Lowfish originally released his 'Burn The Lights Out' LP in 2007 on the US label Satamile but we have found some copies of it in the warehouse. Synth-pop meets breakbeats in an electrifying fusion of emotive melodies and bass-heavy beats across all four sides of the long player with ten then-new tracks and two classics from his Sat.31 EP. They all show that his music, complex yet accessible, evokes images of Blade Runner, Wave Noir, or William Gibson. It is post-modern in approach as it skilfully blends past and present styles to create a sound uniquely his own, seamlessly bridging the gap between eras while pushing the boundaries in his own way.
Altercat proudly presents the definitive reissue of one of the crown jewels of South American jazz. Essentially the brainchild of Argentinian jazz's leading figure Jorge López Ruiz, the project Viejas Raíces marked López Ruiz's departure from the traditional forms of jazz. The trio that recorded this album, consisting of López Ruiz joined by his life-long friend drummer Pocho Lapouble and gifted Chilean pianist Matías Pizarro, created a thrilling blend of jazz and Uruguayan candombe, surrounded by an undeniable cinematic feel spurred by López Ruiz's long experience in the soundtrack field. When read as one element, the cleverly chosen combination of group name and album title (in English: 'Old Roots of the Colonies of the River Plate') readily hints at the kind of sounds the listener will be challenged with when diving into this LP.
Recorded in 1976 in the wake of the "Proceso de Reorganización Nacional", the bloodiest period of dictatorship in Argentina, the album was initially frowned upon by critics and public alike, both still firmly rooted in jazz traditionalism and obviously not ready for the new ideas that musicians like López Ruiz were experimenting with. Despite being a commercial flop upon its release, the album has been enjoying a growing reputation over the last two decades, acclaimed by jazz enthusiasts who value it from a different historical perspective and embrace its experimentation during this revolutionary period of change.
Forty-five years after its release, the album receives the Altercat treatment with a much deserved deluxe reissue, with sound direct from the master tapes and an accompanying 12-page booklet with previously unpublished pictures and bilingual liner notes telling everything you ever wanted to know about the album and those who made it possible.
Three releases deep now, Shadow Play transports us back to the nineties with this extra special collection of music from UK wizard Scott Edward. The Bristolian producer dropped a killer series of tracks from 1993 onwards, using a variety of aliases to explore the realms of the techno universe. It's an honour for Shadow Play to be able to rerelease one of Scott's classics, 'Access Activist', alongside three previously unreleased cuts from the same era. We hope you enjoy these classic examples of British underground techno...On the A-side it's the Scott Edward alias that handles matters, going straight in with the title track 'Access Activist', a mesmerising journey into analogue hyperspace. His flair for composition and arrangement really comes through on this opening track, and leads us nicely into 'All Is Lost', a nifty slice of paranoid techno with a jittery rhythm and a pervasive air of mystery.On the flip Scott's Ultra-Modern Art moniker is at the controls and the change in style is immediately apparent. Gone is the cosmic atmosphere and in its place is a funky, jazzy retro sound. The old equipment gives every sound its authentic identity, which filters through to the final track 'Brave New World' - a jaunty number, which uses acid licks, an optimistic b-line and sweet percussion to provide a delightful end to the project.
Spinning Plates is back for another long overdue release, and this time it comes in the form of a split EP featuring returning artist Andy Rantzen and Laccy with two tracks each. The vinyl only release comes with very special screen-printed silkscreen artwork and is pressed on meaty 180g vinyl for an extra warm and deep sound. Andy Rantzen is a Sydney based artist who appeared on this label's superb second release. The '98%' track from it was used by Sonja Moonear in her Cocoon Mix CD shared with Carl Craig, and Andy is also well-known as part of the duo Itch-E and Scratch-E along with Paul Mac. He assumes that alias here for a remix of 'The Dial'. Laccy aka Pascal Sturmer is a young but talented artist who regularly finds himself behind the decks at cult clubs like Berlin's Club de Visionaire and the Spaced parties in London. A friend of label A&R Bruno Schmidt, he just released on Francesco del Garda's label Timeless, is a real underground head with a bottomless well of knowledge when it comes to cult sounds and scenes and is signed to the top Crisalida agency.
Breakcore attack in the aera ! Dancefloor Trauma ! This is a Toolbox Co-Production. We apologize again to the label for the big delay it tooks to issue this record.
