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Two years after the release of 'Kreise' Selm have once again peered out from the torture racked enclave they call a studio. Originally conceived as two separate EP's and later stacked into an all-consuming album over 44 minutes 'TiiiER / Post-Adrenaline' pushes Selm's agenda of black dwarf techno and physically exhausting industrial churning to new levels. The opening salvo of tracks that form the 'TiiiER' disc (tracks 1-5) posit a techno minimalism coated in the incredible, almost edible crust of controlled distortion and flaking edges garnered through masterful gain staging. Opener 'Sin' accrues greater density with each iteration and pass. 'Kreise' is classic DBX style beep ran into manic filters and weight gain classes.'Moger' is a truly sinister and clinical piece of industrial sound design raising blood pressure with its stainless steel poise. 'Laus' is a real percy, syncopated just the right side of falling over and baked into the toughest compression throbs. It closes the first 'disc' and perhaps what could be considered the more straight forward tracks of the album. 'Post-Adrenaline' the second disc of the set is where Selm's love of intensely textural sound design work can be best felt. 'Nineteen Voices' opens with its disembodied conversations utterly smothered by the roiling mass of bass synth which surrounds on all sides. 'Irr' terrifies the young with it's truly OTT undulance of seismic tone, as reverential to death industrial as it is to guitar music, the riff laid bare. 'Brett' is a damp, warm environment of intelligent growth. Fermenting itself again in a stew of gnashing bass heaviness now crowned with glowing bowed metal and tuned feedback. 'Sommeil' closes the second disc with not a single positive note played, it's a dreary escalation of all the albums previous incarnations, flickering noise shaped rhythm, serpentine bass formations and no rush to please or to entertain. At just under 6 minutes, it and the album are over. Selm do not hold up on this follow up to Kreise. While the albums share ideas they are refined to a point of punishment here. 'TiiiER / Post-Adrenaline' is hyper-modern music that sounds like it's made from air, stone and rust.

140 gram black vinyl, Double sided record sleeve, Double sided photo insert

In 2013, a 16-year-old LORDE quietly, yet confidently asserted herself as the voice of a generation with her full-length debut, Pure Heroine. The album would go triple-platinum, selling over 4 Million worldwide, win two GRAMMY® Awards, a BRIT and spawned the seven-times platinum record-breaking international juggernaut single, Royals,' and quadruple-platinum follow up Team.'

She also curated the official soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and recorded Yellow Flicker Beat' as the lead single. Her last trip to the UK was when she was personally asked by David Bowie's family to perform her spellbinding tribute to the late artist at 2016 BRIT AWARDS. Having once been described by David Bowie himself as "the future of music', Lorde is proving to be that and much more.

Following LORDE's triumphant return with comeback single Green Light,' the singer released her second full-length album Melodrama on June 16.

Melodrama will now be released on standard & deluxe vinyl this April

t’s Indian Summer again and it’s like an unwritten rule to please you with another Atelier release at this beautiful time of the year.
So here we are with a collection of superb re-interpretations of a few tracks taken from the duos debut album “Varsam Court”. Delivering the goods we have no one less than Dutch high flyer’s Tunnelvisions, Lisboa’s LuxFrágil resident Switchdance, Heidelberg’s Lopazz & Casio Casino, Lossless co-head Mathias Schober and Alexander Inggs – one half of Atelier.
No doubt that we’re proud about this line-up and couldn’t be happier with the music we’re going to share with you now – enjoy!
Atelier quoting on the remixes:
“After writing the album Varsam Court, it was truly exciting to hear the songs in a different context. Originally, the album was not written for the clubs, but the remixes on the EP transcend that line, bringing the original ideas to a wider audience and into a new space. These reinterpretations by the artists are a great testament to how
everyone really does hear and feel music differently.”

Veteran NYC based Scottish electronic musician Drew McDowall's latest work is his loftiest, most liturgical, and least industrial outing to date —and potentially the apex of his recent discography.Named after an ancient Greek word for votive offering, Agalmaexudes a hooded, devotional aura, creaking and keeling under vast rafters of stone, stained glass, and shredded wires. It's a music of majesty and mystery but also modernity, McDowall's refined modular system shape-shifting strings, piano, pipe organ, and choral masses into disorienting synthetic mirages of the sacred. He cites the intersection of “joy, terror, and the elegiac” as a centering inspiration –or, phrased more bluntly, “that 'what the fuck is going on' feeling.”



