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Grainy soundscapes flow smoothly together with rippling breakbeats. Dystopian rhythms vanish into horizontal noise. An ancient procession in the dark, guided only by touch.

Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade.

VICIOUS WATER REGIMES stutters along as an ‘ugly’ mass of grey electronica. CAST(O)RO shines from light from the depths with it’s occasional foray into glistening tones. COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. CAST twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it's relentless repetition. WIDOW WALKS gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. ENGE lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable.

SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within.

In Experimental & Parametric Music 1976-2017 more than 40 years of the composer's work are now unveiled. We discover here for the first time the great coherence of this work: from "Signalisations" (1976) to "Mnemosyne pour une acousmaman" (2017). The twelve compositions are annotated and explained in detail by the composer, as well as a kind of wild autobiography.

Joris De Laet was born in 1947, Belgian by birth, self-taught by definition, parametric music and art video composer by choice. Founder of the S.E.M. (Studio voor Experimentele Muziek) in Antwerp, 1973. Internships at the IPEM (Instituut voor Psychoakoestiek en Elektronische Muziek) in Ghent, 1972-1975, under Karel Goeyvaerts, Lucien Goethals and Dr. Herman Sabbe.

De Laet is the founder of the SEMensemble, a group of musicians-composers specialized in performing experimental music and live electronics. From 1975 until 1990, he gave concerts with this ensemble throughout Europe (Germany, France, The Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Croatia, etc.) and in Canada (Montreal, Kingston, Toronto).

Parametric Music was inspired by the deep control on electronic sonics, he has been defining his work since 1979 as 'Parametric Music,' music where composition is based on transformation flows of one or several parameters, selected by the composer, that form, through their converging (or diverging) processes the main characteristics of the regulated sonics of the composition.

4 ethereal beats which inspire evolution and transcend all borders, walls and language barriers by Jostereo & Radius ETC

A beautiful 10" vinyl by the emerging label TORMO RECORDS (their previous edition is none other than Hela, and they also have some stuff from Lodo). Music by Mono Caníbal (Emu Proteus 2, Moog Sub37, Yamaha Dx27, Korg Ms2000, Korg Minilogue, Roland JV1010...); recording in a jungle in another Galaxy (The Empty Hall) in the year of the lord between 2.134 and 4.288 according to the Ummita calendar. The unique and unpredictable letters are the work of the unclassifiable Sagan Ummo (here Satan Ummo). The fantastic artwork is by Sagan Crimewear and the scary mastering (I swear the bass is really powerful) is by J.F. Rojo at Red Records Studio.

'Sing the Gloaming' is the latest collaboration between Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman and Rob St John.

Rob St John is a member of Modern Studies (FIRE Records). Tommy Perman is an artist/musician/designer and former member of the FOUND collective.

'Sing the Gloaming' features guest vocals from Kenny Anderson (King Creosote), Nerea Bello, Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott (Modern Studies), Su Shaw (SHHE), Hanna Tuulikki and Andrew Wasylyk.

The release has been reviewed by The Wire (who also ran a feature on the trio's collaborative work) and has been played by Hannah Peel as part of her 'Night Tracks' show on BBC Radio 3.

The trio's previous collaborations include 'Concrete Antenna', a sound installation in the landmark tower at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop which was an album of the week on BBC Radio 3's 'Late Junction' and was also played by Stuart Maconie (as part of The Freak Zone - BBC 6 Music) and Gideon Coe (BBC 6 Music) amongst others.

And then came the Visitations.

The fifth opus of the Worst Records library could appear as an audiobook for transcendental meditations. If the idea of trance-induced state is no surprise in the music we deliver to the world, this new album by Ricco goes beyond. The pair formed by Gil.Barte, head of Kump Records, and HLM38, in charge of house Notte Brigante, dare to offer a sinuous collection of mantras melted in light, silver dust anddarkness. Each track navigates through ritualistic slow beats, drum'n'bass-ish half tempo incantations and other mystic hybrid forms not so far from Kode 9esque or Shakletonists reminiscences, just to name a few. The titles evoke a spiritual diagonal, from biblical to Islamic worlds and arcanes, passing through Persian tradition and obscure references hard to decipher. Several interludes, leading to the final Prelude, stand as resting rooms to drown the listener into purifying darkambient, where glitches of enlightenment and distants sounds from nature slowly disappear in divine drones. You now hold in your hands a keyholder to somewhere else, a sonic ally through everyday chaos, and spells to protect the soul. Let yourself loose in enchantment.

This is not music about a fast train to Paris. This is not music for airports. From an East German perspective Gajek´s Vitamin D inscribes itself into the progressive myth of Krautrock by shifting the focus to a different side of German history marked by the material traces of the Cold War. This is music that knows about the coexistence of modernism and its ruins, music about the fact that both can be there at the same time: space programs and the damp smell of unheated houses. It's music that taps into the memory of sudden ruptures, trauma and loss, not out of melancholy but to mobilize the lived experience that things can and do, in fact, change. Vitamin D catches the spirit of motorcycles made from scrap metal, of washing machine engines strapped onto strollers to make lawnmowers; a sonic love letter to people living in the margins of infrastructural programs, collecting copper pipes and engine parts in archives of metal and stone, repurposing the rubble of a violent history for dreams of a different world. There, in secret basements, where machines were built out of trash and stolen parts, Gajek finds the sonic resources for an alternative futurism of private cybernetics and pirated airwaves, creating radical and joyful sounds that claim the possibility of something new.

