Beats News

For its second installment Subject To Restrictions Discs presents a split EP by two of Switzerland’s most underrated producers. First there is CCO. A modular wizard known from his involvement in groups such as Wavetest and Savage Grounds. He presents two Techno cuts that are bound in organic sounds and filled with driving energy. The three mellow cosmic wave tracks on the back are coming from Narco Marco. He’s active in Bern’s music and nightlife scene for almost 30 years. His music knowledge is legendary and shows itselfs in his productions which are filled with sparkling details.

White Vinyl 10"

A new release this winter marks a landmark moment in an important musical story. Way back in little 2009, the label hfn music was born in Hamburg, and made its introduction to the world with the release of the Trentemøller compilation Harbour Boat Trips: 01 Copenhagen.
Founder Tobias Lampe wanted to start a label that was more broad in scope than his previous, more electronic-focused projects, and the compilation provided the perfect opportunity to launch one. In the 10 years since then, the label has survived the whirlpool waters of the early 21st century’s constantly changing music industry, and released everything from pop to art-punk, with artists ranging from New York to the Faroe Islands.
Now, they’re about to put out their 100th release. Fittingly, given the label’s focus on new and innovative music, and the historic aspect of the release, hfn100 sees one of hfn’s best songs of 2019 put into the hands of the man it all started with, Anders Trentemøller. His Danish compatriots Blaue Blume’s new album Bell Of Wool is one of hfn’s standout releases this year, and so hfn100 sees Trentemøller remix one of that record’s standout tracks, the fragile, but soaring “Lovable”.
In Blaue Blume’s original, “Lovable” is an airy, tormented song, a gossamer-delicate composition that carefully stitches together layers and layers of shining synths that gradually build up and up into a peak, before crashing into a subtle beat, a musical journey that mirrors vocalist Jonas Smith’s trip from anguish to numbness. Whereas the original’s music sounds woven together from light, Trentemøller takes it into darker territory. He hooks the song to a harsh, sparse beat leaving Smith’s vocals bare and isolated in the burnt-out, dystopic musical landscape he creates.
Trentemøller mirrors the original’s careful building up, adding new elements to fill in the song’s sound, before it collapses into a tough, noir disco groove. It’s a perfectly realised remix – Trentemøller keeps the original song’s skeleton and soul, but fills in the space with sonic touches that could be no one else’s but his.Ultimately, it’s a fitting song for hfn’s hundredth release. For a label that’s always been a platform for its boundary-pushing artists, a collaboration between two of them, that sees an already innovative song pushed into a bold new shape is the perfect way for hfn to step into the next 100 releases..

ISAN’s Robin Saville reveals an ambient album, which merges the Electronica aesthetics of his main project with field recordings, drones and acoustic instrumentation.

A lot of things have been written about what happens to the mind when the body starts moving. Instead of reciting poems of the inevitable self-help books, let’s get straight to the point: For many, taking walks on a regular basis is both liberating and empowering. It is not necessarily so much about the exercise, but rather finding one’s own rhythm in life. Robin Saville – of ISAN fame – is such an ambler His walks inspired him to base his third solo album – his first one for Morr Music – on the out of the way places he came to see and experience while being out and about.

Clocking in at just under 40 minutes in total, "Build A Diorama" is both a subtle culmination and a poignant antipode to what Saville has achieved together with Antony Ryan as ISAN. While the aesthetics might seem similar in places, Saville opts for a decisively different pace when it comes to writing and producing. Progress is steady, and change, however, is slow – like looking at a diorama for a long period of time in the ever so slightly changing light or as a flaneur focussing on one particular spot, a found object so-to-speak, waiting for the mind to orchestrate it appropriately, giving it sense and meaning.

Built around quiet field recordings, Saville’s six compositions transform this highly personal and, therefore, difficult-to-convey experience into a comprehensible exploration of beauty. Where ISAN almost exclusively uses electronics, Saville deliberately expands this well-established palette with acoustic instruments like bass guitar, chimes and glockenspiel, aiming for an even more suitable musical manifestation of what the walker sees and feels once he fully engages in his passion. Ranging from blissfully pulsing pads allowing for complete associative freedom ("The Deepdale Halophyte Economy") to the playful minimalism of an orchestra dominated by busy bells ("Bosky"), Saville’s "Build A Diorama" is not just a valuable addition to his musical output, but an essential audio guide for those striving to explore, learn and understand.

