quête:ph project

*MILKY CLEAR VINYL - 300 COPIES ONLY FOR WORLD!!* Technology + Teamwork’s fizzling synths, interweaving textures and punchy rhythms are beguiling on their long-awaited debut album We Used To Be Friends. However, at the heart of it all it’s the connection between the group’s two members, Anthony Silvester and Sarah Jones, the friendship the much-travelled duo have managed to maintain for nearly 15 years and a showcase of the slow-burning construction of the electronic world that they’ve surrounded themselves with. We Used To Be Friends is ultimately the tale of two storied artists in their own right, holding onto each other through personal and career twists and turns, relocations and broader movements through respective phases of their lives. Silvester and Jones first met and then collaborated as part of biting post-punk five-piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter’s demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Harry Styles and Bloc Party among many others, Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music – she’s also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including: Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Vleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films. Technology + Teamwork is the constant throughout all of that though. “Technology + Teamwork's name perfectly describes how we work” Silvester explains. “Sometimes the teamwork is between each other and sometimes it’s between us and the technology.” Although going by the name Technology + Teamwork as far back as 2014, two events conspired that pulled the project into focus for the pair of them: firstly, Silvester spent a year constructing a soundproof studio shed on the border of London and Essex where he lives. Secondly, inevitably, the pandemic brought the globe-trotting Jones back home to just seven miles away from her long-time collaborator and friend. “We probably hung out more than we had for a few years” says Silvester. “Also, after all her Pillow Person releases Sarah had gotten really good with recording vocals and knowing what did and didn’t work and had a really good home studio set up. We still worked separately though, exchanging ideas via email and WhatsApp.” As with many artists through 2020 and early 2021, working separately was a new necessity that they were forced to adapt to. However, it became clear that there were creative benefits to it. “It really changed our sound and our sounds became a lot more focused as a result” Jones says. “I wanted to use the same ideas of improvisation that I might use while playing the drums for myself and apply that to melodies and lyrics.” The album bristles with hyperpop modernity. You can hear it in the manipulated vocals most prominently on Big Blue’s disco strut and on Moving Too’s heady mix of pitched up voice and burrowing sub bass. However, the pair also looked to San Francisco and the West Coast synthesis movement of the 60s, Silvester inspired by the likes of Suzanne Ciani and Don Buchla. The plaintive lo-fi and melancholy of Amsterdam incorporates Mutable Instrument’s Marbles by Émilie Gillet which – inspired by Buchla’s own synthesis work – outputs random voltages to give the track an air of unpredictability. It’s something that occurs throughout the album, the duo revelling in the happy accidents that disrupt the flow of their hook-laden pop. “The ‘Buchlian’ ideas of music having randomness and uncertainty, completely freed us up” Silvester explains. “It felt a bit like having more members in the band, machines that didn't do what you expected or intended.” Perhaps more subtly, is the influence of 17th and 18th century Baroque music, with Silvester drawing a line between it and the 90’s R’n’B he and Jones both love – exemplified perhaps best on K+B’s percussive claps and sultry grooves. The portentous juddering synthpop of the title track, meanwhile, alludes specifically to Handel’s Sarabande. It’s typical of an album that only needs a scratch of its seemingly glossy surface to unearth a myriad of contorted touchstones and reference points that’ve fermented beneath it. Thematically there’s an anxious sense to the record, with tracks often balancing above a quiet sense of unerring tension even at their most bombastic. Moving Too is the result of an existential doubt that hit Silvester while out cycling, with the outro refrain "it's not enough to die you also have to be forgotten" a take on something Samuel Beckett once said. These worries are echoed on the album’s closing track What A Year, which borrows a lot of lines from the late drag performer and fashion designer Dorian Corey including the grimly defiant "you're gonna leave your mark somewhere in this world just by getting through it”. Those clouds offer a counter point to We Used To Be Friends, but then isn’t that what great pop albums do? Technology + Teamwork undoubtedly love the craft of the hook and the song, but they always position themselves left of centre, prepared to scuff things up, pull something out of shape or manipulate something to leave it sounding warped. Much like their friendship, nothing here is particularly linear – and it’s all the better for it. Bio: Anthony Silvester & Sarah Jones first collaborated as part of biting post-punk five piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter's demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Bat for Lashes, Harry Styles and Bloc Party (among many others), Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music - she's also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Wleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films. Technology & Teamwork is the constant throughout all of that though. "We Used To Be Friends" proves that Technology & Teamwork undoubtedly love the craft of the hook and the song, but they always position themselves left of centre, prepared to scuff things up, pull something out of shape or manipulate something to leave it sounding warped. Much like their friendship, nothing hear is particularly linear - and it's all the better for it.

