quête:2 am
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"Transitional Being reveals another side of XVARR’s production palette — characteristically tranceinducing, this release highlights the transformational potential of dance music.
Spanning the last ten years, these six tracks handpicked by Aural Medium align with a particular relationship to technology that has formed the central pillar to the XVARR studio set up. Often starting with a drum pattern and sequenced bass-line, the physical rhythm is stripped out and surrounding elements are drawn out and manipulated to convey the ‘hidden’ intention behind the track. With the tracks compiled here, he lets the rhythms ride. The influence of more ‘club-orientated’ music has remained firmly embedded in XVARR’s psyche, although typically the trip has been more introverted. The approach here may differ from other XVARR outputs, but the mood most definitely remains the same, with an overarching desire to channel emotion and passion from the other side of nowhere.
XVARR recognizes the parallels between the ritualistic dance of the Witches’ Sabbath and a dark room filled with sweat, smoke, and sound. It is in this parallel void of transcendent possibilities that tracks such as “Running out of Time”, “The Crooked Path” (a nod to Andrew Chumbley) and “Universal” reside. There’s also a subtle presence of influences from Industrial music, with groups such as SPK, Conrad Schnitzler, Chris Carter and Cabaret Voltaire paving the way for XVARR’s early experiments with electronic music. The alchemical results on this EP float in a universe populated by such luminaries as AFX, Drexciya, and the constellation created by Chain Reaction, within a cosmos governed by the gravitational pull of Baldelli and Weatherall."
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Repress !
Where We're Calling From
The Liminal Zone: Reflections on Duval Timothy’s Sen Am
Lamin Fofana
Sen Am is an enduring and tender album, rich and beguiling and generous in a quiet way. Over the last few years, I find myself returning to it, listening and absorbing, reflecting on the voices and working through the multiple layers of feelings and themes it announces with confidence and equanimity. Notions of care and contradiction, expressions of joy and desire and the underlying feeling of unease and turmoil; there is an urgent appeal to the listener for generosity, to strengthen our capacity to hear multiple voices simultaneously, to exist in multiple places at once.
Duval Timothy’s music was dropped into our world from another realm sometime in the spring of 2017. We received the call and we answered it. The rhythm and spirit was transmitted via London’s NTS Radio on the Do!! You!!! Breakfast Show with Charlie Bones and a short while later we were listening to the first vinyl edition of Sen Am in our living room in Berlin. The record got a lot of plays (at home and at some shows, before and after performances). It was like sunlight filtering through a cracked window and remaining there for a moment, dancing. Blue music emanating from a liminal zone, an in-between space, somewhere on the outskirts of Freetown, or rural Sierra Leone, or the outer edges of South London, or Bath, UK, or some undisclosed orbit, unfixed location. The music is soaked in diasporic experiences. It refuses to settle but still invites us to enter and stay awhile in that zone, where multiple forms exist (all) together with jazz, hip-hop, various strands of expressive electronics and experimental music all breathing together and moving around. It is a portal to a place of possibilities, a space for building and repairing possible and lost connections. But life in that liminal zone is precarious; it is life under duress; under pressure – not merely the pressure to produce a presentable, categorizable, and salable body of work, but the pressure that compels us to experiment and create new concepts and things that will help us imagine a different existence, a way out of the turbulence.
Freetown is a marvellous and sometimes sad place. It is one of those unmistakable locations inscribed diasporic memory; a place that touches you, a place that holds you and demands you bear witness: witness to pain, poverty, joy and desire. You remember the voices and the eyes of people even in momentary encounters. In Sen Am, you hear not only Duval’s recollections and sounds of Freetown, you hear family and friendship, people coming together and forming bonds, creating surrogate families. Forging community wherever you go is a practice, and community is at the core of this music. It’s in all the voices, from Emmerson and 6pac to Aminata and Aruna. It opens up a space for Black voices, for Sierra Leonean voices, and those voices extend through the succeeding projects, the 2 Sim EP and the album Help, and all that radiates from Duval’s Carrying Colour imprint.
