Search:man duo

Whereas many electronic producers aim at being the most prolific in their genre, or the most extreme, Lucy and Rrose have wisely chosen to be the most consistently curiosity-provoking representatives of their craft.


Whereas many electronic producers aim at being the most prolific in their genre, or the most extreme, Lucy and Rrose have wisely chosen to be the most consistently curiosity-provoking representatives of their craft. Their decision to team up as a production duo for the newest Stroboscopic Artefacts EP may have seemed inevitable, given their shared responsibility for shifting techno's focus towards the facilitation of profound psycho-acoustic effects. And yet, even those who saw this coming will still be in for a wild ride.

Lucy's skill as a studio technician - displayed capably over his trilogy of full-length albums - has always been enhanced by his skill as a storyteller and as an artist with reverence towards myths and the pull of the unknown. This sonic personality is a perfect complement to the scientific severity of Rrose, for whom the electronic pulse beat and subsonic massage permit entry to a febrile psychic landscape whose contents are never entirely what the individual listener might expect or be prepared for.

As with both of the artists' solo offerings, these recordings feel as much like the branching off point for new creative acts rather than as objects to be passively enjoyed. As such, the opening "Chloroform" is a somewhat ironic title for a piece that is anything but anesthetic: at high volumes, its monstrous low-end surge and prickly, scintillating sonic ephemera are very likely to bring attention to otherwise imperceptible phenomena. "Peeling" continues in this style with a more urgent tempo, developing its own cascade of sensory impressions from seemingly unstable deep-bass loops, injections of intentional surface noise, and pitch-shifted / harmonizer-effected phantom phrases.

"Stained Glass," maybe the most straight-ahead piece on the record, is still a potent distortion of the mundane primed with shivering bell tones, tamed feedback and hints of speaker cones fraying. The climactic "Foil Gardens" is an elegant study in harmonics whose time-dissolving ability nods to the works of composers like Charlemagne Palestine or Eliane Radigue, without being a pure homage to either. The undertow of distortion beneath the glistening tone waves, in particular, provides a distinct update to the legacy of so-called
tonal 'minimalism'.

The end result here is a record that feels uncannily lifelike: an organism that always seems on the verge of a heuristic breakthrough, and whose full potential may not even be known by its creators.

Words by Thomas Bey William Bailey

It is with undoubted excitement that Stroboscopic Artefacts can present the new release from Irish duo Lakker as SA019.




This comes hot on the heels of Lakker's recent work for the label through the dark trappings of Monad XIV. 'Harbour' could imagine a vessel out to sea, battling a tempest. Heavily distorted rhythms build like the swirl of a storm, a distress signal popping on, radio distortion. As implosion seems near a moment of calm sets in and a less maniacal beat assumes control. But the unpredictable hammers resume once more, thumping above a sheet of glinting and sharp precipitation. The storm eventually ceases, abruptly, and the 'Harbour' is left still. 'eeAea' is a different experience. It is based on surer footing, concrete beneath the limbs. A thump, incessant, pounds in the background, giving clarity to a winding sigh and dissonant percussion. Yet there remains melody in the madness, with beautiful hi ends peeking through the atmosphere and a strut which surges towards conclusion. The conclusion ends (unresolved) at 'Valentina Lane'. It is a street of mystery, set upon a gas of syncopated flashes and airy scrapes. An uncomfortable synthesiser hums in the background, darting high and interjecting low. And it meanders thence, pausing for the odd moment of reflection. It is as deliberate as 'Harbour' is chaotic; it is a tight, cogent finale.

From its earliest utterances, experimental music has been particularly disposed to transnational and cross-cultural collaboration. Seeking the answer for a fundamental problem - how to transcend the boundaries of difference, distance, and time - it presents a means to find common ground and communicate through the elemental form of sound. Over the last 5 years, this precisely what the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has achieved, intertwining sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle of summer’) - the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space - distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come.

Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them - each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways - prior to their first recorded outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by 2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely - sending files back and forth, fortified by conversations on a vast range of subjects - these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked.

Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 - a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe - its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground.

Atkinson likens the recording of ‘Un hiver en plein été’ to have been akin to “a playground”, each artist “hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard’s Bande à part”, to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had “a mind of its own”, with both “along for the ride”. This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm - a joyous exploration of the unknown - guides the momentum of the album’s evolving arc, as unfolding chasms of ambient space ripple with humanity, life, and fleeting glimpses of the actions that led to its material core.

Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones - laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz - searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.

“I’m reeling, I’m restless,” sing Deep Throat Choir from the heart of their second album. That restlessness manifests in a set of tremendously abundant, original songs from the east London female and non-binary vocal collective, founded by Landshapes member Luisa Gerstein.

 Released via Bella Union, ‘In Order to Know You’ is a multi-layered assertion of freshly expansive range, driven by two core virtues: a sense of strength in unity and an open embrace of its singers’ personal experiences, shared through collective, supportive vocal expression.

 After 2017’s largely covers-based debut album, ‘Be OK’, the choir recognised the call to evolve. “Having been singing together for five-plus years, and having released an album of mostly covers, it felt like the logical next step to make our own music together,” says Gerstein. “This album is the alchemy of all the specific voices and players that make up the choir, and a collaborative process of writing and sharing music and ideas. Sonically, I wanted to move beyond just voices and percussion, to see what richness could be brought with acoustic instruments and electronics, and to transition from a choir that
does covers to a band with loads of vocalists.”

 ‘In Order to Know You’ heads towards its climax without seeming to touch the ground, from the title track’s devotional exhalation to the stealthy, smoky shimmer of ‘Unstitching’. Its lyrics drawn from a poem by Emma Cleave, the sublime ‘Field of Not Knowing’ closes the album in a vivid tapestry of folkgothic images (moon beams and pipistrelles) and serene-to-soaring arrangements, revelling in possibility: “It’s the place where I begin,” sing the choir.

 For Deep Throat Choir, the result is both an exquisite culmination of journeys taken so far and a lustrous, exquisite springboard for further adventures. Their travels began in 2013, when the collective took shape from a desire to strip music back to the basic elements of raw female voices and drums, united in a fashion that both honours and transmogrifies personal expression.

 A small group of four or five singers steadily expanded, with Zara Toppin’s drums providing a propulsive energy. Cathartic live shows and collaborations followed, ranging from team-ups with Peggy Sue, Stealing Sheep, Horse Meat Disco and Matthew E White, to performances at Green Man, Wilderness, the Southbank Centre’s WOW festival, London’s Scala and beyond. ‘Be OK’ provided a gutsy showcase for the band’s close, collective strengths, bolstered by weekly gatherings at a church in east London to blow
the roof off. A fruitful collaboration with techno-pop duo Simian Mobile Disco on the 2018 album ‘Murmurations’ followed: a testament to the choir’s alchemical abilities.

The latest thrilling incarnation of master rock'n'roll storyteller Tex Perkins (The Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon, Thug, Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums, Tex, Don et Charlie.) and the Fat Rubber Band began with a rare vinyl copy of Link Wray's Beans and Fatback album, recorded in 1971. Perkins and his respected musician, songwriter, producer and bandmate Matt Walker share a mutual admiration of the American electric guitar innovator, whose iconic power chords in his signature 50s rock'n'roll instrumentals, had a profound influence on the evolution of rock guitar. The Fat Rubber Band is borned with this rare vinyl, the pair have enjoyed countless musical conversations over the decade while hanging out backstage and on the road. Walker offered the debut album's opening track, the wide-screen drama of "Pay The Devil's Due". Perkins responded with the plaintive blues of "My Philosophy". Walker replied with the album's fuzz driven debut single "Danger Has Been Kind" and Perkins countered with the glacially-paced, intimate "Poor Simple Minded Fool". The pair road-tested their works in progress as a duo before enlisting bassist Steve Hadley, drummer Roger Bergodaz and Evan Richards on percussion to complete the Fat Rubber Band line-up to record the album's ten tracks at Walker's Stovepipe Studios in Victoria's Dandenong Ranges. "At Matt's studio - you open the door to the studio and nature floods in," Perkins says. "We wanted it to sound rural, to feel the dirt and the grass and the leaves." Even after all these decades, when you think you know that gravelly baritone inside out, Perkins finds new emotional tones in the service of the Fat Rubber Band's songs vivid narratives, with their characters wrestling, but sometimes dancing, with the tougher, darker qualities of the human condition. This is truly existential blues. Bubbling underneath those upfront vocals and raw harmonies are intricately entwined guitar conversations and unexpected percussive flourishes. "Another aspect that we wanted was for the sound to be sometimes a collision and sometimes a marriage of acoustic and electric instruments. We wanted that tension between mandolins and bouzoukis meeting fuzz guitars." "We also considered percussion to be a vital element of the sound we were going for; we noticed in the recordings we loved from the 50s and 60s that often the tambourine hit, or the maracas, or whatever percussion, was right up there in the mix, right next to the vocal," Perkins says.

60 million streams after their 2nd opus Running To The Moon, the duo's 3rd album, War Is Over, is a dive into 70's funk and soul with the same will to get the essential: the beauty of the melodies and the implacable groove. The Hip-Hop instrumentals on which singers and MCs seem to have more fun than ever, serve as a link to the whole.

Recorded mainly in Bordeaux, this new opus marks a turning point in the group's production method. The brass section present on the Running To The Moon tour was involved in the composition and thus brings a more organic touch to the sound of the album.

As usual, the duo has surrounded themselves with a horde of cult singers and MCs: R.A The Rugged Man, Pav4n & Illaman, Yoshi Di Original, Blake Worrell, MysDiggi or the young hopeful Yudimah (Fair 2020 winner) and the Englishman C.W Jones.

War is Over sounds like a declaration of love to black American music, from Early Jazz to Hip Hop, via Soul and Funk.

The Artists Formerly Known As The Connection Machine (Utrecht, Netherlands) go raw and mean on this one! If the underground The Hague-style from the 90s is your thing, this 12" is your cup of tea. 4 hectic 808/303 trax, all mixed in a dirty way, with loadsa fx on the 303.

