Techno Vinyl New Releases - News

Vocal trance
Yes.
But probably not as you would imagine.
Here is Friday Dunard from Cologne.

Ahrpe Records co-founder Amandra navigates a unique space between droning ambience and polyrhythmic funk on 'Dame De Bahia', his first release to emerge on Italian imprint Obscura. This is the French, Warsaw-based producer's second album and follows a string of acclaimed EPs on Ahrpe, Semantica, Tikita and Silent Season. Complex patterns are woven through sustained tone clusters to foster an unlimited sense of energy and focus. Radiant synths glisten over live percussive loops whilst infinite pads wander the boundaries of light and dark. Amandra uses minimalist techniques to build tranquil sonic spaces that evolve on their own accord, making way for carefully mapped out rhythmic cycles. The result is an immersive listening experience replete with subtle details, but never cluttered. "Moody and lightful, this album combines many aspects I cherish in electronic music. Dame De Bahia LP is a direct nod to my beloved Mediterranean roots."

A/B sides of Taciturn Manner LP
Taciturn Manner is Reggy van Oers's first full length on his own Telemorph imprint.

Pertained in a period of strained self reflection, several field recordings have become the core upon which the album has been created. A persistant continuous movement throughout the elements of the tracks causes a certain constrasting tension and gradually transforms into lush cinematic textures.

An intricate and mesmerizing journey, full of rich and surprising details, resulting in a rather emotional expression of his constraint style and coherent distinct sound.

Maurizio Cascella debuts on Love Blast Records with a 2 track EP, Violet Capsule .
Well known for his past productions on Elettronica Romana together with such names as Giorgio Gigli, Dino Sabatini and Donato Dozzy he s a founder of the roman techno scene.
In his new release Cascella propose his concept of techno: catchy, dubby and groovy with a mental hypnotic touch, developed in long efforts, taking you to the darkest side of the dancefloor.

Advance 12" of the upcoming Oscar Mulero album 'Perfect Peace', SEMANTICA 70 with some deep electronix!

New chapter on Nonnative series. New Semantica artists Cosmin TRG, Samuli Kemppi, Opuswerk and Refracted featuring Nonnative 09.

Wriggling away from any clear classification, as 80s Italian new music was wont to do, yet clearly drawing on a number of traditions and procedures, Andreoni and Paladino's AEOLYCA project stands on its own as it intersects the two musicians' already well established partnership in A.T.R.O.X. and The Doubling Riders among other settings with the sounds generated by Mario Ciccioli's aeolian sculptures. Neither aiming for the organic purity of Harry Bertoia's Sonambient recordings or the complex constructions of Mario Bertoncini's works with aeolian harps, AEOLYCA walks a line of resistance in refusing to get with any program. The music that was produced in Andreoni and Paladino's interaction with the recordings extracted by Emiliano Licastro from Ciccioli's sculptures is one that breaks the boundaries between the sound and musical sources.

The work is divided between the quick pop timings of the Rain on the Bells', Sunday Clothes for Brass Bands' and The Peruvian Club' and the longer eponymous structured compositions that bookend the record each track characterized by a dominant sonority inspired by specific iterations of globalized musics. Ultimately, though, notwithstanding their individual structural and sound diversities, the project is indebted to the sampler, the ultimate absorber, the sound source that takes up the most musical space and the possibilities of eroding sources and styles that it imposes.

Further, to indicatively attest the historical context from which it emerges, the 1980s as they came to a close, AEOLYCA was originally released on cassette, that decade's foremost format, agile, immediate, economical and for a US label (Violet Glass Oracle).

This is music that has digested many of the period's instinctive gestures. It exists as a satellite, incapable and unwilling to articulate antecedents and to nurture descendants. This is a unique work in Andreoni and Paladino's well documented activity, individually, in duo, and in their eclectic collaborations with the likes of Roger Eno and Riccardo Sinigaglia. Like the Time Zones Festival from which this project got its start AEOLYCA is what you find on the 'path of possible musics'.

- Peter Sarram

About this release *First 10 tracks only come with the limited edition. Nijmegen's ESHU welcomes co-founder Ivano Tetelepta for his first solo release on the label. It is also the imprint's first full length, but Tetelepta's second album after the hypnotic drum workout that was True Colours, his debut on Fear of Flying in 2012. It comes as a double vinyl release with the first disc being limited, and finds the producer casting himself free from the dance floor and serving up a beautifully atmospheric soundtrack that would be a perfect companion for a nature documentary. When making EPs and 12''s, Tetelepta's smooth and infectious drums are always front and centre in his work, whether solo or as producing with label mates under the ESHU alias. He's also worked with labels like Siena and KERING, but here he shows another side that focusses on short pieces, melody and blissful sound design. To give this album its perfectly warm analogue sound, the whole thing was recorded via cassette and revox tape. The first ten tracks are short, immersive musical worlds with poignant chords and glistening melodies. Some twinkle and shimmer, some sound like an underwater eco system coming to life, and others seem to come from deepest space where solar winds and sonar pulses pass you by. It's cinematic and evocative stuff that takes you away from the here and now and into a different realm. The four tracks on disc two then start with Senang, a suspensory and multi-layered piece of music that has keys, modulations and samples wrapping all around you before Whistle Of Patience has a supple minimal drum line that slowly gets under your skin. Ede 2 Nijmegen is then a turbulent dub track which builds a darker mood before closer De Test sinks back into supple, rubbery and warm drums laced up with hypnotic pads that circle all around. This is an ambitious album of meditative music that offers a beautiful place to lose your mind.

