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Au-delà is a collaborative record by La Scie Dorée and Meakusma.
It features eight pieces of music by La Scie Dorée affiliates.

For the 2018 Meakusma Festival, La Scie Dorée and Meakusma set up a collaboration that brought performances by Timo Van Luijk, Steven Stapleton, Christophe Heemann, Daniel Denis, Bart De Paepe and Kris Vanderstraeten to the festival in Eupen, Belgium. ... This was followed up with a night organized in the province of Limburg in Belgium featuring performances by Frederik Croene and Timo Van Luijk, Tom James Scott, Ecka Mordecai and Andrew Chalk.

After three years and ten EPs, Amsterdam's Will & Ink label offers up its first full length from label favorite Yaleesa Hall and is called Woodall. It explores texture, space and sound design in fascinating ways. Since 2014 Yaleesa Hall has released four EPs on the label and has become known for breakbeat laced stripped-down techno. This debut album finds the producer indulging a less dance floor focussed version of his sound, and one that is better suited to the full length format. Explaining that his tracks most often start as "sound structures and experiments" that then get reworked for the club, here they stay closer to their original forms. Woodall is sound sculpture that is electronic and synthetic but also made of real world sounds that are all truly absorbing. Comes in gatefold sleeve.

Brendan Gregoriy (aka Chymera) returns to A Strangely Isolated Place with his second album under his synthesizer-based ambient moniker Merrin Karras, titled Northwest Passage. Brendan's 2016 debut 'Apex' was needle-point precise in its execution; quantized MIDI notes and sequencers bought unmistakable energy and flair. With 'Northwest Passage' Brendan aimed to create something a little slower-paced and blurred in nature. To achieve this added dimension, the instrumentation is primarily Wavetable and FM synthesis, as well as his small arsenal of analog synths. The result is a glacial feel, reminiscent of the mystery and adventure of the Arctic. The Northwest Passage is the sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic, which is normally only accessible in the summer months. Unfortunately, this passage is opening longer each year due to climate change. With a slightly heavier mood across its eight tracks, the epic, expansive and confident textures and colors of Merrin Karras are however, still instantly recognizable. The star-gazing drones of tracks like 'Passage' and 'He Became Something Else', sit alongside more energetic, pulsing pieces like 'Meridian' and 'Monument'. 'Crevasse' stirs up the drama of a classic synthesizer soundtrack and album closer 'Dominions' brings the turbulent waters to an icy froth. Northwest Passage is a unique take on music that can engulf and enthrall.

Allt E'nte is a reaction to the emerging expectation on politicization of music. a respons to the demand and implicit condition to be current, relevant and take a stand. Allt E'nte repudiates all responsibility, conveys hardly anything, but hopefully occupies space. Allt E'nte celebrates synthesis and rejects binaries. our hope is that Allt E'nte is as out-of-date in 200 years as it is today. No need to point out the paradox. Sincerely, Vanligt Folk

The Roundtable & Northside Records are pleased to offer this long awaited and special Record Store Day reissue of this highly collectible Australian rare groove LP.
If you can imagine the gathering of a group of Australian session musicians channelling the sounds of Herbie Hancock Headhunter's and Marc Moulin's Placebo, recording an album out of hours at a TV studio and then releasing a privately pressed hard hitting jazz funk record then what you have is Arena, one of Australia's most revered and scarce rare groove records.
This was the name given to a pick-up group of session players led by Ted White, a veteran of the British big band jazz scene (an associate of Ted Heath and Basil Kirchin) who had immigrated to Australia in the 1960s to work in the burgeoning television industry. This one-time studio project (recorded only to test out the facilities for a new studio) barely yet thankfully saw an LP release in 1975. Pressed in minute quantities only with limited distribution, the album was subsequently forgotten and obscured by time, only to be resurrected in the 90s by DJs and collectors seeking out lost and rare records.
The album has since become one of the country's most celebrated and collectible jazz funk recordings and has proved to be a pivotal point in Australian jazz, marking a shift from the modern jazz and R&B sounds of the previous decades to the cross pollinating electric jazz funk of the 70s. Characterized by the heavy use of electronically treated saxophone, psychedelic guitar, Moog and spacey Fender Rhodes, the album is a classic of the genre.
While acknowledging the often compiled and sampled breaks track, The Long One, the complete album offers much more, exemplified by its complicated and obsessive jazz rhythms, abstract and middle-eastern horn lines and pulsing electric funk.

Up next on Lawrence English‘s Room40 label is Argentina-born, France-based composer Beatriz Ferreyra with her Echos + album. Ferreyra has played a hushed but critical role in the development of musique concrète since its early days, working with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) directed by Pierre Schaeffer, with whom she collaborated during the writing of his Solfège de l’Objet Sonore. Echos+, one of only a few collections of her work available on vinyl, collects three of Ferreyra’s most affecting pieces, each of which explores questions of mortality and the afterlife.

