quête:inspired

Skylax Armagnac's darling who released his first EP just a year ago, which had an international resonance with rave reviews from Resident Advisor, Bicep, Chaos in the CBD, Peach or even soul clap. Rightly some saw it as a resurgence, a modernized version of 90s New York house, silky and elegant in the Bobby Konders, Mr Fingers way. For this new EP, with fantastic remixes of the brilliant Simoncino, our French prodigy is inspired by the beginnings of trance on the title song (and title of the ep by the way) "The world as we know it (masterclass mix)", UK dub and rave influences, as on some Nu Groove releases (notably the first joey beltram) - the lead vocal sample comes from a speech in which Noam Chomsky describes the United States as a violent country and hard. According to the author "If this piece says something, I believe it is that the music and the party should not serve to forget the problems of the world, but rather to find the strength, the resources, the inspiration to solve them." On "Oh La Musique" Armagnac used the sound of his neighbors as a voice sample ! Indeed, during this incredibly complicated period that we are living in, confinement due to the devastating effects of covid 19, one of his neighbors played music really loudly and for 20 minutes ignored the other neighbors who were screaming "oh oh, the music" through the window. "Turning this moment of irritation into a sample to the glory of the music strikes me as pretty funny." Still according to the author. On B1, it’s a house masterclass lesson by the phenomenal & ultra prolific Simoncino, but do i need to remind you how much italians are masters in their way of paying homage to all the best house music that has ever been created & produced ? Good taste is often on their side ! The red zone club is a tense and incredibly effective mix that can be enjoyed either on a house or techno dancefloor, it is clearly a banger. B2 saw the italian master offers us a beautiful ambient mix. And to conclude "On My Own" is according to Armagnac "a title that speaks of the trust that one can place in one's fellow human beings and of emancipation." A superb EP that adds to the long list of must-haves from Skylax Records.

Having established himself as a core Apollo artist with three fantastic EPs since 2016, Sieren now steps up with a first full length for the label. 'Timelapse' is a majestic 13 track trip into this unique artist's very emotional fusion of post-bass bliss. Sieren aka Matthias Frick is a master of intricate electronics and bittersweet emotions, of deep atmospherics and compelling rhythms. He has been building a dedicated following for some years now, putting out his debut album on Christian Loffler's Ki Records in 2016. Inspired by a rich history of bass-driven UK sounds, he pairs that with a love of field recording and experimental soundscaping, and now shows he is an ever evolving master of his art on this stunning new record.

Floofy - An ear-bugging flute, a huge Moog bassline and cosmic synths, what more do you need for an ecstatic club anthem?

Charlize - Let’s add a “Spacer Woman” style handclap towards the lush pads. Rex club dance floor approved.

Lezaki - Inspired by a fond memory of a one-time festival at the polish seaside, a fusion between disco and trance elements. Long-lasting friendships will develop while you get lost in the song.

Dark Entries is pleased to announce a deluxe reissue of Sexual Harrassment’s 1983 opus I Need A Freak. Lynn Tolliver, DJ/Program Director at Cleveland’s WZAK, adopted the pseudonym David Payton in order to keep his musical endeavors separate from his public persona. Sexual Harrassment (misspelled deliberately) was formed as a concept band, with members selected based on appearance and choreographic skill rather than musical ability. Tolliver’s explicit lyrics focused on the central themes of desire and sexual relations. Working at a studio in Akron, he recorded an album of quirky-yet-lurid electro funk, which was released on Heat Records. Tolliver remarks, “I learned as a youngster, sex sells! The things that are rated the worst – violence, horror and sex – are the things people want to see or hear about.” I Need a Freak was a surprise hit, selling over 100,000 copies.

