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'Yet today is all we have In silence she speaks The rivers below Valleys and peaks As a pale shelter once cherished The shadows we mourn Have all but perished '

'A Pale Shelter' is a trio collaboration between zake, City of Dawn, and Ossa. Two tracks feature close friend Benoît Pioulard. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

Over a year since we last heard from them, Huerco S’ West Mineral imprint shimmers into view for their first release of 2021 - a lush, jittery high of aerosolised ambient thizz and top shelf electroid steppers from Ben Bondy, highly recommended if yr into Perila, Jan Jelinek, Second Woman, Kindohm or Uon.

Last year's "Sibling", released on Special Guest DJ's Experiences Ltd was one of the year's subtle standouts, but Bondy's music refuses to tether itself to one sound or another, instead hovering around the fertile area between experimental ambient and outre club modes. "Glans Intercum" paces further sideways, toying with dub and drone ideas and sandwiching these sketches between buzzing drum workouts that squeeze texture from collapsing beat templates. Oscillating piquant shocks of vibrant energy with steeply opiated hypnagogia and OOBE-like sensations, the results locate a mind in flux, torn between the need to flex hyper-articulated limbs and becoming lost in discretely introspective ambient interzones.

The eight tracks course from a sort of kaotic power ambient energy to a lushly unresolved daydream serenity through alternately convulsive and temple-smushing turns. ‘Rest’ opens with a bitter explosion of digital scree that escalates into pill-belly jitters, and ‘Ash In Emerald Casing’ keeps toes off the ground with Rian Treanor-levels of pointillist hyper-footwork tekkers, contrasting with the DJ Python-esque slithering vox and atmospheric mulch of ‘Spangled (With Stella).’ From the skittish ‘Drip on Nape’ his circles start to bleed into one, with the aqueous shimmer of ‘Ven’ and Stella’s vocals returns on ‘2404’ to blur the lines between up/down, where ’Skizz’ enacts a sort of perpendicular grime and he ultimately comes to bliss out in the fragile glassine fractals wilting from the closing title tune.

Club or bedroom, this one’s for the dreamers.

With Violet Opposition, Van Wey floats the project into murkier waters by adding a layer of overdriven gilding to his trademark sound. This sound is a texturally fibrous take on ambient that Brock has been experimenting with recently. As a result, the bvdub peaks and valleys you know, and love, are even more arresting with the added grit and brume.
Violet Opposition is four achingly impelling tracks smeared across a double LP in violet and yellow swirl, each song taking its time to evolve and cradle you in sinewy tones. Violet Opposition is out on February 4th. The double LP is limited to 500 units worldwide.

"Chari Chari follows his sold out album with a new EP inspired by folk traditions.

“Suburban Ethnology vol. 1” explores his love for ancient sounds, rituals and the power of healing music.

5 tracks crafted in Tokyo that potentially suggest a beautiful soundtrack to real and imaginary worlds."

The second release on Paradoxy records build by Clafrica! A fantastic 6-track tape and digital release, with some breaky and crunchy tracks starting from 123 bpm till 145 bpm.

Beautifully serene and contemplative, ‘Landscape Architecture’ sees classical minimalists Christina Vantzou & John Also Bennett describe quizzical scenes on their follow-up to a sterling 2018 debut for Shelter Press, all mixed and self-released on the duo’s Editions Basilic imprint and now available on vinyl for the first time. It’s a suite of blurry dreamscapes made with flutes, piano, hazy environmental recordings, subs and subtle fx, a perfect companion for works by Félicia Atkinson, Alice Coltrane, Jim O’Rourke, Luc Ferrari, Deaf Center, Pan American.

Reprising the lucid dream-like dimensions of their debut ‘Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface’, CV & JAB assuredly trace a line between etheric whimsy and a spellbinding sort of atmospheric mastery on their sophomore sequence. Fashioned from petalled classical and jazz keys blended with woodwind, richly enigmatic electronics and gently aleatoric intersections of street noise and bird song with water sounds, the album’s 10 parts and bonus track limn a drift through what they evocatively term as “remote thought gardens and conceptual collonades” to deeply trippy effect.

Recorded over the course of three days during a residency in Brussels, the album is detailed with a sure-handed directness as ephemeral as spring light, appearing like a dream that lingers on the mind’s eye with its own perpendicular sense of time and space. That effect has long been key to Christina Vantzou’s work, from solo to collaborations with The Dead Texan and Heinrich Mueller, and it’s now clear that JAB shares this gift for elegantly supposing and luring listeners into their ever-curious explorations of ambient classical metaphysics.

The duo recall the rapt effect of Félicia Atkinson’s poetic compositions in ‘Down a passageway’, while the brooding allure of ‘Phantom Tunnel’ remind us of the quizzical nature of Catherine Christer Hennix’s style, whereas the more explicitly electronic works such as ‘Pungent Lake’ and ‘The maître d’ is dead’ capture the sort of laminal ooze and woozy effect of Jim O’Rourke’s amazing 'To Magnetize Money And Catch A Roving Eye’ 4CD in a more concentrated form.

Lawrence English teams up with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart once again for another voyage into ambient music's punishing underworld. It’s their gloomiest slab to date - unfurling nightmarish Lynchian drones and seismic, overdriven rumbles that sound like a Thomas Köner and Wolf Eyes soundtrack to Dante's Inferno.