The Connection Machine/Cray Emoticon is the multi-talented duo of Natasja Hagemeier and Jeroen Brandjes, who debuted on U-TRAX in 1993 with their instant classic and much sought after 'The Dreamtec Album' (catalogue no: 3 UTR UMM 1). They went on to create another epic release called 'The Black Hole EP' on U-TRAX (catalogue no: 5 UTR UMM 2), but not after they presented 'Bitflower', a true work of art on Planet E from Detroit. Later they released the CD album 'Painless' on Down Low Music and in more recent years two 12"s (shared with The Lost Trax) and an album on Tabernacle Records from the UK.

The title track is originally meant as a replacement for the original game music of level 9 of the 2nd episode (E2L9) of the computer game Doom. The artists thought the original score wasn't doing right to the intensity of the game and made their own apocalyptic soundtrack. 'Gnawing The Heart' already proved its usefulness on many a dancefloor, whilst 'Choice Chip' will satisfy the ultimate speed freaks amongst you. If you're not into drugs or mushrooms, 'I Wish My Zapper Was A Gun' can deliver you the same effects: it's a psychedelic space-acid trip, built around a sample of the sitcom 'Neighbours'.

You can't get wrong with this vintage and merciless dance floor material from the mid-nineties.

Original release date: October 1995.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous edict ‘the medium is the message’ has never been more apt than with regard to modern remix culture. Although the idea of the remix goes way back to the Jamaican dub pioneers and New York disco remixers of the 1970s, the form didn’t truly come into its own until the acid house explosion of the 1980s, when remixers’ credentials often subsumed — and sometimes surpassed — the original source material. Some, among them our lost friend Andrew Weatherall, used remixing as a springboard into multiple other directions, and became auteurs in their own right.

Forged in the white-hot heat of post-acid house Britain, these Heavenly remixes are perfectly weighted with respect and irreverence, the remixer in each case carefully chosen to add heft to the song (as on Al Breadwinner’s dubwise reworking of Mattiel’s ’Guns of Brixton’— the pairing more a game of chess than a best-of-three arm wrestle).

Although Heavenly was founded in the wake of huge upheavals in electronic music, it was still imbued with its own curious parallel life. I’ve always thought of Heavenly as one of the UK’s alt-pop labels; a place where brilliant pop bands live and record, if the general public would only realise. Some of them have ended up in the real, actual charts (Saint Etienne, Doves), but that’s missing the point about Heavenly, who are, like Factory and Fast Product before them, pop music’s conscience.

There is no sense of order to this compilation and we make no apologies. It’s the Heavenly way. Think of it as a present from Loki, the Norse god of mischief. You’ll find a smattering of older tracks: album openers Saint Etienne are taken on a Poseidon Adventure with Underworld, who inject ‘Cool Kids of Death’ with typically manic energy. Elsewhere, ’90s Brum duo Mother add dancefloor pzazz to Espiritu’s innate glamour on an all-funked-up reworking of ‘Los Americanos’, and Mark Lusardi’s remix of Moonflowers’ ‘Get Higher’ is an early Heavenly classic.

On ‘Terracotta Warrior’, a perfect, psyched-out, Mancunian union is created betwixt Jimi Goodwin and Andy Votel, whilst Goodwin cohort Simon Aldred, in his Cherry Ghost guise, receives a proper Tamla-Motowning from Richard Norris (aka Time & Space Machine) on an inspired cover of Cece Peniston’s glam-house hit, ‘Finally’.

There are several of Heavenly’s current darlings here too. One of the most exciting young British prospects, Yorkshire’s Working Men’s Club, effectively remix themselves, as Minsky Rock — WMC’s Syd Minsky-Sargeant and producer Ross Orton — cleave ‘X’ into a riotous industrial racket. Jagwar Ma’s Jono Ma takes the Kraftwerkian leitmotif on ‘Automatic’ and drives the Australian jazz-funkers Mildlife down an electro-convulsive psychedelic tunnel (thankfully no-one was harmed during the making of this remix); Sheffield’s DJ Parrot and Jarvis Cocker deliver one of the outstanding remixes of 2018, turning Baxter Dury’s ‘Miami’ into a lovelorn minor opera; and, making its first appearance on vinyl, David Holmes’ Unloved project is taken on a panoramic Welsh waltz thanks to Gwenno.


There may well be no rhyme, nor reason, to how these compilations have been put together, beyond the fact that they are assembled with love, an innate understanding of the power of great pop music, and a skilled marriage of song and remixer — but does one really need anything more than that for an album to make sense? I’d suggest not.

Venezuela’s Confidential Recipe drops ‘The Bridge EP’ on Radio Slave’s Rekids this December.

Following two stand-out EPs on the techno-focussed Rekids Special Projects throughout 2021, the Venezuelan-born, Bogota-based Confidential Recipe readies his debut appearance on parent-label Rekids. With three killer originals, including a collaboration with Manao and accompanied by a remix from Gene Richards Jr, the EP solidifies Confidential Recipe’s growing vitality in the South American techno scene and beyond.

‘Dance’ leads the ‘The Bridge EP’, with commanding vocals, organ licks and knocking drums preceding a dramatic tempo change in the breakdown. Fresh off the back of releases Truncate’s WRKTRX, Gene Richards Jr flips ‘Dance’ into a funk-laden techno pumper, with the vocals sliced and manipulated around fresh dub techno inspired chords.

On the flip, ‘Come (Dub Mix)’ kicks off the B side, marrying shimmering pads, razor-sharp kicks, and trance-inducing low end for a deep and rolling cut. Rounding out the EP is ‘Come (Breaks Mix)’ produced in collaboration with Berlin-based Manao, and sees the duo add dense breakbeats, rave stabs, and heaving
sub hits over elements of the original for a rowdy affair.

A sublime techno reissue from the vaults of one of London's leading electronic labels of the last 25 years, remastered and re-presented for 2022!

Originally released in 1994 on Mr.C's cult UK house and techno label Plink-Plonk and composed and performed by Laggy Panteli and Zeno Messis (aka Megalon) in their London studio, 'Pandora's Box' is a truly unique record. Sleek, futuristic, fathoms deep and wholly original, the music contained on these 2 discs sounds as modern and as vital as it did on it's arrival all of those years ago.

Exploring a deeper vein of electronic music, Megalon craft their own sonic landscapes that are undoubtedly inspired by all forms of cerebral electronic music. Ambient, Detroit techno, electro, European electronics and of course the duo's experiences in London's early acid house and rave scene all filter through their lens to bring something brand new to the table. The arrangement, sound design and mix on the album is outstanding, lending a totally visionary and modern feel to the tracks that continues to echo today.

'Pandora's Box' is a record that has existed within the shadows for many years, with a hardcore cult following. The kind of record that one might hear deep into the early hours, at the hands of a seasoned selector or an 'insider' who has the knowledge. It is redolent of a time when innovation, ideas and imagination trumped the run of the mill and the homogenous, which goes a long way in explaining what makes this record so exciting some 25+ years later.

A totally essential mid 90's UK techno and electronic classic, as much a treat for the mind as for the body.

Reissued in full conjunction with the artists and remastered by Curvepusher from DAT and original source materials. Redesigned by Atelier Superplus and distributed worldwide by Above Board distribution, 2022.

Triumph breeds confidence, and with confidence comes an expansion of ambition, a focus of ability, an emboldening of audacity. De-Loused In The Comatorium had risked everything Omar and Cedric possessed on the wildest of gambits, the most impossible of dreams: making sense of the riot of influences ricocheting about Omar’s head, and memorialising their departed friend Julio Venegas through Cedric’s magical realist roman-a-clef. It Clouds Hill shouldn’t have worked. But it did, and with that fiendish tightrope act successfully accomplished, the duo stretched the wire even further and higher, over a figurative fiery pit peopled with lions, crocodiles, piranha and other sharp-toothed beasts not yet known to man. Because how do you make great art without taking great risks? Frances The Mute was no De-Loused Part Two. For one thing, the band’s configuration had changed, in the most painful way. Shortly before the release of De- Loused, sound manipulator and founder member Jeremy Michael Ward passed away, a wound Omar says the group never recovered from. But even though his inspired fucking- with-the-sonic-parameters is absent from Frances The Mute, his spirit and influence can still be determined, the album’s concept derived from a diary Ward had encountered in his day-job in repossession. “Jeremy picked up lots of interesting stuff when he was a repo man,” remembers Cedric. “Weird things, including this diary, He let us read it a bunch of times. It was by a guy who’d been adopted and was searching to find his real parents. It was very surreal, it didn’t make much sense – the guy might’ve been schizophrenic – but it was very inspiring. It felt like how certain music helps you escape your boring every-day life. The names and scenes in the diary directly inspired these songs.” Some of the tracks pre-dated De-Loused, having their origins in early demos Omar recorded at the duo’s Long Beach home Anikulapo, songs such as The Widow and Miranda The Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore. Cedric had heard these jams in their embryonic state and began working in his mind on what he could bring to them. “I was attracted to The Widow like you would be to a lover, right?” Cedric remembers. “I sang over it with Omar while we were touring De-Loused in Australia on the Big Day Out, like, ‘Okay, I’ve got something for this.’” A potent ballad, laden with emotional crescendos and evoking the epic drama of Ennio Morricone – an effect aided by an elegiac trumpet part performed by Flea – The Widow would become The Mars Volta’s first song to chart on the Billboard Top 100, capturing the album’s potent sorrow and widescreen sprawl in miniature. Indeed, the lush sound of the album, the depth of detail and breadth of instrumentation, belies its grungy roots. Having tasted the luxury of Rick Rubin’s mansion, Omar veered in the opposite direction when recording Frances, cutting the album in what he describes as “a shithole... Basically a warehouse with one little air conditioner on its last legs, awful wiring and a console you couldn’t rely on. We were there night and day – I would literally lock engineer Jon DeBaun in there. He slept on a mattress in the vocal booth.” A considerably more complex and ambitious album than its predecessor – four of its five tracks lasted over ten minutes in length, with its closing epic Cassandra Gemini spanning over half an hour – Frances The Mute wasn’t recorded “live” by an ensemble, but with the individual musicians coming into the “shithole” and recording the parts Omar had scripted for them separately. “They had to have absolute trust in me,” Omar remembers, “Like actors trust their director.” In addition to the core band – now fleshed out with incoming bassist Juan Alderete, and Omar’s brother Marcel on keyboards and percussion – the album featured guitar solos from John Frusciante, saxophone and flute by future member Adrian Terrazas-Gonzales, a full string section, and piano played by Omar’s hero, salsa legend Larry Harlow. “It was a childhood dream come true,” Omar says. “We recorded with him in my hometown in Puerto Rico, and my father flew in to watch the session. Larry was a perfect gentleman, and a very lively spirit.” The album’s fevered intensity infected even the staid string section, Cedric remembers. “When they performed the part on Cassandra Gemini, ’25 wives in the lake tonight’, one of the guys in the orchestra played so hard he broke his bow, this real old, antique bow. And you could see his ‘classical’ side come out – like, ‘I broke this playing a fuckin’ rock song??’ He was pissed off. But I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, man, that’s on the record! You’ve got to realise things like that are cool.’” The album also features field recordings of “the coqui of Puerto Rico” during the opening minutes of Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore. “We took a page out of the Grateful Dead’s book there,” laughs Cedric. “They recorded air. We recorded fuckin’ frogs in Puerto Rico.”

