Buscar:kelman duran

Berlin-based composer and vocalist FRANKIE, also known as Franziska Aigner, and Dominican-American producer Kelman Duran meet at the Twelve Apostles Church, in the Berlin district of Schöneberg, sometime in 2022, at the beginning of the spring season. They were each asked to engage the space’s solemnity, and its reverence, through distinct performances. Their chance encounter, abounding with mutual curiosity towards each other’s practices, smoothened the path for a years-long collaboration, culminating in McArthur, their first joint album. Following a period of exchanging musical fragments and prompts at a distance, Aigner and Duran come together in Athens, and later in Los Angeles, to prepare the stuff and material for the album, slowly developing a body of work informed by shared hauntings, and a commitment towards the disjointed and the residual. Aigner describes her process as writing “into the negative space” of Duran’s beats—filling in, if not invigorating, their thudding and inflections, but without rearranging the integrity of the whole. The result is an album where time and geography are made elastic, and where sonic improvisations become a site for quiet, and cryptic, articulations of intimacy.

Jake Muir's latest set of soft-focus, sensual electro-concrète, dissolves X-rated gay sleaze flick soundtracks into a shimmering suite of subdued orchestral flourishes and surreal cosmic psychedelia.

Back in 2020, Muir put together a 90-minute mix for Honey Soundsystem, blending tracks from Kelman Duran, DJ Olive, Daniel Lanois and Terre Thaemlitz with obliquely camp dialog samples from vintage gay porn. The idea was to represent queer sexuality in a looser, more experimental manner, grazing the super-sensory pleasure of the bathhouse experience and the illicit joy of cruising without getting too self-serious while doing it. The mix was so popular that Muir followed it up with a weightless sequel two years later, and began developing the concept into a proper album, using more samples of music and dialogue, eventually performing the piece at the esteemed GRM as part of their FOCUS #4 concerts alongside work by Eliane Radigue, Folke Rabe and Chris Watson.

Bathhouse Blues is split into two side-long pieces that wash and ripple with nervous tension and discreet salaciousness. Opening with a familiar theatre sting, there are echoes here of kosmische and experimental electronics on 'Cruisin’ 87', fashioned into puddles of syrupy, back-room ambience. Occasionally we hear lascivious words thru the fog, men mumbling to each other before sex. "That's beautiful," a voice mutters over a dusky cricket chirp on 'Pipe Dream'. "It is," another replies.

Muir's sonic treatment is suitably explicit, like a 1950s Hollywood jump-cut to a train going into a tunnel; he takes the whole-body, mutual release of queer sex and interprets it with heady gestures, peppering jazzy rhythmic frostings into basins of skewered drone and gurgling synths. His sound is coloured by the pleasure of physical touch, a mussy flux of high frequency scrapes and caresses juxtaposed with woozy, dubbed-out fondles and thrusts. Who said the GRM was buttoned up?

Kelman Duran introduces LA’s Holodec to his Scorpio Red label with a debut album of flickering R&B torchsongs and ambient trap-soul that aches in a very special way. RIYL Dawuna, Burial, Junior Boys, MssingNo, claire rousay, Joy O, Triad God, Sampha…

The smouldering ’All Dogs Come From Wolves’ is a definitive statement by a quietly gifted artist who operates inside the long shadow of late ‘90s US R&B and the space where it intersects ambient, neo-classical, and the weightless bass interzones of contemporary UK club music. Bare boned and bathed in a dusky Californian half-light, the album’s 11 songs feel unnervingly stark yet full of tongue-tip sensuality, making a virtue of negative space and atmosphere with a lo-fi soundtrack-like quality that evokes the idea of nostalgic reflection as the route to the future; “a reminder to look to the past to remember where you’re from, to see where you’re going.”

Holodec's been assembling rugged dancefloor constructions for years now, teetering between 2-step, jungle, nu-rnb, and vaporous ambient forms, but rarely has he been as pointed or full-bodied as he is on ‘All Dogs Come From Wolves’. It's an album that can't possibly be cleaved from the place where it comes from, documenting LA's immigrant experience (Holodec is Asian-American), and finding thematic common ground with Space Afrika's "Honest Labour", absorbing prismatic reflections of footwork, rnb and hip-hop instead of trip-hop and dub techno.

