Beats Vinyl New Releases - News

First time reissue of a super-rare private press tape by peerless sound artist and instrument builder Akio Suzuki, recorded behind-the-wall in 1984 at Berlin’s Technical University.
An absolute master of haptic abstraction, Suzuki’s delicate touch on self-built glass harmonica and the Analapos echo unit - metal cans joined by coil spring, like a kid’s tin-can telephone - generates the most ear-teasing spectrum of tones in ‘Zeitstudie’, which was only available in scant quantities via Galerie Giannozo, who organised his 1984 visit and performance which produced these recordings.
If you’ve had the pleasure of immersing in Akio’s work before, you will know the sort of tingling pleasures to be had from his music, and, as the artist states, this is one of the most “joyful” examples of his early work. The four pieces use one of his earliest, transportable set-ups, with a refined version of his glass harmonica - glass tubes suspended horizontally and played with wet fingers or wooden stick - and its sweetly avian harmonics displayed in the two mesmerising ‘De Koolmees’ pieces, while the others generate utterly intoxicating worlds of echo from his Analapos unit, reverberating in two 17 minutes parts like lingering traces of ecstatic melody from Michael
O’Shea’s Mo Cara, or some ancient ceremonial cave music.

Amazing.

ohn Beltran was responsible for some of the greatest ambient techno records of the 1990s, and despite falling into near-obscurity for much of the 00s, his place in the canon has recently been secured thanks to reissues on Styrax and Millions of Moments.

What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less. For- get the rules. Be untroubled.Laurel Halo presents six instrumental pieces that form a meditative, cinematic listening ex- perience. Inspired by recent film score work for Metahaven and Ursula Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler.Working in abstraction leads to a deeper lon- ging for touch and closeness.The tactile sen- sation of struck organ keys and bowed strings, wood and felt on drum heads. Smoke and dirt and stone. Febrile and tactile, hairy and hissy. A clover of highway onramps, a continuous flow, like old leaves melting on their way down a stream at the back of a house. Constant contradiction, the truth's nowhere.

Killer debut LP by Lol K starring vocals by Coby Sey and LA Timpa, following the Londoners’ EP for Mica Levi and co’s Curl Recordings with a crafty set of queer, sensuous pop, configured in brilliant, surprising ways for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil.
The six songs and corresponding instrumentals of ‘The Breeze’ explore ideas of escapism, belonging and inner city isolation in an up-to-date vernacular firmly blunted by sparing, crisply defined but shapeshifting production. The album clearly marks a concerted development of Lol K’s sound - especially compared to their oblique appearances on the ‘Born Under a Bad One’ (Curl, 2018) EP - with the duo’s CJ Calderwood and Junior XL more confidently venturing their vocals into the mix this time, switching between melodic hooks and blunted hush, to a rave-punkish prang out and puckered chamber composition with lowkey rude and innovative production to match.
This newfound confidence subtly oozes from the squashed drill rap mutation of ‘Air Held Softly Alight’, and their ohrwurming opener ‘Proud’, and is smartly tempered into the seething Reese stabs and aggy holler of ‘Oilseed Stone’ featuring an upfront Coby Sey vocal. The album finds its centre in the serpentine, understated strings and dembow bump of ‘Twice’, and the deep 2-step chamber music of ‘Completely Out Of Business’ featuring the vital input of LA Timpa, following his outstanding 2019 debut, and ahead of an achingly strong solo album for Halcyon Veil. For the DJs and anyone who wants to lend their own bars, the instrumentals reveal the subtly whirring mechanics under Lol K’s hood, and how they elide and ride styles while allowing for burred edges and a complex, gauzy soul.

C.A.N.V.A.S. follow aces by Olan Monk and Elvin Brandhi with Lugh O’Neill’s zinging new suite of fractiously reflective, emotive sound-scaping.
Returning from a smart debut in 2018’s ‘Hélico’, Berlin-based Irish artist Lugh sharpens and expands his vernacular with strikingly amorphous and absorbing results comparable in the modern field to everyone from Zoë McPherson and J. Colleran to Arca. He draws on the chaos and rush of emotions that have fractured the world with a fine articulation of synthetic voices that speak to his “rediscovery of lived sensibility on a relational scale”, and with results approaching
something like a simulacra of brain fog - multiple emotions, observations, and speculations all vying for attention at once.
The gnawing, queasy tones, aggy chants and lush dread of ‘Americans’ articulates how we feel watching news on YouTube, and the scything metallic swarms of ‘Braises’ sounds like The Sprawl
and TCF conducting a swarm of drones, but there’s a more surreal levity to the grief-stricken gravity of the album in the devilishly detailed aqua-acoustic chicanery of ‘El Rocio’ making use of underwater recordings by Zuzana Pabisova, and the knackered machine blooz of ‘Music For Programmed Obsolecence’ that’s almost Arca-esque in ‘Irony Chastity Obedience’, and alchemized into nerve-biting black metal mutation on ‘Free Fall’.

A monumental debut work for Shelter Press, ‘Death Star’ is something of a definitive statement or magnum opus in the explorative oeuvre of NYC artist/composer Marina Rosenfeld - a big RIYL Stephan Mathieu, The Caretaker, Félicia Atkinson Marina first grabbed our attention with the uncannily echoic industro-dub environs of ‘P.A./ Hard Love’ in 2016 (a real precursor to Jay Glass Dubs we reco), before showing a quieter, more sensitive side in her collaboration with Ben Vida ‘Feel Anything’. Now on ‘Death Star’ she places deeply uncanny proprioceptive sensibilities to stunning use across an album focussed on the microphone as listening device and instrument - a sort of mechanical ear/eye - with impressively elusive/illusive results.
The original recordings come from an installation - a plexiglas orb housing seven microphones - that picked up and fed back samples of visitors to an exhibition at Portikus gallery, Frankfurt.
Marina’s album reworks those recordings with fragments of piano played into the same system or orb of mics, generating utterly enchanted ethereal spaces that speak to the listener’s atavistic
responses to echoic space and acoustic phenomena.
In four movements Marina grows the source material from liminal, plasmic and dreamlike as she begins to feel out the work’s scope in ‘Death Star’, all quite polite but edged with a menace that gets more complex, with a chamber ensemble playing back notation of the original location recordings in more atonal and aggressive iterations re-amped thru banks of speakers to edge on KTL’s electro-acoustic doom or Iancu and Ana-Maria Avram’s spectralist music.

