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Two years in the making, Future Ruins, TOM And His Computer’s debut album, will be released on Trentemøller’s In My Room label in October 20th. As a 20 year veteran of the Copenhagen music scene, Thomas Bertelsen has been releasing music under the sobriquet of TOM And His Computer for five years, merging the newest technologies with the old, while squeezing fresh sounds out of equipment that’s not only obsolete, sometimes it’s barely functioning at all. “I switch back and forth between the digital and the analog worlds. I’ll utilize old guitar pedals as well as the newest software,” says Thomas Bertelsen, producer behind TOM And His Computer. “It’s never about the gear, though, but rather finding that one little sound that can trigger an idea for an entire track.” Future Ruins was also co-produced and mixed by Trentemøller. While previous offerings have taken listeners to the outer boundaries of what can be considered “electronic music,” including nods to dark wave, dream pop, krautrock and modern psych rock, Future Ruins presents those influences in a new way and represents a great leap forward for the Copenhagen based producer.
The result is a genre-less collection of songs showcasing TOM’s obsession with propelling sounds of the past into the present, and future, combining noise and edginess with his “commitment to fresh ideas with a clear sense of melodies,” according to Clash Magazine. “My tastes are eclectic and I like to flirt with many different sub genres,” says TOM. “The aim was to combine various styles while trying to maintain a common denominator,” which committing to a full-length offered as an opportunity.

GES: Anthology of American Pop Music

Six great pop standards remembered: five pop songs are dissected by sampler, stretched, compressed, and re-collaged. In this way, their identity is lost. What remains is a vague concreteness: flashes of déjà vu and remote echoes that evoke the original.
GES (Gesellschaft zur Emanzipation des Samples)
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Active members: Helmut Schmidt, Jan Jelinek
Founded: 2009
Headquarters: Federal Court of Justice, Karlsruhe, Germany
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GES Glossary

Acoustic Surveillance Series

A 7-inch vinyl record series curated by GES focussing on historical methods of acoustic surveillance. Each record introduces a surveillance system from the past. Starting with Uguisubari in 2017, the series will continue with the release of Orecchio di Dionisio in 2021. GES is open to further suggestions on this subject.

Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice), Karlsruhe

“The use of audio samples as artistic practice may justify the infringement of copyright and intellectual property rights.” (ruling of the German Federal Court of Justice pertaining to Metall auf Metall II, 2016). The court is also the official headquarters of GES.
Circulations

What happens to copyright claims when music from a passing car is captured in a street recording? Is it legal to use this recording freely or is it necessary to obtain licensing rights? Circulations re-enacts this recording situation: audio players are placed in public spaces, where they reproduce the desired sample material. The acoustically choreographed space is then recorded, creating a field recording in which everyday noises circulate together with seemingly incidental music.

Emancipation of Sampling

Fuelled by its criminalization, the act of sampling existing recordings forfeited some of its artistic prestige (see Sampling). GES wishes to rehabilitate and re-emancipate the practice of sampling as a form of art in its own right. Strategy: 1. Name samples and sources explicitly. 2. Choose samples that are as popular and as recognizable as possible (Beatles, Carpenters, etc.). 3. The editing and manipulation of the sample must not compromise its recognizability (negotiable). 4. Use as many samples as possible. 5. Always name more sample sources than were actually used in the composition.

Field Recording

A compositional practice widely used in sound art and ethnomusicology that involves the recording of natural acoustical phenomena. Two additional requirements are usually imposed: The recording process should take place outside a studio environment, i.e. outdoors. And the person recording does not generate any of the acoustic material him/herself. GES expands this definition by introducing the concept of choreographed public space (see Circulations).

Gambling

An acoustic event favoured by GES, already used in numerous sound collages (must take place in public). The most popular option is thimblerig, a cup and ball gambling game commonly played in the street. Compositional instruction by GES: Place an audio playback device in the proximity of a thimblerigger. Play works for orchestra (by Debussy or Mahler). Move slowly towards the gamblers with a microphone.

Helmut Schmidt

Multiple identity and fictional character devised by GES. Figures variously within the semiotic system of GES as member, guest artist or public representative. Following the historical example of Subcommandante Marcos (EZLN).

Kraftwerk

The German band founded by electropop musicians Florian Schneider-Esleben and Ralf Hütter (a.k.a. Die Prozessoren) is the natural enemy of GES. Protected by computer-generated avatars, Kraftwerk operates a quote-hostile cultural hegemony. Their strategy: Install a special brand in the collective consciousness by means of a sophisticated system of quotations and references that may in turn not be quoted by anyone else. Other bands with such delusions of omnipotence: U2, Metallica.

Marcel Duchamp

As the inventor of the readymade, Duchamp may be viewed as a precursor to the art of sampling. However, the artist is appreciated above all for his sonorous qualities, as his vocal silence has often been sampled and processed. It was the inspiration for Jelinek's radio play Zwischen.

Orecchio di Dionisio

This 65-meter-deep limestone cave in the Sicilian town of Syracuse, carved out of a hillside in ancient times, has exceptional acoustics: A person standing at the cave entrance can hear every word whispered deep down inside it. The painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio gave it its name (The Ear of Dionysius) in 1608. The cave indeed resembles an ear and – according to Caravaggio – had a specific function: The tyrant Dionysius I imprisoned his political prisoners in the cave in order to spy on them. Orecchio di Dionisio will be featured in the Acoustic Surveillance Series in the near future.

Sampling

Compositional practice whereby recorded music is fragmented, turned into sound collages and transferred into different contexts of meaning. Since the advent of affordable sampling technology in the 1990s, the music industry has been trying to criminalize and/or promote the practice. Both strategies are driven by the same principle: Profit.

Uguisubari

Sound-making floorboards in Japanese temple and castle complexes, featured in the Acoustic Surveillance Series in 2017. In the Edo period, the “nightingale floor” (literal translation of uguisubari) was a popular acoustic warning system. The principle was straightforward: When someone stepped onto the boards, nails would rub against metal clamps beneath the floor, creating a tell-tale squeaky sound that was said to resemble the chirping of the Japanese nightingale.

Wind

A generator of acoustic events and an amplifier/transmitter of existing sounds. A meteorological form of energy appreciated by the GES on account of its unpredictability. A series about wind as an acoustic phenomenon is planned. Working title: Hotel Corridors.

Zwischen (Between)

Radio play by GES member Jan Jelinek based on recordings of various public interview situations. From the speech of the interviewees (all of them eloquent personalities) the pauses between coherent utterances were extracted and assembled. What we hear is an archaic body language: modes of breathing, word particles and onomatopoeic turmoil. A key question for GES: Which comes first, personal rights or artistic freedom? For Zwischen, Jelinek used only recordings by public figures that were already available to the public.

Listening to Linja’s debut LP makes one think of Polish director Yuri Norstein’s gloomy melancholic (yet playful) movies, or perhaps just of a rainy day, or Chopin.

Velvet Noise is a collection of 7 experimental pieces made by Linja sometime around 2016-2017, using drum ma- chines and a lot of modular synthesisers. The album is woven with Simple melodies that crack through the squeaks and the bleeps, eery pads that fill the voids all sorts of FX. The atmosphere becomes filled with tension when it is playing in the room, as if something is clearly about to happen. Linja’s album is not so easy to describe, and yet due to its coherence and storytelling it has a certain feel and per- sonality of a good book rather than just a record. “It transcends its existence as a record”.

Tape / Cassette

Longstanding collaborators & Bay Area based experimental duo Kush Arora & Lucas Patzek aka Only Now & Orogen return with ‘AVULS’, the project’s sophomore release.

Building on the unearthly, black hole transmissions and creaking, exospheric ambience of their self-titled debut, Only Now & Orogen present an abyssal, elemental broadcast from another unchartered extra-terrestrial zone. Remote and astronomical yet tied to a newfound sense of rhythmic structure, ‘AVULS’ navigates a course through inverted beat-led frameworks, surging detonations of sub-bass, and severely turbulent, monumentally scaled soundscapes.

Amidst this large, slow-moving cyclone of sound sit fragmentary emergences of choral voices and Gregorian chants; a distant, esoteric presence within dense eruptions of attritional noise and infinite recesses of low end.

In harsh, pointillistic detail and through infernal surround sound, Only Now & Orogen channel dub, noise and power electronics, evoking a distorted, ritualistic inflection on the Voyager Golden Record; a mass of tectonic motion and friction; a storm in deep space.

Rian Treanor returns to Planet Mu for his raw and energetic second album "File Under UK Metaplasm". The enigmatic, sweaty energy of Tanzanian singeli and Chicago footwork are juxtaposed with slick, high-def bass weight which sits at the centre of the album. Opening track 'Hypnic Jerks' is the perfect example of this, with crinkled percussive loops cut through by machine-gun kicks and acidic wobbles. Elsewhere, 'Vacuum Angle' takes Sheffield's Warp-ed legacy and brings it crashing into the future, with rhythms collapsing into static and noise but never deconstructing or losing the flow. 'Debouncing' meanwhile folds gliding square synths into rattling dancehall kicks, joining the dots between SND, Equiknoxx and Wiley with a neon Sharpie. "It's using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up," he says. "I'm still focused on making dance music for clubs, but how far can you push that before it's just no."

‘Evolve’ is the first full length album from composer, music producer and violinist Vito Gatto, a concept album that guides the listener on a one-way journey through the various phases of an imaginary evolutionary process. Gatto graduated in Violin from the Milan Conservatory of Music, his research starts from the unconventional application of a classical background into both making music in the studio, and live performances. For this work, Vito decided to put himself in a restricted composing and technical environment; all the arpeggiated sounds on the album are made from one single violin note that Vito sampled. He transforms the same note throughout the entire album, using the different treatment of this micro sample and the arpeggiator programming as the construction of a mutating and evolving structure. The album is Instinctively executed, almost improvised, and elements like distorted bass lines, hardcore inspired percussions, whistles and alienating string melodies represent unexpected alterations. Vito decided to keep these instinctive additions clean from excessive control as a representation of the beauty of the unpredictable. The album track list is an expression of evolutionary phases. From the minimalistic piano piece ‘Decomposition’ to ‘Quiete’ which expresses the state of calm after a shift has occurred, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Stasi’ represent a hazy trance like state. Vito challenges the listener to ask questions like ’am I in the right place? Is this who I set out to become? Do I have to keep evolving, or should I try to regress?’ ‘Evolve’ creates continuous connections between traditional and experimental music, creating dialogue between classical instruments and industrial techno, ambient, noise and de-constructed sounds. The Album will be released in both digital and vinyl formats via NeMu, a fresh new label founded by Vito Gatto himself. The label will focus on experimental projects based on the exchange between acoustic, concrete and electronic sources. The Artwork is part of ‘Jewels’, a series of ceramic sculptures by Benni Bosetto, courtesy of the artist and ADA Project, Rome

Following the first episode, Drivecom presents the second part of the Generative Operations series. It continues with the dark,

technical and minimal concept of music mixed toguether with contemporary, cinematic elements and experimental sounds and textures.

The vision and workflow keeps up the same vibe as with the first ep and you will find more synth lines involved into a generative structure from complex and massive modular patches. The sequencing is always different each time every track is being played back giving us a unique listening.

About the sound design all the tracks have a cinematic vibe as in the first 12”. Always looking for a situation where cinema meets electronic music as being planned as a film sound track. Also constructed from the point of view of a minimalistic vision, you’ll find long progressions and small details focused in electro rhythms as a basic and main structure.

In the other hand all the tracks have a common target: a cinematic vibe. As if they were composed thinking about to fit in any sci-fi thriller movie. Again we can hear massive granular sythesis pads, background noises, experimental compression routines that help to fullfill the Generative Operation series.

The limited edition vinyl has been pressed in 180gr. keeping up the analog character sound in this format, meanwhile the digital version will be a clearer and clinical one.

"Minor Planets completes a trilogy of cosmically themed electro-acoustic albums by UK and Berlin based trio Twinkle3, 15 years in the making. This third installment is once again all about the unique synergies the group discover in combining free group improvisation with studio and musique-concrete techniques. The group's combined love of everything from Lee Perry to Noh Theatre via Karlheinz Stockhausen and King Sunny Ade lead them to respond musically to create a single universe where they all coexist and interact. Aleatoric analogue sequencing, chamber-like acoustic improvisation and dub treatments become distilled into a distinct and emotive narrative that takes us on an exhilarating hyperspace cruise to the outer reaches.

Clive Bell is a virtuoso of the Shakuhachi. His aesthetic takes us on a timbral journey between noise and pitch, expressed and phrased rhythmically by the contour of human breath. This creates a perfect context and focus for a music that moves seamlessly between rhythm, suspension, time modulated analogue states, dissonance and melody. Richard Scott and David Ross share a background in acoustic free improvisation and have pioneered new approaches to rhythm using self-designed analogue systems. On Minor Planets these seemingly paradoxical orthodoxies cross-pollinate in a spirit of wonder and optimism to produce original and experimental music that is both life affirming and uplifting.