I Need A Freak is presented here for the first time on double LP, pressed at 45 rpm for maximum DJ-friendliness. While the album’s naughtier moments seem quaint by contemporary standards, the fusion of lo-fi funk and disaffected vocals still stuns today. On the eternal electro-raunch anthem “I Need a Freak”, minimalism serves to highlight the lasciviousness of the deadpan lyrics, which were inspired by Lourdes Figueroa, Tolliver’s girlfriend at the time. Tolliver’s whimsy shines on tracks like “If I Gave You a Party” and “K.I.S.S.I.N.G.”, which contrast nursery rhyme structures with decidedly R-rated lyrics. “Exercise Your Ass Off” lampoons the home exercise craze, but with a more-than-suggestive sexual bent. Also included are two bonus cuts, “We Want Prince” and “These Are The Things That I Like”, previously released as singles in 1984 and 1986, respectively. “We Want Prince” is both a homage to the Purple one and a gentle satire of obsessive fandom.

I Need A Freak has been remastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. The album comes in a gatefold sleeve featuring the original artwork. Included are lyrics, photos, and liner notes by Lynn Tolliver and drummer Dale Jackson. Tolliver’s sly provacateurship is best captured by the quote: “It’s funny – without sex, mankind is dead, yet we hide the very thing we need.”

In a time where everyone from Whitney Houston to Frank Zappa have been re-created in hologram form, where Grimes recently suggested in an interview that “we were at the end of human art”; there could scarcely be a better time for genre-shifting Leeds-based six-piece Team Picture to bring forth the thrillingly expansive synth-pop opus of their debut album The Menace of Mechanical Music.

Inspired by an early 20th century essay under the same name by American marching band leader John Philip Sousa, Team Picture take a look at the automation of creativity on this, their first record with a fully settled line up. Themes centre around the value of creative identity in an automated age, the increasingly disposable nature of art and where that leaves its creators. At twelve songs split into a three-part suite; The Menace of Mechanical Music is emphatically maximalist.

Tracks like the breathy, twinkling Flowerpots, Electric Beds and Handsome Machines’ Icarus-like striving for the sun are an antidote to a music world awash with digital production manipulation and songs written to algorithm. In debating the loosening of the human grip on creativity, Team Picture have poured every last drop of emotion into the recording process.

The group’s now trademark three-way vocal delivery and blurring of textures takes on new structure and purpose. They’ve always had a self-awareness to themselves, too. Initially grouped in with the guitar psych crowd, thanks to their fledgling repeato-rock, they were quick to disassociate themselves from that on 2018's mini-album Recital. With The Menace of Mechanical Music, they expand their sound further still, pirouetting from the likes of Sleeptype Auction – which glimmers like a late 80’s 4AD artefact – through various FX-laden dreamscapes, to the squelchy post-punk of closer Quit Reading. Yet the group were as much influenced by the work of the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, and his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, as they were music touchstones ranging from Kate Bush, Cass McCombs and The Cure.

It’s Sousa words that resonate most deeply within the record however: “The fears of Sousa echo the fears of today's musician,” says Lewis of the late band leader’s 1907 text. “The re-appropriation of funds and support that the artist needs to survive, the gradual erosion of musicianship and self-improvement, that art will become disposable, and that our cultural identity will disappear.”

Recorded with producer Matt Peel (W.H Lung, Eagulls), half the group were unemployed during the session and a daily routine would see them undertake universal credit meetings and job interviews in the morning, before heading to the studio to work into the night. “It was an anxious process but an enjoyable one” says the band’s guitarist Josh Lewis. Indeed, beyond the increasingly golden gated idea of ‘making it’ as an artist, this new album is simply about surviving as one.
Sousa’s vision of a society that had deferred to automation, where babies were rocked to sleep by wheels and pulleys, and people no longer played piano with their own hands. Well over 100 years later and on the precipice of a technological shift never seen before, The Menace of Mechanical Music is the most human response that Team Picture could have given.

