Beats News

The Colombian techno phenomenon Gotshell debuts on the Planet X label with two bangers – and features remixes from two of the most inspiring techno producers at the moment.

Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Micro-Phonies’ now reissued on Turquoise vinyl. ‘Micro-Phonies’ is Cabaret Voltaire’s most sleek dance record, featuring charting singles ‘James Brown’ and ‘Sensoria’. Released in 1984, the record gained its reputation as the Cabs’ most mainstream album. Their partnership with Peter Care on video for ‘Sensoria’ received major airplay from MTV, and was famously one of the first music videos to be in the New York Museum of Art.



Cabaret Voltaire were very much ahead of their time, harmonising dance music, techno, dub, house and experimental electronics, making them, without a doubt, one of the most influential acts in electronic music.

Limited

Repress.

Rhythmic Brutalism' is the title of this release, available as a two CD set or two separate LPs, the title is also a very apt description of the music itself. Romanian-born Alexandra Atnif was fascinated by the harsh, grey concrete beauty and minimally repetitive force of the brutalist post-war architecture of her homeland, and this fascination has given rise to the music here. Vol. 1 is an EM Records edition, compiled from an earlier self-released double CD featuring recordings from 2014-15. Vol. 2 consists of previously unreleased recordings from 2015 to 2017. Using elemental, inexpensive technology, Atnif' s music is heavy and harsh, stripped down to distressed skeletal frameworks, rhythmic noise, rusting metal and weathered concrete, a distorted DIY realization of her beautifully brutal vision. With a background in European modernist/avant-garde music, Atnif has been influenced by early rhythmic industrial music such as Throbbing Gristle, Esplendor Geometrico and Muslimgauze, as well as later practitioners of rhythm and noise including Pan Sonic, Autechre, Winterkälte, Prurient and Scorn. Across the relatively brief span of years contained within these two volumes, we hear the rhythmic structures begin to fracture and fray, and the outlines darken and become more obscure, with Antif's sensibility evident throughout.

Edition of 100 - printed sleeve, hand-stamped centre labels

Attrition are pioneers in darker electronica. Formed in 1980 in Coventry, England, influenced by a mix of punk ideology and experimental art aesthetics, They emerged as part of the early '80's UK Industrial scene alongside contemporaries Coil, Test Department, Legendary Pink Dots, In The Nursery, Portion Control, and others. Founder Martin Bowes has steered the band through a 40-year career, fueled by a succession of critically acclaimed albums, selling over 100,000 to date. The band has regularly toured Europe, North and South America, Russia and Asia, appeared at major festivals and had their music included on a number of TV and film soundtracks.
The band celebrates their 40 year anniversary with their latest release, A Great Desire on Sleepers Records. The album is a compilation of some of their best tracks from 1986-2004, some never before on vinyl.

new pressing on red & black swirl vinyl. RIYL: New Order, Drab Majesty, The KVB, Black Marble, The Soft Moon. Layering synths, guitars, electronic percussion and live drums, Houses of Heaven fuses early industrial and techno rhythms with the melodicism of shoegaze and a heavy dose of dub-influenced effects on their first full-length album titled 'Silent Places.' Written against the backdrop of the Northern California wildfires, ever-growing tent cities and the continued rise of empty luxury housing in the Bay Area, the album explores the intimate experiences that transpire within the chaotic confines of modern living. Opener "Sleep" basks in the tension surrounding the album's inception with blown-out kick drums, claustrophobic verses, and deteriorating vocal effects. Sharp arpeggiated synths and woozy strings neutralize the track's subterranean anxiety with texture and sensuality. Produced by Matia Simovich (Inhalt) and with engineering credits that include Monte Vallier (Weekend) and John McEntire (Tortoise), it's a potent introduction to the muscular sound design underpinning the album. Booming taiko drums sound the beginning of "Dissolve the Floor," the album's most club-ready track. A pulsing arpeggio gives the song its industrial heartbeat while disintegrating tape delay throws menace into the hazy atmosphere. The undulating techno beat breaks and repairs itself with seductive and satisfying timing. "In Soft Confusion" doesn't stray from the album's obsidian narrative as it envisions and ponders the aftermath of human extinction. Sonically speaking, though, it's the album's most uptempo offering with Tecon's supremely infectious chorus vocal hook and Beck's dizzying guitar riffs. The intricate electronic drum programming is elevated by Ott's live drumming, which lends a refreshingly human touch to the potentially icy, and often mechanical, sonic territory of synthdriven music. Adding density to the album's shadowy allure are the unusual sounds and vintage outboard effects that Tecon and Simovich impressively maneuver into the album's tonal palette. Great care has been taken to finesse familiar pop structures with an inventive edge. It's this mindfulness of past and present that is sure to secure Silent Places as a standout album in the new decade. Also Available From Houses Of Heaven: Remnant 12" EP