NPVR is moniker taken on board by PITA AKA Peter Rehberg and Factory Floor's Nick Void. 33 33 is their debut recording made in July, 2017 at The Premises, London.

Peter and Nik both share formidable reputations in the post industrial shape-shifting world of sound and form with a vast range of releases and collaborative endeavours over a number of years. Together they tie together their collective experience into a vast array of sonic devices unleashing an album of pragmatic imbalance and psychedelic orientation. Blurring the lines of techno, ambient, avant garde, noise etc

33 33 positions itself in the nebulous realm of contemporary (dis)comfort presenting itself on the border of music and sound, the social and the private.

All tracks by Nik Void & Peter Rehberg
Recorded and edited at The Premises, London, July 2017
Mastered by Russell Haswell at Haswell Studio, London, August 2017
Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, September 2017
Artwork by Nik Void

French lifeguard and sonic artist Roméo Poirier’s long sold out debut tape finally gets a vinyl reissue. “Plage Arrière” is a deep sea meditation on a constellation of Greek beaches across three islands. Trumpets, echo-clicks and Harold Budd-esque shimmer piano whirl together on these seductive scapes, which recall the sub-aqeaous ambitions of Jürgen Müller or Jan Jelinek inspecting a coral reef.
Like sand-caked postcards, or pieces of seaglass tumbled and re-engineered by their surroundings, each piece exists a keepsake from the song’s namesake beach.
These missives glide in and out of earshot, bustling like miniature engines, finely tuned and rhythmically confounding. They echo the factory sampling work of YMO on Technodelic: industrial but somehow good-natured, a symbiosis of machinery and wildlife - like an artificial reef or propeller blades smothered in algae.
Plage Arrière is Roméo’s second album this year following "Kystwerk”, where he joined forces with the Norwegian poet Lars Haga Raavand. “Plage” also marks the inaugural release for SWIMS, a new experimental-focused imprint of Cold Blow, who are releasing the LP alongside London label and NTS residents Kit Records

Killer debut album of screwy soul blatz and psyched synth-pop - created in a caravan on the Scottish West coast - by Manc bod Sockethead; the musical handle for visual artist Richard Harris on Andy Lyster’s Youth Aside from knocking out scuzzy wee bombs like this album, Sockethead is a member of Manchester’s Return to Zero production/DJ crew with Turinn and FUMU, and also lectures in art
at the city’s institutions. This should give both casual and keener observers of the city’s mutant, sounds strong context for the colourfully visual styles on ‘Harj-o-Marj’, which factors in heavy
influences ranging from Detroit techno to post-punk, freak beats and screwed rap, to create a rudely shapeshifting amalgamate disciplined with the hands-on craft and tormented soul of John Bender, Graham Lambkin or Jeff Keen, and fraught with the nostalgia and lurking madness of life spent in isolation.
While Richard’s isolation was self-imposed as part of an artist residency in 2018 on the ruggedly beautiful West Coast of Scotland, its sentiment arguably, resonates with mindsets imposed by our
current lockdown. By turns the 14 tracks move from a “pissed and lonely” Graham Lambkin-like collage of synths and cranky vocals in ‘Genesis Redux’ to psyche-celtic geometric synth visions in ’When I Close My Eyes I See Paint’, via the fractal junglist brainjig of ‘Chaos Portait’, to bittersweet synth-funk meditations on ‘Love Loss Missing Yearning’ and ‘Devotion’, and exceptional segue into screwed psychoactive crud on ‘Jahiliyyah’, plus thee crankiest cyberfolk song you’ll hear in 2020 on ‘Hyena Clan’.
It’s naught but essential listening for fans of Manchester’s best, embodying the misery and psychic bruising of isolation, but naturally blessed with an artist’s creative resilience and knack for transmuting heavy feels into rough gold.

Tape / Cassette

This record was primarily informed by grief & loss. It’s overarching theme relates to the cyclic, transient nature of existence and the fact that everything is impacted by the law of change with nothing ever attaining a state of permanence. Dedicated to Adam & Alix.
Following up his 2017 album on Avian and another EP on Rengaine in 2018, we’re glad to welcome Verge on Veyl with 12 tracks of doom & drones to soundtrack the rest of this awful year

Als Re-Release lässt Conrad Schnitzlers legendäres "Con" eine Ära wiederauferstehen. Conrad Schnitzler steht heute nicht nur für seine bahnbrechende Musik, sondern eigentlich für eine ganze Ära - er verkörpert einen gewissen Künstlertypus, wie ihn so nur die legendären 1970er Jahre hervorbringen konnten. Als in einer nie dagewesenen Abriss- und Aufbruchsstimmung eine junge Kunstszene allem Alten und Überkommenen - und in ihren Augen politisch korrumpierten - eine kategorische Absage erteilte, den Kunstbegriff generell in Frage stellte und die Forderung einlöste, dass Kunst und Politik immer zusammengehören. In diesem Klima entstand die Idee der Konzeptkunst, die Auffassung, dass das eigentliche Kunstwerk der immaterielle Gedanke ist, der ihm zugrunde liegt und nicht seine Ausführung. Eine Idee, die antikommerziell weitergedacht wurde, denn nun durfte, ja sollte, Kunst beliebig oft vervielfältigt werden, billig sein und war für alle. Zugleich darf Kunst fast alles und fast alles kann Kunst sein. Conrad Schnitzler ist Konzeptkünstler und verkörpert seine Zeit, wie kaum ein anderer - sein Lebenslauf liest sich wie ein Manifest der Unabhängigkeit, seine Musik ist radikal neu, mutig und zuweilen regelrecht antikommerziell. Der legendäre von ihm gegründete Zodiac Club war der vielleicht wichtigste Schmelztiegel und Motor der subversiven Kunst- und Musikszene Westberlins. Als einer ihrer Helden und Gallionsfiguren, nahm Conrad Schnitzler im Paragon Studio das 1978 veröffentlichte "Con" auf, eines der raren Kleinode, dieser Epoche und seiner Karriere. Stärker als in anderen Arbeiten ist der Einfluss von Tangerine Dream zu hören (deren Mitglied Schnitzler von 1969 bis 1971 war) und als professionelle Studio-Arbeit ist "Con" nicht zu sperrig und artifiziell, sondern setzt stattdessen auf klarere Songstrukturen und musikalische Eingängigkeit. Zu Recht gilt "Con" manch einem als Schnitzlers beste Arbeit. Fast 40 Jahre später erscheint das Werk nun als Re-Release auf CD, LP und digital.