Following the 2020 release of RoundAgain, Nonesuch reissues on vinyl Joshua Redman's first album with his own band — pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Christian McBride, and drummer Brian Blade — originally released in 1994. MoodSwing was Redman’s third recording as a band leader and his first featuring all-original compositions. The young saxophonist sought to change what he believed to be the public perception of jazz — a largely academic and overly intellectualized form of music devoid of the emotional themes that drive many other genres. As he explains in the original liner notes, jazz was seen as, “an elite art form, reserved for a sophisticated intelligentsia who rendezvous in secret.” With MoodSwing, Redman makes the case that jazz can be an accessible musical medium that could evoke basic and visceral emotional reactions.

From the playfully coy ‘Chill’ to the urgent energy of ‘Rejoice’, Redman offers up a communicative and inspired record ofemotional diversity. Joining him in this task was a young band of his peers, all of whom have since become established and esteemed figures in jazz. MoodSwing was one of the first exposures the jazz community had to young pianist Brad Mehldau, then beginning his career in Redman’s quartet. Mehldau anchors these compositions behind Redman’s lyrical playing, occasionally stepping out front to show his talents in ‘The Oneness of Two (In Three)’ and ‘Past in the Present’. The band’s rhythm section has since been recognized as one of jazz’s best, with Christian McBride on bass, and then little-known Brian Blade on the drums.

As the follow-up to his breakout Wish, MoodSwing was universally praised by critics and enjoyed commercial success, selling over 300,000 units worldwide. Entertainment Weekly wrote, ‘saxist Redman finds ingenious ways of creating a modeof acoustic jazz that is both entertaining and enlightening.’ This record continues to provide a cornerstone for Redman’s currentcareer; many of these compositions are still featured in the saxophonist’s live sets today.

Redman’s previously announced European summer 2020 tour dates with Mehldau, McBride and Blade have been rescheduled for 2021, including London’s Barbican, now on July 11.

Magnum II is the eponymous second studio album by English hard rock band Magnum. Originally released in 1979, the album highlights the band’s trademark harmonies and punchy instrumentals very well. Magnum II is a diverse record, as it features ballads and adult contemporary rock, but also hints of prog and heavy metal. A track like “Great Adventure” contains catchy vocals, dynamic guitar riffs and inspired keyboards, while the acoustic “Reborn” showcases a more mellow side of the band. Magnum II is released with a special mirror sleeve, and it includes 2 bonus tracks: “Lonesome Star” and “Everybody Needs”. The limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies is pressed on silver coloured vinyl.

Trumpet genius Booker Little appeared on many seminal records such as Max Roach's "We insist", Eric Dolphys' "Far Cry" and John Coltrane's "Africa Brass". Recorded in 1960 for the Time label, this is Booker Little's second album as a leader (there would only be four) and a major statement in his too short career. A dynamic and yet relaxed session with Little as the only horn in the band, a fine quartet featuring Winton Kelly or Tommy Flanagan on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums. A highly interactive combo inspired by Little's unique trumpet approach. "Little's immediately recognizable melancholy sound and lyrical style are heard in top form" as Scott Yanow stated in his 4½ stars album review.

Growing up in deindustrialized Providence, Rhode Island of the 1970s and 1980s provided NYC-based composer and interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom access to derelict subterranean spaces including the mile-long East Side Rail Tunnel. The tunnel's reverberant darkness would produce distinctive sensory effects and host Russom's formative experiences of interpersonal connectedness, liminality, transgender identity, anti-capitalist desire and state repression.

Secret Passage – an absorbing, memoiristic work by Russom, whose synthesis-based practice fuses information and expression into organic wholes – draws on memories of "unsupervised autonomous zones where I tasted the possibilities of a world without surveillance," as she writes in the liner notes. Inspired by "this beautifully neglected place," the music resounds with ghostlike echoes and raw pulsations.

Russom utilizes synthesizers, field recordings and voice to illustrate hallucinatory revelations of the city's lightless undercarriage. Each track of Secret Passage, originally released as a limited cassette on Voluminous Arts, is dedicated to a friend – entwining personal liberation with collective discovery. The East Side Rail Tunnel has been inaccessible since the 1990s, the result of urban development and gentrification.

