Beats News

Asqus (AKA Aragorn23) is a South African based musician working with algorithmic and gestural composition techniques. For his release on Bladud Flies! - Euclidean Haecceities, the 7th entry into the Abhorrent Jukebox 7" series, two piano pieces are processed using the Bjorklund / Euclidean sorting algorithm. With each execution of the code there are subtle changes to the rhythm, scale and pitch, creating endless possible variations.

Am.11 and Cm.13 follow similar patterns, where dramatically frantic peaks emerge and fall back into a delicate and pensive state. Music for the unsettled.

Each 7" lathe cut is a different variation of Am.11 and Cm.13. No two copies are the same. We believe that this is the first time a generative music piece has been committed to vinyl. Edition of 60 hand-numbered copies.

The 7" has an engraved centre label on side A and comes housed in a beautiful screen-printed sleeve, with each sleeve having a slightly different colour gradient.

Mastered by: Michael Lawrence / The Bricoleur

Artwork: Lauren Winton

28th September 2015. The night of the super blood moon.

Imagining that he would be watching with a number of like-minded moon gazers, Atki2 left the house and instead found himself alone, observing this extraordinary celestial event. Just Atki2 and the moon, bloody, huge and pulsing. This is where the story of ​Requiem​ begins.​

Around the time of this spectacular lunar phenomenon, another cataclysmic event was unfolding, Atki2’s mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Two years after she died, he began to write something in memory of his mother. Searching for a beginning, Atki2 remembered his special audience with the super blood moon, and its place in the story. In the end, it became the sixth movement of ​Requiem​.

Requiem​ is a single piece, divided into movements. With traditions of the requiem mass in mind, and sections that correspond to the liturgical texts; a classic form provides a useful starting point for writing about something as messy as bereavement; a set of rules, which can be followed or broken.

The latest in a series of singles featuring regular Ghost Box artists, special guests and one off projects. This time it's a collaboration between the label founder Jim Jupp's band, Belbury Poly and Ian Hodgson's marvellous Moon Wiring Club.

The artists have very different approaches to their work, but share similar reference points and a common sensibility. Their ideas complement each other perfectly in these two weirdly baroque, electronic miniatures.

Moon Wiring Club is the recording alias for Ian Hodgson. Hodgson is also a graphic artist and has built a huge, bewilderingly detailed other-world of art and fiction around his twelve album releases. Sparse, beat led soundscapes haunted by fragmented voices, Hodgson's music is deeply creepy, yet flavoured with a subtle sense of humour.

Jim Jupp, co-founder of the Ghost Box label, records as Belbury Poly. His melodic electronica references 70s library music & TV soundtracks. Like Moon Wiring Club, it's music that's simultaneously light and eerie.

* Blessed Initiative is a project by Yair Elazar Glotman, which suggests a dissonant, coexistent state of extreme highs and lows. The album attempts to articulate a mental state of simultaneity, in which equilibrium is fleeting, fragile, and its scarcity is embraced. Opposite states coincide, contrast and reflect, creating moments of uncertainty and insecurity. Absurdity and at times even bliss are possible results, in the attempt to channel anxiety into creative forces rather than debilitating ones. In an environment where personas are the sums of the images they project, sounds are also no longer evidence of invention but of ever-changing combination, curation, and editing. The final persona is a sum of the chosen and the deleted, as well as what may be projected from outside, creating a confusing and conflicted self. The sounds collected here are attempts to compose on these uncertain grounds, and to reflect the anxiety released in all these sources' meeting and interaction. As a singular project, Blessed Initiative stops to comment on the conditions that inform Glotman's composition before and after it, and to acknowledge it as a non-linear, ongoing process.

* The focus on process and uncertainty is apparent in the album's phrasing, re-articulation and cycles of repetition and deviation. The pieces were composed from sounds generated on the KYMA system, personal foley recordings as well as tape manipulations techniques. Minor sounds on major scales and micro-tonal tuning suggest an ambiguous harmonic sphere. These were then integrated within idiosyncratic rhythmic structures, at times integrating real spaces and resonating bodies as reverb and augmented echo chambers. Concrete, almost-recognizable organic sounds contrast with these abstract spaces and connect them to tactile experiences. These textures and structures are a palette that reforms and deforms as it cycles throughout the album.

* The photographic series "Relax (blue)", 2004, by the artist Josephine Pryde was chosen for the album's cover as a materialization of tension. The two images represent a closed cycle of energy and unfulfilled release.

* Yair Elazar Glotman is a classically trained musician and sound artist based in Berlin whose previous works on Subtext include the LP 'Études' and a collaboration with James Ginzburg titled Nimbes.

