Beats Vinyl New Releases - News

Limited edition of 300 copies of Natureboy Flako's all new 4-track EP "Besito".

Dario Rojo Guerra aka Natureboy Flako is set to release a unique musical room shaker. Picking up the energy of productions such as “Kuku” from his debut album, these four new banging tracks invite to dance and have fun while bouncing them out loud. The title track “Besito” is carrying a sincere message of love with an unmistaken production quality, also found on his previous release entitled “Theme For A Dream” which explores the boundaries of music, science and spirituality. His rather unpredictable but inspiring output will be continued with a full length album of library-like songs & soundscapes which is set to be released before summer also. But for now level up the energy and enjoy singing along to “Besito”.

“WOW I’m happy you are still making such incredible heat! I actually lost my fucking mind as well as the rest of the club.” - Gaslamp Killer

Acid Waxa are thrilled to present the debut release of AYU Acid aka Sheffield laddies Christopher Rave and Tich Off Me Nut in this Crystal Maze EP of highly infectious, feel good acid bangers!

Holy shit! If it isn’t three unheard 1960s and 1970s reels from the unreal and unreleased Basil Kirchin Tape Archive. Sublime pastoral jazz, autistic children screaming, spooky vocals, experimental tape manipulation and more from the master of such thing.

HISTORY:
The three parts of this new Basil Kirchin album come from three very different tapes from his archive. All parts were unreleased until now.

“Pat’s Pigs” actually sounds to me like a Basil bird recording, slowed and treated, mixed with simple improvisation. But it could well be pigs. Pat’s pigs. This whole tape recording may have been an early experiment towards what was to become Worlds Within Worlds Parts I and II. A lot of Basil’s work was headed in that direction.

“Electronic” – first of all this is not that electronic. There are elements of the classic Kirchin drone sound here, mixed with multiple and treated recordings of the autistic children of Schurmatt, along with Esther, his wife, singing. I remember speaking to Basil many years ago about his Schurmatt recordings. Esther worked as a nurse with the children, Basil got to know many of them, and became fascinated by the extreme musical noises they would make with their voices. This recording is not necessarily for the faint hearted, but makes for extraordinary listening, based on the fact this would have been made and mixed, simply as a classic and progressive Kirchin experiment, back in the late 1960s/ early 1970s. This also has untreated elements that would eventually contribute towards Quantum, his preferred version of the W W W concept.

“The Suspended Fourth” comes across like a soundtrack, so it could well be part of what Basil called his “imaginary film music period”. It has a very distinctive and pastoral Kirchin style leitmotif that repeats along its glorious and slightly disturbed 21 minutes. It’s very well produced, possibly built up and improvised over a few days, could well have been an experiment, a pitch or just something that had to come out in the groovy studio. The tape itself states that this is The Suspended Forth with a subtitle: “The Musical Study Of A Mind, Part 1 Schizophrenia”. It therefore could even be something to do with a soundtrack he was asked to make for a mental heath conference for psychiatrists at Earls Court in the late 1960s (see States Of Mind, JBH005LP – the British jazz musical line seems like it could well be the very same). But who knows for sure? I shall continue looking in the archive for other possible parts.

Before I go, the original title for this album and the artwork come from an empty tape box in the archive, which I think sums up all sorts of things about Basil, his awesome music and the tape archive all at the same time.

More reel discoveries will follow. Thanks for listening as always.

Uniformity of Nature, the second release on Prague based Detach Recordings, marks an exciting collaboration between Romanian producer DYL (re:st, Alpha Cutauri, Skutta) and Germany's Senking (Raster Noton, Karaoke Kalk).

DYL pushes the bounderies of his sound beyond his 170 roots, with the powerful electronics of 'Phrases' and the electrifying team-up with Senking on 'Destroyed City Lights'. Two tracks see DYL in the more familiar peripheries of D&B. The percussive 'Words', with its curious background atmospherics, and the driving, hypnotic collaboration with DB1 on the title track 'Uniformity of Nature'. 'Launch' sees Senking slow the tempo down and delve into a more murky space, yet still highly-charged with razor-sharp sound design.

DYL closes the EP with the abstract 'Semantics', a further excursion into experimental electronics. The record comes housed in a screen-printed transparent sleeve, with a limited edition insert by Romanian artist Teodora Gavrila.

After successful releases on Black Orpheus and Oscillate Tracks, UK rising talent and Super
Hexagon boss, J.Wiltshire returns to MUSAR for his debut album ‘Resa’, a pure listening experience of ambient soundscapes and forward-thinking sci-fi cuts, the second release
in MUSAR's new limited Cassette Tape series, that focusing on producers edgy sides.
'Resa' finds Wiltshire sharing 11 sci-fi and futuristic ambient gems, blends melancholic
movements with rich layers of harmonics, resulting in a sequence of slowly unfurling tracks
that sounds brilliant first time around, but also reveal more intricate details once you've listened a few times.
Listening through from start to finish, where it comes on like a genuine soundtrack to a
melancholic, space film, it's an evocative musical journey that stirs the senses and toys with
your emotions.
Opener 'Barefoot Pilgrim' is a welcoming hazy warm-up atmospheric piece, together with
'Lumb' and 'In The Position' reflects on how Wiltshire maps human calm and tranquillity onto
the softer parts of the natural world, a place where everything sounds calm and peaceful, in
his own words: "I was using music composition for a creative release but mainly as a tool for
calming anxiety."
There are also intense ambient moments and post-IDM dreamscapes inside, such as - 'Dismantlers' and 'Denied', It is in turns icy, futuristic, introspective and blindingly picturesque.
'Other Fruits Resplit' is a particularly standout highlighted track of a sharp and catchy vocal
chop melody, while 'Same Thing Twice' and 'No Longer Concerning' are gorgeously melancholic.

Emotional Response presents the final recordings of the Saint Petersburg Disco Spin Club, a loose band alias of Kirill Sergeew aka Kito Jempere. Principally active for just a few years, these recordings were never finalised - lost as such, until now.

