Search:pre construction

By now you’re probably familiar with our wildly popular Brown Acid series of rare, lost and unreleased proto-metal and stoner rock singles from the 60s-70s. In the endless pursuit of those glorious gems, we often uncover equally brilliant rarities from the late-70s to late-80s Golden Age of Heavy Metal that also just must be heard, but they don’t fit the series’ aesthetic. Scrap Metal, Volume 1 collects some of the greatest unknown and lost Heavy Metal tracks, long buried beneath the avalanche of the era’s classic output.
We all know the old adage that history is told by the winners. But sometimes the losers tell the best stories. And while none of these bands found fame and fortune, this artifact and the volumes to come are testament to the enduring power of heavy music. You can hear the blood, sweat and beers that went into each of these singles. The recordings may be low budget, but the inspiration and talent is immutable. Not only are the amps turned up to 11, the boyish sexual innuendo is cranked to 69. You can hear the convergence of influences — NWOBHM, thrash, glam metal, doom, etc — colliding at once as the era birthed a wellspring of subgenres.
Many of these singles are self-released and were thus limited to a small run of copies. Those that remain are hoarded by collectors and sold for exorbitant amounts. We’ve collected the best of the best for you here. As with Brown Acid, all of these tracks are licensed legitimately and the artists all get paid. Because it’s the right thing to do.
LINER NOTES:
Rapid Tears launch this series with the perfect christening. The Toronto, ON quintet’s 1981 single “Headbang” is such the pinnacle of heavy metal madness that it almost sounds like a spoof. There’s also enough of the rapid-fire sputum that inspired Metallica to bang the head that doesn’t, as such, engage in said practice, to be found on the band’s sole full length Honestly. But “Headbang” is a straightforward glammy anthem for the ages.
Air Raid’s “69 In A 55” may be lyrically so sophomoric that it’s actually pretty clever, but this 1983 Bay Area power metal single is loaded with sleek Judas Priest riffs and interwoven melodies that are downright sublime. The band’s sole release, the 2-song Rock Force 7” features a curious band photo in which 3 band members — dolled up in Crüe makeup and leather — are sexually menacing the lead singer/guitarist tied to a bed. Another low budget highlight is when singer/guitarist Tommy “Thrasher” Merry imitates a delay effect on his vocals as he sings, “tonight!...tonight...night.”
Hades’ “Girls Will Be Girls” has a real demo cassette feel to its vastly uneven mix, but the energy to the performance makes this an undeniable keeper. The long running Paramus, NJ quintet’s 1982 2- song debut 7” titled Deliver Us From Evil features this blistering thrasher dominated by shimmering leads and confident vocals that show why the band went on to near-fame on Metal Blade Records.
Resless don’t need no T to prove that they’ve got “The Power” with this 1984 driving mid-tempo rocker in the vein of Mötley Crüe and Ratt. The River Vale, NJ quartet’s tight crunch wails all over Bon Jovi posers but it’s the band’s unique and subtle deployment of background vocals that gives this rager its staying power.
Pittsburgh, the Steel City, is home to Don Cappa, a band that pays tribute to the burgh, the metal, and the awesomeness of both with “Steel City Metal.” Their lone single, issued in 1987 with only 300 copies released, sounds like the work of some serious steel driving men, with a drummer who might’ve forgotten to wear a hard hat one too many times on the construction site.
The Beast has more of a punk feel to their aggressive “Enemy Ace” track from the 4-song Power Metal EP from 1983 — something like Dr. Know meets D.O.A. But their look, artwork and lyrics all prove that Heavy Metal is where their hearts lie. And this hook filled monster delivers repeated lines like, “I command them all in my lofty realm,” with commendable conviction.
Dead Silence from Denver, Colorado, debuting in 1984 is not to be confused with Dead Silence from Denver, Colorado, who also debuted in 1984. The former a workman’s hard rock bar band, the latter a political peace punk band and neither knowing of the other’s existence throughout their tenure. The pre-internet days were a marvel, indeed.This Dead Silence spits out a slick, Nugent tinged rocker called “Can’t Stop” about life on the road.
The Danger Zone is, by all accounts, not the place to be. And, Hazardous Waste of Boston, MA saw fit to add their two cents on the matter with this 1986 single that combines Van Halen’s flashy musicianship with NWOBHM aggression that sounds so awesome it teeters on itself entering the “Danger Zone.”
Czar’s heavy, doomy “Iron Curtain” single from 1982 hearkens to the sleazy sounds of Saint Vitus and Pentagram with its cranked up DOD Distortion pedal in a Peavey combo amp guitar tone and meaty, barking vocals. The upstate NY quintet only issued this 2-song single, but its driving rhythm, nosedive whammy-bar guitar solos and comparatively mature Cold War subject matter show they had real potential.
Not much is known about Real Steel’s majestic “Viking Queen” from 1987, other than it rocks hard and the 7” 45 sells for upwards of a grand on the collectors market. The Flint, Michigan band recorded at the home studio of local radio personality Bill Lamb, who primarily released Christian Gospel recordings. So, perhaps the band was struck down by a bolt of lightning shortly after this rare single’s release. Whatever the case may be, it’s a must have for fans of classic metal mayhem.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce ViewFinder / Hide & Seek, a new release from acclaimed American experimental composer David Behrman, presenting recordings made in collaboration with Jon Gibson and Werner Durand between 1989 and 2020. Last heard from on Black Truffle as part of the collaborative art song/live electronics madness of She’s More Wild, these recordings find Behrman continuing the pioneering work in interactive electronics that have established him as one of the major living experimental composers.

Side A presents excerpts from two live realisations of Unforeseen Events (1989), the fourth in a series of pieces focussing on the interactions between instrumental performers and responsive software. Like the classic earlier works in the series, On the Other Ocean (1977), Interspecies Smalltalk (1984) and Leapday Night (1986), Unforeseen Events is an “unfinished composition” in which a computer system listens for and responds to specific pitch cues from an instrumentalist. Performed by the composer on electronics and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone in Berlin in 1989, the first realisation immediately ushers the listener into an environment of long soprano notes, lush, sustained synth harmonies, randomised percussive interjections and distantly burbling arpeggiated patterns.

The 1999 realisation recorded in New York with Jon Gibson on soprano shows how much room for the instrumentalist to affect the course of the music exists in Behrman’s interactive pieces, in which, as he notes, ‘performers have options rather than instructions’. Beginning in a roughly similar area to the version with Durand, this later recording eventually becomes substantially more active, as polyrhythmically layered arpeggios and percussive patterns respond to fast chromatic lines and dynamic phrases from the saxophone, moving Gibson in turn to respond with cycling figures and moments of extended technique that touch on the soprano languages pioneered by players like Steve Lacy and Evan Parker. Yet even at its most active, the lack of conventional forward movement in the music allows it to retain what Behrman’s friend Jacques Bekaert called its ‘fragile tranquillity’, as episodes of activity appear only as momentary disruptions of an underlying calm.

On the B side, we are treated to a new collaborative work from Behrman and Werner Durand, building on the 2002 installation work ViewFinder, in which a camera detecting physical motion triggered changes to electronic sound. The piece presented here is a long-distance studio construction, recorded by Behrman in the Hudson Valley and Durand in Berlin, offering up an expansive duet between Behrman’s lush, gliding synth tones and the alien, untempered tones of Durand’s invented and adapted wind instruments. Presented in a stunning gatefold sleeve with art from Terri Hanlon, archival photographs and new liner notes from Behrman and Durand,ViewFinder / Hide & Seek is an essential release showcasing the continuing vitality of a legendary figure in experimental music.

Over nearly 20 years, Howlin Rain may have become the quintessential independent American rock ’n roll band: a steam-spitting Hydra of cranked guitars, kicking asphalt dust through a kaleidoscoping travelogue of desert motels and dives, volleying forth transmissions of sci-fi poetry from the blacktop veins of this cracked and aching country.

Now, in America 2021, capping these strangest and sorest of times, the band returns with The Dharma Wheel, a six-track, 52-minute dive into a joyous fantasy realm of exaggerated present.

“I wanted The Dharma Wheel to be a portal from our everyday world, the one from which you stand on hard ground and hold the album in your hands and peer into the artwork, and into another universe,” says songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Ethan Miller. “You enter into that universe with your eyes and ears and mind and take a ride through free-form meditation on these ideas — from big, fundamental concepts about our existence right down to the grease that rolls down the arm of a pulp novel killer as he eats a gas station hot dog in an old Dodge in an alleyway.”

Lyrically, Miller has completed his evolution into a mushroom-plucking Whitman of the West, singing outlandish tales in a topographic blend of Humbead’s Revised Map of the World and an inverted U.S. where downtrodden bodhisattvas roam the back streets and moonless country roads.

