Suche:in effect

SQÜRL, the duo of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, have announced their debut album, Silver Haze, out May 5th via Sacred Bones.

‘SilverHaze’ was produced by Randall Dunn, who has also worked with the likes of Sunn O))), Boris, Earth, Zola Jesus, and Marissa Nadler, all of whom are artists that SQÜRL cite as inspirations. The album enlists Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Mark Ribot as collaborators, resulting in a communal offering that shares an energetic lineage with the New York School of Poets.



‘SilverHaze’ expands on SQÜRL’s passion for creating rich textural sounds, finessed by a keen ear for production. The band is known for playing with everything from analogue synths to broken radios and pulling inspiration from painters, writers, and birds on the street. ‘Silver Haze’ is a poetic journey of spoken words, dynamic instrumentals, drone riffs and distorted effects, one that features tubular bells and a cello in addition to their signature stacks of delay, encircling the listener in a warm oscillation both delicate and devastating.



The announcement of ‘Silver Haze’ comes on the back of sold out live shows across Europe. Originally intended to happen in 2020, the rescheduled dates saw Jarmusch and Logan perform an original live score to four films by Man Ray. More live dates will follow in due course.

SQÜRL was formed by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan in 2009 to score Jarmusch's movie The Limits of Control. Over a decade later and with numerous EPs and film scores under their belt, SQÜRL are set to release their very first full length record. Silver Haze was produced by Randall Dunn, who has also worked with the likes of Sunn O))), Boris, Earth, Zola Jesus, and Marissa Nadler, all of whom are artists that SQÜRL cite as inspirations. The album enlists Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Mark Ribot as collaborators, resulting in a communal offering that shares an energetic lineage with the New York School of Poets, a school they nod to on the track "John Ashbery Takes a Walk," which features Gainsbourg and turns two early Ashbery poems into an irresistible melodic siren's song. Silver Haze expands on SQÜRL's passion for creating rich textural sounds, finessed by a keen ear for production. The band is known for playing with everything from analogue synths to broken radios and pulling inspiration from painters, writers, and birds on the street. Silver Haze is a poetic journey of spoken words, dynamic instrumentals, drone riffs and distorted effects, one that features tubular bells and a cello in addition to their signature stacks of delay, encircling the listener in a warm oscillation both delicate and devastating.

GRAPH embarks on a search for sound beyond trends within electronic music. The focus is on sound and rhythmic structures that are constructed and deconstructed with the help of digital musical instruments and effects. The focus here is on the attempt to create a living, organic "soundspace".

On their seventh album, GRAPH work with vocals for the first time in their 17-year history, and the result is astonishing! The track "Mad World (astonished)" is a cover version of the Tears For Fears classic, dressed in GRAPH-typical electronic garb and produced atmospherically dense. With "Instabil", GRAPH present one more completely newly produced and extremely danceable track. The whole thing is rounded off with a remix of "Instabil" by Bob Humid. Stunning, astonishing, allways unconventional and very Düsseldorf!

From the viscerally punishing and nerve wrecking, to the wistfully sublime, Kevin Drumm ‘s work often yield a ferocious intensity through the timbres of minute details. Now, throughout this series of archival works dating from 2000 to 2022, his mastery is once again on full display.

On »Battering Rams«, sinister forces interlope with sanguine glimmers of respite and contemplation, while recurring drones ceaselessly crescendo to near paralysing effect, only for the albums final moments to offer a lofty reprise of boundless oscillation, dispelling all the pent up tension into a sanguine state of bliss. Once again underpinning Drums’ genius of turning apparently trivial hums into elongated microtonal worlds that stay etched deeply in your conscious, often long after the works final resonances have already subsided.

Repress!

The last step in the Spiral Tribe trilogy from the R-Zac output (aka a collaboration between Sebastian Vaughan and Simon Carter) featuring three tracks in the pioneering style of early Spiral Tribe from 1994, clearly establishing the inspirational groundwork for dancefloor genres and mind sets to come. Driving layers of bass, transients and dubbed out melodic loops transforming into percussive elements and vice versa throughout extended excursions in fast paced machine powered exercises. Viciously remastered for maximum effect on large sound systems.

Ebalunga!!! is thrilled to announce the first official reissue of the self-released, self-produced, and self-titled 1985 LP Scott Seskind. The album is a lo-fi singer-songwriter jewel. Don’t miss it.
“Authentic and personal, at times it reminds this writer of luminaries such as Jackson C. Frank, PF Sloan, Skip Spence, and Phil Orchs while never feeling derivative.

The songs are melodic and haunting, fueled by existential woes, political angst, and good ol’ fashioned love. Scott’s rich voice has an unpretentious gravitas, his simple-yet-effective guitar playing ranging from delicate fingerpicking to angry bashing.
Created at home on a Tascam 4-Track Portastudio, the recording features few frills and is all the better for it. Unlike most mid-80s records it sounds like it could have come from any time since the late ’60s onwards. As a testament to its greatness, and despite the late recording date, it even gets a nod on Patrick Lundborg’s “Acid Archives” compilation website, Lysergiawhere it’s described thus: “Late phase downer-loner folk and singer-songwriter trip, mostly acoustic, some tracks with a small band.” – Andrew Ure for Ugly
Things.Read a long story about the album in the upcoming Shindig! issue: Story about Scott Seskind in Shiding Mag.
The reissue is available on vinyl with a lyric insert.
Mastering (as always) by Jessica Thompson.

Feedbacks and reviews:
“Almost totally inheralded singer-songwriter Scott Seskind gets the reissue treatment, and I couldn’t be happier. About a year ago I pulled Seskind’s sole vinyl release out of the used bin of a Boulder record store, and with its almost Wallace Berman-esque cover art, could immediately suspect it was something special. The first listen didn’t dispel that notion one bit; here was an impressively captivating and moving collection of four-tracked bedroom folk of the highest order, with an out-of-time vibe that didn’t really snyc with its 1984 recording date. Definitely on the loner-ish end of the folk spectrum, with some aspects of the album harkening back to Skip Spence’s iconic Oar, while other moments revealed the urgency of the ’80s lo-fi revolution. But most importantly, the songs were just really, really great and managed to remain haunting long past their leaving.

Here, I thought, is an album that needs to be heard by more people, NOW. I asked around amongst some record collecting friends and discovered it was pretty highly rated by a small circle of people in the know, and that it had even managed to garner a mention in the Acid Archives despite its late recording date, and most excitingly that there was talk that the digital reissue label Yoga had managed to track Seskind down and secure the rights to his LP. (…) So here we have it, the best songs from Seskind’s eponymous LP. (…) I really hope this release continues to garner the listeners that it deserves.” – Michael Klausman

“The one that struck us the most this year was the almost totally unheralded work of singer-songwriter Scott Seskind, who recorded an impressively captivating and moving collection of four-tracked bedroom folk of the highest order, with an out-of-time vibe that doesn’t really sync with its original 1984 release date. Definitely on the loner-ish end of the folk spectrum, with songs that are really, really great and which manage to remain haunting long past their leaving. Truly an album that deserves to be heard by more people immediately. ” – Other Music

11th album by the one-of-a-kind collective: psychedelia and free form jazz (not jazz) trigger a sophisticated excursion into weird textures with drastic turns. Dislocated dense music full of secret connections!

Kammerflimmer Kollektief – "Schemen"

Before reason prevails, invoked by those who want everything to remain as it is, Kammerflimmer Kollektief disrupts the established supply chains of sound. It seeks more interesting ways to assemble them. Trusting in this, because of the fact that every sound that still comes out of a guitar, a bass, a harmonium, drums and electronic devices has already been taken into the common mangle of meaning anyway. Enough of all that. Here, nothing is explained. Here we speak in schemes. Polished and jerky.