As a career collaborator himself, with stints in Coil, Psychic TV, and countless other shorter-lived partnerships, it's telling that McDowall chose this project to gather such an impressive spectrum of peers. Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalistRobert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi cameo across the album's 42 minutes, contouring McDowall's nuanced negative spaces with shudders, shadows, and shivering flickers of serenity. Each of them shines in their spotlight, elevating these elusive alchemical states into surreal revelations of texture and transcendence.



McDowall's original working title for the record is revealing: Ritual Music.He speaks of his creative practice in ceremonial terms, negating binaries by seeking the middle path to anuminousequilibrium that erases the distinction between the inner and outer worlds.These compositions feel similarly processional and intuitive, at the crossroads of holiness and hallucination, the sacred vertigo of yawning naves rising into untouchable night skies. It's a vision of industrial music as enigma and invocation, cryptic hymnals of shroudedbeautysummoned in catacombs and crumbling cathedrals.



Despite its depths, Agalmais also an album of immediacy and emotion. Celestial laments of and for times of unrest and suffering. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this music as an to attempt to convey experiences he felt incapable of putting into words: “To try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”Agalmamore than acknowledges the ineffable –it embodies it.

The Grouse approaches, intent on witnessing Helium Robots release the ghouls and demons from their machines. What potent mix can this mean? Channeling the raw energy of their 2018 track Sly on Running Back, the monolithic baselines and surging, dense forces of Defy Me and The Grouse itself unfurl from the speakers. To mop fevered brows after those torrents, the alchemy changes to create the fuzzy warmth and bounce of Pang. Playful vocal samples flicker and weave through the chords, giving way to the final melodic flow of Revel. And we’re done. The Grouse, unruffled, proudly turns and stalks away……

Welcome to the curious world of Peter Graf York: a world full of city centre safaris and epic train journeys, Soviet cosmonauts and Oakland rappers, filtered synths and plucked mbiras. It's a wild ride inspired as much by Jamaican dub sorcery as by playful minimalism outta the Pacific Northwest.

Many of these tracks were composed on the hoof - literally en route across sections of the ever-reliable Deutsche Bahn network. As such, there’s a certain travellin-without-moving dynamic across this collection, capturing that cinematic feel of window frames flickering past graffiti'd signal exchanges, morphing into rolling hills and green forests. Expedition Bahn is the sound of ideas being set in motion, each track heralding the arrival of an uncanny destination. Blazed beats give way to acid-fuelled electro, and dub rhythms step aside for 4th world meditations as readily as sleepers on a train track.

We can leave the last word to heroic USSR cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who spent the final moments of his fateful re-entry giving the administration an earful of righteous proportions (regarding the technical failures of the spacecraft). Taking his place as the first martyr of space travel, Komarov accepted the Soyuz mission despite safety concerns, in order to protect the other cosmonauts. It's an attitude that echoes throughout PGY’s sonic universe - make the most of the trip you're on... ‘cause you never know just which way it will go.

Gear used: Tascam MIDISTUDIO 644, MPC1000, Roland JX-3P, MODE MACHINES DT200, Electro-Harmonix MEMORY BOY analog delay, Nord Drum 3P, MacBook Pro, Logic Pro 9

Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade.

VICIOUS WATER REGIMES stutters along as an ‘ugly’ mass of grey electronica. CAST(O)RO shines from light from the depths with it’s occasional foray into glistening tones. COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. CAST twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it's relentless repetition. WIDOW WALKS gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. ENGE lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable.

SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within.

Studio Mule drops “Anthologia”, the final chapter of a close look on the work of the Tokyo born DJ and producer Takayuki Shiraishi, a jack of all trades, that sways through Tokyo’s vast music scene since the late 70’s, a time when post punk grooves called the tune. As part of the band BGM he released in 1980 the album “Back Ground Music” on the legendary Osaka based underground label Vanity. Last October Studio Mule reissued BGM’s no wave, free funk mini-mal treasure. A few Month earlier Studio Mule already published “Missing Link”, a thrilling retrospect on Takayuki Shiraishi's unreleased material from the late 1980s, a creative period of which only a little ever saw the light of the day.

And now “Anthologia”, a record that is dedicated to his work during the years 1990 to 1996, a time span, in which Shiraishi moved on to produce house, downbeat and playful electronica. In 1995 he released the ambient/techno 12inch “Spectral Colours” on the R&S sublabel Apollo under the alias Planetoid. Two years later he manifested his techno leaning creativity under his given name on the album “Photon”, a record that helped launching Japan’s techno scene. It was followed by two more long players, that display his wide musical taste with ambient, house, breakbeat and other genre blending styles. Besides producing, Shiraishi was also a prominent figure of Tokyo’s club nightlife, DJing alongside Jeff Mills as well as Krautrock icons like Holger Czukay.