Romantic Kizomba lilt from DJ Lycox (Tia Maria Produções), stepping out on his first Príncipe session since 2017 with a strong set for the lovers...
Tending to the slower, more melodic and atmospheric side of the Angolan-Lisbon club equation, ‘Kizas do Ly’ arrives earlier than expected with a payload of sultry rhythms and wavey, dusky vibes
that offer a warm glow of hope in testing times.
In four instrumental strokes DJ Lycox lets his fingers sing on the keys with with almost baroquetight counterpoint between his strolling bass and quizzical top lines in ‘Jam’, while ‘Red Lights’ pulls steel drums, glassy percussion and elegant strings into a swaying style calling to mind a slow smudge of reggaeton and Kwaito tropes done by James Ferraro. ‘Babygirl’ follows on a soft focus, dry-iced flex like Palmistry meets Jan Hammer on a deserted Caribbean beach, and ‘Hábitos’
follows with a more lusting tussle of congas, strings and see-sawing bass bound for lights-up moments on the ‘floor.

Bourbonese Qualk legend Simon Crab meets Charles Beullac (Galerie Statique) in a volley of brooding, dubbed-out industrial/illbient misfits for Lisbon’s Holuzam, the young affiliate label of the renowned Príncipe Simon Crab is nothing less than a true pioneer of British post-industrial music, with a catalogue of prototypical dark ambient, groove-driven industrial, and hardcore techno practically unparalleled
in his field. In collaboration with Canadian artist Charles Beullac, ‘Kenemglev’ speaks to the range and nuance of Crab’s output while introducing Beullac’s likeminded industrial audness to new ears;
yielding nine tracks of sleepwalking industro-dub rhythms and tormented electronica blessed with a nocturnal allure that places their work in fine company amid Holuzam’s roster of off-road esoteric groovers.
The title ‘Kenemglev’ means “consensus’ in Breton, and smartly describes their mutual efforts to explore a sort of neutral no-person’s-land or virtual middle ground between their respective musical languages. In suit, all the tracks are titled in Breton - itself a mix of French and English - and their un/familiar nature is reflected in the music’s angularities and secretive feel, roving from Mille Plateaux-like glitch in ‘Douakek’, to the air-stepping pads of ‘Direnker’, and crispy noirish jazz hustle streaked with intercepted radio signals and keening crowd noise in ‘Razheta’, while ’Skaotan’ comes off like a glitching Raime workout, and the squashed break trip of ‘Berzh’ recall
Spectre or Scorn.

White Vinyl

Bezonked, high/low-grade crud from Aaron Dilloway, Nate Young, Joachim Nordwall, and partyrock hero Andrew W.K. as The Gagmen - recorded in a tiny NYC basement in 2012 and now finally seeing light of day on Nordwall’s unstoppable iDEAL Recordings Put three of experimental music’s gnarliest dudes, and their pals, in a room and this is what you get; 40 minutes of charred and gungy electronics with tormented vocals that sound like they just crawled out of a Brooklyn sewer. If you’re remotely familiar with anyone on board, or their various actions between the charts and the gutter, your expectations will be met side-on with engrossing levels of raw tape manipulation and throttled analog synths masticated and spat out in four parts
that hark back to their respective pinnacles of this era;- from Nate Young’s now classic ‘Regression’ seshes, to the body gurns of Dilloway’s ‘Modern Jester’, and Nordwall’s crushing ‘Monstrance’
collaboration with Mika Vainio.
A Swedish newspaper wrote “What the hell is this?”, in a review of The Gagmen’s debut gig in a posh Stockholm hotel, but keener ears will surely recognise the calibre of grot on offer from these dons of the trip metal underground. The mode is slanted and pharmaceutically enchanted, with Andrew W.K. sounding like he’s partied too hard on his pair of severely blunted vocal contributions,
while Dilloway, Young, and Nordwall’s noise supergroup vent crankiest spleen in tortuous tangles of ferric buzz and machine howl, all grungily gelling into anxious, burned-out industrial dub rhythms.
A total headwreck.

The frontier for French electroacoustic mystical music has traversed much ground since Pierre Schaeffer shuffled on the past and laid out a map without borders or designated ground. Seventy years in this land of the fried we hear a plethora of Ideas and ongoing potential coming from all corners of the globe. Inheriting the wisdom of past masters whilst forging a signature style of his own Kassel Jaeger sists as one of the premier explorers of these unknown worlds today. Comprised recently recorded tracks Kassel Jaeger presents a work of revisits and reworkings, one which acts as a hinge in both closing this particular chapter whilst opening up the windows to new sound world to come. In Aster we have a rich deep music replete with dark ambient sonorities swirling amongst intense buzzing tones.

Often chilling and ominous this is a fearless music with abstracted corners and dynamic leverage. Unafraid to embed itself in the ongoing whirlpool of sonic progress. Jaegers output remains a thrilling body of exploration and ongoing transformation..

The ever forward-thinking and experimental Pregnant Void label welcomes electroacoustic sound sculptor Massimo Amato for a spellbinding new album, Lost Sunsets, due in 2019.

Amato hails from Rome and has put out a fantastically innovative and cultural selection of albums that fuse ethnic, spiritual funk and jazz musics made with analogue and acoustic gear. Label head Simone Gatto first met Amato in Lecce in 2017 when he was invited to play by a local electronic music festival. He performed his last album In The Mood and Gatto was so impressed so invited him to work on his label.