Album artwork by Benjmain Kilchhofer captures the feeling of peering through the vacuum of space and catching a rare glimpse of the mysterious alien biomes, fossils, and silhouettes cast by dwarf planets, asteroids, Kuiper belt, and other trans-Neptunian objects."

“Joe McPhee is a legend of modern music, which from the release of the classic "Nation Time" album almost 50 years ago has had an incredibly diverse career that's spanned a wide range of expressions, from jazz and improvised music to experimental and electronic free music. McPhee's life in music could basically be read as a map of leftfield music of our time, but after all these years he refuses to stand still or lock back with any sense of nostalgia.

After 30 years of making electronic music Lasse Marhaug is now synonymous with Norwegian noise music, with hundreds of releases and countless collaborations and projects to his name, including music for film, theatre and dance. In the last ten years he has also made a name as a producer for other artists, including Jenny Hval and Okkyung Lee.

McPhee and Marhaug has known each other since the early 2000s, but only in 2015 did they find time to record together as a duo. The result is "Harmonia Macrocosmica", an album that the two considers a science fiction inspired work. For McPhee it can be read in the linage of his 70s work with John Snyder, as well as collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and the Nihilist Spams Band. Marhaug of course is well versed in this field, but McPhee's sax and voice puts his electronics in a whole new perspective. The pair also found inspiration in early electronic music and vintage science fiction films, with McPhee describing going to the cinema in the 50s as a kid to see "Forbidden Planet" and being blown away by its electronic score as the start of a lifelong love of cosmic music.”

- 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL
- GATEFOLD SLEEVE
- ALBUM FEAT. SKRILLEX, EXCISION, DATSIK, NOISIA,
KILL THE NOISE, AND 12TH PLANET
- FIRST TIME ON VINYL
- LIMITED FIRST PRESSING OF 2.500 INDIVIDUALLY
NUMBERED COPIES ON COLOURED (SILVER AND
BLACK MIXED) VINYL

The Path of Totality is the tenth studio album by American nu metal band Korn. Originally released in 2011, the album finds Korn shifting gears and exploring new territory.

On The Path of Totality band collaborated with some of the leading dubstep and electronic producers in the world, including Skrillex, Excision, Datsik, Noisia, Kill the Noise, and 12th Planet. This resulted in something completely new, yet utterly and definitively Korn.

The title The Path of Totality refers to the fact that in order to see the sun in a full solar eclipse, you must be in the exact right place in the exact right time,' Korn frontman Jonathan Davis explained.

The album includes the singles Get Up!', Narcissistic Cannibal', Way Too Far' and Chaos Lives In Everything'.

The Path of Totality won Album of the Year at the 2012 Revolver Golden Gods Awards. This was Korn's first victory at the Golden Gods Awards, a ceremony that celebrates the best in hard rock and heavy metal music. Korn was also inducted into the Kerrang! Hall of Fame during the 2011 Kerrang! Awards.

Available on vinyl for the first time, the first 2500 individually numbered copies are pressed on coloured (silver and black mixed) vinyl! Strictly limited!

(Record Store Day 2020)

Mannequin Records is proud to celebrate 40th years of Nocturnal Emissions with more reissues setup for 2020.

"Tissue of Lies" is the Nocturnal Emissions first album, released on the band's own Sterile Records label as EMISS001 in 1980. "Tissue Of Lies"
shows you Nocturnal Emissions Industrial roots, from noisy collages to classic power noise, reminding the early Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, Faust ('Tapes' period) or Conrad Schitzler's 'Schwarz'.

The Nocturnal Emissions project, masterminded by Nigel Ayers, has been on the cutting edge of new music since the 1970s. Nigel Ayers has been described as a Guerrilla Sign Ontologist, cutting-up and pasting the contents of the human psyche. With a background in avant-garde art, his work has grown from audio visual installations through underground video works which changed the shape of British television.

In the early eighties Nocturnal Emissions hit London with a barrage of seminal funk; pioneering the use of sound samplers, multi-cultural
collage and electronic noise. They became a shape shifting chameleon lightening the darkness of post-industrial music, combining extremist performance art and video displays with apocalyptic beat music. Nocturnal Emissions have since been credited as a catalyst for a
generation or two of sound workers.

However, at the height of their success, the Emissions decided to shun the crass commercialism that had developed around them, and to develop their work as a secret alchemy. Nigel Ayers has continued to work with a strong underground of cult support, avoiding music industry fashions, and following his own creative path he concentrated on creating a strong sense of a wilderness identity through sound.

Limited edition of 600 copies, on solid white vinyl.

Hypnoskull is part of the global anti-music conspiracy networkTM (since 1992). Hypnoskull was created in 1992 as a solo project in order to experiment in the area of electronic noise combined with rhythmical structures. In the first years of its existence, Hypnoskull was releasing cassettes and tracks on international labels in the so-called cassette network, a widely spread network of independent and experimental musicians and artists who expressed themselves throughout limited tape releases often including artworks, ideas, texts. In 1998, hypnoskull signed to the German label ant-zen and up to today he is still releasing his albums on this highly influential record label. That is not a coincidence: ant-zen stands for ‘anti-zensur’ (anti-censorship), one of the main starting points of the provocative hypnoskull project. Patrick Stevens does not limit himself to just producing music as such, albums always include a severe message, a thought-provoking underlying concept text, questions. The main philosophy: ‘the dance floors, the clubs, the festivals,… are staged warzones with a different set of rules – a therapeutic zone where hidden anger and even aggression of both the artists as well as the spectators can be released in a proper, human way. Music as a means to open up the deepest anger inside human beings, letting it out in a way which is not harmful to others. A strange symbiosis between the two worlds Patrick Stevens is a part of: the techno and the industrial scene. Techno being a genre promoting a peaceful yet hedonistic way of life, industrial on the other hand being a highly nihilistic, philosophic but pitch black reflection on society. The mix of both musical as well as content wise elements of these genres result in what hypnoskull is all about. Added to this an explosive mixture of post-war and contemporary western subversive philosophy – in a rather impulsive manner – makes the project what it is today, after 30 years of existence.

clocolan is Emlyn Ellis Addison, a South African artist now living in Providence, Rhode Island. Exploring themes of ontology and psychedelia, his is a music of imaginary futures—of neglected hinterlands and unconquered vastness lost in the background noise of human endeavor.

Addison’s 2017 album, Nothing Left To Abandon, examined the experience of memory while his new album, It’s Not Too Early For Each Other, examines a more pressing experience: the ecosystemic collapse. clocolan dotes once more on dusty melancholy and electronic psychedelia in his new album, pressing into darker territory and more visceral textures.

It’s Not Too Early For Each Other examines the looming inevitability of a future shaped by mankind's destruction of natural ecosystems—and its seeming inability to alter that course. This music is dedicated to the pariahs: the messengers who confront the murder of the ecosystem.

Emlyn was introduced to Colin Morrison at Castles in Space by Strictly Kev AKA DJ Food. It's proving to be an incredibly fruitful collaboration and a third clocolan long player is already delivered and undergoing mastering for future release on Castles in Space.

The Danish label/imprint arbitrary announces the release of Framework 3 (arbitrary11) by Mads Emil Nielsen. Framework 3 is the latest instalment in Nielsen’s sequence of graphic scores and recordings. The series includes the Danish composer’s own subjective translations of visual materials and sound pieces accompanied by visual notations.

On this release he collaborates with Katja Gretzinger and Nicola Ratti. Published as a limited edition art print folder, Framework 3 consists of risographed scores and recordings on 10” vinyl and CD – with recordings by Nielsen, along with graphic scores by Gretzinger and contributions by Ratti.

Raised in a family of architects Nielsen has for several years been occupied with the question of “how do you intuitively sonify an image?” along with the complementary processes of translating sounds and music into illustrations and scores. In early 2019, he produced various drawings and sound pieces which formed the starting point for the three tracks on this 10” vinyl EP. The audio is derived from synthesizer recordings and basic electronic sound sources (sine waves, feedback, noise) and percussive loops combined with recordings made in the studios at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm).

The audio material was translated by graphic designer Katja Gretzinger into a series of visual notations made while listening to the music. Gretzinger developed various symbols, forms and structures, such as points, bars, 3D balls, irregular patterns / “swarms” and regular patterns (vertical hatchings). These were combined with found image materials and cut-outs from old prints and layered with large geometric forms, which define the individual character of each of the three parts. The resulting 18-page graphic score is included in the release in the form of risograph printed sheets.

Nielsen then invited musician Nicola Ratti, who is also trained as an architect, to create sonic re-interpretations of the graphic score. Ratti reinterpreted the imagery as a selection of sound elements positioned in a three-dimensional area; which he visualized as the space between the composer / artist, Ratti himself and the loudspeakers. These recordings are included on the CD.

1, 2, 3 written & produced by Mads Emil Nielsen, Copenhagen / Berlin, 2019 / 2020 (reworked and combined with a live recording from Standards, Milan, September 2019). Recording by + thanks to URSSS. CD: 1, 2, 3 written & produced by Nicola Ratti, Milan, 2020.
Scores by Katja Gretzinger. Artwork/design (packaging, discs, text) by Mads Emil Nielsen.

Lamunai Records presents Curiouser and Curiouser, a treasure trove of millennial music era from a duo pop group called Santamonica from Jakarta, Indonesia.

The concept of this album is making music from a trip to the adventures of Alice In Wonderland, an eclectic mix of pop, bossanova, electronics, waltz and shoegaze. From Astrud Gilberto and Antonio Jobim, Pizzicato Five meets My Bloody Valentine or Stereolab's 60s sensitivity to Broadcast. A collection of multi-layered analog audio sets, the noise of Joseph Iyup's noisy guitar combined with Anindita's fairy voice melodious lines of strange lyrics wrapped in curling beats, very dynamic, very rich. Listening to the album, on several tracks, we can hear French Pop's acrobatic 5/4 beats until the roar of the wall of
sound becomes a combination that is difficult to imagine at the time and is still very relevant to listen to now.

Now, for the first time ever, one of the phenomenal albums of the 2000's Indonesia wave is now available in a limited format in 2xLP-Gatefold-Marble colors vinyl with an additional 1 song that has never been released before.

Recumbent Speech, Ezra Feinberg’s second album, opens with a lament. Named for the Robert Frost poem, “Acquainted with the Night” was written during one of the many devastating spectacles of injustice under our current regime. Repeating flutes and synths beam out of a low-end darkness, reflecting a collective sense of loss and alienation. Rising slowly, thickening with guitars and strings, “Acquainted with the Night” lifts off, and so too does the album from there. The second track, “Letter to my Mind,'' features the dynamic interplay of Feinberg's guitar with the loose and playful drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, both pushing and pulling atop a looping bass figure. "Palms Up" begins with a lockstep pulse recalling early Terry Riley before jumping into an Ashra-like jam with Afrobeat accents. Side B opens with "Ovation," a tryptic with McEntire on drums which sets a wide lens onto a sweeping landscape, with soaring flutes, wordless vocals, and a hypnotic bassline played on a humming fretless that recalls classic ECM jazz-fusion. The piece plunges into an ambient, interior space before reemerging with a guitar solo fried through an old Space Echo effects processor, conjuring lidded Pompeii-era Pink Floyd. The album's title-track finale, "Recumbent Speech," features the magical pedal steel of Chuck Johnson. Unwinding atop a Balearic analog synth pattern, Feinberg stretches textures of Fender Rhodes and acoustic guitar around Johnson’s lyrical steel, with nods to Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura, as well as Cluster & Eno. Recumbent Speech refers to the possibilities, pleasures, fears, and fantasies that occur the moment the noise dies down, when we are recumbent, in repose but still awake, still speaking, and still aware of ourselves as part of the maddening world. Ezra Feinberg is a guitarist, composer, and psychoanalyst living in Jackson Heights, NY. Feinberg was the founding member of the San Francisco psychedelic rock collective Citay, releasing albums on Important Records and Dead Oceans throughout the 2000s. After relocating to NYC, he issued his first solo record, Pentimento and Others, on his imprint Related States and on cassette on Stimulus Progression in 2018. The release, his first since Citay folded in 2012, earned praise from numerous music outlets including Paste Magazine, The Wire, Stereogum, Vice, and Aquarium Drunkard. In recent years, Feinberg has performed and toured near and far with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Steve Gunn, Alexander Turnquist, Cruel Diagonals, Daniel Carter, Jonas Reinhardt, Christopher Tignor, Kath Bloom, Robbie Lee, High Aura’d, Glasser, Ava Mendoza, Buck Curran, Real Estate, and many others, and has ongoing studio collaborations with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Arp, contributing both guitar and songwriting to the last Arp album Zebra.

7"
(This is...) one of Sascha Müller's weirdest, most experimental musical ideas brought to life as a limited, hand-numbered edition of 100 gold vinyl 7"es. Following the concept of recording crackling run-out grooves from various classic Pop albums and glueing them together into one crackly mess of a megamix this one is a collectors novelty piece for those searching for the most extreme, unusual vinyl releases they can get hold of. Expect looped crackles, pops, surface noise and all the good stuff related to listening to vinyl on a regular but do not expect any kind of structure or user friendly listening experience at all. This is for the die-hard collectors and vinyl freaks only.

