Beats News

DMX Krew is back on Furthur Electronix! Here with a fine versatile EP, ranging in style from tripped out downbeat to Bleepy Sheffield style bass techno and acidic breakbeats. All in all another fine release from one of our greatest living underground legends.

Minor Science—aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson—makes his Balmat debut with Absent Friends Vol. III, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms.

The first two Absent Friends—a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93)—were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio—idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc.—he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden.

Absent Friends Vol. III is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science’s world, even a category as simple as “studio versions” is slightly opaque. “Most of these tracks weren’t ‘composed’ in the studio,” Finlayson explains: “The sounds started out as stems and source material for the live show, and might not have been intended to go together—but then through performance, they settled into shapes that worked. I then recreated those performances in the studio.” That organic process of ideation and realization might help explain the unusual coherence of the album, in which sounds and textures flow seamlessly from one to the next, sometimes seeming to stand still, and sometimes looping back. There are virtually no melodies, few recognizable motifs or riffs, yet the eight-track album nevertheless moves with a distinctive logic and a determined sense of purpose, from the frozen-in-time shimmer of the opening “Introduction” through the early cuts’ studies of space and light; from the seemingly autobiographical “Summer Diary” through the rushing trance (yes, trance) arpeggios of “Contingency” and on to the dulcet denouement of the closing “Gather Your Party (Dispersed Mix).”

St. Virus is a Covid-themed album born in Covid times. It processes the pandemic phenomenon from the aspect of the individual and sometimes of the pandemic itself on a philosophical level.

The opening track, "Isolation", takes the listener on a journey plagued by the sense of loneliness created by isolation. The ever-present melancholy slowly deepens into an overflowing anxiety without release. The eponymous "St. Virus" is a piece that considers the relationship between man and nature and the viruses that appear in it. They work in their own expected and, upon consideration, very honest way. Are we humans honest like this? Are human beings on some level similar to a virus? “Inherently Destructive” presents the idea of the unsustainability of the current situation. The events around us are fundamentally destructive for the individual person, for society and for the culture it carries. St. Virus is a personal soundtrack through Covid times. Record featuring artists are Tapani Rinne, Wimme Saari and Ville Kuukka.

Wisdom Teeth co-founder K-LONE returns with his second full length project, ‘Swells’: a kaleidoscopic and expansive record that looks to deep house, synthpop, leftfield R&B and beyond for a spellbinding masterwork of melodic electronica.

His debut LP ‘Cape Cira’ became the accidental soundtrack of the long strange summer of 2020 - its lush marimbas, hazy atmos and synthesised bird calls providing the ideal soundtrack for some much needed collective escapism. The record was widely deemed one of 2020’s standout electronic LPs, gaining glowing reviews in Pitchfork, DJ Mag, Mixmag and Resident Advisor, and ranking highly in end of year lists by Crack Magazine.

Approaching its follow up, the Brighton-based producer felt a fresh perspective was needed. Originally landing on the name ‘Swells’ as a secret pen-name to write the record under, the intention was to keep the project as separate as possible from ‘Cape Cira’ to avoid settling into familiar territories - but as the record took shape it became clear that it made perfect sense amongst his already diverse discography.

Like ‘Cape Cira’, there is a distinct and intentionally limited sound palette at play on ‘Swells’. Looping vocal cuts, rich cluster chords and undulating arpeggios sit front and centre here - as does the lo-fi plonk of of the CR78 drum machine. But while the record clearly takes influence from a range of vintage sound sources, its overall aesthetic is unmistakably contemporary. Sounds are not artificially degraded nor obscured under washes of sampled tape hiss. Rather, everything is processed with a gloss, hi-fidelity sheen. The record’s rhythms are bright, dry and snappy, and its melodies are processed with a neon poppy glow.

The producer’s unabashed love of contemporary pop music is most obviously exemplified by the appearance of British singer-songwriter Eliza Rose. The pair met for a session at a North London studio back in 2021, and the now Brit Award-nominated singer’s warm, emotive vocal takes became an immediate source of inspiration early in the record’s conception. As such, Rose’s voice is heard in various states of manipulation throughout its duration - initially as reduced and looped phrases, and then finally in full form on ‘With U’: a low-lit, dubbed-out slice of leftfield R&B that beckons comparisons with Tirzah, Little Dragon and even Erykah Badu.

Elsewhere, there are references to G-Funk (‘Oddball’), Autonomic drum and bass (‘Shimmer’), hip-house (‘Love Is’) and even Metronomy-era electro pop (‘Love Me A Little’).

As always, the true magic of K-LONE’s artistry is to present complex, subtle and original ideas in ways that feel familiar and immediate. Melodies are introduced as effortless earworms, only to be twisted out of shape into strange and unusual formulations. Looping rhythms unspool into washes of hazy, dubbed-out ambience before rebuilding themselves. Refined and endlessly creative, ‘Swells’ marks a captivating next step for a producer and record label that have both reliably positioned themselves at the very forefront of contemporary electronic music.