“In the early 2000s, Tokyo's SuperDeluxe was a meeting point for many experimental musicians, both international and Japanese. This duo sprung from a live collaboration at the venue in 2006, where Machida was experimenting with processed steel pan and Lyall was largely performing using a tabletop guitar setup with a range of electronics. Many subsequent encounters were heavily experimental, ranging from densely layered noise music to sound collage.

Through the years, the collaboration shifted to a more tonal approach, with standard tunings and stronger compositional elements. Both musicians have a deep interest in traditional improvisational forms, so there was a natural evolution towards structural ideas—based on minimal scalar patterns—as the sound became more acoustic. The most recent instrumentation explores the unusual combination of steel pan, slit drums and banjo, while also delving deeper into the characteristics of the instruments themselves.”

"(…) Pak Yan Lau, one of the most original pianists of the new European creative scene, has the ability to build complex formal architectures starting from minimal materials – insistent rhythms, barely hinted melodies, electronic effects as evocative as they are mysterious. Darin Gray uses his long experience as the backbone of many improvisational groups with a painstaking work on timbre and a deep and multiform sound, providing a solid support to extemporary creations that have the solidity of pondered compositions. The music of the duo develops on wide structural strings, elegantly combining the continuous surprise of free improvisation with the material suggestions of electroacoustic experimentation, in a game of references and narrative developments almost cinematic, which tell a fascinating sound world, strangely familiar yet constantly new and surprising."
(Nicola Negri, Centro d’Arte Padova, Italy)

Hannes Buder (born 1978 in the former GDR) is a musician, composer and improviser in the field of experimental music. His works concentrate on issues of movement, authenticity, intuition, minimalism, and slowness.

Buder's current projects include the bands 'Zug Zug' with Todd Capp and Andrew Lafkas, 'Gravity' with Hannes Lingens and Andrew Lafkas, the duo Nothingness with Sarah Jegelka, and his solo projects. Beyond that he has collaborated with Audrey Chen, Tony Buck, Audrey Lauro, Hilary Jeffery, Mike Majkowski, Steve Heather, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, the Berlin Improvisers Orchestra and many others. Hannes Buder's Solo recordings include "Changes" (2000), "Dunkelbunt" (2004), "Openyoureyescloseyoureyes" (2006), "Changes II" (2015) and "Oustide WOrds" (2021). He performed concerts in Europe, Australia and in the USA.

Buder has also composed, improvised and recorded music for different dance (Oxana Chi, Judith Sanchez Ruìz), theater (Jörg Mihan, Johannes Maria Schmit) and film projects (Barbara Lubich, Annick Gaudreault). He's been giving workshops at festivals, music schools and with prisoners in jail. He studied guitar in Weimar and Dresden.

Multi Culti launch a new quarterly 12" series in step with the seasons beginning with SOLSTICE I:

Post-pandemic lockdown inspiration can be found in the great planetary balancing act that has taken place since a cataclysmic impact with an asteroid caused mass extinction and set our earth’s orbit off axis. This AXIAL TILT, or obliquity, is responsible for the seasons, and life as we know it has evolved around these unleashed forces. As our lives and for many, careers, have spun dramatically off axis as of late, we look ahead to the coming seasons, with the hope that we can weather the changes, and maintain inner stability. To aid in this quest, Multi Culti promises to deliver sonic support with utmost regularity at the peak moments of cosmic significance, with each Solstice and Equinox.

Beginning this journey are some of the label’s most beloved artists. Israeli duo RED AXES provide a chakra-elevating soundtrack with their inimitable blend of psych-garage-tronica, a sun-kissed banger that signals a long-awaited return to the togetherness of the dancefloor.

ZILLAS ON ACID turn in a robustly wiggly jam that electrifies, frazzling zaps and frenetic percussion recall the fritzy tension of the past year, a cathartic shock-treatment for traumatized dancers looking to get back to prime spine-shaking shape.

Mexico managed to stay open for the most part, and TYU seems to have not skipped a beat here, still in perfect form after breaking out as one of the hottest young producers to emerge in recent years. Dark disco, Mexi-chug, call it what you want, but the emergent genre is never better represented than here… spooky, phosphorescent tribal dance, Tulumminati-tested and approved.

Finally, the big guy - MANFREDAS - whose remixes and edits have been highlight-reel material the past couple of years, delivers a long awaited original track with his requisite heavy-weight swag. Wonky tunings and a chunky downtempo beat underpin Manny’s trademark masterful arrangement style, building patiently, with breakdowns that managed to wring every last drop of impact out of an odd, other-worldy assortment of sounds.

British duo The Boy Least Likely To are not new to Christmas music. It started in 2005 with a charming cover version of ‘Little Donkey’ on a give away CD single, followed three year later by the first Christmas original they recorded, ‘The First Snowflake’, that made it into an episode of Grey's Anatomy. In 2010, the band released the album ‘Christmas Special’, with mostly originals, including the single ‘George And Andrew’, that came with a much watched and liked video. Last year, The Boy Least Likely To released a new Christmas song ‘It Will Still Be Christmas’, that reflected the difficult time the world was going through in 2020. What was still lacking in The Boy Least Likely To Christmas discography was a Christmas 7”. That is now also taken care of, as the band recorded two new Christmas songs for the ninth edition of the Snowflakes Christmas Singles Club. The nostalgic sounding original ‘Two Christmases’ is typical for the somewhat bittersweet nature of many of the duo’s songs, as it is about a recently divorced couple who, for the first time, will celebrate Christmas separately, one after the other, so that their children can celebrate Christmas with both their parents. On the flipside of the record, The Boy Least Likely To rework Shakin’ Stevens number one hit ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ into an uptempo cross between indie pop and western swing. The record comes on white vinyl and is limited to 300 copies.

The Boy Least Like To are composer/multi-instrumentalist Pete Hobbs and lyricist/singer Jof Owen, both originally from Wendover in Buckinghamshire, England, who met at school and began making music together in 2002. They debuted in 2003 with the 'Paper Cuts' 7” on their own label To Young To Die. In 2005 the duo released their first album, 'The Best Party Ever', that made it into Pitchfork's top 50 albums of 2005. Three more albums followed (2009's 'Law Of The Playground', 2010's 'Christmas Special' and 2013's 'The Great Perhaps') and in 2018 the career spanning collection 'The Greatest Hits', including classic tracks like 'Be Gentle With Me' and 'Hugging My Grudge' was released. Their music, once described in Rolling Stone as sounding like what would happen "if all your childhood stuffed animals got together and started a band.” incorporates influences from all over the indie landscape (twee pop, indie country, jangle pop, piano pop) and blends it into something that is unmistakingly To Boy Least Likely To – often joyous and uplifting, sometimes melancholic, with lyrics that reflect our everyday fears and anxieties, as it’s not all sunshine in our lives. In 2021 the band celebrated the slowly opening world by releasing a new digital single, 'Get Into The Summer', a joyous burst of fresh energy, showing that the band’s music is for all seasons

Interiors, the title of this new release from Ultramarine, may have a topical resonance for many listeners who have found themselves in involuntary confinement during the past year, but the five tracks on this EP were actually recorded in 2011, and they represent a significant opening out of the duo's evolving musical perspective.

Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond, who had become friends while growing up together in the Essex countryside, formed Ultramarine in 1989. Throughout the 90s their distinctive music, an enticing blending of acoustic with electronic instruments, secured a loyal following and won critical acclaim. Then, throughout the whole of the next decade, Ultramarine lay dormant. Interiors documents their reawakening, with Cooper and Hammond exploring approaches to music-making made possible by recently developed software, designed specifically with live performance in mind.

Four of the five tracks to be heard here were issued digitally last year. But as Paul Hammond has pointed out, "with Ultramarine the whole point is to create an artefact, so the form and the look of the finished product is central." That's an outlook shared passionately by Simon Lewin's label Blackford Hill, and the music now available on this vinyl record is appropriately enhanced with cover art by printmaker Katherine Jones. Her imagery matches the music neatly in its nuanced interplay of solidity and shadow, line and colour, geometric form and organic growth.

Ultramarine returned refreshed in October 2011, bursting back into public awareness with "Find A Way," issued as a 7" single on their own label, Real Soon. Clive Bell, writing in The Wire, extolled its engaging mix of electronic beats with cool vocals and tropical percussion. More generally Bell embraced Ultramarine's thoughtful hybrid electronica as "music you could enjoy at home without feeling your intelligence was being scorned, or that if you were not physically in a club, you were wasting your time."

On Interiors, the roots of that slinky single are laid bare on the purely instrumental track "Find A Way Back." Its two distinct parts stretch out the beats and flaunt those tropical flourishes, shuffling and flexing, vibrant and heady, languid and sultry. This is techno filtered through the fabric of magic realism, an exotically spiced concoction, chilled and ready to be savoured at home.

With the diagrammatic clarity of its punchy thrust and spooling loops "Even When" distils the essence of Cooper and Hammond's way of working with their musical material: layering and shaping, nurturing textures, plaiting rhythms and juggling accents. The cumulative impact is almost sculptural in its physical immediacy and looming presence. In contrast, on "By Return" the duo skew the outcome, projecting a selection of limber figures into dub's auditory hall of mirrors. They are clearly revelling in the reverb, relishing the recoil and decay.