Holodec croons soulfully over muted piano motifs on 'Tiles', evoking the spirit of Sampha or Dawuna, but with a gaseous glamor that's unmistakably Californian. The mood carries into 'The Wild', utilising wistful pads and saturated noise but refusing to let his music sink into the background. If you feel yourself drifting, there's inevitably a voice, a womp, or a stifled drum sound to drag you back into its presence. 'Bounce' is rhythmically heavy, but still somehow smudged around the edges; beats don't so much pump as fray, the closer you listen the more you hear it falling out of time and just out of space. It's more like a memory of neon-hued dance forms than a replication of the thing itself.

Even at the album’s rudest, the flinty jungle drums of ‘Black Market’ still remain desiccated, just out-of-reach, suggesting not telling, in a way that makes the album’s other highlights such as the vaporous R&B voice note of ‘And My Angel Dies Too’ or the shivering baroque figures of ‘Spirit’ so unusually seductive with their nuanced grasp of inference and a reserve of humility.

West Mineral return with a followup to Mister Water Wet’s 2019's subtropical ambient slow-burn debut ‘Bought the Farm’, expanding Iggy Romeu's horizons to contrast feverish Afro-Caribbean ambient jazz with jaunty illbient and atmospheric freakouts. Low-lit heat that’s highly recommended if yr into Nick León, Carlos Niño, Kelman Duran, Gonçalo F. Cardoso.

Mister Water Wet continues to excavate the tropical soundscapes that simmer the producer's Kansas City home with his Puerto Rican roots, on a new album of extended vignettes and mood pieces that cross a late 90’s Mo Wax instrumentals vibe with present day feelings of displacement and ennui.

LP opener ‘Bory’ tunes us into Water Wet’s weirdly fuzzed frequencies, where tremeloed strings and found sounds resemble what might have been a lost dean blunt x dean hurley sound design concept for Inland Empire, while ‘I Saw the Green Flash' opens a swirl of strings and traditional rhythms caught in a reflecting pool of canned classical orchestrals and 1950s theremin wails. 'Good Apple’, meanwhile, cranks up the mood with aged x looped piano paired with an undulating, bass-heavy shuffle that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelman Duran x Martin Denny mixtape.

'When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground' leans into heady jazz vapours, spreading crackle over pitch-fucked horn samples, but it’s the producer's weird use of percussion that keeps us gripped: scattering his arrangements across the grid, mimicking an ensemble of players deployed in irregular formations. Romeu embraces trip-hop on 'Any Other Time', blending Afro-Caribbean percussion with a swung downtempo beat, while ‘Isthmus’ reminds us of the clatterbox plunder of Moonshake’s PJ Harvey hookup ‘Just a Working Girl’ - with all its asymmetric hooks.

The extended closing track 'Losing Blood' takes a leaf out of Fennesz's glitched rulebook, stretching and folding disintegrating loops through an 11 minute descent into the elegiac aether.

Ltd Black Vinyl Gatefold edition + 32 Page Booklet + Download Code

The LP contains original compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pascal Comelade, Laurie Spiegel, Lyra Pramuk, Chassol, Nicolas Godin and Pierre Rousseau, Pedro Vian and Pierre Bastien, Visible Cloaks, Kelman Duran, Raul Refree, Lucrecia Dalt, Lafawndah.

+ a booklet with writings by contemporary thinkers like Shumon Basar, François J. Bonnet, and pictures by, Araki, Juergen Teller, Elizaveta Porodina, Dani Pujalte, P Jack Davison, Zhong Lin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Adrià Cañameras, Javier Tles among others. Lacquer cut by Josh Bonati & Mastered by Rashad Becker

'PRSNT' is a unique global artistic project combining the input of artists across the worlds of music, video and written word which acts as a statement on how we, as consumers, engage with music in the 21st century. Vital electronic musicians including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Lafawndah, Lyra Pramuk, Lucrecia Dalt and Visible Cloaks have each contributed tracks, which are approximately 32 seconds long.

The concept was devised by Created By Us and the Barcelona-based label Modern Obscure Music. They read a study which identified that the overwhelming volume of instantly accessible information online is shortening attention spans and altering how audiences engage with music digitally. Their curiosity about the state of online consumption developed further on discovering that around a third of all listeners using digital platforms skip to the next track, within the first 30 seconds of playing.

Each musician was given a fascinating challenge to create engaging compositions with real artistic merit, inside the confines of this shortened span. Akin to Brian Eno's famous Windows 95 start-up music, the time constraints are crucial, and the compositions are deceptively complex and more substantial than expectations of their nano nature would suggest.