‘Life Guarding’ offers a first glance into an upcoming album by Wolfgang Tillmans. The song finds Tillmans in open waters, lyrically exploring wor(l)ds as they appear like undertows and tie in the listeners by his candid approach to accept whatever the drift throws at him and leaving him exposed at his most vulnerable. It seems no coincidence that the video Tillmans’ shot and directed for the song finds a similar approach to ‘liquidity’ in visual language. Shifting the lens between micro and macrocosms, collages of body parts, fruit and insects, we find him equally paying attention to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean as well as to the ’same’ water in the form of drops, evaporating on a hot kitchen plate. This current shape of ‘Life Guarding’, in equal measures upbeat and melancholic, emerged in sessions with Tillmans’ long term musical collaborators Tim Knapp and Jay Pluck in early 2019 at Trixx Studios in Berlin, that were further developed and produced by Tim Knapp and Bruno Breitzke. ‘Growing’ was originally part of Wolfgang Tillmans’ sound, light and video installation ‘South Tank’ at Tate Modern in 2017. This summer finally sees the independent release of this collaboration with the L.A.-based duo Wreck and Reference. The song also features excerpts of Fred Weyrich’s lyrics for German singer Alexandra’s 1968 hit ‘Sehnsucht’ (Longing). ‘Growing’ involved the band placing samples of Tillmans’ singing and spoken word over a kick drum-driven techno track made with synthesizers, acoustic drum recordings converted to digital drums, and noisy samples of jangling keys. ‘Wreck and Reference’ are an experimental music project from California by Felix Skinner and Ignat Frege. Drawing upon the blown-out intensity of black metal and noise rock, they eschew traditional guitar-centric instrumentation to construct songs with digital samples, drums, and voice. To date, the band has released four EPs and four full-length albums, and has contributed to the producti

The first notes of Relapse’s “Underground Rave Hits for a Shuttered Club” are obscured with abrasive noise. For this Pinecone Moonshine album, the Bristol based musician known for drum and bass drew from many influences. Melodies and harmonies suggest ideas from extreme metal, blues, folk, and unique medieval, ritual notations. The album ranges from slower tempos like the funky 100 bpm “Curse, or a Swan” up to the 200 bpm breakcore “Hitroll Beat Heart.”

Four years after launching his last EP, Lugo-based artist, Synth Alien, makes a comeback to lead the fourth release of Noise To Meet You. Six Electro tracks, under the wings of a 100% hardware set up that has allowed his sound to reach a step up.

In recent years, the Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. Since her first recordings that were published by Root Strata and Students of Decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. Once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. That compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album Coda.

It’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but Ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. Just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. This subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of Coda.

Her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of Grouper, Felicia Atkinson, and Harold Budd. Mastered by James Plotkin.

Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick ‘getragen’ – without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term’s semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of “expansive, deep, quiet and sombre.” And yet, ‘getragen’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried – two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him. Does Masayoshi’s own definition, however, apply to ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’? Only to a limited extent. Compared to previous Faitiche releases, ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’ is certainly the most ‘getragen’ of them all. Nevertheless, this is by far not the first association that comes to mind. From a distance, these tracks seem rather introspective, cautious even – and reflect the recording situation: deliberately pared down, reduced to a single microphone in space and a separate track for all other instruments, each movement and action is chronicled by the treacherous mike. This confronted me with some unexpected and unfamiliar problems. For example, we had to swap out the seating in the studio as my favoured chair had a characteristic creak. Other, external influences were proved our control: fire engine klaxons, street noise and footfall became part of the recordings and their improvisatory nature. Each movement required careful orchestration, fully aware of its irrevocable nature. Space itself was always present and an audible entity, except on ‘Stripped to RM’ (recorded without a microphone or vibraphone track). After extensive deliberations, we decided to forgo the vibes on this piece – a very similar version had already been released in 2008 (on the compilation ‘Enjoy The Silence’, Mule Electronic, 2008). Jan Jelinek, February 2010

The Oystercatcher is the first collaborative LP from Cucina Povera (Maria Rossi) and ELS (Edward Simpson)

Recorded in London over two days, hours' worth of improvisations have been edited down to form these six tracks.

A fragile interplay is at work between Maria's drifting vocals and the ominous churn of Edward's modular synth. Each sonic element takes a turn at leading the way.

The opening track 'Mantle' is formed from sparse, monolithic electronics, woven gently with a thread of vocals. In the closing track 'Eon' Maria's voice shepherds spontaneous bursts of sounds, almost Rave-like if order were imposed, through 15 minutes of turmoil and resplendent until the end.

Maria's vocals make their own trails amongst the noise, bringing to mind the the exploratory language from Ursula K. Le Guin's album 'Music and Poetry from the Kesh', recalling the same understated mystery.

The overall effect of this collaboration is a completely unique creation albeit within a recognisable lineage of predecessors.

The artwork reflects the vision of these two artists, collaged together. Both images are from a trip to Helsinki. Edward's photograph of Tulips caught after dark are reviled by a flash. Maria's seemingly abstract drawing is a graphite rubbing taken from a granite slab of a pavement somewhere in Kallio. Together the two images represent two different methods for capturing a city's haptic landscape.

The album moves with a feeling of transience, which is no surprise given that the idea to collaborate was formed in Helsinki, realised in London and edited together in Rotterdam.

The Oystercatcher tells a fragile tale, one that spins out into the unknown. A cold union of voice and machine, still tentative and probing, learning to co-exist. A kind of fundamental shift whereby shared moments have been turned to sound.

The Oystercatcher is a bird that can freely travel between the earth, sea and sky. The motif is taken from a Tove Jansson short story. A dead bird washes ashore, two different versions of events are presented to how the bird came to die. The album feels like two different stories being presented on top of one another but ultimately coming to the same tragic conclusion.

Cucina Povera is Maria Rossi - Vocals
ELS is Edward Simpson - Synthesisers
Recorded in London across two days during the Summer of 2019
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick 'getragen' - without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term's semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of "expansive, deep, quiet and sombre." And yet, 'getragen' leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried - two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him. Does Masayoshi's own definition, however, apply to 'Bird, Lake, Objects'? Only to a limited extent. Compared to previous Faitiche releases, 'Bird, Lake, Objects' is certainly the most 'getragen' of them all. Nevertheless, this is by far not the first association that comes to mind. From a distance, these tracks seem rather introspective, cautious even - and reflect the recording situation: deliberately pared down, reduced to a single microphone in space and a separate track for all other instruments, each movement and action is chronicled by the treacherous mike. This confronted me with some unexpected and unfamiliar problems. For example, we had to swap out the seating in the studio as my favoured chair had a characteristic creak. Other, external influences were proved our control: fire engine klaxons, street noise and footfall became part of the recordings and their improvisatory nature. Each movement required careful orchestration, fully aware of its irrevocable nature. Space itself was always present and an audible entity, except on 'Stripped to RM' (recorded without a microphone or vibraphone track). After extensive deliberations, we decided to forgo the vibes on this piece - a very similar version had already been released in 2008 (on the compilation 'Enjoy The Silence', Mule Electronic, 2008). Jan Jelinek, February 2010

Belgian techno wizard Cri Du Coeur is back with a new 2-part vinyl release on his label Arkham Audio titled 'Erickson' & 'Erickson on Acid', which features remixes exclusively from French artists. Jerome D., the man behind the Cri Du Coeur alias, is prized in the industry for giving platforms to Belgian and French artists throughout his career, so it comes as no surprise that he is showing his francophile roots by having a solely French lineup for the remixes on this release. Following the recent release of his EPs 'Diaphragm' and 'Warning', and now bringing us the inebriating 'Erickson' & 'Erickson on Acid', Cri Du Coeur has established that his new alias and freshly-founded but tenacious Arkham Audio label are a force to be reckoned with. The entrancing yet adrenalizing sound that he has adopted shows that his approach to industrial electronic music knows no boundaries or compromises.

The first part of this release features the original mix of 'Erickson' by Cri Du Coeur and remixes of the track by Electric Rescue, Wex 10 , and Trunkline. The second part 'Erickson on Acid' puts a squelching acid twist on things and features remixes by Roman Poncet, Umwelt, and Zadig.

The original mix of 'Erickson' leads with a strong beat and a mixture of industrial sounds that makes for a sublime dark dancefloor track. Electric Rescue follows on with a remix that engages the listener with a terrorising yet intoxicating heavy baseline. Next up is Wex 10 who enchants us with a bouncy laserbeam rhythm and muffled looping vocals. Last but not least on the 'Erickson' lineup is Trunkline's remix which delivers an addictive hazy melody and a deep and dirty mechanical synth horn.

Cri Du Coeur plays with tensions in 'Erickson (on Acid)', putting the listener into a state of hypnosis with squelching sounds that give the song a raunchy character. We are implored to dance as Roman Poncet's remix bears layers of lively percussion beats with twangy synth melodies. The mood intensifies once more as Umwelt's remix features a dark and fuzzy baseline that contrasts with a screeching siren sound creating an ultimate thrilling experience for the listener. Zadig closes off this immense concoction of remixes with a relentless distorted base and scintillating machinelike background noises.

Cri Du Coeur has outdone himself by bringing together such a well-suited selection of artists to create a visceral and magnetizing collection of tracks that showcases his competence in making industrial techno.

Belgian techno wizard Cri Du Coeur is back with a new 2-part vinyl release on his label Arkham Audio titled 'Erickson' & 'Erickson on Acid', which features remixes exclusively from French artists. Jerome D., the man behind the Cri Du Coeur alias, is prized in the industry for giving platforms to Belgian and French artists throughout his career, so it comes as no surprise that he is showing his francophile roots by having a solely French lineup for the remixes on this release. Following the recent release of his EPs 'Diaphragm' and 'Warning', and now bringing us the inebriating 'Erickson' & 'Erickson on Acid', Cri Du Coeur has established that his new alias and freshly-founded but tenacious Arkham Audio label are a force to be reckoned with. The entrancing yet adrenalizing sound that he has adopted shows that his approach to industrial electronic music knows no boundaries or compromises.

The first part of this release features the original mix of 'Erickson' by Cri Du Coeur and remixes of the track by Electric Rescue, Wex 10 , and Trunkline. The second part 'Erickson on Acid' puts a squelching acid twist on things and features remixes by Roman Poncet, Umwelt, and Zadig.

The original mix of 'Erickson' leads with a strong beat and a mixture of industrial sounds that makes for a sublime dark dancefloor track. Electric Rescue follows on with a remix that engages the listener with a terrorising yet intoxicating heavy baseline. Next up is Wex 10 who enchants us with a bouncy laserbeam rhythm and muffled looping vocals. Last but not least on the 'Erickson' lineup is Trunkline's remix which delivers an addictive hazy melody and a deep and dirty mechanical synth horn.

Cri Du Coeur plays with tensions in 'Erickson (on Acid)', putting the listener into a state of hypnosis with squelching sounds that give the song a raunchy character. We are implored to dance as Roman Poncet's remix bears layers of lively percussion beats with twangy synth melodies. The mood intensifies once more as Umwelt's remix features a dark and fuzzy baseline that contrasts with a screeching siren sound creating an ultimate thrilling experience for the listener. Zadig closes off this immense concoction of remixes with a relentless distorted base and scintillating machinelike background noises.

Cri Du Coeur has outdone himself by bringing together such a well-suited selection of artists to create a visceral and magnetizing collection of tracks that showcases his competence in making industrial techno

After the success of the 2 Late 4 Love EP, Roy Of The Ravers returns to Emotional Response with a double LP with a deeper perspective, experimenting in ambient and drone textures, lucid techno travails and acid interludes.

Recorded between 1997 and 2017, the album was pieced together over the last six months after Roy's archives were first feared lost and then found. Approached by the label to release a follow up with something more introspective and personal, it was discovered that a recent move to a new studio had led to over 20 years of music being misplaced after it was believed they were mistakenly dropped at a local charity store. However, deep in a box of what were thought to be patch cables were in fact the decades worth of hard drives and here presented, is a sample of those lost recordings.

The nature of the music is introspection, eschewing the acid beats and white noise for a personal encounter between man and machine. The orchestral opening of the title track gives way to the submarine beats, pulsing TB303 and gliding hats of Robinson College 10 to set the outlook to come. Even with the scattering A Dim And Distant Past waking lulled senses, the melodies and feel all lead to a pause and reflect rather than jump and shout.

This is continued with the haunting drives of Bounce Erec and Oriental X0X-Press; the twisted, warped jams of The Weber Traum Boat Pt.3, Ichi and Roland Corp Labs 05; and the beautiful, heartfelt odes in Sade Lost Theme, The Clock House Pt.2 and closer, Nemesis '01. The album's melodic nature hums and shines as CS (6x8) appears as much a centre piece as a alternative consideration to the acid tinged, club bangs of Roy's releases to date.
A surprise package maybe, but in the rolling, word of mouth phenomena that was Emotinium II, all this and more was sensed and so White Sunrise Music II, spreading across 12 songs of contrasting moods, is a further affirmation that there is something good and worthy of exploration.