Matti Gajek (he/him) is a product of socialist biohacking. Injected with high doses of vitamin D directly after birth, the GDR made sure his bones would be strong even if he never saw the sun. The practice of high-dosage-vitamin D injection, abolished in the West in the 1960s, remained a standard in East German childcare until the wall came down in 1989. It has since become a topic of conspiracy theories surrounding differences of East and West German bodies. The child of political activists, Gajek lived through his first revolution shortly before entering primary school. He grew up in the temporal anomaly created when the end of history was declared and the country he was born in disappeared. Gajek is a musician and artist, publishing records on Throttle Records, Monkeytown and Infinite Greyscale and composing for films, theatre, performances and installations.

Vitamin D is Gajek´s most personal record yet. Alive, detailed, urgent and fresh the album explores evolving textures of highly energetic digital production, vibrant rhythms and haunting lyrical work. Boldly expanding a futuristic and strikingly original musical language Gajek creates a beautiful and deeply moving work of great sincerity and emotional immediacy, making a provocative case for pushing what is possible in a world occupied with calculating what is probable.

At long last, Boston’s Isabella Koen delivers her long-in-the-making debut album of raving mutant body music, Trance riffs and industrial synth topographies forged with raw and brooding industrial sound design that marks her out among N. America’s most interesting new producers of electronic music. Big tip if yr into Jasss, Helena Hauff, Gesloten Cirkel, AFX...
Spanning proper techno artillery, Trance riffs and noise excursions, ’Melody Depleted’ expands on the ruffcut but classy ideas put forth on her tapes and 12”s for the likes of Peder Mannerfelt Production, Börft and Jacktone over the past half decade. It serves a broad but singular showcase of her ability to generate club punishing rhythms, barely-tamed electronic noise and surprisingly sensitive ambient space probes that revel in electronic music’s capacity to evoke fine spectra of technoid feelings with a say it-without-saying-it instrumental finesse.
In an emotive arc that takes in crude, rushy rave futurism (‘Im Laughing’) thru to dark, bolshy industrial tekkers (‘The Harm That I Dream For You’) and an outstanding nine minute finale of deep distance ambient hypnagogia (‘Hypnic Jerk’), Isabella’s first album most deftly transposes a sense of pre-millenial late ‘90s techno warehouse dread into a world dealing with its own register of worries. And like the work of Jasss, Nkisi or Helena Hauff, Isabella proves highly adept at translating the most vital, if elusive, aspects of her reference points with a totally fearless, up-to-date but timeless swerve.
Big hitters like the Peder Mannerfelt-esque breakbeat techno ballistics of ‘Roll Doll’, the wide-eyed, doomy trample of ‘Organ’ and the Stingray-meets-Colin Stetson styles of ‘Take One And Two’ share space with full on EBM techno boosters in ‘Send’ and ‘Mind Tear’, while the roiling synth noise of ‘Mnesia’ and the Drexciyan organism of ‘Through The Kitchen’ diffract her vision into adjacent areas of experimentation that make for a murkily transfixing album experience rather than a collection of rave tools. It’s a dead gritty course for lovers of electronic dance music that gets direct to the feet and leaves bits between your teeth.

Ancient Indonesian tradition meets doom rock in profoundly Ur ways on Stephen O’Malley and Senyawa’s collaborative commission for choreographer Gisèle Vienne Following a decade of creative bonds forged between theatre director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne
and doom sayer Stephen O’Malley that spans multiple soundtracks (solo and with Peter Rehberg in KTL)
and visual artworks, the pair travelled to Indonesia on a commission to explore the country’s rich culture in 2018. They immersed in a magical world of performative rituals where they encountered Wukir Suryadi, an experimental musician and instrument builder whose acclaimed releases both solo and as half of Senyawa have invigorated the avant and experimental rock scene over the past decade.
The six tracks of ’Bimi Sakti’ document groundbreaking ventures between Senyawa and O’Malley, yielding an incredibly powerful mix of electric guitar and bass guitar amp worship blended with the remarkable range of tonalities from Senyawa’s custom-built bambuwukir, plus traditional pipes and possessed vocals.
Practically without precedent in the modern musical sphere, the 44’ release speaks to a resounding mutuality and common musical philosophy between two musicians who are usually geographically separated by a hemisphere. Slow to start, but culminating in a wholly dilated musical vision, the performance effectively collapses eons of musical practice and thought into a singular yet timeless expression of beauty and anguish that transcends the sum of its parts.
Fleshing out the frequency spectrum between flighty, avian flutes and sprawling subharmonic bass riffs, they come to inhabit a thrilling mid-ground over the course of the performance as O’Malley moves up the registers to thrashing mid-range riffs while Suryadi invokes a range of demonic voices and unearthly tones from his bamboo instrument. The results come to prod the pineal like little else beyond, say, O’Malley’s Nazoranai trio with Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi, or the Phurpa album on his Ideologic Organ label, and we reckon should hailed among the boldest and most astonishing records of 2020.

Craigie Knowes continue their long-running War Child fundraiser series with a new 2x12" release featuring tracks from Eluize, DJ Python, Stellar OM Source, Innnershades, No Moon, The Burrell Connection and more. From ambient and downbeat through to techno and electro, the release spans the sounds that Craigie Knowes have embraced over the last 5 years. The fourth installment of the project also sees a completely new sleeve and center label design by Kyle Morrison. All profits donated to War Child UK, a charity helping children in areas of conflict around the world.

Amsterdam-based duo Wanderwelle presents their fourth full-length album titled A State Of Decrepitude. Inspired by the many aspects of impermanence and facets of decay, the duo composed their most intrinsic and detailed production yet.

