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Scuba Death is Ricardo Donoso's alter ego. With more of a focus on analog sound, percussion, sampling, and location recordings, there is an organic undercurrent on Scuba Death recordings that isn't as prevalent in his solo work. This music is rich in atmosphere while still tethered to the deeper ideas that Donoso often explores in his work. Treatises on fear and death­anxiety, the underlining thematic framework for the project, run rampant throughout these claustrophobic electronic passages, and teeter on the edge of being oppressive. Nitrogen Narcosis marks the first full length and strongest statement in the Scuba Death repertoire after the privately issued, ruthless 'Demon Seed' twelve inch back in 2011. The album alternates between surprising lethargic dance inflections all nestled between 75 & 100 bpm, the normal resting heart rate for adults, and the more conceptual, numbness­inducing pieces like '50­-70 Meters' and 'Nociception.' Sequencing plays an integral role on Nitrogen Narcosis as the listener is suddenly thrust into the darkest reaches of the ocean after dark alley grooves are sucked into an aquatic abyss. For a project named after Donoso's near­drowning experience in the South Atlantic when he was younger, there's an impressive amount of reflection & vulnerability present - the field recordings that permeate throughout the album were captured at the same location the undertow caught hold of him that bright Summer day 20 years prior. An inner battle between paranoia and euphoria is played out in well­conceived, precision sonics on Nitrogen Narcosis as Donoso reminds us to look back, break through the surface and go deeper.

Fatima Al Qadiri is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Kuwait. In just a few years, she has quickly built a reputation as a conceptual artist, exploring themes informed both by her own background and global pop culture, through a number of highly acclaimed EPs, multimedia projects and writings. She is also a founding member of the production team Future Brown. Fatima's debut album is called 'Asiatisch', and as the track titles suggest, the record provides a simulated road trip through an imagined China. Musically, the album is an homage to that quietly influential sub-strain of grime, often loosely termed 'sinogrime' due to its preoccupation with Asian motifs and melodies, pioneered by the likes of Wiley and Jammer at the beginning of the 2000s in East London. 'Asiatisch' is a provocation which asks more questions than it answers. The title is the German word for Asian. Unlike its title, however, the music on 'Asiatisch' revolves around the fantasies of East Asia as refracted through pulpy Western pop culture, in particular Hollywood, literary fiction, music, cartoons and advertising. Fatima asks what is meant by the term 'Asian' in a digital age of viral interchange and the hi-speed trading of cultural bytes; the concept of 'shanzhai' proves pivotal, a term whose meaning stems from a wild, out of control zone of banditry, but which has come to be used to refer to the Chinese counterfeiting of Western brands and goods. While a number of producers have made takes on 'sinogrime' over the last few years, 'Asiatisch' is really the first record that attempts to articulate this weird complex of sonic interchanges between the West and China. With the exception of the opening track, 'Shanzhai', a haunting cover of 'Nothing Compares to You' with nonsensical Mandarin lyrics, and the shimmering 'Loading Beijing', 'Wudang' and 'Jade Stairs' which sample and distort classical Chinese poetry staging an epic confrontation between China's ancient soul and the onslaught of the industrial factory machine, most of the tracks blend mallets, bells, gongs, flutes, steel drums and choral atmospherics with the searing synth-brass and the skittering drums of grime, playing melodies that are inflected as much by classic R&B as to synthetic versions of traditional Chinese music. On "Dragon Tattoo" for example, stereotypical iconography of imagined China is slotted into a threatening, robotic R&B format. The carefree pirating of Western brands blurs into a soft-synth pirating of Chinese musical signs.'Asiatisch' is wrapped in pristine artwork by Babak Radboy from Shanzhai Biennial, and the music was given a 3D sheen by in demand mixer Lexxx. Proclaiming both its love of both ancient and imagined China, 'Asiatisch' is a rare album that is both icily beautiful and conceptually layered.

The last time Fennesz released an album on Austrian label Mego it was 2001 and the name of that release was 'Endless Summer'. Now, in 2014 Editions Mego is extremely proud to release the conceptual follow up that landmark of abstract pop. Eschewing the more drone orientated works of 'Black Sea', 'Bécs' returns to the more florid pop mechanisms as deployed on Endless Summer. ' Bécs is not just an album or a series of songs, it's a world to inhabit, a landscape ripe with sounds, songs and that esteemed Fennesz signature. A singular work by a singular artist.

Vladislav Delay's EP "espoo" features two new conceptual, rhythm-intense tracks. Like with "vantaa", the experienced music producer Vladislav Delay continues his search for dance-floor compatible, yet unique and fresh music.

repress

To celebrate the 10th release on Lunar Disko Records, we will also be releasing a 10" from that boy Automatic Tasty. LDR 10.10 is a conceptual 4 track EP named Fieldwork. Automatic Tasty tells a tale through his machines of a lonely Wicklow field from dawn till dusk....limited red vinyl pressing

Adam, on his continuing mission to cross the parallels of Techno, EBM, Electro & Industrial, has gone on to create his most conceptual & best produced album to date. Recorded for Rustblade Recordings from Italy. The album is entitled "State Of Limbo" To fulfill the wants and desires of Adam's vinyl based fans. He has chosen four tracks off the CD to create this his latest 12"

Those who expect dreamy home-listening from Family Lounge, could fall victim to conceptual conflicts of association. Family Lounge is analog Minimal-Techno, defined by Germany's electro-figurehead Anthony Rother.

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