Beats Vinyl New Releases - News

Voiron debuts on Analogical Force with 'Drill'n'Voiron EP'. 5x Tracks where the 'fake Parisian' continues to blur the lines between genres through his own interpretation. Expect braindance blah blah blah inspired cuts so turn on those smoke machine and welcome to Voironland.

DJ/producer Don Pascal has long been an advocate of fusing London’s sound system aesthetic with more traditional music from around the globe.

Following on from his 2014 release The Cali Experiment, (fusing Latin influences with the sounds of London’s underground club scene) we are happy to announce his forthcoming album The Dakar Experiment.

Featuring musicians from Senegal’s legendary evolving band Xalam, The Dakar Experiment is a sonic exploration fusing Senegalese musicianship and London’s Broken Beat scene.

As the homogenised sound of western pop permeates traditional music the world over, The Dakar Experiment offers an alternate pallet of influence, retaining tradition yet suggesting other possible paths.

The foundations of the album were laid at Henri Guillabert’s studio in Dakar over most of 2016 with Moustapha - Taffa – Cisse, Yahael Camara Onono and of course Henri and Don, then completed in London with an array of musicians, pulling on the city’s vibrant and re-emergent Broken Beat scene.

Featuring vocals by Lyric L, Rich BLK and Niara Scarlett, and remixes by EVM128, Trev and Xtra Brux, The Dakar Experiment is an exercise in finding what connects us in an increasingly divisive world.

Offering a visionary approach to the solo guitar, Milanese experimentalist Alessandra Novaga, delivers an expansive meditation on the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman, with "I Should Have Been a Gardener", presented by Die Schachtel.

Alessandra Novaga is among the leading figures within Italy’s thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, consistently rendering striking solo efforts, as well as equally noteworthy collaborating with Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, Elliott Sharp, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instruments applications within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, encountering her relentlessly deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone.

"I Should Have Been a Gardener" - building on from the territory explored within 2017’s "Fassbinder Wunderkammer" - is Novaga’s second LP to draw conceptually on her love for film. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration, the album takes form as a distillation, pulling from across the unique life, death, work, political commitment, and diaries of Derek Jarman. Emerging as an ethereal aural portrait of the man, sound - interventions of tonality with non-instrumental sources - and silence join in a single, unified body that seeks redemption and purification at the boundaries of life; an imprint that, like Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, is magical - flowers blooming between the stones - hovering in the stark space between an endless sea and post-modern shadow of a nuclear power plant.

As remarkably listenable as it is challenging and pregnant with ideas, Novaga’s "I Should Have Been a Gardener" represents a strikingly at ease step forward in the potentialities of experimental music. Bravely taking on the ubiquitous expectations of the guitar, Novaga refused to relinquish the clarity of source and sound, forcing the ear to rethink what is accepted and known at every turn. An immersive journey from one of Italy's most important contemporary voices..

Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood.

Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work for quintet recorded in 2018. A musical assemblage of glued-together fragments and scraps of sheet music from Baron’s past. Compositions wrote in the small margins and folds of paper; illustrated in the art booklet included with the LP. The flute, violin, guitar, keyboard, and bass clarinet phrases saunter at a pre-sleep pace, until a subdued, yet ecstatic Mass theme ushers in periodically. Delivering the warmth of life… it is a slow beauty. It brings me such happiness listening to this piece. Its continuity is cut with scissors and pasted about oddly… all soaked in a certain malaise; a resigned grace.

The next piece and other side of the LP, “Chancel,” is rather different. An audio journal flipped through, dropped on the ground, picked up and opened to another page. A confusing montage of world-ized musical snatches: car radios, church choirs emanating to the streets, moldy organs, domestic piano recordings. Similarly, machine vibrations, bodega conversations, and other environmental observations segue the harmony and disharmony of this listening experience. I’ll finish with some of Derek’s notes from the booklet: “Co-opting new achievements / Thank you for this incredible demonstration / This theatre of procedures / This consoling play of recognitions / No theatre but “what’s that”, / Nowhere for the silver ball to roll to. / How are we so in love.”

Composed, produced, and arranged by Eartheater alone, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin draws a path back to the primordial lava lake from which she first emerged, as it also testifies to the reincarnating resurrections the project has undergone over its first full decade of existence. While the album renews her focus on guitar performance and legible structure, Eartheater balances the unabashed prettiness of acoustic harmonic songs with the dissonant gestural embroidery of oblique instrumentals. Having fallen back in love with the idioms that first captivated her, she worked to crack open the techniques that had fossilized inside of her, while still seeking to apply the electro-alchemical knowledge she picked up along her journey. The result of a laborious revival in fire, Phoenix recontextualizes Eartheater’s combinatorial approach to production within her most confident abstractions, adjacent to some of her most direct songs to date.

Eartheater composed and workshopped most of Phoenix over a ten-week artist residency (FUGA) in Zaragoza, Spain, housed in a sprawling, cubic glass facility that looked out over wildflower-flecked mountains. Following an intensive period of recording and touring, the residency provided her with an unprecedented period of solitude in the small Spanish town. Her newfound sense of isolation ultimately became liberating, leading her to sidestep the crutches and steady grids inherent to electronic music, and to conceive pieces rooted in her guitar and her desire to perform with other players live.