Thank you for the invitation to write about the album Sen Am, on the occasion of its re-release which also coincides with the release of the exquisite double 7” Smɔl Smɔl with cktrl — a wonderful piece which calls on the listener to play both records at the same time to hear the music or play them separately and hear different versions. Duval is strengthening us, encouraging us to feel comfortable with discomfort, with incompleteness, with the hard-to-understand. This is a beautiful thing.
Red Vinyl
The Berlin-based Techno producer I Am Bam brings four tracks to the table on his inaugural label release. Leading with "Queen", "Trezor", "Ko55ke5", and "Owie", all high energy dancefloor killer tracks paired with catchy classical arpeggios and drums.
His track entitled Queen witnesses Bam's unmistakable sound, with a deep 90's vibe and catchy vocals.
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ntroducing a joint label Buena Gente Recordings (BG-01) and Sheweytrax (shew-33) connection! Side A - BUENA GENTE side featuring new Los Angeles producer, IVAN AM, with two DJ friendly cuts - "Exceed" a straight up tech-funky cut leading to 2nd track "Mourning Rain" perfect for rolling into the mornings. SideB - SHEWEYTRAX side features two by DELICATE INSTRUMENTS - a remastered version of tripped out "High Life" and last cut goes deep with "Turnaway" previously only available digitally. Solid beat focused 12" for the floors! Limited edition vinyl!
Inspired from Romanian cultural heritage, be it film, dance or musical instruments, Folclor Abstract is a glance back to the roots in search of a meaningful future.
The first track is inspired from the soundtrack composed by Cornelia Tăutu for the Romanian historical adventure film “Buzduganul cu trei peceți” (1977). The film presents a politicized version of the events that led in 1600 to the unification of the three Romanian countries, in the aftermath of a victorious battle against the Ottoman invasion (Călugăreni, 1595). Dance your way through as the story unfolds.
Dans cu balans is the result of a personal fascination for the cimbalom, an instrument of high versatility, frequently used in the Romanian fiddle music. In contrast to orchestral performances, which adhere to the composer’s notes to reproduce a work faithfully, fiddling is also open to improvisation and tends to produce rhythms that focus on dancing, with associated quick note changes.
Searching for inspiration within Romanian folklore, I found Ivan Braga who was on his own pursuit of cultural heritage, experimenting with a variety of traditional instruments and rhythms from different regions of the country. Doba lu’ Braga is Ivan’s modern take on Romanian drum patterns performed on a traditional Moldavian drum (dobă) with an uplifting twist and arrangement for the dancefloor experience.
Reverie is an expression of the creator’s state of mind. Lost in thought, stolen by imagination, haunted by memories, liberated by dreams
Limited edition audiophile pressing of American actor and singer Robert Mitchum’s 1957 LP ‘Calypso - Is Like So!’ on 180g premium vinyl, plus 8 bonus tracks.
“More hip than Don Johnson’s Heartbeat, not as camp as William Shatner’s
The Transformed Man, and equally as kitsch as, well, most everything else from the ‘50s, Robert Mitchum’s Calypso - Is Like So will win you over.” - Matt Collar, AllMusic
Calypso fever started in America in 1957 following the huge success of Harry Belafonte’s chart-topping singles and albums for RCA. Although some dared to announce, “rock & roll is dead - long live calypso,” the craze soon passed. Not soon enough, however, to stop Hollywood actor Robert Mitcham from recording this, his first LP.
2 track Single from Chosen Few released by Crystal/Dub Store Records
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Limited edition 12” LP - 180 gram silver marble vinyl. In response to a
world struggling with disruption and discord, Tony Tixier has instinctively turned towards his music as a way to re-establish the sundered
connections of everyday existence.
‘I Am Human’, a series of remotely records duets - available only on limitededition vinyl - was created when he returned from a sell-out US tour to find himself locked down in his Paris apartment.
