Buscar:c case

With MEL011, it is Melodies International's immense pleasure to direct their focus towards both Soul and House royalty, selecting and reissuing two of Frankie Knuckles' scarcer remixes of an all-time classic: Womack & Womack - MPB (Missin' Persons Bureau). Now known as Zekkariyas and Zeriiya, partners Cecil and Linda Womack, two eminent members in an extensive lineage of music artistry (i.e. Bobby Womack was Zekkariyas' brother, Zeriiya is Sam Cooke's daughter) engaged in one of music history's most successful and exciting singing and song writing partnerships in the early 1980s. Zeriiya says her process with Zekkariyas flowed like water, their shared complicity and talent led them to write and produce strings of chart topping hits and classic albums as Womack & Womack but also for other renowned artists of the time such as Patti Labelle, Teddy Pendergrass and the O'Jays to only name a few. The original version of Missin' Persons Bureau was first released in 1988 on 'Conscience' (Island Records), a classic album with impeccable instrumentation and thoughtful and relatable narratives that reflect on the nature of life, true friendship, love or in the case of MPB, it's subsequent loss. Following the release of the LP, Island records founder Chris Blackwell introduced the idea of getting Missin' Persons Bureau reworked by House legend Frankie Knuckles and whilst the Womacks weren't originally set on the idea of having their songs remixed by other artists, Blackwell, who Zeriiya describes as a 'record label manager seriously involved in making sure the project is what the creators really want it to be", had earned their trust. With these remixes, Frankie managed to turn a radio hit into underground club classics. The Paradise Ballroom mix conserves the essence of the original, reinterpreting the rhythm section whilst drawing it out over 8 minutes, with expert tension building and release clearly aimed at the dance floor.

in we go... the title track is lifted from the great 'Visions from Limbus' casette (2015), while Kraut pleaser, 'Welson', and the ultra doomy Etranglé Par Tes Limbes are more recent creations to flow from Ernesto González's psychadelic fingers....

comment to come

2 banging tunes... loud sounders... Banging and progressive, with a pinch of acid and discret pumpin effect... Trippy tunes excellent in the mix !!! Must have, once again !

165 to 180 BPM Hardfloor Dancefloor acid sound. Thick Kick !

