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Multivocal is a polyphonic maze that unfolds to both the body and the mind. A generative take on rhythm and spacial perception, it presents the same events in different configurations. The two pieces of the album, "Solid of Revolution" and "Never Odd or Even", mirror each other with the same principle in different musical scales: steady pulses with one millisecond difference in tempo start beating together, then slowly phase organically and progress into ever-changing rhythmic patterns until they finally return to unison.

Multivocal emphasizes shifts of attention in the listener’s experience and plays with the expectations that frame it. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, the pieces reveal the many different aspects and modes of perception that can arise within the same sequence of notes. In this way Multivocal is influenced by concepts of gestalt psychology such as multistable perception - a term describing ambiguous patterns that offer multiple interpretations at once. The minimalism and repetitive quality of the music also refers to trance-inducing and collective music practices, driven by the strong bodily affects induced through the use of rhythms.

Jessica Ekomane's debut LP, Multivocal, is brilliantly original but will also appeal to fans of Caterina Barbieri, Alessandro Cortini, Shasta Cults, ELEH and the strand of minimal electronic music that runs through the Imprec catalog. Pressed in a first edition of 500 copies.

Those two compositions were recorded live during Ars Electronica 2018 at the occasion of the sleeping event "Sonatas for Sleep/less", curated by multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang and cultural theorist Matthew Fuller.

Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.

Jessica Ekomane is one the six composers chosen as collaborators by Natascha Süder Happelman for her installation at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019. She’s also part of the SHAPE Platform roaster of artists for 2019. Her work has been presented in various institutions worldwide such as CTM festival (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), Dommune (Tokyo) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha).

Black Vinyl 2x12"

‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is NYC mutant Madteo’s incredible new album of trigger-happy club graffiti on Demdike Stare’s DDS, weighing in a keenly anticipated follow-up to 2012’s cult-classic
‘Noi No’ LP for Sähkö Splitting at the seams with deviant funk and irrepressible attitude, Madteo’s first LP in 7 years forms a fractal, mixtape-like mosaic of asymmetric techno informed by skewed traces of rap, House, R&B and dancehall. Its 12 tracks are delivered in an enviably nonchalant, freehand style that’s become the Italian-American artist’s ear-snagging signature since 2012’s ‘Noi No’ and ‘Mad Dip Revue’ albums, and also a dozen 12”s and mixtapes over the interim; all of which exerted heavy inspiration for everyone from Andy Stott and Joy O to Demdike Stare over the past decade, making this new LP a perfectly unusual fit for the anything-goes DDS aesthetic shared by label alumni including Mica Levi, Equiknoxx, Iueke and Shinichi Atobe.
Without beating around the bush, ‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is a straight-up masterpiece of cut-up sampledelia bound to make the club dance differently. Crammed with sawn-off edits that never lose the thread, its wild and effortlessly inventive turns of phrase are anathema to linear club music convention, generating fizzing alchemy from mutually exclusive bedfellows such as dancehall and techno, or R&B and noise that could really only be executed by a producer of Madteo’s calibre. Yet for all its singular nature, the album is also patently symptomatic of the times,
sub-consciously parsing a gripping intimacy, personality and urgent yet elusive psychedelia from ubiquitous media overload.
Kicking off with another *****-sampling zinger ‘1 4 U’ (following his infamous use of ‘Marvin’s Room’ on ‘Noi No’), and ending up mired in the melancholy gauze of ‘The Lies That Bind’, at each step the
album effortlessly resists a struggle to square the nature of artistic expression. Fragments of gospel blues noise intersect gauntlets of filtered house fuckry, while restless Autechrian electro rubs up against uncoiled trap and needle-worrying levels of textured bass turbulence, leading to an outrageous turn of stuttering ragga-tekno in ‘Resident Alien (Broke-’n-Steppers Reluctant Club Mix)’ and a final side of collapsed, post-club styles that will leave listeners wondering wtf just happened, and ready to do it all again.

Yellow Vinyl 2x12"

‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is NYC mutant Madteo’s incredible new album of trigger-happy club graffiti on Demdike Stare’s DDS, weighing in a keenly anticipated follow-up to 2012’s cult-classic
‘Noi No’ LP for Sähkö Splitting at the seams with deviant funk and irrepressible attitude, Madteo’s first LP in 7 years forms a fractal, mixtape-like mosaic of asymmetric techno informed by skewed traces of rap, House, R&B and dancehall. Its 12 tracks are delivered in an enviably nonchalant, freehand style that’s become the Italian-American artist’s ear-snagging signature since 2012’s ‘Noi No’ and ‘Mad Dip Revue’ albums, and also a dozen 12”s and mixtapes over the interim; all of which exerted heavy inspiration for everyone from Andy Stott and Joy O to Demdike Stare over the past decade, making this new LP a perfectly unusual fit for the anything-goes DDS aesthetic shared by label alumni including Mica Levi, Equiknoxx, Iueke and Shinichi Atobe.
Without beating around the bush, ‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is a straight-up masterpiece of cut-up sampledelia bound to make the club dance differently. Crammed with sawn-off edits that never lose the thread, its wild and effortlessly inventive turns of phrase are anathema to linear club music convention, generating fizzing alchemy from mutually exclusive bedfellows such as dancehall and techno, or R&B and noise that could really only be executed by a producer of Madteo’s calibre. Yet for all its singular nature, the album is also patently symptomatic of the times,
sub-consciously parsing a gripping intimacy, personality and urgent yet elusive psychedelia from ubiquitous media overload.
Kicking off with another *****-sampling zinger ‘1 4 U’ (following his infamous use of ‘Marvin’s Room’ on ‘Noi No’), and ending up mired in the melancholy gauze of ‘The Lies That Bind’, at each step the
album effortlessly resists a struggle to square the nature of artistic expression. Fragments of gospel blues noise intersect gauntlets of filtered house fuckry, while restless Autechrian electro rubs up against uncoiled trap and needle-worrying levels of textured bass turbulence, leading to an outrageous turn of stuttering ragga-tekno in ‘Resident Alien (Broke-’n-Steppers Reluctant Club Mix)’ and a final side of collapsed, post-club styles that will leave listeners wondering wtf just happened, and ready to do it all again.

Recorded by Randy Williams in 1997 at home studio in San Francisco, California, after a two year stay at Camp Darby military base near Pisa, Italy and some occasional off-duty visits to Giancarlo Lobel in Rome and Marina di Pisa. The encounters made in that period were inspiring for Williams to create a strange and personal style upon his return to the United States. Released and distributed privately in Italy and USA to group of artists and appreciators as compact disc after spectacles, and as music library soundtrack.

Pivotal Iranian artist Ata Ebtekar mounts a head-buzzing debut for Diagonal, pushing microtonal tunings and timbres into mind-bending geometrical designs that echo the modular synth + strings formulæ of Dariush Dolat-Shahi for Smithsonian Folkways, but keen much deeper into noisy, uncanny valleys of modernist perceptual exploration
‘Parallel Persia’ presents the latest iteration of Sote’s restlessly searching sound which has been in action for 30 years now. Commissioned for an AV performance at Donau festival in 2018, the album is a natural extension of his stunning ‘Sacred Horror In Design’ LP with Opal Tapes, feeding classical Iranian music tropes into a computer and modular synths to diffract and detach their meaning
and operation, open them up to strange possibilities of electro-acoustic practice in the process.
But more than ever in ‘Parallel Persia’, his focus turns from percussion to tonal relationships, combining various synthesis techniques and instrumental recordings at the service of a holistic
voice and “locked timbre”, or more simply a poetic way of uniting his sounds into a brilliant aural energy.
As Ebtekar explains, “Conceptually, Parallel Persia deals with the illusion and creation of an artificial hyperreal culture manipulated and controlled by an imperious agency somewhere within all galaxies. Like all realities, greed and arrogance channels destruction of life. However, the path to havoc includes resistance via beauty, grace and symmetry. Snapshots of an apocryphal Iran is presented via sonic schematics for a synthetic “Meta-Persian” experience. This experience can be in our present day life or maybe somewhere else somehow differently in a parallel world…”
In this surreal noumenal space, Sote triggers a series of beguiling chain reactions that resonate throughout each track, with electronic frequencies modulating the acoustic and vice-versa in a dizzying and mathematically sound “euphonious complete whole.” Here, the Tar and Santur initially sound like themselves in ‘Modality Transporter’, but by the end of this opener they are transformed into ribboning tendrils of extruded electronics, and continue to morph in fascinating ways, joined by unearthly voices in ‘Brass Tacks’, and pulled into bittersweet taffy on ‘Atomic Hypocrisy’, while utterly upending our proprioceptions in ‘Trans Force’, and ancient-futuristic chants and dance rhythms working in parallel dimensions to Rashad Becker in ‘Pipe Dreams’, until he’s speaking in a purely singular language of unique intonation and shatterproof, beatless rhythm on ‘Pseudo
Scholastic’.

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: DOME (July 1980), DOME 2 (October 1980) and DOME 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, WILL YOU SPEAK THIS WORD: DOME IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.

These albums represent some of the most beautifully stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.

Previously issued in the out of print DOME 1-4+5 box set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card

Tokyo based H.Takahashi follows up his ‘Raum’ LP for Where To Now? with ‘Sonne und Wasser’, a continuation & development of his unmistakable brand of meditative Pulse Minimalism.

Where ‘Raum’ was concerned with architectural space and energy, ‘Sonne und Wasser’ turns its focus towards the lives of the plants & flowers that live amongst us. This LP has been born from a deep adoration of Horticulture and the microscopic lifecycle of the plant world, where themes of vitality & slow growth are explored through Takahashi’s gloriously delicate & considered movements.

