Beats News

“Basically my albums have developed into my personal field of experimentation” says Martin Gretschmann, aka Acid Pauli. Known primarily for his psychedelic, leftfield club sounds that weave between slo-mo beats and deep burners, his EPs, remixes and collaborations have generally been more focused on the dancefloor. With his latest album, MOD (his third full-length released on his own Ouie label), Gretschmann goes in a tangential direction, drawing inspiration from modular synthesis and the scene that has flourished around it over the last years. The result is an album produced almost entirely with modular systems, inspired by the possibilities and restrictions of carefully shepherding machines that sing to themselves.
“I know a lot of people who somehow found themselves and electronic music in a boring dead-end alley, and who have now found completely new worlds through modules”, he explains. Experimental as MOD may be, it certainly isn’t ‘difficult’ or inaccessible - or as someone put it, the nine tracks here are “soft, elegant, fluent, dreamy - the tracks achieve the effect of space-time morphing - magical states”.
The album is best heard as one continuous piece, allowing it to unfold its delights gently. Most of the tracks were recorded live in one take - often with Gretschmann recording up to 10 different versions before choosing the final piece. Propagating Flip Flops starts things off - its glitchy textures and sync-shifting set the scene for the album - the sounds evolving and developing before resolving into a warm, ethereal tone. Intellijel Bell is made up of deep loops of rhythmic sounds, while metallic sounds and a submerged jazzy undertone hint at the classic Acid Pauli sense of fun. Acid On Yusef uses looped up rhythmic pulses and bass tones, joined by modulated beeps and blips. A touch of that iconic liquid acid sound pulls it together and gives the track its name. Sublime Frequencies Of Cairo is another beatless, floating collection of loops that shift and morph - seemingly suspended in space, before an ambient orchestral element resolves the track.
As the title suggests, Du Brecht, Ich Dub revolves around a bass heavy sound, building up a rhythm of disparate elements that develop into a tense yet somehow weightless groove. Life Polarizer is further evidence that an Acid Pauli album will always somehow drift back towards the groove. The track works the effects pretty hard - sounds pinging between left and right and ebbing and flowing into the mix. Peace Waer Schoen also makes heavy use of delay to create a dubbed-out, wonky feel. The freedom of getting away from computer based production is referenced sardonically in Quantize Hell - its bleepy sounds find a rhythm and progression outside of the grid. Finally, No Kick, No Cry brings the journey to a close - it’s the first and only kick drum of the album and adds a structure to the magical unpredictability of the looped sounds.
The album’s artwork perfectly reflects these sounds within - created by musician and artist Billy Caso. Each track is also accompanied by a minimalist video, created with a device from this modular world - the "Vidiot". It’s clear that in MOD, Gretschmann has produced a homage to the modular scene that might inspire as many people as it delights.

-LTD. CLEAR VINYL-

Reissued for the first time in over 20 years, for the first time on double LP with the original, unedited tracks in vinyl format. Completely remastered and restored audio and artwork. Side D of the double LP includes vinyl etching art: pine tree branches rendered by the band in Bryce software in the 90s for the original album art. // Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and collaboration, enhanced by recent advancements in synthesis and sampling. Fittingly, at the summit of the decade's long, intoxicated arc, their divergent strains of interstitial ritual congealed into one of Coil's most celebrated and hallucinatory creations: Musick To Play In The Dark. Convening at Balance and Christopherson's vast Victorian house / studio in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, they began a series of ambitious sessions aided by inner circle associates Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowall. Although the creative process was admittedly "iterative" and "a bit of a drug blur," the results are astoundingly inventive and well realized, winding through shades of divination dirge, wormhole kosmische, noir lounge, ominous humor, and black mass downtempo, guided by Balance's cryptic lunar muse, which he announces on the opening track: "This is moon musick / in the light of the moon." What's most remarkable about the album 20 years after its release is how brazen, insular, and unpredictable it still feels. The songs follow an allusive, altered state logic all their own, warping from microscopic ripples of glitch and breath to widescreen warlock psychedelia and back again, as much hyper-sensory as inter-dimensional. Even within a catalog as eclectic as Coil's, Musick is a mystifying collection, oneiric evocations of desire, decadence, dinner jazz, and dietary advice, far beyond the pale of whatever gothic industrial ambiguity birthed such a journey. The record closes with a slow, starlit shuffle, bathed in seething sweeps of spectral texture and high cathedral keys, like approaching the altar of some arcane temple. As the trance thickens Balance's voice rises, processed into an increasingly eerie, gaseous haze, but he resists these unseen forces, intent on delivering a final sermon: "Through hissy mists of history / the dreamer is still dreaming / the dreamer is still dreaming."