Street sounds remixes and ambient noises dronified... music for the soul.

Shlomo takes a step away from his own Taapion Records to return to Delsin for his second full EP for the label. The Parisian producer serves up two of his modern techno jams, a lush ambient piece plus a slamming rework by Tommy Four Seven. Up first is In Absentia: Tome 2, a follow up track to his last EP on the label. It is another cold techno cut with turbulent drums down low and icy, slithering hi hats up top all backed by synths that light up the track from behind with a heavenly glow. Tbilisian Cure is a more abrasive affair with blistered synth lines and scurrying electronics running through the fast and brutal drums. Lali then flips the script and offers an ambient excursion with watery synths forming celestial puddles in the sky. It's a zoned out soundtrack that's the perfect comedown. Finishing off the EP, 47 label boss Tommy Four Seven flips this one into a weightless techno groove that rocks back and forth on the drums as sweeping chords leave you feeling suspended in mid air. Plenty of ground is covered in this one, and all with equally compelling results.

Southern Italian sociologist, DJ and electronic music producer Simone Gatto is about to release his second album, 'Heaven Inside Your Frequencies', in December 2017. Recorded and produced between his motherland and other significant spaces and cities the Ionian coast and natural parks of Lecce, his second home Berlin, the Whitney Museum in New York City and other significant places 'Heaven Inside Your Frequencies' represents a complete excursus of his personal and professional paths combining Gatto's theoretical background with personal and artistic maturity, achieved in the last decade.

Completing the reissue cycle of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement's ambient invocations, Papua New Guinea (2012) is rendered in this new remaster by Paul Corley (0PN, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost) and sacrificed to vinyl for the first and last time on Hospital Productions. Slotting alongside 5 previous vinyl reissues of the original tape editions released over the last 12 months, Papua New Guinea loops back to the start of the saga, affording a clearer and more immersive way into one of Dominick Fernow's most (oc)cultish projects.
The eight track dosage of Papua New Guinea generated a wave of speculation as to its shadowy provenance back in 2012. It sounded little like anything else in circulation and left heads genuinely floundering for answers to its riddling track titles and extreme aesthetics; a steeply evocative combination of near-infrasonic sub-bass tones and cold but humid environmental sounds laced with slow, looping, tribal rhythms.
It took at least another year before the project was revealed as an outlet for Hospital Productions capo Dominick Fernow, who had been quietly taking the opportunity to explore a sound putatively unfamiliar to his better known projects. Yet, with hindsight, it's now easier to hear RSE as an inverse, endothermic alternative to the raging energies of his Prurient output or the searing, propulsive combustions of Vatican Shadow, for example.
In stark contrast to proceeding instalments' increasing track lengths, Papua New Guinea is comprised of eight relatively concise parts, with each side of vinyl relating to one of the original tapes. The A-side seeps into consciousness in frightening style with Paul Corley's remaster now bringing the long, slippery sub-bass descent of There Are Many Powerful Spirits Living In The Hills And Stones And It Is Not A Good Idea To Disturb Them to life with uncanny psychoacoustic subtlety, before hypnotic rhythms take possession for the duration and the listener is eventually deposited at the bombed-out ambient ecology of The Spirit Was Angry And Froze The Bulldozer
So It Could Not Move. The Bulldozer Is Still There Today. What occurs between those points defies description in the manner of the strongest psychedelics, and likewise, requires deep immersion for full comprehension.








Strong Spirit Dwells

Ukrainian producer Vakula, whose name is linked to the early days of Arma, re-emerges with Techno Game.

Acid Test continues their journey with the return of Achterbahn D'Amour. On their first proper release in three years, Jool & Iron Curtis patiently craft an intricate sound world - with the opening track, major-key pads hearken towards a bright future, hi-hats rustle like leaves and on "Dehaveland," percussive elements fall into beautiful, random unison like factory machines staging an after hours dance. Samuel Van Dijk's vaunted VC-118A project steps up for a remix, turning in a taut techno version that unfurls smoke pillars of ghostly ambience. The duo wraps up the four-tracker with an unexpected dreamy electro turn, "Don't Talk To Me." Throughout Acid Test 13, they remain in lockstep with the label's ethos - to bend, hammer and flatten acid lines into new, imaginative shapes.