Eartheater’s voice glows brighter than ever at the center of Phoenix’s arrangements — her familiar operatic highs are grounded by newly expanded velvety lows, leaping lucidly up and down octaves. Her intricate guitar work flits across baroque fingerpicked passages and latches into cyclical figures that meet her voice in lush harmonic progressions. From her own guitar parts, to the orchestral string arrangements she wrote for the Spanish conservatory group Ensemble de Camara, to the harp and violin lines performed by her close friends and collaborators Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of LEYA, Eartheater’s applications of acoustic instruments bring an extraordinary emotional emphasis to her compositions. Phoenix prepares for a future where electronic sound — or even electricity itself — isn’t guaranteed, but where her music could still come to life with a group of hands dexterously winding across instruments against the light of the fire. Eartheater drew inspiration for Phoenix from geological imagery, whose turbulence and potential for genesis mirror the trajectory of her own life and relationships. The album’s instrumental pieces directly reference these moments of upheaval, colliding audio of volcano and lightning storms with resplendent string and vocal arrangements. “Volcano” looks out over the album from its peak at the center, its tectonic plates colliding in towering melodies and layers of vocal harmonies, as piano accents crest and cascade down the mountainside. When Eartheater sings, “I’m still building mountains underground,” she is trying to reconcile the pinnacles of her ambition with the comforts of a simple existence buried beneath the surface. “Diamond in the Bedrock” finds her admiring the gemstone forming under intense pressure inside her, but rejecting the romantic promise that the diamond signifies, choosing instead to escape a relationship that has come to stifle her.

With the album’s subtitle, Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, Eartheater imagines being tempered to a state of perfect equilibrium, suspended between melting and freezing, where fire could streak across her body and appear as a crystalline blush. This image captures the tension at the heart of the Eartheater project, as she decides how best to distill her passion and render it cool to the touch; to find beauty in simple pleasure, while keeping one eye fixed on the peaks that loom in the horizon. The album is mixed by Kiri Stensby and mastered by Heba Kadry, featuring photography by Daniel Sannwald.

Following the 2019 Hands in the Dark re-issue of Josiah Steinbrick’s debut solo recording, the Los Angeles based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer returns with “Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue,” to be jointly released on the 18th of September with his Full Bloom imprint.

A vibrant collection of cinematic pieces that drape tapestries of FM synthesis and percussion around serpentine bass lines, the album unfolds like a rapturous dream. Hushed laments, ecstatic rhythms, and hypnotic arrangements induce a state of reverie, where boundaries dissolve between fading memories, illusions, and the hyper-real.

“Liquid / Devotion & Tongue Street Blue” is a potent creative offering, and marks a breakthrough in Steinbrick’s personal approach to the studio.

Lucid Dreams is the self-titled, new project from Jason Luxton aka Overlook, which also features close friends Dean Warburton, Joe Theobald & the vocal talents of Manuela Marchis. With Shades of post-punk, trip-hop and film score dynamics, The Lucid Dreams EP is an immersive multi-genre listening experience that travels through murky underworlds and dream-like hazes.

From 'Stone's Throw' to 'Hallucinogenics' the ‘Lucid Dreams’ EP plays more like an LP, with a narrative amalgamating the different moods created by Luxton to present something that feels clear and complete in its vision.

The man in the crowd is a wonderer with relaxed habits. In him the course of things and movement of the city is reproduced. The Düsseldorfer Detlef Weinrich is such a man in the crows. Some one who is constantly listening to future winds through rushes of the past. He loves the night for its free will. And his music tells stories about it. You might know him as a member of the band Kreidler. As a solo artist he goes under the name Tolouse Low Trax. And he's already got three Eps and two albums under his belt. His first solo album „Mask Talk“ thrives on a feathery beat frequency and cool new-wave-strength. His recently released piece „Corridor Plateau“, which appeared as a limited edition to accompany the exhibition „Corridor Plateau“ contains percussive electronics and Industrial sounding like its from the second industrial revolution. His third album „Jeidem Fall“, is also not from here. It sounds like music brought down to earth from the heavens. But its a dark cosmos in which there are only fleeting glimpses of light. All eight tracks were composed in a short space of time over the period of just a few months and fit together perfectly atmospherically. With a musical expressiveness that undoubtedly twists your emotions, „Jeidem Fall“ attacks the subconscious and clouds the mind. The drums have more movement that on „Mask Talk“. Along with the constant tapping of drumsticks goes melodical arpeggios dancing dark and dirty. At times longing vocals drift abstractly through the room, as on „Sa Seline“ or „Geo Scan“, without telling any obvious story.