This new release by Colin Potter, "The Abominable Slowman", is the logical follow-on from his previous 2015 LP Rank Sonata'. Like that album, there are elements that were recorded many years ago, but this work also contains new music. Again, the emphasis is on rhythm, although the rhythmic components range from conventional drum sounds to strange electronic and/or mutated outbursts, often accompanied by squalling guitars. As to what this sounds like, keywords would be soundtrack, experimental, ambient, electronic psychedelia, contemporary, drone.... There's constant experimentation throughout the album, a search for never-before heard sounds to create obscure atmospheres and a pleasantly disturbing feeling of disquietude.

The LP is housed in a beautiful grey cardboard sleeve, hand-printed by letterpress, and die cut to reveal the printed inner sleeve, which features a number of pictures of The Abominable Slowman during the recording of the album at IC Studio's current London location.

Colin Potter has been a central figure in the UK's DIY and post - industrial underground since the late '70s. His ICR label, founded in 1981, blurred the lines between post - punk experimentation, crude pop, Krautrock - inspired drone work and contemporary electronica, with releases by everyone from DIY legends The Instant Automatons through Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle , experimental composer Trevor Wishart, drone soundists Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate and Bryn Jones's Muslimgauze. He has also been a key collaborator with both Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, working in the studio with both groups since the late '90s as well as serving as a member of Nurse With Wound's current live line - up. From the late '90s to the late '00s Potter's IC Studio, based in a Victorian Water Tower outside Preston, was a lightning rod for musicians working beneath the radar and a focal point for the nascent UK drone scene. Recent years have seen an upsurge in interest in Potter's solo works.'

Unreleased album from 1981, a collaborative project by David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded at Mills College in 1981.

Previously known only to cognoscenti through an obscure self-released three-track 7”, this is the first publication of the complete album, an outrageous confection that mixes art-song and theatrical monologue with live electronics. Starting life as a performance art piece described by the artists as ‘Western Performance Noir’, the record centres on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious “Archetypal Unitized Seminar,” a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers. Delivered by Friedman, Hanlon, Klingensmith and special guest Maggi Payne in forms ranging from spoken monologue to Country & Western waltz, the texts are accompanied by instrumental and electronic contributions by Behrman and DeMarinis. Musically, She’s More Wild is truly unique, demonstrating these two pioneers of live-electronic performance adapting their signature processes to something approaching a ‘pop’ format: we hear the gliding, frequency-sensitive electronics familiar from Behrman’s classic On the Other Ocean and the mutant hacked Speak n’ Spell heard on DeMarinis’ Songs Without Throats propelled by drum machines and twisted into song forms. Perhaps comparable only to the David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s contemporaneous Daytime Viewing in its interweaving of performance art tactics, high-tech electronics and pop sensibilities, She’s More Wild is an essential document, both immediately gratifying and ultimately thought provoking.

“The North Bend is about the Pacific Northwest region of the USA, where I lived at the time the album was made. Still, today I consider that region my spiritual home, even though I am now living on the East Coast I had met Lawrence English in Poland back in 2009 and he kindly invited me to make a record for the label. I was a fan of his releases so this was really an obvious thing for me to say “yes” to
and a chance to create something special. I had released a few EP’s & and LP under my name, all influenced by the so-called “modern classical” ambient style pioneered by the late great Jóhann Jóhannsson and minimalist composers like Harold Budd and Arvo Pärt. The North Bend is the first work that dealt with “place” and explored a locality, the first in a series of recordings all released
with Room40. Since this album came out, I’ve left the Pacific Northwest for another location, New York state, which couldn’t be a starker contrast from the life in the PacNW. I had to start from scratch here in NY, as everything I owned until age 36 was stolen the night before I left to drive to NY. It was both a curse and a blessing. Not having the baggage & pitfalls of old ideas was wonderful, but also losing all the recorded & written works I had was harrowing at the time. Remastering The North Bend seemed like a natural thing for me. Not so much as revisionist history, but rather thinking how to make a record sound in a certain way without being able to revisit any of the mixes. In other words, the creative choices I made at the time (2010) are 100% preserved, there wasn’t any opportunity to revisit those, but rather make the record sound as good as I can framed through hindsight and a decade of separation from the period it was created. “

Limited Blue Vinyl Pressig
'Postsocial' is the breathtaking 8th album from Wold, an infamous black metal unit with strong binds to the landlocked plains of Regina, Saskatchewan in central Canada. 'Postsocial' is a culmination of ideas core to Wold's philosophy, heading deeper into a world of visceral howls and internalised harmonics. Due to the inherent limitations of vinyl, the album now unfolds in a different sequence to the CD, manifesting a crucially altered beast

A chorus for 2020’s haunted cityscapes, Banshee’s first record of the decade begins by gazing skyward, pushing against the shadow within and seeking magic in the everyday. Refracted utopian visions wilfully conceal the underlying gloom, but after finding temporary relief in the clouds, unfulfilled wishes and fragile fantasies soon dissolve into nightmares and psychic terror, with recursive voices hinting at re-lived trauma creeping through inner worlds like the hand of Freddy Krueger.