Interiors ultimately opens out onto "Decoy Point (Version)." With its ozone saturated ambience, this closing track evokes marshland and mudflat soundscapes, seabird mews, maritime signals and tidal wash. Cooper and Hammond feel deep attachment to the Essex landscape and, in particular, to the local history and physical features of the Blackwater estuary. Blackford Hill provides an accommodating home for Ultramarine's ongoing project Blackwaterside, which has featured to date a 7" vinyl record plus 28-page booklet, and a photo film with soundtrack. Now, delving into the Ultramarine archive, this welcome incarnation of Interiors offers a fascinating glimpse of the duo finding their bearings, at a vital stage along the way.

BBE Music is excited to present the long awaited, eponymous debut album from the USA/UK partnership of JTronius and Maverick Quest, aka Sons of the Sun. Delivered remotely following a chance meeting on music-tech networking app ‘Brapp’, the ingenious pair sent files back and forth between Texas and South East London to manifest their shared vision for ‘Sons of the Sun’. Remarkably, the duo are still yet to meet in person. A respected solo artist knighted by Bootsy Collins as an official ‘funkateer,’ Berklee College graduate JTronius is an extravagant entertainer, entrepreneur and lifestyle brand. Self-dubbed The Guvna of the Galaxy, he brings his swaggy, soulful style to all his endeavours. He has shared stages with LL Cool J, The Roots, Talib Kweli, Pharrell, Busta Rhymes and Damian Marley and is an accomplished actor, appearing in a number of successful Hollywood feature films. Genre-blending record producer and multi-instrumentalist Maverick Quest grew up immersed in the aesthetic of hip hop. But in an environment where flipping loops from vinyl was standard, developing his musicianship to create his own sounds was radical, a move that paved the way for his signature sonic. He has previously performed with and produced for Guru, Grandmaster Flash, Ice T, Ibibio Sound Machine, Solo Rosa and Portico Quartet to name but a few, and is firmly rooted in the epicentre of the burgeoning South East London jazz movement. Sons of the Sun’s debut long player features a host of luminary guests and musicians from all over the globe, including guitarist Dai Miyazaki (Bilal, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Tye Tribbett), keyboard player and vocalist Matt Cusson (Christina Aguilera, Brian McKnight), singer Ayesha Brooks (The Voice, Season 6), saxophonist & flautist Jelani M. Brooks (Ghost Note, RC & The Gritz, Erykah Badu), Boston rapper Madame Cruz and Scottish horn collective The Brasscats, among many others. Mixed by Grammy-nominated Clinton “Ubiquity” McCreery and mastered at Grammy-awarded studio The Carvery, this album inks an impressive first chapter in the story of Sons of the Sun.

Five years after the release of volume 1 of the collection “Collected Tape Experiments 1980-1984”, further sound experiments by this incredible Milanese duo re-emerge, never sufficiently valued and who in a few years managed to create hundreds of tracks, synthesizing different influences such as Throbbing Gristle, Residents, Kraftwerk and the arty extremisms of the “No New York” scene.

For their 9th release Slam City Jams welcomes the fabulous Manuel Darquart to the family!
After brilliant releases on imprints like Wolf Music or Coastal Haze and recently getting remixed by the Italo-House legend Don Carlos, we are happy to have the duo on the label with their „Down 2 Dance“ EP. Originally from New Zealand but now living in London, Manuel Darquart bless us with a record full of balearic bliss, backed with a dope remix by Tech Support.
We are kicking things off with the title track, a deep, yet uplifting Italo-House tune: „Down 2 Dance“ is full of sweet chords, perfectly cheesy sax stabs and this catchy vocal cuts we just can’t get out of our head. On „Cultivating Yucca“ Manuel Darquart maintains the Italian vibe but
gets even more balearic with warm pads, some muted trumpets and of course: The slight sound of the ocean.
On the flip things get interesting with „Prince Of The Rinse“: Distorted 808s paired with a funky lead that builds up steadily and finally dissolves into a wonderful synth solo. A tune that reminds of the early Funkineven on Apron Records. To round this record off, we invited
Londons finest Tech Support to give the title track his remix treatment: He added his signature 80s sound to the original and perfecftly stripped back the tune to its essentials, with gated snare drums and little synth blips. What more can you ask for?!

REPRESSED !!

Wolfsheim are a synthpop duo from Hamburg, Germany consisting of Markus Reinhardt (music) and Peter Heppner (lyrics and vocals). The band was founded in 1987 by Markus Reinhardt and Pompejo Ricciardi and was named after Meyer Wolfsheim, a fictional character from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby'. Ricciardi soon left the band and was replaced by Peter Heppner, a childhood friend of Reinhardt's. Together they produced their first demo tape, Ken Manage', in 1988.

After making a second demo tape, Any But Pretty', in 1989, Wolfsheim applied at various labels until they caught the attention of independent record label Strange Ways Records. They are best known for their debut breakthrough single, "The Sparrows and the Nightingales', the first single to be released on Strange Ways in 1991. The band's musical style takes cues from the 1980s New Romantics, new wave, synthpop, and darkwave. The track's sombre synths were produced by Carlos Peron of Yello. Reinhardt says the lyric was inspired by 'The Great Gatsby', "in the 'onomatopoeic tension' between predator and security." Over six minutes, the narrator describes being lost, unsure of where his life is heading, using highly metaphorical language. On the flip is a brand new remix by German producer Ancient Methods, a pseudonym of Michael 'Trias' Wollenhaupt, who provides a driving, EBM-leaning, amphetamine-laced club ready cut.

All songs have been remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Designer Eloise Leigh has updated the record's original design with two sparrows enclosed in a blood moon circle against a deep black purple backdrop. Each copy comes with a black and white photo postcard notes by Carlos Peron and the song's lyrics. This release comes in time to celebrate the single's 25th anniversary.

Recorded in May 2008, ‘Live at the Troubadour’ sees Daryl Hall and John Oates return to the legendary Los Angeles venue they first played as a support act in the 70s. Reissued on double CD and released for the first time on triple LP, the set sees the duo delve into their extensive back catalogue, delighting fans with nearly 2 hours of hits reimagined in a stripped back format, laying bare the beauty of their classic songwriting and mastery of their craft as live performers. The recording includes incredible live performances of ‘Maneater’, ‘Out of Touch’, ‘You Make My Dream’ and many more.














[n] e2. I Can't Go for That (No Can Do) [Live at The Troubadour]

GRAMMY® Award winning duo Twenty One Pilots released their new album, Scaled And Icy, earlier this year and it reached #3 in the UK Official Album Chart. They are now releasing the album on vinyl for the first time, set for release on 19th November. Scaled And Icy is Twenty One Pilots’ first studio album in three years and follows their RIAA Platinum certified LP, Trench.

Written and largely produced by Joseph in isolation over the course of the past year at his home studio, with Dun engineering the album’s drums from across the country, Scaled And Icy is the product of long-distance virtual sessions and finds the duo processing their upended routines along with the prevailing emotions of 2020 - anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and doubt. The duo had to forgo their normal studio sessions but reached a new of level of introspection in the process, adopting a more imaginative and bold approach to their songwriting. The result is a collection of songs that push forward through setbacks and focus on the possibilities worth remembering.

In 2020, Twenty One Pilots surprised fans with standalone singles “Level of Concern” and “Christmas Saves The Year.” “Christmas Saves The Year” arrived at the tail end of 2020 and debuted on Billboard’s “Alternative Airplay” chart becoming the first holiday-themed song to make the list since 2012.

Furthermore, Twenty One Pilots scored one final accolade in the final moments of 2020, officially breaking the GUINNESS WORLD RECORD™ for the longest music video with their history-making regenerative visual for “Level of Concern.” Besting the previous record holder, Pharrell and his 24-hour long video for “Happy,” Twenty One Pilots’ ‘Never-Ending Music Video’ for “Level of Concern” broadcasted for 177 days straight with a total run time of 4,264 hours, 10 mins, 25 seconds.

Twenty One Pilots’ 2018 LP Trench ushered in a new era for the duo from Ohio. A true global phenomenon having surpassed two billion streams worldwide, Trench is highlighted by the alternative hits “The Hype,” “Chlorine,” and “Jumpsuit.” “Jumpsuit” stands as the decade’s fastest rising song to reach #1 on Billboard’s “Alternative Songs” chart and earned the duo their fourth GRAMMY® nomination (Best Rock Song).

No other pairing in the history of Darkwave ever matched the unfettered creativity, resolve, and DIY attitude from the collaboration between the two creative minds that compromise Lebanon Hanover.

The meeting of the Swiss musician Larissa Georgiou, aka Larissa Iceglass and British artist William Maybelline a decade ago in the latter’s hometown of Sunderland in the UK, was a monumental occasion, reverberating throughout the European music scene and even across the Atlantic.

Lebanon Hanover would emerge from the peak of the world-wide minimal wave revival, with their 2011 split 7-inch record with La Fete Triste issued as the catalog debut of Europe’s most ubiquitous Techno-Industrial EBM labels, Aufnahme + Wiedergabe

With Berlin as their new physical home, William and Larissa would soon, however, join the Fabrika Records family. From here, they would go on to release two full-length albums through the Athens based label, starting in early 2012 with their winter debut LP The World Is Getting Colder, and it’s All Hallows Eve follow up Why Not Just Be Solo.

It was Lebanon Hanover’s 2013 third studio outing Tomb for Two that would go on to cement the duo’s legacy, with the album’s single “Gallow Dance” becoming a post-punk anthem for the times, with artwork became the band’s defacto logo. Not only that, the song “Sadness is Rebellion”, also featured on the album, became the band’s official Mantra.

Two years would pass before the release of 2015’s critically acclaimed fourth record, “Besides the Abyss”. In the intervening years, William and Larissa, initially a couple, would find other partners, and relocate to Athens.

Meanwhile, Lebanon Hanover as a live act would expand rapidly in popularity, exceeding capacity during their performances at Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig, and performing sold-out shows across Europe and the UK.

