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Subtext presents ​Hydrangea, the debut album from writer and artist ​Holly Childs and artist ​Gediminas Žygus formerly known as J.G. Biberkopf.

Initiated in 2017, ​Hydrangea grew out of a series of performances emphasising conspiracies and the designer realities that they generate. Navigating a tangle of digitally induced subjectivities and relationships, ​Hydrangea sees Childs & Žygus amidst a continuously evaporating world in which narratives dissolve, leak, fold in on themselves and loop.

Childs & Žygus ask: As individuals are siloed online, can rifts in reality ever be reconciled? Is history a form of science fiction? And are narrators ever reliable? The process of creating ​Hydrangea was defined by the search for a form to bind fiction, poetry, and musical experience. Its narrative is influenced by technical instructions, lectures and whispered conversations, in which slippage and floating focus can create new meanings in the listener that weren’t intended by the speaker.

Childs & Žygus employ a musical language that layers their cumulative practices and experiences. The compositions are cinematic and spatial, working with the illustrative qualities of Disneyesque string melodies and taking cues from Maurice Ravel’s impressionistic piano works.

The work is also influenced by both artists’ lifelong experiences of rave culture, beginning for Žygus during childhood in newly independent Lithuania, spending time juggling Disney and happy hardcore cassettes on the family stereo, and for Childs as a preteen in Australia, tagging along with her sisters to doofs and warehouse parties. Initiated while the artists were both working between Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 2017, the work also draws on Dutch gabber music.

Hydrangea’s development has been influenced by collaboration with artists and filmmakers ​Metahaven, who created the album art.
Holly Childs is a writer and artist. Her research involves filtering stories of computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry, and light. She is the author of two books: ​No Limit (Hologram) and Danklands (Arcadia Missa); and has presented her work at ICA (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Trust (Berlin), Elam School of Art (Auckland) and more.

Gediminas Žygus is an artist working within the fields of sound, documentary and performance. Their practice assembles a spectrum of influences deriving from architecture, ecology, ethnography, science studies, and media theory. As J.G. Biberkopf, their releases have found homes on Knives and Danse Noire. Žygus has performed at Barbican Centre (London), Berghain (Berlin), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), and Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others.

Two musique concrète symphonies of industrial sound, in which musical relationships emerge from sounds more often regarded as noise. All the sounds were recorded by Sounds of Changes, a pan-EU project capturing obsolete and endangered industrial and domestic sounds. 
It’s hard to know when a sound is endangered – we never know what technological changes are around the corner. My work as a composer is concerned with environmental sounds and the sound of industry and machines. I use these sounds as the compositional building blocks of my music, and manipulate and compose with them. The source material is recognisable throughout, even when manipulated, juxtaposed or overlaid.

Sounds are disappearing without us even noticing. From the gradual evolution of everyday tech sounds to the sounds of old Routemaster buses, whistling kettles being replaced by hot water filters, we can’t notice the changes while we’re in the midst of them. Sounds of Changes is an epic project documenting these endangered sounds before it’s too late.

The Eccentric Press / Die Exzenterpresse focuses on recordings in Germany, made with the LWL-Industriemuseum in Dortmund. The sinister opening atmosphere of Wuppertaler Schwebebahn Station in western Germany gives way to the rattling tones of a button sewing machine. We’re in an industrial space soundtracked by machines. The chugging rhythm of a steelwork furnace is interrupted by the punch of a time clock. Pitched material is overlaid to create unexpected harmonies, whilst technology from different eras is coerced into a propulsive rhythm. This piece was commissioned and broadcast by Westdeutcher Rundfunk, Cologne on 9th April, 2016, and was a finalist in that year’s Prix Palma Ars Acustica.

Maudslay Engine was commissioned by ABC Radio National, Australia in 2016, and draws on recordings from Sweden, Belgium, Poland and the UK. Interlocking movements form a 20 minute composition, beginning with a Saab fighter jet, and ending with the eponymous 1838 steam engine built for Kew Bridge. In between, the background pitch of a metal cutter is shaped into a high frequency melody interrupted by a mortise machine. A stray pitched metallic sound from a linotype machine is transformed into a melodic interlude, superseded by the drone of a grain dryer – a huge machine that creates animal feed. The last melodic movement derives from the start-up sound from a vintage 1991 IBM desktop computer, before a fire truck siren closes the piece.

Memory Palace is the debut album by Argentinian electronic artist, jazz drummer and composer Carlos Falanga under the IHHH moniker.

Recorded in Barcelona’s La Isla Studios using mainly an Octatrack sampler, Falanga attempts to break from traditional sequencing by combining modular drones and rubato rhythms: a phrasing technique that accelerates and slows parts of a piece without altering the overarching pace. With a focus on off-the-grid rhythm and a high resolution digital sound, the complex loops unfold to reveal a trance-like quality.