First ever vinyl edition of Justin Broadrick's crushing industrial turns as JK Flesh for Hospital Productions, combining the Suicide Estate and Antibiotic Armageddon releases for a greyscale spectrum of brutalist techno / abyssal acid dub / tramadol tribalism / noxious noise textures that's highly recommended if you're into Regis, Birmingham at night, Kareem...
It's an unflinchingly bleak representation of the world described in hard edged techno and shot thru with moments of affective, synthy pathos. In sonic and literal tone, the record forms a stark reflection on Justin K Broadrick Brummie stomping grounds, using demolished tower blocks as cues for some of the album's most affective moments, such as the wrecking ball assault of Bayley Tower (New Mix), the rubbled rolige of Stoneycroft Tower, or the 'marish zumby techno lurch of Bromford Bridge Estate, and all in a way that surely dovetails with the perceptions of anyone who has lived in a built p British area, or anywhere else with lots of
concrete and little sunlight.The other half of the tracks are taken from and titled in reference to Antibiotic Armageddon - the inevitable point when pill-gobbling citizens of the world are no longer protected against old viruses, and new ones. The tone of these cuts is understandably bleak af, too. Tamiflu dry-wretches a windswept passage of bummed-out dub techno breaks, where Squalene (New Mix])glumly follows suit with the clammy synth malaise of Ethylene Glycol and the knee-buckled crawler Thimerosal, which sounds like one of his Godflesh tracks in the process of terrifying itself to death.s

First ever vinyl edition of Justin Broadrick's crushing industrial turns as JK Flesh for Hospital Productions, combining the Suicide Estate and Antibiotic Armageddon releases for a greyscale spectrum of brutalist techno / abyssal acid dub / tramadol tribalism / noxious noise textures that's highly recommended if you're into Regis, Birmingham at night, Kareem...
It's an unflinchingly bleak representation of the world described in hard edged techno and shot thru with moments of affective, synthy pathos. In sonic and literal tone, the record forms a stark reflection on Justin K Broadrick Brummie stomping grounds, using demolished tower blocks as cues for some of the album's most affective moments, such as the wrecking ball assault of Bayley Tower (New Mix), the rubbled rolige of Stoneycroft Tower, or the 'marish zumby techno lurch of Bromford Bridge Estate, and all in a way that surely dovetails with the perceptions of anyone who has lived in a built p British area, or anywhere else with lots of
concrete and little sunlight.The other half of the tracks are taken from and titled in reference to Antibiotic Armageddon - the inevitable point when pill-gobbling citizens of the world are no longer protected against old viruses, and new ones. The tone of these cuts is understandably bleak af, too. Tamiflu dry-wretches a windswept passage of bummed-out dub techno breaks, where Squalene (New Mix) glumly follows suit with the clammy synth malaise of Ethylene Glycol and the knee-buckled crawler Thimerosal, which sounds like one of his Godflesh tracks in the process of terrifying itself to death.s

After releasing their first two releases on one disc, the third release on Amsterdam imprint Working Titles is a release on its own. Label founders Scott Franka & Kaap are behind the label's third release that features two epic tracks from the Dutch pair and again finds them exploring new and exciting techno territory with their lively machine jams.

First track 'Poise I' is a deep and dubbed out techno track with deft synths slowly shapeshifting and bringing sombreness to the quickened groove. It's late night music to zone you out with sparse but rich detailing to keep your mind occupied and it gets ever-busier over the course of thirteen enthralling minutes. Then 'Poise II' is a 16 minute masterpiece that is watery and dubby. It has undulating synth currents and increasingly textured snares. Building to a peak then pulling back, with occasional freaky vocal sounds and sci-fi motifs, it is a truly cinematic piece that closes out an ambitious EP.

If Psychic Health's self-titled debut album took the lessons the LA duo learned in the teeming clubs of Berlin and Melbourne, their latest LP, Exclusion, look inward, a document of the duo tunneling down the studio wormhole. As such, Exclusion is a remarkably dynamic effort, adeptly jumping between evocative ambience ("Jamaica 88," "Ryso") and equally expansive dance floor fair.
Examples of the latter, such as the album's obvious centerpiece and titular track, Exclusion, document Gabriel Mounsey and Devon Steffens's harnessing modular beast technology for peak techno utility, finding a clear thoroughfare between the soaring strings of Derrick May's classic Transmat releases and Ostgut Ton's current EBM-inflected precision.
As you'd expect from Mounsey's background in film composition, Exclusion whirls with imagery. It's a Los Angeles album, but focuses on raw beauty of the city at night—the lights in the distance, and the desolate downtown streets where kickdrums often waft from disused warehouses. While their debut album opened notable doors for the group, landing distribution from Hard Wax and featuring in the Netflix series Sense8, Exclusion is an altogether masterful turn for Psychic Health, their complete studio immersion easing the listener into deeply hypnotic states.