If the gaseous, clouded noise of 'Material Interstices' sounds as if it could be snatched from one of David Lynch's most unsettling dream sequences, we have to assume that's completely intentional. The inspiration for the album came from two of English's recurring dreams, one of which had recently re-emerged. When English chatted to Stewart about it - a labyrinthine subterranean horrorscape of concrete and iron underneath his house - Stewart related to having unusual sleep patterns. So the music emerged from this midnight realm, and illustrates English's Tetsuo-inspired industrial fantasy in grim detail.

Those expecting the beauty and charm of English's lighter material might be in for a shock. This is vantablack level darkness, inspired by 1980s industrial tape music, blurry noise and the darkest of dark ambient records. Think the bleakest end of Dean Hurley, Maurizio Bianchi, Lustmord or The Haxan Cloak, but assembled to trigger near hypnagogic states. There's an intentionality about "Material Interstices" that feels knotted to its nocturnal inspiration - English and Stewart simultaneously invoke nostalgia, dread and wonder, recalling industrial music's rich legacy but suggesting its future might not be entirely written just yet.

Tape

The occult and folk music have been friends for a while. In the 21st century, hauntology and the resurface of some cult soundtracks from the 1970s and 1980s helped to create a new sense of folk, not associated with the typical acoustic feeling, but more relatable with library, krautrock/kosmische and industrial music. João Kyron and Tony Watts, long time collaborators since the late 1990s with their band Hipnótica, and more recently with Beautify Junkyards (Ghost Box) are well acquainted with this friendship. Hidden Horse is their new project as a duo and “Opala” their first release.

With eight tracks and almost thirty minutes, their first release explores dense and greyish urban utopias. The song titles explore ideas that mix sci-fi, horror, science, space and urban phobia, and the music Kyron and Watts create delivers, using electronics and drums with great relish. Their relationship as musicians, which spans more than two decades, can be felt in the way their music flows with a continuous dialogue.

“Opala” is always keen to take you to another dimension. It lives in its own twilight zone, where the obscure entangles the most obvious senses of reality. It sounds like Jacques Tati “Playtime” with a hauntology soundtrack: it kind of feels that this imaginary world is real, but it’s not. And it sucks you in to be a part of it and enjoy it: close your eyes and let yourself go while listening to “Levitação Magnética” or “Fantasmas do Planeta”. You will feel like a foreigner in a new city.

Well this is brilliantly bizarre; pivotal US underground mail-art and poetry figure John M. Bennett spills his guts on Middle America and other matters in a compendium of perplexing and peculiar
performances set to fractured flute, marimba, concrète tape works and FM synthesis in a way that reminds us of Laurie Anderson’s hyper-influential ‘Home Of The Brave’ via Fluxus, Max Headroom,
Burrroughs, Kurt Schwitters.
All newly remastered by contemporary avant conduit Jack Callahan, ‘A Flattened Face Fogs Through’ yields a fascinating cross section of JM Bennett’s vast catalogue, selected and sequenced by John
Also Bennett (JAB) from some 15 hours of cassette recordings issued 1986-1995. Encompassing fleeting glimpses of warped and processed tekkers thru to relatively straighter recitals, each
juxtaposed with dizzyingly imaginative instrumentals that account for half the interest, the set plunges us into a highly personal perspective on American life in the ‘80s/‘90s, salvaging a poetry from its mundane, “corn walled, strip mall infested landscape” that resonates with Lynch’s evocation of the surreality underfoot USA, and dovetails with early dada and fluxus movements explored by Burroughs (whose manuscripts he edited) and the work of Bennett’s contemporary
Richard Kostelanetz.
Flattened Face includes recordings of classic Bennett poems like “The Shirt The Sheet”, “Last In Line”, “The Transmission”, and “The Blur”, the sound works presented here were made with a spirited cast of collaborators and conspirators - Byron D. Smith, Ficus Strangulensis, Mike Hovancsek, and Jack Wright to name a few (not to mention JMB’s oldest son William E. Bennett, then a child). They represent a fraction of John M. Bennett’s massive output in this marginal but fertile artistic community, and should stand as a testament both to it and to the underlying strangeness of language, the American Midwest, and of being itself.”.

Yellow Vinyl

The first Documenting Sound release to appear on vinyl (we’re just doing a handful of them on wax) is this obsession-forming fever-dream recorded in Kallista, Dandenong Ranges / Autumn 2020 by Jonnine Standish of HTRK, newly mastered and featuring completely genius new meta-artwork/painting by Gian Manik. Anyway, you either altready know how good this one is, or else yr about to find out…

The other week we dreamt that we asked Jonnine aka Jonnine Standish of f#cking HTRK to make some music for a tape series. She ended up sending us what was essentially a 9 track album of new songs featuring Jonnine on bass guitar, a Mopho synth, a wave drum and an electric wind instrument, plus her vocals, clicks and garden chimes, and contributions from Conrad Standish (of CS + Kreme) and mixing by Tarquin Manek. Oh wait…

We approach all of Jonnine’s music with caution cos - hooks - she warned us about them. When her last record 'Super Natural’ was released last year the ohrwurm wasn’t for leaving us in peace, for real it was almost too much - and this time, if you can believe it - it’s worse.