Ylia—aka Susana Hernández—had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut album, Dulce Rendición, on Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth.

But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. “That’s a lot of things all at once, no?” she says.

Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response to those life events—a record of grief.

The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia’s debut, but it differs in key ways. Where Dulce Rendición was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru—a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, “the rain lifts”— captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements, even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro Lévar, lends fingerpicked acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of “Todos los Cuerpos”; multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to “Ame Agari”—or “after the rain”—which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an extended deluge.

One track, the dub techno-influenced “Flowers in June,” grew out of Ylia’s live sets, but the rest are the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in Málaga, five minutes from the beach—jamming and then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the closing track, “El Único Adiós Posible,” she leaves us alone with the instrument in all its stark, unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means and purity of expression: a cycle

Introducing HUUUM, a new group comprising of Tehran born/Vienna-based artist Rojin Sharafi, working with Iranian singer Omid Darvish and Austrian saxophone artist Astrid Wiesinger on their debut album.

It's hard to know where to start with this, it's dark, beautiful, haunting, challenging & dreamlike throughout. The unexpected arrangement creates a mood that fluctuates constantly, scythed by Darvish's vocals and Wiesinger's Saxophone - all orchestrated by the mastermind of Rojin Sharafi. It's forward thinking music at it's finest, experimental music that is fascinating to get engrossed by.

Everything Leads to Nothing The ¦rst part of the album -
Everything Is the New Nothing - is marked by melancholy,
inner crises and many questions: Rustre describes a world in
which we are all networked and connected with each other
and simultaneously feel more and more alienated and
isolated. In his lyrics, he speaks of interpersonal
relationships that develop from mutual togetherness to
streamlined coexistence. He tries to escape the boundaries
of human language, within which shared names can still
refer to different concepts. But Rustre didn't just want to
show one side of the story and provides a constructive
alternative: questions, raised by the ¦rst part of the album,
are answered by the second part - Everything Is the New
Something. Here Rustre ¦nds himself, through acceptance
and self-e¨cacy: no matter how incapable we are of meeting
all the great challenges of our time on our own, we can still
change the way we ourselves deal with them, as well as our
perspective on them. Rustre negotiates between the
opposites of our time and creates two independent albums,
the full effect of which only unfolds when they are together.

Polish composer Martyna Basta follows up her well-received label debut Making Eye Contact With Solitude, with her first vinyl release Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering on Warm Winters Ltd. It's a multi-instrumental ambient album conjuring scenes from the blurry edge of memory. Martyna Basta uses guitar, zither, processed field recordings and voice to render abstract, compelling images, finding beauty in uncertainty.

Second album by Vril on Delsin Records. A deep excursion for mind and body, combining his trademark dub techno grooves with experimental ambient trips.

»In Words« is the first solo album by the Danish musician, composer, and visual artist Alexander Tillegreen. The album represents a series of varied electronic music pieces while also carrying examples of ongoing work with psychoacoustic phenomena. Composed partly of material taken from his artistic practice as an installation artist and his ongoing interdisciplinary artistic research into psychoacoustic phenomena, Tillegreen investigates subjective sonic perception and the negotiation of language. Particularly, these investigations are done through the use of the phantom word illusion, originally discovered by music psychologist Diana Deutsch. Parts of the album were conceived when Tillegreen was the first artist ever in resident at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Triggering the brain’s tendency to interpret language-based auditory illusions as meaningful information and as words within the mind of the listener, Tillegreen’s unique sound works unfold like a kaleidoscope of phonetic mirrors which render possibilities to reflect upon the listener’s own psychological and culturally situated linguistic embeddedness. Gender-distorted voice perception, speech and language borders are all challenged and thematized throughout Tillegreen’s work. The listener’s head and bodily movement drastically affect the listening and the word interpretation. Their psychological subconsciousness, recent events, memories, and expectations as well as the listener’s motion in space all become co-creative and co- composing factors in a reactive and choreographic process of listening. The polyrhythmic seriality of spatialized syllabic structures is accompanied by elements of heavy bass drops, high-frequency tensions, undulating synth lines, and hypnotic effects. Some of the many compositional potentials of the phantom word illusions are exercised and unfolded in selected tracks throughout the album. The notion of language borders is approached from an entirely different and even more “anti-logocentric” perspective on the “eponymous” closing track »Assimilate (in Words)«, where the listener experiences the struggle and collapse of interpersonal communication through conversation. Other parts of the album represent more diverse approaches to abstract electronic music. »In Words« morphs soundscapes into glacial, spherical passages of ambient backdrops, while at other times emphasizes raw tectonic blocks of hyper-panning drones that erupt into high-velocity outlets of energetic, granular fields. Tillegreen is alternating between cyclical, minimalist, hypnotic approaches and complex, glitchy polyrhythmic melodic structures that shift and melt into evocative ambiences. The phantom words and the nature of Tillegreen’s musical visions progressively demand more of the listener’s attention and represent the artist’s ongoing artistic work and scientific research into psychoacoustics and language. While »In Words« is a highly conceptual album, the musical bandwidth is extensive.