With the playful Babes of the 80s maxi-single released in the interim, three years would pass before the next record from Lebanon Hanover, with 2018’s Let Them Be Alien, the band’s fifth studio album.

At the dawn of the global pandemic, where dystopian nightmares that were only ever seen before within the pages of books and flashes of silver screen celluloid, has become a daily reality, a new kind of darkness envelops the world. It was at this Lebanon Hanover returned, sharing a glimmer of hope with the single “The Last Thing,” the duo’s first song from their forthcoming sixth studio album Sci-Fi Sky.

Spanning an epic journey across ten tracks that wander through industrial landscapes, and ascend beyond the atmospheric aether, Sci Fi Sky is Lebanon Hanover’s most cohesive artistic statement to date. With their icy hearts on their sleeves, this is the culmination of a decade’s worth of musical creativity radiating from the minds of both Iceglass and Maybelline, and altogether an otherworldly beacon of hope in a time of sheer darkness.

A limited-edition, hand-numbered L.P. dedicated to the previuosly unreleased 1990 project by Manrico & Nicola - featuring two special new Balearic versions by Ed Longo. Manrico & Nicola are comprised of Italian artist, singer, composer and author Manrico Mologni, together with saxophonist, composer and sound engineer Nicola Calgari. Manrico and Nicola were collaborating for some time in artistic harmony, and decided to form a duo to undertake their own album. Nine songs identified, arranged and recorded on a wave of enthusiasm - their "alchemy" gave excellent results. At the last stage of the work unfortunately, misfortune struck - Manrico fell very ill. For the respect of a unique creative moment, and for a sort of psychological "removal" all of this was forgotten until recently. By chance, Manrico had an old cassette with a couple of those songs - the memories resurfaced and it was immediately a race to meet again. Going though many recording studios, Nicola found the DAT with the temporary mixes which had been waiting for years with their emotional content.
But finding a way to transfer the songs was not easy. Quite by chance, a miracle took place. Their friend Massimo Parretti, in his post-production studio, was still equipped to transfer from DAT, and everything worked - with the sound intact as 30 years before!
The rest is news, and now a 1990 album - and piece of history - resurfaces.
Archeo Recordings is a re-issue record label that regenerates old, lost, or forgotten rare gems, of mostly Italian music, but also 70's, 80's and 90's music from across the world.
All releases are licensed audio tracks, re-mastered in their original form. The sleeves are re-created for today, but all based on the original images.
Archeo would like to make the music available to a wider audience of collectors, DJs, music lovers of a forgotten time.
Artwork by Filippo Sala, Milan, 1990.

Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - collaborators for the better part of a decade - reemerge with 'Palimpsests’, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album’s 2 sides distill 6 years of work into 9 splintered, airy reimaginings of minimalism - each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful - that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète.

Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, ‘Holiday For Sampler’, issued by Planam.

'Palimpsests’, the duo’s second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations - cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza - before culminating, like the album’s title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; “an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”.

With each of the album’s compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, 'Palimpsests’ constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts - traces of memory, image, and action - cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms.

Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album’s two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions - reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality - into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic - reducing their sources to a series of unknowns - recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms.

Shelter Press is thrilled to present 'Palimpsests’, another brilliant outing from the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi. Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, with artworks on printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

After delaying the inevitable for over half a decade, the west coast's most versatile indie rock everyman (Rob Crow, co-creator of Touch and Go sentimental pop superstars Pinback) and the world's most left-of-everything drummer (Zach Hill, one-half of the outlandish noise duo Hella and drummer for Deftones side-project Team Sleep) have joined forces to unite the disparate worlds of noise and pop as The Ladies on the stunningly addictive and efficient They Mean Us. More adventurous than Pinback, and more accessible than Hella, The Ladies prove to be the best of both worlds. It's even better than the ideal album you've been making up in your head for the last half decade or so.

On 18th April, 1980, after decades of anti colonial struggle, the Zimbabweian flag was finally raised at midnight at the Rufaro Stadium in Harare. Not long after, the words "Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Marley and The Wailers!" rang out, and Zimbabwe's independent future began.

In the years that followed, Africa was to produce it's own reggae superstars, as the likes of Alpha Blondy, Majek Fashek and Lucky Dube swept across the continent and beyond, and there's no doubting Bob Marley's explosive impact on this particular narrative.

Marley's unswerving commitment to liberation and unity ranged from the sweeping spiritual sentiments of iconic hits such One Love and Redemption Song to the galvanising, focused tone of 1979's 'Zimbabwe', and his status as global superstar ensured that his (self funded) part in the countries' epochal celebrations meant that the history of reggae in Africa would always be viewed through the prism of his influence ( Wiki/African Reggae : "In 1980, world-famous Jamaican reggae musician Bob Marley performed in Harare, Zimbabwe, and that concert is often credited as marking the beginning of reggae in Africa")

But in fact, the recorded history of reggae produced in Africa stretches back over a decade before Marley's arrival on the continent, and showcases broad pan - diasporic interflows between the Carribean and Africa, with the UK and the US communities playing influential supporting roles, all helping shape the evolution and development of the genre in Africa from late 60's inception to Marley's arrival in 1980, and then well beyond.

Reggae Africa : Roots and Culture, 1972 - 1981 tries to capture a sense of that evolution, starting in 1972 as Mebussa's ultra rare 'Good Bye Friends' effortlessly captures triangular, transatlantic cultural interflows, with the short lived Nigerian group's bitter sweet chords echoing classic US soul, but laid over a gritty, skanking Jimmy Cliff - esque proto reggae rhythm.

Trying to work out the precise provenance of Black Reggae's 'Darling I'm So Proud of You' (1975) isn't easy, but involves Paris based / African focused label Fiesta, some proper OG co-branding exercise with Bols Brandy ( "Bols Brandy presents Black Reggae") - and deeply infectious, lilting Rocksteady.

By 1976, glorious Nigerian sister duo Lijadu Sisters are echoing the chunky roots of a Dennis Brown or U Roy on 'Bobby', and in 1977, bespoke Nigerian drummer Georges Happi is introing 'Hello Friends' with the soon to be universal signature reggae tom roll intro, before veering leftfield with snatches of spoken Afro - English vocal in between the hooky choruses.

Nigerian giant Chrissy Essien's 'I'll Be You Man' (1979) combines floaty Lovers vibes with catchy ska shuffle, and in the same year, Cameroonian afro-funk/disco heavyweight Pasteur Lappe' drifts seamlessly into skanking, Lovers infected reggae on 'Babbette D.O. ( Rastawoman )' (before a sprawling electric guitar solo reminds us how unselfconsiously eclectic so much African music of the era was.)

And finally bookending the compilation, in chronological terms, fellow Cameroonian Tala AM also swaps his funk and soul for the rootsy and infectious 'Hop Sy Trong' (1981), again highlighting the diverse and eclectic approach to this timeless Carribean musical genre taken by African musicians in the years before that Bob Marley year zero event in Zimbabwe.

IMPORTANT NOTE: UNFORTUNATELY THE SIDES ARE REVERSED ON THE VINYL, I.E. THE A-SIDE IS THE B-SIDE AND VICE VERSA. WITH THE PURCHASE OF THE VINYL OR THE CD YOU WILL GET THE SINGLE MP3 FILES AS WELL AS A CONTINOUS MIX VIA E-MAIL.

With the cover artwork for Pop Ambient 2022, longtime KOMPAKT graphic artist Veronika Unland has once again outdone herself. Following the almost baroque, blood-red and jet-black, extremely physical sculptures of Pop Ambient 2021, which emerged from a dark, floral sea like bodies erect for dancing, the front of 2022 is adorned with a pastel-white form, intertwined, folded many times and crisscrossed with delicate shading, which seems to float on a pale pink background; soft, gentle waves woven from Venetian colors that leave the viewer puzzled: Is it a flower, a coral, a mollusk?

Again, the current edition of the tradition-steeped compilation series curated by Wolfgang Voigt is about the persistent and ever-necessary definition of beauty, of reduction, of electronic music of heavy lightness and light heaviness, of ambient's eternal promise of a state of physical and acoustic weightlessness and Pop's of redemption. And about the question why a never arbitrary combination of soundscape, drones, samples and loops, put together in a certain way, can create this feeling of warmth, depth and space, - something three-dimensional, where the imagination feels at home as a fish in the water or a bird in the sky. A key aesthetic stimulus that sends all the senses into a slow glide and drift, after which your synapses feel like they've been bathed in essential oil. Next to Soul, Ambient is probably the most effective musical healing plant of mankind.

Behind the aural test tubes, the who's who of Pop Ambient is once again at work, led for the first time by the highly trafficked Californian duo Blank Gloss, whose debut album "Melt" this year was certified by The Guardian as nothing less than "heartaching beauty". Yui Onodera's "Chrome" as well as "Kari", a cooperation of Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth, could also be imagined in the score of Denis Villeneuve's new film version of DUNE - however, colleague Hans Zimmer managed that quite well without the three. After such wonderful and stylish contributions by Reich & Würden, Triola and Thomas Fehlmann, the ear then lingers a bit longer on the ghostly "Weiht" by Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella, a track like a temple of sound, a deep electronic immersion in a Japanese onsen. In this sea of unnameable time you could sink forever, but with the tracks of Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden & Pepo Galán the journey slowly comes to an end.

Mit dem Cover-Artwork für Pop Ambient 2022 hat sich die langjährige KOMPAKT-Grafikerin Veronika Unland einmal mehr selbst übertroffen. Nach den geradezu barocken, in blutrot und tiefschwarz gehaltenen, äußerst physischen Formationen von Pop Ambient 2021, die wie zum Tanz aufgerichtete Körper aus einem dunklen, floralen Meer auftauchten, ziert die Vorderseite von 2022 eine pastell-weiße Skulptur, in sich verschlungen, vielfach gefaltet und von zarten Schattierungen durchzogen, die auf einem blass-rosa Hintergrund zu schweben scheint; weiche, sanfte Wellen aus venezianischen Farben gewebt, die dem Betrachter Rätsel aufgeben: Ist es eine Blüte, eine Koralle, eine Molluske?

