Search:saturn

2026 Repress

Lisa Decker returned with her second studio album "Soliloquise" one year after her debut album "Serendipity" in 2021 with Japanese Jazz trio Nautilus from Tokyo and a superb single remix of "Everytime" by Pat Van Dyke featuring rapper John Robinson.

For this project she worked on eight new songs. Half of the album is arranged by Nautilus and the other half is produced by SaturnVybz who is known for his works with/and projects like Slick Walk, The Ruff Cats and Jazzanova.

Getting a step forward and conceptually a bit different this release gets the "Oonops Drops" FLIP SERIES treatment which means: Side A and Side B are made by different artists or differentiate from each other like the first volume with Nautilus X Anna Sato & Toshiyuki Sasaki (OD006LP).

Songs like "Free", "Let's Wake Up" and "Summer Child" with their feel warm note of groovy, jazzy pop and the more swing-jazz tune "Rimy Whitewater" meet guitar-electronic touched songs like "Love And Hope", "On My Way" and "True Blue" or her dreamt away track "Stay With Me" with smooth bouncy beats and with an atmosphere for being the perfect soundtrack for a night ride on deserted streets.

Lisa is careful about the artwork and after working together with renowned artist Lindsey Kustusch from San Francisco on her first album she collaborates with local artist Sebastian Maria Otto who is known for his signature art style and exhibitions from Germany to Japan.

Lisa will perform live in Hanover, the 20th May at roof top of the Historical Museum together with Nautilus. Japan meets Germany. Lucky coincidence or: "Serendipity".

As Nathan Fake rises from the nocturnal subterranea and rave catharsis of his previous records, on Evaporator, he resurfaces into the domain of daylight, bringing a tangible sense of air rushing against your face, of big skies, and endless landscapes.

The idea of pop accessibility that trickled into 2023’s Crystal Vision is refracted here through the prism of sweeping ambient, deep electronica, and trance uplift. Evaporator is Fake’s idea of “airy daytime music”, with each track a different barometer reading across the album’s varying atmospheres, which range from vibrant sunbursts, bracing rainscapes, and fine mists of clement melodics. “It’s not overtly confrontational electronic club music,” states Fake. “It’s quite pleasant, it’s accessible. As I was progressing through making the tracklist, I called it a daytime album. It doesn’t feel like an afterparty album.” For the past decade Fake has been gingerly introducing collaborations with heroes and friends alike into his lone, idiosyncratic working process.

Border Community alumni Dextro AKA Ewan Mackenzie transmutes his ferocious drumming for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs into the blurred choral thump of ‘Baltasound’. ‘Orbiting Meadows’, meanwhile, is his second collaboration with Clark, an eerily idyllic duet where microtonal 18EDO piano clangs slowly twirl around wailing pads. Evaporator marks the junction point of old technology and ever fresh creativity for Nathan. The trusty “dinosaur” age software, particularly Cubase VST5, that has powered two decades of music is rarely updated. “I used to sort of feel a bit ashamed of using such old software, and then I kind of had an epiphany – that’s just how I work”, comments Fake. “That’s just how I play. I’m very fond of these old tools, and I get the most joy out of them, but now I’ve incorporated new technology too.” When an artist accumulates so much synergy with their instrument, music making becomes instinctual. By Fake’s account, much of Evaporator just fell into place. The album title arrived randomly in his head (“it felt completely perfect. Airy.”), ideas looped and developed until things locked into place and just felt right. ‘The Ice House’ is a fleeting glimpse of the sonic world he taps into in this creative state, its glassy FM synths built around a counterpoint between rough-hewn crystalline arpeggios and sparse yet gravitas-bearing bass. “That riff I just wrote out on the keyboard, I just played it forever and ever and ever.