This, his third album, was composed between 2007 and 2010 and features collaborations with a series of excellent musicians including Gigi Masin. Tracks feature a mix of synthesizers, harmonium, harmonica, toys and percussions that convey a range of exotic moods and grooves throughout.

An enchanting tone is set from the off, with the heavenly chords and innocent vocal whispers of "Time Capsule" then the rhythmic synth sequences of "To Love The Love". Drifting trumpets bring real melancholy to the electronic glitches of "Dreaming of You", while "Lightwaves" is a transcendental meditation on long sustained chords that empties your mind.

"Lost Sunsets" features exquisite piano notes and glassy tinkles, "Nightflower" is a deeply insular and inward late night ambient track before "Folksong" is an uplifting piece with gentle distant drums and more magical synth work. There is a Middle Eastern feel to the rippling chords of "Blue Petals" and "I Found Love" and the outro is another subtly uplifting piece that is stunning in its celestial synth work.

This is a serene and patient album of richly detailed sound that manages to be stunningly light and deft yet make a huge emotional impact throughout.

"Thanks Simone Gatto and Pregnant Void for being close to me and all the great musicians and friends who helped me. A special thanks to Luca Barlocci and his third eye/camera for capturing the emotion of sound."

Massimo Amato - synthesizers, harmonium, harmonica, toys and percussions.
Imi Gavin - vocals on A1 and D2
Massimo Berizzi - trumpet on A3
Gigi Masin - synth on C1
Mario Fob - reverse guitar on D2

Bruno Duplant’s music often explores the memories of things, moments, and spaces. For this volume, he realizes the idea by religiously recording old electronic devices like VHS, old computer, floppy disk while it’s operating, during several months in 2019, and collected it. Per the artist statement, (e)rase is a reflection on the premature and programmed obsolescence of all of our products, mainly electronic, but also questions on the future of stored data (why, how, for how long, at what price for the environment, etc.). While seems paradoxical, it is an effort of a self-critique which at the same time sculpting a commemoration on the temporal relationship between human and technology.

Joni Void & N NAO are the respective monikers of surrealists Jean Néant and Naomie de Lorimier from Montréal, Québec - who found each other in 2016 through a poetry-reading/performance by Naomie in Jean’s home at the time, a DIY loft-venue known as The Plant. This would lead to numerous events involving both, there and in many other Montréal underground spaces, until both finally worked on a collaborative piece for Joni Void’s album “Mise en Abyme” released in 2019 on Constellation Records, and began performing together as a duo following that. Nature Morte is their first collaborative album, where voice, tape samples & field-recordings meet montage & electronic production to form a collage of sorts, an abstract puzzle that unfolds both artists’ sound-worlds.

Recorded between December 2017 & July 2020 in Montréal, Québec. Mastered by Simon Lancelot. Artwork by Albarrán Cabrera. Design by Sprflxgrfzm.

In 2016, the Japanese Duo Tenniscoats (Saya and Takashi Ueno ) visited Munich for the first time to play at the Alien Disko Festival, invited by the band the Notwist. In the japanese-bavarian bar Nomina Saya and Ueno listened and joined the acoustic brass-string-combo Hochzeitskapelle (Markus Acher and his brother Micha are also members), who use to play in between people in restaurants, on the street, on boats, etc ...but only on a real stage, if they have to. Inspired by this evening, Saya founded the brass-band Zayaendo back home in Tokyo, together with her friend Satomi Endo, who plays the soprano-saxophone. They started to play in parks, forests and bars, and many friends joined, making them a collective with up to 20 musicians. Some of the members are also composers and contribute their compositions.

In 2018, the collective came to Munich, and joined the Alien Disko festival. In 2019, they invited the Hochzeitskapelle to play with them on a 2-week-tour to japan. When they returned to Munich after this for the 2019-edition of the festival, their Munich friends organized a welcome-surprise-party for them, playing one evening only cover-versions of Zayaendo-songs. Taking part were the Hochzeitskapelle joined by Kofelgschroa-acoordion-player Maxi-Pongratz, the experimental duo Schnitt, who play with a vinyl-cutting-machine, trumpet and bass-clarinet, joasihno alias Cico Beck (Notwist) with his music-machines, the duo of Munich-based Japanese pianist Sachiko Hara and clarinetist and composer Christoph Reiserer, and a school-big-band led by g.rag-trumpet-player Alois Schmelz, who excited everybody by beautifully singing one song in Japanese. They played Zayaendo-compositions from the album „Zayaendo Music“.

Every band had recorded their cover-versions at the rehearsals ... just to give as a souvenir to the Zayaendo-members... but as this is such a wonderful and special compilation and just beautiful songs, we decided to make a small, limited vinyl-edition of this as well for others to hear. And traditionally, this has of course to be housed in a screen printed jacket by master Señor Burns, numbered and individually colored.

Alina Kalancea's Impedance is an entirely instrumental album spanning four sides, contains powerful rhythmic sequences, heart-beating frequencies and hypnotic loops that are paradoxically encapsulated in carefully crafted compositions which are full of secret passages and hidden doors. Kalancea's work creates ungraspable sonic experiences, which overtakes you, immersing its listeners in powerful and mind-altering soundscapes. There's no quick payoff on Impedance. This is the sound of new, patient electronic music, full of depth and substance.

Alina Kalancea is a Romanian sound artist and composer based in Modena, Italy. She has studied sound design and synthesis with Enrico Cossimi and collaborated with producer Alex Gamez, and artists Julia Kent and Raven Bush. Highly recommended to fans of Eleh, Caterina Barbieri, Shasta Cults, Jessica Ekomane, Eliane Radigue, and Alessandro Cortini. Packaged in a deluxe, heavy duty tip-on gatefold sleeves printed by Stoughton; cut by Golden Mastering and pressed at RTI.

‘Sotto’ is Andrew Oda’s attempt at world building in sound. Meshing method, mind, metaphysical and mundane into massive murals, its triptych of vivid compositions seem to wield electronic sound like a magic paintbrush. Inspired by the paintings of Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Ljubomir Popović, and Nicole Duennebier, ‘Sotto’’s three parts inhabit environments bursting with explosive internal ecologies of synthesized pulsations, yawning drones, tinkling imaginary chimes, and abstract noisy rumblings that flow, ebb and breathe with the infinite complexity cognition meshing with the chaotic order of natural greenery.