“Down in Florida swamps, run by nature’s law, standing in the water, Eden gone. Two men loading rifles, beasts making time, they shot a boy from an orange tree and watched the colored birds take flight, watch the colors as they soar and dive.” — ‘Under the Wheels.’

The band, Jeff McElroy (bass, backing vocals), Justin Smith (drums/percussion, backing vocals) and Dan Cervantes (guitar, backing vocals), again sounds hardwired into Miller’s vision, building tracks that swagger and sway in response to his verse. Lending a hand this time around is the legendary Scarlet Rivera (Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue) on violin, and the endlessly inventive Adam MacDougall (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Circles Around the Sun) on keys.

Songs were shaped via the blast furnace of endless gigs, then recorded often mere hours after the band slipped the stage.

“The captured sonic fact about this record is that it’s the sound of a band that rehearsed this material a lot and put a ton of work into its construction and was on the road a lot and recorded on days off in the tour schedule,” Miller says. “In some cases we were on stage on Saturday night playing these songs at quarter-to-2 in the morning and by Noon the next day we were sipping coffee in the studio playing them for the machine.”

Rivera’s violin is the first sound heard as the album dawns on the instrumental “Prelude.” Soon, the band joins, twirling the theme into a psychedelicized awakening. “Don’t Let the Tears” brings the boogie, with MacDougall’s madcap synth work and wah-wah guitars showering 70’s glitter upon a parquet dance floor of the mind. “Under the Wheels” and “Rotoscope” center the album with taut, compositional epics populated by murdering drifters and fuzz pedal explosions. The blue hour comedown of “Annabelle” meditates upon the weariness of lost love, with Rivera again amping the heartache via her violin strings.

“In the evening the trains go by, and shake the dust from dirty walls, sometimes I feel like a spider in an old mason jar, who threatens only convex light from down the hall. I’ve been lost to the world since the photos of the black hole, landed on my desktop screaming, perhaps the all and nothing all-in-one is just too much to take, for particles and matter that never found their way.” — ‘Annabelle’

The record closes with the 16-minute title track, a multi-movement suite which cycles from Crazy Horse-meets-Traffic jams through colossal, mass-moving funk stomp, eventually cresting and washing into a sing-along gospel lament.

The Dharma Wheel is an album of great depth, and one steeped in good vibes: a rich, glistening world of the ultra-vivid. As illustrated in Arik Roper’s cover art, the grand dharmachakra has been set in motion, churning off the California coast.

“We were trying to build a world big enough that the imagination won’t go soft on you after just a few listens and where our love for this music, and music in general — along with a good dose of audacity — create a magic carpet ride through the world of The Dharma Wheel,” Miller continues. “In pursuing that I think we also managed to make a record that has a lot of joy in it: the joy of playing music, the joy of experiencing music, the joy of storytelling and poetry, the kind of singular joy and extended ecstatic moment that only a real ‘band’ can express in just that way.”

And it’s this joy, this exuberance and dedication to the lines of cosmic expression — all centered in the exalted art of the everyday — that constructs the heart of the record. At its core, The Dharma Wheel is the triumph of a working band, a transmission from a never-paused before arriving for our strange, bruised, spectacular now.”

Over nearly 20 years, Howlin Rain may have become the quintessential independent American rock ’n roll band: a steam-spitting Hydra of cranked guitars, kicking asphalt dust through a kaleidoscoping travelogue of desert motels and dives, volleying forth transmissions of sci-fi poetry from the blacktop veins of this cracked and aching country.

Now, in America 2021, capping these strangest and sorest of times, the band returns with The Dharma Wheel, a six-track, 52-minute dive into a joyous fantasy realm of exaggerated present.

“I wanted The Dharma Wheel to be a portal from our everyday world, the one from which you stand on hard ground and hold the album in your hands and peer into the artwork, and into another universe,” says songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Ethan Miller. “You enter into that universe with your eyes and ears and mind and take a ride through free-form meditation on these ideas — from big, fundamental concepts about our existence right down to the grease that rolls down the arm of a pulp novel killer as he eats a gas station hot dog in an old Dodge in an alleyway.”

Lyrically, Miller has completed his evolution into a mushroom-plucking Whitman of the West, singing outlandish tales in a topographic blend of Humbead’s Revised Map of the World and an inverted U.S. where downtrodden bodhisattvas roam the back streets and moonless country roads.

“Down in Florida swamps, run by nature’s law, standing in the water, Eden gone. Two men loading rifles, beasts making time, they shot a boy from an orange tree and watched the colored birds take flight, watch the colors as they soar and dive.” — ‘Under the Wheels.’

The band, Jeff McElroy (bass, backing vocals), Justin Smith (drums/percussion, backing vocals) and Dan Cervantes (guitar, backing vocals), again sounds hardwired into Miller’s vision, building tracks that swagger and sway in response to his verse. Lending a hand this time around is the legendary Scarlet Rivera (Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue) on violin, and the endlessly inventive Adam MacDougall (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Circles Around the Sun) on keys.

Songs were shaped via the blast furnace of endless gigs, then recorded often mere hours after the band slipped the stage.

“The captured sonic fact about this record is that it’s the sound of a band that rehearsed this material a lot and put a ton of work into its construction and was on the road a lot and recorded on days off in the tour schedule,” Miller says. “In some cases we were on stage on Saturday night playing these songs at quarter-to-2 in the morning and by Noon the next day we were sipping coffee in the studio playing them for the machine.”

Rivera’s violin is the first sound heard as the album dawns on the instrumental “Prelude.” Soon, the band joins, twirling the theme into a psychedelicized awakening. “Don’t Let the Tears” brings the boogie, with MacDougall’s madcap synth work and wah-wah guitars showering 70’s glitter upon a parquet dance floor of the mind. “Under the Wheels” and “Rotoscope” center the album with taut, compositional epics populated by murdering drifters and fuzz pedal explosions. The blue hour comedown of “Annabelle” meditates upon the weariness of lost love, with Rivera again amping the heartache via her violin strings.

“In the evening the trains go by, and shake the dust from dirty walls, sometimes I feel like a spider in an old mason jar, who threatens only convex light from down the hall. I’ve been lost to the world since the photos of the black hole, landed on my desktop screaming, perhaps the all and nothing all-in-one is just too much to take, for particles and matter that never found their way.” — ‘Annabelle’

The record closes with the 16-minute title track, a multi-movement suite which cycles from Crazy Horse-meets-Traffic jams through colossal, mass-moving funk stomp, eventually cresting and washing into a sing-along gospel lament.

The Dharma Wheel is an album of great depth, and one steeped in good vibes: a rich, glistening world of the ultra-vivid. As illustrated in Arik Roper’s cover art, the grand dharmachakra has been set in motion, churning off the California coast.

“We were trying to build a world big enough that the imagination won’t go soft on you after just a few listens and where our love for this music, and music in general — along with a good dose of audacity — create a magic carpet ride through the world of The Dharma Wheel,” Miller continues. “In pursuing that I think we also managed to make a record that has a lot of joy in it: the joy of playing music, the joy of experiencing music, the joy of storytelling and poetry, the kind of singular joy and extended ecstatic moment that only a real ‘band’ can express in just that way.”

And it’s this joy, this exuberance and dedication to the lines of cosmic expression — all centered in the exalted art of the everyday — that constructs the heart of the record. At its core, The Dharma Wheel is the triumph of a working band, a transmission from a never-paused before arriving for our strange, bruised, spectacular now.”

Cocktail d'Amore Music returns from a short hiatus with a new release from Russian producer TMO. The three tracks are tied together by a propensity for heavy rhythm construction and distorted acid lines, executed to great effect. Opening with "Last Moment Jam" , a searing main room projectile, TMO presents what is heavily inspired by early Chicago acid track. For those looking for something on the trippier end, "Drums Jam" provides a low bpm hallucination full of delays. Closing is, "Buchla 909 Jam", a 10 minute slow burn exercise in analog fundamentals for late night fantasies.

Arriving at a time of considerable uncertainty in the world, Son Lux's multi-album 'Tomorrows' is ambitious in scope and intent. Born of an active, intentional approach to shaping sound, the music reminds us of the necessity of questioning assumptions, and of sitting with the tension.

Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia, and Ian Chang train their sights on volatile principles: imbalance, disruption, collision, redefinition. But for all of its instability, Tomorrows’ exploration of breaking points and sustained frictional places is ultimately in service of something rewarding and necessary: the act of questioning, challenging, tearing down and actively rebuilding one’s own identity.

The band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward. Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions.