Official remastered limited edition of Cellophane project from 1984 produced by Alessandro Novaga, one of THE major influences on Chicago House Music with his trio of releases -Drums-, -Electronic Drums- and -Faces Drums-, all essentially EPs of tough electronic bonus beats, creating the blueprint for many early Windy City productions. He was also behind other such hugely influential cuts as Stopps -Im Hungry- and -Ali Shuffle- by Camaros Gang. Here on his Cellophane album, which came after the huge -Gimme Love- single, we get what I guess you could describe as his magnum opus. The album consists of just two long tracks (or suites perhaps?) that take the listener of on an epic psychedelic italo /space disco trip like no other. Heavy use of synths and drum machines expecially on the part 3 !

After a digital single on Optimo Music Digital Danceforce, Optimo Music welcomes Bergsonist to the main label with a full album. Ridiculously talented and prolific, Bergsonist is one of thee most interesting, thoughtful and important artists of our times.

Bergsonist aka Selwa Abd is a New York–based artist and musician originally from Morocco. She is the founder of Bizaarbazaar, a music platform and publication that publishes podcasts and interviews by DJs and producers from around the world.

Under the guise Bergsonist (derived from Deleuze’s Bergsonism),
she uses a variety of media to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism, techno, and music concrete, to name a few). Through her work, she explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics.

In 2017, she started Pick Up The Flow, a resource to promote congregation and exchange between peers. Currently, co-run with Stephen Decker. In 2019, she co-founded 3afak with DJ Sanna, a collective that aims to empower Arab women’s creative vision in
New York.


Words about the album:

Middle Ouest is an ode to my history, present and future self. Like a sonic autobiography, It’s the first body of work that realistically depicts my identity. It’s a statement towards all the people who tried to put me into a box. I’m not a box but a genre-less ocean. I don’t make genres, I just make music I feel making in the moment.

It’s all about capturing the moment in a given time. If the aesthetic happens to be house or techno then it is. But I’m not a techno artist... I’m just a free sonic ‘voyageur’. I make music as i feel the world; it can be dark, jovial, weird… I mirror the feelings into sonic compositions. However, the only variables that never change in this equation are the message and intention.

"In 2015, it remains a rare and enchanting thing to hear a piece of convergence culture this effortless; which, after all (...) may be one reason Utakata still sounds so otherworldly." by Pitchfork 8.5 -
"best new reissue" - 25 September 2015.

The 1983 cult classic 'Mariah - Utakata No Hibi' sees it's re-release
for the first time. The long sought after final record on the legendary Better Days label, Utakata No Hibi is the culmination of composer and bandleader Yasuaki Shimizu's early 80's work, often compared to his contemporaries Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, as well as experimental new wavers Flying Lizards/David Cunningham, all of whom Shimizu has worked with.

Recognized in Japan for the hit, 'Shinzo No Tobira,' the entire record is a masterful studio production of Japanese folk and pop idioms filtered through a chamber disco, new wave, synth production, sounding more relevant today than upon it's release over 30 years ago.

The packaging features additional artwork from Ira Okudaira, who created the original stunning jacket drawings. It retains the original double 12" 45 rpm play format, and includes a full English translation of the Japanese and Armenian lyrics on the printed inner sleeves.

RIYL: Blood Orange, YMO, Arthur Russell, Julee Cruise.
'PFRLP003' Repressed & Reissued; Limited numbers.

Minimal wave from Greece 1983. Remastered version of a lost & found demo-tape by the band.

Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition — staged by Anne Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live event.

Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of power and paradise.

The music for Faust was written in a band-like process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to it's premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice. From the chaos of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque intricacy,
each track a testament to the energy that brought it into being.

Faust is anchored around three pieces — Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen Song — written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner, whosesonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new
arrangements that couple the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the studio.

Throughout the album and culminating in its closing act — the brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last Song, a pulsing canon of looped and layered voice pierced by black metal screams.Faust is the record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice. Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began in 2013, and this generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently her performance trilogy Sex (2019).