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.

While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (The Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.

Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

Night Gaunt Recordings is pleased to announce “Ambitions of Guilt”, the newest offering from Brighton, UK based producer L/F/D/M. L/F/D/M is Richard Smith who first emerged in 2013 and has been steadily cranking out the hits ever since. Following his stellar release on Cititrax titled “Dream Bleeds”, Richard Smith is back with a new batch of misshapen heaters. A master of blending fucked up rhythms with chiseled body music that’s both danceable yet also makes you question humanity. Every track crafted to hit deep in the bowels of any warehouse, “Ambitions of Guilt” seeps with acid, techno, noise, and anything in between. With sleazy dance hitters that bring to mind midwest acid/techno, such as Gene Hunt, and also taking from British and Japanese industrialists by the likes early Richard H. Kirk and Sympathy Nervous, Smith creates a feeling that’s both familiar yet still wildly unnerving. L/F/D/M consistently seems to know how to explore emotions in this sphere of cold, repetitive machines, creating an exciting soundtrack to a contorted world.

Futuro de Hierro, hailing from Barcelona, is the project by one of the Màgia Roja label/club/community collaborators… mostly known for this work with Dame Area but his solo project Futuro de Hierro is equally (or more?) interesting… the loud repetitive broken beats, noises and powerful delivered Spanish vocals make up for a punk influenced industrial techno sound which borders rhythmic noise at times… like something in between Liaisons Dangereuses, Esplendor Geométrico and Sonar…

This is an uncompromising EP filled with harsh tracks that still work for the dance floor… especially for those fed up with hearing the same beat over and over and over again…

Produziert und aufgenommen von Arca, definiert KiCk i eine neue Ära in der Multiplex-Welt der venezolanischen Künstlerin, Sängerin, DJ, Performerin und Komponistin. Mit Björk, Rosalía, Shygirl und SOPHIE hat Arca zum ersten Mal Kollaborateure in ihre Welt eingeladen. Zuvor produzierte sie für Björk, Kayne West und FKA twigs, komponierte Musik für das MoMA, erschuf gewaltige Noise-Skulpturen oder legte bei Festivals als DJ auf. Mit KiCk i wird nicht nur die Freude gefeiert, die Arca in ihrem Leben finden konnte, sondern auch der manchmal beschwerliche Weg, den sie dafür zurücklegen musste. Ihre Bemühungen, ihr venezolanisches Erbe und ihre trans-lateinamerikanische Identität zu versöhnen, entpuppen sich als Reggaetón und spanischem Pop. Aber KiCk i ist nicht nur eine Pop-Platte oder eine experimentelle Platte, oder auch nur eine Mischung aus beiden, sondern alles auf einmal - und noch so viel mehr. Je nachdem, wo man die Nadel aufsetzt, findet man Bubblegum, raue Geräusche, elektronische Psychedelia, Balladen, Knaller, Gelächter, Tränen, Leidenschaft und Glaubensäußerungen - Klänge und Ideen, die nicht einfach miteinander verschmelzen, sondern gleichzeitig in einer Quantenüberlagerung koexistieren. "Ich möchte nicht an ein Genre gebunden sein", erklärt Arca. "Ich will nicht als eine Sache abgestempelt werden." Wo sie jetzt ist, endet das Nicht-Binärsein nicht mit ihrer geschlechtlichen Identität. Es ist zu einer Denkweise geworden, bei der keine eine Sache nur eine Sache sein muss, bei der mehrere Bedeutungen, mehrere Realitäten in überlagertem Gleichgewicht koexistieren können. In diesem Raum zwischen den Staaten, in dem das eine Ding das andere ist, hat Arca ein riesiges Feld unerschlossener kreativer Kraft entdeckt.

Cascade Symmetry is the culmination of an intense and transformative year-long period. It is an ode to new beginnings and the disintegration of the past.

Recorded and mixed September - October 2017 in San Jose, CA; additional recordings and field recordings taken September 2017 in South Korea.

Gear used: Eurorack modular synthesizer (Mutable Instruments, Make Noise, Orthogonal Devices, Intellijel, TipTop, Ladik, Malekko Heavy Industry, Mannequins, Qu-Bit Electronix, Doepfer), Novation Peak, Korg Electribe 2, Elektron Analog Heat, Strymon El Capistan, Hosa Technology Cables

Initially released on tape and digital through the artist on November 6, 2017.

Kidbug is a love story, one which emerged through a fateful connection when Netherlands-based Marina Tadic (Eerie Wanda) and Australian transplant Adam Harding (Dumb Numbers) met at Joyful Noise Recordings' annual holiday gathering. After enlisting their friends Thor Harris (Swans), Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), and Dale Crover (Melvins), Kidbug emerges fully-formed to present their self-titled debut, 11 songs of beautiful, fuzzed out shoegaze dream pop. Recommended If You Like: My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Breeders, Pixies, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, and/or, Eerie Wanda, Dumb Numbers.

Finland’s Luke Lund is one of the most inspiring modern dub aesthetes. Using odd number time signatures, warped bottom end, and proper experimental murk, HOPIUM creates fiendishly innovative electronic groove and atmosphere. Existing in a far away land tucked north of techno, dub, and noise where all blend and connect, HOPIUM is a wise encoding of fear, frustration, anxiety, and false hope. Luke Lund’s sound is unquestionable sincerity of exploration, equally inspired by Finnish electronic masters such as Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisäinen, as well the legends Justin K Broadrick and Mick Harris – as such, absolutely at home on our label. Releasing on labels such as Youth, Co-Depedent, Totes Format, as well his own encyclopedic Terranean Recordings, Luke’s catalog of work continues to expand as does his global profile – assisted by touring Europe and playing at venues from Berlin to London to Helsinki. All tracks produced and recorded at Solace, April 2018 – June 2019. Mastered by Daniele Antezza at Dadub Mastering Studio. Design by Luke Lund. Executive producer Kurt Gluck.

The globe-trotting Robert Millis returns to Helen Scarsdale for this beautifully fragile album of dissolved glass rendered as a collage of recontextualized minimalism. To astute listeners, Millis should be a household name due to his work in the unpredictably diverse Climax Golden Twins as well as his impeccable curations for Sublime Frequencies (collections include the Deben Bhattacharya: Men and Music on the Desert Road and Indian Talking Machine books). Hie previous solo work include Relief (released here on The Helen Scarsdale Agency in 2013) and The Lonesome High for the Sun City Girls’ Abduction Records in 2016. His scholarship into the hidden corners of music across the world has also earned him Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships.

Related Ephemera is an album composed mostly from the hiss, the crackle, the surface noise of 78rpm shellacs and wax cylinders. “Horrifying,” Millis explains “is the concept to record collectors that vinyl degrades and can be easily damaged. however, initially records were considered ephemeral, especially 78rpm records. They were novelties. Fleeting. Entertainment.” Millis intends for the album to be a feedback loop whereby the patina of handling, playing, living with the record will circle back to the original source material. Furthering that metaphor, Millis amplifies and dilates feedback tones generated from his collection of vintage gramophones.

That said, Millis does cite the intrusion of exactly one field recording, a broken toy, and a few notes from a cello. But the construction of these rarified tones, crispy textures, ghostly rattles, and fluid resonance that ripples through all of Related Ephemera has its origins in the tactile nature of the vinyl medium. It’s hardly the stuff of sentimental nostalgia though. Related Ephemera is more an act of time travel, slipping backwards and forwards with the scratch of a needle (Watch out! What pre-recorded needle jump sound is not your turntable going haywire!). The emotional core to the album is that of a resigned melancholy, almost Bergman-esque in its starkness but not without a brief moment of dark humor.

Here is an album that aligns itself aesthetically with Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith, Philip Jeck’s more languid collages, and even some of Harry Bertoia’s sculptural atmospherics.

The vinyl was mastered and cut by Helmut Ehler at D&M Berlin, whose expertise was necessary given that part of the original compositions from Millis’ reworked surface noise were exceedingly problematic to cut. The D&M cut does temper the composition into a mysterious, diaphanous cloud; where the digital-only mastering provides a cascade of insects gnawing within your inner ear. Two facets. One piece of music.

The Humans were Toyah, her musical director Chris Wong and multi-instrumentalist the late Bill Rieflin (drummer for King Crimson and latter-day REM, as well as Ministry, the Revolting Cocks, Lard, KMFDM, Pigface, Swans, Chris Connelly, and Nine Inch Nails). Originally released in 2009 and issued on vinyl for the first time, this first album features “Noise In Your Head”, “Quicksilver” and “Is It Wrong”.

The Humans were Toyah, her musical director Chris Wong and multi-instrumentalist the late Bill Rieflin (drummer for King Crimson and latter-day REM, as well as Ministry, the Revolting Cocks, Lard, KMFDM, Pigface, Swans, Chris Connelly, and Nine Inch Nails).
Recorded in 2010 at London’s Scala theatre, and issued in its entirety for the first time, the concert features Guest Human throughout, Robert Fripp. The set list includes Humans favourites “Labyrinth”, “Sugar Rush” and “Demigod”, as well the two encore tunes, covers
of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”.

Belgian psychedelic jazz collective Compro Oro are pleased to announce a new collaboration with Murat Ertel, co-founder and frontman of Istanbul's cult psychedelic folk band BaBa ZuLa and his singer partner Esma Ertel. Entitled 'Simurg', the album is set for release on the 19th June via Sdban Ultra and follows Compro Oro's critically acclaimed sophomore album 'Suburban Exotica', released last year.

Compro Oro's introduction to Turkish psychedelics came off the back of a live performance between guitarist Bart Vervaeck and Murat Ertel at Istanbul Express in 2016. Connecting both musically and spiritually, they headed into the studio and under the watchful eye of producer and multi-instrumentalist Dijf Sanders, Compro Oro and Murat recorded several tracks during an intense recording session that would make up 'Simurg'. "The new music is entirely based on improvisation. In contrast to 'Suburban Exotica', which is built more from song structures and where there was more overdubs," explains frontman Wim Segers.

The story of Simurg is a story of attraction, existential research, purification and rebirth. In a mysterious search for fulfilment, millions of birds embark on a journey, crossing several valleys, each representing a human characteristic. While some yield to the attractions of love, ego or grow ignorant and faithless, others remain curious and continue their expedition. Slowly but surely this murmuration of birds thins out and a selection of 30 birds reach Mountain Kaf and the nest of the Simurg. There and then they become one, they are reborn and reincarnated in an almighty and omniscient phoenix.

The strength of Simurg as a result of its power to resurrect from its own ashes reflects the resilience of every human being. We all have the power to strengthen and improve ourselves, not in the least in our contact with others, and this is exactly what this project is about: a spontaneous dialogue, a quest for new musical horizons, a gathering of liberal spirits to reach for the unknown. From the Anatolian rhythms and reverb-smothered funk rock of 'Ben', to the mystical atmospherics of 'Ignorance Is Bliss (Valley Of Ignorance)' and the dark, dub-infused grooves of 'Valley Of Disbelief', 'Simurg' is an allegory about the noise that you can create as a person.

Multidisciplinary NYC artist Gavilán Rayna Russom launches her own label Voluminous Arts, dedicated to highlight electronic and experimental artists whose work challenges fixed categories of genre and categorization. Her aim is to create a platform for multidisciplinary work and events. The inaugural release being her second solo album as Gavilán Rayna Russom 'Secret Passage', following up last years 'The Envoy, an homage to the East Side Rail Tunnel in Providence, Rhode Island, and the friendships she made there.

In Rayna’s words:
“I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1970’s and 80’s. The booming jewelry and textile industries of the previous decades had pulled out by that point. The Italian mob ran most details of the day to day operations of the city. As kids coming up in that environment, before the internet, me and the people I hung out with didn’t know anything else and we worked with what we had to entertain ourselves. We found places that had been forgotten by market interests and made them spaces of creative community building. One of the most special of these places was the East Side Rail Tunnel. Running for almost exactly one mile beneath the city’s streets, the tunnel and nearby Crook Point Bridge were unsupervised autonomous zones where I tasted the possibilities of a world without surveilance. The tunnel was particularly important in my creative development because not only was it a marginal zone apart from monetized spaces of creative consumption, but it also had specific experiential properties. It had a bend in it which meant that when you got to the middle of it you were in complete darkness, and I learned quickly that when you spend enough time in complete darkness you start to hallucinate, which I liked. The acoustics were also remarkable; long natural delays and harmonic-reinforcing reverberances. Making any sound in there added layers of acoustic effects which made noises physical and fluid and, combined with the complete darkness, absolutely dissolved boundaries between internal and external experience. I started hanging out there when I was 14 and continued to return there regularly until development, gentrification and policing eventually made it inaccessible. By the mid ‘90s it was sealed off with progressively more impenetrable barriers. Nowadays it looks very different. This music is about some of the significant experiences I had in this beautifully neglected place and the people I had them with.”