You get 9 songs - 9 - songs - there are chorus pedals and strings and endless atmospheres. The opener is a dream, blurred vision - heartache. The title track - pan flutes - this is basically The Cure’s ‘Dressing Up’ remade. Except Jonnine has never heard ’The Top’. It’s all v weird and auspicious, a complete heartmelt. Also, somehow, real?

Fresh from an appearance on Space Afrika’s 'Honest Labour’ album, collaborations with Klein and Lol K and a placement in the Dazed 100 list, LA Timpa finally offers his head-turning 'Equal Amounts Afraid' album on vinyl following a short CD run just before the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Served up on promising yung London label O___o, and made with additional mixing from Solange collaborator Kwes and mastering from sometime Dean Blunt engineer Amir Shoat, ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ is a beautiful smudge of pop experimentation riddled with timeless musical soul. Following from his 2016 debut ‘Animal’, and guest production for Cold Specks’ trip hop sound, LA Timpa’s gently reserved and melancholic productions push an intimate pop vocabulary into spectral, dreamlike dimensions.

Introspective and avant like Klein’s psyched chop-ups, as sensuous as Blood Orange, but with a taste for expressively harmonised pop refrains that clearly recall Yves Tumor via Richard Youngs, the album unfolds with its own logic, deploying eyelid-tugging levels of hypnagogic charm that practically demand to be heard in sequestered, lowlit situations.

Seducing us to his singular temporality and hazy atmosphere with the vaporous falsetto and ambient soundfield of sirens and groggy bass in ‘Around’, a cut-up interlude leads into fragmented music box melody and intimate plainsong on ‘Fertile’, while ‘Core’ almost echoes the 4AD dream-pop of A.R. Kane, and ‘Give’ beautifully dematerialises indie-pop into ambient gauze.

‘Backyard Exotic’ surfaces his strangest side in a maze of mushied songcraft, ushering a trippier 2nd half where the songs really start to fray between ‘Caretaker’, the smokers’ hymnal vignette ‘Towel Under The Door’, before channelling Thom Yorke in the melting Mbira melody of ‘Rattle Snake’, and spooling out into proper ambient soul with the spine-tracing lines of ‘Tried Ice’ and the smudged magic of ‘Memory Phone’ where he truly divines a strength in his vulnerability in a way that should resonate with the most sensitive souls.

Trap Techno Hybrid Dub. For your Safety, please remove all ashtrays around before listening. It's not a game ! #QUELAFIF

In a thorough dismantling and recontextualisation of his own work, Merzbow sets fire to his mid 90’s ‘Flare Gun’ & ‘White Blues’ EP’s with utterly compelling, visceral, and surprisingly diverse results.
Essentially going toe-to-toe with his mid 90’s self, Masami Akita eviscerates the originals in a bath of tear-out textural tornadoes that only just betray their origins in raw samples of blues rock
bands. Tapping into that long-standing double refraction of influence between Afro-American blues (and subsequently jazz, disco, house and techno) and its acolytes from blighty, Merzbow pushes everything into the red with nuclear levels of ferocity, unleashing torrents of detuned theremin and electronics around the blistered samples in a face-melting style that so many have imitated but have rarely imbued with such spirit and imagination.
The first half of ‘Flare Gun Extra’ parts returns to his headspace and tekkers in the period following his formative classic ‘Venereology’, adapting extreme forms of compression, distortion and dynamic mixing with a manacled grip and expressive sensitivity that’s there if you cares to give it some attention, with particularly powerful results in the freewheeling bombast of ‘Flare Gun II’.
We hear decimated traces of rock riffs shredded up with staggering futurist alacrity in ‘White Blues Part I’, saving a rather unexpected swerve into mind-spanking bluesy guitar psychedelia on the 2nd part that sounds like Hendrix taking an acid bath after his London stint, before ’Deathmetal’ joins the dots far north to perhaps express how the quintessence of blues shored up, petrified in the black country and was dashed on granite Scandinavian cliffs and Japanese islands from the most obtuse angles.
Pure energy and chaos this one.

Simon Shreeve’s doomiest moniker Mønic follows those killer Burial and Regis reworks from a few years back and adds to his Downwards stripes with a necessary vinyl edition packing both volumes of his recent ‘Trawler Tapes’ series originally issued digitally with his Osiris Music UK label, highly recommended to disciples of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’, The Conet Project, Thomas Köner or SAW II.
Made on the English south coast and first issued into the strange high summer of 2020 lockdown, the ‘Trawler Tapes’ depicts Mønic more strung out and glowering than we’ve ever heard. In its unfathomably deep sunk, reverberating drones and keeling atmospheric pressure, it’s truly a musick that evokes a sense of absence, even tragedy and loss, drawing upon various aspects of dark ambient isolationism and thru to more sublime, meditative zones for a sort of dissociative
expression of soul that lives up to comparisons with modern greats, from Thomas Köner to Kevin Drumm.
Where much of Shreeve’s work since D&B/dubstep unit Kryptic Minds thru to his CUB collabs with Regis have been concerned with physicality, his Mønic project inverts that urge for a musick ov liminality. However there’s a fine connection between those polls in Mønic’s use of the full frequency spectrum here, from deeply layered subs to its fine-grained high register timbres,
with cavernous space in between. In both volume 1’s ‘H-NET’ set and volume 2’s ’T-NET’ parts, he oscillates a suggestive shadowplay, drifting from Davey Jones’ locker tones to more static, indoor
subtleties redolent of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’ classic, and thru to midwinter tundra scapes and what feels like lingering Lynchian afterimages, ultimately shoring up with scant glimpses of percussion in ’T-NET 4’

"Four new chapters from Nicolás Jaar in Telas.