Side A’s two pieces – ’Sotto’ and ‘Spirit’ – are both only made up of synthetic sound, created via computer and other synthesizing methods. The spark came from an attempt to show the process of creation, life and the final union through sonic means, spiralling into a dense lattice of lifeforms, spirits, and objects realised in sound. “The original goal of the project was to convey the idea of this sound visualization for creatures and textures that are fluid, tangled and morphing into and around each other,” explains Oda.

While imagination and spirit are the subjects of the first two pieces, the final piece of the triptych, ‘Enfold’, emerges into a luscious and staggeringly beautiful material world. Oda turns here to acoustic recordings made in the field, as well as pianos, bells, and flute (performed by Susannah Oda), layering the results into the trembling organic soundscape suggested by Jonáš Gruska’s cover photography. The entirety of ‘Sotto’ is a living and vivid sound world of Oda’s creation – the first in a pegged trilogy of triptychs – brimming with beauty in which to wander and bask.

For this volume, Sydney duo Andy Rantzen and Jochen Gutsch team up with Brisbane-based Lawrence English to create a new trio work, themed around the ideas, life, and personality of a German philosopher, poet and thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer. Based on Rantzen’s spoken words and English’s haunting sine waves, Gutsch structured the piece by adding piano, trumpets, wailing guitar, and thumping percussion, arranged as the original composition “On the Completion of My Master Work”. On the flip side of the tape, comes the reimagined version of the title piece. Both pieces appear as reflections to each other, maybe challenging each other, making conversations and questioning each existence.

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series: In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 experimental/electronic artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout the year batches of 5 new vinyls will be released.

Each record is limited to 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each 12" is housed in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, coming with a print of the artist artwork.

Participate in this series: Franck Vigroux, John Duncan, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Reinier Van Houdt, Stephen O’Malley, CM Von Hausswolff, Hampus Lindwall, Oren Ambarchi, Kevin Drumm, Bérangère Maximin, Kassel Jaeger, Daniel Menche, Charlemagne Palestine, Giueseppe Ielasi, Carlos Casas, Susanna Santos Silva, Joachim Nordwall, Karbé Dinel, Mauro Lanza

Ike Yard remain a legendary band of early '80s New York City – at once immensely influential, yet obscured by a far-too-brief initial phase. Their debut EP, the dark and absorbing Night After Night, sounds almost like a different group, so rapidly would Ike Yard evolve towards the calmly menacing electro throb of their self-titled LP.

Originally released on Factory in 1982, the album put Ike Yard's indelible mark on the synth-driven experimental rock scene then emerging all over the planet. While historical analogues would be Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca or Front 242's Geography, opening track "M. Kurtz" makes starkly clear that Ike Yard is a far heavier proposition.

With a thick porridge of bass, ringing guitar and strangled/stunted layers of voice, these six pieces are densely packed and perversely danceable. "Loss" sounds like a minimal techno track that could have been made last week, while "Kino" combines Soviet-era imagery with sparse soundscapes à la African Head Charge's Environmental Studies.

Ike Yard somehow pull off the toughest trick in modern music: making repetition hypnotically compelling through subtle variation. The effect of Ike Yard's first LP can be heard in many genres – from industrial dance labels like Wax Trax to electro-punk bands and innumerable European groups (Lucrate Milk, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, etc.).

The fact that the cover artwork does not include any photos of the band, but rather features the original catalogue number (FACT A SECOND) only further illustrates the release's importance and Ike Yard's timeless mystique.

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series: In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 experimental/electronic artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout the year batches of 5 new vinyls will be released.

Each record is limited to 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each 12" is housed in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, coming with a print of the artist artwork.

Participate in this series: Franck Vigroux, John Duncan, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Reinier Van Houdt, Stephen O’Malley, CM Von Hausswolff, Hampus Lindwall, Oren Ambarchi, Kevin Drumm, Bérangère Maximin, Kassel Jaeger, Daniel Menche, Charlemagne Palestine, Giueseppe Ielasi, Carlos Casas, Susanna Santos Silva, Joachim Nordwall, Karbé Dinel, Mauro Lanza

Left of centre experiments from the Dutch underground of yesteryear. Muziekkamer was the name of the home recording studio that gave birth to the twelve tracks on 'Popmuziek', an intriguing document of sketch arrangements and primitive, fairytale sampling wave cuts. This is music which excels due to its inherent naivety; the limitless ambition of 'Black Box' almost sounding like a precursor to the 90s ambient techno of Likemind or Stasis. On 'Being Home Tonight' we can hear an early form of what the likes of Tolouse Low Trax have been bringing to the forefront of contemporary club culture whilst the erratic art-rock of 'Walkman' mirrors what Leven Signs & co were doing over the pond. In trying to create something which represented 'intrusiveness' as a contrast to an earlier ambient tape the trio incidentally blurred the lines between various musical fashions to come. An amazing snapshot of time and place!

Ned Lagin's Seastones is a pioneering electronic composition interweaving metaphors from nature, science, art and music and the origins of music. Reflecting the technology, science, modern art, new ecological awareness and optimism of the times and culture, Seastones embodies the history of electronic music by taking full advantage of tape music, analog synthesizers, and computer technology to create pieces that are dynamic, rich, and deep.

Originally released by the Grateful Dead's Round Records in 1975, Seastones' reputation as a gem of electronic music was further enhanced by the celebrity of the musicians who contributed to the source material. Seastones musicians include Ned Lagin (processed piano, clavichord, organ, prepared piano, electric piano, synthesizers), Jerry Garcia (processed electric guitar, pedal steel guitar, voice), Phil Lesh (processed electric bass), David Crosby (processed electric guitar and vocals), Grace Slick and David Freiberg (processed vocals), and Mickey Hart and Spencer Dryden (percussion).