Growing out of Kito's productions, the 8-piece band, including friends Lipelis (Public Possession / Animals Dancing) and Sergey Lipsky (Simple Symmetry), was developed to create live transformations of his music.

The EP captures SPDSC at their peak; working with a desire to experiment via live improvisation. Can't You See Me, their version of an earlier studio release, morphs the original's melodic 4/4 in to an expansive, surround sound slo-mo Balearic funk experience for the heavens.

This is backed with a remix by Auf Togo Meets Becker & Mukai. After EPs on Leng, Aug Togo, aka Clement Cachot-Coulom and Sasha Crnobrnja (In Flagranti), previously teamed up with Jean-Gabriel Becker and Susumu Mukai (Zongamin), for an acclaimed EP on SaS Recordings. Their remix sensually creeps up, skilled musicianship creating a warm dub, as soothing bass and laid back vocals float to sunset horizons.

As finale, Simple Customers is an 11-minute whirl of lazy, psychedelic beauty. The interplay between bass, drum and guitar is water tight, letting vocals shine to some latter day anthem. A fitting epitaph, a band at ease, confident and as one, these proved to be their last output before Kirill regrouped as today's Kito Jempere Band.

Brooklyn-based outfit Wetware (Roxy Farman and Matt Morandi) return with the intense follow-up album to 2018’s Automatic Drawing, an electronic dirge, simply titled: Flail

Formed in 2015 and known for their odd and unpredictable live performances, Wetware’s new album captures this disorienting confusion in a series of definitive documents that encompass a concentrated, noisier sound that pushes and pulls against electronic textures and frenetic vocals, creating a palate of wild, unhinged sonic collages.

Presented across eleven new tracks in a tightly wrapped and smartly delivered album, Flail is exemplary of Wetware’s dynamics and tension. The 42 seconds of “Car Dancer,” act as a trailer for tension, setting up the episodic blast of “Kismet,” challenging the listener to find a wall to grab. Lead single "Exaggerated Bliss" pulsates before spinning unexpectedly into a chilling spoken narrative. Bitterly terse storytelling follows the staccato map of emotion, and as sparse as “Divided In Halves” is, “Rivalries Regulars” immediately answers with a dense oration that features Farman cursing “I know the reason for it” in stoic repetition, agnostic of rhythm yet in sync with mania.

Re-Release

Black Truffle is honoured to present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. A friend and contemporary of pioneers like Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and Christian Wolff, Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s. Lucier is perhaps best known for I Am Sitting in a Room (1970), in which he repeatedly re-recorded his own speaking voice being played back into a room until the room's resonant frequencies entirely obscure the spoken text. Beginning in the early 1970s, he has written a remarkable catalogue of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, such as audible beating, often using pure electronic tones produced by oscillators in combination with single instruments.

Demonstrating the restless creative drive of an artist now in his 80s, the two recent works presented here both feature the electric guitar, an instrument Lucier has just recently begun to explore. In Criss-Cross, Lucier's first composition for electric guitars, two guitarists using e-bows sweep slowly up and down a single semitone, beginning at opposite ends of the pitch range. The piece is a model of simplicity, exemplifying Lucier's desire not to 'compose' in the conventional sense, but rather to eliminate everything that 'distracts from the acoustical unfolding of the idea'. In this immaculately controlled performance of Criss-Cross by Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, (for whom the piece was written in 2013), a seemingly simple idea creates a rich array of sonic effects - not simply beating patterns, which gradually slow down as the two tones reach unison and accelerate as they move further apart, but also the remarkable phenomenon of sound waves spinning in elliptical patterns through space between the two guitar amps.

In the comparatively lush Hanover, Lucier draws inspiration from the beautiful photograph that provides the LP with its cover, an image of the Dartmouth Jazz Band taken in 1918 featuring Lucier's father on violin. Using the instrumentation present in the photograph, Lucier creates an unearthly sound world of sliding tones from violin, alto and tenor saxophones, piano, vibraphone (bowed) and three electric guitars (which take the place of the banjos present in the photograph). Waves of slow glissandi create thick, complex beating patterns, gently punctuated by repeated single notes from the piano. The result is a piece that, like much of Lucier's instrumental music, is simultaneously both unperturbably calm and constantly in motion.
Stunning LP design by Stephen O'Malley including an inner sleeve with a portrait of Alvin Lucier by Kris Serafin.
Criss-Cross' recorded at Studios Ina GRM, Paris by Francois Bonnet and mixed by Alvin Lucier. Hanover' recorded in Zurich and mixed by Alvin Lucier.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M Belin.
Criss-Cross' recorded at Studios Ina GRM, Paris by Francois Bonnet and mixed by Alvin Lucier. Hanover' recorded in Zurich and mixed by Alvin Lucier.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M Berlin.

Frost is a Brighton-based collaboration between French-Swedish sound artist Johanna Bramli (vocalist for Stereolab offshoot Imitation Electric Piano) and Fujiya & Miyagi's synth player and producer Steve Lewis.

For fans of the likes of Broadcast, Silver Apples and Kraftwerk together the duo create angular and electronic music by blending Motorik and hypnotic radiophonics into neatly wrapped often bilingual pop structures. On 28 September Frost release their debut album Matters via Lost Room Records. The duo has previously released two singles, the murkily glitchy 'Crackling on the Wire' (December 2016) which Edith Bowman made 'Record of the Week'with support also from Annie Mac (BBC Radio 1), Nemone and Gideon Coe (BBC 6 Music) and John Kennedy (Radio X). Followed by second single 'Keratin' (March 2017) - described as 'A detour through the best of 80's pop' (The Lineof Best Fit) - and Frost's debut E.P. of the same name (May 2017).

Dragon Skin is a new conceptual compilation around the ideas of protection and safety released by Cønjuntø Vacíø that showcases new artists and some classic acts of the label.