Red Marbled Vinyl

WEBUILDMACHINES presents “Machines of Deliverance”, a limited edition various artist LP celebrating 50 releases of evolutionary, multi-layered, experimental electronic music and contemporary techno. Offering an expansive stylistic palette from around the world, the artists presented embrace the ethos of the label’s past, present, and future with eight tracks of cinematic, industrial-themed, techno. Suited for the dance floor and repeated listening, with meticulously crafted sound design and precision programming throughout, this release is a unique and inspired addition to the WEBUILDMACHINES catalog. A Side: Headless Horseman (Berlin, DE) – Shift in Time Tunnel (Minneapolis, US) – Everything is Changing Opus Daemonii (Chicago, US) – Quantum Rift Axkan (Los Angeles, US) – Empty B Side: SKD (Riga, LV) – Hellbound in Paradise Sramaana (Lyon, FR) – Sicmundus C-KAY (Tokyo, JP) – Time to Crumble Soseol (Seoul, KR) – Volnost (DIGI ONLY) Faceless (Shanghai, CN) – Four Over Three Linbo (Shanghai, CN) – Falsity Became Our Sport Mastered by Gio at Artefacts Mastering / Berlin Artwork by R. Miller

La Locura de Machuca is the story of one man’s bizarre odyssey into Colombia’s coastal music underground, and the wild, hypnotic sounds he helped bring up to the surface.

One night in 1975, a successful tax lawyer named Rafael Machuca had his mind blown in Barranquilla’s ‘Plaza de los Musicos’. Overnight he went from a high ranking position in the Columbian revenue authority to visionary production guru of the newly formed record label that bore his name, Discos Machuca, and for the next six years he devoted his life to releasing some of the strangest, most experimental Afro Psychedelia Cumbias ever produced. La Locura de Machuca is the story of one man’s bizarre odyssey into Colombia’s coastal music underground, and the wild, hypnotic sounds he helped bring up to the surface.

The Colombian music industry was thriving in the mid-seventies, but while homegrown bolero and vallenato tunes were doing well on the charts, it was imported African records that were setting crowds on fire at the picos – the sound-systems that fuelled neighbourhood parties – and wherever those records were played there were always a handful of groups who were inspired to plug traditional Cumbia directly into the electric currents coming from across the Atlantic.

It was these obscure bands, who fused Colombian and African rhythms with the swirling organs and psychedelic guitars of underground rock, that fired Machuca’s imagination. While the label made its money releasing popular hits by legends such as Alejandro Durán and Aníbal Velásquez, that money was poured back into a unique run of experimental releases by fringe artists such as La Banda Africana, King Somalie, Conjunto Barbacoa, and Abelardo Carbono, one of the godfathers of Champeta Criolla.

When Machuca couldn’t find groups to realise his particular vision, he simply created them himself. Drawing on a fearsome roster of musicians associated with the label, he assembled bands that lasted only as long as it took to record an album ,and unleashed the results – complete with arrestingly unusual album covers – under a series of different names such as Samba Negra or El Grupo Folclórico. This unorthodox approach led his longtime recording engineer, Eduardo Dávila, to describes Machuca’s productions as the “B-Movies of Colombian music.”

The story of Doctor Machuca and his eccentric exploits tells of one of Colombia’s most atypical and peculiar record companies; a defining pillar of Afro-Caribbean psychedelia. His productions have come to represent the roots of Champeta and set the pedigree standards for Afro and Costeño avant-garde. The seventeen tracks on La Locura de Machuca, harvested from the darkest, strangest corners of the Discos Machuca catalogue, sound like little else recorded before or since.