Stellar full-length album selection of archival material from Tim Jackiw ranging from timeless late night techno and deep space soundtracks through to electronic jazz and ambient atmospheres. All music sequenced and recorded in Tim's Adelaide-based bedroom studio between 1995 to 1997 using an Amiga 500 interfaced to various analog synthesizers, drum machines and samplers. Limited colour vinyl double pack - big tip!

Chasing up Good Morning Tapes’ standout EPs by HTRK’s Jonnine Standish and UK synthesist, XVARR, the ’All Welcome’ 12” pairs three previously tape-only tracks with a trio of exclusives on a killer compilation from the promising French labelSupplying a varied and engaging experience ranging from Tapes’ classical Indian invocations to Eszaid’s gutted D&B and Kiki Kudo’s fizzy electro-dub, ‘All Welcome’ renders the label’s aesthetic wide open with a wonderfully shine-eyed appeal to mutual, empathetic ambient souls and lovers
of electronic magick.

Tapes, aka South London enigma Jackson Bailey, coaxes the EP into action with the woozy title tune of his 2018 tape ’Silence Please’, meshing electronic tanpura drone with mysterious winds and sloshing tabla drums in a respectful tradition of English artists including Robert Wyatt and Shackleton, before Eddie Ruscha’s Only Thingz spies Eno via The Orb and Vangelis in the glyding
synth pads and smeared brass tone of ‘All Eyes Open’, and Berlin-based Brazilian artist INNSYTER follows a deliciously groggy ambient hunch in ‘Morning Blend’.

The label then play it closer to home with an eviscerated D&B dub by Eszaid, co-owner of the Paris-based Collapsing Market label, with ‘The Most Sacred Syllable’ primed for fans of Andy Stott or Demdike Stare, and Anthony Naples takes it to NYC with an extended mix of his scudding piano house workout ‘Goodness’ off the ‘Take Me With You’ tape (not found on the LP released by ANS!), and Kiki Kudo keeps it stateside with the palpitating electro-dub fizz of ‘Hala Dub’ in a style relatable to E.M.M.A. or Jay Glass Dubs.

Edit Service is proud to present its 6th release, this time featuring Youkounkoun, a duo comprising of Jeff Lasson of Get A Room and Gaëtan Rossi.

After releasing on Multi Culti edits and Edits du Plaisir, the duo delivers a mini-LP with a diverse range of tempos and moods, from dancefloor-friendly cuts to weirder tracks with Gallic oddities, Dutch new wave, Spanish minimal wave and experimental Iranian music used as the source material. The unsettling post-punk, industrial and mutant kraut energy in those tracks could not be further removed from lazy run-of-the-mill disco edits. In true digger spirit, Youkounkoun picks tracks never edited before and painstakingly re-arranges them by adding a lot of additional production to completely transform these tracks for the dancefloor. The digital files for this LP will be officially released 6 months after the vinyl record is out.

A1 Qu’est-ce que je fais ici The LP opens with this plodding downtempo edit, where a cold but funky groove provides the backdrop for French lyrics about modern alienation, with a chilling result, like standing under pasty neon lights for too long.

A2 Novotel cocktail Slightly faster but still resolutely downtempo, this track features a dance-inducing rhythmic section with spot-on sequencing, understated but unsettling melodic elements and last but not least a range of vocal elements that give the tune an embodied but wholly dehumanized feel.

A3 Musique du texte More than just an edit, in this track the duo blends the French and Japanese spoken words and oriental-leaning melodies from a largely beatless track with a totally new and different rhythmic section featuring a funky post-punk bass guitar and a four to the floor groove. The result is dizzying and irresistible.

B1 Mouvement perpetuel On this particularly mutant cut, bass guitar licks, tight drum programming and dreamy 70’s synths are used with dramatic effect by the duo to highlight the weirdness of French spoken word about perpetual movement: nothing is lost and everything is transformed.

B2 Metallic waves With a much more synthetic feel than the rest of the record’s hybrid offerings, this tune immediately stands out with its heavy and compelling groove, where eerie voices and a flurry of uncanny sounds create a strange and disorienting effect to which the most appropriate response seems to start dancing.

B3 Je veux pas danser In this dissonant and neurotic track, it is highly likely that a relentless synth bassline, an uptempo groove, morbid sound effects will set bodies in motion, even when unsettling Flemmish vocals about not wanting to dance try to convince listeners otherwise.

