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Live IN L.A - 1998 Set. Black and silver splattered vinyl.

“Praying to god whether or not I believe there is one” - PH

Petra Hermanova and Unguarded announce In Death’s Eyes (UGD-009), the debut solo LP under the artist’s own name. This LP features nine tracks utilizing folk and sacred musical technique and instrumentation which drift between song and heavy distorted drones. In a disciplined display of beauty, pain, and astute musicianship, Hermanova brings forth a notable accomplishment of an album. In Death’s Eyes confronts death from start to finish with a rare fervor that leaves one feeling it was utterly necessary for Hermanova to produce - to survive. The transcendent impulse, or the influence of religious music, bears heavily on Hermanova’s compositions in her choir arrangements, but is most apparent in her use of pipe organ, opening the record on Black Glass. Having written organ parts for a significant portion of the record, she sought out the renowned organist Denny Wilke to record with her in the Merseburg Cathedral. Captivated by Wilke's profound skill as a player and knowledge of the Ladegast organ, Hermanova invited him to collaborate on Two Deaths where he delivers an impressive improvisation. While religious music offers spiritual solace from grief, folk speaks to the human and earthly as told by the individual, be they songs of suffering or joy, sin or salvation. To Hermanova, the clean promise of liturgical music is not enough to alleviate the blunt pain of grief. Contrasting the spiritual is the voice of the individual sufferer - the folk musician. For Hermanova, the autoharp embodies this contrast. The autoharp, a familiar sound in Appalachian folk music since its mass production in the late 1800’s, is an affordable instrument designed for the unskilled player. It is the antithesis of the organ which is costly, gargantuan, reserved for skilled players, and quite literally a part of the church. Through In Death’s Eyes the sounds of transcendence blend with the worldly, the tension between them poignantly expressing Hermanova’s struggle for spiritual resolution against the reality of death and loss. Like Hermanova’s lyrics, the artwork, conceptualized by Enes Güç and Evelyn Bencicova, is riddled with symbolism and allusion. We find Hermanova on the cover, digitally rendered. Reclining like an anatomical Venus, her vital organs are exposed, suggesting she is denied a transcendent death and is instead immaculately human. Bearing a sickle, her legs are metallic like armor, both symbols of protection. We see here in this image, as we hear in the nine tracks of IDE, the metaphoric state of someone ravaged by loss, choosing to tear herself open in an attempt to heal. - Reece Cox Petra Hermanova is a musician and visual artist based in Berlin. In 2018, Hermanova began working with the autoharp, which has since become the central pillar of her musical practice. Drawing inspiration from folk, medieval drone, and contemporary textural expressions, as well as Appalachian autoharp music, she creates emotionally driven arrangements accompanied by vocals. In her lyrics, she speaks to the fragility and tenderness of the human condition, religious conceptions of death, and introspective landscapes through narrative and symbolism. Hermanova debuted live at the Berliner Festspiele event The Sun Machine is Coming Down, performed at Trauma Bar und Kino accompanied with her choir, and recently took part in Sorour Darabi’s durational performance From the Throat to the Dawn. Her debut solo album, In Death’s Eyes, is set for release in 2023 on the art platform and label Unguarded. The album, where she wrote for the autoharp, pipe organ, solo voice and choir, features the acclaimed organist Denny Wilke playing the 19th century Ladegast organ of the Merseburg Cathedral. She has toured internationally with previous projects, including extensive sound and visual collaborations with Jon Eirik Boska (Hydropsyche) as well as with her award-winning band Fiordmoss. She was recently announced as a SHAPE+ platform artist.

BLUE-BLACK COLOURED VINYL! LIMITED TO 100 UNITS
Irakli’s new album is due to come out October 2023 on Live at Robert Johnson. Mechanical Moon is a retrofuturistic adventure of beautiful compositions and pulsating rhythms which are weaved together over the span of eight tracks.

We are immersed into evocative atmospheres, full of intricate textures. This is techno where you close your eyes and board an ocean liner that slowly rises and floats towards the moon.

Happy human with sad eyes roamed the neon-lit streets of the artificial island. This section of the metropolis had been designed as a necessity more than any other amenities. It had been allocated a budget surpassing the one for waste management in a city housing over a billion inhabitants.

Society had managed to eradicate love, yet it still grappled with untamed primal instincts such as dancing, sex, or violence. The island provided a discreet haven, away from the prying eyes of telescreens that silently stared into all souls. Similar to Las Vegas centuries ago, it was a safe space where anything was fair game.