Tyyni is the third album by Finnish-born sound artist and musician Cucina Povera aka Maria Rossi. The second album recorded using a more studio-based scenario – as opposed to last year’s Zoom, a collection of in-situ, spontaneous recordings – Tyyni feels like a slowly unfurling mediation on the clash between nature and mechanical living, a rumination on the complexities of modern life that begin to unveil more about the inner landscape of the artist as it progresses. A Finnish word referring to still, serene weather, the title belies a new note of turmoil in Cucina Povera’s soundworld. Tyyni represents a more detailed focus on the sculpting of sounds that curl around Rossi’s hymnal vocal performances. It’s a more adventurous work than Rossi’s previous output that goes further into noise elements and vocal abstraction while maintaining the balance and ecclesiastical ecstasy of her debut Hilja.

While tension at the core of Cucina Povera is always prevalent, previously it was organic sounds that were used to counterpoint Rossi’s singing but on Tyyni these are often replaced with aggressive synths and distortion, profane clashes with the seemingly sacred hymns. Whether close mic’d and intoning in a loop or in full flight, Maria Rossi’s voice remains in the foreground, set here against a more synthetic backdrop. This development builds new worlds for Cucina Povera, a digital environment which brings in a sense of the alien for Rossi’s vocal to duel. The effect is often dazzling. On Salvia Salvatrix, an ode to the medicinal plant used to ward off evil spirits, Rossi’s invocation is encircled by a distorted synth sound tearing at the fabric of the composition. It’s an inspired juxtaposition, leaving the listener to appreciate both sounds as separate and as a duet. Anarkian kuvajainen embraces a sense of chaos, an accidental transmitting mobile phone’s pulse is swept up gently with looped synth swells as Rossi’s prayer-like vocal rhythmically teases the composition into loops that embrace and then drift apart. Teerenpeli flirts with a minimal beat rendered by sampler and processed, layered field recordings of capercaillies, while Side A ends with one of Rossi’s most beautiful, simple tracks yet recorded. Varjokuvatanssi is an a cappela recording built on top of a wordless glossolalia, a shadowy interplay which foregrounds the solo vocal.

Pölytön nurkka is the most melodic song yet recorded by Cucina Povera. While it still maintains an off-the-cuff performance style, the synthesized chimes and 4/4 beat are smothered by a distorted synthesizer which almost replicates the bravado of an electric guitar feedbacking into the night. Rossi’s subject matter talks of trying to start anew, getting rid of extraneous material, perhaps still feeling powerless to affect positive change. On Haaksirikkoutunut, the protagonist vocal is lost, a vessel rudderless on the ocean, buffeted by waves metaphorical or real, digital, atonal chords gurgling and splashing against the bow, a storm forever brewing on the horizon. Saniaiset recalls Coil in its eldritch, nocturnal tone and digital-bell like synth, Rossi’s half-spoken/half-sung voice attaining a creepy tone before flipping into flight. Album closer Jolkottelureitti uses an escalating, sequenced synth that splinters into both abrasive tones and harmonising chords creating a kosmische effect, reminding the listener of Kluster or synth-era Popol Vuh, all the while elevated by Rossi’s searching vocalising.

For an artist with such a singularly unique musical language, Cucina Povera is continually teasing new strands and emotive tones from an evolving palette. Most importantly, Tyyni appears to be pulling back the veil to uncover an artist finding a synergy between her own emotional inner world and practice. As such, on her third album, Maria Rossi has found a third way between abstraction and extraneous emotion, personal experience turned inside out to reveal more about the listener.

Debut album by Smagghe & Cross. Music for blind observers. TIP!

At times, the way the voice skipped intermittently, the recording sounded like an exercise in Uncle Bill's scissors technique but in my defence the mic I was using was hidden. I knew Jean was recording me, he'd asked for an interview after finding my name in one of his black notebooks, Jean didn't know I was recording him. He was tuning into fading echoes and when he thought the tape machine was off he left an echo of his own. "I caused such scenes on the way to and at kindergarten that first day my mother never bothered risking damage to my nascent psyche by making me return. Consequently come first grade my petulance had precluded me from
the nursery school forged friendships of my new classmates. It's why I've always been an observer. But I've never been an archivist. I never wrote the intimate details down. If you fix them on paper there's a danger of shared ownership. The black notebooks contain coded references, the meaning once obvious now somewhat cryptic. Names, some possibly anagrammatical and numbers, presumably long dead phone lines. There are a few sketches but no photographic evidence of any kind. This to most of the population, with it's need for minute by minute high def validation, sounds like a curse. I, however, feel blessed. Evidence is the enemy. Magick for me is the carp in Herman's monastery pond. Brief flashes of gold as i disturb the murky silt of memory." It's there that one of the only two recordings of Jean's voice comes to an end. Jean has his copy obviously but If I know Jean it's long been lost or destroyed.