RUBIKON O.S.T. BIG BEAK RECORDINGS 008

Das Label Big Beak Recordings wurde 2005 von Patrick Pulsinger gegründet und positioniert sich als Plattform für obsolete Kulturtechniken mit Zukunftspotential.
Wir machen Vinyl Schallplatten für Klangkunst von Jazz und Improvisation bis Dub, Techno und Ambient. Alles kann, nichts muss!

Der Soundtrack zu RUBIKON ist auch ohne Bilder ein Ausflug in die Weiten des Universums.
Dezentes Knacksen des druckfrischen Vinyl in der Tiefe des interstellaren Raums. Ein Album in der Tradition der grossen Sci-Fi Filmsoundtracks des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, welche abgekoppelt von ihrer ursprünglichen Bestimmung die Grenzen der Wahrnehmung zu sprengen vermögen.
Erhältlich als Hi- Fi Stereo Schallplatte, Download, Stream und Dolby Atmos Klangerfahrung.
Die Scheibe ist schwarz und die Zukunft findet zwischen deinen Ohren statt.

Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2003)’ is a new in-depth compilation of works by Japanese musician Dream Dolphin.

Co-compiled by long-time friend of the label Eiji Taniguchi, it draws from a vast discography of music oscillating between IDM, Pop and Ambient. First appearing on Eiji’s compilation ’Heisei No Oto - Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age (1989-1996)’, this selection of rediscoveries, further shines a light on the singular musician known as Dream Dolphin and her place in Japan’s rich electronic music legacy.

Dream Dolphin was originally an Ambient and Electronic project by the Japanese artist referred to simply as Noriko, who moved from studying classic Italian songs as a child, to increasingly being inspired by artists such as PIL, Yellow Magic Orchestra, KLF and movies such as ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Le Grand Bleu’. The music she released under the name Dream Dolphin, from the age of sixteen, is unique and versatile in style, encompassing Ambient, IDM, Techno, Trance and even Drum & Bass, whilst fusing natural sounds with her own spoken word lyrics.

Dream Dolphin released an incredible twenty albums in just eight years. In addition to her own projects, she has also put together a number of fascinating compilations herself, as well as composing ambient music to be used in hospitals and other caring contexts. ‘Gaia: Selected Ambient & Downtempo Works (1996-2003)’ contains 15 tracks thoughtfully selected from various albums that until now were only released on CD format.

Venturing off course from his Post-Punk / Dark Wave project,The Soft Moon, LosAngeles born composer and multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, embarks intonew territory withA BodyOf Errors,a bold reimagining of the soundtrack genre.With this album, Vasquez felt the urgency to break away fromTheSoftMoonrealm and deliver an even more intimate, self-reflecting body of work,while further unveiling inner demons & vulnerability. He continues to explore hisnotorious angst and visceral pain, but places them in the context of his ownphysical being, creating the deeply personal, yet relatable and compelling odditythat isA Body Of Errors,which Vasquez describes as a collection of themes toliving in the human body.

Opening track “Interno” with its crushing synthesizers, is a blast off into theabyss of self. Sinister gasps introduce “Poison Mouth” stomping you withrelentless torment before spiraling into oblivion. Halfway, we reach themechanized rhythms and throbbing cardiac pulse of “Surgery” expressingVasquez’s phobia with the body itself. “No Longer Human” with its hallucinogenicflutter and distant cries, imagines a fantastic universe beyond, with a nod to David Lynch’sTwin Peaks. The only lyrical appearance onABody Of Errorsis“Used To Be” a gut-wrenching wall-of-sound ballad romanticizing the strugglebetween one'sgood side & bad side. Pulling you into armageddon,A Body OfErrorscloses with “World On Fire” an epic post-apocalyptic battle-storm paintedvividly through symphonic devastation.

True Dutch legend delivers gems on this mega bomb EP for Deeptrax Records! Orlando Voorn is one of the most gifted Dutch producers out there. The man is well known for his many monikers and anthems like Fix - Flash, Playboy - In Da Jungle, Format One - Solid Session to name but a few. Tirelessly releasing classic after classic for almost three decades now, Orlando keeps pumping out tracks and reaches a new high in his creative output with this ultra fresh release! Anthem alert!