The original track ended up being really short. Here you go, and it’s gone!” These unplanned channellings of sound call forth records from Fake’s past while he looks ahead, perhaps getting at the very essence of his musicianship. The opener ‘Aiwa’ (“the breeziest,” he muses) reminds of the introspection that characterised Providence, excited by the fire and grit of Steam Days’ textural experiments, its chunky slams and clatters surging into a flood of harmonic buzzing as they reach out for old wisdom. ‘Hypercube’ stampedes in a similar chronological confluence, infusing an incessant synth line reminiscent of the golden age of rave with the crackling, ecstatic energy of modern festival anthems. Like the vaporisation of liquid to particles, everything that Evaporator presents has a mutant desire to be amorphous. Sounds rarely settle; the irradiated garage beat of ‘Bialystok’ is pitched downwards to driving, rebounding effect, while ‘You’ll Find a Way’ warps static into shivering energy, cinematic synth strings building anticipation into a gradual gush of chords. This translates into a more expansive stereo field than Fake has explored before.


‘Slow Yamaha’ saves the wildest, most kinetic transformations for last with a cornucopia of crispy melodies and fried drums; a sibilance of cymbals on the left, a susurrus of shakers on the right, and kaleidoscopic lasers pulsing and fizzing all around. Evaporation culminating in pure excited atoms.

"BLUNTS ROLLED" GSF13 the first posthumous release of unheard music by RAS-G'. Eighteen raw transmissions: unreleased beats, remixes, loops & smoky spacecraft meditations arranged in true mixtape spirit exactly as RAS envisioned them. This isn’t a vault dump, it's RAS_G in full form - unfiltered, joyful, psychedelic & rooted in the low end theory.
"BLUNTS ROLLED" continues the ASP mission: connecting hood to heaven, ancient to future, earthly to astral. These sounds crackle with cosmic dust & Cali sunshine - grounded in LA soil, projected into Saturn’s rings. Featuring transmissions from ASP family Kahil Sadiq, The Koreatown Oddity, Zeroh, and even G himself... voices and energies orbiting each other in intimate, galaxy-folding, head-nodding, fronto-scented universes.

As Nathan Fake rises from the nocturnal subterranea and rave catharsis of his previous records, on Evaporator, he resurfaces into the domain of daylight, bringing a tangible sense of air rushing against your face, of big skies, and endless landscapes. The idea of pop accessibility that trickled into 2023’s Crystal Vision is refracted here through the prism of sweeping ambient, deep electronica, and trance uplift. Evaporator is Fake’s idea of “airy daytime music”, with each track a different barometer reading across the album’s varying atmospheres, which range from vibrant sunbursts, bracing rainscapes, and fine mists of clement melodics. “It’s not overtly confrontational electronic club music,” states Fake. “It’s quite pleasant, it’s accessible. As I was progressing through making the tracklist, I called it a daytime album. It doesn’t feel like an afterparty album.” For the past decade Fake has been gingerly introducing collaborations with heroes and friends alike into his lone, idiosyncratic working process. Border Community alumni Dextro AKA Ewan Mackenzie transmutes his ferocious drumming for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs into the blurred choral thump of ‘Baltasound’. ‘Orbiting Meadows’, meanwhile, is his second collaboration with Clark, an eerily idyllic duet where microtonal 18EDO piano clangs slowly twirl around wailing pads. Evaporator marks the junction point of old technology and ever fresh creativity for Nathan. The trusty “dinosaur” age software, particularly Cubase VST5, that has powered two decades of music is rarely updated. “I used to sort of feel a bit ashamed of using such old software, and then I kind of had an epiphany – that’s just how I work”, comments Fake. “That’s just how I play. I’m very fond of these old tools, and I get the most joy out of them, but now I’ve incorporated new technology too.” When an artist accumulates so much synergy with their instrument, music making becomes instinctual. By Fake’s account, much of Evaporator just fell into place. The album title arrived randomly in his head (“it felt completely perfect. Airy.”), ideas looped and developed until things locked into place and just felt right. ‘The Ice House’ is a fleeting glimpse of the sonic world he taps into in this creative state, its glassy FM synths built around a counterpoint between rough-hewn crystalline arpeggios and sparse yet gravitas-bearing bass. “That riff I just wrote out on the keyboard, I just played it forever and ever and ever. The original track ended up being really short. Here you go, and it’s gone!” These unplanned channellings of sound call forth records from Fake’s past while he looks ahead, perhaps getting at the very essence of his musicianship. The opener ‘Aiwa’ (“the breeziest,” he muses) reminds of the introspection that characterised Providence, excited by the fire and grit of Steam Days’ textural experiments, its chunky slams and clatters surging into a flood of harmonic buzzing as they reach out for old wisdom. ‘Hypercube’ stampedes in a similar chronological confluence, infusing an incessant synth line reminiscent of the golden age of rave with the crackling, ecstatic energy of modern festival anthems. Like the vaporisation of liquid to particles, everything that Evaporator presents has a mutant desire to be amorphous. Sounds rarely settle; the irradiated garage beat of ‘Bialystok’ is pitched downwards to driving, rebounding effect, while ‘You’ll Find a Way’ warps static into shivering energy, cinematic synth strings building anticipation into a gradual gush of chords. This translates into a more expansive stereo field than Fake has explored before. ‘Slow Yamaha’ saves the wildest, most kinetic transformations for last with a cornucopia of crispy melodies and fried drums; a sibilance of cymbals on the left, a susurrus of shakers on the right, and kaleidoscopic lasers pulsing and fizzing all around. Evaporation culminating in pure excited atoms. In a world where music has increasingly become background content, making albums remains lifeblood for Fake: “It makes me realise how long; twenty years is ages! It’s weird to see how much the world has changed. Release day back then you did fuck all, now you spend all day on socials. When I grew up the people who made the electronic music I was into were quite mysterious, and the artwork was very abstract. There was a massive distance between you and that music, and that was a key part of it, really. Now it helps to be an extrovert, and I'm just not, but the album marks the first time my face has graced the cover art. I’ve never wanted to do this before, I'm very shy, and generally I don’t like being seen,” he professes. “But, twenty years in, I supposed I could try something new. I'm very lucky that I'm somehow surviving in this world, where the media world favours extroverts and interesting looking people. It’s not my world but somehow I’m still in it.” Evaporator continues to prove Nathan’s necessary presence, with some of his most engaging, varied, and magical music yet.