Here, again, it’s the odder and more essence-like devotion to sound that is semi-narrative, ambient, and concrète that we heard and were drawn to in Pomegranates. Telas gestures towards a more refined tone, with less sudden shifts and vignettes, incrementally shaping an hour of self-reflective music with tracks building and collapsing across its vinyl sides.

When Telas was first drafted and presented to Mana it felt appropriate to mention a sense of monastic retreat. Where Pomegranates often felt epic-like in its scope and shifting scales, this album conveys images of quieter moments spent tending to a vegetable patch within a cloistered garden, perhaps, or the threading of a tapestry with filigree. Nicolás often moves slowly and deliberately throughout, focused on manipulating gauzy fibres and room tone or fluttering around other cryptic actors, so that when bursts of clarity and emotion appear they take on a deeper character.

There’s a greater sense of contemplation and patience in the album’s logic, pointing to a conception of art, melody, and sound which is continuously under construction. In relationship with sister-album Cenizas and surface qualities of recent Against All Logic material it feels that there’s a centre being defined and meditated upon.

Telas was made between December 2016 and January 2020."

Richard Vergez is as much a creator as he is a collector of subcultural ephemera. He is trained by the traditions of the international underground and its aesthetics, from cut and paste techniques to the aesthetics of dub, from the harmonic scales of post-punk to the self-imposed restrictions of minimalism. He works as a visual artist, operates the Noir Age label and releases his own music as Night Foundation.

His compositions are fairly minimal - four tracks of arranged loops on synthesizers, guitar and percussion are mostly enough to produce the otherworldly, hypnotic sounds of the Night Foundation. It is extremly structured music, yet, repetition and minimal changes are crucial here. As soothing as eerie, it cancels out time. Levitation music. But audible is also a certain longing, a feeling of loss and something much darker lurking underneath. Hence, the apt title „Souvenir“ - it is an object with a past, a vessel for a certain memory, a symbol for a desire bigger than the sum of its parts. A nostalgia that is not pathetic; the analog body is still warm, and „Souvenir“ feels more like a letting go than a sappy memory. It is dark music with a penchant for storytelling.

As sparse as the instrumentation sometimes is, „Souvenir“ is a cinematic recording - a chimeric cross between 80‘s american film noir and Aki Kaurismäki, if you will. A music equally focused and wide, zooming in on the details.

Through the 4th world meanderings of „Turning Point“, chilly bass sequences as heard on „Sonder“, the almost campy balearic kitsch of „Too Late“, the transversions between songs, the eerie skits, the slowed down magnetic tapes, Vergez opens up a portal to a world of rich imaginery.

Check out Richard‘s Noir Age label (with excellent releases by Taupe Set XL or African Ghost Valley), his other albums on labels like Jungle Gym Records or Psychic Liberation, and his monthly radio show on Jolt Radio.

Written just a week after 2018's iconic "Make Me Know You Sweet", this surreal, tripped-out sequel from the headier alter ego of Brian Leeds (Huerco S.) is darker, dubbier and more alien than its predecessor >> over an hour of ultra immersive, brain-fluxing hybridized sounds somewhere between Chain Reaction vapourtrails and concrète dream-building.

Captured in one take shots during the weeks following the last album sessions in 2018’, Leeds’ second Pendant album treads a similar netherworld path, channeling a stygian dream-sick effect that effectively explores a flipside to the sunnier prairies of his Huerco S.’ works, shoring us somewhere gauzily redolent of early Wanda Group and the starkest Bellows emissions, but better defined by eerily processed vocals and Lynchian sensibilities that locate it to North America’s dis/possessed lands.

Ritualistic in craft and scope, the six extended tracks of ‘To All Sides They Will Stretch Out Their Hands’ are all titled in reference to indigenous American poetry and thus take shape as elusive, dream-like projections of Leeds’ subconscious and subvocalised thoughts. With a defocussed grain and swirl that perhaps emulates the effect of intoxication thru special herbs, the music acutely suggests altered states of mind, triggering meditations on memory and process reflected by a haphazard and impromptu recording technique. Leeds is a skilled producer, and working instinctively highlights a more fallible, arresting side to his sound - recording and processing vocals on the fly to control his machines less like a conductor and more like a sculptor. When the process hits complications - the DAW failing or outboard gear glitching out - his choice to leave these moments in the final cut allows us to consider the messiness and fallibility of art.

Leeds isn't interested in making aesthetically perfect potted ambience. His narrative is rough and expressive, just as focused on texture as it is tone or rhythm. It's a technique that suggests the heady cut 'n paste sound of musique concrète, but doesn't attempt to recreate it or position itself alongside that canon for academic gold stars. Firing his convulsing collages thru an array of effects gives his music the lively heartbeat of vintage dub, hidden under a fleshy DIY basement noise that could be traced back to Coil or Throbbing Gristle, mediating on memories with haptic strokes and a sense of inseparability between his layers of fuzz and physical actions that most beautifully speaks to a sort of interconnectedness that comes with mescaline, for example.

We’ve been spending considerable time guided by its dream logic - we strongly recommend you do the same, immersing yourself in its spongiform negative space, ruptured raptures and dank bliss.