The images that Kammerflimmer Kollektief conjures up therefore happen not in the focus of consciousness, but rather in its outer realms. In those to which one does not give one's full attention at the moment, but which are nevertheless perceived. For example, when a leaf falls from the ground back up to the tree in the corner of your eye, and for an instant you think this is possible, before you realize it was a small bird flying into the tree; it is in just such irritating moments between perception and realization that the art of the Kollektief also unfolds. On "Schemen", familiar fragments float gently around their core – a Fender Rhodes tone, a bass figure, a guitar motif, a masterful drum shuffle, a moment of icy stasis borrowed from the harmonium playing of Christa 'Nico' Päffgen. Triggering brief associations, they slowly rush off in other directions through free jazz-informed editing work, whereupon such zones can also arise in which perception has a few tricks ready and earlier experience suddenly breaks into the now in a completely different way. Half suspected, half seen.

Half-music like Can from Cologne – also masters of improvised editing – sometimes produced a few decades ago in their in-between moments. The first minutes of "Future Days" for example, which fade in gently, sketch a barely graspable figure emerging from all directions of the room. Kammerflimmer Kollektief also engages in similarly open moments of development. Loosely, it eludes the first formative impressions, keeping itself ready for moments that do not follow any logic of appointment. This looseness in handling makes Kammerflimmer Kollektief so fluidly audible, even when dissonant peaks and free playing arise. What Karlheinz Stockhausen is to Can's understanding of composition, the recordings of The Cocoon are to Kammerflimmer Kollektief. The Cocoon, a meeting of garage psychedelics from the Hannover area with free jazzers from the Galaxie Dream Band, whose album "While The Recording Engineer Sleeps", recorded in 1985 in unguarded moments, operates in a very similar way with decentralized perceptual ambivalences and only appeared more or less secretly four years later on Wilhelm Reich Schallspeicher. Other traces of "Schemen" lead to the debut album of Quicksilver Messenger Service. The guitars of Gary Duncan and John Cipollina, which refer to themselves in an unforced manner, are instructions to let go. They don't want to be traced in every note as a solo, but they give their music a sense that the essential takes place off center, in the mutual and intuitive gift of loving attentions. Consciousness-free.

Loving turns like the little guitar phrase that, like a kind of leitmotif, is repeatedly ghosting more or less unchanged through all of the Kammerflimmer Kollektief albums. A Coricidin induced, very catchy slide idea filtered out of ancient Æther, which – who knows – maybe even centuries ago found its way from somewhere to America – the old, the eerie – and from there wafted on through the ages to southern Germany, to a smoky studio in the Upper Rhine lowlands. A memory of which even the memory no longer knows what it once reminded. Unsaid, then forgotten.

In Kammerflimmer Kollektief you will also find a friend of slowly building, unhurried music, which probably would have been appreciated by the old Franz Mesmer, who 200 years ago, after tranquilizing treatments, sometimes used to play for his patients ambient melodies on the enormous glass harmonica. However, in order not to surrender completely to the flow of one's own life energy, as Mesmer had in mind with his therapies, Kammerflimmer Kollektief occasionally adds hectic tensions, gently embraced by the droning of a sine wave generator, as if a trance could briefly refesh. This old analog sine wave generator is new in the Kammerflimmer assortment of sounds. So, the art of the Kollektief likes to dock occasionally in modern times, yet with the past in mind. Mental states begin to flicker between imagination and certainty, between culture-bound art expression and coincidences: A cawing and scraping can always just be a cawing and scraping with Kammerflimmer Kollektief, the way Andy Warhol's mushroom eater just eats a mushroom.

Heike Aumüller's cover works, which illustrate all the Kammerflimmer Kollektief albums, additionally act as amplifiers of unexplained refractions. Her style consists of eye-corner art that remains so, even when looked at directly. Her shots remain disquieting because they do not jolt themselves into a reassuring order, even in retrospect. Rather than evading the fear that arises when looking at them by trying to impose some irrational rhyme or reason, that fear must simply be endured. This strategy of endurance is equally applicable to the music. The trick is to let parts be parts without compulsively seeking delusional patterns that lull us into a false sense of security and in doing so, possibly delude ourselves. In this context, freedom means not having to anxiously attach a fantasized superior meaning to everything. "Schemen" has an conspiracy disintegrating effect.


b A2 Zweites Kapitel (ruckartig) [feat. Heike Aumüller]

Over the course of a nearly 50 year romantic and creative partnership sound artist Annea Lockwood and the late pioneering electronic composer Ruth Anderson have shared space on a number of significant releases of early electronic and tape music, including Charles Amirkhanian’s trailblazing 1977 anthology of women electronic composers New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, a 1981 split LP on Opus One, a 1997 CD for Phill Niblock’s XI imprint, and 1998’s Lesbian American Composers compilation on CRI. The couple additionally taught a course on the history of women’s music-making, at Hunter College, called Living Women, Living Music. Throughout their time together, they co-authored a number of Hearing Studies designed for people with no formal musical training, which were collected for a 2021 book publication by Open Space Music. They spent most of their private life between Crompond, NY and the house they built themselves at Flathead Lake, Montana. Although Ruth passed away in 2019, the composers’ dialogue continues today with Tête-à-tête, a collection of unreleased archival and new material spread across an LP and a single-sided 10” record.

It all began with a telephone call. In 1973, Ruth Anderson was seeking a substitute to cover a yearlong sabbatical from her position as the director of the Electronic Music Studio she had founded at Hunter College in New York City. Her friend Pauline Oliveros too was on sabbatical, but recommended Ruth call Annea Lockwood—then living in London—about the post. Already drawn to America by the work of the visionary composers with whom she would soon be labelmates on Lovely Music, Annea jumped at the opportunity and within days of meeting in person the pair were, in her words, “joyously entangled.”

Over the next nine months, while Ruth was living in Hancock, New Hampshire, the couple would speak daily by phone in between visits. Ruth recorded these phone calls and, in 1974, surprised Annea with a cassette containing “Conversations,” a private piece she composed by dexterously collaging fragments of their conversations alongside slowed and throwed snatches of old popular songs: “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”; “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”; and “Bill Bailey.” The centerpiece of Tête-à-tête, this side of intimate musique concrète extends to its listeners a rare invitation to eavesdrop on the halcyon phenomenon of two people falling in love. Tender and playful throughout, “Conversations” comes to its zenith with a cut-up of relentless laughter of a contagious beauty that is, for once, properly convulsive.

“For Ruth” is Annea’s elegy to her life partner. In 2020, Annea returned to Hancock as well as to Ruth’s resting place at Flathead Lake to make field recordings, which she wove together with further excerpts of the couple’s 1974 conversations for a commission presented as part of the 2021 Counterflows Festival in Glasgow. A consummate field recordist, Annea imbues the simple sounds of church bells, birds, wind, and the bodies of water that permeated her time alongside Ruth with an otherworldly depth and sense of narrative akin to that of her celebrated sound maps of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers. An oneiric, subtly tonal evocation of a meeting at the shores of existence.

The collection opens with “Resolutions,” Ruth’s last completed electronic work, from 1984. A meditation for the individual listener composed as the result of her study of Zen, it’s a rigorous, process-driven piece that charts the very slow, smooth descent of a 5th from the octave above middle C down to sub-bass frequencies. Minimalist in execution, yet powerful in effect, it glides by almost imperceptibly, with new tones arriving and hovering or levitating upwards, seemingly out of nowhere. A healing piece, it harnesses the highly focused energy of pure tones as a means to, in Ruth’s words, “further wholeness of self and unity with others.”

