Buscar:ot system

Veteran NYC based Scottish electronic musician Drew McDowall's latest work is his loftiest, most liturgical, and least industrial outing to date —and potentially the apex of his recent discography.Named after an ancient Greek word for votive offering, Agalmaexudes a hooded, devotional aura, creaking and keeling under vast rafters of stone, stained glass, and shredded wires. It's a music of majesty and mystery but also modernity, McDowall's refined modular system shape-shifting strings, piano, pipe organ, and choral masses into disorienting synthetic mirages of the sacred. He cites the intersection of “joy, terror, and the elegiac” as a centering inspiration –or, phrased more bluntly, “that 'what the fuck is going on' feeling.”



As a career collaborator himself, with stints in Coil, Psychic TV, and countless other shorter-lived partnerships, it's telling that McDowall chose this project to gather such an impressive spectrum of peers. Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalistRobert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi cameo across the album's 42 minutes, contouring McDowall's nuanced negative spaces with shudders, shadows, and shivering flickers of serenity. Each of them shines in their spotlight, elevating these elusive alchemical states into surreal revelations of texture and transcendence.



McDowall's original working title for the record is revealing: Ritual Music.He speaks of his creative practice in ceremonial terms, negating binaries by seeking the middle path to anuminousequilibrium that erases the distinction between the inner and outer worlds.These compositions feel similarly processional and intuitive, at the crossroads of holiness and hallucination, the sacred vertigo of yawning naves rising into untouchable night skies. It's a vision of industrial music as enigma and invocation, cryptic hymnals of shroudedbeautysummoned in catacombs and crumbling cathedrals.



Despite its depths, Agalmais also an album of immediacy and emotion. Celestial laments of and for times of unrest and suffering. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this music as an to attempt to convey experiences he felt incapable of putting into words: “To try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”Agalmamore than acknowledges the ineffable –it embodies it.

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.

Untold’ is an experimental electronic LP from multi-disciplinary artist and author Sophia Loizou. Depicting a series of speculative sonic landscapes; animals, ocean waves and weather systems are abstracted into eco-centric cyber-dreams creating powerful ambient compositions that invite us to see the Earth through the eyes of others.

‘Untold’ is not about the natural or the technological but the relationships between the two; sonic textures, breaks and melodies are shaped by the dynamics of a lion’s roar or the rhythm of a dolphin’s echolocation emissions. “I didn’t want to make it human-centric,” explains Sophia. “I wanted to remove my compositional and structural domination, to find ways to make it about the symbiosis of systems I see in the world.”

‘Untold’ is part of a much bigger multi-disciplinary project that also includes a collection of poems with accompanying audio, artworks, an AV show and a lecture performance.

Mastered and cut by Matt Colton @ Metropolis.

Absorbing new album from this very special artist. Hand printed sleeves. Very limited edition.

Marta De Pascalis is an italian composer living and working in Berlin. Her solo works employ analog synthesis and tape loops, incorporating free playing into steady, repetitive patterns. She has produced two albums of Berlin School minimal synth excursions: the self-released Quitratue (2014) and Anzar (The Tapeworm, 2016). Her new piece ‘Her Core’ has been published on spring 2018 by The Wormhole. Marta creates densely layered collages of glowing melodic shards and growling bass lines, her hypnotic minimal synth figures warping and whirling around each other before dissolving into entropic oblivion. For her compositions she uses improvisation on a tape-loop system, in which patterns of repetition create a sense of a dense, dynamic and cathartic distance.

All music by Marta De Pascalis Recorded at WORM Sound Studios in Rotterdam, artist's studio and Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, between 2019 and 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Lorenzo Mazon Studio. All rights reserved to the respective owners. doser039LP - Morphine Records 2020

The King & City label is the subject of three 12" reissues, starting with One Blood's classic Lovers Rock take of William DeVaughn's soul anthem, Be Thankful.

Taking the influence of reggae from the Caribbean diaspora within the cultural melting pot of 70s London, the birth of Lovers Rock, often-dubbed 'romantic reggae', is a uniquely black British sound, developed against a backdrop of riots, racial tension and sound systems.