Bologna's Yerevan Tapes project vivid sci-fi sound designs from producer/signer Marie Davidson and sound designer Invisible Church, making up the duo's first collaborative work, recorded during September 2016 - January 2017, and notably starring Theo Parrish playing cymbal on the 10 minute submission, Ten Years.
Spawned from a meeting at RBMA's Montreal '16 festival, Whatever Makes You Feel Safe locates her signature vocals far removed from the structural synth-pop comforts of her roundly acclaimed debut side, Perte D'Identité, and the Adieux Au Dancefloor LP for Cititrax, and elusively diffused into chasmic frameworks of field recordings and depth charge percussion deployed by Invisible Church.
In all three parts they feel out chasmic, void-like dimensions with a microscopic attention to textural and spatial qualities. Marie's vocals signify a ghost in the machine presence on Collage, rendered as silvery streaks and cluster-formed cloud of ferric harmonics perfusing drizzly street or industrial scenes worthy of a Bladerunner scene.
Never Release The Tension meanwhile isolates and focuses in on a blunted, atonal sort of post-industrial sound design recalling Mika Vainio in its brooding pressure, or even the elegiac glossolalia of Liz Fraser via Tropic of Cancer in its lamenting keen.
But the best is definitely saved for last with Ten Years, where speaker-drooping subs underline sheets of steely grey, phantasmic dissonance, punctuated by the patter and splash of Theo Parrish's cymbal work, and possibly betraying a hint of influence from first nation musical traditions as much as kosmische or avant BM.

For Kontra-Musik White Label's 10th release we give you none other than Nuel. The Italian producer is closely connected to the Aquaplano label run by Donato Dozzy - a natural source of collaboration as they speak the same language, not least in the musical sense. Nuel has perfected this dreamlike and seductive speech and it was irresistible for Kontra-Musik. On the surface Nuel's tracks might seem abstract and mathematical, but there's really an abundance of movement and groove in his music. Mechanical yet sensual, there's subtle erotic current running through the whole release: It's like a Marvin Gaye record for robots that just want to get it on.

J.C aka Jose Cabrera and Kastil collaborate and come with the exciting results. A fresh blend of fierce techno, ambience, industrial, noise and found sounds recordings. A full length captivating album that pushes and pulls you through an edgy and engaging world of sound. Part 1 mixes up trance-inducing deep techno with punishing drum programming. Synths have a life of their own as they whip and snap about and bring a post apocalyptic sense of foreboding. Some tracks are abstract modular gurgles and others are lo-fi, heavily textured affairs that are beguiling beautiful. The use of modular synths lends the whole thing an unpredictable and analogue feel that makes is bristle and brim with life throughout. Part 2 focuses on more suspensory ambient sounds. It means tracks zone you out and get you thinking, with distant melodies drifting next to warm solar winds. When drums do appear they are deep down below and dubbed out affairs that unfold slowly. A album that keeps you locked from start till end!

Just as you begin to get comfortable with something, the rug is pulled from under you. A week last Friday, John Dwyer and his band Oh Sees released their newest record, the monolithic psych opus Orc. This release represents the 19th album under some amalgam of the name Oh Sees/Thee Oh Sees/The Oh Sees, OCS, etc. Wasting no time, John Dwyer presents the 20th album (in the 20th year of the band's existence), 'Memory of a Cut Off Head' (out 17/11 on Castle Face), returning to his roots as OCS.

It is easy to forget (especially amidst the ringing of ears and aching of muscles after your typical Oh Sees show) that initially, OCS was a rather hushed affair. After the minimalistic brutality of Coachwhips, OCS was a diametric opposite corner of John's musical world, quiet to the point of whispered in the wind, buffeted by the airy whirr of singing saw, soft and strange. Those early records especially had a rather contraband hush about them, as if the party has gone on all night and continues into the morning but everyone's raspy from talking too much and gradually agrees to whisper and pantomime as they watch the sun come up over the hills. Since then of course, things got gradually louder, faster, crazier...the band evolved since then into the Oh Sees everyone knows. For the 20th Oh Sees release, 100th Castle Face title, and 20th year doing it, John re-examines the quieter roots of it all in particularly baroque and homesteadly fashion. Memory of a Cut Off Head was co-written with longtime collaborator and vocal counterpoint Brigid Dawson, recorded in total in John's own Stu Stu Studio, and it's lush, sumptuous in texture, but satisfyingly retains the gentle grace of the early stuff. There's beautifully executed strings throughout, courtesy of Heather Lockie's fine arrangements, horn arrangements courtesy of Mikal Cronin, and they even brought back the old saw - Patrick Mullins, that is - on saw and electronics. A return and a refinement of old forms, a few solemn meditations on life lived at high velocity, perhaps a respite from it...a softer side of JPD and distinguished company.

Just as you begin to get comfortable with something, the rug is pulled from under you. A week last Friday, John Dwyer and his band Oh Sees released their newest record, the monolithic psych opus Orc. This release represents the 19th album under some amalgam of the name Oh Sees/Thee Oh Sees/The Oh Sees, OCS, etc. Wasting no time, John Dwyer presents the 20th album (in the 20th year of the band's existence), 'Memory of a Cut Off Head' (out 17/11 on Castle Face), returning to his roots as OCS.