- Tomorrows I-III, triple physical album, released previously digitally only
- Featuring the singles “Plans We Made”, Only, Prophecy, Live Another Life and A Different Kind Of Love
- More than 90 minutes music on 3CD and 3LP

»Dog Mountain« is the second release by the Zurich-based producer and composer Laurin Huber on Hallow Ground. After last year’s »Juncture« saw the Edipo Re co-founder work mostly with synthesizers and programmed rhythms, the four tracks are much more restrained, drawing on tape loops and feedback, recordings of acoustic guitar and synthesizers such as the Korg MS-10 as well as field recordings that relate to the overarching topic that informed the making of the record. While »Juncture« had previously aimed at deconstructing the binaries and dualities that shape our lives and thinking, »Dog Mountain« is dedicated to geographical divisions that result from political processes and social constructions. »›Here‹ means one nation, ›there‹ another,« writes Huber in a literary piece that accompanies the record. »Being in sound, such a separation seems odd.«

While treating the metaphor of the border as a »membrane, registering and translating the vibrations of its surroundings« and thus as something that is constantly (re-)defined, maintained and defended however, the artist also takes into consideration that »one cannot escape one’s standpoint,« as he puts it. The music on »Dog Mountain« may transcend and overcome certain borders, but it does not deny the realities that they impose on each and every one of us – whether in our political lives or in the realm of sound. This is mirrored in Huber’s engaging in the structural and sonic interplay of repetition and difference. Working with slowly evolving and modulating elements that are exposed to slight shifts, »Dog Mountain« puts a focus on the interaction between small elements that together form a bigger whole which is marked by constant evolution and change.

Opener »Raja« (»border« in Northern Sami and Finnish) starts off with a two-note melody played on an out-of-tune guitar. Different field recordings and synthesizer sounds drop in and out of the mix until the dynamic shifts and Huber starts playing more notes on his instrument, thus increasing the tension. It’s a meditation on minimalism, but also a piece that mediates between notions of what constitutes the difference between noise and music or referentiality and abstraction in sound. After »Nickel« (named after a Russian monotown near the border to Norway) dedicates itself to explore the friction between hissing white noise and melancholic tape loops, »A Town Is Not a Town« (a phrase taken from the documentary »Kiruna – Rymdvägen«) structurally mirrors the experiment of »Raja« with very different sonic means.

Closing the record, »Storskog-Borisoglebsk« (the title refers to the northernmost land border between Schengen-Europe and Russia) is the longest and most challenging piece, working with both long-form drones and musique concrète elements. It proposes a synthesis of the opposites that are explored patiently and with much attention to detail throughout this record.

HIGHLIGHTS An emblematic figure of the Brazilian avant-garde and a key part of the cultural climate that made the rise of tropicália possible, Walter Smetak was a Swiss musician and inventor of instruments who developed his career in Brazil. "Smetak" (1974), his debut album, was produced by Caetano Veloso and Roberto Santana, and had the support of Gilberto Gil. It sums up a personal universe that combines Afro-Brazilian ritual traditions, theosophy, microtonal studies, collective improvisation and the use of unconventional musical instruments. Liner notes by Caetano Veloso. DESCRIPTION Walter Smetak was a Swiss cellist, composer, inventor of musical instruments, sculptor and writer who developed his career in Salvador, Brazil, and became an emblematic figure of the Bahian avant-garde and a key part of the cultural climate that made the rise of tropicália possible. Since 1969, he has carried out various workshops of experimental music at University of Bahia. His music was materialized in two albums: "Smetak" (1974) and "Interregno" (1980). "Smetak" was produced by Caetano Veloso and Roberto Santana, with the support of Gilberto Gil. There he unfolded a radical sound universe, based on the investigation of Afro-Brazilian ritualistic traditions, microtonality studies and collective improvisational open processes, always under the influence of theosophy, which he discovered in Brazil, and which allowed him to generate a symbolism represented in the construction of his own unconventional instruments, many of them of a sculptural nature, made with unusual materials such as PVC pipes, pumpkins and polystyrene foam, which he called plásticas sonoras. Around 150 instruments were created by Smetak, many of them in a surrealist style. They have been exhibited on various occasions in museums and galleries. His music was often based on graphic scores, many of them of great beauty. In addition to Smetak, Caetano Veloso and Roberto Santana, musicians such as Gereba, Tuzé Abreu, Djalma Correa, Capenga, among others, participated in the recording of this album. The author of one of the most important studies on Smetak, Marco Scarassatti, has written on the work of the Swiss-Brazilian artist: "His original and metaphysical work goes beyond any mysticism created around his figure. He investigated the relationship between sound and light, space and form, microtonality, collective improvisation, as a sound alchemist, a multimedia and unplugged prophet-visionary. While transforming matter, Smetak transformed himself and many of those around him." This reissue reproduces the much sought after original 1974 edition, published by Phillips. It includes the catalog of instruments used, adds a brochure with new photos and presents the remastered audio. The liner notes were written by Caetano Veloso. This project is part of Incidencias Sonoras: COINCIDENCIA experimental music & sound art platform, by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

** 12” LP edition of 300 copies with cover artwork and booklet featuring illustrations by Ettore Tripodi ** In September 2019 Alessandro Bosetti was invited by fellow composer and curator Riccardo La Foresta to create a new work for a newly created ensemble as part of a residency program hosted by Centro Musica in Modena, Italy. The very first encounter took place on Skype – kind of a prediction of the forthcoming physically distanced pandemic times. The first, straight-to-the-point question Bosetti posed to each musician was to tell him the history of their life. The materials collected in the interviews subsequently underwent a process of anonymization, selection and cut-up in order to create the imaginary autobiography of Didone, a genderless character on whom Bosetti composed a combinatory poem in 84 aphorisms, six of which have been translated into music. The ensemble consists of extremely different musical profiles: the contemporary soprano Giulia Zaniboni, minimalist banjo and acoustic guitar player Glauco Salvo, and four musicians with a jazz background such as guitarist Luca Perciballi, drummers Andrea Grillini and Simone Sferruzza, and saxophonist Dan Kinzelman (also part of Hobby Horse trio and long-time collaborator of Enrico Rava). Some of the stylistic features of Bosetti’s project Trophies (along with Kenta Nagai and Tony Buck) can be detected here and there. Persistent repetitions, mesmerizing sonic masses and extended, oblique melodic lines are here led by the clear and precise voice of soprano Giulia Zaniboni.



The voice is at the heart of this work: the textual fragments of the autobiographies are filtered through Zaniboni’s contemporary vocality, while informing the instrumental writing as well. Themes and textures unveil traces of words or sentences; fragments of biographies are embedded in the intricate instrumental dialogue between the two drummers. A final layer was added by Ettore Tripodi, a unique and out-of-time visual artist who imagined Didone in a series of illustrations accompanying the poem. "Didone" is a work about the reconfiguration and recombination of identities, where every specific sense of belonging melts into an indistinct swarming of possibilities.



Alessandro Bosetti is a Marseille-based composer and sound artist with a particular interest in the musicality of language and in the voice, conceived as an autonomous object and an instrument of expression. His works enact a dialogue between language, voice and sound within complex tonal and formal constructions, often crossed by oblique irony. He builds surprising devices, often linked to the radio medium and to a tireless reflection on the relationships between music and language, questioning aesthetic categories and listening postures.



His work has been shown in reference venues such as the GRM / Présences Electronique festival in Paris, Roulette and The Stone in New York, Café OTO in London, the Liquid Architecture Festival in Melbourne and Sydney, the Serralves Museum in Porto and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. His music is released by labels such as Errant Bodies Press, Holidays Records, Rossbin, Sedimental, Unsounds, Monotype, Weird Ear Records.

NVST, part of Statement Crew, Female:Pressure and co-running the Big Science label, drops her debut EP on Serious Trouble, smashing the front door with heavy boots and a belt of sharp throwing knifes. No excuses to be made when she cuts throats, just like she does it to her drum constructions, super sharp filtered and directly forward driven arrangements. She knows how to create a nice tension throughout the record and hits the upper floor just the right time. She definitely belongs to the young artists out there who know how to shape their blades right. Better take a step back. Remix by Benedikt Frey included.

"We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released on 23 April via Memphis Industries. Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music. By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record. The playfulness that's evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that. Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances. Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide-projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date.

LTD EDITION TRANSPARENT VINYL

"We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released on 23 April via Memphis Industries. Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music. By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record. The playfulness that's evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that. Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances. Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide-projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date.