Hi-pressure club futurism from Japan’s Prettybwoy, deploying anxious, metallic, sweaty nu-dance pressure, cooled off by swirling videogame synths and emotional vocals from collaborator lIlI.
Another rapid-fire dancefloor burner from Shanghai’s unreasonably reliable SVBKVLT, ‘Tayutau’ makes a bridge to Japan, curving Prettybwoy’s well-worn raw materials into a pneumatic neon
club structure. He put these tracks together during a time of upheaval while dealing with isolation job loss, burnt hard-drives and almost losing the whole project, the chaos reflected in the album’s
writhing, anxious mood, dipping from mind-throbbing intensity to lithe, poppy delirium. Machine-gun bursts of overdriven kicks and burnt synths form the backbone of ‘Island’, ‘Brontides and ‘Mikoshi’, while ‘Genetic Dance II’ and ‘SLT’ drag the weightless bounce into breathy, florid East-Asian landscapes. Prettybwoy’s confident engineering carries the tracks, and whether he’s exploring the limits of granular ambience (‘ó‹ (Tear)’), weightlessly melting piano and Japanese voices into bouncing subs (‘Isol’) or forming grime-flecked nu-club (‘Rat’s Talk’) there’s the sense that each sound is intricately and meticulously sculpted. The results fall somewhere between
Foodman’s wiped-clean eccentric bangers and the damaged ‘n deranged club philosophy of contemporary prophets like Lee Gamble.

Puckered kizomba zingers from PT Musik - the grown-up alias of Puto Tito - marking a supremely classy progression from his 2019 debut double album with a sparkling trio of romantic pearls for Princípe

Marking the vital Lisbon label’s 10th anniversary year, ’Não Sou Perfeito’ is one of the sweetest treats in its decade long (and ongoing) reign, exemplifying the rich soul at the heart of its sound. The artist’s name change signifies a clear advance in his already emotive style of composition, as showcased in his teenaged productions on the ‘Carregando A Vida Atrás Das Costas’ set. The style of spare, grimy, chamber-like melodies in his formative early work is now found embellished with warmer pads and more nuanced rhythmic inflections to express a heightened grasp of slow jam romance that blends his native Atlantic coast breeze with a decidedly Californian G-funk lean to gorgeous effect. It’s a west coast thing, baby.

‘Aplausos’ is the outstanding A-side, drizzling syrupy G-funk-alike soul leads on a lilting kizomba rhythm and deliciously woozy chords bound to soundtrack embraced bodies and loved-up eyes scanning the dance. ‘Its Mine’ follows to dial up the forlorn ‘80s FM synth soul with an instrumental flair worthy of a Sade vocal (perhaps that’s her not replying to the ansafone motifs?), and ’Tudo Acabou’ bring this brief daydream of an EP to its closing strokes with a come-to-bed sashay of dry iced synth haze and slow-motion hip work.

Stunning choral smoke from the ever wonderful Tape Loop Orchestra, here shedding the blissed drone energies of his best known material in favour of a more lucid expression of ideas constructed almost entirely from the human voice and bass pulses. If you were into that amazing Antonina Nowacka album earlier this year, or indeed Kara-Lis Coverdale’s peerless sacred variations, this one comes highly recommended.
‘Liminal Lungs’ finds Andrew Hargreaves shedding his pedals and effects in favour of a more sober take on fizzing bliss, using a palette of sung notes re-shaped into a virtual choir and fed almost imperceptibly thru his tape loop matrix. In the process, he offers a study in the semiotics of emotion; stripping back to a ghostly chorale where the composer is present but elusive, conducting his voices in an imaginary space that comes to life thru a kind of compositional
alchemy.
The results call to mind aspects of Akira Rabelais’ work with processed sound echoes as much as Luc Ferrari’s concrète abstractions or Alvin Lucier’s room recordings, ushering and inhabiting the liminal space of the title with an exceedingly subtle grasp of mysteriousness as the work’s spatial qualities come into play. As it goes on, Hargreaves creates a growing sense of displacement from the original recordings with bass pulses that reverberate the synthesised space, probing the grey area between perception and reality, conjuring an event the listener can’t be sure ever really took place.

Written and produced by Thomas Caesar, Guillaume Lespinasse, Axel Ropert-Lemercier and Jean Redondo. Distributed by Chez Emile records. Snowballs provided by Tony Mastroianni on a Kawasaki Z750. Type by Dinamo, Illustration by Almost Free Services

AVA. Records celebrates its 10th anniversary with 52 artists. “10 Yahre” is a 4LP compilation housing 22 tracks, a printed 30 pages magazin and a mixed CD. All wrapped in a custom made silkscreen sleeve, also including a textile keychain and stickers. Sonically spanning from ambient to techno, 10 Yahre carries new and exclusive material, all woven around the label’s decade focus on dance floor culture, started 2011 in Cologne, Germany.

The 4LP vinyl includes music by: Am Kinem, Andy Hart, Axel Boman, Cinthie, Damiano von Erckert, Dman, Dogpatrol, форм, Jürgen Ratan, Jus-Ed, Lauer, Lowtec, Move D, Paingel, Paradise Grey, Retrogott, Robi, Ron Trent, Sinoesin, Tito Wun, U-I, Will Saul and Wolfey.

The mixed version of the entire compilation is contributed by Sally C.