London Based Multi-disciplinary Artist And Producer Buffalo Tide Presents His Latest Project 'pure Luxury' A Twisted, Bass-heavy Slow Jam Of Hallucinogenic Cuts That Melt It's Listeners Minds.

In Recent Years Buffalo Tide Has Garnered Spectacular Project Work And Press, Producing Music For Kenzo, Hunter And For Recently Closed Iconic Paris Store, Colette. He Has Released Music On Cult London Label No Pain In Pop, Presented A Mix For Dazed Digital And Had A Feature In The Nme.

Buffalo Tide Has Also Presented His Visual Art In Various Group And Solo Shows, Most Recently His Sound-installation Know Your Beholder At Sutton House In October 2016.

Built Over The Course Of The Last Year, Pure Luxury Features Surreal Vocal Samples, Juddering Sub-bass Lines, Jarring String Arrangements, Synthesiser Sweeps That Haul You Out Of Your Body And More Grime Than You Might Come To Expect From An Artist Like This...

Black printed sleeve repress! Limited to 100 copies.

'Bottle Rain Smoke' premiered on The Creators Project/Vice (video below)

Much of Crewdson's singular sound can be attributed to his musical (instrument) inventions. Via these vehicles, Crewdson crafts skewed sonics that boggle the mind.' XLR8R

'Toys' is the follow up to producer/instrument builder Crewdson's debut album 'Gravity' on Slowfoot Records in 2011 and is a stunning album which is at once archaic and futuristic, folk and tech, accessible and experimental, danceable and introspective, naïve and sophisticated, heart-felt and humorous.

'Gravity' drew huge acclaim from the likes of Gilles Peterson, Clash, XLR8R, Time Out, BBC, Future Sequence and The Fader to name but a few.

The album is a highly skilled and inventive production that draws on a myriad of post-rave styles - garage, dubstep, techno, broken beats - and comparisons can be made to the electronic explorations of the likes of Flying Lotus, Polar Bear, Fourtet, plus contemporaries Mount Kimbie, Micachu and Jon Hopkins' work with King Creosote.

The weird and wonderful hardware electronic musical instruments invented include the The Odd Box, The Concertronica, The Eggiophone and The Sonic Bonnet and the album owes much to these instruments, which have increasingly become central to his production methods and sound, as well as the album's title and imagery. They also provide a clue as to his music's direction. Where the music on 'Gravity' blended jazz inflected harmony and concrete soul with his trademark skewed electronics and tumbling beats, 'Toys' is more informed by the harmonic, lyrical and sonic ideas found in folk music and his instruments perfectly reflect this meeting of folk and technology, the archaic and the futuristic.

In between his debut and this album Crewdson found time to release records as one half of electronic soul duo Eckoclick, be Matthew Herbert's right hand man both on and off stage as well as running his Accidental Records, write music for prominent designer Paul Smith, collaborate with London's National Centre for Circus Arts on a bespoke performance, work with fashion designer Jodie Cartman to create a range of playable musical headpieces, go on tour as tech support to Thom Yorke AND contribute sounds to the rescoring of the first ever British sci fi movie 'A Message From Mars' as a part of The New Radiophonic Workshop in collaboration with the BBC and the BFI.

CLASH: Fragmented post-dubstep with jazz leanings, the producer's work was imbued with a wonderfully engrossing sense of space'

Debut Solo Album From John Carpenter Musical Collaborator On Very Limited Vinyl.

Daniel Davies Has Announced The Impending Release Of Events Score, An Eight-song Collection Of Otherworldly Instrumentals That Expands On The Musician's Distinct Talent For Wringing Modernistic Soundscapes From Vintage Synths. Perhaps Best Known For His Role As A Collaborator And Co-writer On Horror Auteur John Carpenter's Recent Lost Themes And Anthology Albums (as Well As A Pillar Of His Live Band's Subsequent Tours), Events Score Marks Davies' First Proper Solo Album. To Accompany The Announcement, Davies Has Shared 'shadows Alive,' A Melancholy Theme Built On A Glassy Synth Melody Arpeggio, Bolstered By A Creeping, Expansive Low End.

The Album Began As A Brainstorming Session For A Movie. 'i Was Talking With A Friend About Writing A Sci-fi Film, But I'm Not A Screenwriter So I Wrote An Album,' States Davies. 'i Could Imagine Huge Spaceships Cracking The Sky, Giant Sand-snakes Barreling Through The Desert, Or Someone Drifting Across The Bottom Of The Ocean With Just Barely Enough Light To See The Creatures Beneath. It's The Score To All That...'.