To sound like stylistic cross references from the present and past is all just speculation for nothing on „Jeidem Fall“ really sounds like anything that has gone before. You could compare the dark minimal timbre of the drum computer aesthetic with Craig Leon's first reductive album „Nommos“. There is also a hint of the minimallist industrial of the Spanish band Esplendor Geometrico in the bubbly textures. But Tolouse Low Trax is still looking from the present into the future and filter and filters all his personal preferences through his MPC and his small synth setup to make them come alive here and now in a new way. Again Tolouse Low Trax has created a truly mysteriously vibrating drum computer music which offers hypnotic magic for the shadowy dance floor. Only a little light should illuminate the whole thing and the bodies that move above them should have no fear from threatening percussion which are displaced into a misty trance. A dark swaying shadowy mass, ideal for a journey at the end of the night and all those non-places where longing sleeps and the last romantics dance while getting drunk.

Tape

Live three turntables mix using ALL Discrepant, Souk and Farsa Discos records between 2010-2020.
Mixed, selected and recorded by Dj Marcelle / Another Nice Mess.

Limited to 150 tapes/No Digital.

ALEXANDRE BAZIN​ is a member of the ​Groupe de Recherches Musicales​, better known as the GRM, for which he writes documentaries about music for the radio. He is passionate about experimental music and more specifically acousmatic music created by members of the GRM, such as Bernard Parmegiani, Francois Bayle and Guy Reibel. Due to his background as a classical and jazz pianist, Alexandre Bazin is also passionate about instrumental music by the likes of Steve Reich, Erik Satie, Brian Eno ... This album attempts to synthesize these two worlds that are so dear to the composer, either in symbiosis or in opposition to one another with simple and loose melodies as its main theme. The use of analog synthesizers and acoustic sounds are at the heart of the composer's creative process. His music has already been heard thanks to Umor Rex Records in Mexico and the Moogfest festival in the USA.

OCEANS :
"Oceans" ​was written for Marimba, Piano and Buchla Music Easel, in 4 movements around the theme of the Ocean. Simple and loose melodies, played on piano and Buchla. They rotate around the marimba which evokes breathing and the rhythm of the swell. Suspended melodies reminiscent of Generative music although in this case they are an improvisation around a simple motif. Through its title and movements, this work evokes a reflection around climate change and our relationship to Oceans: water, breathing, the repetition of movement, but also its immensity which reminds us of our limits. The piece was performed by Alexandre Bazin on Piano, Buchla Music Easel and Marimba as well as Gabriel Benlolo on Marimba, a member of the Radio France Philharmonic orchestra.

THE DESERTER :
Not escaping a situation to flee but to be physically freed from it. The response manifests itself through the breath, heartbeat and the act of running. Beyond a moral necessity, it becomes a physical necessity that cannot be contained. Your natural defenses provoke this sudden urge. Your body cannot be contained through inaction. Our bodies in action escape all control, in order to free ourselves from the time that is limited to us. A piece for percussion, electric organ and Buchla Music Easel.

DREAM-LAND :
A piece that borrows its titles from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. In the spirit of the GRM’s acousmatic works, such as "L’Enfer" by Bernard Parmegiani or "Suite pour Edgar Poe" by Guy Reibel. Alexandre Bazin, a member of the GRM, wrote music inspired by this mysterious, perhaps imaginary land, at the edge of the human spirit, where a lonesome traveler walks among the shadows, advancing through harsh and hostile nature, "Out of space - Out of time ”. An Earth that evokes purgatory, loneliness and introspection. The aridity of the landscape creates an explicitly vertiginous map where one crosses paths with past memories, lonely angels and an idol named Night. The aridity of the landscape is interpreted through the EMS synthi’s electronics, ideal for its attack, brightness and deep bass sounds, like "Mountains toppling evermore into seas without a shore". The piece ends with a sound recording made in the middle of winter on a deserted beach in the French Landes region during a storm.

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 this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls.

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

Customer’s Copy is the debut LP of contorted cosmic jazz and eccentric minimal electronics by Exotic Sin. The duo of Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa first came together for a performance celebrating the art and music of Karlsson’s grandparents, Moki and Don Cherry, before continuing as an independent unit that still incorporates some of the Cherrys’ instruments as well as their synergetic integration of music with artistic practice.

Preferring the stark contrast of analog/digital, acoustic/electric, and natural/unnatural sounds, Karlsson contributes synthesizers in addition to piano, celesta, and bells, while Iwasa collides anachronistic 90s Yamaha keyboard and guitaret with contrabass recorder, drums, kalimba, and three of Don Cherry’s instruments: one of his trumpets as well as two of his “zen saxophones,” handmade woodwinds appending reed mouthpieces to plastic plumbing parts, also called Don’s kettles after their high-pitched sound. With such timbral juxtapositions, the spirit of Exotic Sin is reminiscent of a number of leftfield jazz-meets-electronics ‘70s duos from Don Cherry’s maverick collaborations with Jon Appleton and Terry Riley to Anthony Braxton’s work with Richard Teitelbaum, İlhan Mimaroğlu and Freddie Hubbard’s Sing Me a Song of Songmy, and Muhal Richard Abrams’ electronic works. On album opener “Dot 2 Dot,” Karlsson’s measured, monastic piano sets an elegiac stage for kettle bends and absurdist electro-percussive filtering courtesy of Iwasa before a flourish of cascading ebonies and ivories together with restorative circular trumpet motifs bring the sidelong piece to a majestic resolution. Named after the character from Ridley Scott’s 1989 film Black Rain, the schizosphere of “Charlie Vincent” interfaces ominous, dystopian synthesizer with permuted organ swells before album closer “Canis Minor” sets gentle sail for a distant bed of lonesome stars.