Aurat (OH-RUT), meaning "Women" in Urdu, is an industrial
band based in Los Angeles,

CA. Non-traditional sounds, raw energy, multilingualism.

Einstürzende Neubauten producer Boris Wilsdorf, Karl O’Connor aka Regis and MY DISCO's Liam Andrews assemble as EROS, bottling no-wave/industrial lightning with a tight set of pulverized, widescreen torched-songs that rasp, grate and throb somewhere between This Heat, The Cure, Cabaret Voltaire, Alva Noto x Pan Sonic.

An industrial fantasy of flesh and steel, ‘A Southern Code’ is the stunning continuation of the trio’s work at Wilsdorf’s pivotal Anderesbaustelle studio on Regis’ watershed album, ‘Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss’. Rejoined by another key muse, Anni Hogan, and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Jochen Arbeit, they effectively galvanised a new band, EROS, during long days and nights in the studio across 2020 and into 2021. The sound they make is fiercely lean, shaped by Wilsdorf’s manacled mixing and anchored in the frankly sexy as f#ck swerve of Regis vocals and his snake-hipped rhythm section.

The first songs issued from those sessions form a lustrous new high point of contemporary industrial and dance music, one porous to Kurdish dabke as much as archetypal goth, pulsing with a metallic bloodlust and spatialized by Wilsdorf’s genre-forming tekkerz in a way that seriously rewards with proper amplification. Judged on its immediate merits, it’s the sort of record that could have feasibly come out at any point between the ‘80s and now, but closer inspection reveals a discreet framework of sculpted subbass and sleekly rolling traction that betrays the modernity of minimalist D&B physics and up-to-the-second sound design that places ‘A Southern Code’ in a timeless echelon.

Registering the venomous drums and over-the-shoulder whispers of its title track, plus the incendiary middle eastern horns of ‘The Crawling Man’ - a real parallel dimension take on The Cure’s ‘The Top’ - to the post-apocalyptic lounge lizard styles of ‘In This Place’, and the unheimlich creep to ‘Nature Unborn (From Sun to Sun)’, the band’s first album plants a vital stake in the ground for industrial musick at the crest of a new decade.

We've noticed heightened data corruption and screen-swipe intensity around the Bristol / Avon region and it's connected devices... But it is too late, the Warning Signals only unveiled themselves at the point of no return....

Fuck it, Bad Tracking are here to dance and sway in our technological demise, to eat all the fruit of our distracted labour and spit it out at our faces with verbal frequency and full-frontal soundystem-testing - enter the mosh, submit to the end time and take one last gulp of reality before it's gone.

Comes with stickers, artwork, a goat stamp, a plastic bag, an extra download, and "there's a secret B side on there too. It's awful".

Tsunamis, Alien Sightings, monumental tower-of-babel 5G erections bringing us closer to god, Bill Gates, the Mayans, ermm, anything else? I think that was it.
To celebrate, and add to the fun, we decided to bring FuckPunk back from the dead once more... Spicing up your lockdown woes and giving you food for imaginary mosh pits, sweaty hugs, friendly ear licking & and of course the depressed comedown the day after, when sad reality hits once again.

Curation and recording of underground music on cassette with the best of Goth/ Industrial/ Synth Punk/ Wave/ EBM Techno/ New Beat/ Noise
EBM/Industrial/Upper Wave/Synth Punk Independent label based in Berlin/Mexico City

Curation and recording of underground music on cassette with the best of Goth/ Industrial/ Synth Punk/ Wave/ EBM Techno/ New Beat/ Noise
EBM/Industrial/Upper Wave/Synth Punk Independent label based in Berlin/Mexico City

Archives from Geins't Naït, the 90's !