ALTER presents a remastered edition of Cremation Lily’s second album, on vinyl for the first time. Recorded whilst living in Hastings and originally released as a double cassette on his Strange Rules label in 2017, The Processes… forms a trilogy of albums in the CL canon that were influenced by the life and atmospheres within British coastal towns. Composed using a rudimentary set-up of synth, drum machine and two modified walkmans, CL draws upon a broad range of influences from the underground electronic music spectrum. Noise, tape music and ambient techno are all referenced and align to form a cohesive collection of tracks, flowing fluidly in sequence. Melancholic synth pads and deep kick drums intersect with crude field recordings and occasional bursts of feedback, evoking a claustrophobic uncertainty that feels more like being pulled under than carried above.

Features additional piano and violin by Theodore Cale Schafer.
Remastered by John Hannon.

»Efia,« the sophomore album by Rosaceae, picks up where the Hamburg-based sound artist’s 2019 debut on Neoprimitive left off, further exploring the topics that had already informed »Nadia’s Es- cape«. From its confrontative front cover to the eight tracks on the album, »Efia« is fully dedicated to the motif of resistance, but does not exhaust itself in polemics. Rather, it masterfully translates the complexities of its underlying central themes into a visceral narrative.
»Efia« was originally conceived as a commissioned work for the 2019 edition of Hamburg’s Noise- xistance festival and departed from a sentence uttered in the British 1980s TV show »Sapphire & Steel« which inspired cultural theorist Mark Fisher in his analysis of what he had coined »hauntolo-gy,« a term originally coined by the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s: »There is no time here, not anymore.«
The album again showcases Rosaceae’s knack for combining abstract experimental sound art with a form of storytelling that had already been at the centre of »Nadia’s Escape« and which relies on both verbal and musical means of giving a voice to the voiceless. The disembodied voice of - amongst others - Jesseline Preach and manipulated vocal samples blend in with dense soundscapes, elements of Neue Musik and occasional pure harsh noise. It’s a mix that deliberately puts different artistic tradi-tions into a dialogue with each other: the hallmarks of European salon culture are con- fronted with Kurdish wedding music and the unnerving loop of someone demanding a »Zugabe« (»encore«).
Thus, »Efia« not only blurs the lines between cultural and regional traditions, but also conjures up the ghosts of a past, ghosts that are more than ready to haunt the timeless present trying so hard to repress the atrocities happening at its fringes. As a whole, this makes »Efia« both a chilling work of sound art and a vibrant political statement fuelled by burning hot energy.

Emotional Rescue is proud to reissue a collection of global music band, International Noise Orchestra, presented across 4 special EPs.

Founded when Berlin based musician Ulrich Hornberg mixed a newly acquired Commodore 64 with visiting Algerian drummer Jol Allouche's tablas "old culture meets new technology" the fundamentals were laid. Simple, maybe naive, with a curiosity to combine and inspire. 'The means of production must belong to the workers', investing in a studio, label and publishing house allowed INO the adventure to record what they wanted, a project via 'gastes', taking their influences and culture, in a melting pot of eastern melodies, african percussion, jazz, soul, dub, and pop an orchestra not of size, but of different playing styles and idiosyncratic interpretations.

Old meets new starts with their cover of Gimme Your Lovin, taking Winwood's classic and molding a white funk, pop, rock, dance hybrid, with enigmatic actor / singer Richard Strange's distinctive poetic delivery. Following Dr. Sarmaz, released under INO's alias - Internationales Gerauschorchester - the global dance vibrations begin.

Feel It Flow is pure 80's dance pop, with Glynnis Thomas (Savage Progress) distinctive tones leading to the jazz fusion of Atai, before closing with the guitar / synth / tabla rhythms of Culture Rescue Service.

Michal Jablonski strikes back on Binary Cells. Almost two years have passed since his last appearance and his banging remix of Casual Treatment's - 99 Reasons. This time the Warsaw based producer is back with his unique touch and we gladly present "Higgs", a flawless stomper 12".

A1 "Rain" is the intro track with a cinematic movie thriller approach driving us in a cold an uncertain atmosphere leading to "Higgs", a post-apocalyptic atmosphere gem combining mesmerizing and mechanic cuts clearly designed for dancefloors. The third gem of this side is "Fragile", an obscure story full of dark energies and shrill noises, transporting the audience into an obscure journey.

VSK and Kwartz decided to join their forces, showing their finest cuts on the B-side "Higgs" has been totally reinterpreted by VSK in a UK approach making it a stomping and flammable gem. Kwartz also added his vision to "Fragile", transforming it in a pure dark ritual.

Theresa Stroetges has and always will be a traveler. Under the name Golden Diskó Ship or as a member of bands like Soft Grid or the improv collective Epiphany Now!, the Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist has continuously been moving through the fringes of experimental music, but also extensively explored the possibilities of tried and tested formulas - whether folk, rock, techno or pop. With her fourth solo album, her first for the Karaoke Kalk label, the Golden Diskó Ship is yet again venturing into unknown territory. »Araceae« is inspired by environmental changes and the eerie feelings that arise when faced with natural beauty - when everything seems perfect on the surface but something feels off underneath it all. As a whole, it is notably more focused on electronic grooves that provide the foundation for Stroetges’s poetic long-form storytelling.

Partially conceived during a residency in India, »Araceae« is the first Golden Diskó Ship record to feature two guest musicians. For »Wildly Floral, Slightly Damp,« Stroetges collaborated with percussionist Dripta Samajder who with his Sri Khol contributes complex rhythms to a driving beat that wouldn’t be out of place in the record bags of daring DJs. Sophia Trollmann takes over saxophone duties for »Ortolan,« a riveting coming-together of intricate, IDM-flavoured techno and jazz-inspired improvisation. Both are integral standout tracks on an album that clearly follows a holistic plan. Already the opener »Clouds of Neon Limelight« dips into anthemic synth pop territory, but unfolds into a great saga full of ominous undertones and Stroetges’s trademark: layered vocals that at once evoke feelings of uncanniness and intimacy.

It’s a juxtaposition that runs throughout »Araceae,« thus enforcing the album’s overall themes of sensual experience and alienation. »Game of Biryani« for example lends some of its musical structures from pop music, calling into question traditional songwriting conventions which here reappear as irritating echo effects rather than recycled old tropes. With the lush »Limping over the Prairies« and the adventurous »Glow-in-the-Dark Gloves,« Stroetges further challenges her audience by applying noise and a heavy dose of autotune respectively to disorientating effect.

The couple makes for an impressive finale of an album that scrutinises our ideas of what is natural - whether in music or the world around us. »Araceae« was inspired by the travels of its creator, but also sets out to ascertain what lies beyond everything that eyes or ears can perceive.

“All heads realize, recognize. Real heads on the rise, recognize. You better recognize”. Another milestone of Hip Hop's Golden Era gets an official 45 rpm on 7" vinyl release to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Smif-N-Wessun's debut album "Dah' Shinin”.

Representing Brownsville & Bed Stuy Brooklyn, rap duo Smif-N-Wessun, Tek and Steele, first appeared on Black Moon’s debut album Enta Da Stage in 1993. Adding relentless rhymes to tracks "U da Man" and "Black Smif N' Wessun," the pair paved the way for the Brooklyn Supergroup Boot Camp Clik.

25 years later, the raw and gritty sound of Da Beatminerz productions cut through the noise that is often found in the present day music industry, and was selected as one of The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums of all time.

Celebrating live music and record store culture.

After having completed the first run of shows for their recent album "2066" through UK, France and Germany, the Mighty Mocambos did an intimate performance at world-renowned Groove City Record Store in their hometown Hamburg.
Not content with just playing stripped down versions of existing material, the band wanted to step up a notch from the "tiny desk" type concert idea and decided to record unreleased tunes for a vinyl single capturing the live energy and crowd atmosphere with analog studio techniques. After having warmed up with a couple of songs from "2066", a cheerful crowd in the packed shop witnessed the band tracking magic takes of unheard songs directly to tape.
"St. Pauli Second Line", an instrumental live favourite with simple but irresistant swamp funk ostinatoes turned into a frenetic call and response chant workout midway of the song. Singer Nichola Richards' tune "Keep It Movin'", a mainstay of the band's live repertoire for years, was cut with great energy, finally finding its way onto wax. "Something's Missing" is a brand new tune with a raw sister funk vibe - written and arranged for the occasion, rehearsed once and performed live for the first time in the version you hear on this record.
While many live recordings a are mere mix of crowd noise and neglectable renditions of well-worn tunes that are unusable for DJs and hardly appealing to the dedicated listener, THE MIGHTY MOCAMBOS - Live At Groove City au contraire is a treat for turntableists and a testimony of the spark that a well-attuned live band can light up, combining the vibes of a concert with the no-nonsense analog sound of their well-loved studio recordings.

Sludge machine music slapped through the infinite mixing desk by SRS - the combined mind of Sunun and Robin Stewart. At any pointData Fossil'sgiddy industrial riddims could collapse under their own weight. There are Sunun inputs and there are Robin Stewart inputs - but everything is offered up to their machines gladly for an output of nu-human-beat. Voices drift through the mix in hushed Italian and Robin's gruff roboticized drawl, floating dub chords left hanging for cavernous subs and rattled bones, distant harps and arps, a sudden blast of trills. 'Spit Fossil' itself is a clipped noise-pop wonder - the aural equivalent of a lights-on Avon dancefloor with only the weirdest left standing.



Recorded on the rooftop of a housing project called Camelot in 2018, the two Bristol locals debuted the live / unplanned collaboration in an inflatable arena called 'Toldo' in the Brunswick Club ballroom (RIP). Then again at Young Echo at the Cube Microplex - a night where it's said anything is possible (Sunun even dubbed Guest's live human heartbeat there recently….). IfData Fossilis hard to describe - it's just the sound of the musical freedom of a city that will never run dry.



It's a high Bokeh honour to welcome Sunun back after we helped release her 2018 debut,Ooid EP. Her live show continues to be the most inspiring re-use of dub principles we've witnessed (again and again). Time only grows her music outwards causing the Young Echo collective to demand she join them. SinceOoid,she's released a 12" of MPC wonders with close Bristol pals Cold Light.


Recently bearing his dub-side to all that didn't know on Trilogy Tapes'Time Travel EP, Robin Stewart is half of world conquering techno-cult Giant Swan. Also a veteran of Rwdfwd stable of imprints (Fuckpunk and NoCorner) - his music DNA is equal parts shoegaze and steppas. In 2020 he was officially recognised for having the largest collection of Bokeh t shirts.

Uniting cosmic tones and lovely notes, unique sound collages and electronic noises, Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne ("Muzak for Broken Lifts"), Brigitte Barbu's first album, explores a dreamy universe, at the crossroads of electronica and the 70s’ post-tune-in/drop-out, echoing shadows of the peculiar doppelgänger; Pépé Bradock. Ça Plane pour Brigitte Barbu…

Resonant guitar notes, odd sounds, electronic hallucinations, and unexpected warm synth layers all gather together in Brigitte Barbu's first enigmatic album. Recorded and mixed during a reclusive one-week residency in a very special studio, under the benevolent cubic radiation of "Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant,” using a computer, synthesizers, and various string instruments, giving birth to this resolutely unique album. The guitars were sharply disciplined, propelling strings into strange and hypnotic limbos, somewhere between a weightless journey through time and a fresh science lab experiment.

A perky cosmic album running away from rules and gravity.

"I wanted to compose an ethereal abstract Hip-Hop LP" says Brigitte, "with guitar as a brainwashed instrument, mirroring machines and computers, even if surely far from being unplugged". So much for that… With a real introspective dimension, the record stands out for its pure whimsical mood. The artist had strict rules for composing: “Each track is based on the association between a title chosen for its consonances, an open tuning, a random tempo and frequencies chosen for their supposed effects, real or imagined, on the mind, body & soul.” For example: Taro Patch -> Whale -> 93,75 BPM or Dobro -> Bear-> 118,125 BPM, Air Resistance -> Open Em -> Panther-> 480 BPM etc.

Brigitte surgically framed an electro-acoustic compendium, finding its atmospheric mothership… Brigitte Barbu, referring to a special interlude from a vintage release "Escalope de Dingue” (Fool’s Cutlet), explains that Muzak pour Ascenseurs en Panne is in fact a custom tribute to family, friends, triggered cosmonauts, René Clément and the card game where the winner is the bearded monarch nonchalantly stabbing himself in the head. It’s a lot!

Marking their 20th year as a band, Maserati returns with their first new album in five years. Produced by the band and mixed by Grammy-winning producer, John Congleton (Explosions In The Sky, Swans, Angel Olsen), Enter The Mirror is Maserati's most compelling mélange of triumphant guitar hooks, abstract synth-pop, and Wax Trax-inspired noise anthems. The gated drums of Phil Collins and chorus-drenched guitars of INXS were prominent influences on Enter The Mirror, paired to magnificent effect with the increasingly dystopian lyrical themes (which, ironically, were also massive influences on popular music in the 1980s, and feel ever more relevant now). In addition to longtime members Coley Dennis, Matt Cherry, Chris McNeal, and Mike Albanese, Maserati are joined by friends and collaborators, Bill Berry (R.E.M.), Owen Lange, and Alfredo Lapuz Jr. Self-reflection and loss of control as both a positive and negative aspect of modern existence is at the heart of Enter The Mirror. It is Maserati's most efficient and cohesive album, and a monumental accomplishment for a band who have weathered many storms throughout their first two decades - and found the will to not just keep moving, but to move with style and chase.