Natürlich geht es auch in der aktuellen Ausgabe der traditionsreichen, von Wolfgang Voigt kuratierten Compilation-Reihe um die beharrliche und immer wieder notwendige Definition von Schönheit, von Reduktion, um elektronische Musik von schwerer Leichtigkeit und leichter Schwere, vom ewigen Versprechen des Ambient auf einen Zustand körperlicher und akustischer Schwerelosigkeit und dem von Pop auf Erlösung. Und um die Frage, warum eine nie beliebige Kombination aus Klangfläche, Drones, Samples und Loops, auf eine bestimmte Art zusammengefügt, dieses Gefühl von Wärme, Tiefe und Raum entstehen lassen kann, - etwas dreidimensionales, in dem die Fantasie sich so zuhause fühlt wie ein Fisch im Wasser oder ein Vogel in der Luft. Ein ästhetischer Schlüsselreiz, der alle Sinne in ein langsames Gleiten und Driften versetzt, wonach sich deine Synapsen wieder anfühlen, als habe man sie in ätherischem Öl gebadet. Neben Soul ist Ambient die wahrscheinlich wirksamste musikalische Heilpflanze der Menschheit.

Hinter den auralen Reagenzgläsern hantiert einmal mehr das Who-is-Who der kompaktschen Pop Ambient-Riege, erstmals angeführt vom hoch gehandelten kalifornischen Duo Blank Gloss, deren diesjähriges Debüt-Album “Melt” der englische Guardian nichts weniger als “herzergreifende Schönheit” bescheinigte. Yui Onodera’s “Chrome” sowie “Kari”, eine Kooperation von Markus Guentner und Joachim Spieth, könnte man sich auch gut im Score von Denis Villeneuve’s Neuverfilmung von DUNE vorstellen, - das hat der Kollege Hans Zimmer allerdings auch ohne die drei ganz gut hinbekommen. Nach so wundervollen wie stilsicheren Beiträgen von Reich & Würden, Triola und Thomas Fehlmann verharrt das Ohr dann etwas länger beim geisterhaften “Weiht” von Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella-Weiht, ein Track wie ein Tempel aus Klang, ein tiefes elektronisches Eintauchen in einen japanischen Onsen. In diesem Meer aus unnennbarer Zeit könnte man ewig versinken, doch mit den Tracks von Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer und Max Würden & Pepo Galán geht die Reise langsam zu Ende.

The Acclaimed Arab-Levantine Contemporary Music & Art Project Returns With Its First New Album Since 2018. Led By Lebanese-Canadian Producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Whose Many Credits Include Matana Roberts, Big | Brave, Sarah Davachi, Suuns. Featuring A Different Guest Collaboration On Each Track, Including Tim Hecker, Moor Mother, Beirut, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox. Europe & Canada Tour In November 2021 With Experimental 16mm Analog Films By New Duo Member Erin Weisgerber.

One of the most renowned and uncompromising entities working in 21st century avant-garde Arab-Levantine art and music, Jerusalem In My Heart presents a new album of vital and haunting electronics and electroacoustics, framed by founder and producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s spoken and sungArabic, buzuk-playing and sound design. Qalaq is the most distilled, variegated and finely wrought Jerusalem In My Heart album to date – featuring a different guest/collaborator on every track, yet as cohesive, emotionally resonant, sonically adventurous and narratively powerful as any release in JIMH’s celebrated discography. Guests across the album's 13 tracks include Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Beirut, Alanis Obomsawin, Rabih Beaini and many more. “Qalaq” is an Arabic word with many shades of meaning but Moumneh particularly intends it as “deep worry” – on various obvious global levels, but also specifically with respect to Lebanon: its collapsing domestic politics, economy and infrastructure; the tragedy and aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion; the intractable geography and geopolitics that continue to condemn the country to corruption, disruption, destabilization and violence. Moumneh writes: “The Side Two tracks are all named ‘Qalaq’ and then numbered, representing the degrees of layered and complex violence that Lebanon and the Levant have reached in the last couple of years, from the complete and utter failure of the Lebanese sectarian state that has driven the economy to a grinding halt, to its disastrous handling of the migrant influx from neighbouring failed states, to the endemic corruption that led to the August 2020 port explosion, to the latest chapter of Palestinian erasure and yet another brutally asymmetrical and disproportionate bombing campaign on Gaza.” Qalaq is shaped by a "dismantled orchestra" ofmusical collaborations, forged through long-distance file exchange during lockdown winter 2020-21 (and the inverted companion to JIMH's previous 2018full-length Daqa'iqTudaiq, which featured a 15-piece orchestra recorded live in Beirut). Moumneh initially through composed Qalaq in purposely stark and skeletal form, then gave each guest artist a section to decompose, edit, re-interpret and recompose as they desired, working their stems back into his own mixes for each piece/section and moulding newfound coherences in the overall work. The result is The album artwork with a front cover colour photograph by Myriam Boulous capturing a scene during the Beirut October Revolution of 2019.











k 11 Qalaq 6 (w/ VÍZ Réka Csiszér)

There is something magical about the synergy of the voices of a couple; they gel, they interweave, they lift each other. Remember classic duets sung by partners over the years; so much is said, more than just words.

'Warm You' is the collaboration between Mandaworld (aka Amanda Hicks) and partner Matthew Tavares (aka Matty of BADBADNOTGOOD fame). It is a song about your lover getting out of bed in the middle of the night because they can't sleep and you telling them to come back to where it’s warm and safe and they’re loved.

It was written in their Montreal apartment a few months after they moved in. Matty described the writing process "We just spontaneously decided to make music, and the idea came out pretty much immediately. I laid down some guitar and then Amanda played the synth line over it and I edited the guitar so the timing was more interesting. We worked on it for a few days getting the chorus and the verses to feel right and, for the most part, everything fell into place super intuitively. Amanda wrote the lyrics."

This heartfelt, dream-pop song, with a mellow shoe-gaze sensibility, lets the pair trade verses whilst the instrumentation builds to a crescendo and the duo's voices finally combine. Lush, passionate and personal, a beautiful song, rich in evocative memories.

On the ‘B-side’, Mandaworld takes centre stage. 'Spoonfeed' is a spacey synth bass-led ambient ballad with smokey hazy vocals, calming like a bubble bath. Produced with a timeless quality, the song leaves you with a sense of tranquility and a feeling of being submerged underwater.

Like all the best music this 7" is deeply personal, yet these are universal themes that are relatable to any listener as they recognise their own experiences within the mood of the songs.

LTD. VINEYARD GRAPE VINYL-

Typically, a band's big indie label debut doesn't come 15 albums into its career, but with Constant Smiles' Paragons, here we are. Primary songwriter and sole "constant" member Ben Jones_who considers Constant Smiles a collective_sees its impressive output as a way to document the group's evolution. Since its live debut as a noise duo on Ben's home of Martha's Vineyard in 2009, Constant Smiles has grown to include contributions from 50 other members, all of whom have personal connections to the group's extended family. And while the collective has indulged an array of musical whims along the way - including Ben's penchant for penning a new set's worth of material for each live performance - Constant Smiles' sound has tightened up considerably over their past couple of albums, in large part as a result of Ben's working relationship with Mike Mackey, who has become his main creative partner. This increased focus manifests on Paragons in the band's most cohesive batch of songs to date, ranging from shimmering psych-pop excursions to bittersweet, piano and string-accented strummers, and an execution that feels like a massive step forward for the band. Through its recent forays into dream pop and shoegaze (Control) and synth-pop (John Waters), Constant Smiles has learned how to incorporate its experimental inclinations more fluidly into the mix. Artists like Yo La Tengo, and the more recent Rat Columns, are good touchstones for Constant Smiles' musical approach - tethering to an indie-pop core while perennially mining genres, always finding new ways to intrigue listeners and pursue a unique vision. Paragons was produced and engineered by Ben Greenberg in the last two weeks of December 2020 at Gary's Electric, with additional recording done by Ben Jones at his home studio, The Void, and his Aunt Leanne's house. The album was mixed at Circular Ruin Studio and mastered by Josh Bonati. The band on Paragons consists of Jai Berger (who performed "Introduction"), Spike Currier (bass and synth), Matthew Addison (drums), Emma Conley (violin), Nicky Wetherell (cello), Adam Lipsky (piano), and Ben Greenberg (guitar and Mellotron).

Recorded in Havana’s famed Egrem Studios, the group displays a cohesion forged by an intense performing and touring cycle. The musical conversation that began in the Areito studios three years earlier blossomed into an easy, intimate dialogue between good friends - allowing full, fearless musical expression and risk-taking outside of their comfort zones.

Building upon Perez Prado’s dissonant, near avant-garde vision of the mambo, and highlighting the Lucumí subtext of Cuban rhythms and styles, the band continues to explore, develop and expand the island’s rich rhythmic palette and repertoire - pushing the conventions of what is considered “mambo” - and drawing deeply from folkloric and religious traditions seldom heard in popular music. 16 Rayos is here to shine its musical rays on us, warm our hearts, and irresistibly move our bodies.

When Orquesta Akokán burst onto the global music scene a mere three years ago, their no-holds-barred 21st century take on the venerable Cuban mambo lit up stages around the world with a fierce and unremitting joy. Singer José "Pepito" Gómez, Chulo Records producer and multi instrumentalist Jacob Plasse, and arranger Michael Eckroth joined forces with a carefully curated selection of Havana’s most extraordinary musicians as Orquesta Akokán, polishing Cuban mambo’s golden sound to a luminous, contemporary sheen. Along the way Orquesta Akokán imbued these legendary Cuban grooves with a renewed vitality and powerful sense of akokán ---the Yoruba word used by Cubans to mean “from the heart” or “soul.”



