2026 — a two-year gap between capture and release, and the third of three volumes issued within nine days of each other. I have had it on twice and am still not sure what I think.

Shark School — Selachimorpha

Released發行

2026-06-26（一手：Bandcamp album 頁 "released 26 June 2026"）

A debut from a Galway trio formed in 2023, named for the taxonomic clade containing every living shark, opening with a track called "Chrondrichtyes." The joke holds up longer than you expect, largely because the record underneath it is not funny at all: "Insomnolence," "Gnashing Teeth," "5AM," a sequence that follows a night from restlessness to the worst hour of it. The band say "Don't Trust A Man" is about wanting to exist without the freight of a gendered hierarchy, which is a heavier sentence than the guitars let on. They have sold out Galway's Róisín Dubh twice, once billed in the name of feminism and once in the name of fish.

Khaki — 原子 (EP)

Released發行

2026-07-05（一手：OTOTOY 商品頁 Release date 2026-07-05，Cat# 4580789772276；iTunes releaseDate 一致）

OGRE YOU ASSHOLE — at LIQUIDROOM

Released發行

2026-06-24（一手：OTOTOY 商品頁 Original release date 2026-06-24；iTunes releaseDate 一致）

Five songs, 46:09, taken from a December 2025 headline set at Ebisu Liquidroom. It opens with twelve minutes and fifty-four seconds of "ROPE," subtitled meditation version, and three of the five run past eight minutes. The band have long treated each era's live arrangements as a separate publishable object. This is the current one.

張仁與 (Zhang Renyu) — 新的過去舊的還在

Released發行

2026-07-10（iTunes releaseDate 一手，collectionId 6787920239；網易雲同專輯頁標 07-09，採信 Apple 的 07-10 週五）

A first full-length out of Taipei on StreetVoice, the platform-turned-label Landy Chang started in 2006. Eleven songs, five of which have been out as singles since early 2025, so a third of the record arrives already worn in. The guest on "我們終於再相聚" is Peiching Su, Taiwan's first singer-songwriter to work from the harp.