Tape transfers by Maggi Payne, master by Giuseppe Ielasi and lacquers cut at Dubplates & Mastering, with domestic photos and liner notes provided by Annea Lockwood.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Down On Darkened Meetings, the first solo release on the label from the quietly prolific Giuseppe Ielasi. Recorded at Ielasi’s studio in Monza outside of Milan over two days in February 2022, the seven pieces presented here continue the renewed exploration of the guitar that marks much of his solo work over the last few years. Emerging in the late 1990s as an improviser working primarily with prepared acoustic and electric guitars, the instrument became less prominent in his work over the next decade, ceding to loop-based constructs that would eventually split into abstracted takes on club music and hip-hop (including his work as Inventing Masks), on the one hand, and spectral electroacoustic explorations (such as the stunning triple disc 3 pauses), on the other. Returning to the guitar in recent years, he has approached the instrument as a source of shimmering metallic glissandi (Five Wooden Frames) or as the vehicle of elegiac double-tracked lines that feel almost like Frisell playing Feldman (The Return). Here the focus is on electric guitar filtered, looped, and splayed out into fields of irregular echoes through a bank of pedals. Like many of Ielasi’s releases, Down On Darkened Meetings is structured as a set of short untitled pieces (here ranging between two and six minutes in length) that single-mindedly explore a single instrument or source throughout. The opening track immediately introduced the distinctive timbral world of fizzing, heavily filtered tones, chiming harmonics, and woozy looping bass figures inhabited throughout. At points it becomes near impossible to trace these sounds to the strings of an electric guitar; at others, as on the final two pieces, the instrument is unmistakable, as Ielasi builds up his shifting loops from snatches of almost unintentional sounding half-playing that give these closing tracks a hushed, private atmosphere reminiscent of Tolerance’s Anonym. While the repeating chords and hanging melodic figures present on many tracks call to mind earlier Ielasi classics like Gesine and Untitled, here the music feels less meticulously constructed than played: Ielasi’s lyrical guitar lines obscured by a battery of effects at times come across like a dilated take on the outer-fringe fretwork of improvisers like Henry Kaiser and Raymond Boni, and the muddy, asynchronous fields of pops and hiss at times wander into areas reminiscent of the hand-played dub techno of Vladislav Delay’s Multila. Like much of Ielasi’s work in recent years, these seven pieces perform a delicate balancing act: between abstraction and immediacy, austerity and abundance. Imbued with Ielasi’s distinctive lightness of touch, considered approach to pacing, and subtly psychedelic approach to the stereo field, Down on Darkened Meetings is a major new work from a quiet master of contemporary experimental music.

Summer Forever And Ever succeeds Blue Gene Stew, 2019’s debut by the Wolfmanhattan Project, a collective unit co-starring three musicians familiar to In The Red listeners: singer-guitarist Mick Collins, front man of the seminal Detroit-bred garage units the Dirtbombs and the Gories, singer-guitarist Kid Congo Powers who played in such legendary bands as the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and drummer-vocalist Bob Bert, whose skin work has distinguished albums by Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus, and Jon Spencer and the HITmakers. The group was founded as a studio project by three musicians who are kept busy by their primary bands. Blue Gene Stew was written and recorded quickly. Powers says, “I think that the new record was much more a group effort. I think there’s more of a group kind of sound, as eclectic as it is. I feel like we all played together, as opposed to playing on each other’s songs.” Bert notes that the band’s music is grounded in spontaneity: “Me and Mick went in and had a couple of rehearsals, and I would come up with a beat, he would come up with a riff. I still have a cassette Walkman, believe it or not, and we’d put it down on that. It wasn’t even a full song. We’d just put down a bunch of ideas. When it came to recording we’d lay down the basic tracks and work out different things, and a lot of it was made up on the spot. It really is a great collaboration.” Recorded and engineered by Mark C. of Live Skull at his studio, Summer Forever And Ever finds Powers playing piano and the Kaoss touch-pad effects unit and Collins playing synthesizer, in addition to their usual instruments. The album reflects the same eclectic mix of musical styles heard on the debut. References and sometimes even direct quotes from sources as diverse as the Andrea True Connection, Captain Beefheart, the Count Five, and Eurythmics leap out of the speakers.

If Susan Subtract of High-Functioning Flesh / Physical Wash personally supports this Portand based duo is because everything that should be the modern american funky ebm / minimal synth is present in “Costo Humano”. Puerta Negra delivers amazing industrial breaks covered in a very simple but extremely effective by funky bass lines perfectly finished by ensoniq style super synth leads culminated by harsh raged vocals sung in castillan language. This is for sure one of the most fresh and brilliant modern ebm work coming from the states recently. For the likes of the west coast modern ebm acts such as Spike Hellis or the mentioned High-Functioning Flesh.

When David Drucker of Painted Faces begins to write and record, every dumb sign, bad horror movie, seemingly innocuous turn of phrase, petty embarrassment, transcendent joke, and musical
influence are drawn together like iron filings to a magnet.
What results is a document of a particular point in time for the artist. There are infectiously haunting hooks and raw atonal passages, cheap synths (and as time goes on less cheap ones), simple but effective chords, ramshackle percussion (a plastic toy maraca passed among audience members that refuses to die), and a host of other elements that all add up to something very special and deeply personal.

It’s a portrait of the artist as a freak.
On his latest album, Normal Street, the story continues. The title track opens with a nebulous cloud of beeps and squeals which slowly give way to more solid melodic form. Drucker, always searching for ever
freakier and liberated pastures, walks a particularly unique line between unpredictably risky experimentation and skillful songcraft. It’s this interplay hat makes Painted Faces truly original and exciting.
What “works” is totally relative, and through his long honed practice of trying things, he has created his own sonic vocabulary.

Normal Street is a fractured collection of songs, sounds, ideas, sometimes brief and other times delicately sustained; its stream of consciousness mischievousness bringing to mind Zappa and the
Mothers filtered through the angst of bedroom pop and tape label minimalism.

Made from coloured vinyl scraps, each copy will be unique in a random colour.

Compilation of 10 tracks as short as effective, accompanied for the occasion by instrumental versions.

The title of Ital Tek's seventh album "Timeproof" reflects what Alan Myson has observed and learned whilst making the album. Firstly, how distorted the perception of time is in the creative headspace - being in the studio creates a timeless environment, one's mind starts wandering and the perception of time is altered. Secondly, the bizarre effect of the last few years of lockdown have somehow infected the title, temporarily contracting our collective notion of time. And thirdly, Alan has learnt how spending time away from the studio can be as effective as being there, giving one space to process. Appreciating the power of being out in nature, putting other things into perspective, refreshing one's ability to approach work with both patience and creativity. Overall "Timeproof" feels more introspective than Alan's last album "Outland". Perhaps because of the time in which it was created or this new relationship to the creative process. The sounds and textures of the record hint at brutality and menace whilst also pulsing and evolving softly with a more refined interior life. It's expansive and elegant, neatly balanced between light and dark, more mossy and dreamy than the extremes of "Outland".

When making the album, Alan spent about a year or so working quickly and intuitively, churning out ideas, sketches and sound experiments without any attempt to finish or perfect anything. "I let it settle until I was ready to return to this body of raw material with fresh ears some months later, sometimes barely remembering what or how I’d done much of it." Over the course of another year he dived into the details, rendering all of this rough material and sound into something with form. Alan also visited older material and ideas, trying out, reworking and sampling, building it into this new body. The finished album feels open, with a gentle intuition that feels as if it's guiding you through.

Over the course of a 19-year career, Marshall Watson has released all manner of musical treats for a similarly wide array of labels, yet it’s the effortless beauty of his downtempo works – and particularly his ambient and Balearic excursions – that have often left a lasting impression.

It certainly caught the attention of NuNorthern Soul founder Phil Cooper, who brought the West Coast producer to the label in the summer of 2021. That EP, Sunsets on Larkin Parts 1 & 2, was undeniably special. The same can be said about his belated return to the label, Foothills, an EP packed to the rafters with slow-burn melodies, sustained chords, becalmed textures and gently unwinding grooves.

Watson’s distinctive take on Balearic naturally comes to the fore on EP opener ‘High Desert’, a soft-focus delight where languid electric guitars, starry electric piano lines, echoing chords and gently pulsing electronics stretch out across a shuffling groove. While tailor-made for watching the sun set off his beloved Pacific Coast – and over the Mediterranean Sea – ‘High Desert’ offers a dose of hazy sonic sunshine that can brighten up even the greyest of days.

Fittingly, the accompanying remix comes from long-time friends of the label Seahawks, whose textured, layered and atmospheric productions similarly blur boundaries between Balearic, ambient, pitched-down dancefloor grooves and glassy-eyed psychedelia. Employing opaque, shape-shifting pads, effects-laden guitars, subtle spoken word snippets and yearning, almost melancholic chords – all atop a crunchy, head-nodding beat and toasty bassline – the duo deliver a remix that’s as emotive and sonically stunning as Watson’s original mix.