First full-length vinyl outing from Berlin-based Nein Rodere, featuring original and re-worked material from his previous self-released tapes alongside new material. A gateway into the work of this shape-shifting artist who can effortlessly move from catchy bedroom pop to more abstract work while crafting a cohesive and engaging LP. Recommended for fans of early Smog, Letha Rodman Melchior, Dean Blunt and Peter Jefferies. Presented in a spot-gloss cover with insert and booklet designed by the artist.

Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations – often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure – “the permission to imagine leaving.”
Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album’s mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, “talking myself off a ledge.”
The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: “My first experience with ambient music was church – slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don’t believe, you feel something.”


Longtime friends and frequent collaborators Luke Entelis (Viul) and Thomas Meluch (Benoît Pioulard) combine their enchanting textures reflecting on a time spent in lockdown, for A Strangely Isolated Place.

"Konec" is Czech for "end," and a nod to the uncertainty of Luke and Thomas’ home city of New York amidst the pandemic. Birthed from Luke’s short synth sketches, the two friends further collaborated in isolation to create a series of strangely beautiful interludes - a sense of vitality breaking through the immediate surrounding dread.

Whilst many of the tracks expand far beyond what a short interlude may dictate, Konec builds on this concept through some of the most thought-provoking loops the pair have created over their many combined years producing.

With an immediate arresting aesthetic, grounded in saturation, decay, and distortion, tracks such as ‘Returning Clear Voice’ or ‘Flaxen’ reflect some of the duo’s more textured work - a hazy mist of life unknown in a city’s uncharted times. Konec’s storyful and engrossing moments come with a confident posture, such as the unforgettable bellowing of ‘Catalune’ or ‘Construction Worker Smoke Cycle’ or the swirling, haunting, ‘Canon’.

The variation in minutia, samples and instrumentation throughout the album cannot be understated amongst its hazy aesthetic and ominous poignancy. It’s one thing to notice the details, but another to unstick the melodies from the closing credits of a dystopian city’s downfall, from the forefront of your mind.

Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri and featuring original artwork by Liz Harris, Konec is available on limited gatefold transparent 2LP + digital.

2x12" vinyl with printed innersleeves.

"Interstellar Funk has crafted a raw, yet simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and endlessly intricate record. Layers of blended harmonies and melodies form the basis for jettisons into leftfield experimentation, heavily processed drums and oscillating frequencies. The result is as infectious as it is pensive; a transcendental journey into a synth-laden landscape.

A stalwart name on our Dekmantel line-ups and with prior releases on the likes of Rush Hour, Berceuse Heroique and L.I.E.S., Interstellar Funk is synonymous with the more brooding side of Dutch electronica. Akin to his DJ sets, which also glide effortlessly between genre, tempo and sound, Into the Echo is daringly eclectic, combining sung-spoken iterations with hypnotic samples and machinic industrial. The release will be supported by a hardware based live-show tour later in 2022.

Ethereal voices haunt the album, a spectral presence emanating both on the titular track and its eponymous twin, 'Octave Echoes.' The latter is built up around breathy reverberations partnered with steely chords and dissected drumbeats. While 'Crickets at Night,' featuring fellow Amsterdam-based producer Loradeniz, switches pace from ghostly ambient to a pulsating, metronome's tick, clockwork rhythms and eerily looped vocals.

Channelling introspective atmospheres, Into the Echo nevertheless holds steadfast to a club- ready beat and momentous bass. 'Northern Winds,' composed with JASSS, edges along the hardcore continuum, exploding with spiraling percussion and flashes of the pair's shared affinity for electro's gyrating-circuitry and dub's ominous dread. And, ionised by piercing synth and bolts of acid, 'Psycho Panner's occultist refrain climbs to an otherworldly crux.

A homage to the potency of analogue machinery and experimental electronica, Into the Echo fluctuates with organic life, often melding synthetic and acoustic instruments together. Guitar riffs flutter on 'Dreamers' before pattering out into warbling, glacial fragments and 'Last Piece of the Puzzle' features a glockenspiel-esque rhythmic element rising to a harmonic crescendo.

Sleeve Photograpy by Bea1991. "

Technology for the Afterlife (aka Victor Groth) is an ambient/new age
artist from Denmark, set to release his debut album Interpretations of
Eternity on Cracki Records in the spring.
The instrumental album explores the frontiers between faith and knowledge, consciousness and oblivion, past and future. It is about longing for a time when rationality and spirituality are not arch enemies, but one and the same.
When there is neither science nor religion: Only mythology.

