Three New Worlds from EM Records: Takao, aus, and The Worm

The latest vinyl arrivals from Osaka’s EM Records reveal how much wonder can live in small, deliberate gestures.

For more than thirty years, Osaka’s EM Records has quietly built one of the most fascinating catalogs in contemporary music. The label’s taste runs wide — reissues of lost Japanese minimalism, post-punk obscurities, outsider electronics, and newly commissioned works that feel unbound by geography or era. What unites them isn’t genre but intent: an ear for artists who build their own systems, who find new forms in familiar materials.

The label’s newest trio of vinyl releases — Takao’s The End of the Brim, aus’s Eau, and The Worm’s Pantilde — extends that lineage in three directions at once. Takao refines the delicate balance between structure and atmosphere that defined his debut Stealth; aus turns toward resonance and reflection, building music that moves like water; and The Worm, a Cornish performance project by Amy Lawrence, reshapes folk traditions into something theatrical, handmade, and quietly uncanny. Each record stands alone, but together they sketch a portrait of where EM is now: rooted in history, open to drift, allergic to repetition.

All three titles are available for preorder or purchase now in the In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi Shop, alongside a selection of other EM Records favorites. Retailers can email us directly for pricing and availability.

Takao — The End of the Brim

When Takao’s Stealth appeared in 2018, it felt like a transmission caught mid-fade: weightless, secretive, impossible to locate. His follow-up, The End of the Brim, feels like stepping into the light that record withheld. Co-produced with DJ eminemsaiko, it replaces ambient drift with a shifting lattice of structured rhythm.

Takao’s melodies graze the skin like nettles, tender and a little electric and guided by years of piano study with Ichiko Hashimoto of Colored Music. “Mar” suggests both Susumu Yokota’s delicate instrumental pieces and Eiko Ishibashi’s propellant score for Drive My Car. Voices roll in and recede like passing clouds — Cristel Bere, Yumea Horiike, Atsuo Fujimoto — each leaving a trace of mood behind. On ‘Main Theme,’ Fujimoto’s vocals could score the opening of a 1970s action film: headlights through mist, a low engine hum, his voice rough and commanding beneath the titles.

Beneath their presence lies Takao’s fascination with the “non-absolute” — music that refuses the glare of statement or genre but lives in the liminal spaces between. Recorded with vintage synths and mixed by Haruomi Hosono collaborator Hiroshi Haraguchi, it sounds luminous and unsettled, a grand pop album that never quite behaves like one. For all its intricacy, The End of the Brim is easy company — uncomplicatedly beautiful.

aus — Eau

Tokyo composer Yasuhiko Fukuzono, known as aus, has long made music that listens inward. His 2023 album Everis grew out of loss — a burglary by another producer that erased years of recordings — and carried the hush of someone rebuilding from memory.

With Eau, a forthcoming collaboration between EM Records and his own FLAU imprint, Fukuzono turns that sense of renewal toward water itself: motion, reflection, and the shimmer of things half-remembered. The record centers on the koto, played by Eden Okuno, its strings resonating like ripples across glass. Around it, Fukuzono shapes air and circuitry into something both fluid and exacting, breathing like ambient music, but never sitting still.

The Worm — Pantilde

On Pantilde, Cornish artist Lawrence — who performs as The Worm — builds a world that feels found, not invented. The Worm is an avant-folk project rooted in the stories of a fictional, time-traveling character, a vessel through which Lawrence explores performance, storytelling, and identity. They call Pantilde “a piece of performance that’s been documented in the form of an album,” and the phrase fits: each song feels like an artifact from an imagined Celtic village, humming with its own folklore and weather.

In an interview with Retrofuturista, Lawrence traced The Worm’s beginnings to prop-making, where the clang of metal first drew them toward sound. From there came clowning, costuming, and early opera — disciplines that taught them, as they put it, “it was more important for the story to be told than for the music to sound good.” That conviction shapes Pantilde, whose handmade performances merge music, costume, and spoken word into a kind of abstract roots ritual. Its songs, played on harp, cello, recorders, and percussion, document that live, theatrical energy in raw, intuitive form.

Lawrence admits, “I may be drawn to the past because I don’t fit very well in the present day, but I know I wouldn’t fit there either.” The music seems to exist in that in-between—homespun, haunted, and deeply human—a pastoral hallucination where even silence feels inhabited, as if the land itself were breathing back.

All three albums — Takao’s The End of the Brim, aus’s Eau, and The Worm’s Pantilde — are available now for preorder or purchase through the In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi Shop. Retailers can email us directly for pricing and wholesale information.