A style suited to the London scene, it represents an apolitical counterpoint to the then dominant conscious Rastafarian sound and continued the soulful and commonly love-themed rocksteady style.

Active during the scene's peak, King & City was launched by Neville King and Lee Laing to champion the sound and alongside other producers like Dennis Bovell, created genre-defining hits.

Formed in 1979 One Blood was made up of the 5 Robinson brothers - Errol, Jerry, Lloyd, Trevor and Paul - and recording at the legendary TMC studios, went on to release two albums and countless singles.

Be Thankful pays homage to DeVaughn's original, with smooth vocals gliding atop tight drum and bass, vocal jumping up dub pom acapella to summer perfection. The tapes here passed to cohort Lexx, crafting a wonderful discodub that is all groove, expertly cutting back and forth...diamonds in the back, sunroof top.

No Tengas Miedo' es un disco que se gestó durante los recientes tiempos de pandemia y que nos hace recordar que no debemos de tener miedo de vivir ni de morir, que tenemos que replantear las formas de vida que teníamos antes de que todo el mundo se detuviera pero que sigue siendo un privilegio seguir vivos. Creemos que esta es
una nueva oportunidad de remediar todos los daños que le hemos hecho a la Madre Tierra, a nuestro cuerpo, a nuestra alma, a nuestros semejantes. Creemos que debemos de tener fe y esperanza en el humano, aún cuando nuestros gobernantes nos dan demasiados motivos para creer lo contrario gracias a sus acciones (y sus inacciones). Todos enfrentamos diferentes obstáculos en nuestras vidas, pero debemos de saber que no estamos solos, que nos tenemos los unos a los otros, todos como hermanos y hermanas, sin banderas ni fronteras. Muchas veces pensé en no realizar este disco por el miedo que la sociedad y gobiernos nos inculcan a siempre esperar los peores escenarios, pero estoy harto de vivir con miedo, de vivir aguantándome las ganas de averiguar lo que puede ser o no ser. Además, desde que yo recuerdo, mis abuelos ya hablaba de crisis, mis padres también, y siempre hemos sabido salir adelante, porque nuestro espirítu es más fuerte que todos sus intentos por derribarnos. He decidido que no voy a parar de luchar por lo que quiero hasta el último día de mi vida. Queremos que todo aquel que compre este disco sienta el mismo espíritu con el que fue hecho y quenos ayude a esparcir la esperanza y fe que tanta falta le hace al mundo. Queremos salir adelante junto con todos ustedes, hombro a hombro, corazón con corazón.

"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."

Notes From The Forest Floor was originally premiered in a different form in July 2015 at The ICA as part of an evenings event dedicated to the work of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. Played in almost pitch dark the hour long piece was played prior to a concert of work by and inspired by Scelsi. Chris responded to Scelsi's microtonal works using recording of insects and other wildlife/environmental sounds from La Selva tropical rain forest reserve in Costa Rica. An edited shorter piece from this installation was on the Scelsi Ep titled Invertebrate Harmonics which gathered great reviews from the Quietus to the Vinyl Factory. Whilst working with Chris again this year having had the stereo ICA installation version sitting on his hard drive for 5 years Adrian Corker asked Chris if he would be interested in releasing it.Chris was soon after heading back to Costa Rica working with David Attenborough and offered to make new recordings and develop the original piece.

Georgia Rodgers Line Of Parts was originally premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2019 as part of the Huddersfield Professional Development Programme for Female Composers of Electronic Music project. Originally having trained a an acoustician Rodgers work is concerned with" timbral detail". She has had work performed by ensembles such as Apartment House and The Riot Ensemble but for Line of Parts worked with the Huddersfield Immersive Sound System(HISS) using its network of 48 channels and 66 speakers.The piece and stereo mix down of this work is composed of field recordings made in the Cairngorms and North London, sine waves and voice.

Isolating is the industrial solo alter ego of London-based, Stephen Hindman, one half of The Golden FIlter. Coming off of their moody 2020 debut EP on Optimo Music, On August 28th, Isolating will release an analog, lo-fi, gritty full-length LP called Perennial on their own 4GN3S label. Disquieting and dystopian, the album shifts from the beatless drone of ‘Mortification’ to the IDM inspired electro in ‘Sacrament’, each track melding into each other with an unsettling anxiety.