As Midnight Sister, multi-disciplinary LA artists Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian make motion pictures. Yes, sometimes with moving images _ but most often only with the music they create together. Balouzian's serpentine, string compositions are movie scenes that allow Giraffe, a brilliant character actor, to cloak herself in a new roles and voices. A bit of Jon Brion's score work; some old Hollywood strings; a solid dose of glam and outsider disco from 70s independent cinema. Any perceived artifice is always matched by an indelible human fingerprint, something perfectly off. Giraffe and Balouzian's respective work in fashion, visual art, video and film scoring _ along with the gang of virtuosos with which they surround themselves _ all wonderfully coalesce as Midnight Sister. And if 2017's `Saturn Over Sunset' was their collection of short films about outcast life in The San Fernando Valley, then their new album `Paining the Roses' is the inventive, meta motion picture that cements them as auteurs. `Painting the Roses' is in many ways a fairy tale -- not so much the sweet-and-happyending kind as something richer, packed with imagination and rooted in the complex human messiness beneath a story's artifice. Frontwoman Giraffe describes it as "this tightrope of being real yet synthetic, organic yet staged, light yet dark, logical yet irrational, beautiful yet dilapidated. Joyful nonsense." Here, disguises like masks and paint are not meant to hide but to liberate, to "set a part of us free", and Midnight Sister often embody this themselves, appearing highly stylized, curious, warm and inviting but a little askew. `Painting the Roses' is a story told through the looking glass, one where we examine ourselves in a funhouse mirror but find clarity in its twists. Giraffe traveled to visit family in Argentina during the making of the album and reconnected greatly with that part of her family history, art and culture. Balouzian created the core album opener "Doctor Says" during a session in the desert outside of LA. The guitar, which reminded Giraffe of South America, has a slow, sweltering surf-tango to it, like Dick Dale doing Carlos Gardel. And even though the song was inspired by Giraffe's reconnection with Argentina, the song is about the fading of some close friendships during the making of the album. "Man, you have changed," Giraffe sings, unclear if tis directed to a friend or to herself. Later on the album, "Wednesday Baby" _ named after Giraffe's rescue dog _ is patient, subtly baroque pop. It follows Giraffe through one of those gloomy days spent in tunnelvision doldrums from which only a sunbathing turtle or your canine companion can pull you out. By the time collaborator Max Whipple's saw comes beaming down from heaven in the song's 3rd part, we're hypnotized by the song's charming ennui. The song lands someplace both familiar and aloof, a little slice of timelessness taken straight from The Cake of Perfect Songcraft.

"I first heard Lady In Satin in a mega-shopping mall somewhere in San Francisco. I was about 20 years old and didn't know much about Billie's records or her life or how her voice changed over the years. Anyway, the sound was coming from the other side of the mall and I remember mistaking her voice for a beautiful perfectly distorted electric guitar - some other-world thing floating there on this strange mournful ocean of strings and I was hooked for life. Ten years later in 2006 I recorded an electric guitar instrumental version of "I'm A Fool To Want You" for my album Post-War. In 2018 I performed a concert in LA. of all the songs from Lady In Satin as a quintet and began preparing guitar arrangements for the recordings compiled on this record - Think of Spring. The title comes from a poem written in 1924 by Jane Brown-Thompson that eventually became "I Get Along Without You Very Well" in 1938 - the first song here. The conceit of Think of Spring is to filter the songs and strings from Lady In Satin through a single acoustic guitar using various alternate tunings and a minimal amount of textures and studio manipulation. most of the songs were recorded on an analog Tascam four track. Think of Spring is inspired by Billie Holiday, Ray Ellis, J.J. Johnson, John Fahey and Robert Johnson. Proceeds from this record will benefit Inner-City Arts & Donors Choose via PLUS1 for Black Lives Fund." - M. Ward