After two successful albums on Silent Season and a recent collaboration album with Bandhagens Musikforening on Semantica, Phil van Dulm & Alexander Bartels have applied their talents to create a mysterious soundtrack focussed on the countless faces of deterioration. Recorded in 2018, Wanderwelle's first electroacoustic album is an anthological approach to a theme that is inseparable from our current global crises.

Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer / theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. He will release his new album ‘Swamp/Things’ on Shelter-Press.

Rigorously experimental without sacrificing the intimacies of self, his efforts as a composer and musician extend across live contexts and numerous critically heralded solo releases, as well as collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Lucy Railton, both contributing to the record, alongside Stephen O’Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, and James Rushford, and others.

Deeply invested in the potential of sound as an elemental form - a root phenomenon with a profound capacity for meaning, as much as a multidimensional material for creative process and ideas – Jaeger’s work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve.

Sound is abstract. When the source is elusive, narrative and meaning shift between the concrete and obscure. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps/Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor - sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive - emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms.

‘Swamps/Things’ was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging 8 works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life.

Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - Swamps/Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world - memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures - captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms - moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth.

A remarkably intimate and forward-thinking aural balm, bristling with complex beauty, Shelter press is overjoyed to present Kassel Jaeger’s Swamps/Things. Two immersive, intoxicating sides overflowing with humanity and ideas.

As a child, almost every Sunday, I was wandering in the countryside, and usually, I was finding myself in my favorite spot: a swamp. Air was different. Trees were dead, but not really dead. Soil was swaying of clear water, and an everlasting mist was suspended all over the place. No one was there and nothing could happen even if some animal tracks were here to prove me I was wrong.
Much later, one of my masters made always this joke about my music. He said I was composing swamps, I guess because of the lack of demonstrative musical shapes and articulations. At the same time, he was acknowledging that I was building a “climate”.
It took me then almost 30 years to understand why I was so fond of swamps. It’s because a swamp is an intermediary space of the organic becoming and the blurry space suspending the cycle of the utilities, which is the cycle of history.

Swamps/Things has been conceived as an opera. An opera without characters, without text, but not without story. The story, here, is only an arc. Because what is an opera, if not an arc? And the arc, here, is the simplest. It’s walking through the swamp. Approaching it, leaching into it, becoming it. The Swamp is us. Our own disappearance, populated by all the beasts we have turned into, by the places we have haunted, and by the time we have consumed. We are traces in an always intermediate state. Animals tracks in the sodden earth of the Swamp. — Francois Bonnet (Kassel Jaeger).

Nahash lands on Shanghai’s SVBKVLT label with his debut album, a frenetic re-mapping of dembow and junglist blueprints made in the image of the label’s wild and thrilling programme, featuring a collaboration with Osheyack plus remixes from Elvin Brandhi, Gabber Modus Operandi and DJ Plead.
Following a crazy run of releases from 33EMYBW, Gooooose, Slikback & Hyph11E, GMO and others, ‘Flowers of the Revolution’ almost feels like an updated mission statement from the label; a wild and futuristic tangle of opposites inspired by the legacy of U.S. interference in South American politics, deploying a rhythmic energy that feels angry and vital.
It’s an Amen-heavy landscape disrupted by a world of incongruous sounds like some colossal babushka doll revealing layer after layer of angular and liquid rhythmic structures, from the symphonic strings and clipped gun reloads on opener ‘The Horns’ to the adrenalised dembow mutation “A Secret Christian Influence” and the more brooding sci-fi swagger on ‘Pluie Éternelle’
On the remixes, Elvin Brandhi enlists Kanja from Nyege Nyege Tapes’ soon to be unveiled Duma project for a brilliantly unhinged sci-fi jamboree that reminds us of the wildest and most exhilarating end of the DHR spectrum, Gabber Modus Operandi turn ‘A Secret Christian Influence’ into a stripped, prism-pushing KuduroXGabber fantasy, and DJ Plead provides the biggest highlight here on his closing ‘A Better Future’ refix; a widescreen, sub-heavy anthem with signature Mahraganat drums and fucking amazing sidechain pads that makes for an almost misty-eyed finale to the dance.

Nídia flashes peak time dancefloor chops on a club-ready partner 12” to her superb 2nd album.
Where the album explores slower, melodic taraxho and R&B, Nídia’s 12” is built strictly for the rave with four tracks of proper dancefloor shapes made in her own style of electrifying body music compatible with heat from Nigga Fox to Nazar and the kind of style you might hear in a Shannen SP set.
‘Chef’ boots off royally with militant snares and rave fanfares locked to a churning technoid flow somewhere between Kuduro, Baile Funk and EBM trance, while ‘Hard’ rolls out on a stentorian, rictus march recalling vintage UKF, and ‘Jam Master’ strikes up high intensity trance riffs synched to industrial strength rhythms a la Nkisi, and the tumbling drums of ‘Munun’ sidewinds off along rhythmelodic vectors recalling a tempered Shackleton piece or a prime, deep Peder Mannerfelt workout.