An escape route appeared out of a happy combination of chances: a loan of a new piano from Yamaha and an encounter with a neighbour, David Freiss, who turned out to be an expert sound engineer. Tixier conceived a plan to spontaneously record a series of pieces, all in one take, and then send them out across the world to a chosen band of his closest musical accomplices - Scott Tixier, Hermon Mehari, Ben Leifer, Logan Richardson and Adrien Soleiman - musicians with whom he felt so closely in tune that the enforced separation of time and space could be overcome - and invited them to overdub a response to create a series of virtual duet recordings “Each track is dedicated to a friend, someone I feel close to - I sent them the track in the morning, and by the afternoon I had the track back with their parts.”
Each side of the vinyl release is opened with a performance of an original solo piece by Tixier, both recorded back to back. ‘Leaking Life’ is a meditation on the passing of time and a call to action to make the most of every day. ‘Humain’ is an expression of his own identity “A presentation of myself - I don’t see myself as mixed race - I am 100% black, 100% white, 100% human.”
Tixier has travelled the world with the likes of Christian Scott and Keyon Harrold and performed for audiences across four continents, but this is his most personal, direct work to date. Reaching out across the world, sustained by a network of friends, he has delivered a statement for our times that transcends the limitations of remote recording with the sheer force of its emotional connection. Personnel: Tony Tixier (piano), Scott Tixier (violin), Hermon Mehari
(trumpet), Ben Leifer (double bass), Logan Richardson (alto saxophone), Adrien
Soleiman (tenor saxophone)
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Unique composer duo Rebekka Karijord & Jon Ekstrand create compelling, hybrid score to intimate portrait of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg `I Am Greta', the intimate Hulu documentary by Swedish director Nathan Gross-man, tells the story of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg through compel-ling, never-before-seen-footage. Starting with her one-person school strike for cli-mate action outside the Swedish Parliament, Grossman follows Greta in her rise to prominence. The film culminates with the extraordinary wind-powered voyage across the Atlantic to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. To musically accompany Greta and the children of the Fridays for Future movement on their journey, composers Rebekka Karijord and Jon Ekstrand spent time searching for the right balance when it comes to how much emotional triggers the music should of-fer: "With the music for `I Am Greta' we aimed to find a sonic counterpoint to the friction between the shy, contemplative inner world of Greta, and the unbounded ener-gy of the natural world and climate change movement. From the start we found it useful to separate the score into three distinct voices: Greta's Voice, the voice of the natural world, and the voice of the climate change movement." "We choose to work with repetition and persistent musical patterns, often illustrated through energetic string arpeggios. This we felt helped underline the remarkable persistence and focus of Greta has on the climate issue, as well as that of the re-lentlessness of nature. Then we found a few places throughout the score, where more melodic aspects could be introduced and carry the story through its dramaturgical journey. It allowed the melodic aspects to shine through when they are introduced." "The score consists of a string octet, modular synthesisers and a voice instrument built by Rebekka of 25 unique singers sampled in their full range. Our soloist on the soundtrack is the cellist Linnea Olsson, whom has a very specific airy and organ-ic tone." "Rebekka and Jon's dynamic score to `I Am Greta' is huge and intimate, uplifting and melancholic, and manages to carry the emotional nuance of Greta's story. The score forms a musical parallel to Greta's journey and narrative voice throughout the film. It's energy, urgency and emotional depth reminds us that the time for climate action is now." - Nathan Grossman, director of `I Am Greta'
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As we continue our ever long winded hiatus from the dancefloor, we are happy to welcome a new group of producers to the label in the form of 00:AM’s fourth various artists compilation. Certainly not the only way we expected to come together this year, but we’re grateful to be able to cultivate another 12” to share with the world.