"The kind of melancholia I'm talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire, but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time." (Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life, Zero Books 2014, p. 24) In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures', the author Mark Fisher outlines - to put it in a big way - a resistant melancholy. This stands in contrast to leftist melancholy resignation', as well as something which Fisher does not talk about: its common masculine counterpart, habitual post-left cynicism - as in seen it all before'. Fisher calls this hauntological melancholy. Haunting, spooks, ghosts and apparitions are an almost constant presence on I Started Wearing Black', the second album by the Cologne-based artist Sonae (pronounced so-nah'). The term hauntology shares a fate with retro-futurism when it comes to inflationary overuse and abuse. It's a conceptual container that looks good and can hold a lot, indeed, too much. Furthermore, hauntology has its peak season behind it, a term on the threshold of its expiration date. Nevertheless, I would like to rehabilitate hauntology and use it properly to characterize I Started Wearing Black', because the term is rarely as compelling to describe music as is the case here. The most recent other example could be Asiatisch' by Fatma Al Qadiri, but with a completely different frame of reference. What are the ghosts of this music It rustles, crackles, ruffles, crunches, rattles, scrapes, sometimes a beat emerges from the constant noise, sometimes an obscure voice mumbles incomprehensibly, sometimes a melancholy piano figure is prevented by this noise from coming too much to the foreground. It definitely is eerie - to bring into play another term used by Fisher in the title of his latest book, The Weird and the Eerie'. In British pop-jargon, eerie first occurred to me more often when referring to particularly leftfield, spooky and... well... ghostly dub, a bass-heavy, echoing noise, from Augustus Pablo to Creation Rebel to Burial. Unlike the Wald & Wagner records by Wolfgang Voigt, Sonae is not a kind of neo-romantic veiling with a tendency for escapist nebula. It is more a noise of latency. The noise signals a latent - not necessarily acute - threat, a latent uneasiness about... yes... about what About a System Immanent Value Defect' That's the name of a track on I Started Wearing Black' where something that sounds like a French Horn (or a foghorn) battles for attention through or against the background noise. An email from Sonae: The piece 'System Immanent Value Defect' should actually be called 'I See Turkey'. I wrote it for my fellow student Elif - she is a pianist and Gezi Park activist from Istanbul. Through her I witnessed the inner conflict and agitation that political circumstances can create: her feelings of guilt when there was an attack, with her safe in Germany as a student, watching the events from afar. It was horrible. When her mother begged her not to come home because she feared for her safety, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. I started with the piece from this mood, beginning with the piano, then the noise (modulated sinusoidal curves), which reminded me of waves and the then heatedly discussed Mediterranean sea: atmospheric, melancholy motifs. In contrast is the anger, the pressure, represented in corresponding sounds - hopefully audible! - During this time I started to think about world views as they can be found around the globe, in how far they held by societies and their political representation. I realized that I know of no political system that is actually about the people and what would do them good. It's always about positions, power, money. I thought that was a lot more frightening on a global scale than merely viewing Turkey in isolation. That's why the piece is called "System Immanent Value Defect", because our world suffers from precisely that. Everywhere, it's all about the wrong things.' Between the wrong things there are happy moments. In the title track, after 184 seconds of rattling and hissing, a beat is unleashed, like an arrow released from a spanned bow, a beatific relief, if there is such a thing. White Trash Rouge Noir' first meanders along spookily, then after 144 seconds it transforms itself into a distant cousin of Einstu¨rzende Neubauten's Yu¨ Gung', but there is no Big Male Ego to be fed here, and the black in the album title is a completely different type of black from that of the Neubauten. Furthermore, I Started Wearing Black' was finished long before the black dresses were worn at the Golden Globes as a sign of protest against sexual violence. Sonae writes that she herself started wearing black some time ago. Her reasons are so-called personal ones: ... resulting from an individual situation (lovesickness), I started to wear black (gaining weight and feeling ugly).' The political dimension of gaining weight, feeling ugly and therefore dressing in black in I Started Wearing Black' lurks within the noise and never becomes explicit and only rarely manifest - or a manifesto. Sonae writes about the track We Are Here': A piece for minorities... in this case, considering the current pop-feminist discourse, explicitly for women. Female artists have long been saying loud and clear that 'we are here' and 'electronic music is not a boys club!' But this pop-feminist moment should only be seen as one part of the dedication of the piece. It is for minorities, for the oppressed, who didn't belong enough.'

Klaus Walter

French label Bright Sounds welcomes prolific Dutch artist Boris Bunnik for a new EP under his most celebrated alias, Conforce. The regular Delsin artist saves this project for his more dance floor driven work and that is the case across all four of the atmospheric tracks here.

'Virtue Signalling' is slick techno that mixes up sci-fi sounds with cavernous dub pads. It's cerebral and cinematic as well as being driven by the rubbery drums. 'Black Mesa' is darker, with a meaning synth line coming in spurts over punchy, broken drums. It's grand in architecture but still has plenty of rich sonic details. On the flipside, 'Compulsion' is more watery, with little life forms suspended in a backlit ocean above slippery drums, then 'Alka' is another underwater affair, with beams of light penetrating from above as a dubbed out groove undulates way down deep. Once again then here, Conforce marries form with function in exquisite ways.

Better Sound 01 comes straight from Chicago producer K-rAd (Chris Grabowski). 3 beautiful tracks, very special EP. Vinyl only! Expect more in the future.

Lossless' first offering in 2018 comes courtesy of co-founder Mathias Schober. With his 'Continuing EP' Mathias' definitely continues what he has started with his recent 'Certanities EP' on Optimo Trax. The EP is a true reflection of Mathias' constant approach to push the boundaries and merge his influences to draw a coherent painting. In this case the drawing is consisting of three truly unique tracks.