In his own words… “I wanted to express the plant that was slow, quiet, powerful, and full of vitality. In an attempt to express the world of one plant, the four songs that make up this album are all based on the first one, ‘Nymphaea’… The melody, chord and tone throughout become familiar, and each change of scene is expressed by subtly changing the arrangement and development of sounds. This is intended for when you want to feel like a plant, or as an indoor soundtrack - I want the music to be played so that it decorates the plants within a room.”

The beauty of Takahashi’s work lays in his commanding ability to stop you in your tracks via a force that is barely there, embracing the use of space & silence to deliver a deep & considered trip. Back in 2017 we said of his then LP… “The music is to help us function - it's music to work to, to sleep to, to help us find a sense of space and oneness within a world that is increasingly wild and untameable.” A Couple of years down the line and our World has continued on its mad path, and it is a true privilege to enable a healing output, & to encourage a global opportunity to switch off and immerse oneself in H.Takahashi’s flourishing Fauna phantasm.

“Takahashi draws cues from a melting pot of closely connected yet wholly individual strands of Minimalism - from the Japanese Minimalist works from the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa, to masters such as Erik Satie and John Cage, and Ambient leaders Brian Eno and Roedelius, Takahashi soaks this historical influence and rings it out it through a modern filter to create stillness, ethereal beauty, and transcendent energy.”

Mad Habitat returns with a serene full-length from Eye Nono. Channeling the more progressive side of American New Age and 80s Public Access soundtracks alongside the rich tradition of Australian ambient music, the record is awash with dreamy melodies and drifting pads. Evoking days spent by the water along the coastline, the album is a beautiful synthesis of the ocean's abundant natural beauty.

“Experimental trio Giraffe crystalize time on ‘Desert Haze’, their new LP on Marionette. Giraffe is the musical project of Sascha Demand (guitar), Jürgen Hall (keys), and Charly Schöppner (percussion). Sascha Demand is a composer that comes from a contemporary and improvised musical background, collaborating with the likes of Ensemble Integrales and Vinko Globokar. Jürgen Hall works in electroacoustic experimental projects, theatre and film scores, with releases on Staubgold and Edition Stora. Charly Schöppner is known for his popular music releases such as Boytronic on major production companies in the 1980´s and composes for theatre, dance, and film scores. With only a couple of releases to date on the wonderful Meakusma imprint as well as an EP on Marmo, little is known about Giraffe. After letting go of other artistic projects, the trio now focuses solely on Giraffe by continuously searching for and finding their own unique language.

Sascha, Jürgen and Charly have quite diverse musical backgrounds, though morphing into Giraffe they tower into one single composer. Their music is a critical statement, not in a political sense but rather an artistic one. Being mindful about what it means to create and how to position themselves as artists nowadays (without the constant hassle of being en vogue and short-lived trends) shaped their rather rare and stoic artistic stance. It is refreshingly honest to see their expression develop so naturally.

On Desert Haze, they’ve created a vibrant and minimalistic tribal sound that feels inspired by the Saharan traditional music of the Tuareg, Jazz, and German psychedelic krautrock. Giraffe themselves also list the radical music of the Viennese School (Schoenberg along with his pupils Berg and Webern) as well as the Köln School with its early electronic experiments as their main influence and inspiration. More precisely the composition process and the organization of musical material within space and time, where a conceptual and intellectual approach melds with an experimental yet expressive sound searching method.

Side A focuses on the trios studio work; it is built around tone color and pitch analysis of resonating prepared guitar sounds. Through a unique mixture of free improvisation and a serialism "rule set”, they develop instrumental layers and structures to form their tracks. Side B sees Giraffe playing more freely with a reduced setup - representative of what you may hear when listening to them live.
Desert Haze, along with its track-titles, showcases an almost mimetic approach to art. The haptic music grabs the listener not as a passive recipient but as an active resonant body to vibrate through. One can almost feel the Elements, pressure and heat forming a diamond, hypnotic overtones ringing through windy caves, shamanistic rhythms conjuring up mysterious and ancient landscapes - where the constant cycle of sedimentation and erosion reveals structures of fragile beauty - always gentle to the hand’s touch and the mind’s eye.”

How could we describe multi-instrumentalist Penelope Antena ? From her Lo-Fi sounding EP ‘Down the Habit Hole “, to her soul infused duo “Honey Drips” with Swiss producer Deheb, to the fragile and tormented melodies of “33-1 Oak” her first single out on the new Parisian label Kowtow Records.

Penelope can proudly say she takes from her mother Isabelle Antena when it comes to cross musical genre. Though the commun thread between all the worlds she cleverly navigates, would definitely be her vocals. Experimenting instinctively with different techniques, Antena uses her voice as a harmonic lab of emotions. Sometimes intimate, sometimes haunted. Always Original.