“Anthologia” features three unreleased tunes of this lapse of time, as well as highlights some work Shiraishi produced together with his friend Jun Sonohara as Musica Nova and a hidden gem he tuned in for the “Isolated Audio Players 1” compilation, published by the Tokyo based Pickin' Mushroom Recordings label in 2000.

The three unreleased tracks display his love for diversification. “Distant Thunder” is a drone driven ambient voyage, that slowly melds into a gentle rhythmic sensation driven by loose hi-hat patterns and a soft chord crescendo. On the opposite, “Lapis Lazuli” comes around as a mellow melodic downbeat trip enlarged with twisted rhythms and cosmic infiniteness. “A Voy-age” shows his love for house music with a grooving arrangement that comes close to the kinky house gems of contemporary producers like Lowtec. Also, the already known “Isolated Audio Players 1” compilation tune “Flicker” is located in the house spheres, delivering nervous jacking minimal vibes emerging from a precise produced dance of melodies, grooves and sound effects.

In comparison, the four Musica Nova tracks show again another side of Takayuki Shiraishi’s many musical talents. “Birds in Paradise” is an elegant triphop tranquilizer, while tunes like “Nocturnal Tribes” and “Green on Green” express his passion for electronic arrangements that think out of the box with airy melodies, slow-motion big beat rhythms, jazz particles and an overall cosmic sound complexion. The tune “Shifting Sand” goes the same direction, while adding esoteric reverberations and a touch of Drum and bass.

Together the eight tracks turn “Anthologia” into something more than just an anthology of Takayuki Shiraishi’s work. In association, all compositions work like an album that overwhelms with a reasoned story-arc, who slowly rises to a hypnotizing peak, from where all downswings to a calm finish, that makes you want to start all over again.

2x12"

Having made initial waves on Cold Recordings and Osiris, Eric Baldwin returns now to Tectonic to release his eponymous album ’Cocktail Party Effect’, bringing his South London roots to Berlin for an all-weekender, under strobe lights.

Drawn by his appetite for powerful rhythmical forms and inspired by the likes of Daphne Oram, The Residents and Captain Beefheart - Eric takes uses background in sound design, knowledge of hacking VST software and adapted spring reverbs and other hardware, to create a truly unique vision of contemporary electronic music. It sits somewhere between Jeff Mills, Aphex Twin & Squarepusher - held together by a connective UK Bass Music spinal chord. A weird but intriguing beast.

We open the track with Japanese cocktail recipes, before moving into the only vocal track of the album, ‘Talking To Bricks’ featuring Bristol vocalist Redders on fine form - charged with disjointed energy and run ragged across a technologically charged dancehall style beat. The LP progresses through the rolling breaks and bleeps of ‘For The Memory Exchange’, into an IDM side-step in the shape of ‘Brutalism’, moving into the gentle, beautiful flickering glitches of ‘PDA’, before we get to the hyperactive twitching alien charge of ‘War On Codex’.

Taking a leap in another direction, we reach ‘Cause For Bad Shelving’, which sounds a bit like Squarepusher when he was on late 90s, immaculate form - taking the tempo up a few notches, while building melancholy. ‘Lack Of Wrong Format’ then gives us a moment to breathe, before diving into ‘Deerhorn’ which brings us right back to the dancefloor. Things are then turned inside out with the jittery wonder of ‘I Get It (Lost Banknote)’, redirected via the industrial clangs of ‘Low_Rise’, before rounding off our sonic adventure with the ponderous tones of ‘Loner’ - which leave you glowing and drifting off into space.

A bold album that’s just brim with a strong sense of originality, direction and grand narrative. From international dancefloors to post-clubbing ear-worms, Cocktail Party Effect is just getting started and you’ll be hearing his name more and more now.

Clear Vinyl

Detroit Underground label head Kero returns to his sonic roots with the first of the Detroit Map Series originally featured on the limited DUTT-181 Series functional record player designed by Neubau Berlin. As a kick-start, Kero reveals Highways—a 5-track extended player of (abstract) electronics that is cleverly pulled together with a downbeat flow and tracks aptly sub-titled as major freeway arteries of the Motor City.