New full length album by France’s most singular contemporary composer. Reflecting on ancient culture’s use and reverance for emblematic monuments which most often represent myths and stories, the album’s narrative has been infused with such symbolic and depicts an envisioned mythology, unfolding through it’s 10 aural pieces. Franck Vigroux‘s music is unique and comprised of tectonic tension, pulsating rhythms and abrasive analog textures like few can produce. Applying his own calculated personal signature in his sonic explorations his distinctiveness comes not only by his unique approach to sound but also by his incorporation of new media practices and performing arts into his A/V work.
Mastering by Denis Blackham.

Double Vinyl Edition of 500 copies in matt laminated Gatefold Sleeve.
10 Tracks. Running Time 55:10.

Kodiak Bachine is a multidisciplinary artist and one of the truly pioneers of electronic music in Brazil. He first formed in 1980 the legendary band Agentss considered to be the very first Brazilian electronic group. In 1982 he composed and recorded 'Eletricidade' with the use of a Minimoog Model D, Moog Liberation, Crumar String Ensemble and Vocoder. This track could be considered as the first techno-pop in Brazil. It was also used on a video-art awarded by different festivals. 'Espirito Das Maquinas' is a re-version created the same year.

Universalist is the first album by ACT! Baroque, kaleidoscope electronics; material sound for a disembodied world. The energy is optimistic and posi - even naive - a statement of unity in the age of psychic dislocation.

10 Tracks of phosphorus midi and brittle digi textures feel indebted in spirit to the masters of psychic jazz as much as the physical euphoria of the club. Above all, this album belongs to the catalogue of Halocline Trance, yet subtle references connect it to a larger lineage of free sound. The empty, divine heaviness of songs like Ecstatica / On Patrol invokes Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony, while the computerized spontaneity of Lava Valley feels somehow connected to Yasuaki Shimizu's Music for Commercials. Non-musical sounds and evocative melodies sit side-by-side - new psychedelia for love and life in the digital jetstream.

ACT! is a project from Toronto-based musician David Psutka. Building on a diverse body of releases as Egyptrixx, Ceramic TL, Anamai and various other collaborations, ACT! denotes a new chapter of creative output from Psutka and the Halocline Trance label. Universalist follows a prolific string of releases in 2017 with Anamai - What Mountain; Ceramic TL + Ipek Gorgun - Perfect Lung; and Egyptrixx - Pure, Beyond Reproach, and synthesizes recurring themes of materiality and the unifying potential of sound.

Dead-Cert dip their dusty digits back in Ami Shavit's precious archive for another hemispheric harmonisation of biofeedback techniques and hypnotic synth sonics following Finders Keepers'
reissue of In Alpha Mood back in 2015.
With an enviable private collection of synthesisers first started in 1972 during his travels to the US and shipped home to Tel Aviv, as an established kinetic artist, as well as a professor of both
philosophy an art, Ami's main focus was art that involved technology; in particular being able to give something mechanical an emotive angle.
As such he sought to combine his love of electronic music acts such as Tangerine Dream and Philip Glass and this new synthesiser technology with his interest in the relatively new technique of biofeedback - a process in which technology is used to relay information about the body's functions enabling a change of physiological activity in order to manipulate them. Combined with his understanding of of alpha brainwave (primarily attributed to a function of the brain that deals with relaxation), Ami embarked on an experiment with what he called Alpha Mood - a state in which the brain is working in relaxation and in which he used music as a means of helping induce his own meditative state.
With practically no formal musical training and working in complete isolation of the Tel Aviv music scene - with the exception of allowing cult prog nearly men Zingale and a handful of close friends to use his private studio - over the course of two years he recorded hours of experimental improvised music, or 'sounds' as he prefers to call it.
The fruit of that experimentation came in the form of a single privately pressed LP aptly titled In Alpha Mood. Part outsider electronic album; part physiological experiment; part work of art, it was limited to only 500 copies and distributed exclusively by a longtime friend, agent and owner of a small local record shop in Tel Aviv. Five 1/4 inch tapes (including the In Alpha Mood master tape) represent the only remaining artefacts of Ami's experiments - the rest having been either lost, given to friends or simply thrown away.
Undated and unannotated, these raw studio recordings proivde a rare glimpse of Ami at work in his attempts to perfect his technique and reach the plane of Alpha Mood.

Reissue of the very first Birds Of Passage album from 2010. Minimalistic Lo-Fi Shoegaze meets experimental pop with drone influences.

For someone who thinks it's difficult to describe music in general, it's even more difficult to describe the soundscapes of BIRDS OF PASSAGE. The influences of Alicia Merz - the girl behind BIRDS OF PASSAGE - are her memories, breathless-inspiring cold winds, the smell and atmosphere of a spring day, smoking cigarettes, sunshine and shadows. As a mixture of all these elements plus a minimalistic experimental instrumentation you as well can describe her music: sometimes shy, sometimes more energetic ( fantastic frown') but always intensely and extremly private. Listening to her debut record "Without The World" is like sharing one long day with Alicia and her thoughts in the diverse landscapes of her home country New Zealand.