Her first LP Antelope - entirely self-produced - comes as proof that the music she makes changes and evolves to perfectly match her personal story. After a painful heartache, Antena settles alone in her parents house, lost in the woods somewhere in the south of France. Surrounded by her grand father’s instrument (Marc Moulin- great Belgian Composer from the 70’s ) she writes this 10 tracks album field with melancholia and broken love. Like on the branches of the Cedars around her house, It’s a folky electronic breeze that hallows onto this record.

New sound, same familiar feeling when listening to Antena (be it Mother or Daughter) : acoustic and electronic have rarely been so intertwined, beautifully combined. And if Bandcamp placed her song “Abuse” as one of the best of 2018, 2019 is sure set out to be a good year for this multi-facetted artist with narrative propension.

In her most personally narrative work to date, A Fossil Begins To Bray is the follow up on Dais Records for NYC producer Hiro Kone, furthering the dialogue set forth on her 2018 release, Pure Expenditure. While the statements on Pure Expenditure rallied behind a point of dangerous excess and injustice, the material on A Fossil Begins To Bray embark upon a journey of discovery and selfanalysis, proposing a potential reorientation towards absence in hopes of illuminating potential futures.

In Mao’s own words, “This album considers the power of absence as neither a lack or deficit, but as a quiet, indeterminable force to cultivate in this time of looming and unrelenting techno-fascism. It asks that we take pause to consider our learned languages and actualities and to better consider how desire shapes our recollections and interpretations of this ‘existence.’” This allegory is expertly applied to every song on A Fossil Begins To Bray. Mao has established a long history of employing absence in her productions to maximum effect. With a vast assortment of diverse elements at play, no single track ever feels overly convoluted and further illustrates Hiro Kone’s skillful attention to dynamic tension and flow. Tracks such as “Fabrication of Silence” and “Submerged Dragon” perfectly represent the power of absence, utilized in a matter to create unique amalgams of decisive, cinematic techno rhythms from the electronic void. As the melodic elements contained within A Fossil Begins To Bray begin to unravel and slowly take form, the unaware are rewarded with a driving yet tangible refrain that offers resolve in contrast to the dense, textureladen backdrop that forms the album’s foundation. The first single, “Feed My Ancestors”, expands upon Hiro Kone’s signature take on electronic music structures. Seemingly free from the predictable contracts imposed by any one genre’s stereotypes, Hiro Kone throttles the foreboding bassline in favor of more calculated, abstract cut-ups that gracefully hold the track in place between hopeful utopia and something more ominous.

Nord Noir spins a tale as much as it paints a sonic landscape. Its progenitor Toh Imago took the time to sharpen his artistic chops under a few different guises, resisting the 21st-century affliction that is instant gratification at all costs, ultimately spending over 18 months to develop the narrative arc underlying his first opus. Using the historical context of the north of France's proletariat past, he created a dense, hypnotic, haunted album that will sit comfortable alongside the works of Daniel Avery, Efdemin and Blawan.

12"LP plus 7", ltd copies

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

The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form.

“We were like children playing with new toys,” Daniel recalls of the early days of American Gamelan music. “Though, as we moved into the 1980s, I moved away from Javanese traditional formalism completely, no longer using a constant stream of notes.” Daniel became a father twice over in the early 80s, transforming his compositional voice, finding himself open to new affects. Notably, the Sierra fir species, ‘abies firma’ … “These trees gave me a sense of rising and rising, all their branches reaching toward sun and sky. Looking at them across open spaces, I felt myself part of their upward striving. The tall mountain trees became rising themes and arpeggios, sometimes even sweeping across the six octaves of the gamelan.”

This album holds a variety of recordings including an especially immersive tape-delay piece for the rebab, a bowed Javanese instrument. A sort of Eastern Frippertronics weaving the stereo field. Another standout is a semi-improvised flute and gamelan work, ebbing in slowly like a night’s wind. “Accumulation” and “Abies Magnifica,” the spirited opening pieces, exemplify the precision and dexterity of Daniel’s group, The Berkeley Gamelan, who at this time were constantly performing around North America. Two pieces on the album were co-composed by Schmidt and the late Lou Harrison, who helped conceive of the American style of gamelan and enjoyed a similarly long and varied musical career. “Unempins to Sociseknum” is based on arranging Harrison’s social security number against Schmidt’s unemployment insurance number. A window into the cooperative spirit and experimentation of the late 70s.

With each LP comes a CD including the addition of “One White Crow,” a three-part tapestry of melodic fragments which epitomizes the second phase of Schmidt’s composing; a divergence from both Javanese and European music. Daniel states, “William James once said that one white crow would suffice to overturn science’s assertion that all crows are black. I felt myself to be ‘one white crow’ amidst the prominent, established musical styles.”

