Pansy "Skin Graft"
The Seattle-based musician Vivian McCall Vivian McCall established her career as a multinstrumentalist and recording engineer with the outsider-y retro pop band Jungle Green in Chicago. After years of engineering sessions for her bandmates, and recording an Jungle Green album with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado at Sonora Recorders in Los Angeles, she recorded the self-titled Pansy (Earth Libraries, 2021): eight, short, deeply-personal songs about transformation and becoming. Vivian, a transgender woman, was processing her transition in real time, and drawing from the music that helped her survive–The Magnetic Fields, Liz Phair, and the eclectic punk of New Zealand’s Dunedin sound (Chris Knox, The Chills, The Clean, and others).
Where Pansy is about becoming a person, the Skin Graft EP is about being one, Vivian says, and balancing ordinary struggles with the existential crisis of living in a country that’s grown wildly hostile to transgender people. Recorded at “the Unknown” studio in Anacortes, Washington, Skin Graft is due via Earth Libraries in November 2025.
h. pruz "Red sky at morning"
“My mother used to quote the red sky proverb to me growing up. I didn’t realize it had biblical origins for a long time… many years have felt like a homecoming back to my creative start in childhood,” Pruzinsky admits. Wrestling with the twin fears of solitude and reliance and an escape from a life that disallowed an expression of their truest self, Red sky at morning simultaneously heeds the call of the journey while working to construct a momentary shelter from the storm – whether it arrives in the dawn or dusk of our lives. It is the story of a wayfinder relinquishing control and allowing the mutinous chaos of love to chart a path to an acceptance of some great stillness. Shuffling across worn floorboards, polished from overuse, that point toward calmer waters, trying to unlearn the frantic pace of introspection, the goal is evident in the hopeful refrain of “Arrival” – “I can clear the cycle.”
– Dawood Nadurath
Chris Liebing & Speedy J "Collabs 3000 – 2025"
Techno pioneers Chris Liebing and Speedy J (aka Jochem Paap) reunite as Collabs 3000 for their 2025 EP, a brand new four-track release and their first new studio material together in nearly two decades.
Channeling the raw, improvisational energy of their recently revived Collabs 3000 live sets, these tracks build on the legacy of their acclaimed collaboration with a fresh, future-facing edge. The EP precedes the full remastered reissue of the electronic techno masterpiece Metalism, out November 2025, and celebrates a partnership that helped to define the sound of early ’00s Techno.