Alicia doesn't need the orotund spectacle of a band to evoke emotions - with the help of different, in a minimalistic way, used instruments combined with field recordings, she doesn't create specific songs - she builds up a mood. There's no typical song structure, there's no melody to chase after - but there's a development which absorbs you and which makes you start to think about elements you block out in your everyday life.

With roots in the early developments of modular synthesis and free jazz and revered amongst the most discerning collectors of international jazz, electronic music and American avant-garde, the experimental drummer known as Bruce Ditmas occupies a firm branch on contemporary experimental music's family tree. As the one time romantic partner (and artistic collaborator) of sound poet Joan La Barbara (later to be Miss Morton Subotnik) and the stand out session drummer for both Robert Mason's mutant synth Stardrive project and Gil Evan's legendary Jimi Hendrix tribute band, Ditmas is best savoured as the first recorded solo artist to utilise Robert Moog's lesser-known Moog Drum controller - an instrument which over the course of two 1977 independent LPs (Aeray Dust and Yellow) would become synonymous with his blooming reputation.
Raised in Miami, nurtured in New York City and willingly exploited internationally, Bruce's public life as a child prodigy-cum-world jazz crusader (drawing similarities with the likes of France's Jacques Thollot) has seen him spread his select discography over many imprints, including Joan La Barbara's own Wizard Label, Enja and ECM - socialising with sound designers like Suzanne Ciani and collaborating on projects penned by Annette Peacock, Paul Bley and his long running collaborator Enrico Rava. Spending the last thirty years travelling between America and Italy as a full-time jazz musician whilst working with inter-communal music initiatives, film directors and theatre groups, Bruce has retained the same maverick passion and macabre creative influences channeling brutalism, futurism, science fiction and psychological horror through his percussive mantra and avant-garde approach to instrument manipulation and recontextualisation.
These selected titles are extracted from various recordings made over the last three decades comprising field recording techniques and percussive manipulation resulting in gritty tonal soundscapes and angular sonic sculptures while drawing theoretical comparisons with European proto-industrial units like Germany's Faust, Swiss electronic jazz pioneer Bruno Spoerri, Czech sonic illustrator Milan Grygar and sprawling generation of Parisian musique concrète informed anti-melodic luminaries. Reflecting a lifelong career in active melodic drum exploration and vivid existential sound design, this record provides an alternative, darker, meditative, glimpse into the work of a proactive composer at his non-conformist best in the uninhibited confides of his own home analog studio.

Mercurial pianist and experimentalist Chris Abrahams (ov The Necks) makes his first incision on 2016 with a delta of sublime concrète, keys, and whirling organ recorded between Melbourne and Berlin for Room40.

A definition of free exploration, Fluid to the Influence flows between rivulets of lilting piano, scarped strings, and paroxysms of atonal electronic noise that knows few bounds, but still appears coherent by virtue of his artistic flexibility.

Lysergic runs of organ calve into ecstatic, Mego-style noise scrabble in One-Liter Cold Laptop, and Scale Upon The Land lushes out to contemplative keys, whereas Receiver is a gyroscopic collage of sloshing electro-acoustic process and skittish percussion.

Trumpets of Bindweed blares head-spinning harmonic organ clusters and glissandi, whereas the spare organ drone space of The Stones Continued could be considered its inverse, and As Tranquil as an Apple melts music melody in fractal geometry.

If you like having the rug ripped and morphed from under your feet and wrapped around your head, this album is a joy.

Christer Bothén's new LP on iDEAL is a beautiful creation moving comfortably between improv, sound art and drone. Christer Bothén is a main character in the Swedish improv, jazz and world music scene. He studied music in Mali and Morocco in the 70s and collaborated w Don Cherry. Bothén has been active in bands like Bitter Funeral Beer Band, FIRE! Orchestra, Mats Gustafson NU Ensemble, Spjärnsvallet and Bolon Bata.

Movente Is A Debut Lp From A Vital And Long Standing Figure Of Italy's Clubbing Scene Under A Brand New Alias. That Alias Is Cleptophonic, And The Album, Due In 2019, Is An Autobiographical Collage Of Experimental Trip Hop Sounds That Is Truly Immersive.

Under A Former Alias, Cleptophonic Has Spent Years Djing And Experimenting In The Studio And Has Made A Real Impact On His Native Scene As A Result. He Is A Very Delicate Person With Serious Attention To Detail That He Puts To Best Use By Delving Deep Into What He Loves: Playing On Turntables And Immersing Himself In A Sonic Realm Cuts Him Off From The Real World And Acts As Therapy For This Meticulous And Selective Person And Artist.