'Travelling Bright is a quietly exceptional album, dreamy and intimate, but borne up on rich elaborate arrangements... David writes Deeply introspective songs and renders them in rich orchestrated widescreen...Dreamlike soliloquies, steeped in mythology and the natural landscape, and presented with an airy spaciousness that carves out avenues for the mind to wander' - UNCUT MAGAZINE

'Travelling Bright' is the very pretty new album from David Ian Roberts, released on Welsh label Cambrian Records. The album feels like a real artistic statement, a double LP, full of ambition from the Cardiff based songwriter. David's lyrical imagery find parallels between our emotional landscapes and the natural world.

Written, performed, mixed and mastered by Richard Pike (PVT).
Standard cassette tape with full colour double sided J-card, imprinted shell, and the choice of 1 of 3 shell colours, rave orange, freight train grey, magnetic tape brown.

Snowed in at an abandoned guesthouse located in the Swiss Alps, long-time friends and musical collaborators, James Varghese and Ramon Ziegler unintentionally became ambient electronic duo Diskret and release the spoils of their reclusive recording getaway on Fri 22 March 2019.

Equipped with synthesizers, drum machines and other wired gadgets, Varghese and Ziegler wandered into the peaks around their native Zurich, unaware of what could emerge from a long weekend of unhurried creativity. The descent of the unexpectedly heavy snowfall broadsided plans to intersperse music making with fresh air and rural hikes, instead being forced to evoke their alpine isolation and the vivid beauty of the whiteout through delicately layered electronica.

After the process they describe now as 'incomprehensible', the EP is the only reliable document of a shared dream, created as if in a trance. Four days of recording synthesizers, arranging chords, eating raclette, stacking sounds, automating filters, fondue, creating beats and occasionally sleeping, comes to this. An EP they had no concrete intention of making.

The Paris based producer and DJ NxxxxxS’s delivers a new 13 track album offering a fresh and summery vibe. Shaped by his wavy trademark sound, which mixes techniques from genres such as, vaporwave, phonk, trap, hiphop, R&B and future beats

Accomplished musician / producer Bryan Richie, bassist for American rock band The Sword, has announced a new solo project under the pseudonym Galactic Protector. Overflowing with bright, synthesizer melodies and blissful, melancholic IDM, the 15 track effort plays out like electronic dream pop songs, hovering between ambient introspection and more active synth pop and post-rock elements.

Tranquil, nostalgic and melodic, 'Evening' pushes sound beyond the realms of IDM and ambient, conjuring a more kinetic, experiential expression of sound. Using an arsenal of analogue and digital synths, Richie's music as Galactic Protector blends new wave and cinematic influences with sophisticated downtempo beat patterns. The tracks initially took shape at Richie's home studio as well as in the Portland studio of producer Tucker Martine (Neko Case, Modest Mouse) during recording sessions for The Sword's 2018 release 'Used Future'.

Das dritte Album des Brightoner Duos Grasscut (Andrew Philips und Marcus O'Dair) erscheint auf Lo Recordings, nennt sich "Everyone Was A Bird" und überzeugt mit einer Mischung aus Electronica, Post-Rock und songbasierter Live-Instrumentierung (Strings, Piano, Gitarre, Drums) als die wohl organischte und eindringlichste Arbeit des Duos bislang.

* Coming together over three years since his critically acclaimed last album, Hyetal completes his transformation from off-kilter dance music producer to futurist pop visionary on Youth & Power. 'Previously my approach to writing music was very rooted in escapism,' says David Corney aka Hyetal. 'I began experiencing a sense of detachment in my life which led me to question how healthy this approach was. I wanted music to help me feel connected again.' Wrenching his music free from the 'confines of computer grids' and pushing melody to the forefront, Youth & Power's texturally rich, psychedelic palette is littered with live played synths, electric guitars, drum machines, processed noise and 'some under-loved 70s home keyboards' recorded at Hyetal's South London home studio.
* 'I'd describe it as experimental pop music,' says Hyetal. 'the sound is in part a return to music I was listening to as a kid, more song- and instrument-based.' Youth & Power is Hyetal's debut as a vocalist, also scrapping samples in favour of live instrumentation and hook-laden songwriting laced with myriad influences. 'I took some time out to teach myself how to sing using an app on my phone. At first I found my vocals worked best for me when there was some distance from the natural sound of my voice so everything was abstracted through a few different processes.' he explains, 'As I became more comfortable singing I decided I wanted to contrast this approach and use some natural sounding vocals that embraced the imperfections'. The album strikes a balance between robotic Kraftwerkian simplicity and soulful organic pop, contrasting the various pitch-shifting and abstracting vocal effects with sharply concise lyrics. Semblances of Hyetal's origins in Bristol's early dubstep movement are still present too, deep inside the album's meticulous rhythm beds. Elsewhere chiming retro keyboard notes and drum machine beats at times recall the likes of Yellow Magic Orchestra contrasting against waves of guitars and noise which bring to mind the influence of Bauhaus and other post punk experimentalists.
* Written as a form of catharsis for Hyetal in his search to return his music from detachment, Youth & Power seeps a sense of hope. 'I found from a distance the most immediate workings of humanity can appear extremely brutal', says Hyetal, 'but when looking through this lens you miss the beauty that happens in the moment.'