Really strong, multi-layered new album from Olan Monk, released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. label/collective of which he is a co-founder and featuring vocals from Maria Somerville and James K, plus additional mixing by Xao.
Highly recommended if yr into John Maus, The Normal, Actress, Eartheater, Suicide.
In possession of its own unusual pace and styling, Love/Dead is a weird and brilliantly addictive gothic pop experiment that takes The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ as its starting point and builds from there in an asymmetric formation that feeds in elements from Suicide, Nine Inch Nails and John Maus, slows it all down and spits it back out covered in heaving subs, doom metal dynamics and distorted, angular electronics.
For goth credentials, Monk recorded the album between the west coast of Ireland and a coroner’s court and mortuary in south London, and if that seems a bit heavy handed - the music is anything but. Monk writes hooky, layered and memorable songs, something that’s so often missing from electronic music producers who mature (in the worst sense of the word) into working with vocalists as a mark of some dubious respectability.
Monk’s background isn’t in electronic music though, and so his imagination extends further out into the aether - guided by the three singular artists with whom he has already collaborated - Actress, Ashley Paul and Elvin Brandhi, with Actress in particular introducing Monk to electronic music “as its own process of creation, beyond production”. So although it’s the electronic treatments that startle, it’s Monk’s songs that hook and poke, making ‘Love/Dead’ a singular and strong addition to the C.A.N.V.A.S. label’s small but already beautifully formed catalogue of releases.

Pontiac Streator, Ulla, exael and Special Guest DJ convene as virtualdemonlaxative for this unhinged West Mineral.
The only info bundled with this one-off grind-trash sesh from the West Mineral crew is “cybergrind, danger music, FTP”. Through hoarse coughs, toxic belches and searing digital noise we’re introduced to
virtualdemonlaxative - a crude effigy with one foot firmly lodged in Napalm Death’s genre-defining “Scum” and a bloody stump cauterized in the smoldering ashes of John Wiese’s painfully underrated “Soft Punk”.
Arrhythmic blast beats collapse into digi-spliced howls, pre-COVID crowd hum echoes beneath anxious alien babbling, searing feedback wails to a disconcerting climax. If the rest of the West Mineral catalogue is simmered in psychedelic sensuality, virtualdemonlaxative is a rare antivenom; it’s the disquieted sativa
to Pontiac Streator, Ulla, exael and Special Guest DJ’s undulating indica. We’ve been informed informally that ‘Cruisin’ (forty seconds long) was performed and recorded in a moving vehicle, almost causing a car accident. There’s a metaphor here, but we’re tired - listen loud and fxcking riot.

Tape / Cassette
Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the crown of the Muku tree?

Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist, composer and an attentive listener based in Berlin. She plays her found native Australian wildlife archive and other field recordings, either through a stereophonic system or often via hand-made speakers and found objects – exploring the timbre and forms of found and self-recorded animal voices while mimicking biophonic patterns to create minimal quasi-bioacoustic environments.

"Tracks on Creepy Crawly were made between 2017-19. Samples were taken from found animal sounds and field recordings made in Berlin and trips to Japan and Australia.Some of the material was played live along side my collaborators in duo projects Native Instrument (Shelter Press, Entr'acte) and Plants and Animalia."

Five compositions are perfect gateway to the Mangan archive, which is rather embedded aural illusion- speculative echo of spieces than a reproduction of rural soundscape.

Felicity has presented projects in many different settings from galleries, gardens, clubs and festivals throughout Europe. Including National Gallery Denmark, Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW and Sonic Act Academy.

The Oystercatcher is the first collaborative LP from Cucina Povera (Maria Rossi) and ELS (Edward Simpson) Recorded in London over two days, hours’ worth of improvisations have been edited down to form these six tracks. A fragile interplay is at work between Maria’s drifting vocals and the ominous churn of Edward’s modular synth. Each sonic element takes a turn at leading the way.

The opening track ‘Mantle’ is formed from sparse, monolithic electronics, woven gently with a thread of vocals. In the closing track ‘Eon’ Maria’s voice shepherds spontaneous bursts of sounds, almost Rave-like if order were imposed, through 15 minutes of turmoil and resplendent until the end. Maria’s vocals make their own trails amongst the noise, bringing to mind the the exploratory language from Ursula K. Le Guin’s album ‘Music and Poetry from the Kesh’, recalling the same understated mystery.

The overall effect of this collaboration is a completely unique creation albeit within a recognisable lineage of predecessors. The artwork reflects the vision of these two artists, collaged together. Both images are from a trip to Helsinki. Edward’s photograph of Tulips caught after dark are reviled by a flash. Maria’s seemingly abstract drawing is a graphite rubbing taken from a granite slab of a pavement somewhere in Kallio. Together the two images represent two different methods for capturing a city’s haptic landscape.

The album moves with a feeling of transience, which is no surprise given that the idea to collaborate was formed in Helsinki, realised in London and edited together in Rotterdam. The Oystercatcher tells a fragile tale, one that spins out into the unknown. A cold union of voice and machine, still tentative and probing, learning to co-exist. A kind of fundamental shift whereby shared moments have been turned to sound. The Oystercatcher is a bird that can freely travel between the earth, sea and sky. The motif is taken from a Tove Jansson short story. A dead bird washes ashore, two different versions of events are presented to how the bird came to die. The album feels like two different stories being presented on top of one another but ultimately coming to the same tragic conclusion.

R&S present the eponymous, debut, full length album transmission from Lost Souls Of Saturn.
Epic in scope, time and space, this multidimensional mind trip is for fans of Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore', David Morales' Red Zone dubs, Don Cherry's 'Organic Music Society', The Orb's 'Ultraworld' and KLF's 'Space' and much more besides.
This ambient house masterpiece combines flavours gathered from across the galaxy, stewing them up into a delicious primordial soup. Old sci-fi soundtracks, acid, free jazz, avant garde, musique concrete, world music and more all whirl around an underground-dance-music axis.
Primarily LSOS are Seth Troxler and Phil Moffa, plus further opaque participants congregating to combine music, imagery, and storytelling into an inextricably linked whole, all wrapped-up in a philosophy of their own making.

SYNTAX Electronix (Valencia, Spain) continues with its second release based on Electro tunes.