Dragon Skin was a type of ballistic vest formerly made by the now defunct company Pinnacle Armor, currently produced in Missoula, Montana by North American Development Group LLC available for public, law-enforcement and military customers. Its characteristic two-inch-wide circular discs overlap like scale armor, creating a flexible vest that allows a good range of motion and is intended to absorb a high number of hits compared with other military body armor. The discs are composed of silicon carbide ceramic matrices and laminates, much like the larger ceramic plates in other types of bullet resistant vests.

On August 3, 2007, the Department of Justice announced that the NIJ had reviewed evidence provided by the body armor manufacturer and had determined that the evidence was insufficient to demonstrate that the body armor model would maintain its ballistic performance over its six-year declared warranty period. Because of this, Dragon Skin was found to not be in compliance with the NIJ’s testing program and has been removed from the NIJ’s list of bullet-resistant body armor models.

De:tuned continue to celebrate their 10th anniversary with this second EP of the series and dive deep down into the ambient techno world. The A side makes you drift away on a rare Sun Electric get together, followed by a Higher Intelligence Agency piece of beauty. DeepChord's dubbed lushness completes this highly intense journey.
Kevin Foakes (Openmind, DJ Food, Ninja Tune) created all the graphic work. Pressed on 180 gr vinyl and a separate digital version will be available from the usual digital shops. Stay tuned!

LIMITED EDITION COLOURED VINYL!

Versalife's second release for 20/20 Vision sees Dutch producer Boris Bunnik aka Conforce return with another slab of signature electro. 'Clandestine Development' serves up dark tones and melodies layered within insistent electro beats and growling bass, that sounds huge on big room systems. 'Aegis' delivers a double dose of mechanical funk, played over atmospheric strings and auditory acid delights. On the B side 'Lamba' continues to impress with a moody laidback bass line holding the groove down over a solid rhythm & dystopian keys. Wrapping things up the title track 'Asimov's Code' plays out like war drums from space pounding away after a blissful intro of building synths.

A loose, organic swarm of steel-bound percussion, meditative bass frequencies and improvisational tonal shifts mark the second instalment of Gaia Tones, with the label’s vision remaining conscious: one track per side filling the entirety of the 12” plate, giving these tunes a life of their own. GT002 sparks to life with side A’s “Chains”, a warped, mystical groove that speaks for the imprint’s deep-rooted sufferation. With a slow-burning swagger of four-to-the-floor, side B’s “Shackles” digs deeper into the earth’s elements, allowing the room to fill up with that familiar gust of machine haze. Experimentation with a message."

Comes in hand made sleeve artwork.

The enigmatic Ando Laj’s latest full-length excursion—9-tracks of heady sonic explorations that defy neat categorization, a plethora of textures & forms arranged with the producer’s signature attention to compositional minutiae. Dog Insight is a series of personal recordings in an inimitable sound world that once again sees the producer taking their esoteric style into new territories. Resolute, mechanized thump is brought to gradual equilibrium by weightless cascade on “Soj Alm”, while skeletal opening number “Aal Tn” rattles into chrysalis, unravelling itself out of murky depths over its duration. A shrouded collection of slow-to-evolve melodic & rhythmic feedback loops, plucked from a haze of nostalgic familiarity—sound sources of indeterminable origin, sequenced & processed to mystical effect. Another intriguing & devotional experience from the Toronto artist.

Recorded at INA GRM and Steamroom

Piano: Eiko Ishibashi // Violin, viola: Atsuko Hatano // Trumpet: Eivind Lonning

Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020

Photo by Eiko Ishibashi // Sleeve design by Stephen O'Malley

Special thanks to Francois Bonnet and Jean Schwarz for bookending 30 years

Due to the wide dynamic levels, please adjust your volume accordingly

Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like an universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans . This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition.

Released in association with Editions Mego.
Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier

Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

new quartet by Samuel Rohrer, Max Loderbauer, Stian Westerhus & Tobias Freund In the present era of media saturation, the artist's dilemma has shifted away from the question whether to fuse disparate stylistic elements, towards the decision of which energies to draw upon: a situation most rewarding for those who listen to musicians navigating this limitless terrain. One such journey, the captivating full-length release from Samuel Rohrer's new Kave quartet coming out this May, is bringing together players who are equally well-versed in the quick-thinking mechanics of free group improvisation and the compositional strategies of contemplative / ‘ambient’ electronic music. With Rohrer acting as creative director and most of the quartet sharing synthesizer duties, there’s a strong sense of unified purpose to this set, and a narrative flow that never causes the listener to focus on one constituent part at the expense of the whole. At the same time, the players know all well that cohesion counts for little without those constituent parts being compelling in their own right. Rohrer and Loderbauer, for example, have previously crafted a unique techno-organic approach with the Ambiq trio, and the lessons learned from that partnership are put to inspired use within this new configuration. Stian Westerhus’ contributions on guitar and vocals, along with Tobias Freund’s electronic reinforcements - Freund also has worked since many years with Max Loderbauer as NSI - all conspire to make something that Rohrer aptly compares as “forest”-like. It’s a descriptor that will have vastly different meanings for each listener. For Rohrer, it refers to music that is confident in the “deep-rootedness” of its foundations and defined by a density and mystery easily confused with darkness, while nevertheless proving its bright vitRight away, on the introductory odyssey 'Cambium' the quartet sets out to make good on this metaphor, creating a hypnotic foundation for what is about to unfold during the next 42 minutes, with brooding, slow, 'searchlight in a fog,' synth washes and percussive stridulation. The twin 'Hibernation' tracks show all the unique elements beginning to coalesce: the emotional tenor is one of vulnerability that melts into the determination of 'staring into the void', a temperamental state challenging to represent authentically in music. The atmosphere of psychic challenge effort lessly gives way to the faintly nostalgic glimmers of 'Giant Peach' - a literary reference to the macabre whimsy of Roald Dahl.
The ultimate dissolution of barriers between organicism and synthesis is accomplished on the majestic 'Divided We Fall', a title referring to Westerhus’ smoky vocalization that winds into a double helix formed from electronic surges.
Again, the ease with which it all comes together is mesmerizing, and while there’s an aura of risk accompanying this walk through the woods, there’s a much more enduring impression of carefully orchestrated growth and change.