Andrew Weatherall, January 2017

Microdosing is a series of compilation 12”s selected by Julienne Dessagne aka Fantastic Twins, and designed in collaboration with French visual artist Geff Pellet. Microdosing is a collective experiment aimed at helping you fighting back your modern obsession with happiness. You may deserve a nice day but the day does not need a nice you, nothing should be forced, everything is permitted. Microdosing will provide you with sonic healing weapons on regular basis and at irregular dosage. Those doses will favour psychedelic social techniques against self help tyranny, creation over soma, provoking over numbing, our outer-selves over our inner-selves. Microdosing refuses the fatality of the pleasure principle. Life is a struggle, time to embrace it. —— "My battery is low and it’s getting dark” We at Microdosing will make Opportunity’s famous last words fully ours. Some would see these as an epitaph on a black screen, we embrace them as a reclaimed fragility. Are we grains of sand wandering in space, hoping for a goal? No. We are the cosmos, the cosmos is us, unafraid of the end, unafraid of the void. Before the rise of the infinite silence, Microdosing brings you new guiding lights, white sun or black hole being a simple permutation of the kinetic rainbow. Oceanic’s “Parallel Lines Of Stripes” is a meandering mantra, an synthesised Moebius ring, a mission to your heart, that furthest star in the sky. Gilb’R’s “Cosmogonie” simply reminds us of the profound relation between spatial systems and the holy act of birth (cosmo, world and gon, conceive). The universe is a body, your body is your universe. Lucas Croon’s “Threshold Stimulus” is the soundtrack of a never ending voyage, the man is on a trip to the core sanctum. Imagine Space as a reverberation room cladded with bakelite. Losing yourself in delay repeats sometimes is the shortest way. Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge & Sam Irl’s “Faeden” is another hymn to the umbilical chords joining us to the outer world, a black monolith of kraut acid, a pagan dance as portal to a destination only you can choose. Microdosing will be back soon with more enablers, helping to turn your petty struggles into a search for a meaning of life. The Quest lives on.

limited to 200 copies (comes in different coloured sleeve, we cannot guarantee which one you will receive))
Area's Dreamlessness is the prolific experimentalist's 5th release for Kimochi Sound, and as usually the case, it incorporates some collaborators for the occasion. Donato Dozzy joins, walking the shimmering line between ambient and wall-of-noise, whereas Eltron John's contribution is a beguiling, bubbly, purple affair. The quietly impressive EP is rounded out with the dull neon throb of Everything Thrown Away and the pensive longing of Through The Wall.

Tilman Robinson’s third album, CULTURECIDE, is an investigation of the anthropocene; a seven part lamentation for our chaotic world.

Tilman Robinson is an Australian composer and sound designer creating electro-acoustic music across a range of genres including classical minimalism, improvised, experimental, electronic and ambient. Tilman’s diverse output focuses on the psychological impact of dense sound employing acousmatic and psychoacoustic principles. His third album CULTURECIDE will be released on Iceland’s Bedroom Community label in April 2020.

CULTURECIDE: “...processes that have usually been purposely introduced that result in the decline or demise of a culture, without necessarily resulting in the physical destruction of its bearers.” D Stein

CULTURECIDE is a rich sonic collage, harvesting sounds from a range sources including field recordings, medical machines that monitor the human body, traditional instruments and synthesisers, often melted electronically. The result is an unsettling paradox with sounds constantly on the edge of recognition. Each piece references a specific socio- political issue ranging from colonialism to neo-liberalism to climate change and the impending singularity of humans and machines. Far from an answer to these questions, CULTURECIDE invites us to meditate on their place in our life and approach personal understanding.

Recorded and produced almost completely in Australia, a land at the forefront of the devastation of climate change, CULTURECIDE was an attempt at catharsis for its author frequently appalled at his country’s incredible apathy and inaction. Mixed by Bedroom Community regular Daniel Rejmer and mastered by Lawrence English, works from the ambitious and unsettling record saw Tilman nominated for the 2019 Melbourne Prize for Music.

Giallo Disco is more than happy to welcome one of the absolute O.Gs of the 2nd wave of horror synth, the one and only Kansas City Warrior turned Mr Dr Hollywood himself… Umberto, who’s new EP ‘Outskirts Of Reno’ takes us deep into the seedy underbelly to tell the tale of a kidnapping. From the EBM dancefloor darkness of The Basement to the ascension-like arps of Repeat. Five brand new tracks from the master of mood destined to work it’s way into the record bags of discerning DJs across the globe… and into the nightmares of the weak… Limited to 200 Copies. Art by Eric A Lee.

An intense psychedelic trip inside the world of a producer who expresses the loneliness of working in a studio, without any ambition. Honest music with a huge amount of emotional intensity.

Next on the DDQ series, Sébastien Michel, best known as UVB, presents his Elements of Joy alias where the French producer explores post punk, industrial and wave influences across 4 rugged tracks. First released as a cassette on his own Body Theory label and now remastered for vinyl on a limited edition of 300 copies.

With her first solo record since 2017's 'Weightless', an unapologetic ode to rave, the record was influenced by her initial experiences of dance music as a teenager - a release for those that must imagine world's unseen and a projection of what it felt like to experience a new reality for the first time. Turbo Olé.