Alien Ensemble's trombone man Mathias Goetz caused quite a splash when he released his eponymous debut LP under his Le Millipede moniker back in 2015: The multi-instrumentalist's initial offering was clearly something else, impossible to grasp, a musical vessel beyond genre, beyond style or era, seemingly beyond space and time even, a vessel that carried an almost cosmic kind of song-craft - music with no fixed stamp of origin, though it did somehow feel like an Alien Transistor release. Followed by remix album Mirror Mirror, which comprised reworks by 1115, Protein, LeRoy, Olaf Opal, and Saroos, to name a few, it's now time for album #2: The Sun Has No Money.Let's face it: There's nothing as majestic as the sun. At least not in our world. If it runs out of juice one day, it's game over: The End. Light's out. For everyone. At that point, it wouldn't even matter if you're rich or poor. We're all equal under the sun. Same level. And yeah, this might not be major news, but then again... we're talking about the sun. The sun! Guess it's about time to acknowledge its power and superiority, right In fact, you can feel it on your bicycle: pedaling at night, when it's on duty in other hemispheres, and you're working hard at the dynamo, sweating, you can actually feel how powerful it is. In the end you get off the bike all recharged, a tune on your lips - and somehow feeling like a miniature version of the sun yourself. And whenever you feel like that, that's exactly the right moment to grab a melodica and get to work.Following an initial warm-up round sans electricity, this new album soon begins to glow: Mathias Goetz aka Le Millipede doesn't need pedals, he boosts circulation by single-handedly* playing tons and tons of different instruments - it actually feels like thousands, easily. And thus begins a show that has countless levels to it: There are various sonic illusions... and yet Le Millipede doesn't hide anything: He's also willing to show the inner workings, the actual recording process and everything else. In short: he goes meta. Makes songs about making songs. That's right: why not use all these beautiful means to address the issue of money It's not the sun that casts shadows, all it does is recharge, fuel: growth & thriving, that's the sun's area of responsibility. And yet there came a man whose plan was simple: steal the fruit from your garden, only to sell it right back to you, for money. We can hear the sea gulls crying in the distance, as somebody is throwing breadcrumbs up into the wind that carries their voices...It's not the sun that casts shadows - all it does is radiate light. And yet there came a time when someone blocked those rays of light. Now if you're some kind of Diogenes, you'll simply say, Move at least a little out of the sun.' But if you're a teacher, you'll maybe light up your pipe and use that to lighten up. What matters is that the percussion parts, in this case, resemble some serious musique concréte. The sun doesn't know shadows - all it knows, is itself. And yet somebody entered the picture and built an entire city. A city full of streets, so that houses can cast shadows into these avenues. Plus, there's music in the streets, music originally written inside the walls of said houses.One of those streets is known as the Tin Pan Alley: a place that got its name from a music writer who compared the sound of so many pianos to the banging of tin pans. That sound: that's one side of the road that is this album. Some of these melodies appear to be shadows of earlier tunes, dating back to, say, 1898 or even before that, melodies that were first registered in the Tin Pan Alley publishers' offices back in 1912 or 1917. We actually get to see this Alley at that point in time. We see the ropes, the workings. How things come together, the actual act of creation. Suddenly, we can hear the shadows!
Okay, so one side of this street is America. The US of A. The opposite side: Russia. And smack dab in the middle: Europe. A pothole in the center. All the back-and-forth that occurs between these two poles ultimately depends on the movement of the sun. Night and day, taking turns, commuting in and out of sight. We get to meet Prokofiew's and Scriabin's ghost, among other spirits, reframed and published by Le Millipede's own imaginary label imprint on the historic Tin Pan Alley. Indeed there are moments on this album when Le Millipede seems to be playing Scriabin's clavier a` lumie`res (tastiera per luce), when his performance seems to be based on synesthesia, a wild cross-pollination of colors and sounds. In case you didn't know this: In the States, Prokofiew goes by the name Brian Wilson, and Scriabin's also known as Sun Ra - yet another guy who's usually broke, but gets to spend a lot of time out in the sun. Together, these assorted protagonists ask the people of the Antilles for Mutabor dance-tokens and send postcards to Moondog in Germany, right back into the darkness. On the postcards you can see people dancing the Biguine...Firing foreign fossil fuels from all pipes (Brennelementsteuer!), Le Millipede controls the very center of this hustle and bustle: going as far as to employ some southern Chopped & Screwed styles, he's 100% current and zeitgeisty! Houston, we've got a problem: there's some kind of myriapod, centi- or millipede on the loose! Well, give me another sip of lean, sizzurp, dirty Sprite, and on goes the journey in the Pullman coach. Let's follow the sun! Keep on moving, keep things motorik! Here comes the Trans-Eureka-Express. Cherish the backpacking days! A piercing rhapsody of sound (bohrende Rhapsodie), we'll remember them fondly! And thus things move on, the sun, the days, the earth: rise, set, action, round and round... onwards eternally. The sun: the biggest loop known to mankind. As if it was some kind of sonic Rube Goldberg contraption, time seems to be stretching out while listening to that hmmm. After all: time is a lot (a lot!) more than just money. And yeah, the sun is the real big shot on (or rather: above) Planet Earth. Le Millipede's live line-up also includes Markus & Micha Acher (The Notwist etc.), Nico Sierig (Joasihno), and Manuela Rzytki (G. Rag & die Landlergschwister, Kamerakino etc.).
*sole exception: Evi Keglmaier (Zwirbeldirn, Hochzeitskapelle) plays the viola. Words/sun worship: Pico Be