It is easy to forget (especially amidst the ringing of ears and aching of muscles after your typical Oh Sees show) that initially, OCS was a rather hushed affair. After the minimalistic brutality of Coachwhips, OCS was a diametric opposite corner of John's musical world, quiet to the point of whispered in the wind, buffeted by the airy whirr of singing saw, soft and strange. Those early records especially had a rather contraband hush about them, as if the party has gone on all night and continues into the morning but everyone's raspy from talking too much and gradually agrees to whisper and pantomime as they watch the sun come up over the hills. Since then of course, things got gradually louder, faster, crazier...the band evolved since then into the Oh Sees everyone knows. For the 20th Oh Sees release, 100th Castle Face title, and 20th year doing it, John re-examines the quieter roots of it all in particularly baroque and homesteadly fashion. Memory of a Cut Off Head was co-written with longtime collaborator and vocal counterpoint Brigid Dawson, recorded in total in John's own Stu Stu Studio, and it's lush, sumptuous in texture, but satisfyingly retains the gentle grace of the early stuff. There's beautifully executed strings throughout, courtesy of Heather Lockie's fine arrangements, horn arrangements courtesy of Mikal Cronin, and they even brought back the old saw - Patrick Mullins, that is - on saw and electronics. A return and a refinement of old forms, a few solemn meditations on life lived at high velocity, perhaps a respite from it...a softer side of JPD and distinguished company.

Written and recorded at Cats Abbey in November 2016 by Anthony Child and Daniel Bean.

Anthony and Daniel played the Buchla Music Easel, harmonium, shruti box, bass guitar, hurdy gurdy, symphonie, glockenspiel, hand bell, Electro Harmonix 45000, Strymon Blue Sky, Strymon DIG, and Roland RE 101 Space Echo.

Front cover image by Ali Wade

Rear cover image by Cathrin Queins

Design by SOMA

The title of the debut lp from The Transcendence Orchestra outlines the modus operandi of this pairing of Anthony Child and Daniel Bean. Recorded in a remote English rural setting over a period of 24 hours this is an apt location for a recording that eschews time and space in favour of methodological displacement and deep psychological navigation.

Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals is an experiment in acoustic and synthetic symbiosis which is deeply influenced by the atmosphere and acoustics of the rural location of Cats Abbey resulting in a set of recordings which can aid to the transformation of consciousness. Deploying a range of ancient and modern instruments and effects including Buchla Music Easel, harmonium, shruti box, bass guitar, hurdy gurdy, Electro Harmonix 45000, Strymon Blue Sky and Roland RE 101 Space Echo among others, Child and Bean conjure an audio experience which encapsulates elements of drone, trance, pulse, rhythm and melody subtly shifting all into a psychologically penetrating experience beyond the aesthetic and into the comforting unknown.

Simbad (aka SMBD) is a stalwart of the underground music scene in UK and because of his vast arrays of releases it's very hard to put him into any box or music category. Since his 2007 album Supersonic Revelation & his worldwide acclaimed dancefloor hit Soul Fever, the London based frenchy has been constantly travelling the five continents entertaining delighted clubbers with his super energetic dj skills or producing and recording various artists from many different genres including deeper Dubstep don Mala (DMZ), UK Hip Hop star Roots Manuva, Cuban songstress Dayme Arocena, Detroit House producer Kai Alce, Berlin based deep Techno artist Fred P, Seun Kuti from Afrobeat's most famous family, Brazilian superstar artist/actor Seu Jorge and being production mentor for the king of cool, radio DJ Gilles Peterson (who made him one of the resident at his Worldwide Festivals). With the Moon Theory EP Simbad demonstrates his talent on some deep analog frequencies for the very solid & ever growing label that is Apron Records. As the music wizard puts it himself : 'im just trying to make some timeless shhhhh man, soul in all forms really, trying anyway ! And I guess that the best is yet to come.

New Abdulla Rashim!!!

Outer worlds explored from inner space. Profound, meditative, organic sounds involving singing bowls, gongs and bells.

"Kazuya Nagaya is a Japanese artist who creates immersive, ritualized compositions through the use of bronze bells, gongs and singing bowls. Since releasing his first album 'Utsuho' in 1999, he has composed music for a range of projects, ranging from collaborations with Tibetan Buddhist monks to a remix for Plastikman. Nagaya uses bronze bells, gongs and singing bowls which are mostly used in Buddhist or Hindu rituals in Tibet, Bali and Japan. He creates unique ambient music by mixing these sacred instruments with modern instruments.

Nagaya`s music is rooted in philosophies and sensibilities unique to Japan. Both Japanese Buddhism -the likes of Zen- and Japan's exquisite forms of artistic expression, such as ink paintings and haiku, all put high value on extreme simplicity entirely free from ornamentation, and indeed it is in their simplicity that they express, paradoxically, the profundity of their spirituality. In this same sense, the ambient music produced by Kazuya Nagaya aims to convey profundity of spirit to the listener by virtue of its very simplicity."