DJ Slip's amazing Discography counts more than 30 releases on well-known lables like Missile, Music Man, Kanzleramt and his own Creation Rebel imprint. His productions are always this little bit different and sets them apart from the rest. Again DJ Slip surprises even those who know. Born and raised in Midwest America he started his music productions with Woody Mc Bride and DBN from Milwaukee. Slip's Homebase is nowadays Brooklyn NY where his Creation Rebel label and the studio are placed too. His brand new album "The Machines Will Know Who You Are" is his first real album and another groundbreaking step that shows his dissimilar sound creations based on electro, techno and instrumental hip hop tunes. The LP contains 12 stories told by the tracks and the guide Slip leads us through the world of strange percussion grooves, post-acid-times, electro bass soundsystems, bangin' techno club memories, chillin' nightflights, Brooklyn and the rough street-life sounds from New York.
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Last delivered 15 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability
Hui Terra. The dreamlike shape of the half-heard word, abstracts with faint impressions of bucolic landscape, or handfuls of translucent and brightly-colored gemstones that hold odd, elusive, asymmetrical form. This enchanting, gently surreal debut album from Alex Cobb's Etelin project explores the power and playfulness of impulsive action diffused through electro-acoustic and ambient sound.
This music was created with digital synthesizers and a sampler in the four months immediately following the birth of his first child, a hazy period marked by a lack of regular sleep and a diet of INA-GRM, Nuno Canavarro's "Plux Quba", and Microstoria's "Init Ding" - records that appeared to produce both stimulating and soothing effects on a newborn's nascent consciousness. Recorded and arranged at all hours, this is an album that reflects on moments of tumult and fragility. Cobb sews small sharpnesses and surprises into its movements to uncover different aspects of each sound source, doubling as hypnic starts cast to advance and variate the narrative in subtle and unexpected ways. Sound and atmosphere manifest in eccentric, alchemical fashion, as though forming in processes of sublimation - solids dissipating into vapor - and deposition - clouds resolving and dropping to the ground in piles - to an obscure and domestic rhythm. There's the purveying sense of moving within the boundaries of small, hermetic ecosystem. This is underscored and doused by a slow, blooming sense of warmth; growing joy without bombast. Even the more startling textures conceal this same truth and emphasis, such as the alien, sour salt-butter electronic babble in "Little Rig", largely sampled from Cobb's son's voice at just a week old. It is emotional music - devoted, affectionate, and playful.
Kaspi & Stride is a new project from Justin Tripp, best known as one half of the Georgia equation. Leanings has its origins in rigorous yet laid back studio sessions, dual personal practice sensibilities that seem to get at Tripp’s creative ethos as well as any descriptors might. The material here was born out of collaborative studio sessions with multi-instrumentalist Jimy Seitang (Conga Square/Stygian Stride) - the “Stride” of K&S. The music from these sessions has been reworked and recontextualized by Tripp to form the eight tracks found on the record. These compositions are heady and diverse, anchored by infectious drum patterns and intricate electronics, capably occupying a somewhat hard to define space between “club ready” and “home listening.”
“Vishing” throbs with a wide-eyed intensity, infused with the type of deceptively rudimentary synth stabs and bass swells that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Hype Williams record. With contributions from Mary Lattimore and Jon Leland, “Kaptoxa” charts a more ethereal, if no less dizzying, course. Indeed, this is an album that navigates dense, tactile passages and airy, celestial planes with aplomb, making a case for Tripp’s prowess as both composer and arranger with equal priority. The most important thing is to keep moving.
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Last delivered 7 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability
Soda Gong presents a razor sharp collection of rigorous and imaginative new music from Moscow-by-way-of-St.Petersburg-based musician and producer Flaty. "Generic TARGZ" places Flaty's precipitously complex drum programming and keen ear for atmosphere and space at the forefront, offering up a dynamic array of techno, ambient, generative footwork, and other tougher to pigeonhole rhythmic experiments. It is a dizzying and cohesive document in which ethereal productions, such as "Praaai" wherein a bewitching vocal pad hovers over delicate, pin-prick percussion, sit comfortably alongside tightly controlled chaos, as with the synapse-knotting "Thread" and heavy-hitting "Horn of Plenty".
Over the past few years, Flaty has released a wealth of diverse and uniformly excellent music under monikers such as AEM Rhythm Cascade, Dada Ques, and Wrong Water. He is most closely associated with the influential GOST ZVUK label, but his work has also appeared on imprints such as 12th Isle, Muscut, and his own ANWO Records. Although Flaty serves as his primary alias, "Generic TARGZ" is only the artist's second full-length under the moniker, following 2016's "New Suggestions", a high-water mark in the impeccable GOST ZVUK catalog. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M. Artwork and design by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.