Recorded spontaneously in a single afternoon, the album captures an unguarded musical conversation between two of the most compelling voices of their generation. Born in Brixton and now based in Harlem, Ruben Fox has emerged as a major presence on the international jazz scene, renowned for the depth of his sound, the emotional clarity of his ballad playing, and a voice rooted in tradition while speaking firmly in the present. His work follows collaborations with artists including Wynton Marsalis, Barry Harris, Roy Hargrove, Jon Batiste, and George Coleman, and builds on the critical acclaim of his 2021 debut Introducing Ruben Fox.

Micah Thomas is one of the most celebrated pianists of his generation, praised for a style that is both restlessly inventive and deeply grounded in the history of the music. A Jerome L. Greene Fellow and Juilliard alumnus, Thomas has worked extensively with Immanuel Wilkins, Joshua Redman, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Billy Drummond, and has been recognised by DownBeat, Jazz Magazine, and The New York City Jazz Record as a defining contemporary voice. Fox and Thomas first developed their musical relationship while studying at Juilliard, where they regularly played duo sets. In Two Minds was recorded on a whim at Chris Pattishall's apartment in Washington Heights, with no rehearsal, no edits, and no agenda beyond mutual respect, listening, and shared musical values. Over three hours, the pair simply showed up and played.

The result is an intimate, conversational record that foregrounds generosity, empathy, and deep musical listening. Sparse, direct, and emotionally rich, In Two Minds offers a rare document of two artists meeting in real time, balancing history, intellect, warmth, and spontaneity.