A visual artist as well as an archivist and coordinator for the Cherry estate, Karlsson continues to learn and study Don’s compositions and approach to piano with her uncles Eagle-Eye and David, who were taught by Don himself, and his use of short piano compositions as loose scaffoldings for improvisation is prevalent across the record’s three otherworldly unfurlings. Improvisor and multidisciplinary artist Kenichi Iwasa is also known for his legendary Krautrock Karaoke night, his contribution to Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 album Workaround, and collaborations with visual artists and musicians from Linder Sterling to members of Can, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, and Wire. Recorded and mixed, with additional alto flute, woodwinds, and contrabass recorder by Robbie Lee.

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 this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls.

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

Jana Irmert has created a metaphoric world of billowing harmonic clouds, gently crackling sounds and abstracted field recordings. All three parts of the album are marked by perpetual subtle shifts, memory turning into an imperfect compass: You can walk through the music in all directions without ever passing the same point twice.
Inside this world of concrete sounds and pure abstractions, of organic timbres and alien noises, all sense of perspective is lost: What is far can seem close, tiny sounds suddenly appear enormous. In a sense, FLOOD is about the desire for change, a sensation that fills us both with anticipation and anxiety. That is why this album is more than just a sonic novel, and why there is more than one story to it – just enter the flood and allow the current to carry you far, far away.“ (by Tobias Fischer)

“Her new work FLOOD has extraordinary depth and dimension.” (Kevin Press, Badd Press)

“Her music is all-immersive, it is all around you and especially when played a bit louder offers a whole sonic depth that you wouldn’t notice otherwise. This is the field where field recordings, drone and musique concrete meet up. This is a very fine follow-up to her debut.” (Vital Weekly)

“An innovative sound that oscillates like the bridge between robots and future tech. And just as the cover depicts, this is a look to the skies, beyond the distant clouds, to other galactic bodies. Yes, this is space age music for a new generation. Breathtaking.” (TJ Norris, Toneshift)

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 this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls.

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

The Danish label/imprint arbitrary announces the release of Framework 3 (arbitrary11) by Mads Emil Nielsen. Framework 3 is the latest instalment in Nielsen’s sequence of graphic scores and recordings. The series includes the Danish composer’s own subjective translations of visual materials and sound pieces accompanied by visual notations.

On this release he collaborates with Katja Gretzinger and Nicola Ratti. Published as a limited edition art print folder, Framework 3 consists of risographed scores and recordings on 10” vinyl and CD – with recordings by Nielsen, along with graphic scores by Gretzinger and contributions by Ratti.

Raised in a family of architects Nielsen has for several years been occupied with the question of “how do you intuitively sonify an image?” along with the complementary processes of translating sounds and music into illustrations and scores. In early 2019, he produced various drawings and sound pieces which formed the starting point for the three tracks on this 10” vinyl EP. The audio is derived from synthesizer recordings and basic electronic sound sources (sine waves, feedback, noise) and percussive loops combined with recordings made in the studios at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm).

The audio material was translated by graphic designer Katja Gretzinger into a series of visual notations made while listening to the music. Gretzinger developed various symbols, forms and structures, such as points, bars, 3D balls, irregular patterns / “swarms” and regular patterns (vertical hatchings). These were combined with found image materials and cut-outs from old prints and layered with large geometric forms, which define the individual character of each of the three parts. The resulting 18-page graphic score is included in the release in the form of risograph printed sheets.

Nielsen then invited musician Nicola Ratti, who is also trained as an architect, to create sonic re-interpretations of the graphic score. Ratti reinterpreted the imagery as a selection of sound elements positioned in a three-dimensional area; which he visualized as the space between the composer / artist, Ratti himself and the loudspeakers. These recordings are included on the CD.

1, 2, 3 written & produced by Mads Emil Nielsen, Copenhagen / Berlin, 2019 / 2020 (reworked and combined with a live recording from Standards, Milan, September 2019). Recording by + thanks to URSSS. CD: 1, 2, 3 written & produced by Nicola Ratti, Milan, 2020.
Scores by Katja Gretzinger. Artwork/design (packaging, discs, text) by Mads Emil Nielsen.

Maja S.K. Ratkje is at the forefront of the musical avant-garde. Her music is bold, original and it is meant for sharing. At its heart lies Ratkje’s own voice, an open door to her individual musicianship and a constant tool for realigning her work with natural expressions and human truths.

On Mara, layers of vocals overlap and layer their way through the reverberant woodwork of an early baroque parish in Austria. At times slow and beautiful, other times frantic and sinister, this live recording is full of depth, passion and life.