The LP mirrors the concepts behind ’Perennial Philosophy’ by Aldous Huxley. Solitarily created in London room on a Modular system, ‘Perennial’ tackles the perspective in spirituality that views all of the world's religions as sharing a single, metaphysical origin, with a nod to the Lucretius quote; “To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.” The album photography of Stephen is by Agnes Haus.

Faitiche presents a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization. Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.

abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.

The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.

The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Presenting a collection of stone-cold classic breakbeats and b-boy jams from the sunkissed vaults of Miami's legendary TK Disco label!

NYC in the late 70's and early 80's saw a nascent street subculture fully evolve, a movement with it's own language, art, aesthetics, dances, fashion and way of living.

What would become what is now globally known as 'hip-hop' was in its infancy, with it's own legends and history being forged on an almost daily basis across the city's Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods. Music was central to hip-hop, the DJ was king and at the hands of people like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Grandmaster Flowers, Mean Gene, Jazzy Jay, Afrika Bambaataa, Charlie Chase and numerous other groundbreaking DJ's of the era, music took on a whole new meaning that would reverberate through popular culture for the rest of time.

The breaks - minute sections or breakdowns of a record where we get to the unadulterated groove and the band on the record cut loose - is what it was all about! Unlike the discotheque DJ's who favoured the long mixes and blends in their club scenarios, hip-hop DJ's were amassing huge collections of records that had these magical sections on them, often x 2 copies of each, so that they could elongate the best part of the record ad infinitum by cutting them up live - all killer no filler! These special on the fly mixes and edits were then unleashed in the local parks of their neighbourhoods, on gargantuan DIY sound systems for all of their friends and neighbours to party on down until the wee small hours. These breakbeat segments also gave the MC's space to address the gathered masses without their voices colliding with lavish string arrangements or vocals underneath. A clear, concise, stripped back slab of funk on which to put forth their ideas, feelings and rhymes for all to enjoy.

Collected here are some of those most infamous breakbeats, all from the TK vaults. These records were studied by these young DJ's, coveted, covered up, hunted down, whispered about in darkened corners by those who needed and obsessed over the freshest of beats. There's a good chance you will have heard these records in some form or another as they have been covered, sampled, recreated and spun in clubs across the galaxy for over 4 decades. These are the very building blocks upon which popular culture and club music have been built, and here they are all in one place for your listening enjoyment!

Released with love and respect by: Above Board and TK Disco, Miami FL. 2020.

New album of one of the biggest Reggae/Dub french soundsystem starring MacGyver, Rooty Step & Pupajim (who worked with Alpha Steppa, Biga Ranx, High Tone, Mungo's Hi-Fi ...).

Available as super limited edition including 60x60cm Poster !

Since their inception at start of the 2000s, Stand High Patrol have rocked sound systems to their own riddim, assimilating and re-purposing the codes of the genre in their own unique style. From tiny bars in Brittany to huge festival stages, on independent radio or across national airwaves, the crew have quietly trod their own path, never compromising their core value of independence. Connoisseurs have long recognised Stand High’s credentials both as a dub group and a leading sound system, but they stand out from the crowd because of their ability to deliver the unexpected, whether live or on record. Their ability to draw such a diverse audience is testament to this atypical approach to making music.

In 2020, almost 20 years since their humble beginnings, the collective presents their fifth album, “Our Own Way”. As with their first two albums “Midnight Walkers” and “Matter Of Scale”, now considered as classics in their genre, this new opus asserts itself as the latest representation of the crew’s versatile approach to crafting sound. Their music, a blend of its own known as “Dubadub”, has always borrowed influences from multiple sources, and over the course of their career their roots in dub and reggae have intertwined with hip-hop, jazz, new wave, trip-hop and numerous other genres. The ‘Dubadub Musketeers’ have never ceased experimenting, forever seeking to increase the sonic territory they cover, day after day. Both live and recorded, they’ve made it a point of honour to never offer up the same thing twice. Any resemblance that “Our Own Way” might bear to those first two albums is a consequence of this obvious creative continuity, rather than of going “back to basics”.