Following up on the waves made by his latest Diaphragm EP, Cri Du Coeur injects his signature high-octane sound into another techno venture. This one comes in the form of the electrifying 4-track EP Warning on the Belgian producer’s fledgling-but- headstrong label Arkham Audio. Featuring three remixes interweaving threatening cosmic soundscapes with pounding industrial beats, this latest EP pulls no punches in delivering a menacing wall of sound. The A-side opens with Cri’s original mix for Warning, showing off his signature style of making jumpy, liquid 303 basslines bounce around a consistent dark pad sound. The combination emanates a lingering sense of dread intensified by warped delayed vocal samples and high-voltage buzzing underpinning the whole experience. Following up is a remix from American producer Dustin Zahn, who delivers a pulsa- ting battleground of modular noise. The essence of the track is the controlled chaos of the abstract mechanical whirring and wailing born from Zahn’s extensive synthesis experience, having worked as a remixer for Adam Beyer, Chris Liebing, Dubfire and many other high-profile acts. UK producer Mark Broom dedicates two remixes for the B-side of the EP. The first is a dark, atmospheric groove with expert attention to detail paid to the percussive effects and the controlled movement of the synth parts, creating a powerful ebb and flow of soundscapes and textures and a set of unique builds and drops. Closing off the EP, Mark Broom’s second track is a track more faithful to Cri’s original, opting to beef up the kick and switch up the pattern for an original clap intonation and, naturally, Broom’s own signature offer of complex intertwined synth effects. The result is an anthemic warehouse filler that feels saturated with organic layers of electronic foliage.

Kutmah closes off a series of 10 inches started back in 2010 from the cream opf L.A. Beatmakers. ... He was supposed to be on that batch of releases but for reasons well documented he had other priorities during that year.

We're delighted to finally welcome the esoteric beat wizard on board with "New Appliance" - as expected from such a singular talent this is a super strong ep, a diverse fusion of his classic beat styles and a signpost to a new departure using all his wave, noise & punk influences.

Cover photo by B+ // Mastered by Jonwayne //Mixed by Kidkanevil

Noor1 is a duo consisting of Zevla and ANFS, which made its debut appearance on the first Vanila compilation from 2019, "ear". Their return here is in the form of an album, hosted by the LP series of Athens' Modal Analysis (MALP02). A.Psi.Mi includes 4 long recordings of Zevla's and ANFS impressions of industrial/noise soundscapes meeting the aesthetics of ambient/experimental.

Tyyni is the third album by Finnish-born sound artist and musician Cucina Povera aka Maria Rossi. The second album recorded using a more studio-based scenario – as opposed to last year’s Zoom, a collection of in-situ, spontaneous recordings – Tyyni feels like a slowly unfurling mediation on the clash between nature and mechanical living, a rumination on the complexities of modern life that begin to unveil more about the inner landscape of the artist as it progresses. A Finnish word referring to still, serene weather, the title belies a new note of turmoil in Cucina Povera’s soundworld. Tyyni represents a more detailed focus on the sculpting of sounds that curl around Rossi’s hymnal vocal performances. It’s a more adventurous work than Rossi’s previous output that goes further into noise elements and vocal abstraction while maintaining the balance and ecclesiastical ecstasy of her debut Hilja.

While tension at the core of Cucina Povera is always prevalent, previously it was organic sounds that were used to counterpoint Rossi’s singing but on Tyyni these are often replaced with aggressive synths and distortion, profane clashes with the seemingly sacred hymns. Whether close mic’d and intoning in a loop or in full flight, Maria Rossi’s voice remains in the foreground, set here against a more synthetic backdrop. This development builds new worlds for Cucina Povera, a digital environment which brings in a sense of the alien for Rossi’s vocal to duel. The effect is often dazzling. On Salvia Salvatrix, an ode to the medicinal plant used to ward off evil spirits, Rossi’s invocation is encircled by a distorted synth sound tearing at the fabric of the composition. It’s an inspired juxtaposition, leaving the listener to appreciate both sounds as separate and as a duet. Anarkian kuvajainen embraces a sense of chaos, an accidental transmitting mobile phone’s pulse is swept up gently with looped synth swells as Rossi’s prayer-like vocal rhythmically teases the composition into loops that embrace and then drift apart. Teerenpeli flirts with a minimal beat rendered by sampler and processed, layered field recordings of capercaillies, while Side A ends with one of Rossi’s most beautiful, simple tracks yet recorded. Varjokuvatanssi is an a cappela recording built on top of a wordless glossolalia, a shadowy interplay which foregrounds the solo vocal.

Pölytön nurkka is the most melodic song yet recorded by Cucina Povera. While it still maintains an off-the-cuff performance style, the synthesized chimes and 4/4 beat are smothered by a distorted synthesizer which almost replicates the bravado of an electric guitar feedbacking into the night. Rossi’s subject matter talks of trying to start anew, getting rid of extraneous material, perhaps still feeling powerless to affect positive change. On Haaksirikkoutunut, the protagonist vocal is lost, a vessel rudderless on the ocean, buffeted by waves metaphorical or real, digital, atonal chords gurgling and splashing against the bow, a storm forever brewing on the horizon. Saniaiset recalls Coil in its eldritch, nocturnal tone and digital-bell like synth, Rossi’s half-spoken/half-sung voice attaining a creepy tone before flipping into flight. Album closer Jolkottelureitti uses an escalating, sequenced synth that splinters into both abrasive tones and harmonising chords creating a kosmische effect, reminding the listener of Kluster or synth-era Popol Vuh, all the while elevated by Rossi’s searching vocalising.

For an artist with such a singularly unique musical language, Cucina Povera is continually teasing new strands and emotive tones from an evolving palette. Most importantly, Tyyni appears to be pulling back the veil to uncover an artist finding a synergy between her own emotional inner world and practice. As such, on her third album, Maria Rossi has found a third way between abstraction and extraneous emotion, personal experience turned inside out to reveal more about the listener.

Inspired by Gibson's 'Neuromancer', Patrick Holland dives deep into the ambivalent future with Simstim. Also known for work as Project Pablo, Simstim uses familiar motifs with a more personalized touch. Pointillist melodies lay in a wash of noise artifacts, as pulsating rhythms fray subtly falling between sections, all delicately glued together with blissful harmonies. For the dancer and/or headphone listener alike.

This record on Kvitnu presents live recordings be PAN SONIC played in Kyiv, Ukraine on June 6th, 2009.
Oksastus – is a Finnish word for process of grafting or cultivating of plants.

"Pan Sonic, the Finnish noise duo who split in 2010, recorded this meticulous live effort in 2009 in Kyiv in the Ukraine. It's impossible to frame it without thinking about the impending meltdown of both band and country, cloaking Oksastus in an apocalyptic backdrop." Pitchfork, 2014 (7.1 rating)

Repress

Leading lights of the neo ambient rhizome alongside Huerco S’ West Mineral label, Experiences Ltd has already amassed a cult following after just one release - ULLA’s ‘Tumbling Towards A Wall’, now returning to relay a sublime, probing debut of crackling, cross-continental communications from mdo, Ultrafog, and Nikolay Kozlov, aka Folder.
Weft from dematerialised ambient tropes spooled between their respective bases in Kansas City, Tokyo, and Samara in Russia, ‘New Path’ slots fuzzily into an expanding prism of contemporary ambient music which echoes the purpose and effect of the original thing via traces of ‘90s/‘00s experimental techno and minimalist rhythms. Their sound effectively recalls K. Leimer’s systems music as much as the Pole’s eerie dub malfunctions; running a lushly frayed and decentralised style that embraces a gently psychedelic sort of chaos and lysergic, hallucinatory vision in an up-to-the-moment way shared by the likes of Huerco. S and uon.
If original ambient was analogous to THC and LSD, and in the ‘90s MDMA, then the effect of Folder’s music, and that of their peers, adds the putative, lushly dissociative effect and non-linearity of Ketamine and psilocybin to that formula. As such ‘New Path’ attempts to follow new routes through your neurons, sparking at new junctures of style and form that better reflect and counter a current psychic state of stasis and anxious anticipation.
Coming from the label behind those cult ‘bblisss’ volumes of 2016-2018, listeners can trust their needs for relaxation and otherworldly curiosity will be sated by ’New Path’, as it courses from iridescent ambient noise in the titular opener, to the laminal diffractions of ‘Plasma’, and soothing textural abstraction of ‘Reset’, shoring up in ‘Node’ as though oceanic ambient currents have individually lead them to this bobbing buoy inthe middle of a noumenal ocean.

First collaboration ever between Japanese noise legend Merzbow and visionary/provocateur Kaoru Sato of R.N.A. Organism (Vanity Records) and EP-4 (WRWTFWW).

Side A: live recording of Merzbow and Kaoru Sato's first live collaboration ever. Recorded October 21st 2018 at Metro Club in Kyoto for a three-label showcase with avant-garde imprints Slowdown, Phonon and Kyoh Records.

Side B: Solo sessions by each artist that took place after the joint performance on the same night. Edited and mixed in their respective studios.

DJ Woody teams up with the incredible champion beatboxer Ball-Zee to drop one of the most original and useful new scratch records on the market! Box Cutter is made up of 100% original recordings with Woody utilising the phenomenal vocal dexterity of the UK’s Ball-Zee to create an arsenal of incredible new scratch sounds.

Side A (the ‘Scratch Side’) concentrates on vocal phrases, noises, sound effects and tones with 16 skip proof loops programmed at 133 bpm and 100 bpm and ends with a lock groove bass tone phrase. Side B (the ‘Drum Side’) contains a remarkable array of drum rhythms and sounds perfect for all manner of scratch drumming, beat juggling and production!

It features 11 skip-proof grooves and phrases at 66.66 bpm, 133.33 bpm, 100 bpm and 83.33 bpm as well as 3 ridiculous freestyle tracks for more intricate juggle routines. 2 copies are a must for all jugglers!

• 100% original sounds and phrases
• Perfect for scratch jams, drumming, beat juggling and production
• 27 skip-proof loops, 2 lock grooves and 3 freestyles
• Super loud and deep pressing on black vinyl

Bristol's Ido Plumes debuts for Livity Sound's Reverse series with a stunning three track EP of aquatic textures and UK style grooves.

The 'Away From The Reign' EP is the first glimpse into the sonic world of Ido Plumes, ranging from the nimble dub mechanics of 'Noise Water' to the 2002 schooled Sub-low echoes of 'Which Way is Up'.

Livity Sound is a label set up by Peverelist in 2011 as a vehicle for a raw and exploratory strain of UK techno, rooted in the heritage of UK dance music and sound system culture. It has since become one of the UK's foremost protagonists for cutting edge underground music.

When the world slipped into madness last month, the ESP Institute put most releases on the back-burner to await brighter days, but then we thought again; why not approach these odd circumstances the way we do most realities, positively and head-on? We’re committed to a community that builds new worlds — this is fundamental to our creative and spiritual relationship with Osaka-born, cosmos-straggling artist, Ground — and while temporarily we can’t physically congregate to uplift each other, its our responsibility as an institution to maintain a platform for prolific creative pioneers, our cherished cartographers of cognitive escape. 'Wakusei' is wonderfully confusing and disorienting music, a follow-up EP to 2018’s critically acclaimed album 'Sunizm', not created specifically for life under lockdown, but nonetheless aptly suited to help release angst, guide meditation, and assist in making this moment in history more interesting if not transcendental. Whereas 'Sunizm' relied on field recordings gathered from rainforests, percussions learned from imaginary ancient civilizations, and the somehow organic freneticism of a mission control meltdown, the aesthetic of 'Wakusei' reduces this abstract instrumentation one step further to a more base-level array of gurgling synth scraps, accelerating engine friction and static-bound phonetic mistakes, all scrubbed into dust by a Brillo pad of white noise. The cliché of “great art is born out of hard times” is not lost upon us — of course the world will look back to this turmoil and its residual contributions to culture — but we see today's art as an immediate coping mechanism, and artists like Ground helping to unlock and navigate internal utopias. We’re already indoors, let’s delve inside.

die ANGEL, the duo project of ILPO VÄISÄNEN (ex-PAN SONIC) & DIRK DRESSELHAUS aka SCHNEIDER TM, starts its 3rd decade of sonic explorations with the release of album #10 which bears the programmatic title "Utopien I".180g LP and DL on KARL.

die ANGEL (or just ANGEL in the early days) was born in 1999during a joint European tour of PAN SONIC and SCHNEIDER TM with the aim to use electronics, string instruments and effect loops to develop a sonic world that goes beyond fixed structures and clearly defined genres. Coming from different musical backgrounds proved quite an advantage for the duo as it meant that ILPO VÄISÄNEN (ex-PAN SONIC) & DIRK DRESSELHAUS (SCHNEIDER TM) had to find their particular modus operandi: communication through noise and action, instant composition, spirit.