Live-recording at Pfarrkirche, Lockenhaus at Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus July 9, 2018. Recorded and mixed by Peter Laenger and Andreas Ruge from Tritonus Musikproduktion. Mastered by Maja S.K. Ratkje at Svartskog 2019.

All music created and performed in real-time by Maja S. K. Ratkje, except sung parts from the Norwegian traditional Hanen sten på stabburshella and the American traditional Mining for Gold.

Maja is using voice processing software created by Øyvind Brandtsegg.

The Buchla 100 experimental session begins with a documentary recording of the noise generators. Something I find endlessly fascinating is listening to different noise sources, so I always feel compelled to record them. The remaining tracks are sequenced by my MANIAC Cellular Automata sequencer. First up are three little sequenced ditties that also incorporate the ARP 2600 modular interconnected to the Buchla 100. After this is an ultra-minimal setup using MANIAC and the mind-numbingly rare Waveform Synthesizer Model 132 module. As far as I'm aware this is the only one of these modules that Buchla ever built! A truly unique module where you have 32 pots that setup the output waveform, and an FM input as well.. The last two tracks are a Cellular Automata / FM crossmod oscillator stereo setup, lots of crunchy high pitched stuff with some deep bass notes thrown in too :

Recorded at Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA on 5th April 2015. Mixed and arranged at Noyzelab, NSW, Australia between July 2015 & February 2016.

Sound Source: Buchla 100 / ARP 2600
Sequencer: MANIAC cellular automata sequencer

In recent years, the Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. Since her first recordings that were published by Root Strata and Students of Decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. Once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. That compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album Coda.

It’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but Ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. Just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. This subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of Coda.

Her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of Grouper, Felicia Atkinson, and Harold Budd. Mastered by James Plotkin.

Steering away through an independent countercurrent from the most pompous and overtly atmospheric alumni of the Berlin School, and the far out yoga classes from New Age, but still very psych militant, we get the concise and thorough sound of “Fluido Tiempo”. Through sort-of-short tracks we unveil possible references such as JD Emmanuel or Amoon Düül taken to realms such as urban commuter trance or empty city vagabondage. Subterranean electronic synthesizer music is well known for its penchant for the loner, the living room wanderer and the night tripper but it has rarely seen a proposal this emotional. Deeply imbedded in the fertile in radical ideas Cassette Culture, Sima figures out sounds to communicate human emotions such as melancholy, uncertainty, absence or loss.
This first reference by Paco León’s solo alias -he usually practices kosmische gymnastics with his band Güiro metts Russia- is a very nice surprise that will delight Cortini or Fitoussi fans.

Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick ‘getragen’ – without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term’s semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of “expansive, deep, quiet and sombre.” And yet, ‘getragen’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried – two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him. Does Masayoshi’s own definition, however, apply to ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’? Only to a limited extent. Compared to previous Faitiche releases, ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’ is certainly the most ‘getragen’ of them all. Nevertheless, this is by far not the first association that comes to mind. From a distance, these tracks seem rather introspective, cautious even – and reflect the recording situation: deliberately pared down, reduced to a single microphone in space and a separate track for all other instruments, each movement and action is chronicled by the treacherous mike. This confronted me with some unexpected and unfamiliar problems. For example, we had to swap out the seating in the studio as my favoured chair had a characteristic creak. Other, external influences were proved our control: fire engine klaxons, street noise and footfall became part of the recordings and their improvisatory nature. Each movement required careful orchestration, fully aware of its irrevocable nature. Space itself was always present and an audible entity, except on ‘Stripped to RM’ (recorded without a microphone or vibraphone track). After extensive deliberations, we decided to forgo the vibes on this piece – a very similar version had already been released in 2008 (on the compilation ‘Enjoy The Silence’, Mule Electronic, 2008). Jan Jelinek, February 2010

Vernal Croossing was Rapoon's fourth album, originally released in 1993 by Staalplaat. One of the most interesting records released by Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering industrial group :zoviet*france) on vinyl now for the first time.

A magic balance between percussion and electronics, creating mind-bending tapestries of minimalistic patterns and quasi-melodic drones fused with occasional doses of well-placed white noise. An approach much in debt to his 12 year stint with *zoviet-france*. It paints a gossamer diaphanous drifting veil of mood over the top. Other than some moody loops and psychoacoustic dimensions, it sounds authentic - hardly a trace of crude electronics or sampling. The drumming - in soft tones rather than hard hitting ones - does nothing to intrude on the passive mood. The overall atmosphere does not really change throughout the recording making it a cool, pacifying atmosphere while having the madcap tempo which would be very easy to dance to.

This edition includes a new track called Total Crossing, edited/constructed by Colin Potter, who has been in charge of the remastering of the record. A deep drone trance/meditation edit that blew Robin's own mind (and also ours!). The successful experiment explained by Colin: "I imported all the masters to my DAW to make a mock-up of the LP & initially they were all together at the beginning of the multitrack, before I spaced them out in the record's running order. And I thought.... what would it sound like with them all playing at once? Well, it was actually suprisingly interesting, so I did a mixdown."