Surrender is the debut full length from DJ, producer, and songwriter Endgame. Stepping out for the first time as a vocalist, and lyricist, Surrender is his most ambitious and vulnerable work to date; a striking statement of intent, with moments of beauty and brutality. Endgame has carved an iconoclastic niche in club culture. Breaking into the scene as co-founder of the legendary collective Bala Club, and resident of the radical club-night Endless. Whilst continuing almost a decade hosting his infamous NTS radio show (and now label) Precious Metals, he has forged a path against the tide of formulaic club music. A visionary DJ and producer, Surrender sees Endgame continue this trajectory, with a project that both amplifies the ferocious club constructions he's known for, whilst making space to open up wounded memories and with sombre unfeigned requiems. Having previously released records on Hyperdub, PTP, Golden Mist and Infinite Machine, Endgame's first release on his own Precious Metals imprint, is him at his most reflective. Surrender is a deeply personal record, about loss and finding meaning in despair. Death is a prevailing theme, with the passing of his father a totemic subject. The recollection of his father's torturous final moments leaves him to mournfully contemplate temporality. Using this sense of anguish, he blurs reality-creating a world where angels and demons are among us in a decaying cityscape; akin to the work of Todd McFarlane. The opener Faithless, propels us into this world, with the slow build of industrial precision amidst the sombre build of harsh melodic synths. We descend deeper into this vision with Barbed Heart, featuring a defining vocal from scene staple and long time collaborator Yayoyanoh, as 808's and skittering hi hats ricochet off one another beneath his bass driven vocal. No Heroes continues our journey into the unknown with a chaotic rush of acidic riffs, pounding percussion, and a reference to the brutalist anthem from hardcore punk band Converge (where the track borrows its name). Requiem acts as the turning point of the record as Endgame steps into the foreground as a vocalist. As the name suggests, this lament is a sombre reflection of grief; its minimalist instrumental allows Endgame's haunted verse to rise into the foreground, like an apparition amidst the smoke in the depths of a dimly lit club. The dark clouds fade into the distance in Exhumed, as the elegant melancholic vocal of Bala Club affiliate and gifted vocalist Organ Tapes reflects off Endgame's sanguine verses bringing hope into the heartfelt instrumental filled with melodic flourishes and bass-bin rattling subs. The thematic haze thickens in Abyss, as the pulsating and doom laden instrumental interweaves with Endgame's sepulchral vocal. Like a message from the void, his words act as an agnostic hymn that pulls apart his sense of self. The contrast of his plaintive verse with the intensity of the instrumental creates a contrast that is symbolic of the record itself, a duality that presents moments of soft reflection against a severe sonic palette to create moments of transcendence.

MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice. The debut release XMIT, an eight-track album featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder, is out on 16 April 2021. Tucker's ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with this collection of harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. On the new album, MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions. In a move away from previous projects XMIT investigates erasing the self, removing obvious traits of the hand and voice, and allowing a focus on the humanoid rather than the human. Instead of recognisable lyrics and coherent imagery, MICROCORPS evolved synthesised voices to generate alternate characters. He expands, "I was investigating how language brings our world into being and how manipulating the actual grain of the voice could open up momentary shifts in perception." Each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured. Setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance, using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing. "I'd been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space." The album artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker that originally featured in his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2. XMIT refers to a time in which information both physical and nonphysical transfers at an alarming rate beyond human comprehension into an age which is at once banal and terrifyingly alien.

MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice. The debut release XMIT, an eight-track album featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder, is out on 16 April 2021. Tucker's ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with this collection of harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. On the new album, MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions. In a move away from previous projects XMIT investigates erasing the self, removing obvious traits of the hand and voice, and allowing a focus on the humanoid rather than the human. Instead of recognisable lyrics and coherent imagery, MICROCORPS evolved synthesised voices to generate alternate characters. He expands, "I was investigating how language brings our world into being and how manipulating the actual grain of the voice could open up momentary shifts in perception." Each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured. Setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance, using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing. "I'd been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space." The album artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker that originally featured in his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2. XMIT refers to a time in which information both physical and nonphysical transfers at an alarming rate beyond human comprehension into an age which is at once banal and terrifyingly alien.

Lamaze is Geneva Jacuzzi’s 2010 debut—a full-length pressing of analog 4- track and 8-track recordings that document the development of her musical style from her first appearance in 2004 up to 2009. It is a selective introduction gleaned from a body of over 200 recorded tracks. The recordings from this period are largely synth pop songs that are typical minimalist constructions with dance floor tempos. Use of experimental recording techniques and varying arrays of equipment produce differing electronic atmospheres—soundcrafting in the spirit of Chrome, Devo, Cabaret Voltaire, and Gina-X. There is also an exploration of format in her playful use of alternating theatrical interludes and instrumental treatments. Lamaze is essentially a collection of demos, which is an atypical debut, but it is among the first lo-fi pop recordings that became the lexicon of the emerging music frontier, today’s “hypnagogic” jukebox—chillwave, bedroom pop, witch house, vaporwave, and more. The sound of the future, but the present of Lamaze is a world that has vanished. The collection is venerated as canon among her devotees and has become a coveted relic among fans and collectors of pop artifacts and rarities.

Since 2010, Adam Keith's solo project Cube has been supplying a steady run of records and cassettes that capture songwriterly fixations and frustrations in a dextrous style of wounded electronics. Though Cube has been the centrepiece of his activity for some years, he's all the while remained active in collaborations, playing in bands such as SPF and Mansion to name just a few. Rounding off a decade of dialogues and agitations, Alter now presents Keith's third LP under the moniker of Cube, 'Drug of Choice' Based in New York, though managing a functional transience that takes in California too, Keith's latest iteration as Cube launches a panoramic set of sonic touchstones into a gristly and hypnotic orbit. Seismic drum machine parts partition an album that layers industrial-tipped takes on digi-dub with roaming guitar lines, piano vignettes, and breakbeat theatrics. For all the abrasiveness and rhythmic allusions that Keith employs, his use of voices alongside lush manipulations of errant samples and atmospheres tempers the commotion, delivering something that feels as much focused on artful constructions of private experiences as it does the cathartic qualities of noise.

Dehumanization is the only full length album from the band Crucifix. Recorded in 1983, it is considered a classic American hardcore album and a landmark of anarcho-punk.Dehumanization delivers a raging critique of war, violence, displacement, and the decimation of human rights and human dignity—themes at once global in scope and also completely endemic to Reagan-era America. The intensity of this message is matched only by the intensity of the sound: a heavy minimalist construction built on brutal guitar riffs, low-end distortion, hardcore fury and teenage speed. It is an album of pure raw power, a hot blast of personal and political outrage and musical adrenaline.Fusing California hardcore with metal and second wave British anarcho-punk, Crucifix carved out their own highly distinctive wall of sound on this release. Ignoring the rules of punk purism in favor of a well produced huge guitar sound, the album preceded much of the hardcore metal crossover of the mid-80s and played an influential but often unacknowledged role in the punk and metal subgenres that followed. “Annihilation,” the album’s opening track, has become iconic . Quoted often, it’s been sampled by Orbital and covered by A Perfect Circle and Sepultura. The original vinyl version of Dehumanization was released on the Crass Records offshoot label Corpus Christi in the UK, and has been out of print since the 1980s. This new Kustomized rerelease has been carefully remastered from an original vinyl source and adheres closely to the audio quality of the original. In addition, the six-panel foldout poster sleeve has been reproduced in its entirety. Taken together, the words, music and graphics of Dehumanization form a complete work and a resonant and enduring document of the period

The trinity of piano, bass and drums is an ensemble construction with a particularly prominent place in jazz, past and present. Indeed, some of these piano trios are among the most revered and popular groups the music has seen.
The standing of the piano trio in the Norwegian jazz landscape is no different. And like a lot of modern jazz from Norway it has also taken on flavours very distinct to this country.
Pianist Torvik met and played with double bassist Bjornar Kaldefoss Tveite and drummer Oystein Aarnes Vik during a short stint in Oslo.
They quickly hit it off, and the idea of making an album with this trio began to take shape. The resulting album, ‘Northwestern Songs’, was recorded at Newtone Studio in Oslo, June 2019.
Here, Torvik continues to explore the relationships between pop sensibilities and jazz, which was also a feature of the music on his debut as a leader, the 2016 quintet recording ‘Northwestern Sounds’. At the same time, the open and revealing nature of the trio format allows him to further explore and challenge himself as piano player.
Personnel: Arne Torvik (piano), Bj rnar Kaldefoss Tveite (bass), ystein Aarnes Vik (drums)

Sam Gendel’s Nonesuch Records debut, Satin Doll, was recorded in Gendel’s native California, and is a futuristic homage to historical jazz. The album features three musicians — Gendel on saxophone, Gabe Noel on electric bass, and Philippe Melanson on electronic percussion — engaging in simultaneous synchronized sonic construction/deconstruction of jazz standards, including Miles Davis’ ‘Freddie Freeloader’, Charles Mingus’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, and Duke Ellington’s ‘Satin Doll’.