“Jay Glass Dubs is back on Berceuse Heroique after his inaugural release and this time he is going straight for the jugular. Jay Glass took a small break from the 80's experimental pop of The Safest Dub and he invoked the spirits of German Kosmische Musik and the studio insanity of African Head Charge. Film Noir vibes are mixed with the greek ancient tragedies, leaving the Apollonian aesthetics of his last release and going for a darker, denser and completely Dionysian approach for this one. Medea meets Touch Of Evil. Harmonia and young Adrian Sherwood are getting loose on some pentatonic Greek Traditional music from Epirus. Jay did it again and we are very happy to release this one.”

West coast composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has chartered a pioneering career with multiple critically-acclaimed albums since 2015. Following the release of The Kid in 2017, Smith focused her energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multidisciplinary creative environment for projects including the first volumes in her instrumental Electronic Series and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening within. She's continued to explore the endless possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the shapes, movements, and expressions found in the physical body's relationship to sound and color. It is this life-guiding interest that forms the foundational frequencies of her most recent full-length, The Mosaic of Transformation, a bright, sensorial glide through unbound wave phenomena and the radiant power discovered within oneself. "I guess in one sentence, this album is my expression of love and appreciation for electricity," says Smith. While writing and recording, she embraced a daily practice of physical movement, passing electricity through her body and into motion, in ways reflecting her audio practice, which sends currents through modular synthesizers and into the air through speakers. Not a dancer by any traditional definition, she taught herself improvisatory movement realizing flexibility, strength, and unexpectedly, a "visual language" stemming from the human body and comprised of vibrational shapes. Understood as cymatics, as Smith says, "as a reference for how frequencies can be visualized," much like a mosaic. Smith describes her first encounters with this mosaic; "the inspiration came to me in a sudden bubble of joy. It was accompanied by a multitude of shapes that were moving seamlessly from one into the other...My movement practice has been a constant transformation piece by piece. I made this album in the same way. Every day I would transform what I did yesterday...into something else. This album has gone through about 12 different versions of itself." As it has arrived, in a completed state, The Mosaic of Transformation is a holistic manifestation of embodied motions. Smith's signature textural curiosity that fans have grown to adore pivots naturally into a proprioceptive study of melody and timbre. Airy organ and voice interweave with burbling Buchla-spawned harmonic bubbles. "The Steady Heart" quivers to life, peppering blasts of wooden organ between winding vocal affirmations. As with a body, moving one portion requires a balance and counterbalance; here, subtle tonal twitchy signals fire in conjunction with coiling arias to create a mesmeric core. When the beat arrives at the midway mark, a swooping and jittery waltz, a sense of stasis in motion, a flow state, is sonically achieved. As soon as it syncs, it disappears back into the swirling ebbs of electric force. Other tracks stray into more ruminative physical realms. "Carrying Gravity" is built around string-like pads that expand and contract like a solar plexus, becoming taught and then loose. If the record could be summarized in a single movement, it is the 10-minute closing suite, a rapturous collage called "Expanding Electricity." Symphonic phrases establish the piece before washes of glittering electric peals and synthesized vibraphone helix into focus. Soon, Smith's voice grounds it all with an intuitive vocal hook, harmonized and augmented by concentric spirals of harp-and-horn-like sounds. Smith's music doesn't capture a specific emotion as much as it captures the joys of possessing a body, and the ability to, with devotion and a steady open heart, maneuver that vessel in space by way of electricity to euphoric degrees.

Green Vinyl

As Metal Preyers, London’s Jesse Hackett and Chicago-based Mariano Chavez distill a sozzled, bleary impression of their time spent with Lord Tusk and a crack squad of Ugandan musicians in Kampala, 2019 for the indomitable Nyege Nyege Tapes Documenting the result of six weeks of making music, art and videos, and Waragi Gin-fuelled rides into Kampala’s nightlife, ‘Metal Preyers’ takes form as an industrial/ambient film soundtrack for Chavez and Hackett’s visual art produced under the Teeth Agency moniker. Joined by a full battery of traditional percussion and strings, plus the canny use of whistling and Lord Tusk’s rude sound system sensibilities, the Afro-Anglo-Americano ensemble serve a triple AAA-rated trip that lures listeners into their intoxicated/intoxicating state of mind and effectively connotes the
experience of a jag deep into the belly of Uganda’s thrilling, sprawling capital city at a crossroads of East and Central Africa.
It’s not the first time Jesse Hackett has worked with Ugandan musicians - his 2017 album ‘Ennanga Vision’ saw him teamed with electro-acholi stars Otim Alpha, Geoffrey Opiyo Twongweno, and Albert Bisaso Ssempeke - however the vibe this time is more psychedelic in a road-level, grimy and noisy style thanks to the expanded platte of inputs, including an all-star Ugandan roll call of Otim Alpha, multi-instrumentalist Lawrence Okello, percussionist Omutaba, and Rian Treanorcollaborator Ocen, all girded by the vital ruggedness of London underground don, Lord Tusk.
In their pair of ‘Dream Sequence’ suites the album freewheels with delirious style, from mechanically musical drones in the title track to a quietly febrile conclusion recalling Craig Leon’s ‘Nommos’. Bouts of melodically stressed noise give way to Gin-steeped sing-song, chunks of chopped & screwed gristle, and dizzy clusters of Singeli-esque rhythm in a stop/start, unpredictable manner that frankly hasn’t been done on record quite like this before.
DJs will find ways of working this material into sets, although the album is really best swallowed in one for an intense, soundtrack-like experience that recalls the drunken rowdiness of films like ‘Wake In Fright’ or a febrile Safdie brothers flick set in Uganda, and speaks directly to the thrill of Kampala’s atmosphere at night.