- the Picture You See Is No Portrait Of Me (true Faith 1989) With innere Tueren', Ergin Erteber Publishes His Artistic Approach To Sound And Vision. It Is A Journey In Which Sound And Images
Unite Compellingly And Form Multidimensional Spaces.
After A 5-year Period Of Experimentation, innere Tueren' Is His Decampment And, At The Same Time, His Liberation From The Dogma Of The Often Functionality-reduced Claim In Electronic Music. With Him Sound Formations Arise Exclusively Through Images, Already In Existence. He Sets These Images To Music And Fills Them With An Emotionality That Was Hardly Heard Before.
Born And Raised In Heidelberg, Ergin Erteber Has Always Been A Prisoner Of His Very Own World Of Images, Which Later Led To His Intense Involvement In Design And Photography. Constant Companion In These Times Was The Music With The Result That He Had To Merge Both Worlds For Himself.
In The Course Of This His Way Led Him To Darmstadt Where He Discovered Music-production In Addition To His Studies. At The Same Time, He Was Both Creatively And Musically Involved In The Art And Club Project galerie Kuzweil'. In This Environment, He Was Able To Gain Many Experiences That Were Certainly Also Formative For His Approach To Music.
His Previous Projects Such As things From The Basement' Also Show Stages Of This Development. In This Particular Collaboration With Steffen Neuert (bergheim 34) It Was Already Apparent That He Was Less Concerned With Functionality, But Rather With Aesthetics And Charisma - In A Figurative Sense, A Rapprochement With The concept Of Beauty' By Umberto Ecos, Whereby Here Rather The Ear As The Eye Is The Center Of Perception. This Approach Is Now Even More Delicate In innere Tueren'.
With The Help Of Jan Barich (map.ache) Ergin Erteber Has Now Been Able To Translate His Own Fragile-poignant Soul Language Into Wonderful Music. The Album, Which By The Way Was Mastered By Josh Bonati In New York, Appears On March 22nd In 2019 On Kann. On 21.03.2019 An Exhibition For The Album Will Take Place In The Gallery Ortloff In Leipzig.

At bleedin' last, The Boats' gorgeous debut album Songs By The Sea (2004) turns up on vinyl! Along with first-ever vinyl issues of We Made It For You (2005) and Tomorrow Time (2006), plus a very special side of unreleased, unheard outtakes, Static Clings (2017) - which are all collected in the The Boats Archive boxset, you should snap these limited runs while you can as they're unlikely to appear on wax again.

Scrolling thru the mists of time to 2004, a very different world indeed, and The Boats formed as an outlet for Kraftwerk-addicted composer Andrew Hargreaves and his pal, Craig Tattersall, fresh from a decade spent with cult post-rock group Hood and as half of The Remote Viewer, to pursue the ideas of post-rock, modern classical and lo-fi electronica along more intimate, personalised ginnels of folk and ambient music, with the cherry on their home-baked treats provided by vocals from another close friend, Elaine Reynolds.

Songs By The Sea was their wistful and charmingly humble introduction to the world; ten tracks balancing exquisitely pop-wise songwriting with gently pulsing, elusive electronics and a patina of crackle that became a real signature of their sound long before everyone else cottoned on and starting putting out pale imitations.

At the time, it received heavy rotation in our record shop, Pelicanneck, and was something of a shared secret between fans from Manchester to Japan via their home-town of Burnley, and still owns a certain section of our memory banks to this day that's often triggered by the smell of coffee, waffles and toasted rye bread in the morning just as much as smudged Hulme sunsets in summertime.

We don't want to gush about it too much but, listening to it now, and on a format the album always quietly yearned for, it's just chokingly nostalgic in its own, low-key and endearing style and leaves little doubt in our minds that Songs By The Sea is one of the finest ambient-pop records to emerge from this region.

What new can be said about this incredible band? They have played the most danceable electronic death disco on the planet since 2012…or was it 2112? The past and the future melts together, trying to draw their timeline but anyways, right now their new 7” ”Stonerdisco”/”Superstandard” is out on Höga Nord Rekords.

Exorcist have embraced hard rock more obvious than before, especially on the A-side, which is a boogie nightmare with fuzz bass and totally freed from guitar solos. The rhythm section with Osynlige Mann on bass and Tentakel on drums, plows in usual manner down space and time while Vesslans synthesizers shoots gamma rays through Exo-universe. The B-side is haunting, unsentimental dystopic disco.

The Exorcist prove that they still hold the powers of making supersonic dance music!

Two years on from their move to Berlin, British Brothers Alex & Digby return with a 10 track, triple LP album to their home imprint Flash As a Rat on the 19 June. The album is said to show the duos full commitment to sound and experimentation after being Written during a very personal time to them both. The Album title "For My Process' echoes this. Coming form a engineering background as well as being know for their modular Wizardry and band based upbringing, expect band Psychedelia with dance sensibility.

All sounds recorded at various locations in Europe, South America and at EMS, Stockholm using the Buchla 200 modular synthesizer.

soar, all sounds recorded with Klara Lewis in Montreal 2018


Mastered by Russell Haswell. January 2020

Cut at Schnittstelle, Berlin by Andreas Kauffelt, January 2020


Image : Mark Hogben

Layout: Nik Void

The last two years have seen me maintaining an association with an unusual bedfellow, death. The loss of Mika Vainio, as well as three members of my own family, has had a profound effect on me and spurred a lengthy reflection on life, death, and everything in between.

Parallelly, while studying the philosophy of science, I came across shadow photons:


"Tangible photons are the ones we can see or detect with instruments whereas shadow photons are intangible (invisible) detectable only indirectly through the interference effects on the tangible photons.

There is no intrinsic difference between tangible and shadow photons: each photon is tangible in one universe and intangible in all the other parallel universes.

They travel at the speed of light, bounce off mirrors, are refracted by lenses, and are stopped by opaque barriers or filters of the wrong colour. Yet, they do not trigger even the most sensitive detectors. The only thing in the universe that a shadow photon can be observed to affect is the tangible photon that it accompanies. This is the phenomenon of interference.