Finders Keepers Records’ continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani’s key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world’s most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers’ decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani’s versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line.

The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne’s first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne’s proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it’s advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani’s globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer Ilhan Mimaroglu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer’s determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla’s production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. “Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano,” explains Suzanne in 2020. “It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA,” she laments. “If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola,” she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small’s aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. “I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent,” Suzanne explained. “He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself.” The basic brief around Suzanne’s musical journey was to be “The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain,” which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions (“I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn’t get street hassle on the way home”), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer.

The release of Blessed Repair is a grand experiment for the Baldi/Gerycz Duo. The duo consists of Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz, both of whom are members of the acclaimed rock band Cloud Nothings. With Baldi on saxophone and Gerycz on drums, they deliver an album that steers away from the process of slowly crafting lyrics and instrumental components. This time, their project is grounded in the gravitational pull of both of their instruments; two people creating and releasing tension in real time. Blessed Repair is an album that romps with the spontaneous energy of free-form jazz.

Baldi and Gerycz are quite familiar with each other as musicians, proving to be an advantage as they navigate the strange yet exciting new waters of Blessed Repair. Primarily, they work as bandmates in Cloud Nothings, but nothing resembles their improvisational work as a duo. In Cloud Nothings, songs are written beforehand and rehearsed, but as the Baldi/Gerycz Duo, they just play. Which is how the project first came to fruition — they are two friends who organically wanted to see how far they can take their music together.

The project uses two iconically jazz instruments, nudging Blessed Repair into the free-jazz realm. The saxophone soars and tumbles and the drums build and scatter, but both instruments are more linked by their playful experimentation and synchronicity than anything else. While they are fans of improvisational jazz music, neither Baldi nor Gerycz had formal jazz training past high school, making this album authentically experimental for them both. That being said, Baldi does recount that his first official gig as a musician was playing jazz music in the background of a wealthy Clevelander’s dinner party in 2008.

The Baldi/Gerycz Duo have taken the opportunity to harness the liberating energy of improvisation in Blessed Repair. And ultimately, they’re two friends exploring and pushing the boundaries of their music.

Dick Verdult, a.k.a Dick el Demasiado is the Philip K. Dick of multi-disciplinary art, the Moby Dick of “cumbia lunática”, and the Charles Dickens of literature and experimental cinema. He first fell in love with cumbia when he heard his nursemaid singing the classic “La pollera colorá”. From this moment on, he adopted the genre and reinvented it, in a perpetual degeneration called Cumbia Lunática, twisting up the elements of traditional cumbia, the “cumbia of the mucamas”, to create an anarchotropical vertebral rhythm, one which supports every moving part.

Celulitis Illuminati is the powerful debut of the anarchotropical gentleman knight of the abstract, Dick el Demasiado, eight dangerous tracks recorded for the first time on vinyl, songs that, upon listening, will liposuck all that grotesque accumulation of adipose tissue out of buttocks and brain. They interweave an amalgam of South American folklore and the cables of electronic music, the plugged-in Ranqueles indians, as in “Asi Que Los Que Sí” (“So That Those Who Yes”) on Side A, surrealist and lugubrious beats, poetry made song and “the dead man’s drool is good for painting watercolors”, as he sings in “Búho Sin Un Ratón” (“Owl With No Mouse”).Euphony that will abduct you away to a viscous street party with “Son Cosas De Hoy” (“They’re Things For Today”) and to an eclectic and excessive dimension with “pero bien bweno” (“but very proper”).

Side B is pure dynamite: “Mecha flan” (“Pudding Fuse”), “Sábado cultural” (“Cultural Saturday”) and “En la jeta” (“In the face”) represent the perfect blend of Lucho Argain (La Sonora Dinamita) and Muslimgauze (Bryn Jones). On top of this, the album includes an as-yet unheard gem, “Llama Mi Abogado” (“Call My Lawyer”), produced by Dick himself and Manuel Schaller, the telepathic mage of the Theremin. When the Dutchman stepped off the boat and onto the block, as well as offering us the TV set, the sculpture of a deranged English woman who devours islands like they were sandwiches, the synthesizer, the sound effect, the African drum, the maraca, the indigenous whistle, he obtained for us the song and the stanza, he provided us with the language and the poetry, the truthful, the epic of the ugly. Cellulite for mortals, cumbia lunática for the enlightened ones! Alfredo Padilla (Trans. Komurki)

Berlin, spring 2020

Written and produced by KTL, Stephen O'Malley & Peter Rehberg

Recorded & mixed at MOM Paraverse Studios, Berlin, March & May 2020

Engineer : Andi Toma (mix), 2nd Engineer : Constantin Carstens (recording)

Mastered at Zino Mikorey Mastering, Berlin, May 2020

Cover art : Nina Hartman, Untitled Capsule, 2020 (Resin, paper, toner, pigment)

Photographed by Joe Levenworth

KTL photograph : KM

A new timley studio album from the duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O'Malley. Recorded and mixed during an unexpected extended stay in Berlin when the borders of the world suddenly closed. The claustrophobic urgency of this scenario is seared into the colossal vibrations set into this vinyl release.

Unlike many of their releases this is a studio record made unto itself as opposed to the many soundtracks they have made for theatre works and the like. It also stands as one of their most fully realised releases to date.