"Davison" commutes through glitch bits, bobbles, and broken beats flickering back and forth as it eventually opens midway through the traffic jam and hopscotched potholes with a synthesized melodic stream. Fisher displays its minimized techno flurry and rumbling low-end growl tempered by subtle blips'n bleeps and clinical precision. Southfield busts apart with modular maneuvering and heavy percussion showcasing an opportunity for Kero to cruise in the passing lane as the piece gradually mutates into a crunchy experimental electro epic. Lodge ebbs and flows with The Detroit Escalator Company-styled minimalism felt many miles away from its source. Chrysler expands and contracts with its 7-minute acid-electronic sprawl—here we see Kero carefully downshift to allow an ambient undercurrent to traverse a moonlit sky in the late night hours creating perhaps the finest soundtrack to (minimal) Detroit-inspired techno of yesteryear with a thumping heartbeat. ~PDS

Welcoming, 'Come Together' - a five track various artists EP drawn from our network of associates locally and internationally. With artists hailing from Japan, Italy, the USA and Australia the 12" features the sounds that bring our families together on dance floors around the globe.Italy's Matisa opens the record with a designer italo-house trip "Garbadine", armed with punchy drums, a warped guitar loop and hypnotic bass line. Melbourne group Polito's "Wallis Axiom" juxtaposes this with a guttural, gurgling outsider-techno piece. Frenetic percs and crunchy distortion collide with alien FX and bleepy modular synthesis for a dark journey.On the flip, New York City master producer Physical Therapy jumps into the deep end with "10000% Pure Love", a raw, hard hitting club weapon. The Allergy Season boss distils the pure, unbridled energy of a sweaty dance floor through a woozy bassline and manic cowbell action. Slowing the pace slightly, Berlin via Japan producer Yuzo Iwata delivers "Acid House" a rugged, growling beast which trips and chugs along as a monstrous 303 weaves in an out of the penetrating vocals "ACID HOUSE". The mysterious Serpent finishes you off with "In The Garden" a syncopated drum workout imbued with a ritualist, primitive energy by the heavily layered percussion and flickering synths.

Concealed within the eclipse, Overdue presents a new black-label 12" series - symbolic of its sinister auditory contents.

Further proof of their unbridled dedication to sound system music and commitment to quality, the Belgian Dubstep imprint unravels
it's fifth physical release. Based in Denver, its newest signee by the name of Ghast returns to the spotlight, following up on heavyweight releases on prominent labels such as Encrypted and Gradient Audio.

The talented American artist sets the stage with two unruly armaments, alongside murderous remixes by Denmark's bass music stalwart RDG as well as the label operators themselves, Substrada & Caba.

Starting the engines, 'Mothership' immerses the stage in flickering echoes and haunting wails - the air bustling with anticipation. Eerily disfigured, granular reverberations materialize amid a pressurized and truly outlandish soundscape, barren at its core. Heading into the second section with renewed vigour, no dance floor remains unscathed in the ensuing aftermath.

The subsequent doomsday scenario, as engineered by Substrada & Caba, strips the ship to its bare essentials - laced with trippy drum instrumentations and the psychedelic foley samples. The meticulous flow presents itself in a bleak dungeon style - hoodlum vocal fragments rounding off the resulting low-frequency inferno.

Flipping the record to its equally profound B-Side, 'Vehement Mess' unhinges another portal into madness - dance floor upheaval guaranteed. Showing no signs of mercy, the infernal armagedon proves to be emblematic for Ghast's dystopian sound design. Profusely industrial and with clinical efficiency, hitting all the right frequencies as the second wave ignites but all available power reserves.

Finishing off any remaining survivors with his irreproachable signature style, RDG's remix marches onwards with unrestrained might in a four-to-the-floor fashion - super-charged, galvanizing the rave in a no-holds-barred shutdown.

A collection of side notes, a tale of the little stories. Compiled over the course of years, renewed, revisited, enlarged and extended, a very personal collage of single frames and flickering motion. Long overdue to find its place in the shelf, Kleintierschaukel‘s first album is ready to accompany the season change. The perfect fit for upcoming golden hours and longer lasting nights.

White Vinyl

This is "Altair", a collection of kaleidoscopic post-breakcore on Love Love Records from veteran french surrealist Ruby My Dear. Presented with artwork by TAPT on white vinyl.

The lights are out and a strange alien force surrounds the periphery of your hearing.. The sound of a haunting music box flickering in the darkness draws you closer but as you begin to approach everything explodes into dank crossbreed DnB rhythms that punch you in the gut and send you flying. As the bombardment of breaks momentarily subside you realise you've been beamed aboard the mothership and are now surrounded by unknown and indescribable visions.