Wie ein schwarzer Wind, der aus längst verstummten Mooren aufsteigt, legt die irische Band Coscradh ihr zweites Album „Carving the Causeway to the Otherworld“ vor, das mit furchterregender Zauberei die Moorwege der Toten freilegt. Aus tief verwurzelter Traditionen und alter Mystik lässt das Album die sechstausend Jahre alten Eichenpfade wiederauferstehen, die von kriegführenden Stämmen unter dem kalten Blick der Druiden angelegt wurden, um in das Reich jenseits des Lebens zu gelangen, und beschwört diese verschwundenen Mühen mit der Erinnerung an die Gewalt selbst herauf. Coscradh kanalisiert den Druiden als Astronomen und Kriegsseher und ruft Mars als den Gott an, dessen rotes Licht Opfer fordert, und offenbart gälische Krieger, die sich zu Gefäßen aushöhlen und die Wut von Goac in sich eindringen lassen, um sie für den Kampf zu verschlingen. Gitarren flammen auf - brennend wie Meteore, die den Horizont durchschneiden - und lassen Riffs los, die mit der Kraft der Vorfahren durchdrungen sind. Der glühende perkussive Ansturm kracht wie Hufe auf tote Erde, während die wilde Grausamkeit der Band wie ein in den Himmel geschleuderter Kriegsschrei ausbricht, gekrönt von ruinöser Pracht. Coscradh bewohnt diesen Bereich zwischen den Welten vollständig und haucht ihrem Werk die Wut und spirituelle Kraft eines Volkes ein, das Wahrheiten in Land, Himmel und Grab gemeißelt hat. Als eine Verbindung aus druidischer Wissenschaft und Blut, ritueller Aggression und sprachlicher Wiederauferstehung zwingt „Carving the Causeway to the Otherworld“ zu einer himmlischen Abrechnung, bei der das Schicksal selbst auf den Altar geworfen wird. Wie Götter, die das Firmament bereisen, fällt Coscradhs kalte, grausame Ausstrahlung auf alle, die sie hören. Das Album ist eine kosmische Hinrichtung, die vergangene Dammwege, Kriegsgötter, Steinidole und sternengeborene Kräfte, die die Druiden zu nutzen suchten, miteinander verbindet. Eine Vision des Nachthimmels als lebendige Festungsmauer der Omen für diejenigen, die auf die alten zornigen Geister hören wollen.

Toronto-based musician and producer David Psutka’s long dormant Egyptrixx alias returns, with How Tidal. A compendium of sorts, which retells the story so far, reworks of highlights from his catalogue sit alongside brand new tracks, serving as a bridge between the past and the future, preceding more fresh music in 2026.
With the originals still sounding remarkably current, a straight best-of wouldn’t have been out of question, but ever the tinkering student of sound, Psutka thought he’d break them apart, just to see how he could put them back together again.

The music on is How Tidal is cutting-edge and futuristic, but never difficult, instead offering accessible gems where multiple strains of bass music are infused with a zingy, techno-pop bounce, whilst ambient moments gift sonic lozenges for maximum contentment. Psutka creates optimistically welcoming environments, where synthetic birds chirrup in cyan skies over babbling rainbow brooks, as 15 inch subwoofers boom by.

Egyptrixx gained renown across the 2010s with his hard hitting yet tranquil experimental dance music dubbed ‘celestial jeep music for a Saturn moon’. Colourful sound design was braided with dancefloor structures, creating an exhilarating tension between melodic and dissonant, euphoric and inward. The debut album Bible Eyes was released in March of 2011 to critical acclaim.

As Egyptrixx, Psutka has released four studio albums, collaborated, remixed, and toured with some of the biggest names in electronic music.
The widely acclaimed moniker is foundational to Psutka’s complex body of work that encompasses multiple solo projects, plus a diverse range of collaborative work. He has performed live at Sonar Festival, Roskilde, Mutek, MOMA PS1 Warm-UP and CTM Festival, and presented sound installations at Galeria Civica Commune di Modena and Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

In 2015, Psutka launched Halocline Trance as a home for his various sound projects, events and collaborations. In recent years, the label has quietly established itself as a platform that facilitates many of Canada’s most exciting creative music projects.

Hyperstellar returns on Bordello A Parigi with a nocturnal and deeply magnetic EP. In For a Flash captures the fleeting beauty of a moment stolen from the night, the tension of a glance that will never return, the sensation of having loved inside a dream. The record carves out a singular aesthetic through new wave, shady atmospheres, and early electronic influences.

The eponymous track, In For a Flash, opens the record like a sudden vision: a burst of light in the dark, propulsive, yet already fading. From its fatalist urgency to the longing of The Dance We Never Had, each piece suggests a different facet of the same mirage. Surrender unfolds like a slow implosion, a toxic war between release and control, while L’Amour sur Saturne drifts endlessly in a suspended space, like a tale where the impossible is still imagined.