This new LP presents two crafted Seastones sets (Sets 4 and 5, 18 tracks) drawn from the entire Seastones composition and contains gorgeous extended processed vocals by Garcia, Crosby, Slick, and Freiberg, and beautiful abstract instrumental passages by Lagin and all.

Lagin is considered a pioneer in the development and use of minicomputers and personal computers in real-time stage and studio music composition and performance. He had classical music training in piano, counterpoint, harmony, orchestration, composition, and the history of music. Growing up in 1960s New York he was deeply influenced by modal and free jazz, and by modern art. Lagin studied jazz improvisation, arrangement, and piano and played in small jazz groups and a big band. Seastones was influenced not only by modern jazz and forms for improvisation, but also by Lagin's studies of early, Renaissance, and 20th century music. He was a touring, studio, and guest keyboard player with the Grateful Dead from 1970 to 1976.

Seastones composition began in 1970, while Lagin was attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1974, with a minicomputer and an E-mu modular analog synthesizer, Lagin was able to play a polyphonic keyboard and hybrid computer-controlled instrument, as well as create simple generative musical processes. The normal controls found on the analog synthesizer were customized to accept computer control and the system was large enough to input audio and control voltages from the other musicians' instruments. This means that the synthesizer controls which were processing the incoming audio from the musicians could be controlled by what the artists were playing. These control voltages and timing signals derived from the amplitude envelope shapes of what the musicians played, as Lagin puts it:

"... became the sources of modulation that are the imprints, the musical touch and articulation, personality and presence of each musician. Interweaving multiple musical identities within an interconnected group. Ensemble interaction and improvisation through instrument and compositional interconnection."

Each track on Seastones is what Lagin refers to as a "moment form". Each track is self-contained, like a sea stone on the beach, a moment in time full of feelings and meaning, an entire world unto itself. Again, Lagin:

"Each stone on a fragment from another place and time. Some are just one mineral, some made of many; some are crystalline; some magnetic; some meteorites from the birth of this solar system or the universe; some contain fossils of ancient lives and little life form's, their stories are imprinted. Ephemeral existence."

"Like real sea stones, the Seastones moment forms are each a placetime, a time island, a droplet of time. They are composed and synthesized and skeletal improvisational forms. Some moment forms are ideogrammatic; the communicate their own self-contained structure, each a sensuous object in and of itself. Some of the moment form compositions are individual, some are related."

"Some are metaphoric abstracted forms derived from geology, and natural history and paleontology, electronics and electricity, organic and biochemical synthesis, physical processes, mathematics, physics and quantum mechanics, language and linguistic structure, and different forms and perspectives from pictorial (and abstract) visual art (paintings - cubism, pointillism, impressionism, expressionism and color field). And some from the sea with tonalities that are complex ocean surface and deep wave forms and currents, with the superposition of many waveforms from many sources. Some moment forms are just one waveform cycle."

Seastones: Sets 4 and 5 is available in this audiophile edition of 2000 copies. This audiophile quality LP was cut by Golden Mastering and pressed at RTI to insure excellence in reproducing Seastone's rich analog sound. Transparent blue vinyl.

Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series: In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 experimental/electronic artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout the year batches of 5 new vinyls will be released.

Each record is limited to 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each 12" is housed in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, coming with a print of the artist artwork.

Participate in this series: Franck Vigroux, John Duncan, Phill Niblock, Jim O’Rourke, Reinier Van Houdt, Stephen O’Malley, CM Von Hausswolff, Hampus Lindwall, Oren Ambarchi, Kevin Drumm, Bérangère Maximin, Kassel Jaeger, Daniel Menche, Charlemagne Palestine, Giueseppe Ielasi, Carlos Casas, Susanna Santos Silva, Joachim Nordwall, Karbé Dinel, Mauro Lanza

Formed in Chicago in 2009, Apiary brought together four of that city's most versatile and prolific musicians: David Daniell (guitar), Steven Hess (drums), Joseph Clayton Mills (electronics), and Jason Stein (bass clarinet). Together, Apiary interwove disparate strands of Chicago's improvised music community, seamlessly incorporating their influences—ranging from jazz to minimalism to noise—into a whole that was dense and hypnotic.

Having developed a reputation for the intensity of their live performances, Apiary entered the studio in the spring of 2010 in an attempt to document their unique sound. These recordings, uncovered and revisited a decade later, have lost none of their power or immediacy. If anything, the intervening years provide a sense of perspective and insight into how vital Apiary's music—grounded in collaboration and possibility—remains. Apiary was reworked and brought to completion in 2020; it provides a fascinating window into a crucial moment in Chicago's musical history, one that still vibrates with startling urgency.

"I acquired my first shortwave radio back in 1998 or 1999. Living in San Francisco at that time, I found a wealth of signals being broadcast from across the Pacific towards the US. This was before cellphones became ubiquitous, so the radio spectrum was relatively free of interference, even living in a city. I quickly found that when I got out of any urban environment, I could receive more signals and with better clarity. So with every opportunity for travel, I took a shortwave. By 2000, I had upgraded by then to a smaller Grundig portable with a wind-up antenna and a MiniDisc recorder in tow. I held out acquiring a flash-drive digital recorded until the summer of 2012, with the technology of the MiniDisc already obsolete by then. This collection represents some of the more interesting finds from that collection of MiniDisc recordings." – Jim Haynes, Northern California, 19 August 2020.

Side A:

1. Random tuning across various bands, picking up WWVB the time channel in the US, the American evangelist Brother Stair, German and Spanish newscasts. Recorded in 2003, Northern California.

2. UBV-76 - the infamous Soviet-era Buzzer signal with a rare message being delivered at the top of the hour. Recorded in Barcelona, April 2001.

3. A chorale joined by an SSB tone. Unknown date and location.

4. Romanian language lesson, as recorded in Barcelona, April 2001.

5. Detuned voices, South Carolina, 2007.

6. Trumpeting fanfare cut to RTTY transmission. I'm not sure if this cut was done internally switching from station to station, or if I made the cut in the minidisc itself. I believe it was the former. Unknown date and location (probably Tennessee).

7. Morse code transmission. Estonia, 2007.

8. Sparse three dot transmission (the letter S, perhaps?) within a series of high energy utility signal bursts. The purpose of which escapes me. Unknown date and location.