Once there, night time lasted all day. Everything retained an analog essence. Music emanated from vintage record players. Amidst the laughter and tears, the artificial glow of the mechanical moon had become the last reminder of life outside.

A life so repetitive that he had been consumed by the desire to transform into a machine or a human satellite. Yet, breaking the cycle in such a manner remained impossible. And so, he wandered for hours on the island, among the weary faces.

Happy as one could be.

Atrocity Machine is the latest full-length album from the Vermont-based doom metal band, Body Void. The album, which was released on October 13, 2023, features six tracks of heavy, crushing, and atmospheric soundscapes that delve into themes of environmental collapse, societal decay, and the darker aspects of the human psyche. Atrocity Machine marks a further evolution of Body Void's sound, incorporating more complex song structures and a greater emphasis on dynamics. The album's lyrics are also particularly poignant, tackling issues such as climate change, social inequality, and the devastating consequences of industrialization.

Cybotron has re-emerged in our contemporary cybercultural age when artifactual futures begin a transition into a new era of "Meta".

By combining their knowledge of philosophy, science fiction, and mechanical engineering, at a time when electronic instrument companies were only just beginning to distribute their products to the masses, two prosumer audio technicians named Juan Atkins and Rik Davis were able to re-engineer Cybotron – a combination of the words “Cyborg” and “Cyclotron” (an atomic particle accelerator) – to be used as a home studio performance music that would change the course of independently produced and distributed electronic music.

Dissolving the boundary between singer, songwriter, and producer, Juan Atkins named Cybotron’s future forward funkadelic sound “techno” in reference to Alvin Toffler’s concept of unlikely “techno rebels” against technocracy. Techno is music that sounds like technology, and its purpose was to help society survive our collision with a universally felt “future shock” by inserting an audio virus into the cultural matrix.

Techno’s blueprint spread across the Detroit-Berlin Axis between Metroplex and Tresor. As human society began its transition from a post-industrial to an information-based market economy, Cybotron enabled a thorough system override of the human senses towards a tangible man-machine hybridity and showed the world how to channel their emotions and imaginations into new sound technologies and create new ‘sonic’ spatialities where listeners can transport themselves out of the physical world into the future. The cover of their debut album Enter (1983) transmitted a fragmented view of a body in motion being digitized mid-stride, dissolving physical and virtual reality into sonic fiction.

Today, the man-machine hybridity of Cybotron is still the truest form of techno, coevolving in conversation with the technological music they created and inspired. The latest data disk marks a new chapter that reflects a techgnostic musical expression of the knowledge acquired during their decades-long hiatus. Unlike the dance music industrial replications of the Model 500 formula, acknowledging the content marketing expectations that segments music into specific, sellable genres, this techno music is self-aware. Cybotron processes dance music tropes spawned from its very own blueprint with a meta-tactical precision out of sync with our current rave new world.

Cybotron’s return demonstrates a studied engagement with what techno was and should be with a peerless update of Juan Atkins’ initial inventive idea of do-it-yourself electrically reengineered music xeroxed onto both sides of the 12” – uploaded directly into the alleys of your mind.
- The Rhythmanalyst

Drose is an experimental rock band from Columbus, Ohio, featuring the songwriting and voice of Dustin Rose. Their fevered, nihilistic new release, boy man machine+, combines their 2016 album of the same name with their debut 7", "a voice", and an assemblage of unreleased tracks — all freshly remastered by veteran engineer Carl Saff.

Dustin Rose calls boy man machine+ "an indictment of human consciousness." The music explores the torments of sentience through the sound of machines across the album, featuring slashing lines from guitarist Gregory Packet and bizarre drum patterns from John Mengerink. The results are harsh, bewildering and strangelybeautiful.