This album follows intergenerational trauma, fugitives of Christian violence in a twilight called Puruma, returning to Mama Cocha, the sea that theorists call Nowhere. Dedicated to the life of Paul Sousa, who while incarcerated, worked years as an inmate firefighter across the Sierra Nevada of California. Also dedicated to the work of Sage LaPena and Dr. Gretel Mendizabal Nolte. (Includes misreadings of Jimenez, Saenz, Claudel, & Wright). Not one, not world, not body, not god, not salvation, not zero; only a ceaseless approaching toward, with, and as the great mystery, by Grace, Tatamama. Jallalla.

ORCORARA 2010 was commissioned and released in 2018 by Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH for the first floor at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 ‘The sound of screens imploding’.

Watching Shackleton’s music morph from dislocated bass experimentation into psychedelic electro-jazz fusion has been a joy. This latest is his most cosmic set to date, following last year’s heady Tunes Of Negation LP “Reach The Endless Sea” with an undulating trio of organic/electronic collaborations with Polish clarinet virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel.
In a world seemingly hellbent on tearing itself apart, it makes perfect sense for two musicians from such disparate backgrounds and disciplines to come together to create a new musical vernacular. Sam Shackleton, returning on Cosmo Rhythmatic after his previous outing on the label as Tunes of Negation, and Polish clarinetist/multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel have joined forces. Their offering is a new album for the label: three long tracks of spiritual introspection and ascensional energy. A work of unison and solidarity.
Both boasting a track record of successful collaborative projects, the two artists have united after being introduced by mutual friends, in wake of a shared interest in minimalism and a broad set of influences rooted in different musical traditions. Joining Zimpel’s demanding multi-layered experience in Avant-garde jazz with Shackleton’s mathematical, esoteric lyricism, the pair have used all the tools at their disposal, aiming at a new form of ritual trance music. This fierce fusion of styles brings out the very best in each other, showing unique clarity and force.

In 1967, 1968 and 1969 most of my works were happenings loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting Of The Snark, a not-so-cryptic poem that, to my mind, gave clues to free the theatre in the same way the “new music” had freed jazz. It never made it to record and I gave up on the idea when I met Sunny Murray and Alan Silva when they arrived in Paris in the summer of ‘69. Few concert venues would have anything to do with us but we didn’t want that kind of connection with the public – famous or not (Jacques Higelin joined on occasion!) – which more often than not would join us on stage to bang percussion, sing, dance, freak out. Our favorite part was when we shut down the lights near the end, silently left the stage, and when the light went on for the curtain... The public had formally taken our place.

Galleries, museums and art/theatre/dance festivals, on the other hand, were open to this early multimedia event – complete with films, masks and early electronic devices (Bernard Vitet, the trumpet player, brought an early portable reverb system to the proceedings). The reels and cassettes we rescued from my basement are rather evasively labelled and the following data is far from precise. The core group was me on piano, Bernard Vitet on trumpet and electronic treatments, Beb Guérin on double bass, Daniel Laloux (who later had tremendous success in film, theatre and voice acting) as MC, Jean Frenay and Jean Vern (who did the artwork for le nouveau jazz) on saxophones, Michel Kurylo, Annick Astier, Lambert Terbrack and my then wife Françoise Tusques “singing” and “acting”, so to say. Jacques Thollot, Aldo Romano and later Noel Mcghie were on drums.

I know for sure side A is a studio recording carried out in august 1968 by the comité action musique, an activist group of artists and engineers aiming to reclaim the means of production from the “record industry”. The line-up is me, Vitet, Guérin, Laloux, Frenay, Vern, Astier, Françoise Tusques, no drums (everyone doubling on percussion), and Michel Portal on bass clarinet and saxophone as guest. Side C is a montage of the surviving bits of the happenings that took place at La Vieille Grille between August 1967 – March 1968 (sometimes on a daily basis in ‘68!), the museum of modern art during the May ‘68 demonstrations, and the Biennale Of Paris in February 1969. Sides B and D are less theatre oriented and may have been recorded either at the American center in October 1968, the international students center in November 1968 (Barre Phillips on bass and Barney Wilen on sax guested on these dates but I’m not able to confirm they are on the tapes), or in the winter and spring of 1969. However, the cassette for side b only read “Snark 1969”...

The name of the group (it changed every time it ventured out), the title of the concerts and accordingly the cuts on these LPs were all lifted randomly from Lewis Carroll’s poems and novels.

Back then, I described what we did in this way: “Composers, directors, writers, band leaders, those people are vampires sucking the blood of musicians and actors. They are byproducts of the current state of our society. Yet, someone who has something to convey needs performers... Unless a cultural revolution happens soon, I think it’s impossible to overcome those contradictions. Therefore, I wish that this rendition of the hunting of the Snark would be the last ever rendition of any work of art, and that the next stage of evolution is that any individual craving for expression will have the physical and intellectual means to create without constraints, to freely associate with others, without bearing the weight of so-called geniuses and nobodies. We want to bring to the stage the same revolution that happened in jazz with the new music.