Influenced as much by Burial as by New Order, the solitude of classical composers or eccentric glam rock acts, Hyperstellar continues to build his artistry on numbers, and intimate constellations.


Vinyl gatefold jacket includes a 12x12 insert reproduction of the original LP jacket art.Recorded in 1956 and released in 1957, Supersonic Jazz is arguably the first long-playing album by Sun Ra and His Arkestra on his Saturn label. However, it was not recorded as a debut. Rather, the album was assembled from tapes recorded during a number of sessions at two Chicago studios (RCA Victor and Balkan), and several tracks had been released as singles before their inclusion on this album. (Sunny's first fully realized commercial album was 1957's Jazz by Sun Ra, produced by Tom Wilson on his short lived/soon to be defunct Transition label.) Prior to these sessions, Sunny was still arranging for the Red Saunders Orchestra and singer Joe Williams, in addition to arranging for and coaching doo-wop ensembles. As Sunny's ambitions achieved liftoff, the Arkestra coalesced, began building a repertoire (mostly of Ra's originals), and making forays into studios. Deciding it was time for commercial releases, Sunny and business partner Alton Abraham launched Saturn (sometimes called El Saturn) as a record company in 1956. As a first offering, Supersonic Jazz is a pinnacle Sun Ra release. While reflecting many prevailing bebop, Latin, and R&B conventions of the mid-1950s, it's evident that Sun Ra's musical voice and vision were starting to propel him away from the jazz mainstream. Biographer John Szwed finds on these recordings "characteristics which seemed alien to swing, bebop, or the new, more soulful and hard-edged music which was coming to be called hard bop."

Babau is the pantropical project of Artetetra founders Matteo Pennesi and Luigi Monteanni in which a fascination with exotica, world music 2.0 and field recordings meets the compositional and improvisational techniques of computer music. Their latest work, the album »Stock Fantasy Zone«, was recently released on Discrepant and they have been nominated Shape artists 2023. The duo has participated in various Italian and non-Italian festivals such as Fusion, Club to Club, Nextones, Outernational Days, Camp Cosmic and Saturnalia.

»Flatland Explorations« is an ever-growing collection of completely improvised attempts at mapping the surface and irregular shapes of Babau's sonic flatland by means of audio manipulations and digital sorceries. Joining live recordings with studio material and field recordings, the duo crafts its unique sound made of granular illusions, midi extravaganza, wind instruments' acrobacies, and vocal calembours. The results have been remarkably described as 'the sound of a continent moving, ethnicities, animals, plants and mineral included.

Out of the stack, the flatland has no boundaries.

Clear Red Vinyl. In den späten 1990er Jahren zog Peter ,Sleazy" Christopherson mit Jhonn Balance - seinem Lebens- und Coil-Partner - von London ins ländliche Weston-super-Mare, und schuf ein Umfeld für alles, was ,musick, musick, musick!" heißt, mit einer wechselnden Mitgliedern, darunter Thighpaulsandra. Coil's Coil verdoppelte sich fast, und inmitten dieser fruchtbaren Zeit stellte Thighpaulsandra die einfache Frage: Warum spielt Coil nicht live? Nach einer 16 Jahren Wartezeit, dank des rasanten technischen Fortschritts in Form von MacBooks, DAWs, VSTs und Plug-ins waren Coil in der Lage, ihre Musik auf die Bühne zu bringen, wie sie es sich immer vorgestellt hatten. Mit der Performance konnten sie die Risiken und Freiheiten der Echtzeit-Klangmanipulation, wie Sleazy anmerkt: ,Die Show wird Minute für Minute umgestaltet die Show Minute für Minute... die Richtung ist sehr spontan, nicht so sehr in Jazz-Improvisation, sondern in einer Art Bewusstseinsstrom - Thighpaulsandra brachte uns seine Weisheit, und er konnte uns überzeugen, dass wir es schaffen konnten." Wenn Coil live spielten, waren sie, wie eine Schlange, die sich häutet" alle sechs Monate in etwas völlig anderes; in der Vorbereitung auf das 2004er "Even an Evil Fatigue"-Liveserie vorbereiteten, begannen Coil mit der Arbeit an ihrem nächsten, die Zeit definierenden Meisterwerk Black Antlers. Black Antlers zeigt die späte Coil-Periode: reduzierter, straffer und schlanker. Die Musik wurde rhythmischer, mit einer größeren Betonung auf Beats: ,Die Songs, die wir gemacht haben, sind eher... nicht Rock im eigentlichen Sinne, aber du weißt schon, konventioneller in Bezug auf die Struktur, aber jetzt ist das, was wir tun, eine Art elektronischen' Genre." Der Sound von Black Antlers ist eine mitreißende Energie, die Thighpaulsandras fortschrittliche Synthese, Balances poetische Lyrik und Christophersons Flirten mit Jazz und Ableton-gestütztem PowerBook Maximalismus. Vervollständigt wurde das Trio durch den renommierten Drehleierspieler Cliff Stapleton auf einer ,speziell in Auftrag gegebenen" elektrischen Variante, die sich in die ,seltsame und weltfremde Musik" der Band zu integrieren; der an der Royal Academy of Music ausgebildete Perkussionist Tom Edwards (der auch mit Thighpaulsandra in der der Live-Band von Spiritualized auftrat); und der Spezialist für europäische und nahöstliche Blasinstrumente Mike York an Pfeifen, Bombarde, Duduk und Balalaika.