If emptiness is heaviness is Godliness, Birds of Prey’s third full-length LP is an immaculate conception from on high. The record luxuriates in the spaces between. What’s left out says as much as what made it in. Deep, droning, and dub wise, “Vanishing Point” cascades in elegance. Its reference points call towards the sample manipulation of American tape music and the downward gaze of amniotic British bass music. It charts its own path nonetheless, building its own space for drifting off to. Unlike many peers operating in similar realms, Birds of Prey are a proper band, a foursome: Grant Aaron, Clay Wilson, Eric Holmes, and Camille Altay. Each are artists in their own right with a distinct practice. In Birds of Prey, their collaborations in studio take on a greater shape, whittled and edited into cosmic formlessness. Although borne of improvisation, you may never know that in the listening. “Vanishing Point” is a tight, coherent work, the sound of a cadre of talented musicians locked in flow. Rippling tones become glacial melodies. Cavernous drums emerge barely from the ether. Rhythms interlock, interpolate. Patterns repeat and dissolve whence they came. There is untold potency in simplicity, and Birds of Prey make it known.

Dix Ailes is a musical proposal for 2 female voices, 1 percussionist, 1 electronic device and 1 place with high reverberation. Between minimalist music and pure pop, Dix Ailes plays on an acoustic illusion, that of making indistinguishable the origin of the sound (instrumental, loudspeaking or architectural), based on work on harmonics, frequency vibrations, the physical resonance of the place, psycho-acoustics.

Essentially centered on the voice, Dix Ailes addresses the notions of empty and full, of internal listening and silence, of liminarity and transformation. By a principle of initial composition based on symbols and archetypes, the music of Dix Ailes echoes universal rituals and myths, and shares with them a language that tempts to escape the sequences of rational logic, and thus to open up to an contemporary poetic landscape, made of archaic and invisible.

Window In is Michael Vallera’s third full length offering on Denovali, following All Perfect Days (2018) and Vivid Flu (2017). The four tracks that compose Window In are an exercise in density, movement, and space. Raw studio recordings of electric guitar were taken as the foundation, then heavily altered and manipulated through sampling, erasing the trace back to origin of the sound. The result is a series of vignettes that are unattached to a particular source but instead exist in an emotive and internal state.

Oberman Knocks makes a welcome return to aperture records since his last release Dilankex in 2014, which featured an outstanding 17 minute remix from autechre.
Working on other projects during this time seems to have charged his creativity and Knocks now propels himself back into the fold for his third album Trilate Shift with cleaner, more polished production and a change of direction which should certainly see his appeal rise across a wider audience.
Last year Knocks produced the soundtrack to The Red Tree, an award winning documentary film from Still films (New York/Dublin) and in 2016 he was commissioned by The Lowry in Salford to produce a sound installation, 30 Days of The Smiths, forming part of their Week 53 festival, a version of which was also performed live.
Trilate Shift sees Knocks serve up fourteen lustrous tracks of proficiency and divergent ingenuity encompassing interjections of disembodied vocals, setting the scene for a distinctive musical trajectory.

Ali Zarin, Muslimgauze Archive Series volume 35. Limited Edition 2 x LP

Clear Vinyl

Huerco S.’ West Mineral Ltd. coax out a lather of ambient downbeats and techno mutations from Russia’s Ol & Flaty in their 2nd volume of Serwed material Forged from intuitive live jams recorded in their home studios, Serwed’s sophomore side delivers 10 fractious, shapeshifting oddities full of lopsided, minimalist rhythms and uncanny spatial complexities. Each part is cut from the fabric of longer sessions and highlights points in their creative process where intersections of their individual inputs transcend the sum of their parts, generating strange and inquisitive new permutations of rhythm and sound, or a “kind of new entity” as they prefer to call them. Collected and arranged into album format, they make a uniquely
etheric flux that resonates richly with West Mineral Ltd.’s between-worlds aesthetic and adds up to a surreal and captivating bigger picture.
Variously touching on aspects of abstract techno dub, early-hours dancefloor experimentation, and heartstrung yacht rock strokes, the results smudge definitions of club music in a way that see those spaces as playgrounds for the imagination, and not simply sites of reenactments of the past, or outlets for alcohol suppliers. As such the album offers myriad options for altered state dancers and ‘floor-edge wallflowers, exploring a mutable range of styles between the Dynamo-meetsBellows flux of ‘Initial II’, the nervously stepping tics of ‘Platm’, and the strung-out 0PN-ism of ‘In Spare’, while the likes of ‘Grip’ and the jet-streaked minimal house abstraction of ‘Plane’ are more urgent in their bassy heft.
Ultimately ’Serwed II’ beautifully mimics and evokes a state of blipping thizz associated with the later hours of an MDMA buzz, yielding an immersive, impressionistic trip likely to leave its users gently disoriented but glowing with satisfaction.

