Techno News

Stuart Evans, aka Sordid Sound System is one of the founders of The Green Door Studio, a not for profit, analogue recording studio in Glasgow which emerged from an increasing disillusionment with the modern ways of music production. His sound holds outsider qualities, being everything but generic and predictable, mixing dub with movie soundtracks in the tradition of Carpenter and Italian likes.

On this 7” released on Höga Nord Rekords, SSS deconstructs and rebuilds music in an imaginative style, pairing tribe-ritual “back to ape”-beats with synthesized cosmic harmonies. In a way, we are enjoying straight up dub here but this record is also a display of the vivid and creative Glasgow scene centred round “The Green door studio” and record labels like “Invisible Ink” where krautrock and 80’s/90’s electronic music is part of the foundation. Boundless joy for every girl and boy!

AGT Records return to their Editions series with the reissue of a sizzling 4-tracker from Stabilizer. Originally released in 2001 on Boom Box records, its sound is a scintillating hybrid of breakbeat and electro and a prime example of the glory days of the early 2000’s breaks scene.

As electrifying breakbeats pound away beneath clinical high-hats and percussion, each track has its own personality and character. Mysterious samples and melodies are used to powerful effect, creating a sense of intrigue in amongst the beats. They are expertly placed and relieve the pressure of the tracks at just the right time, allowing the dancefloor to stay locked in, head down.

While all of this is going on, rolling basslines create warm grooves that keep things pushing forwards, the chunky bass weight balancing with the ice-cold elements above.

This record captures the hedonistic spirit of the rave from two decades ago, and with things beginning to open up again that feeling is due a return to the dancefloors. Moving from the living room to the main room, it feels right to get this one back into circulation, all in good time.

The inaugural release from TOHT is a 12″ trip that takes you from the banks of the Ganges to the break-beating heart of the equatorial rainforests.

This vinyl 12″ is a ‘white label’ style release, housed in white disco bag sleeve. It features ‘Breathe’ by User Only (Mat Carter & Stu Dunn), part of the TOHT family sound.

It launches project TOHT‘s entry into the audio abyss, aiming to cut through the noise and communicate a transcendental rhythm.

It is the first of three releases in the ‘Mask’ series and features two tracks chosen to whet your appetite for the TOHT sound.

Artwork for the series by Sez K.
Mastered at StarDelta Audio Mastering

Repress

Arad, real name Dara Smith, first joined the VOITAX catalogue in June 2020. Back then, the Irish artist served us up with "Radiance Haze" - a 6-track EP, spanning from heavy-hitting breaks to the ethereal ambience, with heavy features of Smith's vocals. Known for his multidisciplinary vision on music, he has also previously made seminal moves with his work as one half of Lakker, alongside Eomac, dropping groundbreaking music on heavyweight labels such as R&S, Blueprint and Stroboscopic Artefacts. For his second EP on VOITAX, Smith now returns with five beautifully crafted tracks that he titles "Augmented Fantasy". While following a similar approach, he does not fail to expand his repertoire of celestial dream-like atmospheres, which he carefully surrounds with a whole variety of vocals, and accurately placed broken drum patterns. In addition to his own singing, Arad also presents two impressive collaboration tracks, in which one of them features the voice of Stine Omar, also widely known as one half the Berlin-based pop duo EASTER. Driving rhythmics and processed, grainy vocals turn this piece into guaranteed hit material. Another collaboration with the befriended vocalist and music producer Nina Hynes serves as a touching closing chapter for this brilliantly produced, eclectic 5-tracker. All pieces are perfectly glued together while keeping their very individual character and soundscapes. The listener is certainly left with an augmented fantasy, as well as a curiosity to hear more to come from the Irish talent.

Collecting orders for Repress

Merciless machine funk, haunting soundscapes and rugged electro styles, drenched in concrete and vigorously fortified by the iconic German producer's sonic development through 90s street culture. Credit 00 moves like no one else.

Hits from DJ 2Bears and Amployee. Very low risk investments!

Silver Vinyl

Electro from 2002.
#minimumcontrol

Limited hand stamped copies..

2021 REPRESS! Robotic, atmosferic, dark electrotechno as we have come to expect from The Exaltics. Reminiscent of old B12, Transmat and Dopplereffekt releases.

NYC producer WTCHCRFT makes his debut on Posthuman’s I Love Acid series, with Elisa Bee on remix duty. Cut by Radioactive Man.

Mindcolormusic 10 year anniversary triple pack with 12 artists new to the label, each providing 2 tracks - limited to 150 copies!

Gen Ludd are Glasgow-based Rich McMaster (Golden Teacher, Modern Institute) and Tom Marshallsay, both of whom are a big part of the extended Rubadub family. Their music perfectly embodies the Rubadub ethos of music for heads and feet.

After months of negotiations with our minister of finance Hillington West Snr, TAFKNAGL (That artists formerly known as General Ludd) return with four precise cuts of pure rhythm and motion.

These tracks are a message to the Ramona-toting, gymnasium-powered international dance deejay. Please be bold enough to play them... you'll make the world a better place. We'll give you free WAVS too.

New label launch from Moy, Dynamics of Acid! First release is from the man himself and is a cracking 4 track EP with the highest quality acidic Braindance. Limited hand stamped copies..