Tiar ignites the label with Ambient Occlusion with this statement of a 4 tracker. The homonymous track borrows subtle melodies from ambient techno until a destroying amen break cuts into the track with sheer violence. Both MNRLS and Shading Lines expose Tiar's years of training and deep knowledge in breakbeat mangling techniques. For closing the release, Games Sense chisels the main track into an ever building, abrasive, tense, and sub-heavy grime-flirting bomb.
Note: This is a 180g pressing

Wound Without A Tear is a compilation of “Australian” Ambient and Experimental Music; an area so often overlooked and misunderstood because it does not easily fall into historical context. However, the fifteen years (1993-2008) the collection cites–a period of early 90s post-rave ethereality defined by pleasure-centred spaces (chill-out rooms) and the personal computer’s emergence as a popular tool for file-sharing and secondary-living in the 00s–is befitting of closer examination.

The recordings were sourced from artists, labels, corrupted disk drives, CD-Rs, the W W W and archives of Melbourne’s 3RRR community radio station.

During the 1990s, as new technologies emerged and mass digital culture flourished, artists explored the emergent possibilities of the Internet with a utopian fervour, viewing the web and its plethora of images and information as a site of boundless potential. In the 2000s, file sharing connected people around the world directly to one another, and this incorporation of online experience into material objects, meant there was an increasingly porous border between the online and offline worlds–if there remained a border, at all.

What is remarkable from this collection is that so many people, working (mostly) on their own came up with such remarkably similar ideas. In most cases these similarities can be related to the inherent qualities of the medium, though often any distinction is decidedly blurred at the edges.

The compilation seeks to make the works of these various artists available as a means of “demystification”. No specific destination is intended upon. Perhaps by the time you have reached the end, you will have forgotten where you began.

Endnotes:
How do you pronounce the title? Wound /waʊnd/ Without /wɪðˈaʊt/
A /eɪ/ Tear /teə(r)/

1. Wound. Furl. Twist. Wrap. Surround. To Move Back or
Forwards to a Desired Point.
2. Tear. Interruption. Disruption. Imperfection. Rupture.
3. Two words evoke a chain of events.

INCANTATIONS is a collection of sixteen visual and sonic experiments centred around the idea of score as spell,

A spell and its incantation are distinct, but conjoined by a symbolic, almost umbilical force. A spell is a totem text, a material call for change — a seed, a recipe, an instruction, a potential. The incantation of a spell gives it life, brings breath to body, raises hairs, moves minds. For this project, eight spell- scores were created by visual/text-based artists for a musician/composer to incant. Taking a wide interpretation of what can be considered a score, these works include concrete poetry, collage, painting, drawing, spell-poetry, instructional art, and recipe. The resulting sound works give voice to these evocative “texts”, residing in the liminal space between musical form and magical utterance.

Creating what became the cover artwork for this release, musician and artist Benjamin Kilchhofer conjured salt paintings reminiscent of ancient runes and salt circles — improvised talismans of protection. Translating these expressions into sound using a hydro harp (water drops hitting tuned water-filled porcelain bowls), musician and artist Tomoko Sauvage evokes an embryonic environment, the cleansing and purification of salt water oceans. Artist Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh created a piece that arose from a drawing ritual — a meditation on textile, pattern, and code. In response, Museum Of No Art (Mona Steinwidder) worked her composition by “weaving the piece, layer by layer”. She was “particularly interested in the state one achieves when one works repetitively, stoically and excessively towards a form. Which leads to trance or meditation and creates its own immaterial energy.”

Dani Spinosa, poet of digital and print media, created a typewriter poem that emerged after consulting Hesiod's “Works and Days and Theogony” to learn more about the witch goddess Hekate. Synchronously, interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom had recently returned to research on Hekate, teaching about the goddess in her class “Queering European Witchcraft Traditions”. Russom spent time with Spinosa’s spell, spoke to Hekate, and then unlocked the gate, seeking to “stir sonic emanations that were radiant, multiple and liminal.”

The side ends with a composition by musician and artist Felicia Atkinson via an instructional text from conceptual artist David Horvitz. What is it like to inhabit the mind of a crow? This simple gesture to befriend a crow, to be in relationship with something other than human implies much more, a re- orientation to our living environment and forms of intelligence.

The B-side opens with electronic composer C.R. Gillespie’s sonic manifestation of a score by bricolage artist Andrew Zukerman. Taking compositional inspiration from the Smiss stone, Zukerman created a collaged visual score on staff paper that hints at the formal aspects of occult symbols and sigils, while remaining obliquely secular. Creating an interlocking tapestry of “Roman gamelan”, Gillespie’s track dramatizes the negotiating power and structure of the abstract score

Over three days, iconic Canadian poet bill bissett created a jazz-scape painting filled with an ecstatic gathering of eidetic spirits, “connekting trembling xploring serching remote brooding grooving melodee solo lifting n refrain filling.” Immersing himself in the energy of the painting, musician and composer Idris Rahman overlaid three takes of bass clarinet and found that “melodies, textures and harmonies emerged without thought and the piece took on a life of its own.”

