The Singapore born, Melbourne based artist delivers a tender and cinematic RnB moment that explores what lingers when love fades.
On “Shadows,”KiTe proves that restraint can be its own kind of power. The Singapore born, Melbourne based R&B and pop artist strips things back to the essentials with a gentle beat, hazy guitar textures and a voice that sounds like it’s caught somewhere between a dream and a memory.
This is a track that you will want to play on repeat just to catch the details you missed the first time.
“Shadows” unfolds slowly, like light seeping through half-drawn blinds. KiTe’s vocals are smooth and his phrasing carries an emotion that is intriguing. When he murmurs lines about love’s lingering ghosts, you can almost see the late night streets, the flicker of neon and the empty spaces that once felt full.
Listen here:
“Shadows” sits in that sweet spot between R&B sensuality and minimalist pop. The production feels handcrafted with each layer adding on to the next, and a slow burning atmosphere building. What makes this track stand out is how KiTe leans into vulnerability, and turns solitude into something more cinematic in structure.
KiTe is emerging as a promising new voice in modern R&B. And he is an artist who understands that connection is not build on perfection per se, but on presence. This is music for the moments in between, for the long drives, quiet nights and the spaces where reflection becomes its own kind of comfort.
About KiTe
Singapore born and Melbourne based, KiTe is a rising R&B / Pop artist who beings smooth and soulful melodies together with early 2000’s inspired emotion.
Influenced by Keshi, ASTN, DEAN, Junny, and Bryson Tiller, his music balances contemporary production with timeless sentiment.
A former engineering student turned now full time musician, KiTe began producing at sixteen from a simple dining table setup. His journey from Mando Pop singing contests, where he earned a Top 5 finish, to performing live and writing for other artists including K-pop groups, has shaped his signature sound.
There’s an unmistakable sense of reckoning in Zoey Tess’s new single, “Knocking at Your Front Door.” Tess doesn’t hide behind any metaphors or soften any blows. Instead, she steps forwards, steady and to say what too many are afraid to.
The song opens with Zoey’s voice front and center. “I had a dream the world was burning, no one cared, the earth kept turning” is a lyric that lands like a hard truth that nobody wants to hear.
Recorded at the legendary Clubhouse Studio in Rhinebeck, New York, the song captures a kind of analog immediacy that sounds live. Produced by Spencer Hattendorf and engineered by Paul Antonell, “Knocking at Your Front Door” brings together a sharp and intuitive band with Teddy Kumpel on guitar, Reed Sutherland on bass, and Nate Mondschein on drums. All of them work together to serve the emotions of this song.
After the initial sessions, Grammy winning engineer Mario J. McNulty (David Bowie, Prince) handled the mix, giving it a clean and open feel that allows each lyric and texture to breathe. Dave McNair’s mastering gives it that final polish. This is protest music, after all. It’s supposed to make you a little uncomfortable.
What makes “Knocking at Your Front Door” so effective isn’t just its political bite, but its clarity. Tess reckons with the present moment. With the noise, the hypocrisy, fatigue and the flickr of hope that refuses to go out.
It’s the first single from her upcoming debut album, There’s Gonna Be a Reckoning, which was written earlier this year amid a growing sense of civic and spiritual unease.
The album, according to Tess, was born “from a need to speak out against rising authoritarianism, religious hypocrisy, and deep inequality.”
By the final verse, Tess sounds more like a mirror than a messenger and reflects back the chaos we have all grown a little to accustomed to. The revolution she is calling for is not just political, but it is moral, emotional and deeply human.
About Zoey Tess
Zoey Tess is an American singer songwriter, producer, and musician whose work bridges the confessional edge of 90’s era singer songwriters with the fearless spirit of 60’s folk protest music.
Born in Coral Springs, Florida and raised in Newtown, Connecticut, Tess began studying piano and violin at a young age before attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan and later Berklee College of Music.