B4 In my castle In this hallucinated edit where sounds reminiscent of oldschool Chicago house and dub music are used for completely different purposes. Dance-inducing and hypnotic, it plays on the repetition of melodic and rhythmic elements. Delightfully off-kilter, it closes the LP in style.

Italo-disco inspired house music, IN MY DREAMS is the latest single from New York/Moscow duo IPF aka INTERNETPOWERLIFTINGFEDERATION. A warm, galloping bass line fuses with razor-sharp synth stabs, creamy pads and late-80’s house drums. A dual-vocal exchange explores self-delusion, obsession and a single-sided relationship between girl and the boy who lives in her head. Melancholic yet pop-y, IN MY DREAMS wouldn’t be out of place in club run by Erasure, Depeche Mode or Human League at their most soulful and dancefloor-ready. In the spirit of classic 80’s dance music traditions, the original mix gets three additional reworks: a classic Electro version, a “big room” friendly HI-NRG version and stripped down version. This is the first release from New York city based label Daddy Issues, limited pressing 150 copies only.

Fresh collab from Multi Culti’s Thomas Von Party and Calypso’s Iñigo Vontier — SALSA FINGERS debut on Pigmalião’s ‘I Lost My Poncho In Istanbul’ with two downtempo chuggers. Coco Fantasma takes it's name from the forthcoming coconut and ghost pepper salsa that the Canadian-Mexican duo have cooked up. ... For real.

Mouth harp, tribal drumming, and a haunted flute hook make for a low-key floor-filler for the slow-mo house DJ's and global neo-shamanic cult builders alike.
Amor Modular takes the familiar Cumbia groove into new territory with a modular synth riff, tight Latina voices take the heat up to 11 and once again, the Salsito’s trademark flute hook brings a perfectly dosed hit of folklorica.

Japanese 3 piece electronic band “D.A.N.”’s world wide debut single on mule musiq’s sister label “studio mule”. D.A.N. is a probably most successful japanese band in a electronic music scene at the mo-ment, they’ve performed with james blake, the xx, bonobo and name a few in japan. “Sundance” is a first single cut from their 2nd album (it’s released in only japan). It’s a electric boogie track which some people bring “the xx” to mind.

Any historians keen on the subject of "French youth in the 1980s" are holding a treasure in their hands. As a true archaeologist of this decade dedicated to disposable culture, digger-in-chief Vidal Benjamin with his newest compilation, 'Pop Sympathie', offers them a unique journey in the heart of the cyclone of emotions that struck all teenagers during the first seven years of François Mitterrand's mandate. Fifteen musical nuggets, exhumed from the dungeons of history, each and every one of them teaching us about what really obsessed the youngsters at that exact moment, i.e. what happens when the city lights come on at dusk, when irrepressible urges that stir them to get lost even more appear until the end of the night.

The artists gathered here did not have the honour of breaking into the local charts, but they all individually reached for the sky. Each song of 'Pop Sympathie' tells more or less the same story: that of a girl who throws herself into the night like one immerses one's self into the void, who rushes into a one-night adventure to become a star. And too bad if in the early morning she finds herself back at square one. In all these miniature odysseys there is neon lights, lasers, smoke machines, broken glass on checkered tiles, strangers on leather benches, celebrities in the bathrooms, stolen kisses, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, Polaroids, venetian blinds and radioactive tubes.

If the first opus of Vidal Benjamin, 'Disco Sympathie', focused on the funky mood of songs that could have been played at Le Palace, then 'Pop Sympathie' develops itself as the imaginary soundtrack of another nightclub, Les Bains-Douches, the capital’s epicenter of nocturnal drifts. So what do we listen to, blasé, at Bains-Douches? Mainly synthesizers. The child of punk and post punk, French New Wave celebrates the matrimony of machines and lolitas under the auspices of a retro trend that revisits the atomic age. Trying to surf on that wave and hit the charts, a bunch of producers (Stéphane Berlow, Laurent Stopnicki, Bernard "Black Devil" Fèvre, Johny Rech, Jean-Yves Joanny ...) will spot their talents amongst friends, in a travel agency or at the local bar. These virtual stars are called Cecilia, Laurent, Sonia, Janou, Fabienne, Anne, Arielle or Ronan, not even 20 years old, and often leaving just an overexposed photo and their first name on a single as the only memories of their swift passage in this particular musical story. It took all the love and sweet madness of Vidal Benjamin to bring them back in the light of day.