Sam Gendel is a musician and producer living in Los Angeles, CA. He is most known for his work with the saxophone, though he is proficient on multiple instruments. His work is diverse and includes significant collaborations with a wide range of artists including Ry Cooder, Blake Mills, Sam Amidon, Perfume Genius, Moses Sumney, Knower, Vampire Weekend, and inc. no world. Gendel’s previous discography includes the critically praised Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar with bassist Sam Wilkes and 4444.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Ashioto, the first international solo release from Japanese drummer-percussionist-composer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Active for over a decade, Yamamoto has performed and recorded extensively with artists such as Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi and Akira Sakata, as well as participating in innumerable improvised and ad hoc groups.

Ashioto presents two wide-ranging pieces that combine Yamamoto’s percussion work with piano, field recordings, electronics, and contributions from guest musicians Daisuke Fujiwara and Eiko Ishibashi.

Beginning with a passage of chiming metal percussion, the first side slowly builds into a rolling, open groove reminiscent of Yamamoto’s work on Eiko Ishibashi’s acclaimed Drag City LP The Dreams My Bones Dream. Spacious piano and synth notes, along with Ishibashi’s spare melodic figures on processed flute, hover above this propulsive rhythmic foundation, the whole effect adding up to a more abstract take on the area explored on Rainer Brüninghaus’s ECM classic Freigeweht. The LP’s second side opens up a cavernous space filled with ominous electronics and shimmering metallic percussion, which organically transitions into a passage of rumbling piano chords and mysterious concrète sound. Later in the piece, Daisuke Fujiawara’s saxophone enters, playing melancholic melodic fragments that are looped and layered, creating a seasick swaying effect familiar to listeners of James Tenney’s works with tape delay systems. Beginning as delicate bass drum pulses, Yamamoto’s accompanying percussion eventually builds the piece into a raging torrent of free-improv splatter, processed sax and fizzing electronics.

Though grounded in instrumental performance, Ashioto is very much a studio construction, making inventive use of electro-acoustic principles in its editing and mixing. Together with its sister Ashiato – a different take on the same ‘script’ released simultaneously on Japanese label Newhere – Ashioto demonstrates to an international audience for the first time the true breadth and ambition of Yamamoto’s work.

Mastered by Jim O’Rourke. Cover photos by Kuniyoshi Taikou. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

Black Truffle is very proud to present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring.

Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from rooftop to church, from stasis to flares of momentary romanticism. Peaks considers summits as being both above and below, reframing the idea of apex from a more intimate perspective. Hamann considers how our domestic and personal geographies might form their own apogees, meridians, or nadirs.

Assembled in 2019 while an artist in residence in Krems, Austria, Peaks begins with Hamann’s more familiar cello but soon unravels into resonant electronic interiors; Southern California nightscapes heard through windows, San Francisco bathroom fans, snatches of recordings of friends, hand organs, and engines. signal/centinela draws primarily on recordings from Hamann’s time living in San Diego, and carries with it a certain sense of nostalgia in the sense of homesickness, longing, and displacement of distance and time. Side B is composed from recordings gathered on a different continent, Europe, weaving piano with recordings of sleep, breath, church organ, and the act of climbing. under/over emerges as it recedes, overlapping moments of arrival to create another kind of ‘spire’ in the sense of spir (breath). Peaks, with its omission of any recordings from Hamann’s home of Australia, hints at how the very construction of home itself, might be restless, untethered, changeable, and malleable.

On Peaks, Hamann interrogates tropes of ambient concrète musics, intentionally pivoting formally around material which teeters on the edge of cliche. This exploration asks whether familiar frames of harmony, field recordings and narrative trajectories can excavate new territories, or be ruptured. Peaks untangles a very personal sense of tension between beauty and shame in experimental music: treating lushness and harmony as possessing potentially muscular musical properties that might wrestle with or construct senses of belonging and home.

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.

"Aix" is an outstanding piece of work by Italian electro-acoustic savant Giuseppe Ielasi, originally released in 2009 on Taylor Deupree's 12k label, the follow-up to 2007’s "August" (12k) and Ielasi's first collaboration with Nicola Ratti as "Bellows", also out in 2007 (Kning Disk). Originally only released on CD (12k), the album got a very limited vinyl issue on Czech label Minority Records in 2010. Keplar presents this extraordinary and timeless collection of 9 evocative minimalist soundscapes on vinyl again after 10 years.

From the original press release in 2009:

"With Aix we see Ielasi building his layered, atmospheric music around rhythmic grids. Most of the time these are quite irregular and the pulses are not neccessarily stable or clear. Where his previous work approached sound in a linear fashion Aix imposes a strong vertical development with the aforementioned grid and a production consisting of ons and offs, employing as much improvisation as Ielasi’s previous work, but in a different way.
Despite the self-imposed grid structure, Aix relies heavily on randomization. Not in the traditional sense of sound placement but instead of the spatialization of sounds, echoes, reverbs and the stereo image. As a result, Aix has an amazing sense and clarity of space as the small fragments of sound breathe and find their own place in the mix, thanks to Ielasi’s sublime skills as a mixer and engineer.
Ielasi relied heavily on numerous short samples and combining them in ways that fell into his groove; some found from others' recordings and many more recorded during the past year. We hear fragments of percussive (acoustic) objects, drums, piano, trumpet, guitar, and, of course, synthetic textures. Although there is a distinct rhythmic pulse to Aix, Ielasi manages to mold it into something wonderfully languid and warm... and strangely inviting."

Composed and recorded by Giuseppe Ielasi in Aix-en-Provence, Autumn 2008. Remaster by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover photograph "Construction, Barcelona" by Taylor Deupree. Layout by Dan Dudarec/Marco Ciceri.

For more than 20 years Giuseppe Ielasi has been releasing his recordings on labels like Erstwhile Records, Häpna, Kning Disk, Dekorder, 12k, Entr'acte or Editions Mego, as well as on his own label Senufo Editions.

The label Keplar has been on a long hiatus and is now back with its KeplarRev series presenting vinyl re-issues of essential electronic albums from the 90's and 00's, as well as new recordings by momentous electronic and ambient artists.

First album in 8 years from legendary Dearborn duo . Windy and Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance and Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade,the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy and Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance and Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound.

Christophe Chassol is reshuffling the deck. After making his name worldwide with three magnificent ultrascore compositions (Nola Che?rie in 2011, Indiamore in 2013 and Big Sun in 2015), working with Solange and Frank Ocean, and playing the most prestigious halls, he's taking his quest to arrange reality even further with Ludi, his new project that includes an album, film and show. It's play - an all-important word in music - that underscores this impressive, masterful construction freely inspired by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Everything is part of the melody: a playground or basketball players in the suburbs, an arcade in Tokyo, a roller coaster, singer Crystal Kay and rapper Kohh. Solo musicians were filmed in rehearsal, like flautist Jocelyn Mienniel and the composer's partner, drummer Mathieu Edward, who managed to reprise on stage

Chassol drew from the great German author's utopic book, where music, mathematics, aesthetics and spirituality intermingle, to create a passionate work produced by Bertrand Burgalat's label Tricatel that once again justifies his special place in the musical landscape.

With Ludi, Chassol directs his own round of Hermann Hesse's game, taking on the title of Magister Ludi, master of The Glass Bead Game. With this double album, Chassol realises his ambition: to compose unprecedented music that fills us with joy and prompts reflection.

Canadian born, Berlin based producer Aquarian makes his full length album debutThe Snake That Eats Itselfon Bedouin Records.
This record follows his collaborative EPs with Deapmash as 'AQXDM" and is his first solo release since his 2016 experimental mixtape for Quiet Time. Nearly five years in the making, 'The Snake That Eats Itself' is Aquarian's most complex, diverse and emotive work to date, plunging his trademark UK sound-system/techno hybrids into a self-contained, cinematic universe streaked with heavy influences from industrial, IDM, drone and dark pop music.

It's written in Brooklyn, New York, in a deeply transitional, yet seemingly endless period preceding his relocation to Berlin, the title of the album refers to the Ouroboros, a mythological serpent symbolizing the cycle of birth and death and infinity itself.
'The Snake That Eats Itself' pits Aquarian's most abrasive and brutal moments next to his most wistful and introspective.

Viscerally thick layers of tape saturation envelop the album as sludgy synths ooze against brittle atmospheres; breakbeats fragment, explode and disintegrate into swarms of delay and noise; scorched, metallic percussion - sampled from a year-long demolition and construction project next to his apartment - forge the rhythmic backbone of the album. These elements, however, seamlessly make way to startlingly crystalline and shimmering ambient passages, offering a sense of reprieve and balance.