Edition of 1000 with 20-page pamphlet holding program notes, scores, & a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms. Including a complimentary CD with additional 20-minute suite

Sean McCann, September 2019

This split release unites two female underground acts, both of whom have recently become pivotal parts of the contemporary electronic musical landscape in Japan. Hot on the heels of the acclaimed PAREDO EP compilation (TAL12), which has been released in May 2019 (and also includes contributions from Lena Willikens and Miki Yui), the SUPER MILD split album is the second outing by KOPY and TENTENKO on TAL. Their newest works punctuate their highly individual approaches to contemporary experimental dance music.

TENTENKO is a Tokyo-based electronic music producer. Her career began in 2013 when she joined the mainstream idol group BIS. Immediately after her departure from BIS in 2014 she commenced work on her solo project under her artist name TENTENKO. Since then she has radically reinvented her music away from glossy J-POP towards weird and industrial rooted dancefloor. TENTENKO first made a name for herself on the alternative Japanese music scene with a steady flow of live performances as well as collaborations with members of the legendary Japanese noise band HIJOKAIDAN.

For a few years now KOPY has been an unpredictable and charismatic part of the vital electronic music scene of Osaka. She has quickly garnered a reputation for creating her live sets exclusively with borrowed electronic equipment. Her name KOPY very much originates from this "concept". Apart from a few performances at Düsseldorfs famous nightspot SALON DES AMATEURS, she has been invited by LENA WILLIKENS to her showcase at the MEAKUSMA FESTIVAL in 2018. Her sinister dancefloor mystique is heavily steeped in the free spirited noise and rhythm cultures of her hometown.

A malicious statement of intent from Pact Infernal’s Altar label, Mors Omnibus I is an assemblage of amenable architects of dread summoned together to create a collection of ominous rhythmic rituals.

Silver / Gold C90 Cassette in J Card.

Chambre Noire Records is a new label out of Montreal, managed by Peter Bunzinelli. It is the continuation of a mix series and a radio show on N10.AS, active since 2017. For its very first release, it features Puma & The Dolphin’s debut record, the Primitive EP, including a remix by Michal Turtle. P&TD is a Bulgarian producer based in Sofia. The Primitive EP focuses on firedance grooves, exotic percussion along with a dub and post-punk approach.
A1 - Jungle Futura The EP open With this wild chugger. Layering jungle sounds with loose hand percussion, the mood is at the crossroads between Latin and oriental influences. As the track progresses, the rhythmic section is enriched by skippy snares and a variety of vocal samples, sweeps, and melodies, with undeniable firedance-inducing results. A2 - Camel in Dub
Darker and more synthetic in some regards, this track is closely aligned to the post-punk paradigm with its bass guitar and Linn Drum groove, and dub techniques skillfully used by the producer to create a rather psychedelic mise en scène. After laying down the foundations of this plodding rhythm, satellite voices, rhythmic and melodic elements follow one another, taking the dancer on a real trip. A3 - The Dress With vocal samples and a bass guitar at the forefront interspersed with minimalist but highly efficient rhythmic elements, melodies and other bleeps & bloops engaged in ear-catching interplay, there is something loose, sensual and slightly hazy about this track. B1 - Cobra Dance Taking a similar yet slightly different approach to the post-punk sound of previous tracks, this tune features a catchy bassline and groovy percussion of a rather Latin persuasion, alternating between vocal samples, melodic elements, and rhythmic phrases. In a sense, this track is reminiscent of the spirit of Martin Hannett’s work with ESG, that is to say, groovy dance music that feels like the opposite of synthetic.
B2 - The Dress (Michal Turtle Remix) Highly-esteemed British producer Michal Turtle’s remix of The Dress is a stunner. Stripping the track down to its primordial elements and treating sounds in dramatic and psychedelic fashion creates a very mystical and trippy feeling all over the remix which feels eminently balearic but with a unique twist. Light footed and dreamy on one hand, groovy as hell and impossible not to dance to on the other, this is probably what dancing on clouds feels like.

DRNTTCKS return with their fifth full-length release, this time on british tape label Industrial Coast. "White Gaze" takes a grim look at Europe anno 2019: ongoing wars against migration through the EU government and Frontex, the rise of racist nationalist parties all over the continent, a re-installment of identity politics and re-legitimation toxic masculinity. Things are fucked, but maybe they are as fucked now as they were in 1910 or 1986, because the regime has been mostly the same. It’s the panoptic stare of white, wealthy and more than often male, heterosexual cis bodies. Who still set the rules. Who still distribute the power.

All graphic work on this release is done by artist Elisabeth Thoma. The photos used for "White Gaze" were taken in the ethnographic departement of a natural history museum. There were no white bodies objectified or exhibited.

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Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it and curate sonic conversations from others.

Disc 1 contains the very first and last known recordings of Burgess's voice alongside domestic incidents, rehearsals and answering machine messages, while Disc 2 invites 23 artists and musicians to remix the rare material into a unique Burgess portrait far beyond 'A Clockwork Orange'.