As a way to explore the connection between food and music, the curators commissioned a recipe from electronic producer and home chef, Yu Su. Her simple and wholesome pudding recipe lays out instructions for texture and taste that musician Scott Gailey stirs into a sonic caldron of field recordings and electronics. The closing chant, penned by writer and activist adrienne maree brown and incanted by musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland, was the result of a synergistic conversation between the two. The refrain, “surrender to the present moment / what’s coming now is all that’s left” is a mantra reminding us of the power of speech, repetition, and the evanescent nature of temporal experience.

he eight spell cards, inspired by the format of oracle and tarot cards, are invitations for further interpretation and play. To be under a spell is to be lost in a transformation, an alternate reality, to be in collaboration with an unknowable and powerful force. The works in this collection have created a spontaneous and ludic alchemy, courageous attempts to catalyze and spark in our present moment.

Curated by Seance Centre

'An Orchestral Suite For Tape' is a compilation specifically curated for playback on the noble cassette tape format, featuring orchestral arrangements by Texas-Indiana duo zake & City of Dawn. Including songs from four albums and one compilation, the first time these tracks have been available on tape, the mood is deep and meditative, the billowing clouds of synthesisers providing ample space for thought and relaxation alike.

Over the last couple of years, Morph and Bedside of Copenhagen have been engaged in the ambitious and on-going project Lightroom - a delicate exploration of male intimacy as a healing ritual against toxic masculinity. Working with more than fifty people to date, Lightroom has given birth to film, photography and music, and has traveled around the world at festivals and exclusive events, facilitating a continuous room for reflection on the concept and image of man - with the intention of decalcifying our ideas to create movement towards the new.

What remains when light fades ? Gil Barte, co-founder of Meth O Tapes and Kump Records, brings an answer in sketches with this new release. Faithfull to his previously developped style made of musical miniatures, he draws a diagonal throughout the abyssal void of the unknown.

As a catalogue of apparitions, « Transmutation » turns shadows into presence all along these pages, sometimes breaky, sometimes ritual, haunted with glitches and drones, reminding us enchanting sightings then losing us in sticky dark ambient margins, in a forest of walls with faces, in deep corridors, whispering under. Everything rustles here in spectral encounters, blurry, storyless figures barely named in titles. It's music for sleepwalkers, for those who know how to cross by to the other side, to the black screen of darkness and set what they have to give there.

STBL is the alias of Spanish sound artist Jorge Ortiz de Pinedo. "Reflected" is his new LP for Gailur Records, an intense voyage from the roots of classic ambient to more experimental layouts very rich in textures and details. This unique mixing brings us a very special release of contemporary ambient music. This is the 4th release of Gailur Records.

The Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers-from social networks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet strives to express. We need to cool down. Thomas Köner's music can help change the pace of our perceptions: 1) In DAIKAN (2002) - a Japanese term meaning "the coldest" or "the coldest part of the year"-the ear stretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a sonic drama offers the slowness thanks to which the skin of perceptions can reconstitute themselves; icequakes awaken listeners to the frozen life without scaring them. 2) Banlieue du Vide, considered by many to be Thomas Köner's most iconic audiovisual work and best kept secret, has not been released previously. It is in the collection of a couple of art museums, e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has been awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004, in the category Digital Musics. Banlieue du Vide is the result of months of time-lapse observations of empty streets in the Finnish Arctic Circle, shown in glacially slow slow-motion. Phase cancellation, on which all noise cancelling technology is based, here affects the perception of time, the sense of the flow of time extinguishing itself. At this stage the void is not yet empty, traces of past noise fill the listeners mind with their haunting presence. A remastered stereo version of the soundtrack is released as a special premiere as Bonus Track of the DAIKAN album. Listening to this album, an excess of heat turns into an empowering coldness-like the transient feeling of our terrestrial embodiment in the midst of entropy.

Cherrystones returns with the second of the "Aged" EPs for Emotional Response. Time propels and so does sound, thus orbiting nuances and motion leads us here, to present whatever maybe or interpreted as. Since the acclaimed Aged Of Bronze EP a symbiotic progress of craft arrives in the aptly titled Aged Of Silver. Again each track is like a coded syntax, unlocking the puzzle to aid a listeners journey and experience, building blocks to a utopian scape in form without form notes and pictures living and residing in the dimensions.

Never pandering to trends, his art based on immediacy and the moment, no disposable sub genres that fade as fast as they emerge, transposing and emitting heard and unheard a way to communicate with himself and those that identify.

A capsule of touched emotions bearing gifts for those in the present and wishing to be present, a key with keys analogue for Silver Tongues and Brass monkeys living in the shadow of a Scorpian's Tail.