Argentinian producer Xhei who already released his music on labels such as Micro.fon, CLR, Afu and many more is back with his first EP on Nachtstrom, including an amazing remix by Christian Wunsch (Polegroup, Tsunami, Soma, Modularz, Faut Section). Limited clear transparent 12'-vinyl. Huge early support by Chris Liebing, DVS1, Oscar Mulero, Rodhad, Len Faki, Exium, Pfirter, Damon Wild, Bas Mooy, DJ Emerson, Raiz, Truncate (Audio Injection), Drumcell, Nihad Tule, Gayle San, Keith Carnal, Dubfire, Paco Osuna, Henning Baer, Kyle Geiger, Thomas Heckmann, MTD, Hans Bouffmyhre,

Crack is the new album from Shampoo Boy on Blackest Ever Black. The Vienna-based trio's second LP to date, following 2013's crushing BEB debut Licht, Crack finds Peter Rehberg (Editions Mego), Christina Nemec (comfortzone) and Christian Schachinger leaving behind the post-everything in search of their very own neo-something: a powerful alloy of extreme electroacoustic music, luminous ambience and the mineral fundaments of rock and black metal. As before, they're staring down the void, but this time they're looking beyond it, too, for the fissures and faultlines that might let some light in.Opener 'Spalt' immediately signals a departure from the monolithic doom of Licht, conveying instead a sense of adrenalised movement, of acceleration towards an ever-receding horizon. There is no percussion, yet Nemec's chasmic bass and Rehberg's protean electronics eddy and modulate to give rise to an unstoppable momentum. 'Spalt' becomes a peculiarly wracked Autobahn chase, one where you're uncertain if you're the pursuer or the pursued. There seems to be some promise of escape in Schachinger's highly lyrical, spiralling guitar improvisations, which nod to Fripp and Goettsching, but Shampoo Boy's vision of the cosmos is more hard-boiled and unforgiving than that of their forefathers. There are some furies that can't be outrun. If 'Spalt' dramatises a failed getaway then 'Riss' considers what happens if you do get away, only to find your hiding-place isn't quite as safe or secure as you had presumed it would be. Slow, ceremonial downstrokes suggest a return to the vast and uncanny woodland landscape in which the events of Licht unfolded. This time, though, the city intrudes upon the scene of pastoral unease: Rehberg seems to be scanning the airwaves, picking up unintelligible snatches of conversation and machine noise. These mingle with nameless natural currents to create pernicious hybrid forms, which curl and ricochet about the stereo field. Subterranean bass tones, meanwhile, seem to reverberate from an ancient and appalling source. The accumulation of noise and energy across 12 minutes becomes unbearably suspenseful; a reckoning seems inevitable. It is typical of Crack's unorthodox Weltanschauung, however, that just when we think the game is up, we are faced not with oblivion but with potential absolution: 'Riss''s closing section is a gravely serene tone-painting that clearly suggests the possibility, if not certainty, of rebirth and renewal. Perhaps you can start again after all. But of course the game isn't up, and all roads lead to Side B: given in its entirety to the three-part 'Bruch', the most potent and pugilistic manifestation of Shampoo Boy's brute psychedelia to date. Part 1 is a near-gothic assemblage of tortured computer processing, abyssal drones and stray industrial noise. This gives way to the calm but agonised concrète of Part 2; sparse, minimalist and dub-damaged, it's the sound of Part 1's traumas remembered through a fog of painkillers. Before long, however, the medication falters and those traumas come back in to focus: so much so, that the broiling digital synthesis and annihilating slow-motion riffage of Part 3 come as a relief. For a while the thuggish monochord attack here feels almost Stooge-ian - grungy, swaggering, sewer-savvy - but it doubles back into abstraction, subsuming itself into the Shampoo Boy's larger, gravity-defying architectures of feedback. By this point it has become impossible to distinguish individual instruments, processes or contributions; the group mind has taken over, the third eye is on fire, and the album climaxes in a black flash of negative ecstasy. Epic in scale, complex in mood and dazzling in technique, Crack is a momentous achievement from three improvising musicians at the height of their powers. A lived-in and emotionally-charged work, harrowing but energising, it digs deep, deep into the underworld to open up new lines of space-time enquiry. It is also a sustained achievement of arrangement and post-production remarkable even in light of its makers' pedigree: the harshest and heaviest passages are rendered with a sense of space and richness of detail that is truly otherworldly. Russell Haswell's astute mastering amplifies this, resulting in one of the most exhilarating and rewarding entries in the Blackest Ever Black catalogue. Click here for high res cover JPG, Click here to listen to 'Spalt'

Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld, working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless, exploring the meaning of natural', listening for the pulse of the ancient, using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age. Coloccia and Barnett's ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of 'Truth Teller', moving through the agitated wormhole techno of 'Dreamsnake', to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of 'Healer'. 'Blight''s zero-hour synth pulsations are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones, 'AM Horizon' is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread, 'Agate Cross''s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield of pure tone. 'Ash Grove' and 'Rose Eye' are exhilarating exercises in contemporary musique concrète: complex timbral constructs in which Coloccia's disembodied glossolalia, swooping strings and other nameless sonic spectra conspire to evoke extra-dimensional space and the highest spiritual drama. Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K's Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra's recent work, Conrad Schnitzler's more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.

