180 Gram vinyl

Temples of Jura is proud to present ‘The Great Beyond’, the ninth studio album from Ilija Rudman. The concept of the album is the afterlife with words from Nikola Tesla, Slavoj Zizek, Jim Morrison, JF Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle, WH Auden, Azar Nafisi and Eleanor Roosevelt woven together to tell the story of ‘The Great Beyond’ and what may lie ahead for us all. The voice itself was created by Ai (let’s call him ERIC) and is set beautifully to music that has a timeless cinematic quality. Ilija only uses pure Analogue equipment in the creation of his music, resulting in a rich tapestry of basses, drums, chords and lead sounds. He’s been a prolific producer for over 20 years now with a discography that runs deep with more than 100 Vinyl EP releases and 8 studio albums, but we feel he’s reached the pinnacle with this concept album. We’ll leave the final word to ERIC “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” More

The original environmental album from the Kyoto Connection available on Vinyl for the very first time. The album was composed, produced and recorded by Argentinian producer Facundo Arena over the course of one month in early 2018. A classically trained pianist and analogue hardware obsessive, for this project Facundo wanted to move out of his comfort zone and compose the album purely using plugins and sequencing software on his iPad, running the songs directly onto tape, in this case his trusted 1978 Akai GXC-70D tape recorder.

Why an iPad? Facundo explains “In the 1980’s Japanese ambient producers experimented with hardware sequencers and computer sequencers on the Atari ST. Today thanks to IOS apps like Samplr, Korg Gadget and Fugue Machine it’s possible to experiment like the old days with new ways of composing and recording. Each track was recorded live into the Akai, so there were many takes to get the right result with each take recorded on the same cassette (recorded and erased over and over again) which helped to achieve an ‘old tape saturation’ effect”.

The image for the album is taken from an original 1960’s Japanese postcard featuring the famous Arashishama Bridge. The album is pressed on heavyweight 180 Gram Vinyl with sleeve design by Bradley Pinkerton. More

180g vinyl pressing.

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyo Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says.

Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyo Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains.

Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyo Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition.

Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.

Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within. More

Following last year’s ‘Monster Skies’ comes another 6 track mini-lp of original works from label head Jura Soundsystem. Once again the EP aims to bring together the melting pot of influences that also inspire the label, Dub, Ambient House, Leftfield Disco and Balearica. The EP was made with the Roland classics, the Juno 106, SH101, D-05, TR 707 & 727 and includes guitar and sax work to balance the electronic sound palette. Mastering By Matt Colton. More

n The Senses’ is a soundtrack concept album from Fernando Pulichino based around the premise of music for film. Melody, ambience and mood are central to these pieces influenced by the likes of Angelo Badalamenti, John Carpenter and Johnny Jewel. The result is timeless electronic music infused with bittersweet synth chords & melodies, beat less atmospherics, bubbling electronics and synthesizer minimalism. More

Temples Of Jura is a new offshoot catering for original artist material from a variety of genres. The first release is a split Dub 12” featuring Melbourne’s Len Leise and Adelaide’s Jura Soundsystem. As the title suggests Len’s track is a homage to the legendary Dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood whilst Jura Soundsystem debut with a more Rootsy excursion across 3 mixes. More