Since Interstellar Space, John Coltrane's posthumously released duo album with Rashied Ali, the combination of sax and drums has received an aura of sublime spiritual ambition. It is where tireless truth seekers come together to aim for something transcendental. Something too big for words. Of course, a lot has happened in the meantime.

The available options - philosophically, stylistically, temperamentally - are endless. Musicians are aware of those historical turning points, yet they also try to add their own twists and interpretations. Some of them succeed. One of reed player Mattias De Craene's many projects - MDC III - is a project involving drums and saxophone. A striking difference: De Craene invited two drummers (Simon Segers, Lennert Jacobs), that have been active in the worlds of jazz, pop, free improvisation and experimental music. They are the ideal foil for De Craene's vision, which seems to exclude no opposites. While the use of a recorder, electronics and percussion steers the music beyond the classic acoustic limitations, the result becomes strikingly rich with contrasts. What is abstract and introspective the first moment can switch - gradually or abruptly - to moments of fierce ecstasy the next.

The music feels free (free from limitations, free to choose its own logic), but also invites. Shifting moods and textures are combined with intricate rhythmical patterns, as the drummers lock together in dense, complex and/or ritualistic grooves. A minimal pulse, accompanied by murmuring hisses of brushes and a serenading sax is contrasted with moments of exuberance. The result is many things at once, but despite these wildly varying colors, sounds, textures, rhythms and moods, they are all linked, part of a generous, iridescent whole.

The trance-inducing trio MDCIII is back. And that equals yet another delicious load of modular drums, wildly processed saxophone sounds, improvisation & pulsating grooves.

After their first EP, MDCIII ft. Sylvie Kreusch, and their subsequent first (internationally) acclaimed album 'Dreamhatcher', the 'double drums' saxophone trio with Mattias De Craene, Simon Segers & Lennert Jacobs is all set to show what angle rock 'n roll can really come from. On their new album 'Drawn In Dusk' (release: end of September via W.E.R.F records) the trio delivers a whole new palette of sounds that are just as mystical, energetic and wild as 'Dreamhatcher'.

For more than twenty years, Roel Funcken has been a cornerstone in electronic experimentation. Alongside his brother Don, this Dutch sound sculptor melted hip-hop, industrial and soundscapes under monikers like Funckarma and Shadow Huntaz. A prolific solo musician and collaborator as well, Funcken teams up with Cor Bolten to revive the Legiac project with the eight tracks of Banisteriopsis Caapi. Keys appear through a sorrowful haze in "Mimosa Hostilis", this machined mist difussing as distorted strings penetrate before a dawning of icy brightness. Modulated forms and shapes billow in the bubble and trill of "Pyschotria Viridis" before the orbiting interference and introspection of "Epicatechine." Percussion is reduced to a texture, the duo finding structure in droplets of water, the stretch of steel and a litany of field recordings. The partnership dive deep into their chosen sounds, elongating and expanding tones to find harmony in the absence and isolation that is their focus. Pieces like "Solanaceae" bristle with an understated elegance, like starlight piercing a brooding night sky, while "Banisteriopsis Caapi" finds an eerie solace in its repurposing of voice as an undulating elegy. Legiac achieve a distant intimacy with their listener, a relationship forged through complex compositions, gentle movements and subtle shifts.

George Palmer is a young artist from the DUB and sound system scene where he quickly stood out thanks to these stage appearances. It was with the international label Irie Ites Records that he wanted to collaborate in order to produce his first album.

Entitled "Working Man" this opus is composed of 10 titles including 2 combinations with LION D, famous international singer based in Italy and SOLO BANTON, famous English singer and toaster who needs no introduction.

The instrumentals are composed by big names of the genre: Sly & Robbie (Jamaica), Jammy's (Jamaica), Naram (New Zealand), Med Tone (Israel), Irie Ites (France) giving this project a great scope.

After the release of 6 music videos from the album and the physical (CD) and digital release at the end of June 2022, the project will soon be released on LP due to strong demand from its fans. In addition, this summer you were able to find George Palmer alongside Irie Ites Sound for fiery stage performances at various European festivals.

To accompany the release of the LP, several clips will be released and a new tour is in preparation.