The full color magazin and video includes works by: Alina Bader, Andy Kassier, Angel, Anna Beil, Ata Macias, Bailey Keogh, Damiano von Erckert, Dirk Jeans & Lou de Bètoly, Funkycan, Guido, Jana Marei, Jana Maria Dohmann, Joana Pratschke, Johannes Wohnseifer, Juri Bader, Kuchenbaum, Manuel Fischer, Maria Sécio, Martin Fengel & Public Possession, Mathias Schmitt, Maximilian Schweizer, Michael Satter, Naum Hirsl, Nicolas Wenz, Peter Wolff, Rein Vollenga, Rucksack Leer, Stelan Mergenthaler, Suzanne Caroline de Carrasco, Twit One and Yves Taron Harouche.

Compiled by Juri Bader and Damiano von Erckert, mastered by Enyang Urbiks. Design and concept by DVE 1989.

bblisss specialists special guest dj and Ben Bondy’s Berlin/Brooklyn duo, xphresh, debut a lush volley of shatterproof jungle accelerators and RPG intrigued illbient beatdown on the newly minted 3XL division of Experiences Ltd, finding a gaseous spot somewhere between DJ Crystl’s pioneering ambient hardcore and NWAQ x Final Fantasy

‘xephon’ is a dream fusion by two distinctive, dextrous catalysts of the current flux between dance and ambient poles. In five shots they careen from sublime junglist tension to subaquatic dub wooze, disembodied shoegaze and cyberpunk illbient gunk with a wickedly unresolved, fractal quality that’s a real pleasure to sink into. As pillars of a scene that’s emerged and helped reshape, displace definitions of “ambient” and “dance” music over the past few years in particular, their collision of energies here feels to model a lush form of quantum mechanics; evoking the sensation of existing in multiple states of emotional and physical excitement simultaneously.

Scaling between the gyring junglist roil of its title track and the post-club gouch out of ‘eikon’, xphresh hit squarely between their dilated 3rd eyes with a proper, rushy thizz. The ephemeral ballistics of ‘xephon’ are effectively congealed into the charged sot-dubstep plasma of ‘myst’, while ‘luh’ passes out into radiant choral bliss on the “up” side, contrasting with a deep sink into the queasy belly of 4 Hero’s Macro Dub Infection all-timer 'The Paranormal In 4 Forms’ on ‘scum break’, before they yield to the mazy emotional rip currents of their closing beauty. At each stage it’s easy to pick out their reference points, but their natural ambiguity and restless style means their coordinates are never fixed, always in search of an elusive ghost particle that’s in the shine-eye of the beholder.

First ever vinyl pressing of Yellow Swans’ 2007 noise tempest, practically bubbling the lacquer thanks to a great remaster by Rashad Becker that presents Pete Swanson and Gabe Mindel Saloman right at the biting point.

Originally deployed on ultra-limited edition of just 60 cassettes back in 2007, ‘Drowner’ was one of the legendary duo’s fiercest deployments of scorched earth noise-gaze. Originating at the mid-late point of their arc, it kicked at the embers of rock’s funeral pyre, scattering plumes of strung out psych riffage and charred amp distortion at the midst of the fecund ‘00s noise scene. Like the best Yellow Swans releases, it touches places that other bands and records simply don’t reach, overwhelming the senses with chokingly intoxicating levels of emotion that surely live up to the record’s title.

When Swanson and Saloman cooked up ‘Drowner', they were surfing on a wave of interest generated by the percussive noise surrealism of their acclaimed, politically-fanged 'Psychic Secession'. ‘Drowner' was more in line with the duo's shows - all overdriven, tape-fraying melt and psychedelic, feedback warbling. Channelling everything from MBV to the most blistering ends of Fushitsusha with an apocalypse-baiting recklessness, they harnessed keening, magisterial levels of feeling in the process. Anguish, love, panic, the sheer pain of being; the feeling will alter from person to person and listen to listen, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a strong emotion, likely to be frighteningly intensified when consumed thru headphones.

Between their slow, 11 min march into oblivion on ‘Sandwall’ and eventual collapse into tattered tape tekkers and muezzin-like plangency on ‘Disjecta’, the album feel akin to a religious experience, with atavistic psych echoes of ‘Velvet Water’ giving way to the crushing dirge of ‘First Drowner’ and uniquely elegant chamber noise of ‘Isolation Tank’, before ripping your guts out in the ravishing ‘Seafloor’.

Almost 15 years after it was originally released, as the US basement noise scene fades into memory and many of its figureheads wash into the gutters of history, ‘Drowner’ feels more vital and needed than ever. An elegy for the end of days?

Finding a rich seam in stark minimalism, soundsystem pressure and fractalised rhythm, Cassius Select is at the vanguard of contemporary broken beats and punishing low end.

This new Select transmission comes correct on Bruk, prodding at the same bold dance futurism already laid down by Siete Catorce and FFT, whilst sounding nothing like either of them. 'Dread Percent's swelling pads and dislocated MC shards are a foil for the ruff angles of 'Fish Tek'. 'Mess Mutual' teases and stalks at a lower tempo and then twists up another set of bars over a bed of alien drone, laying the groundwork for the massive, grime-licked hooks of 'Shake Like Me'.

Hinting at the anthemic while remaining steadfastly cool and deadly, Cassius Select's mutant brand of club has the space and versatility to slip between scenes, doing damage wherever it lands.