The EP’s three other tracks amply demonstrate the subtle variety within Watson’s downtempo output. Vocalist Julie Childe makes her mark on ‘Sweet Sounds’, a brilliant blend of warming deep house and laidback Balearic nu-disco that sports subtle hints to his work as one half of synthwave duo Causeway, while ‘Open Sky’ brilliantly wraps undulating TB-303 acid lines and echoing Spanish guitars around a hypnotic, locked-in dancefloor groove.

Then there’s ‘The Landscape’, a deliciously saucer-eyed slab of breakbeat-powered, TB-303-sporting genius that evokes the immersive, early morning waviness of the ambient house era, the beach party psychedelia of San Francisco’s free party movement, and the bleeping wonder of turn-of-the-90s UK dance music. Like the rest of the EP, it’s an enveloping, head-soothing and mind-expanding treat.





e B2 High Desert Seahawks High Sky Remix

VE ABOULKHEIR - 22/12/2017 GUILIN SYNTHETIC DAYDREAM (2021)

22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream is a perceptual trap. Inspired by an experience of intense perceptive disorientation while crossing a market in China, Eve Aboulkheir reinstantiates, in the field of sounds, the swirling and anamorphic universe of thwarted perceptions, surrounding multitudes and shifted sensations. She thus constructs a dreamlike and artificial universe, suspended and hyperactive, which is both an electronic vortex sucking us in and a mechanical ballet developing its arabesques around us, caught and fascinated by these volutes of sound that fracture like a kaleidoscope in which our eyes-ears are immersed. 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream approaches the musical form in the most direct way possible, i.e. through its effects and its empire on our sensorium.

(fr) 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream est un piège à perception. S’inspirant justement d’une expérience de désorientation perceptive intense lors de la traversée d’un marché, en Chine, Eve Aboulkheir réinstancie, dans le champ sonore, l’univers tourbillonnant et anamorphique des perceptions déjouées, des multitudes environnantes, des sensations décalibrées. Elle construit ainsi un univers onirique et artificiel, suspendu et hyperactif, à la fois vortex électronique nous aspirant et ballet mécanique développant ses arabesques autour de nous, piégés et fascinés par ces volutes de sons qui se fractalisent comme un kaléidoscope dans lequel sont plongés nos yeux-oreilles. 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream aborde la forme musicale de la manière la plus directe qui soit, c’est-à-dire à travers ses effets et son empire sur notre sensorium.

LASSE MARHAUG - HOW TO AVOID ANTS (2020)

Using concrète techniques to collect, transform and assemble sounds of various origins (sounds of tree branches, leaves, but also guitars or synthesizers), Lasse Marhaug elaborates a dense and subterranean work, which unfolds through the multiple dimensions induced by the great diversity of its sound material. There is a labyrinthine feeling in this work, a feeling that is better understood when the inspiration for the title of the piece How to avoid ants is revealed, a very practical and then poetic undertaking, that of avoiding the anthills lining the path to the forest camp in the kindergarten to which his little girl, who was then frightened of insects, was going. It is such an activity of circumvention, diversion and byways that Lasse Marhaug uses to create an exploratory and evasive music.

(fr) Utilisant les techniques concrètes pour collecter, transformer et assembler des sons d’origines variés (sons de branches, de feuillages, mais aussi de guitares ou de synthétiseurs), Lasse Marhaug élabore une œuvre dense et souterraine, qui se déploie au travers des multiples dimensions induites par la grande diversité du matériau sonore. Il y a un sentiment labyrinthique dans cette œuvre, sentiment qu’on comprend mieux lorsque se dévoile l’inspiration du titre de la pièce How to avoid ants, entreprise très pratique et devenue poétique, celle d’éviter les fourmilières jalonnant le chemin vers le camp forestier du jardin d’enfant dans lequel se rendait sa petite fille, alors effrayée par les insectes. C’est une telle activité de contournement, de déroute et de chemins de traverse qu’emprunte Lasse Marhaug pour créer une musique exploratoire et évasive.

Since its beginnings, Hypnótica Colectiva has always shown a special interest in the music recorded and released in the city of Detroit.

A place with which we have both a blood and spiritual bond because of what occurred there socially and artistically during the 20th century.

This love led us to become ambassadors of what was happening there on a musical level, holding cultural events to screen documentaries translated into Spanish, as well as a number of themed sets at our events, dedicated motor city sections in our record shop or recently lectures on the history of the city and its music at the Museum of Illustration and Contemporary Art of Valencia (Muvim).

The time has now come to bring all this history, this musical influence, to the editorial section of our label HC records.

Detroit Legacy was born from the idea of capturing these influences on vinyl. Seeking artists from all over the world who share this passion that inspires them to create their music, what we can define as the universal Neo-Detroit.

For this first edition or first volume, the collective has enlisted in its ranks creators affiliated to the label who have shown us in their careers, this influence and this feeling.

Paul Cignol opens the record with Distance. From Dublin he offers us a track of warm sequences inspired by Deep Techno, with deep pads responding to organ keys and a subtle touch of 303.

Mallorcan LLuis Barcelo Sureda is responsible for the second track Funk Station. With a Techno Soul character that we might hear from Detroitish labels like Acacia or producers like Blake Baxter.

A real eminence in Techno is the Catalan Don Alex Martín, who already released in the mid-90s on Monssieur Garnier's label (France Communications). The Barcelona native brings his wealth of experience and wisdom through Megatech, which transports us to the spectrum of Derrick May’s Transmat who, in his day, was nicknamed "The Innovator". This track provides agile sequences of complex syncopated rhythms, combining with a dreamy Michigan style synth.

The anthem of the album comes from Ghent. The sublime Belgian creator, Mariska Neerman, once again makes our hairs stand on end and our hearts melt with a heavenly composition entitled Stellium.

No one interprets Neo-Detroit quite like Mariska, whom we baptise as a sovereign heiress of the genre in the world. If we have to think of an influence for this piece, we go straight to the genius of Detroit, the one and only Jeff Mills, in his most symphonic and harmonic facet of tracks released on his label Axis Records such as "The March", A Universal Voice That Speaks To All That Will Listen or A New Found Sense Of Being.

Some of these songs have been re-interpreted by world class philharmonic orchestras such as the Montpellier Philharmonic Orchestra at the 2005 Blue Potential (Pont Du Garde). Mariska's score in this song fuses organ keys with harmonic layers and violin - favourite instruments of the Detroitian extraterrestrial - with a harmonic result of strength and hope. An authentic anthem of classic emotional Techno.

Old School electro takes centre stage with the Master from Terrassa Ivan Arnau a.k.a. Dark Vektor. In the influence of Juan Atkins (the creator) as Cybotron or Model 500 and later creators who developed this sound like Aux 88. Metaverso Frik is a great recital of a urban poetry created and interpreted by Ivan, to completely devastating effect.

Croatian Bojan Jascur a.k.a. N-TER, closes the vinyl with We Will Emerge, in a exercise of vindication, a common weapon in the context of Detroit music. Raging, trippy electro in the purest style of Cosmic Force or Dynarec.

This first tribute to 8 Mile doesn't end with the vinyl, as 2 digital bonus tracks are included in the release.

We return to Barcelona with Pastin Futon in another sequence of consecutive oscillated rhythms oscillated much like Kevin Saunderson (The Elevator) in his day and the Techno Groove that we know today.

The most robotic touch of the release is the closer with this synthetic jigsaw puzzle of a track with echoes of the 1967 Detroit Riot, the Detroit Rebellion. Again produced by another Barcelona native, The Bandit (Dj Spy / Util Records). The sequences are very reminiscent of Arpanet and Drexciya.

The idea for the cover comes from Motor City itself by Jon Yowell, first cousin of HC records founder and head of HC records David Verdeguer.