Over the course of over 2 decades now, die ANGEL crafted a catalogue of 9 albums released on labels like EDITIONS MEGO or EDITION TELEMARK that were recordings of either the core duo or featured like-minded artists like cellist HILDUR GUDNASDOTTIR, OREN AMBARCHI, LUCIO CAPECE or BJ NILSEN. die ANGELdelve deep into the microcosms of tones, shaping nuanced layers of abstract sound that integrate elements of Musique Concrète, Minimal Music, Industrial, Noise, Blues and Psychedelia, and yet bear the unmistakable die ANGEL signature.

"Utopien I" is not only the duo's latest effort (feat. OREN AMBARCHI) but also a clear political call: in a world of a general decline, we need new ideas and approaches to design the future.

All tracks performed & recorded December 2015 - January 2016

by Ilpo Väisänen & Dirk Dresselhaus at ZONE, Berlin

Overdubs on 'Cargo Cult'by Oren Ambarchi (Milano, Italy) April – May 2016

Edited & mixed by Dirk Dresselhaus May 2016 at ZONE, Berlin

Mastered by Helmut Erler at D&M, Berlin, December 2019

Ilpo Väisänen : electronics & effects

Dirk Dresselhaus : electric guitar & effects

Oren Ambarchi : electric guitar & effects

Hendrik Weber aka Pantha Du Prince (‘a fantasy character...a poetic transporter for the concept behind the music’) has carved a niche for a style of techno he calls, ‘layered and cinematographic.’ He released the Diamond Daze (2004) and This Bliss (2007) albums on Berlin dance label Dial before signing to Rough Trade and widening his audience with Black Noise (2010) and The Element of Light (2013).

On “Conference of Trees”, Pantha Du Prince explores the communication of trees and creates a sound concept based on it. What we experience here is a break through recording of experimental music, visual poetry, club culture and speculative science.

► One half of duo Lumisokea and persistent sonic explorer ANDREA TAEGGI (Opal Tapes, SM-LL, Type, Präsens Editionen) debuts on OOH-sounds with a new solo album under-the-influence of mushrooms.

► Recorded at Willem-Twee synthesis studios in Holland, Mycorrhiza is a lucid excursion into a new form of 'ritual-computer-music' — gamelan from the future.

►Master + Cut by Helmut Erler, D&M Berlin. Limited Edition of 200, 12" black vinyl housed in gold cardboard sleeve with 'ad-hoc' fluo sticker.

Of course this is not the first album born under-the-influence of mushrooms, but apparentlyTaeggi doesn't take them here as he rather observes the cognitive and intelligent behavior of mycorrhizal fungal roots—one of the great mysteries inhabiting the forest soil, and from which a network of beneficial underground relationships with plants sprouts. Known as Mycelium, this fascinating wood-wide-web very much resembles the intricacy of the human neural system—transporting carbon, water and nutrients from one tree to another. A mutualistic symbiosis that Taeggi similarly establishes with the rather rare arsenal of sound machineries he had access to at Willem-Twee synthesis studios in Holland—a center for experimentation inspired by Berio and Maderna's Studio di Fonologia RAI in 1950s Milan.

In the process of tweaking and feeding electric impulses and sound signals into instruments of the likes of the iconic ARP 2500/2600 and a number of testing/measuring units from the 50/60s—originallynot conceived as musical instruments—Taeggi engages into an exchange of nutrients and information, while abruptly sabotaging un-welcome elements, hence accelerating the sound superhighway towards spectral psychedelic tension—a process he seems to be extremely in control of. Taking a step aside from his usual minimal approach to address more complex structures and augmented mind-sets, Mycorrhiza sounds at times like gamelan from the future: a lucid excursion into a form of "ritual-computer-music" with a conspicuous penchant for detail,alluding to a continuitybetween pseudo-cerimonial and laboratory-like computer music, steering clear from any reference to a specific creed or religion—imagine Stockhausen drinking the Amazonian sacred brew Ayahuasca..

The swarming micro-movements of "Cuttleburrs" multiply in a series of crescendos marked by sudden falls, saturated drums incursions and tense sonic clusters, introducing the more explicit gamelan percussive tones and compositional forms of "Kodama" and "Icaro". Recorded on the ARP 2500, "Mycorrhiza" uses white noise generators, resonant bass and spring reverb to conjure up a magical fungal diorama, which expands into the spooky shadows of skeletons and demons of "Phantasmagoria" and the spectral mystics of "Oculus Cordis"—the Eye of the Spirit — in which Taeggi grapples with the same sine-wave generators that Stockhausen used in his seminal "Studie I" and "Studie II".

Islands, volcanoes and instrumental exile stories... From Overseas is the experimental ambient project by Kevin Sery.

Originally from the tiny French overseas department and region, Reunion Island, he routinely bounces between his home island, a small port town on the east coast of the US & Continental Europe picking up fresh ideas & inspiration along the way.

With a beautiful master by Stephan Mathieu (12k, Shelter Press, ... ) From Overseas Releases his first full length album "Home" on PITP. "Home" is a journey through beautiful soundscapes where dark and light intertwine, where ambient tones give way to post-rock guitar craft, then segway to melodic drone, noise and back again.


These soothingly powerful songs evoke emotions on a full spectrum, dreamy unplanned travels and inspire us to question the nature of the place that each of us calls home. The fourth track, Maloya Tales, is a personal tribute to Sery's homeland 'Reunion Island' and gives the listener a glimpse of the mystical rhythms of traditional Reunionese Maloya music.

The awesomeness of this record can’t simply be denied and without a doubt, Chained To Oblivion will more than likely be my doom album of the year. I just don’t know how anything can top this. So please, give it a listen and enrich your life with it’s vibrancy" - NEW NOISE.
"Spirit Adrift’s 'Chained to Oblivion' Is An Epic Tale of Doom Metal Redemption" - VICE "This doom metal massif is as heavy as the Himalayas, and the passion involved is second to none." - METAL INJECTION "This is an album that will get people through tough times. You can feel the authenticity, which is a very powerful thing in the days of unending sarcasm and ironic creation" - TOILET OV HELL.

F.S.Blumm enters Andi Otto's studio with a whole palette of strings and a mission to create quirky, peaceful soundscapes. The artists intertwine acoustic and electric guitars, harps, electric bass, psaltery and cello in eleven electronica compositions ranging from neo-classical gravity ("Entangleland") to spaced-out dub jams ("Active Fault Map"). "Yukiyama" evolves in multilayered patterns braided over warm tape-noise. "Kilani" reminds of Rabih Abou Khalil's ECM recordings, with its oriental scale and a beat that counts to seven. The tunes shine most when silence takes over, when the sounds find space to unfold and decay. Far from being trivial ambient lullabies, these compositions burst with detail: Bells rattle, a kalimba resonates, and vintage synths induce their voltage into the acoustic framework. Andi Otto and F.S.Blumm have been musical collaborators in the studio as well as on stages between Berlin and Tokyo for more than a decade now, the heyday being their previous duo album "The Bird And White Noise" in 2014. On "Entangleland", Andi Otto contributes the cello, harp and synth recordings and takes care of the mixing. Compared to his recent releases on Multi Culti or Shika Shika, these tracks are less dancefloor oriented. The calm of this album is a flourishing environment for Otto to pluck the acoustic cello which we usually hear in a more processed way in his solo works. F.S.Blumm contributes guitar and bass recordings as well as saturated percussion echoes from his self-made spiral box. Blumm is famous for his acoustic solo productions since his early outings on Morr Music or Tomlab. He has also appeared on Pingipung a few times, for example with his album "Up Up And Astray" or as a Lee 'Scratch' Perry collaborator with the "Quasi Dub Development" project. He recorded three duo albums together with Nils Frahm and is a member of the mighty "Jeff Özdemir & Friends" collective in Berlin. "Entangleland" sees the two artists weave together a mass of acoustic motifs, synthetic melodies, riddims and improv jams where the magic emerges from the sum of the parts. "It's not about accompanying a cello theme with the guitar or vice versa," Andi Otto says. "Entangling sound means letting go of hierarchies, that no one is first. Our studio is not a control room, it's a place of imagination where we take things apart and make things whole."

Legendary album of Jacaszek from 2009, first time on vinyl, 180g, gatefold, with downloadcode

PENTRAL (lat: inside, spirit, temple).

Michal Jacaszek's new project is an attempt to describe a gothic church interior by means of sounds. A temple owes its special atmosphere not only to visual elements but also to characteristic acoustics – reverb, enhancing and prolonging a slightest whisper into infinity. Jacaszek spent several days in three Gdansk historic churches (Oliwa Cathedral, St. Nicolas' church, St. Mary's Basilica) recording chanting, organs, and also a broad spectrum of accidental noises. Source sounds were were used only as a stimulus which releases the sound of the whole inside, and as such, they were consequently retouched in the post production process. Studio work and also the atmosphere of melody and arrangements were subordinate to the idea of portraying the church as a place filled with distant mysteries, a huge music instrument.

Bastard Jazz is proud to present the sophmore solo album by one of the gems of the New Zealand underground soul scene, Isaac Aesili. Woven through electronic soul, with threads of jazz, funk, R&B and house music, Isaac's 'Hidden Truths' is the stylistic unification of all his previous projects (Karl Marx, Funkommunity, Sorceress) into a dazzling and diverse body of work. Three years in the making, its depth is clear from the first listen, and is peppered with some of New Zealand's finest soul and jazz musical talent, including two stunning female feature vocalists from New Zealand; Ladi6 and Rachel Fraser.

The album opens with an ominous instrumental 'Mirror' setting a dark a tone for the album the start, shimmering with shades of Dilla swing snapping over metallic chords and a graceful trumpet solo that enters midway through. Wild feat. Ladi6' is a heavy downbeat future soul joint with stratospheric synths layered over driving beats that build alongside the elegant vocal weavings of New Zealand's first lady of soul, Ladi6, while 'Player' sees Isaac's unique vocals tell a tale of dangerous seduction within a synth funk-driven dancehall cum house music that feels like the Gap Band on a tropical vacation. 'Jungles' is a deep, native and ocean-like soundscape that begins with syncopated synths and beats that collide dramatically into a frantic, sweeping synth outro, followed up by'Realms' , an intricately crafted song that has sonic elements from techno-house that are other-worldly accompanied by live drums that flip after the breakdown into a swinging conclusion of the album's first half.

'Run Every Way' is an epic percussion-driven electronic blues that begins with a vocal chorus from Isaac that could just as easily be interpreted lyrically as a warning about climate change as it could an expression of the inner-self, while "Refugee" is also a heavily percussion orientated joint that fuses romantic classical strings with otherworldly synth stabs and Isaac's haunting vocals moving climactically into a tender coda conclusion. "Rain Gods" feat. Rachel Fraser is a heavenly pathway into Rachel's luxurious vocals with clever lyrics merging the soaring synths and looped bassline into a short yet memorable chorus'and 'Steps' is classic Isaac Aesili production including deep Rhodes chord changes, a knocking beat with layers of percussion, synths and horns providing a warm emotive accompaniment to Isaac's vocals. 'Last Minute' is a simple yet sophisticated jewel of space and time that concludes the vocal tracks of the album in a proper soulful style, and 'Maureen' rounds out the album as an expressive instrumental outrolude that features Isaac's trumpet.

Isaac Aesili is an Internationally acclaimed solo artist and the producer and creative force behind Funkommunity, Sorceress and Karlmarx. Isaac's original productions have been supported internationally by DJs such as Gilles Peterson (BBC Radio 6 Music), Benji B (BBC 1), and Lefto (Belgium, Worldwide FM). His trumpet playing features on many collaborations including 'Layer' by Julien Dyne (Wonderful Noise/BBE) and 'Midnight in Peckham' by Chaos in the CBD (Rhythm Section). A world-renowned musician on both trumpet and percussion, Isaac is a member of the Lord Echo band. His music fuses Soul, Funk, Jazz, Afro and Latin styles with R&B, Hip Hop and Electronic music. Isaac's much anticipated sophomore solo album "Hidden Truths" is out on Bastard Jazz (NYC) in 2020.

Unreleased album from 1981, a collaborative project by David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded at Mills College in 1981.

Previously known only to cognoscenti through an obscure self-released three-track 7”, this is the first publication of the complete album, an outrageous confection that mixes art-song and theatrical monologue with live electronics. Starting life as a performance art piece described by the artists as ‘Western Performance Noir’, the record centres on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious “Archetypal Unitized Seminar,” a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers. Delivered by Friedman, Hanlon, Klingensmith and special guest Maggi Payne in forms ranging from spoken monologue to Country & Western waltz, the texts are accompanied by instrumental and electronic contributions by Behrman and DeMarinis. Musically, She’s More Wild is truly unique, demonstrating these two pioneers of live-electronic performance adapting their signature processes to something approaching a ‘pop’ format: we hear the gliding, frequency-sensitive electronics familiar from Behrman’s classic On the Other Ocean and the mutant hacked Speak n’ Spell heard on DeMarinis’ Songs Without Throats propelled by drum machines and twisted into song forms. Perhaps comparable only to the David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert’s contemporaneous Daytime Viewing in its interweaving of performance art tactics, high-tech electronics and pop sensibilities, She’s More Wild is an essential document, both immediately gratifying and ultimately thought provoking.