You are given a brief moment to contemplate before your legs are swept from underneath you by a flurry of amens that would fry the minds of the hungriest of junglist's epicures. Journeying deeper into the heart of the beast you become aware of distant and immense rumbles but are stopped in your tracks by grinding brutal machinery rising up on all sides. As quickly as it appeared it starts to collapse and you are plunged into near darkness once again.

Pulses of light slowly begin to stab rhythmically from behind clouds and you feel yourself begin to move faster and faster through a void that is now streaked by a spectrum of colour. Floating debris starts re-arranging around you at light speed and every fiber of your being is simultaneously stimulated with needle-like accuracy. As the last string plucks play out the darkness falls away and the cover artwork comes back into focus. You immediately leave wherever you are and encourage someone else to experience this music.

2x12"

"Reactions" is the debut album from First Tone, the musical partnership of New Orleans-based artists Turk Dietrich (Second Woman, Belong) and composer Duane Pitre (Important Records). While the project has been at work quietly sculpting their sound for years, "Reactions" is the first available set of recordings. Those familiar with the respective works of the two artists will be happy to find a collection of music that is very much of the duo, and yet totally unlike anything they've produced before.

Over six tracks, First Tone unfurl poignant, flickering compositional works that utilize pitch material that is tuned using the system known as Just Intonation (which Pitre has studied for nearly 15 years) in conjunction with various software and a single hardware synth. The result is a collection of music that is both organic and alien. Layers of tone and texture build and dissolve from the ultra minimal to the enormous, on occasion seamlessly blending the two. A wide array of striking timbres patiently wash over one another, at times sounding like organic instruments, at other times sounding completely otherworldly.

"Reactions" is a masterclass not only in sound design and dynamic range, but also in sonic depth. The album's approach to the usage of time and dynamics work together to create the perception of a three-dimensional spaciousness of sound. The holographic effects produced from the spaces between the album's sounds are mesmerizing, with discreet arrangements that demand repeat listens to fully absorb.

RUMPELN
Pumping proto-rhythms disrupting a wall of distortion building up from unintelligible screams, broadcasts of gadgets on the brink of destruction, DIY instruments made of springs, shards of metal and trash, all hardly held together by a skinny, long-haired figure jumping in the flicker of glitched out AV loops – there’s a deep understanding to be found in Anton Kaun’s performances that we, as animals, will never really get along with our electronics.

DANIEL DOOR
With his latest setup, „wallwart scales“, Daniel Door explores the sonic depths of a bundle of wallwart power outlets. Disconnected from the machines (like smartphones, external hard drives and old Casio keyboards) they once fed with electricity, their distinctive inner wiring becomes the base of a microtonal scale made audible by an EMF microphone (the Elektrosluch made by LOM, Batrislava, Slovakia) and mangled in a constantly re-sampling arrangement by an Elektron Octatrack sampler.

Swedish composer and multimedia artist Marcus Fjellström's debut Miasmah release follows two critically acclaimed full length albums on Lampse (2006's 'Gebrauchsmusik' and 2005's 'Exercises In Estrangement'). In addition Marcus has had several commissioned works requested, leading to him working with, among others, the Swedish Royal Ballet, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, numerous ensembles, soloists and filmmakers including 'Salad Fingers' creator David Firth. Currently based in Berlin, Fjellström's compositions often combine aspects of modern classical composition and arrangement and more avant forms of music, be that acoustic or electronic.

'Schattenspieler' (which translates as 'Shadowplayer') takes the form of eleven compositions which explore ambience and melody, texture and silence. Haunting synth and orchestral instrument-based audio constructions, flowing from one moment to the next - the fleeting ghosts of Fjellström's melodies rise, only to be buried under a claustrophobic clutter of percussion and creaking background noise. These pieces do indeed feel like you're listening to something more implied than obviously stated, as if Fjellström wants only to expose us to the shadow of the music - the implication being perhaps a more terrifying experience than to be confronted outright…listen to 'Schattenspieler' and you may find your mind starts to play tricks on you…

The undeniably Angelo Badalamenti-esque descending synth strings of opening track 'The Disjointed', lay the foundations for Fjellström's 'Schattenspieler' album; music resting somewhere between the unsettling horror soundtracks of Jerry Goldsmith, the elevating melodies of Cliff Martinez, and the subtle audio constructions of Miasmah label mates Kreng and Jacaszek. Marcus' wide ranging abilities in composition and his willingness to let go of accepted form and function makes 'Schattenspieler' a perfect choice of release for the Miasmah label. The suspense laden 'Antichrist Architechture Management', with its harrowing and tense undertones, weaving synth lines and a wash of static hiss and flicker, is a particular standout track. Despite it's a strangely oppressive sound, shafts of light grace 'Schattenspieler'; pieces such as 'Untitled 090616' find gorgeous melodies are boxed in by unsettling arrangements and sparse background ambience. There is a coldness to many of these compositions - not without emotion, but somehow remorseless. 'Schattenspieler' is, for the main part, a defiantly bleak journey.