Across the A Side, we are joined by three artists who we’ve had the pleasure of hosting and playing with in Montreal over the past couple years. Alfredo92 of the Axces crew in Copenhagen presents ‘Tente Hjul’ which gets the remix treatment from Mr. ACTION SHADOW himself, Fett Burger. The result in something distinctly mechanical but not without a human pulse and a tear jerking conclusion. Fantastic Man then puts his own psychedelic twist on the hardcore continuum, taking the beautiful palette of his recent LP on Mule Musiq to the brink of insanity with ‘On Tha Run’.
On the B side we find two new friends to 00:AM. We have a mandatory “minimum of 1 ESB tune gets played a night” policy round these parts, and so its truly a pleasure to release his ‘Sequential Dub’. Nothing less than a future classic, it’s dubby and understated, but a little quicker than you think. And finally, its a pleasure to introduce 2wo2imes, who delivers ‘Immune’ a deep and driving excursion into the wormhole.
It’s a weird world, we miss you all, but we’ll keep doing what we know best, releasing and enjoying the music that moves us - no matter the time or place.
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Unclassifiable percussionist and producer Chiminyo will be releasing his long-awaited debut album “I Am Panda” via London tastemaker label Gearbox Records on the 25th of September. The ten-track album is a foray into unexplored sonic territory, featuring a host of diverse guest musicians from London’s burgeoning music scene. Chiminyo's music may be rooted in the London jazz scene, but his music is transcendent of anything that could be defined as such. Whilst his joint use of analogue and digital technology meaningfully honours the manic city lights of London’s bustling scene, it remains ever-changing crossing over into hip-hop, future pop, experimental electronic and global spheres. Chiminyo's tech-heavy drum kit set-up, combines the raw, immediate live sound of percussion and the futuristic timbres of his electronic productions to create his own, daring soundscapes. Via laboriously self-coded software, each cymbal crash and drum hit triggers a synth or sample, allowing Chiminyo complete control and freeing him of all loops, click-tracks and backing tracks.However, it is important to note that Chiminyo's music is far more than just a technical feat. Whilst still highly innovative in it's composition, "I AM PANDA" is purely the result of a deep and tireless exploration of the music that Chiminyo truly resonates with to create a soulful, spiritual, and evocative record that feeds off the conflicting duality between technology and nature. Composed and arranged by Chiminyo and recorded at Konk Studios by Ricardo Damian (Jorja Smith, Sampha, Binker & Moses), the new album also features a host of talented guests including Kweku Sackey aka K.O.G, singer Dunja Botic, and spoken word artist Brother Portrait of Steam Down fame. The new album follows on from Chiminyo's 2019 debut EP "I Am Chiminyo", which served as a visceral introduction to his unique sound, and earned plaudits from the likes of Gilles Peterson, BBC 1Xtra, CLASH, Red Bull, Jazzwise, Jazz FM and more. As well as his own solo project, Chiminyo also performs and records with some of the leading figures of London’s music scene, including spiritual jazz-leaning outfit Maisha and psychedelic energy bomb Cykada. He has also previously collaborated and recorded with Gary Bartz, Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Theon Cross, and Zara McFarlane.
"An amazing dub infused reimagination by buzzy Brooklyn duo Overcoats, of the Local Natives hit single When Am I Gonna Lose You. This version of When Am I Gonna Lose You has never been released physically
Local Natives have released a new version of “When Am I Gonna Lose You” back in December, with the touches of Brooklyn duo Overcoats. The original single is off of Local Natives’ latest album, Violet Street. “We loved singing this song and the more we sat with the lyrics and layered the harmonies, the more powerful the words became for us. It’s a beautiful song and we were really excited to be part of a reimagined version. “It’s hard to have perspective on songs you’ve spent so long with and are so close to, so having an amazing group like Overcoats reimagine one feels like a gift. We’re honoured that they created their own version of When Am I Gonna Lose You, they did a great job, especially with their beautiful vocals.”"
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Demon Records presents three new reissues from the cool ruler of Reggae, Gregory Isaacs.
Often described as the ‘ultimate rude boy Reggae star’, Gregory Isaacs recorded some of the greatest Reggae albums of all time and became known for his iconic, laidback vocal style.