SHIFTING - The brandnew album by FRANK POPP ENSEMBLE, the first since 2005! It has been quiet during the last years, apart from an album as „Frank Popp“ called „Receiver“ in 2009 on his own label TV Eye Records. Frank Popp was always busy tho, working as a producer for other bands (Odd Couple, Sun And The Wolf, etc), designing hundreds of posters and booking top notch concerts in Berlin (The Jesus And Mary Chain, Billy Childish or 60s legends The Pretty Things, just to name a few. Once a month Mr. Popp runs several dance partys since many years. Now he is back at his desk for his own musical project FRANK POPP ENSEMBLE! And again he got help from many wonderful special guests lending this project their voices, such as Jesper Munk, Aydo Abay, Lucy Kruger, Kat Ott from 24/7 Diva Heaven, Anna Glahn and classic FPE singer Sam Leigh-Brown. Mr. Popp wrote, recorded, produced and mixed „Shifting" in Spain between january and march 2021, accompanied by Jascha Kreft (Odd Couple) for the songwriting sessions. The 16-song heavyweight takes us on a colourful journey through vintage soul scorchers, psychedelic soundtrack scapes, spector-esque sound walls, bootboy glamrock and even a riviera space-disco tune can be found on the new longplayer. Of course lotsa things changed in that many years. Many lyrics are written by Popp himself, out for trouble in impertinent phrasing here and there. The music has become mature and deeper and his voice can be heard on two songs, the first time ever. It sure is a remarkable piece of high quality music, that’s been delivered here. Watch out, world!

From a research work started in full lockdown three years ago, finally sees the light (or darkness) Echi Senza Fine, a remastered collection of sound material by Tasaday. Inspired by the controversial media story in 1971 of the discovery of a tribe in the Philippines that apparently had technology that had stood still in the Stone Age, the project officially borrows the name Tasaday in 1984 from the evolution of Nulla Perreale, in turn union of Die Form (musical part) & Orgasm Denied (performative part).

To put it in the words of Marcello Ambrosini, the Tasadays find in Die Form the controlled destruction of the form after its careful design and construction, while in Nulla Iperreale the spontaneity free from any possible superstructure. They declare themselves new primitives, not in the perspective of a nostalgic return to a pre-industrial or prehistoric external world, but in the exception of an inner experience in stark contrast to the leviathan of the single utilitarian thought that has dominated the West for centuries.

Their production-action does not allow itself to be tempted by the repetitiveness used by many industrial groups of those years, thus resulting seminal in the evolution of the scene. Their impulse to go further and not remain caged in the format of the new wave is witnessed by their particular sound vocabulary that sees, along with the use of conventional instruments, the use of DIY tools such as Chopper Vox and highly sui generis tools, like the Camolofono, cariole loaded with sheets, stones, tubes, chains and “garbage” of various shapes and sizes.

A discography dotted with primordial electronic experiments that reaches the new millennium through several vinyl records and an endless number of cassettes. From this undefined and mysterious number of tapes that is born Echi Senza Fine: 14 tracks (+ 2 digital bonuses) remastered, collected by Asymmetrical, who also edited the release insert, a collage of visual and textual material from their fanzines. A series of 300 transparent vinyl + Insert.

The musical project of Jake Webb, Methyl Ethel have always been a surrealist outfit - a dark and obscured expression of life set to the backdrop of dream pop hooks.

'Triage' is a more reflective album than their previous two however, featuring 'Scream Whole' and 'Real Tight' it explores the notion of coming of age, only to reference it for the snapshots and passing memories that it has become.

Enjoying phenomenal successes over the last few years, the single 'Ubu' was recently accredited Gold in Australia (helped by it landing at #4 in Triple J's Hottest 100) and their tourdates in Australia and the UK since 2016 have all been sellU outs.

In the wake of a 2020 edition of Movement in the City's second album Black Teardrops (1981), Sharp-Flat Records returns with a prequel by way of a reissue of the band's self-titled debut from 1979.

As the 1970s were drawing to a close, the epic Black Disco studio project with its signature pairing of drum machine and organ had run it course. After delivering a killer trilogy of cosmic lounge outings dating back to 1975, the group yearned for funkier grooves and the core trio of composer Pops Mohamed on organ with Basil Coetzee on tenor sax and Sipho Gumede on bass decided to hire a drummer and rebrand as Movement in the City. In contrast with the New Age detachment of Black Disco, Movement in the City was conceptually grounded in the bleak social realism depicted on its photographic album covers and leaned into the vivid sensibilities of library music from the era. Blending Cape jazz with funk and soul, the group's output evokes a soundtrack for South African city life at the outset of the 1980s while nodding allegorically to the subterranean movements that were in the course of shaking the cage for political change.