Carmesí Diabla that originally was released on cassette is now on vinyl with 4 outstanding remixes by : Randstad, The Mover, Max Durante and Melania. Distant find the mix between techno and EBM elements that gave the artists a step forward to work on the remixes. From Slow techno to Acid Rave thru Industrial Techno.

At the crossroads of ritual, industrial, and electronic music, there exists a niche where many experimenters are blurring the lines between genres. Among them are the three members of Nze Nze (UVB76 and Sacred Lodge). Summoning sequenced machines, digital samplers, and multi-effects, they make instrumentals collide with guttural vocals and warrior tales from Fangs mythologies (the vernacular language of Central Africa), arranging it all to create hybrid, unclassifiable, and disorienting pieces.

The fundamentals of radical electronic music are there, but the production is on the level of the great free-jazz records, allowing it to claim a heritage far beyond modern-day offerings.

After the legendary French Ethno-industrial band Vox Populi! vanished into obscurity in the early 1990ees, some, like bass player, Francis Manne aka Francis Laffont aka Kosa Nostra aka Kosa aka Fr6, expanded in their their new artistic adventures. Alone or with others, he followed his multi-disciplinary sonic visions that he already displayed on the label Vox Man records, that he founded with Vox Populi! member Axel Kyrou in 1982. Together they released the famed "Audiologie" compilations, an audio fanzine featuring a contemporary outlook on the experimental electronic, and improvisational avant-garde music scene of the time. Particularly the two "Alterntative Funk: la Folie Distinguée" compilations turned into today’s collectors’ items for fans of bizarre electronic music.

Now Notte Brigante brings “Kosa and Friends 1987/97“, twelve unreleased recordings that display Francis Manne’s ongoing musical creation after the break-up of Vox Populi!. Minimal Synth, post punk, field recordings, psychedelic, cold wave, and weird proto funk are welcome thoughtful listeners into an eccentric world of pop and poetry, of experiment and groove. As the visual part was always equally important as the music for him, the cover links to Manne’s graphic work, which has also often been featured on many Vox Populi!, Bain Total, or Vox Man Records. A venturesome collection that documents an unexplored universe of a visionary French avant-garde musician and his vivid peer group.

Sasu Ripatti, now sporting the new "Ripatti Deluxe" moniker, presents his very own abstract take on early rave and happy hardcore. "Speed Demon" marks the first release on Ripatti's newly launched label "Rajaton".

The Finnish word ”raja” has multiple meanings. It could refer to a ”border”, ”limit”, ”boundary”, or even ”capacity” if understood broadly. It feels that ”border” is the first interpretation that comes to mind when the word is met in isolation of additional context. It often includes political energy of some sort. Or perhaps it’s just this particular point in time that leads the mind into such field of thought.

As the Dutch author Rutger Bregman notes in his book Human Kind – A Hopeful History, the real trouble with people began when the first person had the idea of drawing a line on sand and claiming ownership of the area on their side. The concept of physical borders was born.

Naturally, there are mental borders, as well. Think about all the things you shut out because they’re ”not for you”. They are numerous and we do it all the time. The issue is not to stop that, but to recognize when to let new things in, even if they’re not commonplace. Mental borders might often be easier to rewrite than physical ones, but the challenge remains a real one.

That’s where the derivative form ”rajaton” comes to play. By simply adding the ”-ton”, all borders, limits, boundaries and capacities are lifted in an instant. We have something ”borderless” instead, and are thus free to expand our thinking.

One could argue that the word ”rajaton” implies not the removal of borders but instead their very non-existence at large. How will our mind work when the concept of borders doesn’t even enter the conscious thought?

Mental borderlessness is a truly fascinating concept. A maximalist array of opportunities and potential ideas enters the picture – one which is also limitless, unlimited, sans boundaries, and also without a danger of being depleted. It’s an all-existence of multitudes where hierarchy also starts to deteriorate, giving way to a new form of full understanding without judgement.

Music is one fine place for such thinking, especially when thinking about the role of the listener. Occupying a much more active position than is generally recognized, the listener can greatly benefit from borderless thinking, and thus help to enhance the collective perceived significance of any given body of work. When there are no boundaries, the interpretation remains unchained and honest.

Basically it was all already said by the late revolutionary jazz pianist Burton Greene: ”Borders are boring!”

Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘The Covenant, The Sword and The Arm of The Lord’, as originally remastered in 2013, now reissued on White vinyl. Known for being the harder, more experimental album of their “Pop” period, ‘The Covenant, The Sword and The Arm of The Lord’ was originally released in 1985 and includes the classic ‘I Want You’. The album embodys Cabaret Voltaire’s industrial electro-funk sound and their punk ethos.

Cabaret Voltaire were very much ahead of their time, harmonising dance music, techno, dub, house and experimental electronics, making them, without a doubt, one of the most influential acts in electronic music.

“...The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord is an exercise in paranoia with anxiety coded into the jittery sample-heavy structures of the music itself.” - Spectrum Culture

Asymmetrical runs the double edition release of Fill-Lex, the release will be release on vinyl and tape.

Years ago we known this artist and felt in love with his particular mode to interpretive the music, finally then we got an LP album with all the artist registers. The A side is a long side, songs for reflexing and to concentrate to feel his agony and deeply songs cruelty. Sam de la Rosa did a reedit that transport you to under soul fight. The second side is oriented to dance floor but without leave his furious method of percussive loops and aggressive voices. 3 songs that will be blow your mind and your feet.

ble edition release of Fill-Lex, the release will be release on vinyl and tape.

Years ago we known this artist and felt in love with his particular mode to interpretive the music, finally then we got an LP album with all the artist registers. The A side is a long side, songs for reflexing and to concentrate to feel his agony and deeply songs cruelty. Sam de la Rosa did a reedit that transport you to under soul fight. The second side is oriented to dance floor but without leave his furious method of percussive loops and aggressive voices. 3 songs that will be blow your mind and your feet.

EB/Industrial/Upper Wave/Synth Punk Independent label based in Berlin/Mexico City

EB/Industrial/Upper Wave/Synth Punk Independent label based in Berlin/Mexico City

Søulless returns to Industrial Complexx with I Am Abomination, his second album on this label, on which he has also released two more releases with Agent 15, a project born in this new pandemic era and formed by Francesco Rachele and Felipe Novoa, and with Moral Excerpt, a duo he forms with his compatriot Davide Pappalardo, also a contributor to our reviews section.

Søulless, and the different projects of Francesco Presotto, base their sound on the roots of industrial music, with massive rhythms, degraded structures and a deep respect for the origins of this musical genre. However, the interpretation of Søulless is completely open, as it feeds on different influences and techniques more typical of other experimental styles.

I Am Abomination shows the creative skills of Søulless with six tracks in which the author recreates six chaotic and perverse scenarios, in which the attitude of a human being with great self-esteem problems is denigrated. This concept is perfectly transferred to a sound environment, each cut shows different moods, in which psychopathies, fears and degenerative mental problems appear.

Once I Died was born as a solo project of Gianluca Rimei, an Italian musician and producer former member of the techno-industrial duo Calle Quevedo. Once I Died wants to give vent to obscure and experimental sounds without a predefined direction, creating repetitive atmospheres and noisy sound environments.

We repeat our experience with Unknown Pleasures Records, collaborating again with the Honoris series of releases, this time paying tribute to Bauhaus. Several bands and musicians create versions of different tracks by this legendary English band that conditioned post-punk to take a sonic trajectory based on what they later called gothic rock.

Industrial Complexx resorts to the same formula again with this special release combining the album in double cassette format and a biographical book about Bauhaus . Unknown Pleasures Records releases this compilation on CD and Soil Records on vinyl.

SOIL Records’ first vinyl for 2021 comes with sublime work from MOKEN.

Industrial Complexx releases its second album of various artists , which, as it did with the first volume, coincides with the release of its printed magazine. The platform was first born as a webzine but soon expanded its activity to the printed format and also, as a record label, holding on to an experimental, risky, dark and transgressive musical line.

Industrial complexx Vol.2 is an album that besides combining release with diverse authors, also combines styles that oscillate between industrial and other more usual terrains of advanced electronic music, such as IDM.

On the A side we find three tracks, by Tullia Benedicta, Magnum Opus and Bad Faith Actor, that exemplify how wide can be a field like the industrial one, with influences of darkwave, EBM or techno. But when we reach the fourth track, it is the Lo-Fi sound of Group that gives it a different, more subtle character, where the percussive elements are the ones that rule. And to conclude this first face, Ximo Noguera opts for an abstract style, with a space-time that seems to break continuously.