For the new Arma release Ena explores different, distinct facets of his sound across three productions. “Pale” distills his vision of techno as a minimalist, repetitive construct. Working around non-standard time signatures, he creates a densely woven lattice of percussive pulses, which cut a polyrhythmic path through nightmarish sheets of noise. “Secondary Color” uses a broader palette that opens the Ena sound up to the light,,, “Wired” heads further away from the grid in pursuit of sound design exploration, as a rack of pipes and chambers strike, boom and chime against artful distortion and cavernous reverb. While Ena has historically been hesitant about remixes of his material, he warmed to the idea of long-time Arma friend JASSS reworking “Wired”. Taking the track into her own fiercely individual sound world, she uses the harmonic tonality of the original as a jump-off point for an epic, emotionally forthright chiller loaded with coldwave bombast, trap hats and Silvia’ own voice. Coming from entirely different angles of approach, Ena and JASSS are bound together by their fearless individuality. You can sense the slithers of pre-existing music somewhere in their constructions, but such familiarities are no more than faint echoes of places they passed through on their way to somewhere new.

Rockets Audio starts the saga with 4 finest minimal house trackers by Matheiu, Denis Kaznacheev and the master trio Wareika. A rocket (from Italian rocchetto "bobbin" is a missile, spacecraft, aircraft or other vehicle that obtains thrust from a rocket engine. Rocket engine exhaust is formed entirely from propellant carried within the rocket before use. Rocket engines work by action and reaction and push rockets forward simply by expelling their exhaust in the opposite direction at high speed, and can therefore work in the vacuum of space.

In fact, rockets work more efficiently in space than in an atmosphere. Multistage rockets are capable of attaining escape velocity from Earth and therefore can achieve unlimited maximum altitude. Compared with airbreathing engines, rockets are lightweight and powerful and capable of generating large accelerations. To control their flight,
rockets rely on momentum, airfoils, auxiliary reaction engines, gimballed thrust, momentum wheels, deflection of the exhaust stream, propellant flow, spin, and/or gravity.

Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th century China. Significant scientific, interplanetary and industrial use did not occur until the 20th century, when rocketry was the enabling technology for the Space Age, including setting foot on the Earth's moon. Rockets are now used for fireworks, weaponry, ejection seats, launch vehicles for artificial satellites, human spaceflight, and space exploration.

SOUND rockets are the most common type of high power rocket, typically creating a high speed pitch by the wave of rythm with an oxilator. The stored delay can be a simple pressurized detune or a single filter delay that disassociates in the presence of a curve (EQ + FILTER ), two hats that spontaneously react on contact (RANDOMIZER), two snares that must be ignited to react, a solid combination of effects with oxidizer (solid GROOVE), or solid fuel with liquid oxidizer (hybrid FILTER BAND DELAY). Chemical rockets store a large amount of energy in an easily released form, and can be very dangerous. However, careful design, testing, construction and use minimizes risks.

Emotional Rescue is delighted to present a collection of works by the founding father of the modern drum movement, Glen Velez. Collated from his first 3 solo albums from 1985 to 1989, Sweet Season is a snapshot in to the pioneering composing and performance of this four-time Grammy winner. Born in 1949, of Mexican American ancestry, Velez grew up in Texas before moving to New York in 1967. Playing jazz on the drums he soon gravitated to hand drums from around the world (frame drums in particular), seeking out teachers from many different musical traditions.

Among the many instruments Velez favours are the Irish bodhran, the Brazilian pandeiro, the Arabic riq, the North African bendir and the Azerbaijani ghaval. Although these instruments are similar in construction they have their own playing techniques that open new possibilities.

Sweet Season highlights this vocabulary, mixing and adapting techniques from various cultures to develop new ones. The music, often composed as cross-cultural ensembles, has a particular fondness for polyrhythms - superimposing different meters simultaneously - while incorporating Stepping Split-tone and Central Asian Overtone singing to complete the global horizons.

This new genre of contemporary drumming has been hugely influential and seen Velez work with the likes of John Cage and Steve Reich, as well as teaching his virtuosic combinations of hand movements and finger techniques to many emerging players.

WRWTFWW Records is insanely happy to announce the first ever vinyl reissue for both volumes of Yoshio Ojima's superb environmental music project Une Collection des Chaînons I and II: Music For Spiral, originally released in 1988 on CD only. Each volume is sourced from original masters and comes as a double vinyl LP with liner notes in English and Japanese . This marks the inaugural release from the ESPLANADE SERIES by WRWTFWW Records which focuses on the works of Yoshio Ojima and friends.

Une Collection des Chaînons II (along with its complementary predecessor Une Collection des Chaînons I) gathers selected music pieces conceptualized and produced for sound-designing the Wacoal Art Center in Aoyama (Tokyo) also known as Spiral, a hub for a wide range of sophisticated cultural proposals spanning visual arts, theatre, music, design, fashion, and lifestyle.

Named after its superb curled-shaped structures laid in a vast atrium, Spiral is a monumental work of architecture by Fumihiko Maki, designed according to the principles of Metabolism, a movement advocating the fusion of the notions of megastructures and organic biological growth - in essence, evolving designs and constructions, adapting to human needs naturally.

Evolving, organic, adapting, these are notions that perfectly describe Yoshio Ojima's divinely designed brand of environmental music. Continuing, embellishing and bringing the Collection des Chaînons (which translates as collection of links) full circle, this second volume approaches sound design in relation to various contexts, sizes, and shapes. The nanoscopic neoclassical lullaby "Les Trois Grâces" brings attention to the importance of small details, "Pulse at Soothe" starts with the minimalism of a Satoshi Ashikawa piece and slowly drifts into mystical landscapes and cavernous echoes, "Entomology" and its melancholic artificial forest feels like a Twin Peaks mirage, and "Atrium" literally feels like a floating visit of a gigantic open space structure. With each timbre selected with extreme precision, each element placed in space with the utmost care, and textures worked to allow a wide canvas of emotion for the listeners, Yoshio Ojima's music is the constantly transforming connecting point between humanity and architecture.

Sitting alongside Midori Takada's Through The Looking Glass, Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way, Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green, or Yutaka Hirose's NOVA, Une Collection des Chaînons is a pivotal work of Japanese environnmental/ambient/minimalist music.

A note from Yoshio Ojima: "Please listen to this album at around the same volume as daily life sounds such as air conditioners and refrigerators."

“Requiem” is the name of the new Cold Beats Records release. The reference number 14 of the catalan label is written by L´Avenir, the cold synth side project of veteran electronic musician and sound artist Jason Sloan. Known throughout the space and ambient music scenes for his contemplative electronic soundscape work for close to two decades; Sloan founded L’Avenir in 2012 to explore his long time love of synthnpop and dark minimal wave music created purely from analog and vintage equipment. While still retaining the atmosphere of his solo records, the music of L’Avenir is rooted in the tradition of the minimal, analog, synthesizer music of the late 70′s and 80′s ( Fad Gadget, Depeche, Click Click, Chicago’s Wax Trax Records scene etc…). Growing up through the original scene while it was happening, it’s no suprise that Sloan’s music would eventually move in this direction. While releasing over a dozen solo albums and E.P.’s under his own name, Sloan has played live all over the US, Canada and Europe including the influential Live Constructions radio program at Columbia University, STEIM in Amsterdam and Philadelphia’s The Gatherings concert series, one of the country’s oldest continuing ambient and electronic music series. Sloan is a Professor teaching full-time in the Interactive Arts department along with being the founder and program coordinator for the Sound Art concentration at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. L’Avenir returns with Requiem, the fourth, full-length album for Barcelona’s Cold Beats Records. Requiem finds L’Avenir visiting themes of postmodernity, alienation and spiritualism while expanding the sonic palette far beyond his minimal synth beginnings. The music of L’Avenir has, at times, been compared to 4AD era Clan of Xymox or mid-period Depeche Mode. But while echoes of the former can be heard, L’Avenir brings a uniquely fresh perspective unheard in other bands of the genre. Requiem features eight new songs and is available on limited edition blood red vinyl. Requiem is L’Avenir’s sixth release was written and recorded between February 2018 and January 2019 in a Minimal Space, (Baltimore). Limited edition of 300 copies lacquered pressed on 140 gr. high quality red vinyl and digital album.

Aggelos Baltas is a veteran of the global electronic music scene, responsible for a handful of celebrated EBM 12”s as Dream Weapons, and a particularly heady and open-ended brand of krautrock as Fantastikoi Hxoi. His newest project, Anatolian Weapons, was conceived as a way to bring together these two seemingly mismatched concepts, with the polyrhythmic percussion and wailing tones of Greek folk music serving as their unlikely bonding agent. His output garners praise particularly around the Golden Pudel scene, such as Vladimir Ivkovic, and Phuong Dan. Lena Willikens, from the same circle, included Baltas’ track “Disillusioned” on her Dekmantel Selectors compilation in 2018.