9. Ham Radio Relay Transmission. Unknown Date. Probably Northern California.

10. I always called this utility signal 'the calliope.' I have no idea what its purpose is. Unknown date. Unknown location.

11. This percolating utility signal was recorded in South Carolina, 2008.

12. Ham Radio Communication. Summer 2001. Tennessee.

13. Unknown Shortwave noise. Unknown location. Unknown date.

Side B

1. Tuning in a SSB Ham radio broadcast. Unknown date, location.

2. A brief snippet of a science fiction reading about 'Professor Cantrell' Barcelona, 2001.

3. WWCR / Alex Jones broadcast. Christmas 2006, Nashville. I have no desire to re-broadcast any of that man's bullshit. But I politely ask that you take note of my editorial hand in response to Jones' caller.

4. Peculiarly warbling SSB detuned transmission. Melbourne, Australia, 2003.

5. A conspiracy theorist speaking about fluoride and water fluorination. I heard him numerous times in the early '00s, but I am not sure of his identity. Other topics included home schooling and garden cultivation. Northern California, 2005.

6. WBNY with Commander Bunny. One of the strangest pirate radio broadcasts. Unfortunately, the WBNY transmitter is very weak, and this was most understandable snippet of the recordings. South Carolina, 2007.

7. Outlook on BBC World Service, discussing the future of payphones. Northern California, 2005.

8. HF-GSC at 4724 kHz transmission from Andrews Air Force Base. This was one of the only times I actually wrote down a frequency, which is still being used as of 2020. Recorded in Death Valley, 2012.

9. Radio Damascus. Estonia 2007.

10. SSB detuned transmission with distant crosstalk. Unknown location and date.

11. End of broadcast and interval signals for Radio Romania. Recorded in South Carolina, 2012.

12. Interval signal for Radio Vatican. Recorded in Estonia, 2007.

Mort Garson’s road to cool cultural caché and the sublimity of Plantasia meant a decades’ long journey through an underworld of sophisticated, international, string-laced dreck (i.e., your great-grandparents’ record collection) to arrive at Music from Patch Cord Productions, this set of queasy-listening you now hold.

Music from Patch Cord Productions shows that Garson’s knack was to exist in both worlds, super-commercial and waaay out. He cut delirious minute-long blasts for commercials (as to whether or not they were actually ever aired remains unknown) and spacecraft-hovering études. Were there really account managers out there in the early ’70s that gave the greenlight to these commercial compositions which seemed to anticipate everyone from John Carpenter to Suicide? What were these campaigns actually for, Soylent Green? Regardless, Mort’s jingle work laid the groundwork for the future. As Robert Moog himself noted: “The jingles were important because they domesticated the sound.” Via Garson’s wizardry, the synthesizer transcended novelty to ubiquity and dominance.

Other curios and questions abound. How did Garson’s arrangement work for Arthur Prysock’s satiny body worship album This Is My Beloved transmogrify into the body-snatcher pulses of “This is My Beloved”? Are the two pieces even related? What is the IATA code for the airport of “Realizations of an Aeropolis”? What denomination is the “Cathedral of Pleasure”? If “Son of Blob” sounds like a hallucinatory melted ice cream truck theme, what on earth does Blob’s father sound like? Every sound wrangled out of that Moog by Garson pushes things further and further out.

Of course, these are all questions that may never get answers, as Garson wasn’t the most organized modern day composer, busy as he was conjuring strange new realms with his circuit boards and synths. He worked and wrote right up until his death in 2008, his daughter and Sacred Bones still going through all of the material left behind. He wouldn’t live to see it, but his renaissance was just around the corner, the seeds that had been scattered in record bins around the world suddenly coming to bear fruit. Take a bite!

The unfathomable quantity of Pan Daijing meets Werner Dafeldecker's mercurial sound art on this surprise, limited edition 7' pressing.
Leading on from her heavily arresting Lack album for the PAN label, A Page To A Corner is Daijing's first collaborative release. The title track is a lethargically hypnagogic thing, with Daijing lamenting an unseen force, bound into a mesh of monotone drones and keening strings to ultimately quease-inducing effect.
On the B-side, Daughters of The Botanist, Daijing's death croak vocals are placed front and centre of the mix against a more dynamic backdrop of gong-like tones that gradually recede to leave the slithering sound of extended instrumental techniques and brownian electronics.

What does a contemporary album mean to us? Marc Pinol and Hugo Capablanca asked themselves this question when faced with the challenge of recording their first C.P.I. LP. To find the answer they went back to some of the most important records in their lives and listened to them from start to finish. At a time when the whole concept of an album might be at its lowest ebb for decades, they wanted to return to the old way of telling stories, recreating the notion of a narrative "journey" but doing so in their own original manner. 'Alianza' displays a wide range of emotions through only a few elements. There are no structures, barely any drums. It's a puzzling journey that moves through darkness and light, happiness and despair, hope and menace, as it unveils its own mysterious universe. Every track is a world in its own, yet all of them are linked by an invisible energy that reflects a coherent constellation. To achieve this, Hugo and Marc used a broad array of vocal timbres, including their own drone-treated voices, digitized vocals from an old vector synth, and those of several contributors. Most of the sounds on the album come from digital devices, as they wanted to "prove themselves" in the studio "by doing something as warm as we could while trying to avoid analogue if possible? The major part of 'Alianza' was recorded during the spring of 2018 in Barcelona, with further takes and additions recorded in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Switzerland. It features contributions from Spacemen 3's Will Carruthers, Tanja Siren, Veronica Vasicka, Anna Homler, Demetrio Martini and Pablo Sanchez. The album was mastered by Gordon Pohl in Dusseldorf. The artwork is by Dominic Brucia and features a picture by Tanja Siren. The album was created with the support of The Richard Thomas Foundation.

We met Franck Vigroux for the first time years ago at Berlin's Berghain during a soundcheck. At that time he performed with Mika Vainio, with whom Vigroux often worked together.

The first track on »Ballades sur lac gelé« dates back to that time. It was created under the impression of this collaboration and friendship with Mika Vainio. This album is dedicated to him.