'PRSNT' acts as a critique of flighty feed culture, but is simultaneously constructive, providing something which is either proposed solution, or "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" resignation. Every artist has interpreted the brief differently, resulting in an intriguing blueprint for the potential future of digital music. Could abbreviated micro compositions satisfy, inspire and nourish like their longer counterparts? They certainly take up much less of listeners' busy lives, which are often spent tackling ever-increasing workloads.

Ltd White Vinyl Gatefold edition + 32 Page Booklet + Download Code

The LP contains original compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pascal Comelade, Laurie Spiegel, Lyra Pramuk, Chassol, Nicolas Godin and Pierre Rousseau, Pedro Vian and Pierre Bastien, Visible Cloaks, Kelman Duran, Raul Refree, Lucrecia Dalt, Lafawndah.

+ a booklet with writings by contemporary thinkers like Shumon Basar, François J. Bonnet, and pictures by, Araki, Juergen Teller, Elizaveta Porodina, Dani Pujalte, P Jack Davison, Zhong Lin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Adrià Cañameras, Javier Tles among others. Lacquer cut by Josh Bonati & Mastered by Rashad Becker

'PRSNT' is a unique global artistic project combining the input of artists across the worlds of music, video and written word which acts as a statement on how we, as consumers, engage with music in the 21st century. Vital electronic musicians including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Lafawndah, Lyra Pramuk, Lucrecia Dalt and Visible Cloaks have each contributed tracks, which are approximately 32 seconds long.

The concept was devised by Created By Us and the Barcelona-based label Modern Obscure Music. They read a study which identified that the overwhelming volume of instantly accessible information online is shortening attention spans and altering how audiences engage with music digitally. Their curiosity about the state of online consumption developed further on discovering that around a third of all listeners using digital platforms skip to the next track, within the first 30 seconds of playing.

Each musician was given a fascinating challenge to create engaging compositions with real artistic merit, inside the confines of this shortened span. Akin to Brian Eno's famous Windows 95 start-up music, the time constraints are crucial, and the compositions are deceptively complex and more substantial than expectations of their nano nature would suggest.

'PRSNT' acts as a critique of flighty feed culture, but is simultaneously constructive, providing something which is either proposed solution, or "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" resignation. Every artist has interpreted the brief differently, resulting in an intriguing blueprint for the potential future of digital music. Could abbreviated micro compositions satisfy, inspire and nourish like their longer counterparts? They certainly take up much less of listeners' busy lives, which are often spent tackling ever-increasing workloads.

Fast-rising Lisbon-based DJ/producer PEDRO has shared details of his long-awaited debut album, ‘Da Linha’, which releases on March 20 via Enchufada. First teased with the release of bubbling lead single ‘Calores’ in January, ‘Da Linha’ crowns a defining breakthrough three years for PEDRO that has seen him establish himself as one of Portugal’s most vibrant and exciting new-school producers. His debut EP, ‘EP ‘Damaia’ (2017) – named after the suburb of Lisbon he was born in – immediately signposted a bright, borderless club sound rooted in experimentation, which has since been best emphasised by 2019 releases including the Buraka Som Sistema-sampling ‘Rapazes’ and a breathless collaboration with Nigerian MC, Magugu (‘Too Much’), both of which feature on the LP tracklist.

First inspired by his older brother, who would introduce PEDRO to the latest electronic music coming out of Portugal, he still references DJ Rolando’s ‘Knights Of Jaguar’ as a memorable early touch point – a record he still credits with influencing the melodies he writes to this day. Living and growing up in Damaia, PEDRO also went to school with friends of Angolan, Cape Verdean, Brazilian and Mozambican descent, exposing him to a whole patchwork of new sounds and genres like kuduro and kizomba from a very young age. With such a rich and diverse musical upbringing, it is perhaps no wonder that ‘Da Linha’ is bursting with energy and colour across all 10 tracks, melding together the hyper-specific sounds, instruments and voices that have sound-tracked PEDRO’s life so far. From the marching, militant rhythm of ‘Stuck On You’ ft. standout Ghanaian MC, Bryte, to the silky, bubblegum vocals and gloopy, earworm melodies of closing track ‘Para Ti’ featuring Xcelencia, you’d be hard pushed to find a debut record that captures a city so viscerally.