Shadow photons would go entirely unnoticed, were it not for this phenomenon and the strange pattern of shadows by which we observe it.

Thus the existence of a seething, prodigiously complicated hidden world of shadow photons has been inferred."*


I have drawn a parallel between shadow photons and death. The interference phenomena, parallel universes, and how shadow photons affect tangible photons they accompany, offer, in my opinion, similarities, an unknown universe which is death and how we, remaining tangible human beings, are affected. This quest has led me to be more willing to accept chaos in my life and to conclude that Death is perfection, everything else is relative.

Sixth release on Danish label Petrola 80 is the blissful debut album by ambient/experimental artist Merdh Laleh. Featuring saxophones, choir, drums and much more, Merdh Laleh explores ambient emotions through a Lynchian dreamscape packed with emotion on a total of 10 tracks, showcasing his characteristic playfulness and experimentation in sound. Emotional electro-acoustic music anno 2019.

Sludge machine music slapped through the infinite mixing desk by SRS - the combined mind of Sunun and Robin Stewart. At any pointData Fossil'sgiddy industrial riddims could collapse under their own weight. There are Sunun inputs and there are Robin Stewart inputs - but everything is offered up to their machines gladly for an output of nu-human-beat. Voices drift through the mix in hushed Italian and Robin's gruff roboticized drawl, floating dub chords left hanging for cavernous subs and rattled bones, distant harps and arps, a sudden blast of trills. 'Spit Fossil' itself is a clipped noise-pop wonder - the aural equivalent of a lights-on Avon dancefloor with only the weirdest left standing.



Recorded on the rooftop of a housing project called Camelot in 2018, the two Bristol locals debuted the live / unplanned collaboration in an inflatable arena called 'Toldo' in the Brunswick Club ballroom (RIP). Then again at Young Echo at the Cube Microplex - a night where it's said anything is possible (Sunun even dubbed Guest's live human heartbeat there recently….). IfData Fossilis hard to describe - it's just the sound of the musical freedom of a city that will never run dry.



It's a high Bokeh honour to welcome Sunun back after we helped release her 2018 debut,Ooid EP. Her live show continues to be the most inspiring re-use of dub principles we've witnessed (again and again). Time only grows her music outwards causing the Young Echo collective to demand she join them. SinceOoid,she's released a 12" of MPC wonders with close Bristol pals Cold Light.


Recently bearing his dub-side to all that didn't know on Trilogy Tapes'Time Travel EP, Robin Stewart is half of world conquering techno-cult Giant Swan. Also a veteran of Rwdfwd stable of imprints (Fuckpunk and NoCorner) - his music DNA is equal parts shoegaze and steppas. In 2020 he was officially recognised for having the largest collection of Bokeh t shirts.

(Please note these are handpaintesd sleeves that have been handled and aren't always perfect - part of their charm - but please be aware)

One of 2020’s most distinctive new dance and electronic soul LPs, ‘Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes’ sees Kuduro auteur Nídia come into her own with a strikingly fresh, deep and original showcase of Afro-Portuguese dance music.
Five years on from Nídia’s debut 12”, and notable recent production and remix work for Fever Ray, Kelela and Yaeji, the Lisbon/Bordeaux-based wunderkind’s 2nd album lays out a supremely supple and crisply defined sound placing a critical, dare-to-be-different spin on elements of the African Zouk, Kuduro, Tarraxho and US R&B sounds she grew up with. Now after becoming something of a cult one-to-watch, and still only barely in her 20’s, Nídia’s sound has patently matured in terms of its emotional levity and pacing, but at no expense to the thrilling, rude angularity of her early 12” and 2017 debut LP ‘Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida’. Nídia’s music is now just cooler, concentrated and on-point stylish in a remarkable way that uncannily matches the mood of the times.
Showing off sharply honed melodic sensibilities and nudging her drums into singular syncopations, Ndia’s subtle but radical alteration to her sound now calls to mind beats by Timbaland, Lenky, The Neptunes or Equiknoxx (even LL Cool J) as much as her label mates on Príncipe. By stripping her sound down to its essence, rather than cluttering with FX or bait sounds, she’s arrived at a raw dancefloor blueprint that’s tough playing but sensitive, unafraid to go slow, heavy and heads-down in the club while also packing combustible peaks of excitement.
With effortless suss, Nídia shifts from an ‘Intro’ of experimental rave minimalism comparable to Rian Treanor,
to a mix of Arabic wind motifs and clipped Deep South bounce recalling Virginia Beach’s best on ‘Popo’, while a trio of ‘Rap’ instrumentals tilt the game from mutant drill to 3-step sickness and a super strong nod to LL Cool J’s ‘I Need Love’. Zipped in with the a bubbling 8-bit slow banger ’Tarraxo do Guetto’ and grimy shockout eruption of ‘Capacidades’, Nídia’s cool hand on the pressure gauge keeps interest rapt until the finalé fanfare of ‘Emotions’, which surely matches the likes of Lex Luger or The Dream’s brassy mini-symphonies for emotive grip, but in a less muscular, more sensitively ambiguous way that Nídia coolly owns.

Exceptional, humid tarraxho beatdown pressure from Lisbon/Bordeaux-based wunderkind Nídia, accompanying her killer 2nd album.
Spinning off from the slower highlights of her album, ‘Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes’, Nídia’s 7” perfectly displays the subtly radical advances in her productions style on two achingly squashed and rude swivels that set her sound head and shoulders apart from the crowd.
Initially soft and tentative, but ultimately hard and freaky, ’Tarraxoz Academy’ plays out a heavy, druggy tension between its burning, biting point electro-leads, wavey organ refrain and dragging drums that recalls a screwed take on an imaginary DJ Stingray & Nkisi joint.
The modern rare groove of ’Cheirinho’ on the other hand comes marks a leap forward, or even sideways, from what you may expect from her early work, draping velvet chords on a natty swing beat like Omar-S gone broken beat or Dego doing Angolan R&B.