Born, raised and a lifelong resident of Detroit, Jon is an enormously talented musician capable of writing lyrics, performing them on the mic and manipulating a number of stringed instruments as well as the drums, where he is a true master.

The cover is a tribute to the formative backgrounds of many of the city's musicians in every sonic trend. Wayne State University in the capital of Michigan.

Founded in 1868, it has offered didactic teaching to many of the city's musicians.

Not all of Detroit's creators went to university, and even less so when talking about Techno, many artists are self-taught or learned in a non-academic way, but it seems to us a good base to begin to highlight the origins of the city's music in a historic building, where those who have the opportunity to learn about music have been and continue to be educated.

The adapted designs are the work of our image manager Dani Requeni.

Mastering by Steve Voidloss at Black Monolith Studios in London (UK).

French techno titan Madben unveils his much anticipated ‘Troisième Sens’ LP on Maceo Plex’s Ellum Audio.

Madben started absorbing the techno of Jeff Mills, Dave Clarke and Speedy J in the 90s, growing up in Lille in northern France. He retains a passion for DIY culture and warehouse parties thanks to youthful raving at Brussels' Fuse, Gent's Kozzmozz or in abandoned factories in Courtrai. All this has shone through in his music, including a debut album on Astropolis in 2018 that featured a collaboration with Laurent Garnier and a recent EP for Garnier and Scan X’s label.

Over the last decade, he has become a European club and festival favourite playing places like Berghain and Awakenings. His studio boasts a fine array of machines utilised to full effect on this latest opus. ‘Troisième Sens’ perfectly reflects what the artist has always loved, listened to and played, keeping one eye on the dance floor but never at the expense of musical narrative. It’s a genuinely progressive, multi-genre body of work that allows listeners to fully immerse themselves in the seemingly limitless depths of the Frenchman’s sonic capabilities.

He says, “Over the years, I learned to have more fun with the gear in my studio, and this has been the result. The album took three years to finish; I started in an underground basement studio in Paris before moving to Nantes. Therefore, it may surprise listeners with such a diverse selection of moods. It's dark in places but happy in others.”

'Departure' kicks off with uplifting synth work and broken techno beats that have a celebratory feel. 'Addicted' is a lithe cut with steamy vocals and a more fulsome combo of drums and bass, while 'Circuit Breaker' cuts loose in the cosmos. Acid wobbles, smeared synths and metallic percussion all make for a bouncy cut before 'Fade In Fade Out' continues the cosmic trip with vastly oversized synth patterns that will light up a dark space with overwhelming euphoria.

The brilliant 'It's 1 am In A Rave' is a dark, heads-down banger with 'Lost Memories' then layering up melancholic synths and Plastikman-style drum loops into something full of deep thought. There is no let up with the superb acid techno gymnastics of 'No fear', and 'The March' is a turbulent mix of sheet metal synths that whip about over steel-plated drums. 'You Dance Like A Robot' is end-of-the-world electro with a menacing robot vocal, and the electro tip continues with expert drum programming and menacing leads on 'Deep In The Jungle'. 'Meta' is a flailing rhythmic workout that sounds like the machines are in meltdown, and 'I Made A Dream During This Nightmare' is a serene techno soundscape for ruminating about the future of the human race.

Intelligent yet immediate, impactful but emotional, ‘Troisième Sens’ is another standout techno record from Madben.

Omni AM presents the long-awaited reissue of “Can We Get / Keep Doing That.” This timeless record sent dance music in a new direction. Euphoria Record’s vaults are open and finally, for the first time since 1997, this seminal tech-house classic is available to everyone for the very first time in over 25 years. This 1997 indie record was Euphoria Records second release – and their first international record. Whether you agree with it or not, many people consider this one of the pioneering records of American Tech-House. Both sides and several mysterious alternate versions have graced the decks of DJs like Evil Eddie Richards, Terry Francis, Derrick Carter, Tyler Stadius, and Magda. The list goes on.

We were lucky. Curve Pusher lovingly remastered the original four tracks from the 1997 studio masters. Then, he went a step further, and remastered some previously unreleased versions – including a live version in Chicago that encapsulates what Omni AM was back then: ambient house. There’s a bit of Chicago, a bit of London, a bit of New York, and a bit of Tokyo in every second of these classic, genre-defining tracks.

A1.
“Can We Get” happily sits with the finest works of Ron Trent, Chez Damier, and Mood II Swing – and goes further, as Omni AM has never feared genre definitions. It opens with classic deep house chords, floating synth pads, and sparse vocals. The bassline is deep and warm. Marky Star and Adam Collins expertly work the percussive effects but always keep the theme simple and clear. Everyone knows this is a classic house track because it hypnotizes you.

A2.
“Keep Doing That” continues the theme with another classic late-night killer. However, this one is totally different – almost industrial, yet clearly housey and ambient. It drives deep into a tough groove that just builds and builds. The dub-influenced bass line gives way to a more angular synth riff that both offsets and adds to the track's forward thinking sound design. It’s dark and dirty, yet terribly sexxxy at the same time. It was and always will be mesmerizing. Once again, musical magic by Marky Star and Adam Collins.

B-Sides
The flip side features two remixes of “Keep Doing That” by UK tech-house legend Mark Ambrose. His bubbly, psychedelic take on the track pumps up the percussive Chi-town groove while going in a distinctly London afterhours direction. Trippy, for sure. Fun for all, for sure. These remixes are guaranteed to make your afterhours weird.

PURPLE VINYL


A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Violeta Vicci rides a motorbike, is fluent in seven languages, and feels at home in England, Switzerland and Spain. A multifaceted, contemporary violinist, vocalist and composer, she feels comfortable genre-crossing from classical to ambient, multilayered electronics, her influences ranging from Bach to Brian Eno. Her music has been played on BBC Radio 3 (Hannah Peel), Radio 4 Woman's Hour, BBC6 (Iggy Pop), KEXP and Resonance FM.

Since starting the violin at the age of four and giving her concert debut at the age of fifteen, she fulfilled her long life dream to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Violeta has recently supported the Orb on their 30th anniversary UK tour and collaborated with the likes of Thom Yorke, Elbow, Jonsi (Sigur Ros), Steeleye Span and Ellie Goulding. She also arranges the strings for Fontaines DC and writes and performs with psychedelic rock band TTRRUUCES. "We didn't have a TV when growing up, so spending time in nature, building castles in the sand, reading, playing music and listening to fairy tales, played a big role in creating my inner magical universe."

During lockdown, Vicci started "Live Music in Nature" a series of live-streamed concerts performed in beautiful natural locations around the UK, combining strings, voice and effect pedals to create a soundtrack to nature.

She has been nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award 2021 and has released two studio albums to date.

REPRESS

Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails/How To Destroy Angels) composed the Forse series using a Buchla Music Easel. Forse, meaning "maybe" In Italian, is a series of 3 double LP releases Cortini recorded for Imprec to release in 2013.

"All pieces were written and performed live on a Buchla Music Easel, in the span of one month. I found that the limited array of modules that the instrument offers sparked my creativity. Most pieces consist of a repeating chord progression, where the real change happens at a spectral/dynamic level, as opposed to the harmonic/chordal one. I believe that the former are just as effective as the latter, in the sense that the sonic presentation (distortion , filtering, wave shaping, etc) are just as expressive as a chord change or chord type, and often reinforce said chord progressions.

Of all the years with Nine Inch Nails the period spent writing and recording the instrumental record Ghosts I-IV is probably the one which changed my approach to music making the most. After that record I started getting more into instrumental composition, although I tried to approach it in a different way. While we had a vast array of tools and instruments at our disposal then, I decided to approach my pieces limiting myself to one instrument only, as I found myself being more decisive when faced with a limited creative environment."

All the best music has a community underneath it. The extended family around London’s Total Refreshment Centre (TRC) connects continents and generations, creating the rich relationships in full effect on Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre. It’s an eclectic and electric collection that draws from new school jazz, hip hop, dub, soul, funk, and drill: sounds you’ll hear trailing out of cars as they spin up the Kingsland Road or spiraling out of doorways like so much smoke. Turn it up loud to hear the widescreen young cousins of Guru’s landmark Jazzmatazz in full effect: top players from London, Chicago, and Melbourne seeking out new collaborations, new ways of working, or just new tunes, always coming back to that central truth – that we all need each other.