'...lost contact with scientist team looking into the energy signature on Psylos Prime. Just entered orbit, on my way to investig... SYSTEM ERROR---'
Last words from seasoned psychonaut Disrupt, and the beginning of 'Under Triple Suns', a
gripping SonicFiction paperback novel, cut to holo-disk for the very first time.
Dubbed-out loop clusters, foggy melody nebulas and hazy layers of alien field recordings are
held together by otherworldly off-the-grid rhythms, shaping the experience into an highly
immersive sonic tale of crash-landing on a mysterious planet.
Out on the Jahtari-sublabel Zonedog the album follows the trail of previous space exploration
endaevours like 'Omega Station' and 'The Recreation Room'. Coming with beautiful
vintage-SciFi water color artwork by Ellen G.
--- SIGNING OFF...

Melody As Truth present “Melodies In The Sand”, a collection of works from Czech artists Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi.

The husband-and-wife duo began working together in the mid 80’s as part of experimental ensemble Capella Antiqua e Moderna, a unique association of musicians whose repertoire spanned various styles of European classical music.

With an inventive and unorthodox approach to both historical and modern compositional techniques and interpretive procedures, the Havel’s have steadfastly developed a unique and musically autonomous language which continues to expand to this day.

Spanning their early work in Capella Antique e Moderna to recent pieces recorded for Viola De Gamba, ‘Melodies In The Sand’ is presented to the listener with the simple aim of shining a light on these incredible musicians. Their work has within it the ability to penetrate and enrich the innermost corners of a perceptive human soul, a gift which they share with sincerity and humbleness.

Solo debut by multi-instrumentalist Manuel Chittka. The Love-Songs, Jungstötter and Pantha du Prince associated drummer creates two compositions of intimate beauty. EIGENMODEN is both, rhythm-based, and at the same time softly swayed by modular electronics. Making this release a personal and contrasting accentuation of contemporary Minimalism, Ambient and Jazz. The music was recorded in Hamburg-Altona and Berlin-Marzahn and mastered by Italian film composer Giuseppe Ielasi.

„A layered electro-percussive music that is supposed to flow in a tangible pulse and combines moving textures with detailed events. Mostly tuned metal percussion instruments like gongs, cymbals, or metallophones ring and sizzle together and unfold both meditative and noisy.“ Manuel Chittka

René Huthwelker’s solo performances emphasize minimalistic repetitions that are created foremost by analogue-synthetic spheres. 'IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII' is Huthwelker‘s solo debut in which he presents an insightful exploration of polyrhythmic networks, based primarly on the analogue synthesis of the Buchla system.

muslimgauze vs species of fishes

The story of this unexpected collaboration dates back to the summer and autumn of 1998 when Bryn Jones AKA Muslimgauze, the politically conscious music genius from Manchester, discovered Species Of Fishes' albums through the Dutch label Staalplaat. Jones embarked on a journey of reinventing the Muscovites' tracks, infusing them with hypnotizing noise pulsations that were both harsh and sharp, yet profoundly humane, while evoking ethereal Arab echoes.

The original remixes became the inaugural release on Species Of Fishes' self-titled label in 1999, with a limited circulation of 500 CDs. Another edition was later released in the United States in 2007 by Tourette Records, with a circulation of 1000 CDs. The first edition featured a selection edited from the original DAT cassette, accompanied by minor revisions, while the second one faithfully reproduced the entire studio session, providing insight into the creative process rather than focusing solely on the final result.

In this new reissue, Species Of Fishes have curated the tracks, discarding repetitions, unsuccessful takes, and technical pauses. The result is a more dynamic compilation that retains the core elements of the original work while reducing the total duration by almost half.

'Trip Trap', 'Some Songs of a Dumb World', and 'muslimgauze vs species of fishes' comprise three chapters of Species Of Fishes' album triptych, which unveils the originality of the Russian duo, pioneers of the unparalleled electronic scene who were ahead of their time.




d B1. Ctrl+S

This release is also a reflection of my musical past combined with lots of field recordings made in the last two years. But for this release I wanted to have a combination of deeper, more abstract dancefloor minded compositions and experimental rhythmic noise. A journey for that open minded people. Trying to blend a mixture of tribe, goa, techno but also rhythmic noise, ambient and drone.

The title name is based on this cycle of reincarnation, but getting back to earth again and starting a new life. So there is not a new entry into the next realm or dimension, hence the name "Kept in Reality". Also your soul wants to go at some point, somewhere it seems your are not ready or not allowed

New album by the imaginary German quartet via Denovali. Although the title "Systeme" suggests a perhaps rather distant-cool album, it is the most personal and concentrated soundtrack so far created by Thomas Bücker from Münster in his "E-Smog-Playground" studio. In 2008, the quartet still flirted with cyrillic-mysterious melancholy and red wine-swilling trakl melancholy. 15 years and four albums later, it seems almost cynical to simply continue at this point. Because: late modernity delivers its very own complex tragedies - in real time.