The debut recording by Setting, a trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers); Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye); and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell). Deluxe LP edition features 140g black virgin vinyl and a reverse board jacket with art by Timothy Breen. Deluxe CD edition features a gatefold jacket with art by Timothy Breen. RIYL: Popol Vuh, Brian Eno’s Ambient 4, Harmonia, The Necks. Setting, befitting its name which can be read as noun or verb, and simultaneously suggests the sun, or any star in the firmament from our earthbound perspective; a story and its surroundings, its scenic context or mise en scène; or a psychedelic experience, as in the prescription to mind one’s “set and setting” arose outdoors, uncontained and unconstrained by architecture. The group’s debut recording Shone a Rainbow Light On traverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Kosmische correspondences are inevitable and valid, but also somewhat deceptive, given this meditative music’s terrestrial rootedness in the familiar natural world, more in native humus and humidity than in outer space. Fuelled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, these four stately longform pieces sound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog (or, as we call it in North Carolina, a pocosin). An instrumental trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones, Setting established its own setting and found its footing in regularly scheduled improvisational sessions outside Westerlund’s home in Durham, North Carolina, beginning in 2021. The three players began as two, in the context of occasional Bowles and Westerlund percussion duo performances dating back to 2018. Fennelly provided the initial impetus to gather and play together with intentionality and discipline, as well as an harmonic adhesive and thickening agent in the grain and gravity of his harmonium and synthesizer. As always, Bowles’s background as a pianist and drummer informs his approach to banjo, imparting a woodiness, a piney verticality and resinous tang. Westerlund’s training with Milford Graves is apparent in his polyrhythmic flow and its correspondences to human circulatory and corporeal rhythms. They recorded their collective discoveries with engineer Nick Broste in the spring of 2022.The record begins, like the group’s name, and like the language of its unique instrumental interplay, with ambiguous grammar: “We Center,” the first and longest track at thirteen and a half minutes, builds patiently to a percolating climax of tidal heaving, with ceremonial connotations. “Zoetropics,” the shortest piece, follows, offering a more diaphanous counterpoint to the density of its predecessor. The zithery, shivering “A Sun Harp,” its title redolent of Sun Ra, showcases Westerlund’s unfettered drumming, which skitters restlessly until anchored, at its conclusion, by a minor bass progression. Finally, “Fog Glossaries” exhales through the maritime and meteorological evocations of its title, distant buoys clanging. Although certainly elements and strategies of so-called ambient and drone musical traditions are invoked and deployed, those diffuse terms feel inadequate to describe everything else happening here: the devotional valences, the minimalist rigor, and even submarine jazz inclinations perceptible beneath the surface. Throughout this four-movement program, which invites deep listening, it is often difficult to differentiate individual instruments from the massed choir of the group’s unified sonic presence. At times what sound like field recordings cicadas, birds, wind, water splash out of this slow but powerful current, only to be revealed as overtones produced by harmonium, banjo, or cymbals. Setting’s sound is fundamentally synthetic in the sense of synthesis, not artifice—in a manner remarkable for its almost entirely acoustic arsenal of instrumentation, often registering as the product of a single alien technology, perhaps the rainbow lights of that bog-marooned UFO. (“Setting,” of course, can also refer to a machine’s variable operational amplitude its temperature, volume, speed, elevation, etc.) Sometimes the most seemingly extraterrestrial lifeforms are in fact our unfamiliar earthbound neighbors. Despite the destruction of many such habitats, the coastal plains of eastern, tidewater North Carolina is home to more pocosins freshwater, evergreen wetlands with deep, acidic, sandy, peat soils than anywhere else in the world. These threatened peat-bog ecosystems are the only native environment to sustain the carnivorous Venus flytrap, among other oddities. The sonic ecosystem of Setting similarly deep, acidic, and boggy contains equivalent wonders, savage and delicate, for listeners willing to take the time to sink.

Die spanischen Old-School-Death-Metaller DECAPITATED CHRIST sind zurück in bester Form mit einem neuen Hammerschlag-Album namens 'Glorious Tyrannizing of Human Rats'.
Dieses 5. Album der Band ist ohne Zweifel ihr bisher stärkstes, eingängigstes und brutalstes Werk.
FFO: Fans von DEICIDE, AEON, VITAL REMAINS usw..

Chicago"s Axis: Sova hit the beaches of southern California with Ty Segall to make a total hi-fi classic. Often feral and consistently catchy, Blinded By Oblivion is lit up with interlocking drum kit + drum machine, adventuresome guitar, bass, and harmonic vocals on every song. Icy lyrical perspectives, rendered in a sunshiny natural paradise, transmit the fun and fraud of human polarities with urgency and an occasional eye roll. Making for an undeniably good/bad time, streamlined and more reflexibly physical than previously known, Blinded By Oblivion begs the universe to bring back rock and roll radio. All the elements are there: compassion for our collective fallibility, rebuke on the tip of the tongue, all rolled tight with hook-laden, high-energy construction. "Bout halfway through Blinded By Oblivion, we hear Sova say, "I think my heart is made of metal." Yuuuup. But we"d argue there"s at least a ventricle or two made of post punk! And with vena cavae split between psych and southern boogie. And cardiac veins of glam, power pop, and punk Sometimes the heart is simply filled with sweet melody - so man, the beats of this metallic muscle are insane!