It's the big 5! Berlin - Frankfurt based label House Is OK is celebrating its five-year long presence and has decided to mark that period with something special Label's story started with a sticker Homeboy printed in his former hometown, Zagreb, saying House Is OK'. Catchy, right It became an underground slogan of the local scene. It didn't take long for people to embrace the idea stating that it's OK to be into melodic, fresh, groovy yet, at times, a bit awkward dance music.
Just around the same time Homeboy's Frankfurt based bro's Oliver Achatz and Janis played with the idea of starting a record label. Guess what the logical choice for the name was
Ten records, dozens of original songs and remixes later House is OK continues to grow.
Literally. What was once a platform for the original three founders is now an international family affair supporting the talented artists from Frankfurt, Stockholm, Alexandria and Orlando. Nurturing the friendly approach this musical family continues to grow.
Looking back at the first five years, not only at the music that connected them all but at the bonds that deepened through the production process, House is OK crew wanted to take
create a proper reminder and thank the ones supporting them throughout the years. A double 12' pack titled Gemišt' seemed like a proper way to do that.
- Gemišt will be released as two separate EPs featuring the original music from Kornél Kovacs, Roman Flügel, Gavri & McQueen, TCB, House Of Life and the label makers themselves. Oliver and Janis deliver tracks under their known names, while Homeboy
introduces his new project with fellow Wilde Renate resident The Swift, called Longhair.
Croatian artist Ugruv Smek marks his yearlong collaboration with the label delivering yet another smashing artwork.
Mark the upcoming February when Gemišt part I' is to be released and while you're at it, move on to March just so you don't miss the Gemišt part II' release. And yeah, in case you're wondering - of course it's both 12' EP release and in digital format. House is OK's got you covered.

Releasing an album into the world is a special moment for any artist but when you're an artist who grew up in remote northern Ghana with no schooling, spending a life herding cows and goats, building your own instruments and teaching yourself to sing, then there's a particular sense of occasion and celebration in finding recognition and an audience for that music.

This is the case for Guy One, an utterly unique artist who is writing and performing Frafra music, a style that originates from a small area in the north of Ghana. Whilst Guy One is already loved and adored locally by now - building up a fervent following in local villages in which no funeral or wedding would take place without his soaring voice and deeply rhythmic playing, before then transforming into an award-winning, TV appearing artist in Ghana - his music is now to find a much wider audience through Max Weissenfeldt's Philophon label (Jimi Tenor, Hailu Mergia, Alemayehu Eshete) on this Berlin meets Bolgatanga release.