This feeling of "Something's not right here" runs like a thread through the entire new album. While it still sounds popularly symphonic here and there, there are also many soundscapes that have an observing, almost unmasking effect. Microtonal shifts, polyrhythmic structures, tempo fluctuations and sound aesthetics torn out of context create a fragile, unpredictable foundation - as if TALK TALK, TIM HECKER and SKRILLEX were making music together and challenging our tolerance for ambiguity.

Typical of the Bersarin Quartet: sparks of optimism shimmer through everything. However, sitting back and enjoying doesn't really want to work - necessarily. Because that makes it exciting without freezing in escapism - fortunately.

Repress!

The recording of Improvisational Loops began in 2012 during yoga classes at Body Actualized Center in NYC.
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In the spirit of past 'New Age' or Minimal music, it aims to open up a space within the room giving the listener a chance to explore inward or outward.

It was recorded using a digital synthesizer, reverb, and looper."

Terekke, January 2018

We celebrated a decade of releasing music in 2020 with our Time Capsule boxset compilation. “Time Capsule Extensions” sees the longer versions of six tunes from that anniversary release aggregated for this special companion album.

In keeping with tradition, the new year brings another offering from Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. »Organic Music Tapes Vol. 3,« the third instalment in Tiago’s ongoing series, continues to develop a freeform dual approach to organic and fluid compositions for Piano and Organ - this time adding a real church tube organ to the proceedings.

Evolving from the foundation laid in the first two volumes, Sousa introduces the pipe organ into his signature piano compositions, expanding his sonic palette into an even more otherworldly organic realm.

Much like its predecessors, »Organic Music Tapes Vol.3« immerses listeners in a nebulous sonic landscape, where the compositions exist in a nebulae-like state— eternally floating over stars and planets. The contours of these musical pieces are indefinite and indeterminate, refusing to settle or conform, a testament to Sousa's commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional minimalism while still paying respect to the American pioneers of the genre, such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

Enter then the third volume and be locked in a new theatre of eternal music by an artists that keeps pushing his own style to ebullient highs.

‘Rituals’ is the new album of spiralling drone & ambient formations by Italian artist Danilo Betti aka April Clocks (Union Editions / Mixed Up); a new work of sublime disorientation by the Rimini-based outlier, arising from a period of reinvigorated artistic practice.

Emerging just over a year after the project’s second album ‘It Takes Time’, ‘Rituals’ heads deeper into spheres of consuming, hypnagogic haze, coursing through nine coalescent compositions of amorphous yet absorbing electronics.

Where ‘It Takes Time’ represented an autodidactic interpretation of Betti’s formative influences – namely shoegaze & proto-ambient - ‘Rituals’ is an enigmatic proposition, the product of subconscious resonances, a mysterious sound world that finds traces of evanescent beauty and uncanny captivation in sustained tones, cavernous oscillations, and aesthetic imperfections, like the notes of subtle surface noise embedded within many of these productions.

Attesting to the value of Betti’s background as an industrious solo artist, making music away from prevailing sites of activity, ‘Rituals’ consolidates the inspirations and hallmarks of the April Clocks project into an acute reflection of Betti’s vision, one that feels completely his own.

In the buried somnolent splendour of the opener ‘Hypersleep’, through the sound art rustle and time-stretched cycles of ‘A Cure’, into the stroboscopic magnitude of ‘Ceremony’ and the haunting string loops of ‘Coward’, Betti captures compelling impressions drawn from a submerged perspective; a deluge of smokescreens and crosscurrents from the other side.

Bearing the influence of subliminal states, ‘Rituals’ is nevertheless lucid and arresting. There are sumptuous holding patterns of ambient evaporation that stream into vast maelstroms of sound (‘Displaced Euphoria’), enervated organ themes that distil sensations of stasis and dissociation (‘Wound’), as well as psychedelic movements in wide tracts of negative space (‘No Time, No Land’). From here, the acoustic glitch of ‘Disappearer’ and the stratospheric slipstreams of ‘Mirror Being’ bring the album to an astonishingly dramatic conclusion.

Throughout such moments of reverie and tension, ‘Rituals’ makes for a hypnotic listening experience. It’s an album that signals a pronounced sense of development for the April Clocks project, from past vestiges of physicality to present degrees of heightened abstraction and ethereality, from the Warp-influenced rhythms and frameworks of ‘It Takes Time’ to the wide- ranging, experimental sounds that unfold here.

Encompassing forms of decomposition and otherworldly futurism, decay and sublimation, distortion and lustre, this is unique, cerebral music that reaches inward and ascends outward, drifting elsewhere, according to its own coordinates.

Recorded and Mixed at Tower of Disintegration, 2022.
Mastered by Miles Whittaker.