Proceedings are launched with The Director. Sitting somewhere between contemporary classical and doom this is a sliding and menacing mass of sound, more Masque of the Red Death than The Decameron. Silver lining is an alarming swooping buzzing track, looming and lowering only to rise and descend again. A delicate play with the Shepard-Risset glissando manifesting a delirious swarm of sound. Lee's garlic orbits into a short fragmented zone with bursts of harsh feedback and crashing fx, all manner of audio enters and is discarded with an underlying sense of despair and frustration. Proceedings continue on Side B with Tea With Kali where a calmer plateau is embedded with oscillating guitar and fluttering electronics. Beating sine waves envelop the listener in a meditative thought piece of sound. Frostless concludes this epic dispatch as a subtle and gentle foray into twitching electronics as a light buzzsaw drone swirls as around your mind.

The interplay of sources (guitar, electronic equipment (hardware, software, speakers) is so entwined it's often difficult to discern who is doing what amongst the broad sound field. KTL VII is instrumental music as visual narrative resulting in an exquisitely crafted release full of sophisticated and sublime illusory effects.

Repress!

Faitiche presents the release of a new album by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek (faitiche13). Since their debut (Bird, Lake, Objects, faitiche03, 2010) they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo's second album.

"The river, forcing its way through veins between the outposts of the forest, was a great heart. Placidly as it flowed, gently as its descent beat against its vague banks, it brought and gathered sustenance for the busily mediating humus that swelled sunwards in the strangest cell configurations, trees, plants, animals. The silence all round was uncanny and stuck on the ear. Spasmodic squelches, a gurgling in the muddy hollows of the bank beneath overhanging shagginess, the slurping of ominous cavities, that shot out now and again between the long-spun threads of time, like something detonating, testified to the steady monotony of the process. From the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the mighty Pan could still be heard to rumble." - from the novel Tropics by Robert Müller (translated by N. Grindell)

*****

Dear Masayoshi Fujita,
many thanks for the audio files. Your additional vibraphone recordings go wonderfully with the material we have already. Preparing the vibraphone with more percussion instruments was the right decision. Combined with my tightly woven synthesizer and sample loops, the result is a fragmented sense of space. I have taken the liberty of manipulating certain recordings. One might now say that our joint recordings are both a basis for further processing and new pieces in their own right.

While listening through our improvisations, I noticed a tendency towards atmospheric sounds. I am almost tempted to call them tropical. This has strengthened my resolve to work with dense background textures - among others, I'm using material produced in connection with my radio pieces Kennen Sie Otahiti (Do you know Otahiti SWR2, 2012) and Dialoge zur Anthropologie (Dialogs on Anthropology, SWR2, 2013): artificial field recordings, jungle and rain forest settings that do not hide their staged, fictional character. They are synthetic and speculative. As you know, I have long been obsessed with the tropics. This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness, hostile to life but also excessively productive. I am fascinated by the idea of installing clear minimalist forms amid such luxuriant tropical growth. Perhaps my image of the city of Brasilia is a good example: the utopia of elegant and ascetic modernism, surrounded by rampant vegetation.

Corresponding to this, I would like to expand our liner notes to include a quotation from Robert Müller's novel Tropics - an expressionist travelogue published in Germany in 1915. It goes without saying that this work cannot be wholeheartedly embraced: its imperialistic fantasies of omnipotence and its 'master race' posturing, characteristic of that time and place, are, of course, intolerable. Please excuse my casually dismissing this, but it is not what I am interested in here. Tropics is fascinating as a nervous jungle phantasm that openly indulges in exoticism at the same time as deconstructing it. In this way, the main character's adventure becomes a journey into the subjective. It resembles a feverish inner delirium, exposing exoticism as a simulated, utopian perspective. What it boils down to is insubstantial, nothing but foam and froth.

7"
(This is...) one of Sascha Müller's weirdest, most experimental musical ideas brought to life as a limited, hand-numbered edition of 100 gold vinyl 7"es. Following the concept of recording crackling run-out grooves from various classic Pop albums and glueing them together into one crackly mess of a megamix this one is a collectors novelty piece for those searching for the most extreme, unusual vinyl releases they can get hold of. Expect looped crackles, pops, surface noise and all the good stuff related to listening to vinyl on a regular but do not expect any kind of structure or user friendly listening experience at all. This is for the die-hard collectors and vinyl freaks only.

"On this seven track album we hear MinaeMinae (alias Bastian Epple) playfully scurry through his dense soundscapes on a tightrope. The sounds lying somewhere on the crossroads of psychedelic trance, exotica, ambient and melodic dance music – veering further off orbit with nontypical rhythms and dystopian percussive patterns.

MinaeMinae understands musical material similar to documentary footage which he would cut up, repitch, and rearrange freely. Most of his tracks are a mix of analog, synthetic sounds and recordings of ethnic percussion and guitar. Recently Bastian began experimenting with modular synthesis and self made tape echoes - seeking a more reduced and minimal composition style compared to his earlier quite whimsical tunes.

Growing up in a small village in southern Germany, Bastian was never interested in kitschy folk sounds that everyone would mindlessly clap and sing along to, rather he took solace in the time he would spend delving into patterns and repetitions that pleased him. His guitar strumming and what sounded to his mother like a young Philip Glass on a cheap Casio keyboard encouraged little Epple to continue on this self-taught path of developing his musical language. He then started to experiment with a tape recorder and layering sounds with non-musical samples, which his former village friends found too weird – then to eventually working with a small freeware DAW. Bastian went on to study Media Art at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe – initially enrolled in music but the frustration and doubt of not being able to produce the music he wanted led him into film and documentary media. During his studies, Bastian was living with Florian Meyers (Don’t DJ) for several years where they would philosophize life and music into the wee hours – he encouraged Bastian to start sharing what he’s been quietly working on all these years and slowly emerge from this anonymity which eventually led to his first release on Human Pitch last fall.