On the Cuban side of the equation the Orquesta boasts some of the island’s greatest instrumentalists culled from members of near-mythical groups such as Los Van Van, NG La Banda, and Irakere (notably César Lopez, Orquesta Akokan’s point man in Havana). The ensemble for 16 Rayos shines a light on Cuba’s musical families and multigenerational legacy with the participation of two fabled Vizcainos on percussion - Roberto "Tato" Vizcaino Jr. and his father Roberto Vizcaino Guillot, a member of Chucho Valdes’ seminal 90’s quartet. Another family duo added their masterful legacy to the recording, with trumpeter Reinaldo “Molote” Melián bringing in his son, Reinaldo Melián Zamora, to play trumpet on several tunes alongside lead trumpet Harold Madrigal Frías. The winds and brass are rounded out with a rich saxophone section made up of young lion Jamil Shery and Germán Velazco (musical director for Pablo Milanés)on tenor, with Evaristo Denis on baritone and César López on alto, along with Yoandy Argudin and Heikel Fabián Trimiño on trombone. Coros were sung by Eddie Venegas and Luis Soto. Significantly, Orquesta Akokán added strings to the ensemble for the first time, with the participation of violinists Amelia Febles Díaz, Jenny Peña and Anabel Estévez Acosta, whose virtuosity stems from the classical training for which Cuban musicians are so renowned. The power and grace of Pedro "Tata" Francisco Almeida Barriel’s vocals lead the way on “4 de Octubre” and “Llegue con mi Rumba,” evincing why he is considered one of the Cuban rumba’s premier exponents. Another highly recognized singer, legendary guarachera Xiomara Valdés - who’s shared the stage with legends such as Beny Moré and Omara Portuondo and received the Ministry of Culture’s Distinción por la Cultura Nacional de Cuba as a significant contributor to Cuba’s musical legacy - is the featured guest on the title track.

Aufgang is back with its 3rd album, “Broad Ways”, slated for release in November 2021

With this 3rd album, the franco-lebanese duo perpetuates its winning alchemy by drawing on the psychic and collective traumas of recent History at the crossroads between European and Middle Eastern cultures.

What more was there to prove for the Aufgang duo since their re-invention of US techno a few years ago through the means of organic instruments like piano + drums, and releases on Infiné & BlueNote/Decca ?

Maybe that they would from now on independently take onto themselves, the full conception and distribution of their body of work, supported by a collective of visual-arts creators, dancers, and emerging talent-incubators (Bi:Pole/Believe/ BigWax/Alter-K)...

“Broad Ways” could be translated as «in many ways» in the sense that there are many ways of seeing the world, and that everything is not binary and that on the contrary, our lives are shaped by the each other’s own paradigms...

In this clever mix of experimental techno, lyrical prowess and melodies in the Arab tradition, can one imagine a future that would solve the world’s current contradictions in a boiling magma so complex of which Edgar Morin would be proud... Following this unique trademark, this art of mixing influences and cultures, along the New York, Paris, Lebanon and now Sydney axis... how far will they go?

According to Pitchfork, AUFGANG “blends piano, drums and electronic music with virtuosity, with one foot in the club and the other in the conservatory.”

Rami KHALIFÉ, composer and pianist, transcends the classical heritage of his years studying at the Juilliard School in NYC and the Middle Eastern origins of his masterful family: his father Marcel KHALIFÉ is a major composer and musician in the Arab world.

The drummer and producer Aymeric WESTRICH has an instinctive DIY approach and infuses his music with his knowledge of urban and electronic cultures, developed with Kery James, Cassius, Phoenix and more recently Lomepal.

Taking their inspiration from multiple artistic movements and currents, from the Disco of the mythical Larry Levan to the poetry of Oum Kalthoum, these two free electrons have created their sound between Paris, Beirut and New York, in reaction to the frenetic energy of big cities, as if in an effort to prevent this energy from corroding their freedom. It’s a unique experience born from the sublime diversity of these two masterful approaches.

It's back-to-back hits with the return of the Names You Can Trust split single series featuring two new emerging artists and record debuts.

After years on the local New York scene as DJs, collaborators and permanent fixtures amongst the brightest of musicians and artists, Raspadura has spent a long time brewing behind the curtain, tucked away in the musical minds of real life partners Josue Granados (Sonidero Mixteco, Los Taxis) and Dayan Silva (Dayansiiita). Their coming out party as recording artists is a perfect encapsulation of the duo's raucous but delightful energy. "Pa Que Gocen" is pure punkera, but seasoned with a deep musical appreciation that abounds in the timeless tropical music universe, and surely a precursor to further recording adventures, as this debut should warrant. The appeal is obvious as soon as the needle drops. Silva's enchanting vocals grab you immediately, with tales of sweets upon sweets. Pure visions of dulce, panela and miel are chanted over the rhythm of Granados' low down ska-beat and hypnotizing tres cubano. For Raspadura, dessert is first!

Come fly with Grupo Pernil in this ode to the timeless vibes of gypsy rumba, merengue and guaracha. Featuring an international all-star cast of musicians from travelling adventures and collaborations of recent years, "Danza de la Cabra" was originally conceived at home in the NYCT studio, and later brought to life with additional sessions inside Amsterdam's Heat Too Hot and Barcelona's Nación Funk studios. This one-off instrumental recording turned into a case of severe psicodelica, under the influence and improvisation of the group's talented players and percussion professionals, then amped and electrified for maximum effect with a touch of studio magic and a taste for local iberico. Featuring members of Greenwood Rhythm Coalition, Conjunto Papa Upa, Fundación Tony Manero and Los Fulanos.

The Black Keys release a special tenth anniversary edition of their landmark seventh studio. El Camino (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) will be available in several formats including a Super Deluxe edition of five vinyl LPs or four CDs, featuring a remastered version of the original album, a previously unreleased Live in Portland, ME concert recording, a BBC Radio 1 Zane Lowe session from 2012, a 2011 Electro-Vox session, an extensive photo book, a limited-edition poster and lithograph, and a ‘new car scent’ air freshener. A three-LP edition, which includes the remastered album and the live recording, will also be available. The Super Deluxe version will also be available digitally.

El Camino was produced by Danger Mouse and The Black Keys and was recorded in the band’s then-new hometown of Nashville during the spring of 2011. The Black Keys won three awards at the 55th annual GRAMMY Awards for El Camino – Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Rock Album – among other worldwide accolades. In the UK, the band was nominated for a BRIT Award (Best International Group) and an NME Award (Best International Band). The week of release, the band performed on Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and the Late Show with David Letterman, and later that year, went on to perform their first Madison Square Garden show.

Rolling Stone, which featured the band on their cover around the release, hailed El Camino for bringing ‘raw, riffed-out power back to pop’s lexicon,’ and called it ‘the Keys’ grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.’ The Guardian said, ‘They sound like a band who think they've made the year's best rock'n'roll album, probably because that's exactly what they've done.’

In the newly written liner notes for El Camino (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition), David Fricke says:

The story of the Black Keys' seventh album, named after an automobile, long out of fashion and featured nowhere in the artwork, begins on a sidewalk in the middle of a blizzard. On the afternoon of January 9, 2011, singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney stood on the pavement outside the Bowery Hotel in New York City, saw the weather turning vicious, looked at each other and came to the same decision: They had to get off the road.

The night before, the duo scored another first in a season getting crowded with them: The Black Keys' debut appearance on Saturday Night Live, performing ‘Howlin' for You’ and ‘Tighten Up’, the breakout singles from their latest release, Brothers. Two days earlier, Brothers – the Keys' first Top 5 album, released in May 2010 – became their first Gold record, passing a half-million in sales thanks to heavy FM rotation and a near-year of gigging, now set to run deep into 2011 including a prestige slot at Coachella and victory laps in Europe and Australia.

The Keys "tried to settle down" after cancelling the tour, Carney says. But that didn't last. "I said, 'We should just make another record.' And I asked Dan if we should get Danger Mouse" – the hip-hop and modern-rock producer, real name Brian Burton, who worked on the Keys' 2008 record, Attack & Release, and co-produced ‘Tighten Up’. Auerbach and Carney did not have any new songs, but as the drummer notes, "Most of our records – we don't have material when we start. Brothers was made up in the studio."

In the UK, the record gave the band their first top 10 hit, and in the US it debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200. The band was also the #1 most played artist at Alternative and AAA radio formats for 2012 in the US. The album’s first single, ‘Lonely Boy’: reached #1 on the Alternative and AAA charts; it also entered the top 10 at Rock radio. The second single, ‘Gold on the Ceiling’, also reached #1 on Alternative radio and the third single, ‘Little Black Submarines’, reached the top 3 at Alternative radio.

El Camino has been certified Double Platinum in the US; Platinum in the UK, Belgium, France, Ireland, and the Netherlands; Triple Platinum in Australia and New Zealand; Quadruple Platinum in Canada; and Gold in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. Of the album’s singles, ‘Lonely Boy’ was certified Double Platinum in the US, nine-times Platinum in Canada, Triple Platinum in Australia, Platinum in New Zealand, and Gold in Denmark and the UK. ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ was certified Platinum in the United States, Australia, and Canada. ‘Little Black Submarines’ was certified Platinum in the United States. The Black Keys also were nominated for an MTV European Music Award in 2012.

Recently, the band announced their World Tour of America. The Black Keys will perform three intimate shows in Oxford, MS, Athens, GA, and St Petersburg, FL, surrounding their September 25 headlining set at Pilgrimage Fest in Tennessee.

The Black Keys recently released their tenth studio album, Delta Kream, which was recorded at Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. The album takes its name from William Eggleston’s iconic Mississippi photograph that is on its cover.

Formed in Akron, Ohio in 2001, The Black Keys, who have been called ‘rock royalty’ by the Associated Press and ‘one of the best rock ‘n’ roll bands on the planet’ by Uncut, are guitarist/singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. Cutting their teeth playing small clubs, the band have gone on to sell out arena tours and have released nine previous studio albums: their debut The Big Come Up (2002), followed by Thickfreakness (2003) and Rubber Factory (2004), along with their releases on Nonesuch Records, Magic Potion (2006), Attack & Release (2008), Brothers (2010), El Camino (2011), Turn Blue (2014) and, most recently, “Let’s Rock” (2019), plus and a tenth anniversary edition of Brothers (2020). The band has won six Grammy Awards and a BRIT and headlined festivals in North America, South America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.

The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin's Westend on February 2, 2019. "Live im Haus des Rundfunks" documents the first half of this evening, in which the individual composer-pianists introduced themselves to the audience in solos, duos and trios. This carefully choreographed set served as an electrifying prelude to the grand finale, the 20-minute collective mantra of Steve Reich's 1973 composition Six Pianos, a studio recording of which has already been released on the 2016 record Steve Reich "Six Pianos" – Terry Riley "Keyboard Study #1" (FILM LP/CD 002).