‘I Am Gregory’ was first released in 1993 on Jet Star’s Charm label and was co-produced with Gregory’s wife June. Highlights include ‘Goosie Gander’, ‘Mommy Doesn’t Understand’ and a cover of Bob Marley’s ‘I Am Still Waiting’.
Demon Records is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of ‘Work Up A Sweat’, pressed on 140g black vinyl and featuring a printed inner sleeve.
Hey Existeers!
The new Pudel Produkte release has arrived!
This time, it’s more like a record for yellow press readers – due to the high celebrity density on the two tracks! First, there’s Richard Fearless. The guy has been on the “Mission Impossible” soundtrack and he was famous in New York and London as DEATH IN VEGAS. He composed the music on this record and recorded it together with the slackers of Circuit Diagram, which is why the project was aptly named DEATH CIRCUIT. That’s logical, that’s correct, excellent!
One track of theirs is called “Strom Dub”, and the full length of it has been pressed onto the A-Side of the record. It sounds like Synthesizer music usually sounds: Sexy and warm and cold. The tears of technology dripping onto your head for eight and a half minutes while the spirit of the 80s sneaks in through the back door.
Like the B-Side, this track is a grower, a slow creeper you’ll want to hear again and again. Ac-cording to science, this is just what the people need in these days of unhealthy acceleration. And yes, the B-Side: There’s the track “Teeparty am Waldbrand” which translates to “Tea Party at the Forest Fire”, and it features the fat-mouthed DAS BO and RALF KÖSTER. Trust us, it’s just as hard for native speakers to decipher what they’re saying, but we were assured there’s even a “political dimension” to the track, so I guess we’ll have to listen again. Soundwise it’s a beautifully clut-tered mess, a cold wave sprinkled with bizarre brittle that lures you out into nature.
Ah yes, Pudel Produkte – it’s still minority music from the planet of the apes for people that know where to go, and that is elsewhere than the others.
Interstellar digital dancehall with stunning synth, superb vocal by Robert Ffrench in extended mix & mad style by obscure DJ Shortie Ranks. Recorded at Creative Sound Studio (Kingston, JA) in 1985.
"On “I Am Wondering” – a lovers of sorts – Ffrench is Dennis Brown in the high notes, and Gregory Isaacs in the song`s playboy sentiments. A guitar gently wah-wahs, while the synths do a giddy glissando. Midway through this discomix the bass becomes boss – throwing everything else – chopped piano chords and all – into echo. Then it`s rewind for the DJ cut – a brag and boast toast from Shortie Ranks – recounting his triumphs at legendary Kingston reggae venue, Skateland”. (Ban Ban Ton Ton - April, 21 of 2020) Robert French grew up in central Kingston and attended Kingston College. He recorded his first singles in 1979, at the age of 17. He achieved success in 1984 with his performances at the Festival Song Contest and the Reggae Sunsplash festival. He had a combination hit with deejay Clement Irie with "Bun & Cheese", and his first two albums were released in 1985. He had another hit in 1989 with "Modern Girl", a collaboration with
Courtney Melody. In the mid-1990s he relocated to New York City, where he teamed up with rapper Heavy D, with whom he had a hit with "More Love", with an album following on Ras Records, featuring collaboration with several artists including Lady G and General Degree. He has since returned to Jamaica, where he runs the
Ffrench record label and distribution company. He released the album Yesterday and Today in 2001, collecting many of his earlier singles. After a period of inactivity as a recording artist, he returned in 2009 with the single "I Do". As a producer he has worked with artists such as Dennis Brown, Buju Banton (he produced Buju's first single
"Ruler" on Stamina riddim), Beres Hammond, George Nooks, Luciano, Jah Cure, Yami Bolo and Sizzla to name a few. Robert French was the cosin of the late great Pat Kelly. As a french label, big fan from Ffrench productions, i'm very proud and happy to start a collaboration with Robert Ffrench, the most french jamaican. Stay tuned for many many more.