Chicago"s Axis: Sova hit the beaches of southern California with Ty Segall to make a total hi-fi classic. Often feral and consistently catchy, Blinded By Oblivion is lit up with interlocking drum kit + drum machine, adventuresome guitar, bass, and harmonic vocals on every song. Icy lyrical perspectives, rendered in a sunshiny natural paradise, transmit the fun and fraud of human polarities with urgency and an occasional eye roll. Making for an undeniably good/bad time, streamlined and more reflexibly physical than previously known, Blinded By Oblivion begs the universe to bring back rock and roll radio. All the elements are there: compassion for our collective fallibility, rebuke on the tip of the tongue, all rolled tight with hook-laden, high-energy construction. "Bout halfway through Blinded By Oblivion, we hear Sova say, "I think my heart is made of metal." Yuuuup. But we"d argue there"s at least a ventricle or two made of post punk! And with vena cavae split between psych and southern boogie. And cardiac veins of glam, power pop, and punk Sometimes the heart is simply filled with sweet melody - so man, the beats of this metallic muscle are insane!

Ne$$ and Baby J’s 2nd album comes after a long collaborative working relationship from previous group A-Alikes. The album represents an original voice in hip-hop, addressing working-class proletariat stories of street life, and the effects of capitalism and black and poor people. Ness has been a successful part of the US hip-hop seen over the past two decades, working with the likes of Mos Def, Dead Prez and Bilal. Baby J is an established UK, hip-hop producer whose production credits include Amy Winehouse, Skinnyman, Dead Prez, Plan B and Mark Ronson. The album has a range of guest features including previous SONY RCA signed Jamie Joseph and Conway the Machine (Griselda). The album is sonically broken and dark with a raw purist Hip Hop sound.

Mick Flannery is one of Ireland's most acclaimed songwriters and singers
The award- winning, double- platinum selling artist has released seven studio
albums, three of which have reached No. 1 status.
On September 15th he will release his eighth studio album 'Goodtime Charlie'.
Featuring collaborations with Valerie June, Anais Mitchell and Tianna Esperanza.
Mick has partnered with US Label Oh Boy Records, which for them will be their
first non-American signing.
"Mick Flannery has a voice for the ages, a complete Master of his craft" cited by
Clash Magazine, whilst The Sunday Times said he "conjures up exquisite storytelling." His last album in 2021 consisted of a collection of duets with up and
coming Irish artist Susan O'Neill. American Songwriter called 'In The Game' a
"Sorrowful Masterpiece." The record was nominated for the Choice Music Prize,
and won the RTE Radio 1 song of the year two years in a row for tracks 'Baby Talk'
and 'Chain Reaction.' The album was the biggest selling independent record in
Ireland in 2021.
Mick Flannery's songs are fluent in expressing layered aspects of the human
condition, its flaws, triumphs, and general uncertainty. Originally a stone mason
by trade, he once described his stage presence as that of a 'Mountain goat'
however over the years that shy awkwardness of said mountain goat has started
to dissipate. His live shows are renowned for his self- deprecating humor,
audience engagement and the ability to bring people on a journey of both
heartbreak and joy, often in the same instance

This will be an anniversary edition LP on clear vinyl in a jacket with a silver foil stamp on the lettering - It will also include a 12 page booklet, a printed innersleeve and a sales sticker

The LP was fully remastered from the original analog tapes, and includes a previously unreleased track called "Smile"

The 5th release comes from the hands of ecuadorian mastermind Fauna Extinta aka Nicola Cruz. The First EP under this alias which Nicola uses to explore biology that once was, and now is left as a memory or a myth. Drawing these ideas of creation, biogeography, evolution and extinction, serve as an inspiration for programming and conceptualizing new material of analogue realms, always challenging the mind and spirit.