The B side opens with the IDM of Ivax soyaf, a Valencian producer with a long career who recovers the style and sound that most characterized him in his first stage as a producer. Go5 continues with a rather experimental industrial line lacking in rhythmic elements. Lex-Or opts for an industrial techno with a uniform rhythm and bass lines that appear, disappear and bend, with a completely alterable harmonic pattern. Santiago López closes the release with his sinugly metallic sound, with sharp drones created with his hybrid instruments.

Noise industrial dub effect for the start opening on a Breakcore dry long drink.

Always hot on the steel-hard plates and murky subterranean atmospheres, Public System turns in a haunted double package from the crypt. Spanning hi-octane indus bullets, half-baked mutant salvos and shadow-clad juicers from a host of reputed names and rabid underdogs, this new comp collates ruff’n’tuff joints from gritty techno don Container, genre-unbound explorer E-Saggila, Berlin’s electro arsonist Privacy, acid-spitting hydra DJ Loser x Penelopes Fiance, basement guerillero Yabboq Penuel alias Le Syndicat Electronique, neo-punk beat thrasher Crave, Yves Tumor collaborator and sine-wave crusher Anthem, expert circuit dissector Beau Wanzer, Liquid G as remixed by Mick Wills, Night Gaunt’s Lower Tar, occult machine funk preacher Maenad Veyl, DJ Chupacabras under new guise 110, soundwaves cross-pollinator DJ Richard, vibrant mood-scapist Gavil�n Rayna Russom, as well as label boss Myn going ubiquitous with studio fellows Kluentah as Myntha, and R Gamble as Fade Accompli. A much desirable feast of raw, unhinged, all-round spine-tingling jams for the club and not.

Uzi is Muslimgauze’s gem from the late 80s. Cinematic, minimal, noisy, hypnotic, and gloomy. Probably not so overtly Middle
Eastern as his later works, though definitely bearing an influence. Backed by electric drones, percussion forms a living, breathing
atmosphere of impending menace.
For a strange reason this album was missing in VOD’s Chasing The Shadow Of Bryn Jones 10xLP Box-set. Now you have the
chance to complete your Muslimgauze discography!

"Extremely intense Arabic dub noise music, designed to blow minds and loudspeakers.
2021 Remastered reissue with new artwork Originally released in 1997 by Soleilmoon."

»C'est Disco« was the first studio album by the Italian band Rats. It was released in 1981 by Italian Records and is a record strongly inspired by the wave and dark scene of that period. The band's line-up featured vocalist Claudia Lloyd on vocals, and on guitar the only member present in the more famous version active in the late '80s and '90s, Wilko Zanni, who in the next album would take Claudia Lloyd's place on vocals.

»Obsessions« is clearly a cult single of the era and one of their Neon's personal highlights. The band recorded the 4 track live in April 1982 and then reprocessed the take at Kindergarten Studio. The twelve inch was then released on the highly influential indie label Materiali Sonori. Neon is still considered as a legend of the Italian new-wave scene, one of the leading figure of the Florence underground movement that spread between the late '70s and the early' 80s.

Periphylla the sub-label of Diffuse Reality releases its first vinyl reference with an album by the duo I Tpame I Tvrame,formed by Franc Kurti, from Albania, and Dina Hajrullahu, from Kosovo. The duo’s style is a mixture of darkwave, industrial and other post-punk genres, and they have a sound of their own, led by Dina’s mystical voice and the wide range of sound they possess.

Forty minutes of dark atmospheres in an evocative mix of dark ambient, ritual, darkwave, drone, industrial and noise by the head of Donations Project, with a remix by J. Mardaras member of Amor Eterno. The album is presented in a limited edition cassette of 20 numbered copies under a careful presentation in a silk-screened cardboard box.

Thirty-sixth Eclectic Reactions Records reference signed by Rama. "FRTHCMNG_NZ?" is the title of the album presented by this artist from Bizkaia from the mining area on the left bank of the Nervión. Over the course of forty minutes, in a total of three songs plus a remix, Rama develops a wisely refined drone with industrial passages and dark ambient melodies, seasoned with film fragments in a suggestive, hypnotic, rhythmic and beautiful result. As a counterpoint, the artist Fernando Carvalho offers a remix in the form of Industrial Dub and marvelous Breakbeat. The album is presented in a limited edition of 20 hand-numbered copies under a careful presentation in a silk-screened black cardboard box.