But where much of what Baltas has released as Anatolian Weapons is instantly recognizable as dance music, To The Mother Of Gods—Baltas’ debut album for Beats In Space—is something else entirely. Created in tandem with Greek folk musician Seirios Savvaidis, it is a work of simultaneous collaboration and subtraction whose meticulous construction becomes more apparent with every listen. An album-length exploration of what happens when the principles of dance music are applied to pre-digital musical modalities. It is a record of psychedelic folk music that has more in common with Kikagaku Moyo, Minami Deutsch, and the Habibi Funk label than it does with anything else Baltas has produced under any alias. It’s difficult to imagine this music in any kind of club setting.

And yet, it’s very much the work of a DJ. Baltas initially heard Savvaidis’ music through a friend, and was absolutely amazed. “It was his very esoteric, pagan [music and] beautiful lyrics that grabbed me,” he writes. Seirios is a composer and performer of traditional Greek folk music with a growing discography of regional psych-rock gems. Baltas reached out to collaborate and the seeds of To The Mother Of Gods were sown.

Savvidis contributed stems of ten songs, which Baltas deconstructs and rearranges with appreciation of the ancestry of their lineage and of the deceptively ancient eerie, droning qualities inherent in the style. Occasionally augmenting Savvaidis’ recordings with his own, Baltas treats these elements as if raw materials for an architectural process.

To The Mother Of Gods showcases Baltas’ arrangement skills. He treats Savvaidis’ songs as landscapes, filling them with slanted, droning light and setting the singer’s vocals in dead center. His years behind the decks have given him an intuitive understanding of dynamics—drums crest and recede like tides, snippets of bassline repeat and swirl. He knows how to entrance, and when to push the music from the head to the body. Opener “Taratchi Katarratchi” (“Stormy Cataract”) is sung as a spell to ward off the fear of death, but Baltas’ orchestration demonstrates that dancing is an equally effective way of dispelling the darkness. The beat he assembles from Savvaidis’ playing recalls the late-night ecstasies of Primal Scream circa Screamadelica.

To The Mother Of Gods is a reminder that folk music and dance music are both powered by their audience as much as the musicians themselves. Savvaidis’ lyrics echo pagan Greek themes, touching on what Baltas calls “the magic of nature.” At times, as on “Kalesma” (“Invitation”), this can feel incantatory. Savvaidis chisels his vocal melodies into hard, clipped syllables, their cadence recalling Gregorian chant, and yet Baltas cloaks these details in washes of distortion. “Ston Stavraito” (“In Stavraithos”) is delivered with a lamentive tenderness that Baltas swells into a prideful stomp, immersing Savvaidis in marching drums and distant vocals that form a resilient protest-song. To The Mother Of Gods is a testament to the ongoing and innate truth that music can take us beyond ourselves. That repetition and drone can shepherd us to a liminal space beyond thought and rationality, where the wall between perception and reality does not exist. Call it spirit, if you want, and watch as it courses its way through modern-day dance music, mid-century psych, and the ancient sounds of the anatol.

Anatolian Weapons’ To The Mother Of Gods will be available from Beats In Space on June 14, 2019 in limited vinyl and unlimited digital forms.

Artist Highlights
• Aggelos Baltas is an Athenian music producer creating and Djing under the monikers of Anatolian Weapons, Fantastikoi Hxoi, and Dream Weapons.
• The Anatolian Weapons moniker is an outlet for Baltas to explore global music—from African to Anatolian and Middle Eastern, while also incorporating sounds from his home country of Greece.

Eagerly awaited debut album from oft-cited UK's most out-there band, features in the works with The Quietus and Wire already.

180GM PRESSING - 500 COPIES ONLY.

Difficult times required difficult music, my Yarns, that's why we had Guttersnipe; with its own sort of energy-kind there then.Reiner: A singular yield, a singular yield now.Barns: A whot
Reiner: A singular yield mate! Rich guitar strang, flow motive pounding underneath.Vox like Death come winding through the fields. Barns:  Hell of a way to describe a vocal style.
Me: Nah but for real my Donny, Have you read a presser 1 sheet lately It's the most

They say the PR era, circa late 80's killed the golden age of music journalism:
They say Guttersnipe have continuously melted all the forms that they come up against. They are right.  Because Guttersnipe is not part of a tradition we know well. You will identify the departure from it though, immediately, upon hearing My Mother The Vent. This LP, the promotional version of which, likely sits in your hands (disk, whatever). The innovation here is a FIRM commitment to the flowmotive polyrhythm underwriting the seared, nay fried, tonal rainbow and de-reasoned vox.

Not Nate Nelson, nor John the masseuse dude from Sightings but TIPULA CONFUSA.  Don't want to put the captain obvious pants on so tight I can't jump around the yard because why waste a good yard hang. I'll put on my blighty nighty instead. UROCERAS GIGAS has bridged so many gaps, finally unlocked the AxeWeld CODE and is really playing the thing. Not to mention bringing forth a world-view so utterly unique.  Good luck finding anything like it.

Finally some REAL disjunction in the music; clear and intended. In an age when most computer music composers use stochastic systems and still manage to drop some linear pathground shit, the brawler drums and slanky guitar constructions on My Mother The Vent are a genuine treat.  I've spent too much of my adult life so far hearing too much of this shit to not recognize REAL GAME. And here it crawls out of the grey shadows of ol' BLIGHTY.

Our post-music age: after the fine human endeavour known as music, the result of letting the cybernetic run ITS horrible game on us. I'm not waxing confusingly in a rarefied tone here. Nor running the boring sci-fi script. I really think that is were we is.  We left the human-music-on-a-human-scale behind and much to our detriment. Here we sit in our crumbling reality. But Guttersnipe come paleo, like the rhapsodes with long ass memories rattling off Homeric verse well into the age of manuscript culture, but here, with future tones.  Luckily. Otherwise, me and the record label here wouldn't be wasting our time and yours with a 1 sheet for My Mother The Vent.

So a proper first time on wax for these amazing creatures is a welcome addition to the world of things.  These drums and these guit-lines are so cranké, as they say here in my odd neighborhood.  These voices are so utterly expressive without even the damn language at hand ; like the great horns. We'll rinse this record out, I'll put on my old blighty nighty and go dance in the street.  Alex Moskos, Montreal, August 2018Guttersnipe is:UROCERAS GIGAS - Guitar, Analog Synth, VoxTIPULA CONFUSA - Drums, Drum Synth, Vox

A world premiere of AI-generated symphonic music!

All three audio files are compiled from two live recordings with different microphone settings. The cover image is generated by algorithms trained with the following image searches: migration, mediterranean, boat, Libyan coast, EU. Different search engines were used. »Land der Musik« celebrated its world premiere on 7 October 2018 at steirischer herbst '18 - volksfronten in Graz, Austria. Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst in cooperation with ORF Musikprotokoll.

A1. soundalikeStrauss (an audio reverse-engineering tool is used after the initial cross-fade) A2. AIstrauss (algorithms are trained with midi-files of Johann Strauss waltzes) B1. AImahler (algorithms trained with midi-files of Gustav Mahler symphonies) B2. (untitled)

A new standard of beauty. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can now group photo pixels or audio waves into meaningful categories. This is similar to how our brain operates, yet the outcome seems distinctively non-human. At the same time it appears that the sphere of our appreciation and imagination may just have expanded. The question of whether we are still able to see and hear the difference between automated and so-called autonomous artifacts should be left to historians. On the other hand, producing this analog audio record with this image on the front cover really is an antagonism. A more appropriate medium might be a tracking chip of your online and offline activities generating customized results in real time—be it images, music, or whatever.

If AI is communist (to quote the libertarian Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel), then this statistics-based technology might actually reinforce centralized monopoly capitalism and the coming crisis of inequality, just as it might accelerate into Deleuze's notion of the Society of Control. But it might also be seen and heard as a demo, a new standard of beauty, for the redistribution of wealth and for solidarity; in short as a utopia freed from exploitation, nationalism, and racism, liberating us from our own perception of this world. »Land der musik - The Graz AI Score« demonstrates how machine learning might help us to finally create the perfect Austrian national music identity. Yet in doing so, our ultimate aim is to get rid of the construction of national identities all together.