You have said too much to a stranger in a bar bathroom; your back is killing you because of everything you haven’t said; you’ve overwatered your houseplants again. Small Million is here for you. Flowing from the collaboration of longtime creative partners Ryan Linder and Malachi Graham, the Portland-based indie pop outfit welds deeply affecting sonic production to smart lyrics about intuition and inhibition, losing control and ending up in unexpected places, being willing to fuck up, bodies hurt and bodies joyful.

The effect is both intimate and epic, delicate and fierce. Listen to it to ache, dance to it to heal. In the time since Small Million's last release, years of chronic pain have led lead vocalist and lyricist Malachi Graham to deep explorations of embodiment that have changed everything from her singing voice to her dance moves to her observation of human frailty. “There’s one side of chronic pain that leads you towards intuition, self-discovery, and listening closely to yourself. But it also means you end up sitting on the side of the room a lot, watching people and paying attention. Also you’re pissed,” notes Graham. Producer and instrumentalist Ryan Linder’s background as a filmmaker informs the textured richness and intelligent restraint of his song building. He approaches production with obsessive technical rigor that’s always in service of centering intense emotion.

Graham’s clear, unadulterated vocals breathe at the heart of Linder’s rich sonic terrain, drawing comparisons to The Cranberries and Florence + the Machine. Linder and Graham have been writing as a duo for a decade, but for their newest chapter they've expanded the band, enlisting Ben Tyler (Small Skies) on drums and Kale Chesney (Lo Pony) on bass and harmonies.

Small Million's evolution into a four-piece has expanded the band’s sound from their synth pop origins to encompass more organic, raw indie rock energy. Small Million has played with artists like Fakear, IDER, Hatchie, HÆLOS, Lo Moon, and Loch Lomond, and their tracks have been featured on compilations by Tender Loving Empire, PDX Pop Now!, and Vortex Music Magazine. They released their debut EP Before the Fall in June 2016, their follow-up, Young Fools, in Fall 2018, and singles “Saintly” and “Tarot” in 2019. Their newest music is dropping throughout 2022.

In 2020, electronic musician Nina Pixel was offered a track on a compilation album of songs from the Liptov region. What started as a rearrangement of a single folk song eventually grew in scope and size, eventually becoming a series of releases. Titled Ancestral Archaeology, the series counts two self-released EPs, an audiovisual show in co-operation with Adrián Kriška, and now, after two years, a double LP published by Weltschmerzen. In this definitive form of an album, Ancestral Archaeology reveals itself as a musical reimagination of traditional historical Slovak culture at large.

Nina Pixel averts the perils of lapsing into inauthentic fakelore by building her music with, rather than on, the ethnographic riches of Slovakia. With the eagerness of a genuine archeological prospector, Ancestral Archaeology invokes the always present but seldom perceived linchpins of folklore culture: the desperate clinging to the memory of pre-Christian paganism and witchcraft, songs with narratives of beautiful innate wyrdness that is utterly unfit for mass culture, and superstition as the most serious longing for the balance between sense and irrationality.

If we acknowledge the truism of folklore as the shared way of expression in rural society, the techno music on Ancestral Archeology proposes that, in the urban society of ours, this role is served by raves. The argument isn't as much declared as it's implied // in music and in the spoken-word lyrics that are rife with historical and contemporary sources. An 18th-century recipe by the writer and priest Juraj Fándly proposes snorting the grounded flowers of the medicinal weed Valerian as a way of curing bad vision. "It is a proven remedy!" we are repeatedly assured, and it's not hard imagining Fándly and his parishioners, strung out on Valerian, moving almost involuntarily to the rhythms of their era just as we can move to Ancestral Archeology.

Nina Pixel is a Slovak music artist based in Berlin. Lyrics are inspired by Slovak folklore traditions, songs and shared beliefs.



Manifestation tools: cello, overtone flute koncovka, fujara, gong, metal bowls, sheep bell, field recordings of Slovak forests, Andreas's tom and various drum machines.