The term Memory Palace refers to an easily recalled visual memory, with the album taking inspiration from hypnagogic symbolist painter Odilon Redon, even lifting a track title from a painting: 'When Life Was Awakening In The Depths Of Obscure Matter'. Falanga aims to highlight the void between the mundane and the magical, the everyday and the unexpected, by manipulating traditional sounds, structures and tempos into new forms.

Falanga has toured around Asia, America and Europe, supporting national and international artists such as: Colder, Marco Mezquida, Jorge Rossy, Carme Canela, The Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Amparo Sanchez and many others. He has released with Sunlinxx, Emerald and Doreen, Finis Africae and Nein Records.

Six Correlations was originally composed for a commissioned performance in Berlin and recorded in early 2018 over three days. The project explores the intersections between traditional music from various cultures, with a particular focus on Gaelic folk music native to the remote island regions of Scotland, where half of Ginzburg's family originates from.

It incorporates influences of Iranian traditional music, Indian classical and generative composition techniques. Six correlations considers the relationship between the organic and the digital world as a meditation on whether modernity implicitly
represents a long slow goodbye to nature: a long slow goodbye to everything that is not integrated into the networked world. The response to the disappearance of both nature and non-digital culture is presented here as an aspiration to imagine and communicate an harmonious relationship between the organic and the technological.

Produced using a hand drum, piano, voice, shruti box and Roland SH-101, six correlations brings together many of the influences from the Subtext artists Ginzburg has worked with over the last years, such as Turkish artist and percussionist Cevdet Erek and Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro - as well as connecting with his instrumental explorations with Paul Purgas as Emptyset, and recent releases on Arc Light Editions such as 'Salm' - an LP of Gaelic Psalm singing from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
James Ginzburg is one half of Emptyset and founder of Subtext Recordings, as well as co-curator of the Arc Light Editions imprint with Jennifer Allan.

* On Sutarti Joshua Sabin draws influence from the compositional structures and psychoacoustic properties that exist within early Lithuanian folk music, exploring the emotional potency of the human voice through the manipulation of elements of archival recordings.

* Obtaining access to the folk music archives of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Ethnomusicology Archive from the outset of this project, Sabin felt a particular resonance with the extensive library of vocal recordings and specifically the song forms of the Sutartinė. Derived from the Lithuanian verb 'Sutarti' - to be 'in agreement', 'to attune' – Sutartinės are a Lithuanian form of Schwebungsdiaphonie - a distinct canonic song style consisting of two or more voices that purposefully clash creating extremely precise dissonances and the phenomena of aural ‘beating’.

* Inspired by the psychoacoustic research of Rytis Ambrazevičius, whose computer analyses reveal the unique acoustic and harmonic complexities in these archival songs, and transfixed by what Sabin describes as their “arresting and often almost plaintive and minimalistic beauty”, he sought to compose directly with the recordings themselves as a raw material.

* Sutarti exists fundamentally as an emotional 'response', presenting archival voices through radical recontextualisations that Sabin hopes simultaneously express both his personal perspective and experience, and also speak universally to the power and versatility of the voice as a communicator of meaning and emotion.

* Produced with archival recordings, instrumentation including, Skudučiai and Fiddle, and field recordings of Lithuanian forest ambiences.

* Joshua Sabin is an Edinburgh based composer and sound designer, who’s first LP “Terminus Drift” was released on Subtext in 2017.

Piezo returns to Facta and K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint with a 5 track EP of experimental, warping, majestic club music. Since his last outing on the label, the Milanese producer has refined and consolidated his aesthetic considerably: through a spree of crucial releases on his own label, Ansia, and then with the release of his essential debut LP, Perdu (released in 2020 on experimental powerhouse Hundebiss). LSD Superhero sees him bring together the goofy, club-ready aspects of his output on Ansia with the meticulously crafted cybernetic sonics of his debut LP, but with the addition of something new: melody. The title track opens the record with house lights up: glitching percs build around gasseous pads and trembling subs in a drawn out climax that finally collapses into a rolling technoiddembow beat at its midpoint. Next, ‘Unto’ squeezes the producer’s wonky, sub-heavy sonics into a 4x4 template - one of those special 5 am tracks that will appeal equally to dubsteppers and minimal heads. (Remember that time Shackleton appeared on Perlon?). ‘TB2’ - a collaboration with label head K-LONE - balances nectar sweet melodies with bust-up drums and glitching FX hits, while ‘Dijitz’ sees him flex his full melodic knack for an eyes down, half-stepping synth workout. To close, ambient wobbler ‘Xxx^_^x’ refracts bass music sonics into something sprawling and shadowy - like an old Benga track exploded and

Racah is an on-going collaboration between South England based sound artists RSPTN (f.k.a. Rasputin) and The Bricoleur. Their Summoning / Edge Lands is the 6th entry into the Bladud Flies! Abhorrent Jukebox 7" series. Selected from over four hours of continuous music, these two short tracks are microcosmic distillations of the nighttime recording session as a whole, downbeat, fugue state ambience occasionally boiling over into pulsating blasts of noise.