Leaving Berklee after a year to pursue her own artistic path, Tess worked under the mentorship of producer Vic Steffens (Whitney Houston, The Blues Brothers) and performed with the jazz fusion group Artful Soul. Her 2020 single “Late Night Thoughts” highlights her R&B and soul influences, but her forthcoming debut album, There’s Gonna Be a Reckoning marks a bold creative leap into folk rock territory.
The album, which was recorded at The Clubhouse Studio in Rhinebeck, New York, features production by Spencer Hattendorf, collaborations with Dave Eggar (Coldplay) and mastering by Chris Gehringer and Dave McNair. Taking inspiration from Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey, Tess has a sound that is fiercely contemporary and one that refuses to look away from the world as it is.
There’s nothing manufactured about Ray Ray Star’s new single “One Step Away.” This is the kind of song that bleeds truth – a cathartic, guitar driven confession from an artist who’s had experience of every lyric.
Released to coincide with the Canadian Convention of Narcotics Anonymous, “One Step Away” is more than a song about addiction however. It is a deeply personal portrait of endurance, of redemption and the fragile hope that comes with choosing to stay sober one day at a time.
Written over five years ago, “One Step Away” emerged from one of the darkest chapters in Ray Ray’s life. “I was barely holding on,” he recalls, “fighting like hell just to make it through another day.” The song sat unfinished until recently, when a speaking appearance at an NA convention reignited something in him – the realization that his story might serve others who are still in the fight.
That was the spark became the foundation for finishing the song, a raw and honest anthem for those on the path to recovery:
The track itself is a powerful slice of modern rock with soaring guitars and a dynamic production that echoes the push and pull between despair and determination, while Ray Ray’s voice carries an honesty that refuses to let you look away. There is no studio gloss to soften the message.
For Ray Ray Star, “One Step Away” is the culmination of a long, complex journey. A guitarist, record producer, executive producer and entertainer, he’s spent decades moving fluidly between onstage performance and behind the scenes production. His resume includes international tours and co-producing NBC’s Real Music Live, but it’s in his personal transformation that reveals his musicianship. Sixteen years clean and sober, Ray Ray channels that experience into both his music and his psychic work, forging a creative path that blends spiritual insight with true rock ’n’ roll energy.
The title of the song is a direct nod to the first step of Narcotics Anonymous, a concept that speaks volumes. At its heart, “One Step Away” is about the moment when everything could go either way. The choice to give in or to keep fighting. Ray Ray doesn’t romanticize recovery, he honors its difficulty. The song’s strength lies in the willingness to admit that even after sixteen years, the battle still exists, but so does the victory.
This is a track for anyone who has struggle with addiction, but also with the weight of being human. Ray Ray Star takes his scars and turns them into something defiant, something redemptive and ultimately, something beautiful.
There’s a quiet poetry in the way “Nefasphere” came to life. Fifteen years ago, in a college classroom in New Jersey, a young Ethiopian musician named Mikael Seifu met Ben Neill, a composer already known for his experiments with the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid instrument that fuses brass performance with electronic control.
Seifu was a student then, and was just beginning to shape what would become his signature sound: a fusion of ancient Ethiopian tonalities with the pulse and texture of global electronic music.
Neill was the professor, an emerging artist who had already collaborated with the likes of David Behrman, John Cage and La Monte Young.
Fast forward to 2025, and the conversation that began all those years ago has evolved into Nefasphere. The word nefas, from Amharic means “wind,” “breath,” or “spirit” and it’s an apt metaphor for what the music achieves – a flow of energy that moves through both artists, reshaping itself as it passes.
In the Worldwinds Mix, Neill and Seifu create a kind of ambient exhalation with long, flowing tones and circular patterns that expand and contract like the breath itself. Seifu’s electronic grounding draws from the Ethiopiyawi Electronic movement he helped define. It’s meditative yet propulsive, organic yet digitally alive. Neill’s Mutantrumpet threads through this landscape, with its tones resonating like ancient horns re-imagined for a new era. The effect can be felt with the African rhythmic pulse beneath the Western harmonic drift, and yet the music never settles neatly into either world.