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Last delivered 6 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability
Under their exael moniker, Berlin-based producer Naemi makes highly imaginative music that can be seen as a study in contrasts - precise, hyper-detailed drum programming sits atop fuzzy, organic pools of ambience, virtuosic futurism is wrung from a falling apart laptop. Following a string of excellent releases, both solo and in group settings, “Flowered Knife Shadows” features eight productions that feel like the full realization of the project, demonstrating the artist’s range and knack for vivid, pressurized productions. From the dextrous, chops-flexing “Koch Metish” to the sanguine “Reality’s Sweetheart,” Naemi’s clarity of vision and instantly recognizable aesthetic are delivered here with remarkable potency. Frost on the window, whispers in the dark.
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Last delivered 5 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability
Motoko & Myers is the collaborative project of Bay Area-based duo Wonja Fairbrother and Daniel Letson. “Colocate” follows their 2018 debut release on the Open Hands Real Flames imprint (Bass Clef), further developing their distinctive style which combines melodic, pop song structures with live improvisation and odd or no-meter approaches to rhythm and timing. It is a collection of bright, addictive listening, full of tracks that manage to feel at once hooky and aleatory, naive and rigorously arranged.
Recorded and assembled sporadically over a period of several years, the album’s idiosyncratic palette was achieved through much technical and methodological eccentricity: “4-handed” collaborative keyboard playing; 12-bit sampling and archaic presets; field recordings of cicadas in Louisville, Kentucky and church bells in Freiburg im Breisgau. The album’s nine tracks exude a homespun quality that is rare to find in contemporary electronic music – hazy, warm, and disarmingly organic.
Soda Gong presents “Support Surfaces,” the new record by Alexi Baris, a musician hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia. Baris’ methods are patient and deceptively rigorous, trading in sonics that are at once organized and organic. Synthetic and acoustic elements are presented in sonorous states of perpetual flux, carefully amalgamated into structures of fertile ambiguity. His is a diligent and painterly approach to sound design and arrangement, in which tiny events are magnified and brought up close, and expansive gestures are repurposed and shifted in scale. There is an abiding quality to these compositions, sounds that have been hung in the air with remarkable restraint and left to float there, defined by texture, tone, and their own entrancing spatiality.
All music by Alexi Baris.
Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M.
Artwork and Design by Alex McCullough.
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Last delivered 4 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability
Australia-based musician Mark Gomes presents the debut full length under his own name for Soda Gong. “Alphane Moods” finds Gomes employing strategies that will be familiar to listeners of his work as Blue Chemise – elegiac, loop-based modes of composition and a predilection for concise etude forms – that manifest here with a strikingly different scope and intent, shifting from expressive abstraction into more conceptual terrain. Over the course of fourteen widescreen tracks, he navigates the gap between nostalgic and futurist sensibilities, concocting elusive, romantic, and sanguine settings that feel both plucked from the past and beamed in from a time still to come. Gomes describes his approach on the record as a “practice of ‘constructed ambience’, deploying sounds and track titles with pop-psychological associations of escape.” The result is a vivid, cinematic album that splits the difference between the worldbuilding retrofuturism of the best vaporwave music and the shadowy, homespun tape vignettes for which Gomes has become well known.
Written and produced by Mark Gomes
Master + cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M
Artwork by Alex McCullough
Atte Elias Kantonen is a composer and sound designer based in Helsinki, Finland. “a path with a name” follows well-received releases on Mappa and Active Listeners Club, and finds Kantonen expanding the scope of his dynamic and idiosyncratic practice. Here, he places his listeners within an auditive diorama, affording them myriad views of the microscopic landscapes contained there within. An oneiric narrative is established from the opening track, in which a heavily treated voice proposes a dialogue and introduces us to the wonders of the soundscape. This speaker appears at various points throughout the record, functioning as guide, confidant, and friend. Those familiar with Kantonen’s prior output will immediately recognize the shapeshifting, 3D timbral constructions presented here, arrangements that are positively overflowing with glimmering, delicate, polyphonic detail. This is a record that invites and welcomes speculation about the nature of the quest that it sets its listeners out upon, with Kantonen offering up trail markings to provide (dis)orientation before turning them loose to explore the soil, moss, and tide pools.
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Last delivered 3 years ago available to reorder, subject to availability