A spoken word and music project by writer Justin Hopper and folk musician Sharron Kraus. It also features Ghost Box's own Belbury Poly. Based on live performances of Hopper's 2017 book The Old Weird Albion (publ. Penned in the Margins), it’s a poetical, autobiographical and psychogeographical account of his experiences at Chanctonbury Ring on the West Sussex Downs.

The album is a blend of folk, electronic music, poetry, prose and environmental sound. Kraus’s electro-acoustic soundscapes and songs interweave with Hopper’s rich, intimate narration. Musically it moves effortlessly from the traditional to the avant-garde with Belbury Poly contributing music and production throughout and bookending the work with a memorable theme tune.

Finding its spiritual home on Ghost Box, the project is reminiscent of a lost era of poetry and music albums, like David Cain and Radiophonic Workshop's The Seasons. It comes artfully packaged in a style that recalls a poetry and music for schools LP, with a nod towards 1960s Topic folk anthologies.

HEXAGON is the new album on More Than Human by duo Stephen Wood and Scott Gubbels aka Kensington Gore. It's an immersive 6-track album full of propulsive electronics, eerie sci-fi soundscapes and Kosmische chug.

For all it's dark eldritch tones and dystopian leanings 'Hexagon' is a curiously optimistic record. There's darkness in the anxious synth stabs for sure but also wistful melodies and subtle shades of instrumentation - which seems fitting as the band are named after the fake blood used in old Hammer horror films, it's an intriguing combination. Like an ancient curse whispered in a space station.

One of the most slowly riveting psych LPs we've spun in a while'
THURSTON MOORE (on 'Kensington Gore')

'Acrobats' is the debut album from Laura Moody, a wildly alternative cellist, vocalist and avant-singer songwriter. Fascinated with words and songwriting as well as sounds, noises and textures, Laura draws on the infinite possiblities available from her solo cello and voice. From a multitude of influences, Laura creates emotive songs that inhabit a unique space between the avant garde, classical music, pop and singer-songwriter tradition.

Originally conceived as a hip-hop scratch/battle record for turntablists, Do or Die is made up of short instrumental beats interlaced with sound effects and vocal snippets. Predominantly constructed from obscure vinyl samples, the record also features an Emu Drumulator, and live performance samples of cello, organ and percussion. Re-contextualized as home listening experience, the album sounds timeless and fresh, a musical journey rich with drama, romanticism, and humour.

Do or Die, was produced over the course of a year (2003-2004), and self-pressed by Milk & Beef as 1,000 vinyl LPs at the end of 2004. This pressing was taken on by short-lived label The Thin Man, and released in 2005 with catalog number TTM001.

Of the 1,000 copies pressed, 100 were distributed directly by Milk & Beef, and we believe a further 150 were sold through The Thin Man. So roughly 750 copies remained in stock, 50 of which were held by the artists, 700 by the label.

In 2009, Milk & Beef were approached by Bladud Flies! with a view to re-releasing Do or Die. The Thin Man were duly contacted to request the return of the 700 copies, but to our horror and disgust, confessed to having 'thrown them in a skip' a couple of years previous. They showed very little remorse, and we were left shocked, upset, and short of 700 records...

Not wishing to dwell on this distressing and acrimonious situation, we decided to go ahead anyway, individually screen-printing a new sleeve design for the 50 copies still in our possession, and releasing them as a now very limited one off edition: Do or Die (Resurrection). Vinyl purchasers will also receive a free download of a digital version re-mastered by The Bricoleur and featuring 2 bonus tracks, Louise and VW.
We suspect there are still copies of The Thin Man release of Do or Die out there somewhere, possibly in the back of a record shop, or maybe in a skip near you. However, it's safe to say that this limited run of 50 editions are all salvaged artefacts to be treasured.

Is this the end of the Milk & Beef story Or will there be 'Life After Death'...

- Milk & Beef

A shimmering and tragic delirium - improvised piano of Richard Moult, recorded in single takes at St. Leonards Parish Church, St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. Aside from the vocal by David Tibet on Five and the oboe of Mark Baigent on Four, the remaining sounds have been tweaked and teased out of the piano by The Bricoleur. Recorded by Michael Lawrence at St. Leonards Paris Church, 2008.

Limited edition - 500 copies.