Premiere on Fill-Lex Records of the Russian-Greek producer based in Seville Maxim Gkikaev aka Rise Black, in which he presents us with themes composed from 2016-2019, the first release in its volume 1, volume 2 will be published at the end of the year.
With an electro heart, these songs take us through his last years, a mixture of various types within the genre, more aggressive, or with sweetness, in sad and melodic moments or more experimental and raw, with a continuity as few know how to do. Broken bases and broken rhythms with melodies that will stay in your mind in direct trip to the brain.

Rise Black and with his other aka Oscitin has released on labels like Moustache Records, Retrowave Records, Underground Music Experience or his recent publication in Tripalium Records Corporation in his sublabel Digital Mutant Series.
Apart from his facet as an artist he combines it with editing as co-owner of labels such as UME, NYY Records and Another Perspective, and he is the host of the Electronic Wave parties in the Prisma room in Seville.

An album with 11 tracks that will not leave you indifferent, come in and enjoy

I listened to it day and night, in Tokyo's subway, walking across the busy streets and empty avenues. Sitting on the pavement in front of a konbini, a can of whisky-perrier in hand. On the plane, amidst the opaque grey clouds. And at the temple - humid mountainous scapes and dry wood.

In Japan the sun sets earlier, and the warmth of the day lasts a little longer, so it fades more smoothly into the night.

Aesthetically and musically speaking, it makes you want to dance the ‘JIVZ’, somewhat inebriated, a little too early in the afternoon, as if it were too late already, with nylon-bodies, bulging booties but the shoulders cumbersome, as the notes of 'HDV' play along.

Then, at first slow and wobbling, you hit the road onto some warm and cramped nocturnal destination. Preferably serving sake and broiled foods, 'D1V4G' on my mind.

Recall Eno through the volutes of 'M45C4R4D3'. And 'QYURKY RUQ' in Cutty Ranks' live and its lo-fi riddim.

The impression of being an airwave lost in between two AM frequencies, in the near-quiet of this interstice - 'D41N7Y 5QU4R3'.

Then you open an eye, look to your left, the body buried under a plaid, the pendulum of the big wooden clock has lost the pace, 'In Transit Across The Uni', and you can't help but think these ebony and solid oak monsters sitting in the living room once were that incredibly hi-tech cupboard in an ancient home. Giant mechanism, in the heart of the house. Watches and proportions. You close your eyes.

I figure myself the creature from the cover dancing an elastic dance, when comes the last of the 'JIVE ED' - its limbs suddenly zoomed-in, stretching out like chewing-gum seen from a disproportionate perspective, retracting just as quickly. Something that would fit the beach scene from Funky Forest like a glove, or the one of the animated short's screening.

Only frustration, the hope for a stronger, lastingly groovy and cheerful 'LYFSPAN’.

Correspondence on 12/12/18 at 13:02 - Charli TAPP























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[] JIVE ED 6
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On his adventurous first new album in 5 years, Vladislay Delay renders an extreme ecology of electronic sound inspired by time spent above the arctic circle, surrounded by tundra and the rawforce of nature and visually given life by Ripatti’s wife, Antye Greie-Ripatti, aka AGF.
Although it features no location recordings, ’Rakka’ clearly imparts its theme thru a riveting palette of weathered textures, unyielding rhythms and the kind of reverberating, widescreen sound design that’s defined his catalogue of cult, contemporary music since the late ‘90s. While Vladislav been notably absent from release schedules in recent years - aside from working on the soundtrack to ‘The Revenant’ (2015) recording with Sly & Robbie (more of that to come) in
2018 - this new album is surely a bracing reminder of his knack for creating utterly immersive environments at the poles of ambient, dub, and noise.
Inspired by the struggle to survive in unforgiving conditions, the music patently resembles a number of styles associated with music from northerly latitudes. Elemental traces of Scandinavian black metal, Pan Sonic or Deathprod-like power electronics and Thomas Köneresque ambient isolationism are all detectable in the album’s brutal panoramas, and evidently speak to a shared conception of the extreme arctic’s uncontrolled and uncorrupted wilds, and their frighteningly magnetic sort of push/pull on the senses.
Titled in Vladislav’s typically alliterative style, the tracks cascade in aggressive iterations of gravel-swilled rhythm and tonal attrition. The barely-harnessed might of opener, ‘Rakka’ triggers a chain reaction on events that follows into a sort of blast-beaten ambience in ‘Raajat’, and what sounds like throttled blvck metvl vocals meshed with flashcore in ‘Rakkine’, whilst ‘Rampa’ hammers home a martial noise techno tattoo, and the final couplet take this sound to its logical end-of-earth degrees with breathtaking form.
‘Rakka’ is certain to both reaffirm and upend what listeners know and love about Vladislav Delay,while firmly galvanising his sound for an unsure future.

Words from Ransom Note...
Undivided, unified, the overwhelming sense of oneness. Feeling and experiencing this was her strongest desire since the departure, a deep longing. Walking back to base, she knew this had been obtained, it was clear and ran through her like water. Though she did not feel complete, she did not feel intergrated or a part of the whole, as it were. The collective 'one' disected, distributed and proliferated without her. Did she feel spaciousness or emptiness?

Netsh is dead, long live Netsh ! The 24 year old producer is back on Comic Sans Records and delivers a 6-tracker EP that sounds like a
true aggiornamento in his music.
The braindance inherited from Aphex Twin which we can hear in Neural Netshworks, is here replaced by something new that defines
the contours of a 2.0 upddate of his creative process.
Netsh has left aside most of his usual hardware and used different time signatures.
This renewal in his working method gave birth to Cyberbass, an energetic style in which IDM and futuristic bass music blend
to musically describe a close dystopia where humanism has given way to transhumanism.
The EP and its tracks are crossed with contrasts, the ear is often knocked out by a powerful polyrythmic before being released by
emotionally intense breaks.
It's probably Netsh's way of illustrating one of the biggest philosophical debate of our time : will technology free human kind or on the
contrary enslave him ?