Spencer Clark is back with a futuristic eco-friendly record. It’s life on earth as you never heard it.

The story goes like this: Spencer wanted to do a soundtrack for the yet to be made “Avatar 2”. And if you know Spencer’s work, you’ll know that he engaged on this mission reading material that influenced the rich and crazy imaginary world of “Avatar”. If you think about it a little bit, something like “Avatar” could have really come out from the mind of Spencer Clark.

But it didn’t. So, he dwelled around the idea of that soundtrack, working on what is now known as “Avatar Blue”. The record we now release is a selection he made from the 2CD released last year on his own Pacific City Sound Visions.*

Like many of Spencer’s other alias or incarnations, Star Searchers introduces the listener to a new world. Besides making sounds/soundtracks for alternative realities he cares about making a world for his music to live in. It’s never superficial or dedicated just to the act of imagination, Spencer creates sounds that sustain the reality he imagined. That’s why they’re so rich and consequential in the realization of music as a medium.

“Avatar Blue” is music but also literature. And cinema. Star Searchers’ sound creates an absorbent sound about what’s happening in aquatic life. It goes beyond the perception of what we’ve seen or what we’ve known, it’s a neo-future aquatic life, with a world building structure and sounds and narratives that go along with it.

All done with a sound-aesthetics that could be described as slowed-down-trance, that fits 1980s synth nostalgia and dreams of sci-fi to come.
*Note: The 2CD version is available as a digital download with a purchase of the album on selected stores.

Our final release of 2019 is a 4-track EP by Red Axes, the prolific production duo of Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi from Tel Aviv. The pair were raised on a diet of post-punk, new-wave, and Italo-disco at fogged out warehouse and basement parties. Their own productions and remixes have appeared on labels such as I’m a Cliché, Correspondant, and Hivern Discs. “Voom” kicks things off with wild percussive toms and bubblegum female chants over a fat electro break. “Doom” rightly brings us into a dark, menacing cave where see pulses of light in the form of carefully placed synth lasers. “Mister Q” serves up metallic rhythms a la Front 242 backed with a strobe-ready sound. “Prblems” is the 10-minute anthem that closes the EP in typical Axes fashion: militant drums, battered electronics and lovingly drowned traditional instruments hypnotically pulse and reverberate. All songs have been mastered by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The EP is housed in a die cut jacket that keeps the dancefloor vibes with a bold, DIY design by Eloise Leigh.

Orestt / Markus Gibb / Disrute / Balaban

This is another incident of despair, hope and rhythmic adventures. Nothing beautiful without struggle.

ERUPTION is an outburst of creaking energies, unconventional ideas, arhythmic thoughts, cacophonous images and musical phantasms. ERUPTION is also the name of the second album by Kluster, a band project of the musician and video artist Conrad Schnitzler, who died in 2011, together with his colleagues Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. ERUPTION was also the name of a two-day festival that took place in July 2018 at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. For two days, artists and musicians from different generations and working in various fields met here, who were in one way or the other inspired by the comprehensive oeuvre Conrad Schnitzlers’, as well as by his free-spirited thoughts and actions. The result was a multi-faceted programme of concerts, performances, sound and video installations, which resulted in the release of these two special records on Pudel Produkte, the house-own label of the Golden Pudel Club. The single features a previously unreleased piece by Conrad Schnitzler & Ken Montgomery as well as a story told by Asmus Tietchens about his father and Schnitzler, who unwittingly crossed the Atlantic together on the steamboat Bornhofen in the late 1950s, one as an engineer, the other as a heater. The LP brings together the festival's invited artists, Schnitzler‘s contemporaries

such as Ken Montgomery, Wolfgang Seidel and Asmus Tietchens, as well as young artists who developed works especially for ERUPTION. Among them are Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny with fragments from their performance Phantom Con Ballet, the DJ Phuong-Dan who composed a musical collage from the poem About Rhythmus and rhythm studies by Schnitzler, a piece from the performance of Felix Kubin, who uses a light scanner and his modular synthesizer to convert graphic notation into sound, a theatrical sound piece by Carl & Sohn (also known as Les Trucs), the producer and DJ RVDS, who interacted with the piece Tanz im Regen by Conrad Schnitzler and many more. Initiated and curated by Nika Son, a musician and artist based in Hamburg