Licht is the debut album by Shampoo Boy, a new guitar, bass and electronics trio from Vienna, comprising members Christian Schachinger, Christina Nemec and Peter Rehberg. Schachinger and Rehberg have played together in various projects over the last 25 years, most notably Peterlicker - see Last Slave (2010) and Nicht (2011), both released on Editions Mego. Schachinger was also involved in Der Scheitel, their album In einem Haus das Liebe heißt being a classic of German 'Schlagermusik'. Rehberg currently operates the Editions Mego family of labels and is a member of KTL, R/S and Fenn O'Berg as well as working on theatre productions with Gisele Vienne, and with choreographer Margret Gudjonsdottir. Nemec's background is in avant-rock and industrial outfits such as Bray and her own performance group SV Damenkraft. She remains highly active as a solo artist, both as Chra and under her own name, and she has performed on several occasions with Lydia Lunch. Licht is made up of four improvisations recorded and mixed at Twisted, Wien between April 2012 and January 2013. Mastered by Noel Summerville at 3345, London. Artwork by Stephen O'Malley.

Last handful of this triple monster masterpiece of drone.

A limited re-press of the horn-drone extravaganza, originally recorded in 1974. Combining four of Wada's self-made "pipehorns" (made from plumbing materials, over three metres in length), with an electronic drone tuned to the electrical current of the performance space, this is a lost masterpiece of early minimalism, placing Wada rightfully in the pantheon with LaMonte Young, Phil Niblock, Maryanne Archer and Alvin Lucier.

Recorded in Syracuse, New York, this recording captures the room-filling complex overtones generated by the ever-shifting interplay of the breathing horns and the constant electronic drone. This is a music of ritual hypnotic power, its heavy low end mass and sense of change within constancy engendering a meditative transcendency.

"Earth Horns with Electronic Drone" is the fourth and ultimate release in Em Records' Yoshi Wada series, a must for all fans of minimalism, heavy drones, ritual, mystery and world-shaking transcendence. From an original performance of almost three hours, the CD features a 77 minute excerpt; the full performance is featured on the triple LP set. From Earth Horns to beyond the firmament: prepare to be elevated!This edition comes with full colour inner sleeves, including many unseen rare photos from mid 1970s performances and facsimile concert posters.

With Contemplative Figuration we see Broshuda pushing his amorphous, impossible-to-pin-down music in exciting new directions. Stitched together in various European cities over the last few years, it is the artist’s most dynamic and ambitious release thus far, drawing equally from musique concrete, beat research, ambient, tape collage, and spoken word. Episodic in nature, the collection functions well as a sort of impressionistic travelogue, with romantic, hazy atmospheres coaxed from borrowed equipment, serendipitous recording sessions with old friends, and even a drum sequence programmed with Mario Paint, among other curios and sleights of hand. Broshuda deftly wrings bonafide cohesion and balance from these disparate source materials, tools, and locations, as on opener “Kakigori,” which allows a snaking harmonic drone the space to evolve before exploding it into a sort of seething, dubbed out pointillism. Later, “Lied Für Hase” concocts a potent, humid atmosphere of beautifully evolving acoustic piano loops and elegant narration. Taken as a whole, Contemplative Figuration is a weightless, transportive record, one that is bursting at the seams with ideas, mischief, and a restless spirit.

Mastered by Helmut Erler at D&M, Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

Soda Gong presents a razor sharp collection of rigorous and imaginative new music from Moscow-by-way-of-St.Petersburg-based musician and producer Flaty. "Generic TARGZ" places Flaty's precipitously complex drum programming and keen ear for atmosphere and space at the forefront, offering up a dynamic array of techno, ambient, generative footwork, and other tougher to pigeonhole rhythmic experiments. It is a dizzying and cohesive document in which ethereal productions, such as "Praaai" wherein a bewitching vocal pad hovers over delicate, pin-prick percussion, sit comfortably alongside tightly controlled chaos, as with the synapse-knotting "Thread" and heavy-hitting "Horn of Plenty".

Over the past few years, Flaty has released a wealth of diverse and uniformly excellent music under monikers such as AEM Rhythm Cascade, Dada Ques, and Wrong Water. He is most closely associated with the influential GOST ZVUK label, but his work has also appeared on imprints such as 12th Isle, Muscut, and his own ANWO Records. Although Flaty serves as his primary alias, "Generic TARGZ" is only the artist's second full-length under the moniker, following 2016's "New Suggestions", a high-water mark in the impeccable GOST ZVUK catalog. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M. Artwork and design by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

UK producer Dennis Huddleston goes by the artist name of 36. He is a much-loved producer with a fine back catalogue which is investigated here with The Box, a new collection of his earliest and perhaps most admired works. They were all written between 2005 and 2012 and are drawn from albums such as 2009's Hypersona, 2010's Hollow and 2012's Lithea. The bumper six vinyl collection also features a bonus album, Orphans, of all new and previously unreleased tracks. There is a real depth of range and emotion to these tracks so it is no wonder the artist says they are some of the most personally cherished works he has written.