Hawthorne is the powerful new album and short film from Queens-by-way-of-Detroit emcee Motown Priest, a gifted lyricist with a penchant for writing gripping narratives. More than just a gifted storyteller, he also has a phenomenal ear for production that helps to take this project to another level. It’s a cohesive, poignant, and incredible piece of art that serves as a searing look at the world we all live in today. “This album and film weren’t about cheap moralism or heady preaching, it's a very simple idea of confronting who we are, and who we are affects the world around us,” Motown Priest explains. “This is where Hawthorne, in both music and film, connects.” He’s true to his word, too, because the album’s 12 tracks bang just as hard as they make you think. They’re the type of songs you can sit with and unpack, or you can blast them at full volume to make your system rattle - or both. Tracks like “For Sale” and “The Calogero Effect” boast soulful, nostalgic production that fits their more meditative narratives of succumbing to vices and childhood innocence. On the other hand, “Pandora’s Box” straight-up slaps thanks to its distorted guitars and live drums, while “New Religion” is an aggressive, teeth-gritting banger. It’s all part of Motown Priest’s plan to fully engage with his audience while delivering one of the year’s best releases, regardless of genre and medium. In addition to the album, Hawthorne exists as a short film that further explores many of the same themes (ceaseless desire, identity, and capitalism) through the visual format.Within its 35-minute runtime, the film follows the same protagonist as the album, a young man who seeks change and fulfillment but doesn’t consider the pain and damage he causes along the way. It makes for a damning look at so many cultural ills, and it couldn’t have arrived at a more fitting time.

Tape

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Released in the UK in January 1967 by Decca Records and February by London Records in the US – Between The Buttons was the Stones’ fifth British and seventh US studio album. Released as the follow-up to Aftermath, this album marked a high point in the band’s career, continuing their ventures into psychedelia and baroque pop balladry, it is among the band’s most musically eclectic works. Brian Jones sidelined his guitar on much of the album, instead playing a wide variety of other instruments including organ, marimba, vibraphone, and kazoo. Piano contributions came from two session players: former Rolling Stones member Ian Stewart and frequent contributor and studio legend Jack Nitzsche. It was the last album produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager and producer of all of their albums to this point.

The album has one of the most striking sleeves of the period, featuring a classic Gered Mankowitz image on the cover. The photo shoot took place at 5:30 in the morning following an all-night recording session at Olympic Studios. Using a home-made camera filter constructed of black card, glass and Vaseline, Mankowitz created the effect of the Stones dissolving into their surroundings – according to Mankowitz… ""to capture the ethereal, druggy feel of the time; that feeling at the end of the night when dawn was breaking and they’d been up all night making music, stoned.”

The songs continued Aftermath’s lyrics of acute social observation and savage insight, their earlier raw, rootsy power enhanced by other influences of the period – notably The Beatles, The Kinks, and again Dylan. It is one of their strongest, most varied LPs, with many great songs that remain unknown to all but Stones devotees.
The inventive arrangements and innovative instrumentation on brooding near-classics like All Sold Out, My Obsession and Yesterday’s Papers brought a new dimension to the music. She Smiled Sweetly shows their hidden romantic side at its best, Connection is one of the record’s few pieces of more conventional driving rock and album closer Something Happened To Me Yesterday includes Keith’s first solo vocal.

The US version includes contemporaneous hits – the two songs that gave the group a double-sided number one in early 1967: the shameless and controversial Let’s Spend The Night Together and the beautiful, melancholy Ruby Tuesday.

Released in the UK in January 1967 by Decca Records and February by London Records in the US – Between The Buttons was the Stones’ fifth British and seventh US studio album. Released as the follow-up to Aftermath, this album marked a high point in the band’s career, continuing their ventures into psychedelia and baroque pop balladry, it is among the band’s most musically eclectic works. Brian Jones sidelined his guitar on much of the album, instead playing a wide variety of other instruments including organ, marimba, vibraphone, and kazoo. Piano contributions came from two session players: former Rolling Stones member Ian Stewart and frequent contributor and studio legend Jack Nitzsche. It was the last album produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager and producer of all of their albums to this point.

The album has one of the most striking sleeves of the period, featuring a classic Gered Mankowitz image on the cover. The photo shoot took place at 5:30 in the morning following an all-night recording session at Olympic Studios. Using a home-made camera filter constructed of black card, glass and Vaseline, Mankowitz created the effect of the Stones dissolving into their surroundings – according to Mankowitz… ""to capture the ethereal, druggy feel of the time; that feeling at the end of the night when dawn was breaking and they’d been up all night making music, stoned.”

The songs continued Aftermath’s lyrics of acute social observation and savage insight, their earlier raw, rootsy power enhanced by other influences of the period – notably The Beatles, The Kinks, and again Dylan. It is one of their strongest, most varied LPs, with many great songs that remain unknown to all but Stones devotees.
The inventive arrangements and innovative instrumentation on brooding near-classics like All Sold Out, My Obsession and Yesterday’s Papers brought a new dimension to the music. She Smiled Sweetly shows their hidden romantic side at its best, Connection is one of the record’s few pieces of more conventional driving rock and album closer Something Happened To Me Yesterday includes Keith’s first solo vocal.

The US version includes contemporaneous hits – the two songs that gave the group a double-sided number one in early 1967: the shameless and controversial Let’s Spend The Night Together and the beautiful, melancholy Ruby Tuesday.

Voïvod’s commercial peak and one of their many artistic peaks, 1989’s
Nothingface marked a move away from the Quebec metal band’s thrash beginnings to a more progressive rock sound epitomized by their fantastic cover of Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” But it remains quintessential Voïvod, complete with sci-fi themes and tricky tempo changes. Long out of print on vinyl, Nothingface returns with a metallic (natch!) red vinyl pressing remasteredfor vinyl by Peter Moore.

Following in the footsteps of "Mind Palace" and "Lost Spirits", respectively issued in 2018 and 2021, Hidden Empire return to Stil vor Talent with their eagerly anticipated third studio full-length, "Momentum". Going the same route that came to define their sound throughout the years, Branko Novakovic and Niklas Schäfers cook a savvy mix of deep electroid flavours and prog techno magnitude which flourishes in the long-playing format. Orbiting the frontier between proper no-nonsense, floor-focussed effectiveness and a trademark exploratory take on electronics, Hidden Empire here delivers one of their most accomplished slices to date, which not only spans the largest span of their many-faceted influences, from tribal anchorage to hypermodern escapology, but breathes a truly epic wind into it.

Draped in luscious, silken envelopes and easternmost ambiences, "Dawn" gets the ball rolling on a mystique-imbued note, halfway meditation-friendly material and square-shouldered club busting wares. Moving into Afro-infused house grounds, "Modesty" finds Branko and Niklas heading for the deeper end of the spectrum, as they pull out a clinically precise blender of rattling percussions, opaque incantations, lush synth swashes and verbed-out machine talk, tailored for nightly boogie rituals in the forest. "Avalanche" opts for a more brooding, deadlier approach. Cutting its path away from prying eyes, this one finds Hidden Empire pulling the stealth weaponry to absolute hypnotic effect - perfect for serious in-between peak time business with its thick, thriller-like tension, mist-shrouded atmosphere and surgical focus. Featuring Felix Raphael on vocals, "Who We Are", is a pop-influenced chugger that perhaps best defines Hidden Empire's ambivalent style, both hi-NRG and innervated with a melancholy that infuses down to the bass and most functional elements. Geared up for big-room traction with its seesawing synths and clinical drumwork, Raphael's moving timbre does more than offer a sensible counterpoint to the track's overall sturdy backbone, it takes it to a whole other dimension completely.