Faitiche presents Jan Jelinek’s album Tierbeoachtungen in a limited pressing on vinyl for the first time. Originally released on Scape in 2006 as a CD and download, the album’s six tracks took their cues from Jelinek’s live concerts of that period: dense, slowly unfolding loop improvisations made with a laptop, various effect pedals and miniature synthesizers. It is music that floats in a semi-conscious state between dream and awakening, always slightly mysterious, leaving traces that lead directly to the psychedelic-cosmic music of the kraut era.

In his release notes for Tierbeobachtungen at the time, the late lamented Martin Büsser wrote:

"The animal is experiencing a renaissance in music. It provides a reflective surface for our notion of the unbridled and irrational, of that Other the philosophers Deleuze/Guattari – as part of their ‘Animalisation’ – called the embodiment of artistic deliverance. And yet, how much of a liberation can art actually tolerate? To what extent can music truly throw off its fetters without descending into chaos? Jan Jelinek’s album title provides a first hint of this development: Tierbeobachtungen (animal observations) is his fourth album for ~scape, and it addresses the issue of release and liberation. Recorded almost in transit, while preparing his move to a new studio, the tracks reveal and relish in their improvisational character, and drifting, lost sound – yet they never lose sight of their underlying structure. Tierbeobachtungen might be Jelinek’s freest and most personal work, with simply arranged tracks based on four to five layered and modulated loops, while his own studio equipment provides the main sampling sources, from synthesizer and guitaret to vibraphonette. Jelinek takes on the role of observer on this record, with a level of reflection remaining audible throughout. However, this is by no means intellectual, distanced music – Jelinek leads us straight into a thicket, an acoustic jungle where sumptuous splendour meets the uncanny. A long tradition of psychedelic music pervades the recordings – Amon Düül, Cluster, My Bloody Valentine – yet whatever musical memories might vie for our attention, these are no clear-cut references, just loose associations. On occasion, one might even be tempted to take them for field recordings – gems discovered, stored and returned from their travels by ethnologists fifty or a hundred years ago. Similar to the pioneers of industrial music, like Cabaret Voltaire or Zoviet France, who experimented with field recordings to challenge Western listening habits, Tierbeobachtungen takes us to new, unknown territories and brims with sounds that defy geographic or stylistic classification, not unlike the semi-conscious state between dream and awakening. (...)" Martin Büsser, 2006

New 2xlp of grinding beat experiments from Black Dice's Eric Copeland. Controlled chaos, chopped sample mayhem, moments of beauty and destruction over four sides.

Shanghai’s Svbkvlt spring a killer new batch of martial steppers and pointillist electronics by 33EMYBW backed with remixes by Lechuga Zafiro, Ikonika, and Hakuna Kulala’s Don Zilla Originally Issued on digital formats late last year to coincide with its live premiere at Poland’s Unsound festival, ‘Arthropods’ is now available on a limited vinyl pressing for the first time and manifests as the alien spirit twin of the soul-seeking creatures 33EMYBW brought to (semi)life in
the ‘Golem’ album. Her animist powers appear strengthened here, generating unique constructions that synthesise aspects of footwork, deco-club music and trilling trap with crystalline melodies and a virulent, gremlin-in-the-machine sort of madness.
This stuff is pretty much exactly what we reckon a lot of folk imagined music to sound like in the year historically imagined by Blade Runner. From the lush pads and flyaway chorales of ’Symmetry’ the album delivers a futurist rush of probing electronic tones and posthuman, bone-bending rhythms between the rail-gunning attack of ‘Tentacle Centre’ and the tri-step trills of ‘Induce’, packing thrilling runs into dembow DNA mutation with ‘Adam Bank’ and a sort of militant sinosoca-footwork style in ‘Arthropods Continent’, while ‘Drum3’ sounds like it evolved from a patchleft on a synth in the Radiophonic Workshop.
For the remixes, Ikonika evens out ‘Arthropods Continent’ into a sort of bucking ballroom workout, and Lechuga Zafiro reins in ‘Adam Bank’ with a fidgety parry, but Uganda’s Don Zilla keeps it out there with a cyclonic twyst on ‘Drum3.’

New York’s Fridman gallery re-activates its record imprint with this absorbing collaboration between Ben Vida (fresh from his stunning 4 hour ‘Reducing The Tempo To Zero’ opus for Shelter Press), and noted composer for dance, Marina Rosenfeld - whose collaborative album with Warrior Queen and Okkyung Lee P.A. / HARD LOVE’ is to this day one of the most brilliantly singular LP’s we’ve stocked. RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Laurie Spiegel, Terre Thaemlitz, Rashad Becker.
Working in the space between improvisation, sculpture, sound installation, and experimental composition,
both artists’ skill for creating highly descriptive yet elusive sound structures is at its illusive and ephemeral best across both pieces, from the strangely penetrative metaphysical point of view explored in ‘Any Landscape’, to the sprawling tendrils and searching electronic filament of ‘Branches’ that feel like the process of mycelium or spores finding a way into the cracks between the decayed concrete, glass and steel of crumbling urban environments.
Drawing on decades of combined experience, ‘Vertice’ unfolds along two 20 minute pieces with a natural grasp of more delicate sounds opening out in vast imaginary spaces. Their palette of field recordings, vocals, keys and electronics is placed at the service of an elusive underlying schematic, snipping away at the ligature of logic until their sounds are released into space as clusters of animated insectoid patterns. It resembles patches of gently overgrown vegetation, like rooftop gardens or thickets of mossy growth overhead.
In scale and fractured design, it comes to describe a vertiginous sense of detachment from reality, probing and challenging the listener’s proprioceptive senses with cool but heady arrangements of free-floating,
aerial, and seemingly unmetered tones and dabs of vocal that appear to describe a slow and purposeful movement above and around our architectural surroundings.