9T Antiope have made a name for themselves in the vibrant experimental music scene of Iran over the past years. Now based in Paris, Sara Bigdeli Shamloo and Nima Aghiani are expanding their stylistic scope and team up with long-time friend Siavash Amini for their debut release on Hallow Ground. After 2017’s »TAR« and »FORAS« the year after 2018, »Harmistice« is Amini’s third LP for Hallow Ground and his first in collaboration with other artists. Recorded in Paris and Tehran, the four tracks are the result of »all the long hours of speaking online, being kilometres away, it is a love child of those short times we actually got to be physically in one place.« Vocalist and lyricist Shamloo enters a dialogue with Aghiani and Amini’s sound art, which is from restrained but interlocks voice and noise with striking subtlety. »Harmistice« seamlessly blends the visceral with the sublime, the abstract with the oh-too-real.

From the very first second of »Blue as in Bleeding«, »Harmistice« evokes a sense of suspended terror. Shrill frequencies and aleatoric bursts of feedback give way to a hard-hitting bass drum until Shamloo’s voice arises from the chaos with an uneasy clarity. It’s the perfect opening for a record that is built upon stark contrasts like this one. Amini and Aghiani bring together synthetic sounds with acoustic instruments, creating a tangible tension on which Shamloo’s sometimes sensitive, sometimes emotionally detached delivery thrives. »It’s all based on a dream, a nightmare about war,« she says in regards to her lyrics that move between poetic abstraction and first person prose, blurring the lines between lived experience and sinister premonition. »Harmistice« takes inventory after the oneiric damagehas been dealt in real life.

As a whole, »Harmistice« is thus as ambiguous as its title suggests. As an all-too-lucid dream about unspeakable things that are being lent a voice it overwhelms the senses with an unheard-of volume. Drawn from the depths of the subconscious, »Harmistice« may just be the most challenging album in either 9T Antiope or Amini’s discography.

A surreal mosaic of eerie chant processionals, tape-rot trickery, and panicked oud madness. These are sonic forgeries of atavistic heritages, recorded by analog means using esoteric techniques."" They have been known by many names: The Givers of Illness; The Bandylegged Riders of the Ill-Promised Sun, etc_ Honed and expanded through their travels, Ak'chamel's singular sound comprising desert-scorched psychedelia, post-apocalyptic shamanism, and bizarre ritual folk is as unique as the physical theater of their otherworldly live performances.

For 46 minutes Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures our perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He’s assisted by three additional percussionists - Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay’s Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive whorls.

The piece is frankly astonishing in its grasp of the maelstrom. Initially tentative, searching, with higher register hits like moths butting lone lightbulbs in an abandoned apartment block, the distant, plangent peal of twin brass wafts between rooms to impart a distinctly floating, OOBE- like feel for space. The brass recedes while the drums’ low end thickens and roils like a gamelan tempest, blurring impressions of knackered buildings or the temple rituals of ancient epochs, with sounds wafting in from other rooms to mess with the stereo field like ghosts of worshippers doing their thing. Remarkably, it conjures a fever dream miasma of ricocheting, thunderous polymetric clatter and proprioceptive fuckry without ever losing its head.

Hungtai’s canny use of contact mic feedback drone and cymbal saw gives the whole thing a sense of gauzy delirium that unites the grouches like mildewed grout and cobwebs, coarsely gelling the elements in a way that resonates with Pauline Oliveros and co’s Deep Listening band acousmagique as much as Basil Kirchin’s keeling ‘World Within World’ classic, the ghosts of Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’, the possessed atmosphere of the cabin where Harley Gaber recorded ‘Wind Rises in the North’, and no doubt Harry Bertoia’s massive metallic sculptures, agitated at midnight.

Humid, menacing, and wraithlike, the album’s’ sense of keening chronics belies a visionary hand at the tiller, here tightened by Rashad Becker’s mastering, which faithfully brings to light, and shadow, the depth of perception and wild but concentrated energies at play, sealing in place a truly staggering session for adventurous ears, cineastes and Lynchian acolytes alike.

Recital is honored to publish composer Allan Gilbert Balon’s first full-length LP. Born 1986 in Les Abymes on the island of Guadeloupe, Balon is an artist (exhibiting at MoMA PS1 in 2022) who publishes beautiful handmade books and audio on XYÄ Edition run with Uta Guan Hyë in Créteil, France where he now resides.

The Magnesia Suite harbors an unhurried, coastal tranquility that flows lucidly as an album. Though prominently a pianist, a breadth of Balon’s musical spheres are visited on this record. Disparate elements of percussion, reeds, organ, voice, and tape recordings are all cast together. Each slowly excavated, surveyed and then set away.

“Stella Maris” opens with an organ and voice procession in the vein of a Charlemagne Palestine singing piece. “Lustras” is a patchwork of various tape captures (a la Alvin Curran, Rip Hayman, or André Thomkins); piano clusters dredge into xylophone by night with cicadas swimming in radio transmissions. First hearing the track “Pleuro Delez Waltz” is what made me approach Allan about making an album for Recital. The proximity of the voices against the small percussions, all laced with Balon’s piano stylings. I’ve not really heard anything like it before. The album ends with “Ogadia,” a gentle piano march with soprano saxophone and electronics. Feels to me like a Dave Burrell-infused rag played slowly, beautifully resolving the outsider-jazz-sound-art-poetry-collages of The Magnesia Suite.

The LP includes a booklet of quiet texts and beautiful graphic scores.