Vinyl edition ltd. to 300 copies, purple vinyl, incl. 8-page 12" booklet with drawings by Marcus Fjellström.

Cologne’s resident conjurer Hodini steps up for his second solo EP on WOLF Music Recordings. Bringing elements from his hip hop background into this unique five tracker, Hodini dusts off long forgotten cuts, sampled with that MPC chopped graininess, blending lo-fi vocal sound bites with deft jazz loops, all adding a distinct, textured edge to his work.

‘Velved Groove’ and ‘Special Shoutout’ kick things off, snapping in funk fills and skipping guitar riffs behind a concoction of hazy spirals that transfix from the off. The former is an uptempo, twisted, jazz club house jam and the latter a bubbling voyage through the afterhours, bourbons flowing and faces flying from every corner.

A master of misdirection, Hodini also moonlights as one of Germany’s leading underground hip hop producers HulkHodn, proving he can flip styles and meld genres with ease. Featuring his alter ego, ‘Doggo Content’ is his nod to this - a crackling slo-mo trip through the intoxicated mind, soundtracked by stretched vocal snippets, wading bass notes and a crunching snare.

Two of the harder-hitting club tracks close out the EP, both focused around hypnotic bassline carousels and looping layers. ‘Where’s The Wine’ interjects Rhodes flickers with bongo rhythms and unsettling laughes, as ‘One4Fries’ marries off-kilter, piano stabs alongside jazzy flourishes and fizzing percussion.

CAIN closes out his Fine Grains triptych with a vivacious EP of signature bass shuddering, polyrhythmic drums. ‘High Call’, his first 12” on the now Amsterdam-based label, offers 6 original tracks and a remix by Japanese producer Jun Kamoda in homage to the revelatory spirit and pre-medieval origins of carnivals. Artwork by Dutch/Scottish artist Roos Dijkhuizen created through ink and water drawings.

Colours emerge from the dark, glowing torches and fire embers flicker through the night. ‘Caapi’ warmly draws you into proceedings, an alluring tease of soothing chimes and preview of the infectious shuffling drums that will follow. From ‘Apsara’, Cain sets us on the front foot. A pounding, stuttering rhythm ignites the track, as spinning chord sounds echo and a haunting, hallucinatory vocal lead us on. The carnival is fully alive in ‘Gundon Night’, a sinister and menacing broken track steered by Cosssack warrior chants. High on the mountain we reach the pinnacle of ‘High Call’, a triumphant lead track with CAIN’s recognisable warm and driving, rhythmical drum patterns. The otherworldly psychoacoustic melodies of ‘Taiyi’ and slower-paced triplet drums structures of ‘Zetwal’ make these tracks the outliers of the EP, but they also complement and help to complete the picture. Jun Kamoda’s zany turned up marching techno take on the lead track signs out ‘High Call’ in playful, multi-coloured order.

Oblique Russian sound strategist Natalia Salmina’s latest forking path portfolio as Atariame, Voiceless, arose in the wake of a dissociative relocation to Moscow, where she found herself adrift amidst a manic metropolis, alone in a skyscraper staring out at trees: “It made me lose faith in my ability to communicate, in my ideas about life.” Days without speaking turned to weeks. Even in private she felt estranged from her voice, and soon ceased singing.

For solace she turned to her Waldorf Blofeld, mining its panoramic frequencies to craft a shivering suite of futurist-noir nocturnes and rhythmic noise vignettes, equal parts exorcism and manifestation, desperation and delirium. Track titles hint at the headspace – “Outside At 5 AM,” “Same Thought All Day,” “Stay Late” – mirroring the music’s mood of hoods up, headphones on, wandering empty urban tunnels under flickering streetlights. Enigmatically, Salmina slips in a sliver of spectral voice on the intro and exit songs (“Breathe Exercise” and “Deconstruction”), framing them as induction into and escape from the cryptic isolationist condition of the rest of the collection. Mastered by P. Nikolsky, Powerhouse Moscow. Design by Britt Brown.