Disproportionate forms, color changes, backdrops weaved into the foreground, all lay the dense earth for Gestrüpp through Benjamin Kilchhofer’s artwork."

clear vinyl

"Kapital Band 1 – Internationale Solidarität” is the third album of Martin Brandlmayr & Nicholas Bussmann. Since their first album “Kapital Band 1 – 2CD" in 2004 the duo explores the possibilities of improvising music with machines. Investigating parallel existences and mimetic affirmations of machine structures and human patterns. For their third album they revised their experimental settings once again. “Internationale Solidarität” is a search between impulse and logic, algorithms and attitudes, false random and real mistakes.

Martin Brandlmayr – drums
Nicholas Bussmann – robot controlled grand piano "the automat”
“the automat” is made by Winfried Ritsch

Martin Brandlmayr is a composer & drummer playing with Radian (Thrill Jockey), Polwechsel and Trapist. He has been working with ErikM, Christian Fennesz, Howe Gelb, Klaus Lang, Dieter Kovacic, Billy Roisz, Sachiko M, David Sylvian, John Tilbury, Ken Vandermark, Otomo Yoshihide, Mats Gustafson and many others. He has released almost 30 albums and toured on all continents. For his radioplay "Vive Les fantômes” he received the Karl-Sczuka-Prize for radio art 2018.

Nicholas Bussmann is musician and artist. As a musician he is playing Telebossa and his multi-language choir "Cottbusser Chor”. He has been working with numerous musician and artist: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Butch Morris, Chico Mello, Van Dyke Parks, Lucile Desamory & Lindy Annis. As an artist he showed his work at Museu Serralves Porto, Hangar Bicocca Milano, Taxispalais Innsbruck & Shanghai Biennial.

A stunning 17-minute-drumming-trip from feathery spheres through bold grooves to a dense thundery finish by Simon Popp and Sebastian Wolfgruber, the two drummers known for channeling World Music, Afrobeat and Jazz drumming in solo projects and with Munich-based Jazz quintet Fazer.
The B-side holds a rework by fellow Munich producers Zenker Brothers. The Ilian Tape heads and notorious audiophiles put their drum machines aside and weaved the recordings with layers of mystic synths into a tingling organic IDM tune.

(Record Store Day 2020) Hip re-works of the Amsterdam based afro-funk styled unit

3x12"


We're celebrating our 30th release and we have done it in a big way, gathering a handful of like-minded friends, close and far!. This triple vinyl album contains a selection of 12 catalog tracks, receiving free and stunning treatment from masterminds like Venetian Snares, Samuel Kerridge, OM Unit, DgoHn, Plaid, Etapp Kyle, Dwaallicht (WISP), Humanoid (FSOL), EOD, Konx-Om-Pax, Radioactive Man and Anthony Baldino. Not many words are needed except this powerful release expands the AF sound palette from different approaches, making it, undoubtedly, in one of our essential records of the year. Packed in gatefold deluxe sleeve designed by Geometric Love studio.

Like the Grass documents and reimagines a warm summer's evening in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2018. Four musicians convened: Johannesburg composer and bow expert Cara Stacey, South African violinist and composer Galina Juritz, German harp player Antonia Ravens and Swiss guitarist and sonic explorer Beat Keller.

Together they improvised using a graphic score titled "Luhlata njengetjani" ("Green like the grass" in the southern African Siswati language), inspired by the rivers of eSwatini, blackbirds in the parks of Basel and the evocative, red-flowered umcinci or erythrina tree. The South African umrhubhe mouthbow's dense harmonics folded around skittering, fractal violin loops; temperate swells of guitar were punctuated by agitated harp pings and the hearty thuds of Ugandan and Mozambican lamellophones.

This joyous, unfettered outpouring criss-crossed between southern Africa and Europe, forwards and backwards, for the following two years. The fruits were unpicked and rewoven into new mosaics by Cara, Galina, and two of our favourite recording artists, Object Agency and Hello Skinny.

Recorded as part of Cara Stacey's studio residency in Basel, Switzerland, supported by ProHelvetia Johannesburg.

Repress

Founder of Modern Obscure Music, Pedro Vian, drops his debut longer player 'Beautiful Things You Left Us For Memories'. Having previously released on well respected labels such as Hivern Discs and Mathematics Recordings, Vian brings things in-house, with 12 tracks that push beyond simple categorisation. Travelling through abstract, sonic labyrinths, taking in ambient, techno and even pop, this release is a kaleidoscopic work that demands the listeners undivided attention.

Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross (recorded by two core members of the Ever Present Orchestra, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom it was composed, on Black Truffle 033). Through the use of e-bows, the guitars take on a role akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier’s works since the early 1980s, but with added harmonic richness. Like much of Lucier’s instrumental music, the pieces recorded here focus on acoustic phenomena, especially beating patterns, produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches. The work presented here is some of the richest and most inviting that Lucier has composed. Though all of the pieces clearly belong to the same continuing exploration of the behaviour of sound in physical space and make use of related compositional devices, each takes on a strikingly different character. Titled Arc, for the full ensemble of four guitars, four saxophones, four violins, piano and bowed glockenspiel inhabits a world of sliding, uneasy tones, punctuated by a single piano note. Where Double Helix, for four guitars, rests on a pillow of warm, low hum, EPO-5, for two guitars, saxophone, violin, and glockenspiel possess a limpid, crystalline quality. Accompanying the four new compositions are two adaptations of existing pieces for radically different instrumentation, demonstrating Lucier’s excitement about the new possibilities suggested by this dedicated ensemble. Works for the Ever Present Orchestra is an essential document of the current state of Lucier’s continuing exploration, as well as offering a seductive entry-point for anyone who might yet be unacquainted with his singular body of work.

Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier. Includes a download code featuring hi-res vesions of the LP material. The download code also includes the bonus Adaptions for the Ever Present Orchestra featuring two pieces (“Two Circles” and “Braid”) that are not included on the LP version. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

Limited Edition of 500 handnumbered Box Set including 4LPs (180g), 1 CD, Download Coupon and a high quality 120 page booklet. NOTE: BOX IS SHRINK-WRAPPED BUT WILL BE OPENED FOR SHIPPING TO AVOID SEAM-SPLIT.

Black Truffle Together With Bernhard Rietbrock And Zhdk Are Honoured To Reissue This Stunning Boxset Celebrating Alvin Lucier's 85th Birthday Celebrations Which Took Place In Zurich, 2013.

Alvin Lucier Is One Of Most Important Figures In More Than A Half Century Of Avant-garde And Experimental Sound Practice. He Has No Equivalent. He Is Among America's Most Important Composers - A Towering Pillar Of Intellect, Creativity, And Beauty Realized Through Sound. His Singular And Unparalleled Body Of Work, Focused Around Acoustic Phenomena And Auditory Perception, Which Included, Among Many Others, The Groundbreaking Works Bird And Person Dyning, Music On A Long Thin Wire, And I Am Sitting In A Room, Each Quietly Shifting The Understanding Of What Music Could Be - Deceptively Discrete Gestures, Laying Their Mark On History And The Expectations Of Nearly Everything To Come, While Radically Expanding The Field. It Is Such A Life, Defined By Such Striking Accomplishment, Which This Release Celebrates Across The Four Lps, Cd, And Book Which Make Up The Lavish Illuminated By The Moon Release.

Recorded In October Of 2016 At The Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Festival At The Zurich University Of The Arts, The Box Gathers A Remarkable Range Of Performances Of Works From Lucier's Life In Music, From The Iconic To The Lesser Known. It Begins With Wonderful Stagings Of I Am In A Sitting Room And Music For Solo Performer Performed By The Composer, Before Presenting The Work Charles Curtis Performed By The Cellist For Whom It Was Composed, And Double Rainbow, A Recent Work, Performed By The Incredible Joan La Barbara. Over The Course Of The Set's Many Discs, We Encounter Works Ranging From Nothing Is Real (strawberry Fields Forever), Braid, Two Circles, Hanover, Step, Slide And Sustain, And One Arm Bandits, Performed By Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'malley, And Gary Schmalzl, With Further Contributions By Charles Curtis And Many Others Involved In The Celebrations Of Lucier's Life And Work. The Collection, By Offering An Expanse Of Material Otherwise Unavailable In The Composer's Discography, Opens A Rare Window Into The Breadth And Range Of Territory Which He Has Approached, As Well As Into The Unique Humor Which Has Quietly Bubbled Through His Entire Career. It Is A Singular Recording Event, The Likes Of Which Are Unlikely To Be Repeated.

A Worthy Tribute To One Of The Last Century's Most Important Composers, Offering Insight, Recognition, And Critical Investigation, Long Overdue And Lovingly Produced. Including An Extensive, Lavish 120 Page Book, With Numerous Unseen Images. Pressed On 180 Gram Vinyl, This Limited Edition Of 500 Individually Numbered Copies Is Unquestionably One Of The Most Beautiful And Important Releases Of 2018.

Key Selling Points: - Limited Edition Of 500 Handnumbered Units From Legendary Electronic Music Pioneer Alvin Lucier

- Lavish Box Set Including 4lps, 1 Cd, And A High Quality 120 Page Booklet.

- 180g Vinyl

- Incl. Download Coupon To Redeem All Tracks

- Over 190 Minutes Playtime

- Remarkable Collection Of Performances Of Works From Lucier's Life In Music, From The Iconic To The Lesser Known.

- Mastered & Cut By Helmut Erler At Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

ROW goes back to a collecting of field recordings that Hirsch took for Oerol, an annual theatre festival taking place on the West Frisian island of Terschelling / NL.
The recording was taken aboard the ARAD, a lifeboat of the Dutch rowing team Roeiteam Ter- schelling Recreatie during a training exercise on 25 April 2011. The course stretched from the harbour of West-Terschelling out into the Wadden Sea and back again. The focus is on the coxswain's commands which resemble a funk singer's ones and which make the team become one body working their way through the waters.

After numerous concerts and performances throughout the last years, Summe 1 is Andreas O. Hirsch's first release on makiphon. The album concentrates on peculiar soundscapes and drony pieces, carefully inter- woven by means of pitched harmonicas, electric guitars, mini fans, de- lays and the electric palm leaf, an electroacoustic invention of the artist. The eight titles evoke a space somewhere between interstellar geography (Maxwell Mountains - a plateau on planet Venus), abstract physics (Teilchenbeschleuniger), botanical scenery and animality: Kemeri 5 am features nocturnal crane calls that Hirsch recorded on a bike trip in a swamp near Riga while he was busy with decoding bird messages via morse code. Opossum Pravda is dedicated to the tenacious marsupial that likes to wander around at night and which is able to hang from trees by its tail. Kautschukwaage seems to suggest an exotic setting and provides a link to the rubber bands which one hears resonating in the miniature.
Sleeve designed by the artist. 300 copies. Mastered by Joseph Suchy.

Tape / Cassette
OG Evil Rock and Post-Punk Experiments by Phul Recorded between 2018 - 2020 Satanic payment methods accepted