Walter Bachauer has been an active part of Berlin's but all in all Germany's electronic and progressive music scene in the 70s & 80s. In the early to mid 80s he got back to compose and play music under the pseudonym Clara Mondshine and this is his second out of three albums from 1983 “Memorymetropolis”. It takes you on a little journey into the cosmic mind of late Mr. Bachauer. Easy listening melodies come in smaller doses here despite his fondness for the pop oriented side of the so called “Berlin School” electronics and the overall time in which he operated this project

All eyes are on Islandman, an interplanetary musical trio from Istanbul who release their long anticipated, third album Godless Ceremony on September 10 via Danish imprint and long-time home of the band, Music for Dreams.

Islandman makes an incendiary, uplifting and psychedelic slew of music drawn from a world of make-believe, rooted in Anatolia. These 10 tracks (+ 3 additional exclusives on the vinyl) – all of which flirt with balearic, house, down-tempo and electronica with a global gaze - are awash with acid drenched electronic motifs and stuttering electronic drum machine syncopations. The group effortlessly sail the globe, dropping into the tropics of Ecuador (AmarnosAhora),to Mali visiting North African desert blues masters Tamikrest (TarhamanineAssinegh) and North India (Drums Of Colca) whilst never forgetting the music and poetry from the band's spiritual home, Anatolia (Kara Toprak).

In Godless Ceremony we are withdrawn from time and place, delivered to a fantasy zone, dreamt up in the sea, gazing at the stars. It's a musical storyboard, that whilst conceived in Istanbul by producer, singer and multi instrumentalistTolgaBöyük, journeys to far off places, real and imagined.

Hindustani tablas, Tibetan flutes, flamenco guitars, Anatolian Saz and Balinese (Bhasa) vocals all mesh within a concept (and coping mechanism) that contemplates daily routine as beautiful and meditative and as Tolga has appreciated over a testing two years in which he lost his father,"You can take part in a religious ceremony, search for supernatural powers, but sometimes you need to find happiness in small, everyday things".

The record's tracklisting and flow, like it's production ambition and aesthetic, peaks and troughs and arguably perculates at the Underworld-esque title track Godless Ceremony, where Tolga takes front of stage delivering the lead vocal and playing the Saz, an Anatolian stringed guitar-like instrument.

Previously released as a single is Kara Toprak, originally a folk song by AşikVeysel from Anatolia and exceptionally popular in Turkey, it’s a collaboration with Danish guitarist Jacob Gurevitsch. Tolga trips to Bali (singing Bhasa) in Aku Membawa, a house groove (already played on Pete Tong's BBC Radio show) which was produced in collaboration with DJ DIVO, OliO& Music for Dreams label boss, Kenneth Bager. TarhamanineAssinegh is a co-production between North African desert blues protagonists Tamikrest and Islandman, with Islandman reconstructing the song, perfectly fitting with their mission as contemporary cartographers. Drums of Colca splices the tabla and Hindustani tradition from India (it's actually two separate tabla recordings mixed together) with electronic accents whilst incorporating the mouth harp from Mongolia and Tibetan flutes. The guest collaborators are Troels Hammer & Ole Theill. Istanbul Lockdown was originally recorded for dance music giant Boiler Room, as an exclusive as part of a lockdown broadcast. Made in Istanbul, with live strings and Turkish clarinet, it brings back difficult memories for Tolga, having lost his father around the same time.

The core members of Islandman are multi-instrumentalist & producer, TolgaBöyük and EralpGüven (percussion) and ErdemBaşer (guitars). Islandman have become known for their live performances, as anyone who has witnessed their live streams from Istanbul for the London Jazz Festival and Boiler Room can attest to.

Islandman simply avoids boundaries and Godless Ceremony is ultimately their most open-minded work to date. The subtleties and deft electronic touches bewilder and their clear appreciation of music on a global level is an education for us all.

Made during summer 2020, Loraine James’ second Hyperdub album, ‘Reflection’, is a turbulent expression of inner-space, laid out in unflinching honesty, offering gentle empathy and bitter-sweet hope. ‘Reflection’ further develops a unique pop sensibility realised on last year’s ‘Nothing EP’, while tones of Drill and R&B seep through into this collection too. In contrast to the brash splashes of 2019’s ‘For You And I’ LP and the grimey anger of ‘Nothing’, ‘Reflection’ is pared-down and confident, taking the listener through how last year felt as a young black queer woman in a world that has suddenly stopped moving, the arc of the album peppered with Loraine's diaristic confessions. Starting positively with the gentle pop-trap of ‘Built To Last’ ft Xzavier Stone, into the bumpy instrumental of ‘Let's Go’, the album switches tone with ‘Simple Stuff’, followed by regular collaborator Le3 bLACK amplifying Loraine's vulnerability on the downcast drill of ‘Black Ting’, then ‘Insecure Behaviour And Fuckery’ is a techno glide which pairs Nova's confrontational plea for respect, delivered in monotone autotune, against deep Drexciyan chords. With Baths on vocals, the weightlessness of ‘On The Lake Outside’ soothes numb feelings, and Eden Samara explores the shadow world of anxious dreams on the airy R&B of ‘Running Like That’. Closing track ‘We're Building Something New’ with Manchester rapper Iceboy Violet brings the album together, confidently suggesting a new world is in reach. ‘Reflection’ is a brave step forward for a unique and creative 21st century musician.