Serenity Now returns with the next dose of bangers from DOC ’N ’ P1LL in the form of RX
PRESCRIPTIONS Volume 2.
Following last year ’s widely appreciated debut, the Stockholm-based duo is back with four
brand new club-oriented tracks, once again rooted in their self-made genre Synth-Tech – a
fusion of
synth-driven techhouse, melodic tech and deep house, built around a sound that ’s cerebral
and deep. With their unique sound, DOC ’N ’ P1LL mix snappy drums and percussive
elements with hard-hitting melodies, creating tracks that hit with precision and energy.
Volume 2 explores a wider range of moods while keeping things direct and floor-focused.
From the bouncy opener to the more hypnotic and stripped-down moments, each track
reflects the duo ’s long-standing experience both behind the decks and in the studio.
If Volume 1 laid the foundation for Synth-Tech, this second installment takes it further –
deeper, weirder, and even more confident. Four new flavours. Same prescription. No filler –
just four cuts made for peak-time impact.

Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 2.


These albums are important because they are Sun Ra's first recordings before the Saturn sessions, made in 1956 when the Chicago musicians were searching for something more, something beyond.



In 1957, Transition Records gave us Volume 1, but before Volume 2 could be released, the label went bankrupt, and it took more than a decade for it to finally be released on the Delmark label. Today, for the first time, both volumes are available, as they were meant to be from the beginning.
Volume 2 is presented here for the first time with the silver cover originally planned by Transition!

The Sludge Of The Land is the new album by digital folklore and post-exoticism Italian duo Babau. Their first full length since 2023’s Flatland Explorations Vol. 2, with The Sludge Of The Land Babau lands on Impatience with their signature audio-prestidigitation at it’s most disorientingly pungent and zonked, a uniquely contemporary approach described as the sound of a continent moving; animals, plants and minerals included.

As part of a residency at Casa degli Artisti, Milan, in 2022, Babau turned their atelier into a recording studio and performing venue thanks to Francesco Piro, who produced the entirety of the album. There, the duo improvised with different acoustic and digital instruments for several hours a day. Returning after ten years to a sound more akin to a band or small orchestra, Babau re-explores tropes and themes of exotica and jazz from their unique and off-kilter perspective of terminally-online diggers-dwellers of the internet flatland.

An homage to digital content consumption and dopamine-infused sensory overloads, The Sludge Of The Land imagines itself as an abstract sonic wunderkammer of online detritus. By diving into the world of ‘sludge content’: audiovisual chaos produced by mixing different content using split screens or dizzying patchworks of videos, Babau celebrates the formless, viscous goo, spam, chum and slop of out-of-context moving image, fast paced digital videos and lo-fi mp4 artifacts. By endlessly spiraling into the non-spaces of The Net, Babau explore the uncharted parageographies of lavacasts, mysterious Chinese anthropozoomorphic legendary beings, vampiric doomscrolling glides and doppelganger, ctrl+c & ctrl+v spiritualism. These ghosts of pointless microevents and traveling-without-moving bedroom boredom are stuffed by Babau with the epic tone and compositional approach of exotica and world music 2.0 reveries, resulting in an absurd, playful narrative of the dangers and allures of the web.