Francois Tusques

Following the reissue of the V-Neck EP Auto, Emote have sprung back to life with some lost DAT recordings of the band from the late 1990s.

These semi live recordings made at the Spike Studios in Fulham where a back to basics project and a deliberate move away, from computer programmed music.

The project was heavily influenced by the albums Drastic Season by African Head Charge and Get Up With It by Miles Davis. The tracks contain an array of random procession instruments ranging from African pianos to kitchen utensils, vintage synth tones and drones are provided by an Arp Odyssey and a Korg MS-20

The tracks where then recorded on to a 8 track real to real AKAI X-1810D

By the time the delayed Dub Fiction album came out in 2000 the duo had decided to go their separate ways and the project was abandoned.

Your record collection will have to be modestly far out not to find this record modestly far out!

Supported by Alex Night (Fat Cat Records) and Chloe Alice Frieda (Alien Jams)

In 1986-87, years before their 1993 debut record, guitarist Øystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) took a musical pilgrimage to Germany to solicit collaboration with one of his musical heroes. Øystein, who tragically was destined to be murder by former member Varg Vikernes in 1993, bought an Interrail ticket and travelled from Norway to Germany to seek out experimental musician Conrad Schnitzler. Conrad was the founder of West German Krautock incubating club the Zodiac Free Arts Lab in West Berlin in 1968 and a former member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster (key experimental groups in the development of industrial music and Kosmiche electronic music).

Do we see what is really there? On the EP titled “Kelly”, the artist Eden Burns touches the topic of perception. How do we perceive and how do we channel our out-of-body experiences? The 4 tracks on this EP are the result of the artist’s extensive exchange with 4 objects. One track = One Object. The objects will not reveal themselves to the listener when experiencing the music. Not showing the objects alongside the music is a choice made deliberately. The meditative music is shifting, layers of sounds invite to form entirely new objects in one's head. Do we hear what is really there?

When one considers the American post-rock bands that emerged at the outset of what would become the modern era of the genre, the moment when a once fringe experimental form transitioned into a recognized faction of contemporary alternative music, there are only several still active today. Salt Lake City's I Hear Sirens are a member of that circle, having released their debut EP in 2007, followed by two LPs including 2013's Between Consciousness and Sleep, an album that has achieved a place of high regard with fans. However, the moment of their greatest acclaim has since stood as their culminating statement. But now their highly anticipated new record Stella Mori marks the continuation of their inspired exploration into instrumental music and its power to foster emotional release, invite reflection, reward vulnerability, and become the artistic abstraction of a limitless number of interpretations for each individual listener.

Dematerialisation du son.


LTD 300 - Printed Sleeve - Sticker

Himalaya (HC16) - An interstellar collective of beatmakers connected by a common goal to blur the boundaries between what's audible and what can be seen through the eyes of imagination. First observed over the Polish sky in 2016, it sends an irregular signal which is decoded by terrestial observatories in a form of original musical material. The signal is proven to originate from a mysterious matter of high-density, which accumulates in the very core of the collective - The Vibe.

Himalaya (HC16) - An interstellar collective of beatmakers connected by a common goal to blur the boundaries between what's audible and what can be seen through the eyes of imagination. First observed over the Polish sky in 2016, it sends an irregular signal which is decoded by terrestial observatories in a form of original musical material. The signal is proven to originate from a mysterious matter of high-density, which accumulates in the very core of the collective - The Vibe.

Re-release of the record originally released on 2016-02-05!

Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M Berlin and presented in an exact replica sleeve of the original 1966 release by Stephen O'Malley.

sales information: Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMM, AMMMusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe's beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label's founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMM's influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track 'Flaming' on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies AMMMusic's first side, 'Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset').

Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde - Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare - AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaf, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe's prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies.

Evan Parker famously described the improvisational logic of AMM's music as 'laminal', in contrast to the 'atomistic' approach more common among the generation of British improvisers (Bailey, Rutherford, Stevens and co.) to which he himself belonged. AMM improvised in layers: layers of sound subtly rising and falling or abruptly starting and stopping without being propelled by the implied pulse of free jazz improvisation. Rather than a pulse, AMM's music began with the sound of the room in which it was played, the Cageian anarchy of silence. By embracing the non-synchronous simultaneity of layered sound, AMM was able to create a musical container into which nearly anything could be incorporated at any moment: on AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew's purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music (and, on the LP's second side, an extended fragment of 'Mockingbird').

AMM's clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Where improvised music has tended to foster the development of idiosyncratic stylists who move freely from one group to another, AMM, initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic

the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices.

- Francis Plagne

Clear Vinyl

Steve Von Till has charted an extraordinary musical path over the last several decades, from his main duties as singer and guitarist of the boundary-breaking Neurosis to the psychedelic music of his Harvestman project and the gothic Americana he's released under his own name. But No Wilderness Deep Enough is truly like nothing you've ever heard from him before—an album that's devastatingly beautiful and overwhelming in its scope, reminiscent of the tragic ecstasy of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' recent work as well as the borderless ambient music pioneered by Brian Eno, late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's glacial compositions, and the electronic mutations of Coil. 

