quête:plastic flat

We presenting the upcoming Posthuman album "The Mind Is A Heavy Burden" coming out on Netherlands based imprint Flatlife Records. The full album arrives as a 9-track purple 12" vinyl and 13 track digital / streaming. This isn't the usual club-ready acid house to be expected from Posthuman of recent years, but instead a callback to their output in the early 2000s and their cassette releases on The Dark Outside. There's still plenty of their signature 303+808+101 sounds throughout but it's overall slower, more introspective and darker.

On her sophomore album "Germ in a Population of Buildings", upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift, and the feeling of discovering strange patterns in different ecosystems. Often, the Amsterdam-based artist finds herself zooming in and out beyond a place's most recognizable surface features to inhabit the microscopic and gigantic. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures. upsammy's debut album, 2020's critically-acclaimed "Zoom", was praised for its careful reimagining of IDM, evolving vignettes that nodded towards the dancefloor without being shackled to its rigid set of rules. On "Germ in a Population of Buildings" her process has evolved considerably; the skeletal trace of IDM is still present but it's been trapped in amber, allowing her unique sonic landscape to develop organically. 'Being is a Stone' is a proof of concept in many ways, layering upsammy's contorted voice in rickety patterns beneath a lattice of fragile rhythms and faintly melancholy synths. It's never immediately obvious where the sounds are coming from - a hiccuping beat might be glass cracking underfoot, and larger pulses could be wet concrete, rusted iron or bent plastic. As the sounds develop they morph into each other, demolishing what came before and building on top of the ornamental wreckage. On the dynamic 'Constructing', upsammy's sound design fluxes through hyperactive bass music structures, abstracting expectations at every turn. Often her sounds are whisper quiet, rattling and vibrating until heavier masonry drops and disrupts the structure. And when discernible rhythms subside into the background, like on the album's eerie title track, they become almost illusory, morphing between the real world and the electronic. upsammy's processed voice works like a bridge between these realms, snaking between stark, whimsical melodies on 'Patterning', arching from AutoTuned detachment into cooing, dreamy intimacy. By considering the harmonies between each location she's visited, upsammy has been able to build a unique topology that's an uncanny digital amalgam of her lived experience. It's a thoughtful alternative in an era more concerned with flatting the landscape than crumpling it and examining its peaks and troughs.

Iconic french punk band Ludwig Von 88 celebrates its 40 years birthday with a 4LP/CD box set including their recent albums "L'Hiver des Crêtes", 'L'Ete du No Future", "Le Printemps du Pogo" & "L'Automne de L'Anarchie".

Who managed the artistic feat of composing 56 cosmic hits in one year, recording them, engraving them with chisels on plastic discs that are not at all environmentally friendly, and packaging them in a magnificent box, with marvellous illustrations and sleeves of a taste that surpasses perfection? Who did?

Look no further than the Ludwigs, who could do it. And since they had no plans for 2023, apart from celebrating their fortieth birthday over a tasteless cake in a dingy old flat in a godforsaken suburb in the forbidden zone, they did it. And they're proud of it.

56 tracks. One album per season. The Mozart of pogo becomes the Vivaldi of stakhanovism!

Good rough punk, ska, swing, reggae, cumbia and even yodelling. What a gift to the universe before its final destruction.

Listen and enjoy. Sing along and get your groove on. After the Ludwigs, the music will have the flavour of a rosewater romance declaimed by Garou in Birkenstock and the colour of the cosmic void after his encounter with André Rieu's five poodles.

RAW SPACE" is rooted in chaos and chance, sensuality and intensity - it's an album that's able to sound alarmingly freeform and tightly controlled simultaneously. Already established as a genre-disrupting DJ, and even dubbed "demon of the Nile" by Ugandan politicians after an exuberant performance at Nyege Nyege festival in September 2019, Kampala-based sonic hypnotist Authentically Plastic brings a digger's literacy, an activist's intent, and an artist's playfulness to their jagged debut album. As both a DJ and a producer, Authentically Plastic is drawn to the idea of chance as a creative tool - to push against the idea of the all-knowing genius, and approach artistry instead as a facilitator, unraveling parallel mismatched rhythmic events. Their musical process is to start with chaos, then attempt to mold those fleshy structures into polyrhythmic mutations, pulling influence from East Africa's innovative musical landscape and augmenting it with an exploratory sense of surrealism. On opening track 'Aesthetic Terrorism', rough-hewn industrial rhythms chug mechanically against course, dissonant synth blasts and acidic arpeggios. There's a faint sparkle of Detroit's chrome-plated Afro-futurism, but bathed in neon light, reflecting Africa's contemporary electronic revolution. Authentically Plastic's productions have a sense of thematic coherence, but their myriad influences are torched into cinders, leaving inverse impressions and ghost rhythms: the tuned overdriven clatter of 'Anti-Fun' echoes Ugandan kadodi modes, yet simultaneously mirrors the rugged out-zone grit of Container or Speaker Music; standout centerpiece 'Buul Okyelo' meanwhile is as rhythmically cross-eyed as Slikback or Nazar, but juxtaposes kinetic dancefloor thumps with chaotic microtonal ritual cycles. Writing "RAW SPACE", Authentically Plastic found themselves fascinated by sonic flatness. They realized that in Western art, there's an obsession with depth of field that carries into music, robbing it of intensity. The album is an example of the power that can be reclaimed when you let go of depth, letting sounds rub together carnally and spawn something fresh and unexpected.