Bringing together the sound of Richard Hayman and Black Dice, Korla Pandit and Sun Araw, Tony Scott and Carl Stone, once again the duo crafts a compelling audio-textual hallucination of transglobal chimera. A multi-fi, extremely layered treasure of fifth world music.

RIYL - Sun Araw, the strangest corners of the internet, Senyawa, digital wind instruments, Nuke Watch, Black Dice, exotica, hallucinating.

Babau is the pantropical project of Artetetra founders Matteo Pennesi and Luigi Monteanni, where their fascination with exotica, world music 2.0, and field recordings merges with the compositional and improvisational techniques of computer music.

Their latest work, All the Gurls were at the Women’s Archo Ashinto, was recently released by Bamboo Shows, while the previous Stock Fantasy Zone and Flatland Explorations Vol.2, were released by Discrepant. They were selected as SHAPE+ artists in 2023, and the duo has performed at various festivals in Italy and beyond, including Fusion, Club to Club, Terraforma, Nextones, Outernational Days, Camp Cosmic, and Saturnalia. For years, they have been striving to synthesize what has been described as the sound of a continent in motion—people, animals, plants, and minerals included.

The Sludge Of The Land was produced and mixed by Francesco Piro at Casa degli Artisti, Milan, and co-produced by Babau
Drums by Giovanni Todisco, bass by Francesco Piro and piano on A4 by Vittorio Cosmo.
Master by Nick Foglia.
Art by Luca Schenardi.

Es gab eine Zeit - nennen wir sie Saturn-Rückkehr, nennen wir sie die frühen 90er Jahre, nennen wir sie den letzten Atemzug, bevor das Internet alles verschlang - als wir von den Zero Boys uns plötzlich einer ganz anderen Art von Feuer gegenüberstanden. Wir waren aus unserer Hardcore-Haut herausgewachsen - nicht aus Ablehnung, sondern aus einer Weiterentwicklung heraus. Wir waren unruhig. Songs kamen nicht mehr in Ausbrüchen purer Geschwindigkeit; sie verdrehten sich, dehnten sich aus, stellten Fragen. Struktur war nicht mehr der Feind. Wir ließen die Songs atmen, und im Gegenzug erzählten sie uns Dinge, die wir nicht erwartet hatten. Die hier versammelten Songs aus ,Make It Stop" (1991) und ,The Heimlich Maneuver" (1992) fangen diesen Moment ein. Diese beiden Alben, die innerhalb eines Jahres entstanden sind, sind Dokumente einer Zeit, in der wir unserem Instinkt folgten - die Grenzen unseres eigenen Sounds ausloteten und persönliche spirituelle Erkundungen durch den Fuzz und die Wut hindurchflochten. Es war nicht religiös. Es war eine Suche. Der Versuch, das Selbst im Lärm der Welt zu finden. Der Versuch, ehrlich über Verwirrung, Widerstand und die Teile von uns selbst zu sprechen, die nicht so einfach in Slogans oder Genres passen. Damals wussten wir, dass wir uns veränderten, aber wir wussten nicht, in welche Richtung. Jetzt, Jahrzehnte später, offenbart das Zurückhören etwas Klareres. Diese Songs - textlich, musikalisch, emotional - fühlen sich heute dringlicher an als damals. Die politischen Aussagen sind gut gealtert, was sowohl ein Triumph als auch eine Tragödie ist. Was wir in einem Moment kreativer Verbrennung geschrieben haben, klingt jetzt wie Warnsignale - über Institutionen, über Gewalt, über das stille Bedürfnis nach Sinn unter all dem. Also ja, ,Playback is Hell". Aber nicht die Hölle der Qualen. Die Hölle des Feuers. Die Hölle der Transformation. Die Hitze der Erinnerung und Bedeutung, die plötzlich wieder aufsteigt. Danke fürs Zuhören - damals, heute und in Zukunft. - Paul Mahern, 2025