In contrast to the last two Stand High Patrol records, the hip-hop inspired “The Shift”, or the Bristol indebted “Summer On Mars”, “Our Own Way” doesn’t have a unifying concept or theme. Rather than being limited to a single aesthetic, the LP pays respect to the entire canon of Jamaican music, all unified under Stand High’s inimitable production values. With the wealth of experience gained during the recording of their last two records, the collective decided to aim for a freer project, letting themselves be guided by their own music and their own instincts. The end result is a musical portrait of what Stand High Patrol is in the present moment.

The tracks that make up the new LP burst out of the studio, each born out of unbridled, impulsive creativity. Previously unheard compositions and specially re-tooled dub plates have been assembled into a tracklist that shifts and moves like a classic Dubadub Musketeer live set. Each step of the process has been refined by years of practice : composition, effects, and the final mix. Throughout “On Our Way”, the brutal dub stepper, though still a favourite for sound system sessions, is noticeable by its absence. Instead, it’s the full weight of the crew’s reggae heritage that’s expressed in the mix. It's not just the depth and weight of each tune that strikes the listener, but also the spaces heard between the notes that grab and hold their attention.. The sense of a trip, whether musical, internal or geographic, is omnipresent throughout the LP, linking each track to those before and after. “Our Own Way” finds Stand High Patrol exploring as usual, yet also narrating their journey as they’ve rarely done before

DJ/producer Don Pascal has long been an advocate of fusing London’s sound system aesthetic with more traditional music from around the globe.

Following on from his 2014 release The Cali Experiment, (fusing Latin influences with the sounds of London’s underground club scene) we are happy to announce his forthcoming album The Dakar Experiment.

Featuring musicians from Senegal’s legendary evolving band Xalam, The Dakar Experiment is a sonic exploration fusing Senegalese musicianship and London’s Broken Beat scene.

As the homogenised sound of western pop permeates traditional music the world over, The Dakar Experiment offers an alternate pallet of influence, retaining tradition yet suggesting other possible paths.

The foundations of the album were laid at Henri Guillabert’s studio in Dakar over most of 2016 with Moustapha - Taffa – Cisse, Yahael Camara Onono and of course Henri and Don, then completed in London with an array of musicians, pulling on the city’s vibrant and re-emergent Broken Beat scene.

Featuring vocals by Lyric L, Rich BLK and Niara Scarlett, and remixes by EVM128, Trev and Xtra Brux, The Dakar Experiment is an exercise in finding what connects us in an increasingly divisive world.

Fully immersive electronic music by US composer Maggi Payne, inspired by the arctic winds. Maggi Payne's sound worlds invite the listeners to enter the sound and be carried with it, experiencing it from the inside out in intimate detail. The sounds are almost tactile and visible.

The music is based on location recordings, with each sound carefully selected for its potential—its slow unfolding revealing delicate intricacies—and its inherent spatialization architecting and sculpting the aural space where multiple perspectives and trajectories coexist. With good speakers, some space in your schedule, and a mind-body continuum willing to resonate with Payne’s electroacoustic journey, but then it will take you to places that other music can’t reach.

From the sounds of dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing she immerses the listener in a world strangely unfamiliar. Maggi Payne is a composer, video artist, recording engineer, photographer, and flutist and is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music and a faculty member at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Creole Soul!" Two words are enough for David Walters to qualify his music. The exclamation point to support radicalism and faith in its purpose.
A lapidary definition behind the doors of which hides the maze of a culture that crosses the oceans, connects continents and islands by an invisible but powerful thread. A deeply ingrained bond that allows Africa, America, Europe, and the Caribbean to converse with each other with a language as universal as music, dance, carnivals, or ceremonies.

Spread on the globe; the different creole cultures find a point of convergence where they are all represented: New York.
In this city, where motivated by his friend photographer JR, he once gave a concert in the street, David Walters decided to set the scene for his new album.