Guy One's international debut #1 is an album rooted in tradition as much as it is the contemporary ("Frafra music Made in Germany" says drummer producer Max Weissenfeldt if he's forced to put a label on it) but given the fact that the traditionalism of Frafra music itself is a largely unknown force, the results are more even more potent and stirring in their creations. Choirs, trumpet, organ, bass, drums, synthesiser, vibraphone, saxophone and piano, the album is as bursting with instrumentation as it is ideas and innovation.

The album's perfect positioning between the old and the new and in taking that middle ground and launching it into completely new territory is enough to completely unglue the definitions of what music can be.

Air Lows is the debut solo album by Silvia Kastel. The Italian artist has been a fixture of the underground since her precocious teens, clocking up many miles in Control Unit with Ninni Morgia ('It's like Catherine Deneuve dumped two cases of post-Repulsion psychiatric notes over Pere Ubu's Dub Housing, lit the fuse and, ahem, stood well back" - Julian Cope), including collaborations with the likes of Smegma, Factrix, Gary Smith, Aki Onda and Gate (Michael Morley of The Dead C). Both solo and in her work with others, Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock and improvisation. Air Lows is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but assuredly breaks new ground. Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono's Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very 'human' synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock's Sextant and Sun Ra: all were touchstones for Air Lows' conception and composition, and all strains of music addressing - or complicating - the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like Though used sparingly, Kastel's voice remains her key instrument, whether subject to dissociative digital manipulations as on 'Bruell', delivering matter-of-fact spoken monologues, or providing splashes of pure tonal colour. Recorded between her expansive Italy studio and a more compact, ersatz set-up in Berlin, Air Lows gradually takes on some of the character of the German capital: you can hear the wide streets and uninhabited spaces, the seepage of never-ending nightlife, the loneliness. Air Lows is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: the glorious technicolour J-pop deconstructions of its first half leading inexorably to the icy noir of 'Spiderwebs' and 'Concrete Void'. These later tracks are reminiscent of 2015's magnificent 39 12', Kastel in the role of numbed, nihilistic chanteuse stalking dank, murky tunnels of reverb and sub-bass. But in fact there is contradiction and emotional ambiguity to Air Lows from the outset, and throughout - a sense of both infinite space and acute claustrophobia; energy and inertia; fluency and restraint.

* Each cassette comes with an individually hand-printed silk screen cardboard case and DL code, craftily designed by Damien Tran.

* Renowned for her tracks featured in Richie Hawtin's game changing DE9 Transitions mix, Akiko Kiyama reveals her another side under her new alias Aalko on No Man Is An Island. This is her Kebko Music label's fourth instalment and her fifth album. It is a culmination of Kiyama's recent practices in a wider music spectrum, going well beyond her minimalistic techno characteristic. It covers a variety of styles as she demonstrates her knack for breaks and ambient, reflecting her early influences from Ninja Tune and Warp. Each cassette comes with an individually hand-printed silk screen cardboard case and DL code, craftily designed by Damien Tran. Also, No Man Is An Island EP is set to be released on vinyl in this winter.

* Kebko Music is Tokyo-based Akiko Kiyama's independent music label focusing on releasing avant-garde music which is not bounded by any specific genres but embraces the whole range of techno, experimental music, field- & live-recordings and classical music. The label owner established her name by Richie Hawtin featuring her track in his well-known DE9 Transitions mix in 2005. Since then, her music style has gradually changed to explore the edge of electronic music. The core of the label is based on small handcrafted editions of cassette tapes. It aims to give a chance for all of artists and listeners to explore their musical experience and creativity.

Granny13 opens with Nicola Ratti's 'Odd Doubt'. With the use of a modular system and tape loops, a broken rhythm is obtained by parallelism between single sound signals as LFO one or processed tapes.On the second side, Giovanni Lami's 'Johnny Leech' is made with a small bunch of equipment, just a chaotic hand-made synth (cacophonator) and a memoryman, working mainly on static electricity and leakage current in the synth used without any kind of power supply.