Birmingham, UK’s sprawl of low rise warehouses and their links to the military-industrial complex inspires this crushing new take on the “Brummie” sound and spirit from former native Arash Moori for his longtime pals at Type In nine harsh and disorienting bouts of angular drums and hazardous noise texture, ‘Exothermic’ doubles down on the tonal and rhythmic brutalism of Moori’s debut for Type, ‘Heterodyne’ (2015). It forms a deep topographical reading of his home region’s maze of 1-storey munitions workshops, flyovers, canals, and spaghetti road systems, all intersected by the ghosts of Jungle pirate radio and lit up by hotspots of nostalgic reminiscence; places where he studied, walked thru, DJed atand protested with long-time friend and Type label co-owner, John Twells. Moreover ‘Exothermic’ is concerned with how this environment and the city’s progressive past affects the mood and music of its contemporary population, and how it ultimately came to inform the visceral nature of the “Brummie Sound”.
Working to a fierce, noisy aesthetic that’s been firmly expressed in hard-bitten Brummie and midlander music by everyone from Black Sabbath to Scorn, and even Coventry’s Delia Derbyshire, who acknowledged the infamous Luftwaffe blitz on her home city as a formative sonic experience, ‘Exothermic’ explodes with a tightly coiled, abstract-industrial energy that’s surely worthy of comparison with any of them. In fits and bursts, rhythms inspired by the city’s pirate radio jungle heritage clash with sheets of metallic calamity; sawn-off percussion ricochets the space like shrapnel searching for a target; and structures are torched like Raymond Mason’s municipal artwork ‘Forward’ which went up in flames during the city’s 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq war. It’s all intended to mirror a negative feedback loop of intensity between the place and its people, and does so with a mix of bostin’ glee and dark humour familiar to the region.
From this meld of psychogeography, subjective hauntology, and objective history, Arash Moori’s work in ‘Exothermic’ most cannily and explicitly results a simulacra of a place shaped by emotions, personal memories, and accreted histories, and rendered in a temporal flux as chaotically tiled and riven with radical energies as the place itself.

New Fries has never been interested in being a band. What we mean is a spirit of abandoning ideas of what songs should be, how they should be performed, and by whom. We’ve never been interested in the tradition of songwriting—though we’re interested in musical elements like repetition, space, and dynamics. We have wanted our music to make people dance but have also wanted to produce the feeling of that being taken away from a room. We often work around these sorts of energy transfers (whether or not we name them this way). This space to make music in has felt wild and free. We have also contradicted ourselves. We are also always changing. In 2018 Ryan Carley (synthesizer) left the band and we found ourselves at our first juncture to restructure and re-evaluate New Fries. This is such a classic boring story, we know. But immediately we knew that as a three piece (the band’s original formation) we had to turn to something new and open—the way some describe “beginners mind”. Anni grabbed bass (which was new to her), Tim grabbed guitar and a sampler as a new juggling routine, and Jenny reduced her drum kit to three pieces. We wanted to create a structure that allowed us to be curious about being in transition.

Much of this record sounds and reflects on this in-between. It’s anxious in its repetitions and unsure of genre. It rejects a singular character or emotion and attempts to instead act as a container for many. Anni’s lyrics state this directly: “it lacks a mood, it lacks definition” / “curiosity beyond expectation”. Her lyrics describe the spaces, objects, people, and situations that embody an in-between—her grandfather who worked as medium, the ecology of the foreshore, Mount Tambora’s eruption in 1816 that produced the Year Without a Summer, and mesh (the fabric). The result is a collage of 6 songs and many otherwise quick ideas.

Much of this collage was testament to the work of engineer/musician Carl Didur. Carl (Zacht Automaat, formerly US Girls) is a long-standing pillar of Toronto’s experimental music community. He is also a tape expert, which we knew these songs needed entering the recording process as mostly bare grooves. The result was less that of hiring an engineer than it was working with a collaborator. His musical ideas are all over this record. ‘Is the Idea of Us’ is the situation of musicians/non-musicians making music together perhaps completely illegible in the music on this record and to the random listener who doesn’t know our story in South Bend, Indiana (how did you find us?!) But with this title we name this absurd gesture, through our changing relationship to making music both as a unit and as individuals. There are enough bands out there; we insist on do it differently.

Maenad Veyl returns with his sophomore album, ‘Reassessment’, a collection of 13 tracks inspired by inner turmoil and change. Expanding on the sound palette established with last year’s critically-acclaimed ‘Body Count’, Feriero ventures into heavier, more abstract territories and collaborations with Years of Denial.
I wrote a new album as Maenad Veyl at the end of last year, in part inspired by events surrounding some personal health issues and a (minor) surgery. I wanted the music, title and artwork (shot over a year ago) to reflect what I experienced then, as I saw them as a metaphor to other changes I was going through at the time.?
Needless to say, as we geared up for release as we usually do, the world ground to a halt. All the images , words printed or spoken on the album have changed meaning since and, compared to what many people are going through now, my “inspiring changes” feel distant and unimportant.?
We’re not blind to the fact this could be seen as inappropriate or in bad taste, and we’ve contemplated every alternative, but in the end we’ve decided to keep things as “business as usual” as possible, so ‘Reassessment’ is now up for pre-order. - Maenad Veyl

Santilli debuts on Mad Habitat, a gorgeous complement to last year’s “Surface” on Into The Light. The instrumental palette here is focused around crystalline electronics and a battery of percussion, a beautiful synthesis of vaporous and earthy tones that recall the timeless sound-worlds of heroes like Jon Hassell and Steve Tibbets. A reflective mood diffuses across the entire record, conjuring up pensive visions of sun-dappled water and stretches of the coast. The sounds themselves have a shimmering, holographic quality, conjuring up the sort of auditory and spatial depth you can get lost in as each side unfolds

Clear Vinyl

Between Sleeps is a french producer based in Paris, passionate about sound design and synthesizers. His stage name and musical world evoke the state of semi-consciousness, when neither awake nor asleep. With dreamy pads and strong rythms, his music mixes electronica, house and techno. Boards Of Canada, Lone or The Field are among his main influences. All the tracks included in the EP Fantasia have been composed with the same hardware set-up: a sampler, an FM synthesizer and a substractive analog synthesizer. Every track has been recorded in one stereo take.