After five years of traveling the world, meeting musicians for the TV show “The New Explorers” (Canal +), it is around this hyperactive city that he chose to shine his Créole Sun. To imbue his music with the state of mind and aesthetics that reigned in the 70s and 80s.
While in 2018, he soloes produced Nola Is Calling (an album recorded in New Orleans with the Creole community of Black Indians, selected by Gilles Peterson in the best of 2019 on BBC 6). That’s with the essential contribution of the musical mastermind Bruno “Patchworks” Hovart (Mr. President, Voilààà Sound System, Da Break ...) that David produced Soleil Kreyol.

More than a musical partner, Patchworks turned out to be the sound engineer David was looking for. The second part of an ideal pair, the one with whom, set on the same frequencies, he wrote, composed, recorded, played all the instruments. Thought all the arrangements, tweaked the details as carried by a continuous breath. Or rather a light. The “Soleil Kréyol” (Creole Sun).

For the last 20 years London-based author and party organiser Tim Lawrence has dedicated himself to excavating the history of New York City party culture and bringing some of the most powerful aspects of that culture to London’s dance scene, from where it has ricocheted around the world.

Having conducted the first and set of major interviews with David Mancuso of the New York City Loft, Lawrence started to host Loft-style Lucky Cloud Sound System parties with David and friends in London in June 2003. In February 2004 he published the first of three published three pioneering histories that have excavated and championed the previously overlooked foundations of contemporary party culture: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music (1970-79), Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene (1973-92), and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor (1980-83). Since 2018 Lawrence has hosted and DJed at the community audiophile party "All Our Friends. Paper Magazine describes him as the “reigning authority on the history of dance music in New York”.

With knowledge to share, and a readership as well as a dance floor to feed, Lawrence released Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor as the debut imprint on Reappearing Records. A year in the making, a compilation featuring rare and iconic tracks that appear in his much-loved and heavily-thumbed classic Love Saves the Day amounts to the follow-up. The collection features several tracks selected regularly by Mancuso, the party host who exerted a prophetic and unparalleled influence on New York City party culture, as charted by Lawrence. It also includes choice picks from groundbreaking DJs such as Michael Cappello, Steve D’Acquisto, Francis Grasso, Richie Kaczor, Larry Levan and Nicky Siano, whose expressive contributions are faithfully recorded in Love Saves the Day. The compilation traces how disco grew out of the record collections and intuitive sensibility of these and other DJs, offering a unique survey of the era’s expansive sonic palette.

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.

Following 2019’s New Atlantis LP under his experimental techno alias Efdemin, Phillip Sollmann’s Monophonie is a project dedicated to uniting different strands of utopian music. His approach: combining and recontextualizing rare historical instruments of sonic research of Hermann von Helmholtz (19th century) with the self-designed, microtonal instruments of Harry Partch and metal sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia.
The result is a psychedelic investigation into just intonation – alternative tuning systems that create unique sets of harmonics not found in conventional scales. Monophonie recasts these sounds into new rhythmic environments where epic kosmische, polyrhythms, acoustic techno and microtonal glow are interwoven into a rare music.
Over nine tracks, the album explores multiple forms of minimalism, from unwavering repetition to paired-down chords and sparse sonic environments. But it also seeks to expand the sound spectrum of Partch’s custom built organs and melodic percussion instruments as well as Bertoia’s sonambient singing metal rods into a atmospheric otherworldliness.
Monophonie was first composed in 2016 and premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in 2017, before it went on to the renowned Ruhrtriennale and Kampnagel in Hamburg. It was performed by one of Germany’s premier neue musik collectives Ensemble Musikfabrik together with Sollmann himself on von Helmholtz’s original double siren, with set design by Michael Kleine and wardrobe by Peter Kisur of Honeysuckle Company.

2011 album available on vinyl for the first time. Master percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah joins forces once again with dubmaster Adrian
Sherwood at the controls and a whole host of guest musicians, including contributions from dancehall pioneer Jazzwad and electronics from Adamski.

All the elements of a classic African Head Charge album are present: spaced out dub, tribal chants, ecstatic trance but updated with a rugged sound system undercarriage. Arguably some of the hardest hitting AHC rhythms laid down in the studio to date.

Cut as a double LP for maximum dynamics by King Kevin Metcalfe. Includes digital download card for full contents and double-sided poster insert containing new interview with Bonjo on the making of the record.