Clovis Goux

Tempo Dischi's second release is one of electronic music’s seminal albums; 1798 Italian space disco album: Automat by Automat.

A year after the release of Oxygène by Jean Michel Jarre, a milestone for electronic music, “Automat" was released in Italy, a timeless record that has influenced the years to come. Released in 1978 by EMI Italia, the album has been produced by two veteran italian songwriters and composers, Romano Musumarra and Claudio Gizzi after meeting Mario Maggi, one of the major innovators in the manufacturing of electronic instruments in Italy. Maggi invented the first programmable monophonic synthesizer ever made: the MCS70. Its sounds have been the basis for the production of the whole Automat album. That synth was used only for this record and remained a prototype, leaving a halo of mystery behind this record.

The album moves in the furrows of an atypical space disco, with abstract classical arias alternating with more sustained rhythms, which combine electronic experiments, progressive psychedelic journeys with cinematic themes. The A Side, composed by Gizzi is an electronic disco-tinged suite divided into three parts (The Rise, The Advance, The Genius). Ater a brief spatial intro, the insistent arpeggio expands into a soundtrack theme with a sumptuous melody, which slowly fades away to make room for a progressive psychedelic journey. The B Side, composed by Musumarra, is made by three tracks, including ‘Droid‘, one of the most representative songs of the electronic music of the early eighties. A magic sequence between the bassline, the electro drums, and the spatial disco theme with a futuristic and cinematic mood. This is a record that has influenced the music of our days and after 40 years may still sound contemporary.

Artificial Intelligence

On Laughing Gas, the third EP from Wild Nothing, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jack Tatum delves deeper into the territory where he thrives: namely, the synth and sophisti-pop of the 1980's. Working within a more mechanical and synthetic framework than his previous releases, Wild Nothing continues to delicately toe the line between the organic and the unnatural. These are still pop songs, but there’s an underlying sense of uneasiness that threads the music together.

Recorded in Los Angeles, CA and Richmond, VA with the help of Jorge Elbrecht, these five songs were originally imagined alongside last year’s Indigo and were written and tracked simultaneously with the album. When work on the full-length was nearing completion, Tatum set these ideas aside; they seemed to fit better on their own.

In spare moments between tours, Tatum began to look back and piece the songs together at his home studio in Richmond, reconnecting with Elbrecht to mix the EP. With Elbrecht in Denver and Tatum in Richmond, the two went back and forth on the final touches, molding a common thread from the Lô Borges inspired new wave of “Sleight Of Hand” to the propulsive, icy synth funk of “Foyer”.

Often considered a secondary or transitional format, Wild Nothing has always used the EP to further explore new ideas and influences. Laughing Gas is no exception.

Les Adventures de President Bongo: Named and shaped in loving tribute to Tintin, the fabled Belgian journalist who defined what it meant to be an adventurer in the 20th Century.
'Les Adventures de President Bongo' is a unique work that will reveal itself over the next seven years, give or take, in the form of 24 LP's.

SAGA:
There is a transient photo kept by two whale hunters that have been left to oversee equipment and housing. At the world’s coldest nook they share a single memory of mercy and beauty. The portrait of Dolores Del Rios that reaches just below her thin shoulders.

Printed on a label of canned fruits she never gets cold during hibernation at 73° North at Mosquito Bay. The almond shaped eyes and the high cheekbones of the goddess is the last memory from the world her custodians were never to see. The glacier made its demands, it received Dolores the goddess like it acquired everything else with its incessant presumptuousness.

No one got to know of the passions and desires of the custodians of Dolares Del Rios; no one got to know of the childish envy of them who loved the portrait of the goddess and both wanted to keep it to themselves.

Limited vinyl to 300 copies

Coltan Major Harmonics is atwo tracks 7’’ by Manu Louis, which also features in an interactive Installation by Escif at MIMA Brussels.
On track A, Coltan and his catchy bass line features a cocktail of London singer Heidi Heidelberg and Manu’s voice in a groovy and outrageous song about the precious mineral. The music uses only the original material composed by Manu for Escif’s interactive installation.