The Moire Mix takes the same thematic DNA and refracts it through a more textural lens. Here, beats glitch and shimmer around deeper bass modulations, suggesting the interference patterns from which the mix takes its name. This version is less meditative and more exploratory – a field recording from some unseen interdimensional borderland between Addis Ababa and New York City.
What makes “Nefasphere” so affecting isn’t just its sound, but its story. This is music born from a relationship – teacher and student, mentor and mentee – that has evolved into genuine creative partnership. In Seifu’s own words, the collaboration marks “a rebirth… a reflection of the power of honest mentorship full of mutual respect and insight.” For Neill, it’s the realization of a long held artistic vision to create living, breathing music systems where structure and improvisation coexist in perfect balance.
Both versions of “Nefasphere” invite deep listening. They resist the quick satisfaction of streaming culture, instead unfolding slowly, like a landscape viewed from above. It’s music that rewards patience, music that is unmoored from trends and yet deeply of this moment.
For Seifu, this marks a luminous return following his acclaimed Zelalem EP (RVNG Intl, 2016). For Neill, it continues a lifelong exploration of evolution in his music, from minimalist composition to digital improvisation, from hardware to human breath.
But for both, “Nefasphere” is more than a collaboration. It is a shared meditation on sound as life force, a reminder that in the meeting of air and electricity, something sacred can still occur.
More About Ben Neill
Composer/performer Ben Neill is the inventor of the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, and is recognized as a musical innovator who “uses a schizophrenic trumpet to create art music for the people” (Wired Magazine). Using interactive computer technologies, Neill generates unique musical and visual experiences that blur the lines between acoustic and electronic music, minimalism, and visual media. Neill has recorded thirteen albums on labels including Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, and his own Blue Math label distributed by AWAL/Sony. His first book, Diffusing Music, was released on Bloomsbury Press in 2024.
More About Mikael Seifu
Mikael Seifu is an Ethiopian electronic music producer committed to “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” – a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa. Born and raised in Addis Ababa, he moved to the US and went on to study music production & the music industry at Ramapo College of New Jersey, a small school about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan. Here Seifu met a mentor in Ben Neill, the composer and music technologist who trained with La Monte Young. Seifu was inspired by Neill to take serious his calling in music. Mikael’s music does not westernize or electronicize extant Ethiopian music. Instead, Seifu uses Ethio-Jazz’s spirit of brewing estranged styles for his own musical tincturing. Seifu’s passion above all else is to create something befitting of its time, yet “eternally Ethiopian.”
Italian composer Marco Di Stefano has been recognized for his ability to blend classical orchestration, folk influences and cinematic scoring into music that feels both epic and deeply human.
His latest project Far Inside takes this skill a step further, pairing his orchestral compositions with striking visual narratives.
The new video for “Tarantella Noire”, a track on the new album, brings together live recording footage from the European Recording Orchestra in Sofia with AI generated cinematic clips, creating a tension between reality and imagination.
Inspired by the events in Palermo in 1992, particularly the murders of judges Falcone and Borsellino, the video balances historical drama with a fictionalized narrative, exploring the shadowy underworld of organized crime through a visual lens.
We spoke with Di Stefano who walks us through the creative decisions behind the video, the process of blending orchestral performance with cinematic storytelling, and how he translated a pivotal moment in history into music and imagery.
1.Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
The track was conceived with a strong cinematic and narrative focus, designed to evoke clear imagery and guide the listener through a story. Consequently, the visualization could not be merely an accompaniment; it had to function as a genuine narrative support.
I chose to merge two core elements: authentic footage from the recording session, which lends credibility and showcases the artistic genesis of the piece, and cinematic clips generated via artificial intelligence.
2. What was the inspiration behind this new video (visuals, storyline etc.)?
The inspiration for both the song and the video is rooted in a fictional narrative set against the real historical context of the events in Palermo in 1992, specifically the dramatic escalation leading to the murders of judges Falcone and Borsellino, who symbolized the fight against organized crime.
For the video, I adopted a visual approach that balances documentary style with a cinematic feel. The majority of the footage features the studio recording session with the European Recording Orchestra in Sofia, which highlights the high production value and orchestral commitment. I integrated short, AI-generated clips depicting an old, abandoned house in the Sicilian mountains, envisioned as a criminal hideout. This duality creates a visual tension that mirrors the historical drama of the story.