This initial release on the new Futurepast label marks Davy's first output as a producer, crystallizing his endeavours in the studio and bearing witness to his long-standing experiments in electronic music.Built between London and Berlin over the last four years, The Long Now lays down the blueprints for following ventures on the label: using old and new gear to create unique, obscure soundscapes both outside of memory and away from nostalgic projections of lost futures. In a timeless and precise collaboration, Davy has brought together two historical figures for this release: 1990s R&S Records associate David Morley mixed the tracks,
while Simon Davey of The Exchange lent his renownedmastering skills to the project.Temporality, time travel and perception are key concepts for Davy, and not only in the EP's title.The four stripped-down tracks move forwards, sidewards and backwards in a bid to get us lost - not in space but in what time might sound like should we be swimming through it.Mysterious and ageless synths mesh with the beats of an unnamed drum machine under Davy's control.We move through a non-linear story told by three distinct forward-thinking techno titles:No Memories Planned, Circular Weeks and Causal Loop.Finally, the titular ambient track pans out cinematically over the images left in our heads:an invitation to begin it all again in The Long Now...

First in the TRUST XY recombination series. DL/MS, Keith Tucker, The Exaltics, and Privacy remix original tracks by DJ Glow, Microthol, DJ Stingray, and VC-118A.

For the second release on Futurepast, MGUN aka Manuel Gonzales offers a fresh take on his Detroit roots with three tracks that escape the usual categories. No two subsequent bars are identical, simultaneously reflecting and satisfying our curiosity. Gritty drums and panned-out synth sequences in 'The Nerve' result in a suspenseful yet unmistakably energizing step. 'Snap In', with its funky, reverb-soaked highs and hefty breakbeat, demonstrates MGUN's talent for folding in his electro and hip-hop influences. 'Intent' recalls a dreamy, vintage slideshow projector, misplaced memories lining up in a heartfelt procession. Each track taps into an elemental feeling within, fitting snugly into Futurepast's time-traveling vision.

Voltage Festival is releasing a compilation of 4 EP's to celebrate five years of existence. The EP's are dedicated to four sub-genres of techno and represent the versatility in techno of Voltage Festival's line-up.

The series starts off with a classic techno EP called ‘Zener Diode’, followed by a deep techno one called ‘Wiring Harness’, an industrial release with the name ‘Circuit Breaker’ and closing with acid techno called ‘Resistor’. The artists featured on the releases already made their appearance at Voltage Festival, or are playing on this year’s edition.

The third coming. Finland's otherworldly Electro lords Blastromen return to the Dominance Electricity mothership to deliver their much anticipated new long-player. Four years after Reality Opens, the ten new compositions featured on Cyberia continue where their last album left off and take it straight to the next level. Elaborate arangements with catchy synth melodies, haunting Electro breakbeats and epic, vocoderized lyrics prove once again that Blastromen are a class of their own.

Outer Gateways is the culmination of twenty years of friendship and countless years of anger, frustration, sadness, obsession, addiction, bad sleep, and poor mental health. The cycle of these feelings didn’t begin twenty years ago, and it won’t end in 2020, but the friendship began in the desert and won’t end this year, either, for two brothers - Gary Geiler and Kevin Palmer - who share concussions, floating head hauntings, bouts of self-deprecation and, most strongly, white hot anger towards those who bulldoze for a buck and a Black Friday piss-up. They are friends who make music to fight a failing future, not for an optimist’s sake, but to quiet their anxieties for a moment of sleep before the alarm clock drags the shit back into focus.

BOA is a brotherhood formed through almost classically cinematic settings: desert drives to pick up a small town’s Wire magazine; skating soundtracked by Public Enemy, Godflesh, Adrian Sherwood and No U Turn; copies of Burroughs, Ballard, Bradbury, and Borges traded between backwoods parties and band practices. A connection unharmed by circumstance and strengthened by time lays the groundwork for a creative, emotional exchange delivered in bass weight and Chronic forms.

Twenty years of the above (and way beyond) led to a release on Seagrave in 2015, before hunkering down to fine-tune their collaboration into the eight tracks contained within Outer Gateways. (The preceding 12”, SUS033, features material recorded after the completion of the album; Mosca’s remix pulls from sounds contained within the album.)

Kevin and Gary - who produce as Best Available Technology and Ovis Aurum, respectively - cast sonics to curse oil barons with rapid dick decay. Sound-making stops time as it silences the anger, focusing fatherly / brotherly frustrations towards those who hate unconditionally, who destroy without compassion, who desecrate for their own sakes and spit upon our futures. A tool to fight eco-anxiety and a map to chart the next twenty years, Outer Gateways is sonics proper operated like heavy machinery.

BOA's Outer Gateways LP will be available on vinyl LP & digital, with 100 limited edition copies housed in heavy-duty black jackets screen-printed in glimmering metallic gold.

For over 4 years, David Coccagna aka Chaperone has been a constant part of Great Circles, as musician, art director, and muse. With Snapback Balaclava he once again fully embodies all of those roles, delivering three inspiring tracks, selecting his remixers with specific attention to their musical histories, and designing his cover art. Across the A-side, Chaperone scrapes away at the grit - personal grit, the grit of anxiety, and Philly grit. These are meditations on loops, and loops on meditations. Each one appears on the surface to be a brief quote, but time dilation takes over, and minutes later we discover that Chaperone has welcomed us into and back out of his own healing moment.
Like Chaperone's P O N D release (GRCR-009), the B-side of Snapback Balaclava is a Great Circles extended family affair with a trio of diverse remixes that expose and exploit fragments of the chaos Chaperone so carefully contained. Hitoshi Kojima (Thrive) reinterprets Pulse Feels Swells Beating with relentless syncopated rhythms and synth lines that hang like massive string drones. M//R lays down a signature percussion ensemble palette, zeroes in on otherwise peripheral elements of Grit Neglect, and then deftly navigates sea change with both. Matt Korvette and Sean McGuinness of Philly punk band Pissed Jeans open up the pit and finish the story, taking Femur Baseball Bat to its literal and brutal potential with monstrous vocals and kicks.