Reviews

The Wire
''Two Italian mucisians share a split single of glitchy fun and everyone goes some happy. Lami s piece uses a defective unplugged synthesizer to make huzzing chitters that have a kind of rhythm in spots. Ratti s contribution is a bit more structured it sounds like a record of accordion miniatures broken into pieces, then glued back together with little pieces of felt stuck onto it. Which would definitely be a pretty hep thing to hear.''

Textura
''Some releases qualify as art objects as much as musical collections, a case in point this recent seven-inch vinyl outing featuring material by Nicola Ratti on one side and Giovanni Lami on the other. That shouldn't be interpreted to mean that the musical content isn't worthy of one's time, as it assuredly is, but more to emphasize how striking the sleeve artwork by Opora is and how effectively it complements the musical content.Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and issued in an edition of 150 copies, the release opens with Odd Doubt, a concise experimental setting by the Milan-born Ratti, who's issued material on labels such as Anticipate, Preservation, Die Schachtel, and Entr'acte and who's presently working with Ielasi in the project Bellows, with Attila Faravelli as Faravelliratti, and with Enrico Malatesta and Faravelli in ~Tilde. Though Ratti started out as a guitar player, his current focus is more on beat-analog experimentation and sound installation. In Odd Doubt, Ratti's modular system and tape loops generate broken rhythms that varyingly call to mind dub-techno, even if dub-techno of an extremely wonky variety. Off-beat chords, crackle, and snare strikes add to the dubwise flavour of the material, though ultimately it registers as more of an experimental exploration than straight-up dub exercise.The flip side features Johnny Leech by Lami, a one-time photographer now known as both a field recordist and a musician focusing on soundscaping and sound-ecology. In his contribution to the seven-inch, Lami's chaotic hand-made synth (cacophonator) and memoryman give birth to blustery smears of static electricity that ultimately mutate into an Oval-like array of ripples and scratches. Johnny Leech is so removed from anything conventionally musical, it makes Odd Doubt sound like a Top 40 pop song. Like Ratti's piece, Lami's is short, so short, in fact, it gives the impression of being an excerpt from a larger sound art work. Here's a release where the abstract nature of the musical content matches its visual presentation.December 2014''

Vital Weekly 951
''Granny Records is from Greece, but the two musicians here are from Italy, of which I don't I heard from Giovanni Lami before. His piece is called 'Johnny Leech' and he uses a hand-made synth known as the cacophonator and a memory man (a delay machine), 'working mainly on static electricity and leakage current in the synth used without any kind of power supply'. It makes up for a nice piece of chaotic lo-fi sound, which is put forward through methods of improvisation. Quite a nice piece and it fits the format very well. The crackling of vinyl surely adds an extra layer. Nicola Ratti uses a modular synth and tape loops, of what seems to be percussive material, but the rhythm is broken down and the whole thing has a nice gentle feel to it, even when it bumps, clicks and glides, but the synth makes it more subtle. Here too one could say this perfect for a 7": one doesn't have the idea that this is cut from a longer part as is not unusual with this kind music. Especially Ratti seems to have worked out his music as a composition, which is very nice. (FdW)''Vital Weekly 951''Granny Records is from Greece, but the two musicians here are from Italy, of which I don't I heard from Giovanni Lami before. His piece is called 'Johnny Leech' and he uses a hand-made synth known as the cacophonator and a memory man (a delay machine), 'working mainly on static electricity and leakage current in the synth used without any kind of power supply'. It makes up for a nice piece of chaotic lo-fi sound, which is put forward through methods of improvisation. Quite a nice piece and it fits the format very well. The crackling of vinyl surely adds an extra layer. Nicola Ratti uses a modular synth and tape loops, of what seems to be percussive material, but the rhythm is broken down and the whole thing has a nice gentle feel to it, even when it bumps, clicks and glides, but the synth makes it more subtle. Here too one could say this perfect for a 7": one doesn't have the idea that this is cut from a longer part as is not unusual with this kind music. Especially Ratti seems to have worked out his music as a composition, which is very nice. (FdW)''Vital Weekly 951''Granny Records is from Greece, but the two musicians here are from Italy, of which I don't I heard from Giovanni Lami before. His piece is called 'Johnny Leech' and he uses a hand-made synth known as the cacophonator and a memory man (a delay machine), 'working mainly on static electricity and leakage current in the synth used without any kind of power supply'. It makes up for a nice piece of chaotic lo-fi sound, which is put forward through methods of improvisation. Quite a nice piece and it fits the format very well. The crackling of vinyl surely adds an extra layer. Nicola Ratti uses a modular synth and tape loops, of what seems to be percussive material, but the rhythm is broken down and the whole thing has a nice gentle feel to it, even when it bumps, clicks and glides, but the synth makes it more subtle. Here too one could say this perfect for a 7": one doesn't have the idea that this is cut from a longer part as is not unusual with this kind music. Especially Ratti seems to have worked out his music as a composition, which is very nice. (FdW)''