Vainio's oeuvre is also significant in connection with the history of raster, so it was only logical and our wish to release this album by Franck Vigroux.

With the beginning of the corona pandemic, Franck Vigroux took up this early material again, he continued to formulate it and completed the present album »Ballades sur lac gelé«. The title already defines the theme of the ballad, a "song/poem with very minimal structures" (quote Vigroux).

"Ballade" is also a play on words with the French word "balade", in this sense a ramble, a ramble over a frozen lake. The reduced, cool structures reflect this. But at the same time, under the surface, the (often distorted) sound carpets steadily increase to immense power. Like ice that grows and tectonic forces that have to erupt, glacier-like.

Vigroux is very skilled at creating music in this minimalist setting. The intertwining of very few musical elements creates a kind of soundtrack that is multi-layered and at the same time universally intelligible.

»Ballades sur lac gelé« will be released on June 26th, 2020 as a digital pre-release exclusively on our sites. The physical formats, i.e. CD and vinyl, can be pre-ordered. The official worldwide release date will be announced at a later point in time.

Jesse is one most interesting electronic acts of the Northern countries. Stiletti-Ana and Kalifornia-Keke make up the core of the band that plays with new genres and often explores new musical areas. In the bands residence, the studio in Helsinki with a collection of retro futuristic synthesizers that would make even William Onyeabor envy, the members are toying with new influences and creates deep pulsating and atmospheric songs. Höga Nord Rekords now release two of them as a 7”.

This single has more in common with Stiletti-Anas solo record from 2019 than of earlier releases by Jesse and is more oriented towards and ambient- and leftfield sound than “Fluids” from 2018. The songs bubble and flows beneath a tense surface. The music is suggestive and soft, still with a club nerve in it.

Jesse often chooses new musical paths and this release is the start of such a new direction.

Tape

Orezero’ is both the prequel and sequel to ‘111 Angelic MIDI Casacde’ in that I’m not sure which ones is Wonderland and which one is through the Looking Glass. So it can stay unresolved as both and
neither?
Feels like a strange time to be releasing what might be the most joyous Bass Clef record. Certainly ‘One Tree Island’ and ‘Heavy Lifting Light Wave’ are two cuts of happiness, but the kind of happiness
that acknowledges and incorporates all the unhappiness that came along the way. Other tracks are a more rarefied kind of joy I guess, I find myself stripping back layers on these tracks to an extent I never would have dreamed was possible for me.
These tracks were recorded in 2019 over quite some time, although each track itself takes no more than 3-4 hours and are recorded live. Editing clears the clutter to reveal the intent, not always obvious at the time of recording. I was pushing myself, again, to focus on harmony, and melody, the two things I think I am worst at, rather than returning to rhythm and texture, the playgrounds I always felt most comfortable in.
Instrument restrictions helped as always – most of the sounds heard are from two ROMplers, much-loathed relics of pre-computer music, loaded with largely un-tweakable samples of acoustic instruments, samples you have heard on a billion records, but hopefully stacked in new combinations this time around. Backed up with Microkorg, a resolutely and extremely popular, yet deeply uncool, digital synthesizer.
The tracks here were originally intended for two different records (maybe that’s why the prequel/sequel feeling persists) but thanks to excellent old school A&R in the form of an evolving conversation with Laurie from Slip, together we eventually uncovered one record that I think manages to weave all these threads together. I hope it will bring some smiles to some people.”

FREEDOM/FICTION REMIXES is a compilation of six experimental dance tracks featuring an international mix of well known and upcoming artists. Opening with a hybrid rhythmic statement by Berlin based multimedia artist Zoë Mc Pherson (founder of SFX-Label), to be followed by L.A.'s performance duo Pacoima Techno, who bring track 9 – Apparatus – of L Twills' recently released debut album Freedom/Fiction to the Drexciyan dancefloors of their self-proclaimed genre Casa Teka, Xiu Xiu ends side A with a disturbing but electrifyingly lynchian noise interpretation of Freedom/Fiction. Side B takes the Album's tunes to another night's sight: Automatic Subject gets a new coat by John Tejada's well known and intriguing techno-sound, Montreal based Tobias Rochman (one part of Pelada) turns M.A.S.T.E.R.S. into a techno-drum'n'bass version, whilst upcoming Berlin based producer and Dj Nomi Elektra finalizes the spectrum with an acid-house interpretation of L.A. Automatic Subject pt.2. Releasing on the 16thof October, the compilation is a limited edition of 300 12” Vinyls and can be ordered through Word&Sound. The Cover shows “Autoportrait”, a painting by Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jäger.






Automatic Subject pt2. Remix Nomi Elektra

Nick Klein delivers his final album recorded in the USA and his first for Joachim Nordwall’s iDEAL, marking the start of a close working relationship with the totemic Swedish institute ‘Actor-Network Theory’ is a puckered kiss-off to NYC, delivered in the manner of Nick Klein’s volley of slow bangers for the likes of L.I.E.S., Alter, and Ascetic House since 2013. In five parts he drills into out a signature style of sourest synths and machine rhythms that revel in the thrill of grinding
dissociation, seething with a seat-edge tension that sets Klein’s sound out from the crowd with its jolts of rawest electronic expression and bruxist bite.
The thrumming velocity that took Klein up to 2018 feels tempered and chiselled into some of his deadliest, most unyielding work here. Punctuating his time spent in NYC, before starting a new chapter in the Netherlands, the tracks betray a palpably pensive nerviness to his typically bullish styles in a way that has begun to bleed into his most recent releases on Psychic Liberation and Viewlexx.
Pummelled groover ‘Tail Eating’ and the fierce traction of ‘Every Move Move For The Monitor’ are countered with keening choral voices and serotonin-depleted strings of opener ‘Choking On Ice’, while the sparing strokes of ‘Pear Brandy’ casts a long shadow of midnight blooz guitar, and bony flutes creep over the stygian flow of ’Spider In Brown Powder’ in a salty balance of his patented, dissociative dryness with more esoteric, emotive urges.

on the quest for non linear grooves - pure, explorative, outsider rhythm jams