FOR FANS OF : MARK LANEGAN/MICHAEL GIRA/NICK CAVE.

Over the course of recent time, an aching, growing void has developed where our normal way of life has resided. Uncertainty abounds, and Steve Von Till's No Wilderness Deep Enough provides a voice of existential wisdom and experience to offer comfort and perspective in an era of uncharted territory. These six pieces of music shape a hallucinatory landscape of sound that plumbs the depths of the natural world's mysteries and uncertainties—questions that have vexed humanity since the dawn of time asked anew amidst a backdrop that's as haunting as it is holistic.

Von Till’s fifth solo album is a swirling and iridescent blend of ambient, neo-classical, and gothic Americana that swan-dives into the darkness of modern life, with the resulting emergence a sonic document of rural psychedelia that transcends the physical world—towards a greater spiritual acceptance that connects naturalism, spiritualism, and the corporeal form.

With a foundation of simple melancholy piano chord progressions embellished with mellotron, cello, french horn and electronic treatments Von Till's scorched ache spreads across the terrain of No Wilderness Deep Enough like a brushfire, adding a tactile level to his sonic creation as well as an inviting level of friction to the burning beauty painted across the album's framework.

With a foundation of simple melancholy piano chord progressions that came to fruition during jetlagged nights in his wife’s childhood home in Germany, No Wilderness Deep Enough was further embellished with mellotron and electronic treatments in Von Till’s home studio in North Idaho.  Viewing the emerging result as an ambient instrumental album, he consulted friend and engineer Randall Dunn (Marissa Nadler, Earth) about adding live cello and french horn and piano in a proper studio.  After enlisting Brent Arnold on cello and Aaron Korn on french horn, he challenged Von Till to sing over the music and make it his next solo album—which is exactly what happened, with final work being completed at Tucker Martine’s (the Decemberists, Neko Case) Flora Recording and Playback in Portland.

Neka Neka' (on General Purpose) is the first solo release by multi-disciplinary artist, Ex Ponto (Ivan Mašic). Coming of age during the mid-90s Melbourne rave scene, Ivan was infected with music by the legendary Kate Bathgate on 3RRR community radio.
Hearing music by the likes of Oliver Lieb, Will E Tell, HMC & and other producers of the time, an infection quickly turned into a music obsession that lives on today.

In the following years Ivan would go on to manage one of Melbourne's longest running record stores (Dixons Records) and in 2005 built a recording studio, aptly named The Womb. From 2005-15, he produced and played on over 20 albums for improvisation collective, Council of Elders and experimental, no-wave band, Wunderlust.
'Neka Neka' is a nod to ex-Yugoslavian experimentalists of the 80s (Rex Ilusivii, Kozmetika, Miha Kralj etc) and the thriving, late-night hedonism of Belgrade's Club 20/44.

To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls "the third ear".
The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.
The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights, but in Tanpura Study they are embedded in a series of gestures, what I call signatures, on the melodic level.
In Tanpura and Harpsichord, there is an encounter of overtones with chords braided into pun-notes, what Gerard Grisey calls "degrees of transposition". Taken together, this amounts to a non-spectralism in which, contrary to first impressions, there are no fundamental frequencies, even in the bass.
Ajaeng Ajaeng: with respect to European string instruments, the technique col legno affords the direct encounter of wood and string, opening the way to a more tactile conception of the sustained sound, while bringing the materiality of the bow and its practices into question. In violin, viola, cello bows, Pernambuco wood offers an ideal example of extraction, colonialism, deforestation.
With the Ajaeng, a Korean musical instrument, the situation is more complex. The dialectic of court to folk music, always political, always incendiary, may be heard here in the encounter of forsythia and silk, of Dae Ajaeng to So Ajaeng, and on a broader level of Dang Ak (Tang Dynasty music) to Hyang Ak (native Korean music) and their representations.
Alternating music and sound, overtone arrays mingled with noise, marked by the bow change, in flamelike patterns which flicker, emerge, and fade again. A slow down structure, also formalized in Time Medicine, seems to produce a long decrescendo, with the technique of the players drawing out the flicker patterns in a kind of game.
The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a "social hieroglyphic", which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student.
The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target.
This music is made for meditation. On retreat in 2019 I had a revelation: there is no difference between the prayer, the hearing, and the void. There is nothing original in this idea; Wonhyo and many sages have thought it before.

—Eyvind Kang, April 2020

Wonderful lo-fi synthpop / collage LP by Marseillaise duo Jean-Marie Mercimek: Something has been brewing in France in recent years. Underground record shops, small venues, micro labels and young musicians are creating a new vibe in various parts of the country. A broad range of styles & genres get randomly mixed into a melting pot with refreshing results.

Jean Marie-Mercimek is one of those projects coming out of this new scene. The duo of Marion Molle and Ronan Riou revisits french lo-fi synth pop in a fairytale-like way, utilising their collection of rare automatic casio keyboards, frequency modulation chanson and tape collages towards a multilayered comic book journey in form of a concert. As if there was an animated wax brush painted cartoon version of Elli & Jacno!