Heartbeat Hartcore music... Asmatik gently silk and knife, surprising you but not too mutch. Fast and clear, hard and sweet... Opposites meltdown to create a large scale of ambience... the Ep even offer a kind of Noise Ambient

- Ursprünglich als EP zwischen den ersten beiden Bon Iver Alben veröffentlicht, enthält Blood Bank einige der beliebtesten Songs der Band - Erstpressung auf farbigem Vinyl - mit 4 brandneuen, exklusiven Live-Aufnahmen der EP-Titel, die auf der Tournee 2018, 10 Jahre nach der Entstehung der Songs, aufgenommen wurden - Bon Iver 2020 live in Berlin, Köln und München // Die "Blood Bank" EP wurde ursprünglich Anfang 2009 veröffentlicht, kurz nach dem geliebten Album "For Emma, Forever Ago". Die EP war der Vorbote eines neuen Sounds für Bon Iver: eine Bewegung weg von der akustischen Gitarren-geführten Instrumentierung des Debüts und der Beginn einer Erkundung der experimentellen Klänge, welche die Entwicklung von Bon Iver seitdem mitdefinieren. Die Neuauflage dieser bahnbrechenden EP ist gekoppelt mit brandneuen Live-Aufnahmen aller EP-Titel. Eine Reflexion über die Blood Bank EP von Ryan Matteson: When I reflect on the songs that make up the Blood Bank EP, I am drawn to mantras, both musical and lyrical. The driving and pulsating rhythm of the title track is held steady by the repeated refrain, I know it well, before it eventually yields to a beautiful array of guitar distortion and noise. These moments are significant through all four songs. When the steel guitar makes its entrance on "Beach Baby," it's transportive. A blissful, breezy feeling sweeps into the room and that puts you within the moment. Close your eyes and you can feel it. "Babys" follows perfectly. A piano guides your mind to the new beginnings that come with the changing of seasons. The awareness of time passes and makes way for another day. Then there's "Woods." A flawless finale. Foreign and new. Not just a new direction but a new beginning entirely. A place where boundaries don't exist. It was a signal change of things to come, laying the groundwork for new collaborations. A decade later, the song says so much in just three lines. Most significant to me are the words, "I'm building a sill to slow down the time." Time doesn't slow down, it races.

For the first release of the new decade we are honoured to introduce LA-based Oxóssi who has conjured a captivatingly sinister sonic palette for his debut EP on the label.

Sama
A scorching 8-bar intro catapults us straight into 'Sama', the first track of the release, where abandoned-jungle-ruins atmospheres meet threatening wooden flutes and weighty wobs - Oxóssi is not messing about. The narration proceeds with a melody sung by a penetrating laser-beam-like synth, which adds a space layer to this organic banger, getting more and more detuned throughout the track while kickstarting a call-and-answer march between the flute and synth-wob melodies. Don't expect to uncover the secrets of 'Sama' at a first listen, this intricate creation will keep revealing itself listen after listen.

Saut Dans Le Vide
An alluring pad harmony and a hidden inspirational message from the artist introduce the fascinatingly titled 'Saut Dans Le Vide', a masterful arrangement of unrelenting piano chords, subtle choir stabs, dreamy flute leads and compellingly staggering drums. Elements keep artfully alternating throughout this convoluted composition which arouses a pensive, melancholy-nuanced hopefulness.

Undead
It's time to get glitchy here, as 'Undead' makes its entrance. Shimmering melodies rain down in a glittery shower of eerie purple confetti, surrounded by rattling white noise strikes and playful-yet-mighty bass hits. As the story evolves, an 8-bit synth lead briefly takes us to a post-apocalyptic landscape before we momentarily wake up from this psychedelic daydream, just in time to take a breath and dive back in for round two.

Luz Azul is a group started by LA-based vocal and performance artist Anna Homler (aka Breadwoman) together with musicians Marcos Fernandes and Robert Montoya in 2007. On this record they compose their own mesmerising cosmic universe where the hypnotic speaking in tongue voice of Anna Homler blends mesmerising together with the sound of her found toys intensified by the shamanistic percussion of Marcos and the pulsating electronics of Montoya.

As fellow percussionists and sound artists, Marcos Fernandes and Robert Montoya's collaborations began in 1983 and ran the gamut from ambient to noise, rock to electronica to improvisation. Both were founding members of Trummerflora, a collective of creative musicians based in San Diego from 1999 to 2009.

All three artists were active in the improvised music scene in Southern California and met at Spring Reverb 2006, an annual festival of experimental music curated by the Trummerflra Collective. At the time, Fernandes was experimenting with processed percussion as well as phonography and samples while Montoyawas exploring improvisational possibilities on the computer.

Fernandes and Homler expressed their mutual interest in collaborating but it was not until the fall of 2007 that they performed a series of concerts together. Pleased with the results, they performed together again in the spring of 2008 with the addition of Montoya. There was chemistry and the trio promptly decided to enter the studio to capture their collective magic. The session yielded the music found on Luz Azul.

Anna Homler - voice, pocket theremin, sample sticks, whistles, assorted dry and squeaky objects, greeting cards, wood devil, tiny metals and motors and potato slicer
Marcos Fernandes - percussion & electronics
Robert Montoya - electronics

Demon come, demon go.

It’s a 3fer with New Orleans Sonic Terror partners dropping down south dark hop, nem0 with the abstract downtempo, and a piece of filthy sludge from German noise terrorists appended for shock value.

Yokohama-based producer Foodman - aka 食品まつり or Shokuhin Matsuri - continues his expansive sonic voyage with his new EP Dokutsu, out on 6th March 2020. It follows his 2019 release ODOODO, which was issued on Diplo’s Mad Decent label. Dokutsu is the first release on Highball, a brand new label exporting forward-thinking music from Japan.

Foodman emerged from Japan’s nascent footwork scene, using the genre as a springboard for an escapist exploration into a dazzling array of sounds. He’s since earned the respect of influential fans including Diplo, Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat and HOMESHAKE, while Pitchfork, Noisey, FACT and Tiny Mix Tapes have included his releases in various ‘best of the year’ lists since 2016.

Opening track Kazunoko sets the tone for what will follow. Its woozy rhythm is evocative of the off-kilter playfulness that’s become a hallmark of Foodman’s uncategorizable artistry. It’s also a sign of his inventiveness that he constantly adds fresh layers to the track without losing sight of its light-hearted, spacious feel.

Another of Foodman’s unorthodox traits is his ability to meld the frenetic with the soothing. Hirake Tobira is a case in point. Its production is hypnotic, while its central motif - endless twists and variations on a vocal sample - is sufficiently insistent to demand attention. Kachikachi reverses the trick with a thrilling rush, stuttering otherwise unobtrusive sounds.

Elsewhere the EP plays on sonics which have echoes of the familiar while remaining alien: the boss fight soundtrack of Oshiro, the clattering percussion that dominates Imo Hori, and the ambient psychedelia of Konomi.

Based in Yokohama, an hour south of Tokyo, Foodman’s multifaceted skills also encompass DJing and painting. His press image, shown above, is a self-portrait. From the stripped-back sketches of his 2012 set Shokuhin (released on Giant Claw’s Orange Milk label) to the richer textures of ODOODO, Foodman has subverted everything from Okinawan folk to J-Pop to D&B/classical fusion into his own otherworldly inventions.

»Alchemy« is the debut album from 22-year old singer-songwriter Tara Nome Doyle, following the singles »Heathens«, »Neon Woods« and »Mercury«. Doyle’s 2018 EP »Dandelion«, featuring her breakthrough-hit »Down with You«, has so far amassed nearly two million streams. Recently, two of her songs featured in Sophie Kluge’s feature film »Golden Twenties«. Doyle is a member of Kat Frankie’s choir on whose a capella EP she features.

»Alchemy« deals, in two songs each, with the four phases of development of the pre-modern natural philosophy, the alchemy. The album can be read psychologically or as a portrait of someone coming of age. Experience and reflection are closely entwined which is as beautiful as it’s threatening.

Doyle, whose middle name is pronounced just like »Naomi«, is from Berlin-Kreuzberg, her parents are from Ireland and Norway. She speaks (and sings) both languages without accent. Is it permissible to recognize the biographical background of these landscapes in her art? The stored heat and the fog from the Irish peat bogs, the magic of the the Norwegian forests?

The concept album was recorded in large parts with David Specht (bass player and producer of Isolation Berlin) and Doyle's newly founded band in Berlin. Specht remains reserved, keeping the band in check. It’s the interiors that we should hear – acoustically, but also thematically. The drums sound more like a knock on the window pane than the city noise outside the door, the guitar controls the harmony and not the power supply. The first instrument remains Doyle’s voice, which is always working and is looking for a way. Inward, outward. All songs were written by Doyle, for the arrangement for »Neon Woods« she worked with Max Rieger (Die Nerven, producer for e.g. Drangsal and Ilgen-Nur).

Nastia Reigel’s long-awaited sophomore EP on Dustin Zahn’s ‘Enemy Records’ has finally arrived! Disarm to Surrender demonstrates a perfect balance of artistic taste and technical ability.

The EP starts off with the heaviest track "Horses".

Backed by hypnotizing chopped-up vocals, the track hammers through steadily with no compromises. Trace follows in a more restrained and minimalistic fashion but manages to retain perfect tension. The B-side starts off with Natural Desires. It’s equally as hypnotic as the A side but more spatial and groove-focused,
making it an ideal candidate for warming up or winding down.

The titular track Disarm to Surrender completes the EP in a more abstract way. The track hints at the noise and post-punk leaning influence found in her alternative project, Rosa Damask.

Support from Marcel Dettmann, Luke Slater, DVS1, Truncate,
James Ruskin, Dustin Zahn, Perc, etc.

Limited edition 180g 12″ record featuring 5 bangers. Comes with high-quality gloss sleeve featuring Gobsmacked skull artwork.

Taking influences from underground spaces and dark clubs, the GOBSMACKED! 12” series kicks off with a bang, dropping a five track vinyl from Diarmaid O Meara. The Irish producer describes himself as “trying to push the boundaries of electronic noise” and he couldn’t be more right. It’s just 30 minutes long and hugely pulsing, but packs more punch than a gym full of heavyweight boxers. “While working on new tracks in the studio, I’m always trying to create my own personal rave, and when I find myself in the middle of a dark and twisted sound, then I know I’m on to something,” he says of the creative process in his Berlin bunker studio.

The 12” includes a number of previously released digital singles by Diarmaid O Meara, which have been his chart topping and most widely played tracks, that have not yet made it onto black gold until this point. Featured as multiple Beatport number ones, peak time festival big room sounds, countless Boiler Room recordings, the 12” is a collection of club belters, tried and tested over countless sound systems and DJs.

At Diarmaid O Meara’s touch in the studio, the technotic sounds released from his control become alive, while dark vibes take a stormy ride through intense rhythms. Track titles like ‘Selfish Bass’ convey the vibe of music that chews up and spits out razor-sharp techno and rave fusions that race to tempos upwards of 140BPM. There are playful techno tracks like ‘In Your Head’ next to euphoric rave ups like ‘Live In The Night’ and bass contortions like ‘Ripcord’ that are masterfully concise but utterly devastating. Not to mention the ever hypnotic, chugging sounds meets massive crescendo of ‘Improbable Strip’.

“Whenever something crazy emerges through a rig, enough for you to you hear people screaming in ecstasy, and you know the production has delivered”, he says. And it is exactly this momentum that GOBSMACKED! wants to deliver – it sounds loud and obnoxious but also fun that draws on real appreciation for dancefloor destruction as well as countless hours of studio work. Therefore, it is no surprise that the artwork for the series also features the style of the well known Gobsmacked bunker parties run in Berlin venues like the infamous Griessmuehle, where said music has probably been overplayed to crowds with goldfish length memories. .

“All heads realize, recognize. Real heads on the rise, recognize. You better recognize”.

Another milestone of Hip Hop's Golden Era gets an official 45 rpm on 7" vinyl release to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Smif-N-Wessun's debut album "Dah' Shinin” .

Representing Brownsville & Bed Stuy Brooklyn, rap duo Smif-N-Wessun, Tek and Steele, first appeared on Black Moon’s debut album Enta Da Stage in 1993. Adding relentless rhymes to tracks "U da Man" and "Black Smif N' Wessun," the pair paved the way for the Brooklyn Supergroup Boot Camp Clik.

25 years later, the raw and gritty sound of Da Beatminerz productions cut through the noise that is often found in the present day music industry, and was selected as one of The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums of all time.