3. What was the process of making the video?
The process was guided by the dual objective of maximizing the musical performance and enriching it with an evocative visual context. The primary phase involved the meticulous editing of the recording session footage, selecting and assembling the most effective and dynamic moments of the orchestral execution.
Following this, I made the decision to incorporate the AI-generated clips. This was not merely filler, but a deliberate choice to elevate the video’s atmosphere beyond a simple making-of. The integration of these cinematic elements allowed us to create a richer visual texture, providing an implicit narrative backdrop that supports the epic quality of the music and demonstrates my ability to curate detail and the overall mood of the final product.
Revvnant’s brand new album Death Drive is a record forged from emotional intensity, political awareness and something of an unflinching reflection on the state of the world.
Across its eight full songs and one experimental interlude, the album explores despair and rage as well as moments of fragile hope, pulling the listener into its atmospheric vortex.
Listen here:
The tracks themselves are as diverse as they are visceral with each one carrying a specific narrative. The opener “Death Cult” lashes out at Christian Nationalism with ferocious energy, while “Horror” functions as a call to action against the rise of American fascism.
“Rise” is a meditation on climate despair, pairing mournful piano with swirling Mellotron, Moog synths and hypnotic drum programming. “Alien World” reflects on the disorientation of the Covid pandemic, whereas “Neukölln” captures the tension between depression and wanderlusting euphoria. Songs like “Rusted Hearts” and “Damascus” witness urban poverty, addiction and cycles of extreme violence across the globe, meanwhile the closing track “Into the Grey” channels the awe and terror of mountains into a sprawling and immersive sonic landscape.
The production on this album is a careful balance between an expansive sound and something more inwardly intense. Schutzman recorded and produced the majority of the album in his home studio, layering piano, synthesizers, drum programming and vocals with a meticulous ear.
Guest musicians include guitarists, bassists, drummers and backing vocalists who all add a depth and texture that enhances the album without overshadowing its overall core vision. All vocals were recorded and the album mixed by J. Robbins at Magpie Cage Studio in Baltimore, and mastered by Paul Logus at PLX Mastering.
What makes Death Drive particularly compelling is its texture and the way it combines different influences. From the brooding and dark atmospherics of industrial and doom, the hypnotic pulse of trip hop, and the melodic sensibilities of dream pop all converge. There is an overall tension throughout between glimmers of beauty and hope, with chaos and doom, hope with despair, all mirroring the human impulses it explores.
Schutzman explains:
“The underlying theme of this album is in the title – Human nature’s fundamental drive toward self destruction, as exemplified by our current world.
David Lynch once said he didn’t like making films with only one genre. I’m the same way with my music. I love for a band like Radiohead is equally important to the inspiration I take from Black Sabbath. The power of Paul Simon’s songwriting has shaped me as much as that of Trent Reznor.
I let all of my influences bleed together, consciously and unconsciously, until they stew into something I hope resembles like originality. The sound can make ‘industry’ people scratch their heads, but I don’t care. It’s who I am musically, and can’t do anything to hide it.”
For listeners willing to engage, Death Drive is an immersive and truly thought provoking journey. It’s music that demands attention, reflection and shows Revvnant’s commitment to intensity and artistic integrity.
About Revvnant
Revvnant is the creation of Elias Schutzman, formerly the drummer for The Flying Eyes and Black Lung. Moving beyond percussion, Schutzman embraced analog synthesizers, drum machines, Mellotron, fuzz pedals and lead vocals to create a project that draws inspiration from trip hop, dream pop, industrial and doom.
Although this is primarily his solo vision, Revvnant often expands into a collaborative collective, featuring contributors on guitar, bass, drums, keys and backing vocals. The project’s first show was a sold out support slot for Orville Peck in 2019, followed by appearances at festivals such as Freak Valley Festival, sharing stages with Black Mountain, High On Fire, and Red Fang.
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