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917, Anthony Burgess was educated at Xaverian College in that city and at Manchester University. He served in the army from 1940 to 1946 and as an education officer in Malaya and Brunei from 1954 to 1959. He published more than 50 books (including 'A Clockwork Orange' and his masterpiece, 'Earthly Powers') and composed around 250 musical works. He was created a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by President Mitterrand of France and a Commandeur de Mérite Culturel by Prince Rainier of Monaco. He died in London in 1993. His books are still read all over the world.

Alan Dunn is an artist and curator based between Liverpool and Leeds, where he is a reader in Art & Design at Leeds Beckett University. His projects have been presented at Tate Britain, ICA, Liverpool Art Prize, BBC Radio and Bluecoat.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester is an independent educational charity which encourages public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.

The fourth Plafond sees fine-crafted contrasting pieces complement each other in courtesy of Ulla Straus and Oceanic. Along the wide arbitrary landscape of listening or 'ambient' music, it is a delight to have two artists, separated by the vast Atlantic, contributing quite opposite interpretations of such to the series. Perceptual time feels as a recurrent theme which binds them, albeit in a whole different modus operandi. In her iconic tactile productions, Straus excavates levels of advanced musical complexity in the seemingly most simple. Throughout two tracks her crude and beautiful technique riffles, compositions that remain prone to the transient, combining field recordings with morphing saxophone and guitar. This is deeply evocative music that turns its recipient into a mode of contemplation. 'I Forgot to Take a Picture' breathes melancholic romanticism, 'Becoming Warm' feels lorn yet hopeful. Pastoral haze over a rouge-tainted barren, the crackling insides of a wooden forest house. Picturesque and minimalist, Pennsylvania's Straus manages to temporarily stop the sand from gravitating downwards. Oceanic antagonises Straus with the triptych 'Three Sides of a Shell', recalling different emotions adhering to the fourth dimension. As a performing artist Oceanic masters the element of suspense. Here, over the course of nineteen minutes, a three-note sequence is explored within the producers imaginatory, chapterised, providing moments to navigate through his fictitious galaxy. Stuttering melodies across azure waters, synthesised bleeps as flickering stars over a moonlit mountain pass. Oceanic's music feels advanced through actively incorporating contemporary futurism, whilst never losing the glacial glance that is so familiar to its early nineties foregoers. It is as if listening to 'Three Sides...' heightens the senses, towards possibility, innovation even, triggering illusions of time dilation, shattering the hourglass. Comes in hand printed dreamy, pink sleeve, including Obi-strip, by the BAKK Innerspace Ink Station.

Shukai is psyched to announce our second release - music for the animated television film Alice Through the Looking Glass, which has never been released before. The music was recorded in 1981 and the film was broadcasted on Soviet television in 1982.
Alice Through the Looking Glass created by Kyivnauchfilm studio and directed by Efim Pruzhansky is a colour animated film based on the novel by Lewis Carroll.

Volodymyr Bysrtiakov is a Soviet analogue of French Vladimir Cosma or Italian Ennio Morricone. Great soundtrack composer whose most active years were 80-90s when he worked at the Kyivnauchfilm studio which audio department was like the British BBC Radiophonic Workshop at those times.
The soundtrack for the animated film Alice Through The Looking Glass is an attempt to create a psychedelic electroacoustic piece with victorian flavour. The film animation style is similar to Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoon clips. You can find it on Youtube by the way.

Rites Of Passage' traditionally refer to rituals distinguishing movements from one period of life to the next. Solitary Dancer's debut LP evokes a retrospective of these experiences, organized into four acts: coming into being, detachment, liminality, and re-incorporation of the self. This narrative calls for a self-exploration of moral corruption, loss of innocence, social rebellion, and societal disillusionment.

Deathprod, a.k.a. Helge Sten, has been deeply embedded in the Oslo music community for decades, but his brooding soundscapes and deliberate process make him seem sometimes like a phantom. Sten is a founding member of Supersilent, adding his sounds and treatments to the avant jazz leanings of that powerful collective, and he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Biosphere, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
But Occulting Disk is the first new Deathprod album in 15 years; his attention to detail is next level, and the darkly powerful soundscapes arch and swell like the shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Raw, emotional, political and deliberate, this is ambient music with deep intention.

Fans of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Steve Reich, Autechre, Swans, and GAS will all need this record – Deathprod makes some of the most powerful experimental ambient composition of our time. His last LP, Morals and Dogma, from 2004, was listed as one of Pitchfork’s top 50 ambient albums of all time. FACT calls Sten the “dark ambient master.” The New York Times said “Sten loves to summon up thick, often ominous clouds of sound, gesturing at everything from avant-garde composition to black metal without ever quite revealing his hand.”