The claustrophobic Summoning takes some cues from dub with a distant bass line propelled by a slow lurching beat and spluttering space age electronics, while Edge Lands is an even more disparate and dissonant affair. Murky, blown-out tones shift into pink noise as the childlike chimes of a carillon lullaby echo sinisterly in the background.

The 7" lathe comes housed in a beautiful screen-printed sleeve with yellow paper inner. A particularly elegant touch is the BF! logo and catalog number that has been engraved on side A.

This LP focuses on recorded sound and structures made with recorded sound. How the original sound was produced and the objects used in the production of the sounds is of secondary interest. Tiny details in the sounds are important and what might appear to be insignificant, dull or uneventful is often salient. Acute, obsessive listening brings these elements to the fore. 
In the process of making these structures, meaning begins to emerge and unfold. This is always highly subjective, ambiguous and uncertain and might fleetingly resonate with many ideas, objects, narratives and situations that are not connected with sound.

Inspiration often comes from existing music but also from the entire history of ideas and, again, a tiny detail might produce a kind of creative resonance. Curiosity is predominant and drives forward the process of composition.

"Can a music made with the modern tools of digital music and contemporary production sound eerily as if created with the same equipment that Stockhausen, Henri and Berio all availed themselves of in the radio studios of the 50s and 60s – and yet sound bright and fresh to the ears of today's listeners? Robert Worby shows us how, with Factitious Airs." — Carl Stone

THE NEW SELECTA VOL. 1 is the first of 3 new records to be released by Richard Wilson under his Rognvald moniker via WIFETRAX on Love Love Records.
The New Selecta is an explosive exploration into uncharted territory of the deepest and dankest UK jungle using a 'future-old skool' template. Deep, gut-busting bass fires down through swampy ambient clouds while hyper-edited breaks crack like lightning, swelling into moody skanking grooves. The hyper-retro-futurist junglizm of The New Selecta rushes too relentlessly to have been put out all at once so listeners will get their fix in 3 instalments in order to prevent fainting.

Stacked Up At Zero is the new full length instrumental LP from London based artist / musician Ross Downes and is a carefully crafted record fluctuating between calm solace, foreboding tension and ambient longing. Fundamentally an electronic record, synthesisers create a darkly ethereal setting, evoking entranced contemplation that regularly gives way to more shadowy territories. From comforting to concerning, it captivates through an inventive combining of genres.

Stacked Up At Zero is an intensely intimate and personal record. A place that Downes built to occupy, wander and give voice during a difficult year. It’s a record of psychological landscapes, between truths that need comfort and fictions that give escape. The influence and love of cinema permeates the record. Downes builds a world, creating an environment influenced by soundtracks, potential narratives and a propensity for the dramatic.

Evocative sound design and field recordings provide atmospheres that accompany, place and shroud the melodic and compositional preoccupations of the record. The influences, from a multitude of approaches and styles, contribute to a dynamic collection of shifting densities that reference minimal, ambient, industrial and contemporary classical music.

Drones shift and fluctuate whilst a myriad of synthesisers propel, distort and drift. Expansive groaning bass frequencies lay ominous foundations for progressive lines, vast sci-fi pads, digital ticks, sampled strings, disembodied voices and sparse percussion immersed in cavernous echoing reverb.

Recent musical activities from Downes have included compositions for large European art installation projects. During 2019 he contributed a piece to Mischa Kabul’s long running installation Res-o-nant at the Jewish Museum, Berlin. In 2018 he composed a lengthy work for his collaboration, with Cologne based, artist Sebastian Freytag on an ambitious light/audio installation titled Sygnal for The Museum Slaskie, Poland. He has recently completed work on soundtracking Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost's Sydney Bienalle exhibition which opens this Spring.

The first commercial release from sound artist Samson Stilwell, Signals was produced combining synthesized sound and field recordings to take the listener through a rich, dynamic soundscape, melancholy yet uplifting, contemplative yet buoyant.