With I Will Make a Baby in this Damn Economy, Fat Tony embodies the kind of quixotic figure he would rap about; a singular entity who’s motivated, confident, and hungry; a perpetual-motion-machine locked in a staring contest with his country. It’s the latest album in his catalog produced entirely by L.A-based producer Taydex since 2020’s Wake Up. Later that same year Fat Tony released Exotica, and ever since he’s demonstrated he is in his own lane as a professional rapper with the mind of a magician, as quick to conjure an image as pull it out from under you, deftly manoeuvring through so many details and references a listener feels as if they have witnessed the work of an illusionist. He paints these canvases inside of songs that rarely spill past three minutes; they’re pocket-sized diaries replete with acute observations, character studies, microdoses of storytelling, and single-minded ruminations on a topic that bud, blossom, and fade before too long. Fat Tony & Taydex’s I Will Make a Baby in this Damn Economy cements Tony’s status as someone whose albums are not so much lyrically-lyrical as they are picaresque.
As with any Fat Tony project, the bars are tight as ever, but are so fluid for the 34-year-old it’s almost easy to take for granted the details, warmth, and humanity inside his free-associative tales of day-one friends who’ve passed, edgelord grifters who want to spit game, and nights on ketamine. Taydex’s production sprints through disparate yet simpatico styles, dipping its toes into Pi’erre Bourne-esque bass (see lead single “Spectacular”), house (“Loosen Up”), and even hyperpop. Meditations on loss and grief are woven throughout, but Tony throws a few curveballs as well: Consider “Alexis,” which sweetly reflects on a long-term platonic friendship. Taydex finds a Teddy Riley-indebted New Jack Swing groove just deep enough for the feeling to land and underlines the song’s sincere candor. This is the appeal of Fat Tony writ-large: his boisterous voice and genial personality invite you to the party, then you stick around to hear what he’s saying, which is frequently more introspective and complex than one assumes.
Written and recorded in Taydex’s new studio in North Hollywood, Tony says, “We had much more freedom and flexibility in making this album and you can hear it. It felt like a family project.” If the album is comfortable and loose, it is also dense and substantial. The album’s final two tracks contextualize the immediacy of what came before it—the mezcal with ices drank, Paul Wall swangin’ through to drop knowledge, the Polaris Prize-winning rapper Cadence Weapon providing a vibe check. “Make a Baby” accounts for Tony who’s seen everything, and knows he’s met the one to be a father with, and yet chooses to take his time to get it done. Taydex’s beat recalls turn-of-the-century R&B and the millennial promise of an endless good time. Sombre closer “Jasper, TX” is Tony coming to grips with the story of James Byrd, Jr., a Black man from East Texas dragged to his death by three white supremacists in 1998. These songs are not only trademarks of Tony’s fastidious rapping—they are deeply personal examples of his approach to artistry and life itself, where every decision is made in the shadow of history.
It’s here the mission statement of I Will Make a Baby in this Damn Economy comes into focus—you get the sense he means it, he’s ready for it, he’ll fight for it. He’s waiting to take the world at its word.

Close your eyes and merge into Benedikt Frey’s 'Fastlane'. Imagine sitting in the driver’s seat of a an automobile, one with exceptional horsepower and torque, as you stare out the windshield at the red light, warping in fata-morgana a mile down the road. It’s a straight-away, a black top with two lanes, and against your better judgment you decide to floor the gas. No hesitation in your muscle, your ankle or the ball of your foot, which you now realize is some kind of universal pivot, the first point of contact fusing your body with the will of machine. In this moment you’re in awe that you, a human, an animal, grew from pond scum into something so advanced as to engineer this thing, a mechanical beast capable of overwhelming power and exhilaration. But you also feel a seductive dread, an outside force diverting you from caution toward a dangling carrot of curiosity, asking yourself, ‘How far can I take this thing?’ The dread, now a constant, is numbed, equalized by an adverse intoxicating gratification. You feel both sensations in real time, however, rather than take responsibility for yourself, friends, family and innocent bystanders, you cement your foot to the floor and lean your head back. Noise around you fades to mute. Smell the benzene-scented air, feel the wind on your face, the menacing vibration of the vessel you control beneath you and every grain of asphalt under its tires. This mile has now lasted an eternity and you’ve left your body for some objective view, as if watching climax of a film. Past the point of no return, you embrace abandon and lean into fate. The film becomes slow motion, a crawling pace so mesmerizing you convince yourself of an option to eject yourself from this madness, but as you finally let go of your last morsel of fear, you run the red light head-on into the nucleus of a fantastic glistening sculpture of torn metal, glass, oil, broken dreams and heartache. 'Fastlane' may be just drum machines and synthesizers if you’re timid, but listen harder and know the catastrophic reality of existence, a wreckage so gruesome we dare not rubberneck, but afterall it is our nature to stare.

Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri’s career defining album Ecstatic Computation, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years.

Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Ecstatic Computation revolves
around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.


Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As
long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.