Ionisation is the first LP by Italian poet Adriano Spatola. Born in Yugoslavia in 1941, by the age of 23 he became a major force in the Italian avant-garde. “Towards Total Poetry,” Spatola’s critical study on the state of modern poetry, spells out his position: “to become a total medium, to escape all limitations to include theater, photography, music, painting, typography, cinematographic techniques, and every other aspect of culture, in a utopian ambition to return to origins.” Graphic poetry (cut-up zeroglyphs), volatile and beautiful prose (particularly his books The Porthole and Majakovskiiiiiiij), and of course sound poetry, represented here for the first time. Spatola was the editor of many underground publications: Baobab (a legendary audio-cassette magazine), Tam Tam, and Edition Geiger. Each of his pursuits spread the margins of the format, all done with a relentless, piercing curatorial eye.

Spatola has dark, drunken wit in spades. In his sound poems, an even more saturated persona is conjured. A desperate humor sneers through this LP, a humor that has surrendered to the severe joke of life long ago - lashing out on syllables and ingrown word games. Particularly, his classic “Aviation/Aviateur” (akin to his “Seduction/Seducteur,” & “Violacion/Violateur” etc.). Read by lesser performers, these pieces would falter and float by in the trough, though Spatola’s bull-like confidence tears through. “Poker Foundation” features the poet hysterically singing “the play of the words” over a classical radio piece, mocking and squawking against the string swells. Steve Lacy plays scissors, knife, and saxophone on “Hommage à Eric Satie,” a piece originally recorded for the luxurious Cramps LP boxset Futura. Collaborators Gian Paolo Roffi and Paul Vangelisti are also featured across the collection.

The LP concludes with the titular work “Ionisation,” recorded just days before his premature death in 1988. Feeling his sinking health, his belly in the quicksand, he prefaces the piece, “a funeral march for my body.” He proceeds to scrape and pound the microphone on his chest, face, and clothing. This thick pumping of Adriano’s torso rapping across the speakers abruptly stops after two minutes. A piercing moment.

I was born the day after Adriano died, which has some poetic meaning to me, naturally. I am indebted to him, his sickly sweet manner. The opportunity to publish these largely unknown sound works is an honor which brings a warmth to my torso. Much appreciation goes to Giovanni Fontana (poet and dear friend of Adriano), who helped produce this edition with me. “Every single word has been a tempest of gestures.“

Sean McCann, January 2020

Bullion returns with a brand new release for 2020. Black vinyl housed in reverse board single sleeve and black poly-lined inner sleeve. Includes the singles ‘Hula’ and ‘We Had A Good Time’.Follows October’s release of Bullion’s ‘4 Down’ compilation, which featured covers from the likes of Westerman, Joviale, M. T. Hadley and Bullion himself. Nathan Jenkins is a songwriter and producer from West London, currently based in Lisbon. Under his pseudonym Bullion he’s released records on Young Turks, R&S, The Trilogy Tapes and Whities. As a producer and mixer, Nathan’s worked with Sampha, David Byrne, Paul Epworth and Westerman. Remix credits include Todd Terje, Metronomy, Model 500 and Dita Von Teese.

Twisted post-IDMish electronics by Siegmar Fricke

Blaq Numbers welcomes back DJ Psychiatre for the 8th
instalment in its Blaq Tapes series. The French producer’s
Introspection EP boasts 5 cuts of modern and melodic Detroitleaning House with flashes of early Trance, talkbox Acid and
other psychedelia. Big hitters Goddard and Pedr (aka Pierre
Moritz) contribute two remixes to the release; the former
jumping on the ghostly, soulful breaks of “Sumthin About Luv”
while the latter reworks “Falling Endlessly” into a grooving
110bpm roller.

Comprising producer-engineer Joel Krozer ((Clark (Warp), Smerz (XL Recordings), When Saints Go Machine (Escho)) and Brian Della Valle (singer-songwriter of Of The Valley) the Copenhagen based duo got together when Joel heard Brian recording in the studio below his. Their encounter led to a series of late-night recording sessions, together with collaborator Søren Holme, that quickly became the cornerstone of their partnership and the formation of Fluqx. Monolith is the exceptional debut album of Fluqx and offers state of the art production and highly creative Electronica tracks with that special something. The sound of Fluqx is distinct - a merging of deeply warped synthesizers, swirling textures and Brian’s affecting vocals. There is a versatile range of sounds and atmospheres across these twelve tracks - from the delicate arpeggios of ‘Carvings’ and ‘Ephemeral Objects’, to the massive drum sounds and cutting synth leads of ‘Monolith’ and ‘Hanami’. Della Valle’s warm falsetto navigates through this dynamic landscape with ease and hooks the listener in on tracks like ‘Feather’ and ‘Staring At The Sun’, whilst providing space to breathe on tracks like ‘Here‘ and ‘Golden Hour‘. Elsewhere, ambient, droney textures are at the forefront on ‘Mojave Booth’ and ‘Diamond Dust’, maintaining the dreamy, otherworldly nature of the Fluqx sound