LTD. WHITE W/ DARK BLUE SPLATTER VINYL

First time ever on vinyl! On beautiful white vinyl with a dark blue splatter // "Webster explores themes of different relationships through her broody tunes, tackling the notion of writing only sad songs by writing her "saddest song" yet. In a way, the record feels like a comingof-age for the singer-songwriter into her own perfectly curated moment, which surely will lead to bigger and better things." - NYLON // "Faye Webster is filled with lush bluegrass sounds, featuring plenty of slide guitar and the occasional trill of a fiddle, which Webster's fragile voice flits through like that of a younger Natalie Prass." - W Magazine // "_a soulful offering heavily inspired by the country and western music she grew up listening to." - Pitchfork "Her self-titled record will win fans across the musical spectrum for its left-of-center approach to folk. Webster is a lifelong student of country-western songwriting and Americana sound (...) But she punctuates her own tunes with subtle flourishes of funk. Her voice hits a sweet spot somewhere between bluegrass powerhouse Alison Krauss, Natalie Prass, and Tennis's Alaina Moore, whose light vocals glide across any melody." - VICE // #8 album of 2017 - Gorilla vs. Bear

To finish to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the legendary label F Communication:

For the first time available on vinyl a compilation of the famous Megasoft Office series. Included many unreleased tracks.

The Megasoft Office series started 10 years ago. Since this time, visions and emotions inspired by music became a more popular feeling. Most of the tracks on this album are unreleased music which has been specially created by F Com artists to feed your creativity.

More releases from these artists are available all year long through albums or singles on the label.

(*) first time on vinyl

Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination.All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music. About the album Anna explains"there's a sadness and wilderness that inspired me to write this album, also a timelessness. I believe that this park has survived not only due to its beauty but also because of the iconography, it has been liberated from predictable ideas and ideals. The people who built this park truly set their minds and imagination free. All thoughts fly is a homage to this creation, and an effort to articulate the atmosphere and the feelings that this place evokes inside of me. It's a very personal interpretation of a place that I lack the words to describe. I'd like to believe Orsini built this monumental park out of grief for his dead wife, and in my Sacro Bosco I used this story as a core for my own inspiration: love as a foundation for creation."

coloured vinyl

Fractions return to Fleisch for a third time with their debut LP, unleashing eight tracks of highly effective techno-infused body music inspired by the melodrama of French films such as La Haine and Irreversible. With a palette of modernized 90s rave elements they transport the listener on a cinematic ride of contrasts between the explosive and the soothing, through violence and action to love and hope. Featuring Zanias on Track A4

Eric Kupper collaborates with the incredible, Samba-inspired Japanese singer Keiko Yoshimura for an original production on his long-standing label Hysteria.

After remixing a track sung by the lovely and super talented Keiko, a Japanese singer that specializes in Samba, Eric Kupper was so enthralled with her voice that he felt compelled to reach out to her to collaborate on an original production. Eric felt it would be an interesting concept to combine the Samba melody, Japanese lyric with Afro-Cuban rhythms.

This record is the result.

James Giuffre was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger, notable for his development of forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians. His 1960 album Western Suite features an unusual trio of clarinet, guitar and valve trombone. The first half of the album is devoted to Giuffre’s country music/folk- inspired suite, while the second half features a lengthy and abstract version of the big band standard “Topsy” and a Thelonious Monk song.

This album could easily have turned top-heavy. After all, here’s a record which, in just under 40 minutes, covers anything from Arabic scales to Japanese sounds, from free jazz references to concepts by Finnish pianist Kari Ikonen’s favourite painter Vasiliy Kandinsky.
To realise his vision, Ikonen even personally developed a device allowing him to play micro-intervals on his piano. And yet, things turned out differently: If anything, the results sound dream-like and mesmerising rather than stodgy and severe.
The album’s genesis may serve to explain this paradox. In August of 2019, Ikonen suddenly found himself with a month of free time. Without thinking twice and as if in a premonition of the Covid-lock-down, he recorded ‘Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions’ at his own home. His only companion was his beloved Steinway, captured by a personal selection of high-end microphones. Just a few days after the final session, the pieces landed on the desk of ECM- and Blue-Note-engineer Johannes Lundberg who mixed the album at his Gothenburg Epideminstudios. Clearly then, the music is spontaneous. But it’s also refined and deep. The influence of Kandinsky inspired
Ikonen to write some of his most complex and monumental pieces.