Take your phone, your tablet and your TV and throw them out the window! That’s the spirit and the idea uniting the eight tracks of the album “Out the Window” by Christopher Schwarzwälder & Iannis Ritter. Listening to this otherworldly piece of downtempo electronica will make you feel relieved and excited, as if you had actually removed your electronic shackles for a little while. This album is light and heavy at the same time, it’s in your room and outside, it is loud and quiet like an extroverted introvert.

The nature of this album is organic and analogue and simply weird - it’s a juxtaposition of well-known, homey sounds and the strange. The intro “Snow Broom” feels like waking up on holiday, where you hear the familiar sounds of your loved ones in the kitchen, however they are in a new kitchen, so it feels alluringly different. The title track “Out the Window” seems to conjure the listener and you will find yourself spacing out as if you were smoking really good sativa for the first time. Electron (feat. Mo) is another highlight, with its different characters it resembles an audio book of “The Neverending Story”. The vocals in “Make things smaller” and “Safe Place” feel hip-hop influenced and ancient, like someone rapping in-front of an open fire.

“Out the window” is an album for late summer, autumn, winter time or any time that you like to look out the window and inside your own mind.

Some time around 20 years ago, the artist known as Dub Surgeon made an absorbing album of beautiful dub infused with ambiance, found sounds and horizontal rhythms. The Lost Future was recorded at the former Amsterdam Film Academy where Dub Surgeon. The recording engineer for the project was Ricardo Villalobos. Dub surgeon and Ricardo Villalobos then mastered it together, putting it through several vintage mixers and recording it to 2 inch tape. Then, tragedy struck: a storm surged and ignited a fire that ravaged the studio. The master copy was thought to have been lost forever. Dub Surgeon stopped making music and disappeared into the shadows after just two EPs on Future Dub in 2002/3. But one day 15 years later, totally out of the blue, he received a demo of The Lost Future. "Pay attention to this," it said. Attached was a demo version of the long lost album and now, finally, it has a perfect and impossibly poetic home on Dubai's Ark to Ashes, which is named in homage to the story of Lee "Scratch" Perry burning down his Black Ark studio to rid it of demons. Sounding as fresh as ever, The Lost Future is an authentic dub experience with a story as special as the music itself

Shackleton works up a hypnotic group energy alongside avant-goddess Heather Leigh, percussionist Takumi Motokawa, and mallet player Raphael Meinhart in their debut as Tunes of
Negation for Shapednoise’s label; Cosmo Rhythmatic
‘Reach The Endless Sea’ is a heady blast of lysergic, chromatic colour and syncopated rhythms that partly imagines an alternative musical timeline where the Hawkwind and Ashra Tempel fans,
proto-Humanoid types, and new age travellers who made up the UK’s rave vanguard prevailed against the law to enact a freely psychedelic dance music. The album follows in the vein of
Shackleton’s previous trio of vocal-focussed trips for Honest Jon’s and his Woe To The Septic Heart! label to find the mystic pied piper’s spirit bolstered and tempered by a collaborative, multi-
directional flow of energies.
Gushing in five durational parts running between 10-15 minutes each - or long enough to draw listeners into their dilated temporality - the music comes in waves of pointed, timeless intensity and illusory suggestion, subtly shifting pattern with an acid-dosed logic. Following her triumphant ‘Throne’ LP’ in 2018, Heather Leigh provides sacral vocals to the canto couplet of ‘The World Is A Stage’ and ‘Reach The Endless Sea’, providing an elevated constant between its moire of possessed vibes and lilting rhythms, before the trio of instrumentalists take the reins on a mazy trajectory between the harmonic lather of ‘Tundra Erotic’, thru the sanguine meditation of ‘Nowhere Ending Sky’, and an epic, 15 minute invocation of ancient Indian raga traditions and mountaintop kosmiche in ‘Ruckschlag Rising Then Resonant’, before they all come down together in the Amazonian delta flow and oozing sprawl of ‘The Time Has Come.’
While no single description will sum up the potency and conviction of Tunes of Negation, their mission can be summed in a line from a poem by 13th C. mystic Jalalu’I-Din Rumi which inspired the album’s title, stating that ‘Reach The Endless Sea’ strives to “aid transmutation and enter into the light.”

The band TORSO is Ken G and Orie. Ken is from Tokyo underground rock band Group, who have previously released on P-Vine Records.
Summoning the vibes of Arthur Russell, and minimal composition, the duo use cello, flute, glockenspiel, piano and soprano sax to hone a warm, organic sound, already getting airplay on Japan Blues' show on NTS radio.