»God created man because he dreamed him. / But man forgot God and created the machine because he dreamed it. / At the end of the twentieth century, however, the machine has forgotten man. / Who could predict who or what she dreams of« (Friedrich Kittler)

After 'Cobraxine', 'Boogie Throb', and the Ana Ott released 'Molochville', Brecht Ameel (Razen/Ameel Brecht) gives us his new album under the Br'lâaB moniker 'Other People's Crimes'; a high-on-paranoia, pre-crime-surveillance narrative, constructed after hours in the studio from a combination of Ameel's own recordings on a widely varied set of instruments, library music, flea-market broken vinyls and old cassettes. Part blind-overdub palimpsest-collage, part straightforward composition, the 10' contains both Br'lâaB's loop constructions and tracks performed by the found audio phantom band called the Acid Boogie Quartet. Bearing more gritty layers of both sound and subtext than ever, the 'Other People's Crimes' EP stands as an artefact of wild paranoia and spy-thriller sonics, weaving vignettes of surveillance gone wrong, doublethink and confessional echolalia.

Police and thieves are in the streets, running wild with nosebleeds and ill will ids. Dial v for victim as the night horizon broods a neon luminol glow. Howling at the vortex, buried under blindfolds, vigilantes take to crime with fear and ketamines.

Rebar continue their geography-infused musical journey with the second EP, Lost in New York City. While the first release unveiled the majestic anthropophony of the Japanese capital, this release is centered around the city of New York. As in the previous offering, the three tracks all pertain to different styles, exploring different facets of techno, while carrying the common soundprint of the American metropolis. The first cut unveils a mesmerizing techno construction, while the second makes for a groovy interlude, rounded up by rolling techno in the third track. A mysterious and compelling affair, released on vinyl and digital at exactly one year from the inaugural opener.

Roman Flügel needs no introduction, so lets not hammer on about his lengthy history as a kingpin of contemporary German dance music, his essential contributions to the musical evolution of Darmstadt and Frankfurt, his achievements as a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist traversing genres with remarkable grace, his sense of dynamism and urgency in the construction of big-room anthems or the meticulously woven textures of melancholy found throughout his minimalist work, his ability to pay homage to pioneers of his musical heritage without diverting to pastiche, his fearless combination of familiar melody with synthesized aberration and imperfection, his approach to instrumentation as Haiku poetry where the ordinary is made profound through simple isolation, his rejection of stylistic pretense and acceptance of comforts found in the constructs of folk and pop, his contrast of cold efficiency with a warm naivete´, his yearning to return down previously-forged paths with a new accumulation of experience, the confidence to paint the room blue when it was meant to be black, his belief that a beautifully executed idea will always transcend the need for incessant polishing, the way in which he leads arrangements to the edge and only implies a resolve, his framing of musical narratives as sketches, outlines, or skeletons where the listener's perception compliments the whole, or his notion that sometimes stories might not need a clear articulation but might only come through in hints of mood, pace, and color, a language which doesn't rely on words to communicate but which paints for us in Themes. Yes, rather than hearing our attempt to elaborate on Roman's Flu¨gel's debut album with the ESP Institute, lets just simply listen.

The New York Downtown Producer/Composer Returns With His First New Album In 3 Years

EIGHTEEN: the year of release, 2018. EIGHTEEN: the age at which I first used a synthesizer.

In creating EIGHTEEN I worked independently in the studio, initially building up tracks with synthesizers and found sounds recorded in my daily comings and goings. After working with the tracks over a period of months,I shared them with a few musicians, who added their own instrumental layers. Though working independently, we all shared a similar working process: working in our personal recording spaces, as opposed to larger recording studios.

The musicians are: Gabe Gurnsey (drums) of Factory Floor, with whom I collaborated on the Beachcombing EP and performed live at London's ICA. I appear on Gabe's newly released album Physical;

Larry Saltzman (guitar) has played in my Love Of Life Orchestra since the 1970's. Well-known for his work with Arthur Russell ('Kiss Me Again', Flying Hearts), he is in high demand in NYC by acts such as Simon and Garfunkel;

Paul Nowinski, (bass) has played with LOLO since the 1980's. Paul has an impressive list of credits, including Les Paul, Keith Richards, Bernard Purdie and the Boston Pops; Matt Mottel, (electric piano), is the newest addition to the Love Of Life Orchestra. He is half the duo Talibam!, a leading act in the noise jazz scene; Lewin Barringer, (guitar), is a talented guitarist and producer in Philadelphia.

After mixing the final tracks, I brought the mixes to Berlin. There I worked with the brilliant mastering engineer Mike Grinser who helped to give the album a unified sound.

I think of this album as electronic music. It was created in my home studio, using analog and digital synthesizers, found sounds recorded on my phone, and instrumental parts contributed by friends. Finely crafted melodies and harmonies are set against subway noises, street construction, and distant foghorns. Sometimes there are sustained clusters, generated by my leaning against the keyboard. Deliberateness paired with randomness: this is what guided the artistic process.

This album is atypical for me as I am not playing saxophone. (I do play one reed instrument - a harmonica.) I grew up with the sax as my primary instrument. Yet my father was a radio journalist so the reel-to-reel tape recorder was a ubiquitous presence in the family home. From an early age,

I experimented with the tape machine: recording, overdubbing and splicing tape. I learned about Varese from Frank Zappa liner notes; I read John Cage's 'Silence.' Electronic music was on my radar.

My first exposure to an actual synthesizer came when I recorded my first single at the fabled Sound City Studio in Van Nuys, CA. The studio had a custom Neve board, but it also had a firstgeneration Moog modular synthesizer sitting unused in the maintenance room. I asked and they kindly let me experiment with it. Soon, I enrolled at the University of California - San Diego after I discovered they had separate studios for their Moog and Buchla systems. These large modular synthesizers were affordable then only by institutions and rock stars. But these would be soon eclipsed by smaller, cheaper synths in the 70's and early 80's. In the same way, recording studio technology became accessible in the 90's. . And thus the personal computer and digital audio allowed studio quality production in the home studio. Electronic music had become democratized.
Handmade music by way of digital technology: this is the music of EIGHTEEN

An Invitation To Disappear is the debut LP by British electronic musician Inland aka Ed Davenport - and his first release for A-TON. Based on his soundtrack for a video installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, Davenport has recast the material and field recordings into eight tracks of rhythmically intricate electronics and spectral, ambient techno, inspired by Charrière's visually striking, 76-minute tracking shot through a palm plantation toward a totemic soundsystem on full blast.
Both the album and original soundtrack were created in response to the 200th anniversary of the eruption of Indonesia's Tambora volcano in 1815, which plunged the world into darkness and caused a series of extreme weather conditions. At the time, the natural climate change crisis resulted in numerous global famines and is known throughout the northern hemisphere as 'The Year Without Summer', with global communities forced to adapt to sudden radical changes in temperature and weather.
An Invitation To Disappear offers a contemporary parallel, leading viewers - and listeners - down a seemingly endless direct path of gridded palms from dawn to dusk; a bio-commercial monoculture where ancient jungle once flourished. Light flickers between rows of fruit-laden trees and a distant fire burns in the undergrowth where the border between natural image and computer simulation breaks down. At the same time, formerly incoherent rumblings of sub-frequencies begin to transform into the contours of rhythm. This is reflected sonically in eight perspectives on the lush, synthetic jungle, made of myriad buzzing fauna, morphing melody and colossal bassweight. All paths lead toward an apocalyptic dancefloor, though speeds vary widely; rhythms dissolve from straight to broken, synth tempos operate by their own internal clocks (and logic). Juxtaposing industrial agriculture with rave culture, the album explores the industrialization and refinement of nature, and the new strange forms emerging from the synthetic grids of both.
As Inland, Davenport has previously contributed soundtracks to other installations by the Swiss-born Charrière, whose artistic practice focuses on bridging environmental science and cultural history, often taking place in remote geophysical locations, including ice fields, volcanos and radioactive sites.
Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. A former student of Olafur Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente, Charrière's art explores post-romantic constructions of nature, staging tensions between deep or geological timescales and those relating to mankind. His work has previously been shown across the globe, including at the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2017, a solo show at Kunsthalle Mainz this past Spring and an upcoming solo show at the Berlinische Galerie opening September 26.
Inland (real name Ed Davenport) is a British producer, DJ and founder of Counterchange Records based in Berlin. Known for his detailed and explorative house and techno releases on his own label, Infrastructure, Naïf and more, Davenport has recently gravitated toward the contemporary art world, finding inspiration in the cross-pollination between Berlin's art and music scenes. Previous sound design collaborations with Charrière have been exhibited in institutions such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in 2014 and Thyssen- Bornemisza Contemporary in Vienna in 2017.
The gallery version of An Invitation To Disappear premiered this past April at the Kunsthalle Mainz and will be on display at the Berlinische Galerie as part of Charrière's solo exhibition As We Used to Float, opening September 26, 2018. The LP will premier live together with the video installation during a special presentation in Berghain the same day for Berlin Art Week.