Interdisciplinary artist Sébastien Robert strikes an emotive and explorative tone on his debut album Emerging Threshold, interpreting and layering field recordings and adding swathes of synthesised sound to conjure up an experience that reads and sees the cosmos in the mundane. The album touches upon kosmische musik, but does so in modern and updated form. This is ambient music that digs beyond the ambient perspective as the intensity of all tracks is mostly subtly confrontational and leaves little room for distance.
Robert investigates disappearing indigenous rituals, exploring their sonic, visual and contextual characteristics and translating them into works of art. Emerging Threshold is the result of his sonic exploration of the western flank of the Sierra Neva volcano in Chilewhere he recorded its immersive geological activity and natural echo, all the while experimenting with the tonal variations that can be produced by the trutruka, a traditional wind instrument of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile. Capturing the landscape's complexity and focusing on the subtle modulation of different physical states, Robert plays with the ostensible randomness apparent in his recorded material, igniting an interpretative stance on field recordings that is subtle and openended. Emerging Threshold is both intensely intimate and cinemascope.

Mastered by Robin Koek / Distribution by Crevette
Photography by Sébastien Robert , Artwork by Anatole De Benedictis, Layout by Jonathan
Castro Alejos

Soccer96 is made up of two thirds of The Comet Is Coming, currently whipping up a cosmic storm on their Mercury Prize nominated album Channel The Spirits.


Their bold approach to improvised composition, recording processes and experimentation is reminiscent of Flying Lotus, Can, Thundercat and Gaslamp Killer.

STATIC (ORIGINAL SURF SOUNDTRACKS VOL. 1) released this Spring serves to stir up the wanderlust for those new frontiers.

Ethereal soundscapes, lo-fi guitar excursions and rising orchestral, neo-classical moments summon images of the wild, awe-inspiring surf destinations - Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, The Faroes and beyond. Aficianados of cold water cinematic adventures will already be familiar with CJ's work. The album is a selection of 8 tracks, each originally composed for one of a number of award winning surf films scored by CJ Mirra over the past four years. The light, the landscape, the size of the waves and colour of the water all had an influence on the sound,' says CJ on harnessing the essence of these cold water locales.

A musician and composer, CJ Mirra's entry to the world of surf film came through acclaimed director Chris McClean after Chris heard an early track that was leaked online. This led to a unique partnership that has produced over 20 short films screened at festivals worldwide from SXSW to London, as well as the award-winning live A/V show 'Chasing Zero'. The critically acclaimed 'Edges Of Sanity', with poetry by Dan Crockett narrated by Charles Dance, features on the album alongside a series of evocative and ethereal tracks taking the listener on a journey across an epic surfscape.

CJ Mirra will be on tour in late April / May. The new live band features renowned surfer/ musician LeeAnn Curren and will be accompanied by visuals from Chris McClean.

The latest entry into Bladud Flies! Abhorrent Jukebox series denotes something of a departure for Hastings based producer The Bricoleur. While Path of the Nyau Perpendicular To Everything shares a similar headiness to The Bricoleur's previous introspective drone work, this latest offering is a far more confrontational and spontaneous affair, bristling with punk rock energy.

On Path of the Nyau heavily manipulated gamelan samples trigger in flurries that overlap and intertwine, bringing to mind Harry Partch's microtonal compositions for percussive instruments, Wolf Eyes in-the-red industrial brashness and fellow British explorers Liberez. Perpendicular To Everything sees long lost snatches of naively prophetic and desperately paranoid radio transmissions disintegrate into a molasses-slow hip-hop beat.

Combining ethnic and electronic music into impossible clamorous forms, The Bricoleur offers a brief yet beatific blast of ritualistic noise.

Thames presents diverse sound interactions along the River Thames that surprise with their musicality. As we travel from central London to the river’s furthest estuary, it feels like we’re travelling back in time. We hear the sounds of nature and industry in competition, from the pitched, quasi-musical sound of Tower Bridge lifting up, to the marsh frogs of Allhallows. 
“This collection of field recordings by the London Sound Survey brings the Thames to life through sound. Over many years Ian Rawes has made an audio mosaic reflecting this extraordinary landscape, from Tower Bridge to estuarine marshes and a now-lost oil refinery, allowing listeners a unique insight into the experience of these places.” — Rachel Lichtenstein, author of ’Estuary: out from London to the sea’ (Penguin, 2016)

Since 2008, Ian Rawes’ London Sound Survey has documented the changing sound of the UK’s capital through a huge array of new field recordings, capturing every aspect of London life. Ian began making field recordings of London street life partly because he believed the city’s rate of change was quickening.

The London Sound Survey went online in 2009 and has grown since to include much sound-related historical material as well as over 2,000 modern-day recordings. As the project has progressed, the soundworld of London has changed, with familiar sounds becoming extinct imperceptibly, never to be heard again.