Im Jahr 2016 beginnt die gemeinsame Geschichte der Pianisten Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp und Kai Schuhmacher, sechs seelenverwandten Musikern, die sich zu einem Kollektiv an den Schnittstellen von klassischer Komposition, Pop, Elektronik und Minimal Music zusammengefunden haben. Nach gefeierten Auftritten in der Kölner Philharmonie (mit Hauschka, ohne Kai Schumacher), der Bundeskunsthalle Bonn sowie der Hamburger Elbphilharmonie gastierte das Projekt am Abend des 2. Februar 2019 auf Einladung des RBB im geschichtsträchtigen Haus des Rundfunks im Berliner Westend. Die damals entstandene Aufnahme des Konzerts im Großen Sendesaal bildet die Grundlage der nun vorliegenden Veröffentlichung. “Live im Haus des Rundfunks“ dokumentiert den ersten Teil des Abends, innerhalb dessen sich die einzelnen Pianisten solo, im Duo oder Trio, dem Publikum vorstellen. Dieser Part stellte das Vorspiel zum großen Finale dar, dem 20-minütigen, kollektiven Mantra von Steve Reich’s Komposition Six Pianos aus dem Jahr 1973. Eine Studioaufnahme hiervon wurde bereits auf der 2016 auf FILM erschienenen Schallplatte STEVE REICH "SIX PIANOS" - TERRY RILEY "KEYBOARD STUDY #1" (FILM LP/CD 002) veröffentlicht.

The Black Keys release a special tenth anniversary edition of their landmark seventh studio. El Camino (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) will be available in several formats including a Super Deluxe edition of five vinyl LPs or four CDs, featuring a remastered version of the original album, a previously unreleased Live in Portland, ME concert recording, a BBC Radio 1 Zane Lowe session from 2012, a 2011 Electro-Vox session, an extensive photo book, a limited-edition poster and lithograph, and a ‘new car scent’ air freshener. A three-LP edition, which includes the remastered album and the live recording, will also be available. The Super Deluxe version will also be available digitally.

El Camino was produced by Danger Mouse and The Black Keys and was recorded in the band’s then-new hometown of Nashville during the spring of 2011. The Black Keys won three awards at the 55th annual GRAMMY Awards for El Camino – Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Rock Album – among other worldwide accolades. In the UK, the band was nominated for a BRIT Award (Best International Group) and an NME Award (Best International Band). The week of release, the band performed on Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and the Late Show with David Letterman, and later that year, went on to perform their first Madison Square Garden show.

Rolling Stone, which featured the band on their cover around the release, hailed El Camino for bringing ‘raw, riffed-out power back to pop’s lexicon,’ and called it ‘the Keys’ grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.’ The Guardian said, ‘They sound like a band who think they've made the year's best rock'n'roll album, probably because that's exactly what they've done.’

In the newly written liner notes for El Camino (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition), David Fricke says:

The story of the Black Keys' seventh album, named after an automobile, long out of fashion and featured nowhere in the artwork, begins on a sidewalk in the middle of a blizzard. On the afternoon of January 9, 2011, singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney stood on the pavement outside the Bowery Hotel in New York City, saw the weather turning vicious, looked at each other and came to the same decision: They had to get off the road.

The night before, the duo scored another first in a season getting crowded with them: The Black Keys' debut appearance on Saturday Night Live, performing ‘Howlin' for You’ and ‘Tighten Up’, the breakout singles from their latest release, Brothers. Two days earlier, Brothers – the Keys' first Top 5 album, released in May 2010 – became their first Gold record, passing a half-million in sales thanks to heavy FM rotation and a near-year of gigging, now set to run deep into 2011 including a prestige slot at Coachella and victory laps in Europe and Australia.

The Keys "tried to settle down" after cancelling the tour, Carney says. But that didn't last. "I said, 'We should just make another record.' And I asked Dan if we should get Danger Mouse" – the hip-hop and modern-rock producer, real name Brian Burton, who worked on the Keys' 2008 record, Attack & Release, and co-produced ‘Tighten Up’. Auerbach and Carney did not have any new songs, but as the drummer notes, "Most of our records – we don't have material when we start. Brothers was made up in the studio."

In the UK, the record gave the band their first top 10 hit, and in the US it debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200. The band was also the #1 most played artist at Alternative and AAA radio formats for 2012 in the US. The album’s first single, ‘Lonely Boy’: reached #1 on the Alternative and AAA charts; it also entered the top 10 at Rock radio. The second single, ‘Gold on the Ceiling’, also reached #1 on Alternative radio and the third single, ‘Little Black Submarines’, reached the top 3 at Alternative radio.

El Camino has been certified Double Platinum in the US; Platinum in the UK, Belgium, France, Ireland, and the Netherlands; Triple Platinum in Australia and New Zealand; Quadruple Platinum in Canada; and Gold in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. Of the album’s singles, ‘Lonely Boy’ was certified Double Platinum in the US, nine-times Platinum in Canada, Triple Platinum in Australia, Platinum in New Zealand, and Gold in Denmark and the UK. ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ was certified Platinum in the United States, Australia, and Canada. ‘Little Black Submarines’ was certified Platinum in the United States. The Black Keys also were nominated for an MTV European Music Award in 2012.

Recently, the band announced their World Tour of America. The Black Keys will perform three intimate shows in Oxford, MS, Athens, GA, and St Petersburg, FL, surrounding their September 25 headlining set at Pilgrimage Fest in Tennessee.

The Black Keys recently released their tenth studio album, Delta Kream, which was recorded at Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. The album takes its name from William Eggleston’s iconic Mississippi photograph that is on its cover.

Formed in Akron, Ohio in 2001, The Black Keys, who have been called ‘rock royalty’ by the Associated Press and ‘one of the best rock ‘n’ roll bands on the planet’ by Uncut, are guitarist/singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. Cutting their teeth playing small clubs, the band have gone on to sell out arena tours and have released nine previous studio albums: their debut The Big Come Up (2002), followed by Thickfreakness (2003) and Rubber Factory (2004), along with their releases on Nonesuch Records, Magic Potion (2006), Attack & Release (2008), Brothers (2010), El Camino (2011), Turn Blue (2014) and, most recently, “Let’s Rock” (2019), plus and a tenth anniversary edition of Brothers (2020). The band has won six Grammy Awards and a BRIT and headlined festivals in North America, South America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.

It's been already 10 years since the first DJ's Choice parties in basements and squatted social centers in Rome. Many things have changed, but the approach remains the same: using music as a form of expression and a means to affirm one's identity.

RM stands for "Rebel Music" (i.e., music by DJ's Choice founder The Rebel), but is also short for "Rome", a city represented in track one by the 'Jedi Master' of Roman hip hop: Danno, from the pioneering underground crew Colle Der Fomento.

Also performing on The Rebel's instrumental are New York hip hop duo The Good People in track two, ''Body Rockin''', remixed by another Italian hip hop legend, Ice One.

Rome and New York are two worlds, two styles, but two sides of the same coin. Our Rebel Music brings them together as if they were two stops on the same subway line.





e 05: Body Rockin' (Hip Hop Room Remix) feat. The Good People

Diving into the archives of Alter Ego - the Italian experimental ensemble of Manuel Zurria, Paolo Ravaglia, Aldo Campagnari, Francesco Dillon, Oscar Pizzo, and Eugenio Vatta - Die Schachtel is thrilled to present Microwaves, a never before released body of recordings of works composed by Atli Ingólfsson, Giovanni Verrando, Yan Maresz, and Riccardo Nova, made with Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen) in 2005. Resting at the outer reaches of avant-garde chamber and electronic music, the LP’s blistering structures, tones, and textures - plowing forward with frenetic energy - remain radical and ahead of their time, more than 15 years after they were first laid to tape.

A modular chamber ensemble with a pointedly anti-academic approach to music, over the course of its activities - running roughly between 1990 and 2010 - Alter Ego developed a devoted following among some of the most forward thinking voices in experimental music, all the while collaborating widely with artists spanning a vast range of practices and disciplines, including Robin Rimbaud, Philip Jeck, Matmos, Gavin Bryars, Andrew Hooker, William Basinski, David Moss, Alvin Curran, Terry Riley, and near countless number of others.

Alter Ego’s diverse activities can be understood as interventions with the disposition toward formality within contemporary chamber music, often pairing themselves with artists working well beyond their own context as a means to develop highly original interpretations of a specific composer’s work. In 2004, this process led them to instigate a collaboration Pan Sonic, the Finnish duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen, pioneers of a remarkably distinct form of rhythmic, experimental electronic music, and regarded by many as one of the most visionary and irreverent projects working in the field during the '90s and 2000s.

Initially conceived with Fausto Romitelli in 2004 before being sidelined by the composer’s untimely passing the following year, Microwaves acts, in part, a remembrance in sound, featuring four works by some of his closest friends, the composers Atli Ingólfsson, Giovanni Verrando, Yan Maresz, and Riccardo Nova. Each composition, Ingólfsson’s Snap, Verrando’s Harmonic Domains #3, Maresz’s Link, and Nova’s Thirteen13x8@Terror Generating Deity, have roots in a pallet of samples and fragments drawn by each composer from existing works by Pan Sonic. Upon completion, these compositions then entered into a collaborative process between Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen (Pan Sonic) and Alter Ego (Manuel Zurria, Paolo Ravaglia, Aldo Campagnari, Francesco Dillon, Oscar Pizzo, and Eugenio Vatta), and were performed collectively by both groups during an extensive tour that year.

Distinct and free-standing, while operating as a seamless whole, the four works encountered across the album’s two sides - built from the sounds of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, electronics, and further treatments - present an engrossing intersection between electronic and acoustic sound that diverges from most standing conceptions of electroacoustic music. Each composer’s carefully rendered structures rise and fall within the startling, conversant interplay between the two groups, finding perfect balance - between the frenetic and restrained - in what can only be regarded as one of the most striking and singularly unique expressions of contemporary chamber music realized during the 2000s.

Vast in scope, visionary in concept and artistry, and sonically engrossing, Die Schachtel is thrilled to present these never before heard recordings from the archives of Alter Ego. Microwaves is available on black vinyl, in a limited edition of 350 copies.