With its cast of jazz fusion all-stars, Movement in the City is the manifesto of a band in transition - a bold and slick first offering that delivers a modern South African sound capable of both the funky exuberances of "Mister Lucky" as well as the down-home pathos of "Blue Sunday." Restored from its original tape masters and released in partnership with As-Shams Archive and Pops Mohamed, this rare artefact of South African jazz history is back in print for the very first time since its original 1979 release.

BART & THE BEDAZZLED: PEOPLE PERSON + CARBOARD MAN (7")
Bart & The Bedazzled return with a sensational AA-side 45 with the highlife-vibed-plaintive pop of 'People Person' and the layered 'Cardboard Man', featuring the gorgeous guest vocals of Earth Girl Helen Brown. "World dance pop meets '80s indie" LA's northeast side is home to a dizzying number of independent artists and bands. One of the scene's most distinctive sounds emanates from Bart & The Bedazzled, a collaborative group led by talented songwriter Bart Davenport. After debuting in 2018 with the Blue Motel album Bart reconnects with the stellar musicians that make up the Bedazzled for two exclusive new songs of, what he terms, "world dance pop meets 80s indie". Consisting of Los Angeles' highly respected players, the collective are undoubtedly a "musicians' band" playing for joy, performing for and with other artists that inhabit underground haunts such as Zebulon or Permanent Records Roadhouse. This is their sound!
With these new tracks The Bedazzled usher in a new phase, adding a small dose of drum machinery to the mix, resulting in an uplifting, danceable endeavour. On top of this, hand played congas and shakers blend with ultra clean guitars to form a rich context for Bart Davenport's patented, smooth vocal. Newcomer band member and producer Nic Hessler (Catwalk, Captured Tracks) fits these pieces together in seamless mixes.
People Person celebrates the collective human experience, while subtly acknowledging that people often are "the worst". It's an upbeat ode to a beautiful world that sadly may never be saved. Meanwhile, the semi-fictional Cardboard Man critiques a society desperate for truth and a way out of dark times only to find omnipresent, puppet-like heroes offering nothing real. Featuring guest singer Heidi Alexander aka Earth Girl Helen Brown her distinctive tone and phrasing add a much needed weirdo energy to a decidedly consonant pop track.
It comes as no surprise the group have gravitated towards world-dance-ish sounds. Andrés Renteria is an accomplished crate-digger and DJ, as is bassist Jessica Espeleta. She kicks off People Person with a dubby bass line, setting the stage for Wayne Faler's African highlife inspired guitars. It's still Bart & The Bedazzled, but this time they come with a sound somewhat reminiscent of '80s bands that also incorporated international flavors, such as the post Young Marble Giants project Weekend or French electro-obscuros Antena. Like those bands, Bart & The Bedazzled have a wide range of influences and the artistic intention to make something contemporary with them.
Above all, they're a group of friends who enjoy the creative process together. For them the journey is as important as the finished work.

• 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL
• GRAMMY AWARD WINNING HIP HOP PRODUCER FOR THE FUGEES, CYPRESS HILL AND HOUSE OF PAIN A.O.
• FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE NY D.I.T.C. CREW
• INCLUDES THE SINGLES “THE HIATUS” AND “J.D.’S
REVENGE” AND FAN FAVOURITES “5 FINGAS OF DEATH” AND “THIS ONE”
• FEATURING GUEST PERFORMANCES BY FAT JOE, PETE ROCK, BUSTA RHYMES, PHIFE DAWG, BIG L, LORD
FINESSE, AG, SADAT X AND TERRORIBUL A.O.

Bronx-born hip hop artist and producer Diamond is known as one of the founding members of the New York collective Diggin’ in the Crates Crew. He produced for a number of artists, including Cypress Hill, House Of Pain, KRS-One, Xzibit and won a Grammy Award for his production of the title track from The Fugees’ iconic album The Score.

In 1997 he released his second studio album Hatred, Passions and Infidelity. Included are the tracks “MC Iz My Ambition” and “No Wondah”, which were built around the lyrics from De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High”, released one year earlier. The album features many guest performances, including Don Barron, John Dough, Gina Thompson, Phife Dawg (A Tribe Called Quest), Pete Rock, Big L, Lord Finesse, AG, Fat Joe, Busta Rhymes, K. Terroribul and Sadat X.