"Repeat The Good" ft. Wolfson balances out a fast-ticking groove with those subtle melodic lines Hidden Empire champion to astounding vibrancy, offering a particularly satisfying glimpse into their vortical imaginarium, whereas "Last Call" has us journeying to straight out Moroder-esque territories, flush with the aptly configured palette of fuzzy space disco bass, fast-paced Italo churn and vocodized talk for good measure. All in breaks and chopped-up euphoria, "Vivid" runs the hoodoo down in muscular fashion and with impressive levels of energy throughout, all set at cranking up the heat one notch further, while "Rebel" provides us with the kind of rough-around-the-edges EBM horsepower and neon-clad synth engineering that'll get the basement in a state of alert. Encompassing all of the pair's idiosyncratic merger of styles - from pop-laced Italo to spaced-out techno wares, through jagged motorik and heavily mecched-out jacking house, "Alright" shows off Hidden Empire's wide arsenal of pyrotechnics under the most compelling of lights. A more openly jagged and quirky weapon that hatches into a full-fledged solar number around the half, "Momentum" roars up the club's highway at full throttle, proving a formidable asset when it comes to plunging dancers into a state of weird, left-of-centre euphoria.

A stroboscopic eclipse is predicted as "Dark Sun" enters the room, deploying its obscure wingspan over the ravers, not quite a bad omen as it lets more light in with every bar, its brittle piano lines and heart-wrenching vocals cutting a path into the crowd's pulsating hearts. Graceful as Hidden Empire's music can be, a moment of utter exhilarating beauty. "Savasana" wraps up the voyage with a pure slab of cyphered 4x4 seduction, as an ASMR-like voice guides us across the soul-questioning haze that blankets our pathway onto a luminous finale. A piece of elusive nature, clearly designed for the club and yet telling a tale of off-piste initiation through twelve fascinating movements, "Momentum" will undoubtedly etch on the listeners' mind as one of the German pair's most strikingly powerful emanations.

Download:
1. Hidden Empire - Dawn Interlude
2. Hidden Empire - Modesty
3. Hidden Empire - Avalanche
4. Hidden Empire & Felix Raphael - Who We Are
5. Hidden Empire & Wolfson - Repeat the Good
6. Hidden Empire - Last Call
7. Hidden Empire - Vivid
8. Hidden Empire - Rebel
9. Hidden Empire - Alright
10. Hidden Empire - Momentum
11. Hidden Empire - Dark Sun
12. Hidden Empire - Savasana
13. Hidden Empire & Felix Raphael - Who We Are (Instrumental)

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Platform 23 again explores to the dense voids, this time with a touch of the funk, with a reissue of Dutch experimentalists De Fabriek and two tracks from their "Music For" cassette series, this time calling all Hippies.

Featuring both original and reinterpretations from modern-day heads, Dunkeltier and Khidja, this double-pack is something of an oddity, showcasing the bands' expansive range, moving away from the noise, drone and industrial soundscape releases they had become known for and crafting here, free flowing, groovy longform jams.

Active since the late 70s to today, De Fabriek (The Factory) have never considered themselves a real band - being also a label too - with an evolving and irregular line up centred around Richard van Dellen, they present their music and output as a kind of work-union.

With literally four decades and dozens of releases across all formats, 1988's cassette release, 'Music For Hippies', has become something of a cult curio, with the long improvisational tracks, Lullabye and Coming Down eschewing the rougher, industrial experience for something completely different.

In opener Lullabye, we go full leftfield P-Funk meets Motorik undertones. An incessant beat is laid from the start and doesn't cease for over 10 minutes, while spoken vocals call closer to the Krautrock realms of Can and hark to Liebezeit's stylised grooving best.

Analog, echo washed, with touches of glam and wrapped in simple effects pedal work, the secrets are passed to Dresden / Berlin inhabitant Dunkeltier aka Sneaker DJ aka Thomas Smorek. His darker moniker, appearing on obscure edits for Macadam Mambo and the much-missed Bahnsteig 23, his 'Hey Robot' mix adds bass, percussion, strings and synth to remold Lullabye into a late night, red light, basement denzien. This is followed by an additional, bonus reimagining, creating an all-new time piece, an ear worm of the best kind with Tik Tok Goes The Clock.

The second slab presents in Come Down, a more resembling De Fabriek werk. Edited to fit, the darkness is entered as snapshot vocal quips, oscillations and synthesised mutations are laid over a lazy, relentless ostinato rhythm where cymbals crash on the bar. Inviting, calling, De Fabriek's aptly titled downer is in fact, a joyous journey.

To complete, label affiliates, Khidja take a break from finalising their debut album to unfold their 'Psychebabble Mix', a dozen plus minutes of warped, twisted, cassette machinations that suck the listener further along the trip. Added bass propels their edit suddenly to a new direction, a hook for mind and for the open willed, the body. De Fabriek's "coming down lullabye" arriving on vinyl for the first time, with a twist and shake, calling deeper to acceptance.

London based imprint High Praise are proud to announce the last addition to their roster. Having released a slew of heralded 12”s on Capitol K’s Faith And Industry Records, Darker Than Wax & XVI Records, London based producer & sound designer Dampé prepares to release his expansive and head-spinning new 12” ‘Glow’. With previous support coming from the likes of Tom Ravenscroft, Dummy, Bandcamp, Boiler Room, Mixmag, DJ Mag and Keep Hush, Dampé showcases why he’s making a name for himself as one to watch in the UK’s vibrant Electronic music scene.

Opening with the hypnotic arpeggio of title track ‘Glow’, the EP launches headfirst into a spinning world of driving rhythms and grainy synth textures. ‘Ravey Emo Tool (Like Me)’ provides a welcome moment of cloud parting serenity. ‘Twenty Two Savanna’ utilizes twisting, contorted breakbeats colliding against trance-like euphoria inducing synth patterns and shuttered vocals. On the flip, second single ‘Clay’ brings a dose of 2-step bounce to the proceedings, with an off-kilter but rock-steady groove. Atmosphere builds steadily as the gated notes and industrial effects of ‘Through The C10’ spill out of the speakers, before ‘King Tide’ brings the 12” to a powerful close with its rippling keys and avalanching waves of low end pressure. A truly impressive offering with incredible attention to detail.

A four track full colour special edition vinyl from Mella Dee.

The lead ‘Riptide’, features original vocals from synth-pop trailblazer and founder of New Order/Joy Division Bernard Sumner. A slice of euphoria streaked with melancholy,

'Big Eff Off Groove' was the first track of the EP to be released as a single, following on it's massive Summer of 2022 where it garnered support across some of the biggest festival stages and clubs internationally. Mella Dee speaking on the record describes it as “Exactly what it says, heavy hitting no frills groove, complete with full on dubbed out effects. Enjoy.”!

Followed up with two cuts of rolling house music on track 'Find Love Yourself', the 'Deeper Love Mix' explores Mella Dee’s affinity for the murkier corners of dance music, whilst the original mix is a deep-in-the-dance groover paired with a haunting Little Dragon vocal sample.

Extra Muros is an annual itinerant artistic residency initiated in 2017. The third edition was co-organised during the winter 2021-2022 by the FLEE art collective in collaboration with the Music Department of the Museum of Ethnography, Geneva (MEG). Five artists participated in this residency including: Prins Emanuel, Nabihah Iqbal, Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Cosmic Neman, and Maria Spivak.The residency was held at the MEG in two phases. The first part of the residency and encounter represented an opportunity for the artists to explore the museum’s archives, collections, and exhibition spaces. The second phase was dedicated to the composition and production of original musical content in an ephemeral studio set up in the auditorium of the Genevan institution.

In this context, the pieces presented in this album were all conceived during this residency. Having never worked together, the five artists and musicians, each with their own distinct musical path, discovered a variety of sound resources at the Museum. These included eleven traditional instruments from the African continent, Asia and Oceania from the MEG collections, as well as synthetisers, audio effects units, amplifiers and several other vintage emblematic analog electronic devices from the collection of the Swiss Museum and Center for Electronic Music Instruments (SMEM) in Fribourg. In addition, recordings of traditional music from the five continents belonging to the museum’s International Archive of Folk Music (IAFM) were also made available to the artists.