Narcotic is perhaps one example of an album in both camps of the muslimgauze spectrum, it denotes the expertise acquired in oriental percussion by Bryn Jones after a crescent development and practice through action, part Tribal, part Ambient with shades of texturized noise, glitch details and field recordings, as result the listener is inside this intoxicant atmosphere of exotic madness, where the basic musical premise constituted by the consistent tribal beats from darbukas and tambourines contrasting radically with the eerie sounds from organic noise, distortions and minimal jams.

The opening track "Medina Flight" bangs on with a metallic sounding looped drum track that blares with distortion at some points while background voices chant out vocals nearly throughout. The track is flavored with other harsh sounds and even a few woodwind sounding instruments before subsequently breaking down and starting back in several times. "Believers of the Blind Sheikh" is a 10-minute middle-eastern sounding dub track sprinkled with live drum sounds and more occasional vocal samples of unknown conversation. "Saddams Children" leans more toward traditional instruments, but one can hear the gurgle of electronics lightly in the background.
The instrumentation of the album is amazing. When I first started seeing that Muslimgauze released so many albums in such a short amount of time, I naturally thought that the quality might fall suspect, but Narcotic is a solid piece of work that covers quite a chunk of the electronic music spectrum, although a lot of the rhythms tend to fall on a little harder side. It manages to blend ethnic and electronic sounds into quite an interesting mix.

The images of a surrealistic desert land inhabited by the bizarre and general strangeness abounds in between the strong rhythm usage and cinematic atmosphere unbound, subsequently the decisive progression from the album increases this sensation. The listener easily gets submerged into this opium like state, suscintly guided by the beats and echoes from oriental sounds that wander in and out of the speakers and far away and so close from the mind.Interesting and atractive the album keeps a middle ground status, half experimental and other half adapted for the tribal and linear structure common to Muslimgauze, the listener will find quite another of the many faces of this enigmatic artist.

Multi explorations mood on Neimad's debut EP for his crew label.

Whilst walking in a future metropolis with the rumbling depths of buildings soaring up like a sonorous boom, several languages are gently spoken over your shoulder, until suddenly one emerges and gazes back. Pablo's Eye is looking completely through you, and in your inability to articulate its descriptive genre (ambient, spoken word, or maybe cinematic trailer) you are at once disarmed and liberated by the sincerity. The Florist's Mum is proud to introduce Pablo's Eye's first LP of original music in over 20 years, A mountain is an idea.

Quartz makes his long awaited Rupture debut with 4 stunning futuristic d&b tracks. Quartz's accomplished synthesis and engineering skills make this compelling EP well worth the wait. Welcome to the Hydra!!

Rise Black returns to Fill-Lex Records to close his Olympus Anthology. 7 tracks of visceral Electro that were forged in the pre pandemic era and that will blow you away to his conceptual world. Hard, direct and uncompromising, these songs continue the saga of this Zar who has made Olympus his own.

- 2021 repress / comes in label sleeve -

This is the 1st release from Seba & Paradox since 2011. It carries the traditional breakbeat sound that the duo is known for, but with a sense of modern electronic music.
Delusions is a 'think break' based track with a monotonous beep that brings the thoughts back to minimal techno. The
sub on this track is very low! Make sure your system can handle it.
Future now is an 'amen' track with typical Seba & Paradox break edits and vocal samples. This track has already gained a lot of interest within old Seba & Paradox fans.

Austrian rising star Wingz with smooth and catchy vibes, and a smashing, rhythmic machine-like track by the Belgian Urph. Another excellent release by Trickdisc, a label always tending towards some counterstream in the search of the timeless gold.

Die beiden 'Microtronics' Ausgaben sind zum ersten Mal auf Vinyl erhältlich, remastered von den Originalbändern, mit Artwork von Julian House. Ursprünglich erschienen sie als zwei auf jeweils 2.000 Exemplare limitierte Tour-3inch-CDs: 'Microtronics Vol. 1' 2003 zur 'Haha Sound' Tour, 'Microtronics Vol. 2' folgte 2005 zur 'Tender Buttons' Tour.

Sound can be a labyrinth, a twilight drift. Sound can truely unfold when it escapes logic or categorisation. For it is never really one thing or another, especially abstract, collaged or found sound, as it is always connected to a time and a place, or sometimes to an intention, or a notion, or – even more vague – to something as dubious as a feeling. So all this is inevitably inherent in a sound too. Sound is a fact but also an inbetween. In A Piece Of Work, concrete composer crys cole takes us on a journey through those inbetween places. Fragments collected over time in Oslo, Berlin, Vienna, Winnipeg, Melbourne and Lisbon were later arranged and assembled into an invented space, a story arc, a freeform poem. cole's work is one of dynamics and proximity, of complexity and sensitivity. One that embraces both montage and movement. Originally commissioned by Radiophrenia (Glasgow, Scotland), where it premiered in 2019, A Piece Of Work has been developed through live performances and studio sessions, naturally progressing over time and eventually leading to this final version presented here on vinyl.

Composed, performed and recorded by crys cole, 2019-21. With additional percussion by Oren Ambarchi and electronics by Seiji Morimoto. Mixed with Joe Talia at Good Mixture in Berlin, 2021. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, 2021. A Piece Of Work was commissioned by Radiophrenia in Glasgow, Scotland, and originally premiered in 2019.