We are very excited to present the new collabo release between Cosmic Compostions and Jitwam's selftitled album " ".

Born in Assam, Gauhati, in Northeast India, but currently based in New York's storied borough of Brooklyn, Jitwam spent his formative years in New Zealand and Australia, before living in monasteries in Thailand, orphanages in South Africa, and washed out apartments in London. Of everywhere and nowhere, his music draws influence from a litany of iconoclasts including, but not limited to RD Burman, Moondog, The Velvet Underground, Yayoi Kusama, Jay Electronica, Jay Dilla, Moodymann, Leon Thomas, Madlib and Asha Bhosle.

Across " (selftitled)", he utilizes knowledge acquired through years spent digging through dusty crates, and talents honed as a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and vocalist. A series of stumbling, jazz/soul-rooted beat sculptures, each buried beneath a haze of fuzzy psychedelia, broken microphone blues, and articulated through a freestyled process he describes as "first thought, best thought", " (selftitled)" solidifies Jitwam's spot as a major emerging talent.

Recalling the fourth world dreamscapes explored by oddball songwriters like Connan Mockasin, Clarence Clarity, Jai Paul, Silicon, and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, it represents a time of transition and remembrance for Jitwam, while still fulfilling the core qualities he looks for in song. In his words, "Music is a refuge. A shelter from the storm. A place you can go to close your eyes."

Since he first shared his music with IZWID Records boss Kutmah at a Brainfeeder afterparty in London, Jitwam has released through Leaving Records, Cosmic Compositions, and The Jazz Diaries (the label he co-runs with Casey Van Reyk and Nigel Mphisa). He's also written with Inkswel (BBE) and Paul White (R&S), featured on Moodymann's K7! "DJ-Kicks" compilation and been championed by Gilles Peterson, Alexander Nut, Andrew Jervis (Bandcamp), and Funkineven. Mainly mixed and mastered by Matthewdavid at Stones Throw studios in Los Angeles, " (selftitled)" will be available on vinyl and digital formats.

The long established and critically acclaimed DJ-Kicks series kicks off 2017 with suitably accomplished DJ, producer, vocalist and instrumentalist Matthew Dear at the helm.A man of many musical hats, Texas born, Detroit raised Dear has a wide reaching discography that takes in face melting techno as Jabberjaw, dark avant-pop under his own name and intricate minimal as Audion.Often with a gothic slant and full of curiousness, his pensive but playful music is an intoxicating distillation of many different influences, often withhis own stylised vocals at the centre.

NPVR is moniker taken on board by PITA AKA Peter Rehberg and Factory Floor's Nick Void. 33 33 is their debut recording made in July, 2017 at The Premises, London.

Peter and Nik both share formidable reputations in the post industrial shape-shifting world of sound and form with a vast range of releases and collaborative endeavours over a number of years. Together they tie together their collective experience into a vast array of sonic devices unleashing an album of pragmatic imbalance and psychedelic orientation. Blurring the lines of techno, ambient, avant garde, noise etc

33 33 positions itself in the nebulous realm of contemporary (dis)comfort presenting itself on the border of music and sound, the social and the private.

All tracks by Nik Void & Peter Rehberg
Recorded and edited at The Premises, London, July 2017
Mastered by Russell Haswell at Haswell Studio, London, August 2017
Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, September 2017
Artwork by Nik Void