ANAMAI is the experimental folk project of Anna Mayberry and David Psutka - soft sounds to dent skin and flesh. The music is naked and exquisitely personal, threatening banality, but mainly an embrace of the commune. Dramatic and confidential anthems of divine insignificance. Across three studio albums the project has explored the nature of intimacy with tiny confessions released into vast lakes of sound. Simple songs punctuated by clusters of detail. The project is built on contradictions: traditional yet modern; miniscule yet infinite; proud but deflated. Something for everyone and nothing to no one. A search for peace?
ANAMAI will release their third album, Dream Baby, on Halocline Trance this fall. Listeners will hear residue from Psutka and Mayberry’s other projects - the scratchy expression of HSY + the functionality of EGYPTRIXX + the baroque digitalia of ACT! but ultimately the record breaks new ground in a long-running series of collaborations.
9 tracks of liquid sonics suggest an antecedent in early Harold Budd or a spiritual homage to the performative intimacy of Bossa Nova artists Joao Gilberto and Gal Costa. Drips of colour across an axis of sound, dimension and human experience.

ehind Dosage there is Sayoko, a Japanese woman living in Paris, who works with a rich, organic, yet destabilized musical style, but with a pulsating life that makes her pieces fascinating.

His songs - since they are songs here - on the edge of pop music, are made for re-listening; each passage revealing new secrets hidden in the complex mechanics of his compositions. Evidence is never at the rendezvous, and yet the pleasure of listening, the joy of being carried away by texts that border the surreal without ever complacent, grooves that always seem on the verge of "collapse without ever poking the nose, this pleasure and this joy, unique, do not leave us from one end to the other of this theory of the pink, UFO album, for those who seek this, and to surprise the others too.

Sayoko: voice, piano, bass, electronics;
Buz: battery; Franca Mai: poems;
Dirty_Pink: guitar;
Gaspar Claus: cello;
Vincent Epplay: electronics;
Nicolas Laffererie: guitar;
BN Würtz: electronics, bass, composition;
Simon Takahashi: electronics, composition

The collaboration between influential German artists Klaus Schulze and Pete Namlook led to the famous The Dark Side of the Moog series. The sixth part in the series offers more of their breeding music, although it’s one of the more experimental records from the series. The Final DAT starts with distorted text fragments and during the different parts of this recording an amount of techno is added to the musical layers. The volume shows the different directions the two composers headed two during their careers.

The pioneering composer Klaus Schulze created over 60 albums during his career, which started back in 1969. Pete Namlook is another German composer, who played an important role in the increasing popularity of electronic music.

Black Truffle is honoured to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom’s legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975 and here expanded to a double LP with the addition of over 40 minutes of contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems.

Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long opening piece “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones”, four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analysed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In “Chilean Drought”, three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. “Piano Etude I (Alpha)”, the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom’s “On Being Invisible”, in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones” but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the ‘performer’s active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge.’ Enriched with archival images and new notes from the composer, this expanded reissue of Brainwave Music is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of live electronic music and alive to the possibilities it might still contain.

You go 1500 km from Moscow in Siberia direction and you find Orenburg, the city located in the vast steppes, where «Serenades» come from. Started as a local music community, «Serenades» became a real hotspot involving dozens of international musicians and djs with podcasts and parties. Being true aficionados of music which lays between ethnic and electronic, «Serenades» have created a real oasis in Russian snow.

In 2019, «Serenades» continue their story with the first ever release - a big & eclectic compilation where every track is exclusively produced for the label concept by musicians from all over the world.

Shamanic ambient, percussive drums, slow industrial beats from the compilation clearly represent Serenade's taste in contemporary world music.

A collection of bedroom-engineered rhythms, psyched out slow jams and 4-dimensional steppers by GF. Very low business risk. Brought to you by Max & Can. Fictional Background: The cinematic vision of an unfinished short film project entitled ULAM SPIRAL served as the main inspiration for the score composed by Gerry Franke. Farcically over-dimensioned, the film was impossible to realise from a financial and practical perspective - a psychedelic blast of visual concepts, that lead to the unique narration style in which Franke tells an exotic story of death, a madness created by obstinacy, intrigue and coincidental creation. In 1963 Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909-1984) discovered a remarkable spiral formation while sketching with numbers during a mathematic lesson. He drew the natural numbers starting with 1, continuing in a left spiral and highlighting all prime numbers. Soon an unexpected pattern emerged from the sketch: The Ulam Spiral. An unexperienced director, who everyone referred to only as "Stab", was determined to realize an optical idea that alledgedly came to him while being on a trip to Jordan reading about Ulam and his spiral discovery, which initiated ideas of the connection between regularity and coincidence in Stab's mind eventually leading to the abstract script for the short film in 1993. When Franke was approached by Stab to compose the score of the film, he loved the wild imagery and the complex themes and decided to record music for ULAM SPIRAL in early 1995. A few months later Stab disappeared and Franke took a break from producing the soundtrack to focus on his band. In 1998 Stab reappeared with new ideas and convinced Franke to proceed with the score for the film, only to vanish again a couple of weeks later. Fed up with the inconsistency of the project, Franke decided to finish the soundtrack for his own listening pleasure in 2001 and kept it a secret - until today.