In pairs, the residency’s participants were able to combine their respective creative worlds with the museum’s historical instruments as well as sound archives. This compilation is the result of this rich dialogue.

Gargantuan volcanoes erupting with primal force, fountains of molten lava bursting sky high and massive boulders hurtling capriciously through the air. These potent and violently alluring images in the documentary series The Living Planet captivated Raoul Björkenheim's imagination in 1986. The search for a band name had come to an end. -”I was mesmerised. The name Krakatau sounded like a drum fill to me”. After studying at the Helsinki Conservatory for a year and the Berklee College of Music in Boston for three, Björkenheim relocated to Finland where he played in bands with Jone Takamäki, Antti Hytti and Tom Nekljudow, and later went on to work with composer and drummer Edward “Eetu” Vesala (1945-1999). His always original and highly demanding Sound & Fury workshops were a pivotal hotbed in the local improvised music scene, but after four years of Vesala's strict leadership Björkenheim felt a need to leave Sound & Fury behind and direct all of his attention towards Krakatau. The lineup on the first album “Ritual” consisted of reed virtuosos Jorma Tapio and Tapani Rinne, the bassist Sampo Lassila and two drummers, Michel Lambert and Heikki “Lefty” Lehto. “Krakatau’s debut album was very challenging to make, as I felt that it might be my one and only chance to record my own music, so I wanted it to be as intense and effective as possible”, says Björkenheim, “I was lucky enough to work with an incredibly talented cast of musicians. I can still listen to the album and feel satisfied that it really works. The first guitar solo illustrates what was to become my modus operandi: to try and play the electric guitar in unexpected ways.” Svart Records will release an expanded double LP version of Krakatau’s Ritual. Limited to 500 copies and due out on March 24th, the album contains an album’s worth of previously unheard material recorded in 1987 in Studio Helsinki and at the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation studio.

Introducing a brand new artist on Skep Wax Records, MARLODY releases debut album I’m Not Sure At All. Limited edition white vinyl LP plus digital DL and signed postcard. Marlody’s first album I’m Not Sure At All takes anxiety, weakness, fear - and turns them into strength: powerful melodies, the sweetest harmonies you ever heard, and lyrics that insist on the possibility of hope, without losing sight of the possibility of despair.

Dominated by her extraordinary keyboard playing, Marlody’s songs are illuminated - and sometimes made sinister by occasional bursts of programmed percussion, submarine bass and distant, chiming digital bells. These are deep, darkly beautiful pop songs. When she was a girl, Marlody was one of the higher-achieving classical pianists of her generation, winning competitions and destined for greatness.

She hated it, and threw it all away. In the intervening years, putting more and more distance between herself and her classical origins, she listened to Yo La Tengo and Shellac and a hundred other things that took music to new, untutored extremes. I’m Not Sure At All is the outcome. Marlody’s painful personal journey is not glossed over in the lyrics: Words is about the debilitating effect of psychiatric medication; Malevolence is about the horrible urge to commit inexcusable violence;

Friends in Low Places is a remarkable hymn of solidarity with all those people who’ve contemplated taking their own lives. But the songs are strangely uplifting: they offer up their truths so calmly and are so generously wrapped in harmonies that they feel like gifts. There are great stories here too: Summer takes a child’s point of view, describing the beginnings of new life after the loss of a parent.

Wrong relates the history of an adulterous affair, with a piercing sympathy for the emotional state of the adulterer. There are musical echoes: the infectiousness and daring of some of the vocal melodies might remind you of Kate Bush, the intimacy might remind you of Cate Le Bon, the stabs of anger and pain might remind you of Liz Phair. The keyboard is sometimes as smooth as Fleetwood Mac; other times it’s as raucous and distorted as Quasi. The harmonies are from another place again – you could imagine hearing them in an Unthanks recording. I’m Not Sure At All will be released by Skep Wax on limited edition white vinyl and all digital services.

Both broadening and defying the sounds of their first two 7” releases, Delivery continue their claim for the title of hardest and fastest working band in town on their debut full length LP ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’. Collecting songs written over the Melbourne five-piece’s two year lifespan and following on from the band’s bedroom project origins of ‘Yes We Do’ and the expanded one-two punch of ‘Personal Effects/The Topic’, ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ captures Delivery at full force for the first time, leaning into the fully-realised live sound they’ve been quite actively working on since their first show in March 2021. Here the band collate a 12-track garage-punk opus, their five distinct voices simultaneously pulling songs in different directions while an undeniable chemistry reveals a combined hive mind ascending on a clear group mission… to rock. If you didn’t have the Delivery phenomenon yet, you’re about to. Marking the beginning of a victory lap for Delivery, the album rounds out a sprint of unrelenting live shows, impressive support slots and two stellar 7”s, all within a tidy 18 months. ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ is a statement from Delivery and one of the strongest Australian punk debut albums of the past decade.

Milan based label Positive Not Happy collect its first various artists release called “Quadrifonia”, exploring a wide range of styles connected by a common sound aesthetic. The four tracks leads you into a realm of profound and psychedelic grooves with accurate sound design and effective rhythms, music for the body and the mind, from the soul. The selection of artists includes true gems from Dawl, Modex, TC80 and The Lumens, representing today’s underground club scene in its pure beauty.

Sunergy brings together synthesists Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.'s intergenerational collaboration series. For this edition, a panorama of the Pacific Coast provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of a life-giving form vast and volatile with change. Fortuitously (as is the freaky way), Smith and Ciani were discovered to be neighbors in the small coastal community of Bolinas, California. The two had become close friends, bonding over their experience as woman musicians and, more unusually, their shared passion for the Buchla synthesizer. The music of Sunergy embraces this kinship, with Ciani and Smith respectively performing on the Buchla 200 E and the Buchla Music Easel, two modern configurations of the innovative instrument developed in the '60s by Don Buchla.
Sunergy was recorded in the Bolinas home where Ciani has lived for the last twenty-four years. Her living room overlooks the Pacific Ocean from a cliffside perch, creating an idyllic, inspired setting for music making. Setting up their synths side-by-side, Ciani and Smith took turns keeping time and freely improvising for the album sessions. As a complete piece, Sunergy is shaped by slow, pulsing forms and sinuous, melodic sequences that conjure both an oceanic world and the unlimited sound made possible by modular processing.For her part, Ciani has long been a Buchla voyager. Suzanne proselytized the potential of Don's synthesizer instruments in the '60s and '70s, performing her own compositions before introducing synthesized jingles and sound effects to household audiences. Ciani then achieved wide recognition for her debut album Seven Waves, a collection of colorful, classical song-like melodies fluidly working with harmonic textures and sounds of the ocean shore. Since its 1982 release, Seven Waves has become an important chapter of the ambient canon within which contemporary artists like Smith have developed their own synth syntax. Smith was born just a few years after the appearance of Seven Waves, growing up in Orcas Island, Washington. A place of profound natural beauty, the islands would inform Tides, her first instrumental collection from 2014. Smith composed Tides as an accompaniment for Yoga classes, ultimately freeing her from conventional songwriting into the exploratory, synth-based compositions demonstrated in ecstatic variety on 2016's Ears. Despite the serene setting where Sunergy was realized, the album does not romanticize a complete oneness with nature. Smith and Ciani use their collaborative ground to reflect on the unstable forces at play across the Bolinas horizon. Sunergy takes stock of Bolinas in the 21st century, a once-thriving artist's refuge now vulnerable to real estate pressure extending from affluent San Francisco, and more irreparably, the specter of climate change erasing its many waterfront habitats.
A diametric dynamic is present in Sunergy, a somber meditation amidst the intense cultural and solar forces transforming the landscape, and a hopeful assertion of the surviving creative culture of Bolinas. Far from rehashing the gentle grace of the artists' seminal works, Sunergy instead seeks to awaken and bear witness, employing the Buchla waveforms to mirror the infinite rhythms of the ocean and our essential relationship to it.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani's Sunergy will be released on September 16, 2016 on LP, CD, and digital formats. An accompanying documentary by Sean Hellfritsch will be offered in tandem.