He Is A Master Of A Stylish Musical Collage Technique - Both In Sound And Images. As Such Movente Is A Collage Of Different Sounds, Sampled With The Turntables And Put Together With Logic, While His Passion For Collage Also Spills Over Onto The Album Cover, Which Is Made By Pieces Of Paper From Magazines, Newspapers And Comic Strips. The Result Is An Experimental Trip-hop Album With A Singular Sound That Puts Together Pieces Of Life, Sounds And Images That Are Meaningful For Him, Especially The Last Song, Which Is Dedicated To His Mother Who Sadly Committed Suicide A Few Years Ago.

There Is A Beauty And Delicacy To The Music Throughout This Most Excellently Escapist Album That Is Utterly Absorbing. Pads Swirl Round Louche Beats, Crisp Hits Ring Out Into The Night And You're Left In A Deep State Of Contemplation Throughout. There Are Warped And Shimmering Cuts, Dub Tracks Drenched In Reverb And Melodically Rich Broken Beats. The Whole Thing Is So Spacious You Get Sucked Right Into The Centre Of It All And The Thoughtful Moods And Deft Sonic Details All Making A Truly Lasting Impact. This Is An Exquisite Album That Encourages You To Really Get Lost In A Unique Musical World.

Never released before recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions in Brussels, May 7th 1977.When Paul Burwell and I started playing together just after Christmas, 1969, we found ourselves wrestling with a new language of sound, listening, actions, objects and space. At first it was music. We studied in the improvisation classes given by John Stevens at Ealing College in 1971-2, also took classes in African music at London's Africa Centre. Most of the musicians lasted only one or two sessions so we resigned ourselves to being a duo and worked out an approach to free improvisation that expanded from simple structures and instrument combinations. Decomposition, we called it. We had worked intensively together, searching for techniques through which to decondition ourselves from orthodoxies, devising exercises in listening and instrument building, studying esoteric organology, bioacoustics, environmental sound, raw musics and anthropology. We were both fascinated by phenomena like diffraction, propulsion, resonance, projection, masking and heterodyning, and by shamanism, the symbolically grounded agency of shamanic drums, animal-becoming and noisy costume, the shaman's capacity to enliven quotidian space with the commotion of discarnate audible entities from the spirit world. This recording is one of the very few that conveys anything of what we were about. Paul Burwell - percussion, whistles David Toop - flutes, home-made reeds, whistle About the Logos Foundation Belgium Flanders' unique professional organisation for the promotion of new music and audio-related arts by means of new music production, concerts, performances, composition, technological research and other activities related to contemporary music. This organisation has been founded in 1968 by Godfried-Willem Raes.

Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) retitle themselves die Angel for Entropien 1, their eighth LP of electro-acoustic music together, and the duo's debut for Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmic label.
Accompanied by skilled improvisor Oren Ambarchi on two tracks, die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, electric guitar and field recordings warped and riddled with FX.
Taking its title from both the Finnish word and German plural for entropy - in physics, the measure of thermodynamic disorder within a system - Entropien 1 renders seven examples of their kinetic systems in elusive action, keening from arrhythmic mulch to sloshing brownian motions and a brilliantly towering 15 minute exploration that tips into billowing, white hot feedback with scintillating effect.
The amorphous results document and describe a freeness of energy travelling from body to machine and diffused across alternating acoustic environments. Each player works as controlled, external variables which act upon and interact with the different acoustic conditions to tempestuous impact, convulsing between squashed, recursive diffractions in Roha, to the sublimated roil of jazz drums and electric guitar wail in Terminen Kevät, before harnessing sloshing feedback chaos in the combustible, diaphanous two parts of Entropia - both North and South - which bring the LP to its logical, compelling conclusion.
With the addition of Wold or KTL-like metal emulsification and lacquer-bubbling grain in Kitka, and Ambarchi's plasmic overdubbing in the burning plasmic plong of Silvaticum, the overall impression is like auditive DMT, dissolving the senses and the ego - simultaneously theirs and the listeners - to better snag us in the music's metastable potential and aid our unanchored exploration in those dimensions. Entropien 1 is dedicated to Mika Vainio.

DJ SONIKKU, based in the UK, who has been gaining popularity for his releases from labels such as Distant Hawaii and Lobster Theremin, and his hit re-edits of Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" from his own label Dilemma, will be releasing his highly anticipated new 12" EP "Supinboru" with some new songs inspired from his recent tour in Japan. His brand new EP will feature the video game music inspired title track Supinboru,' the rainbow-colored Electronic/Pop track Damage /Sonsho,' as well as a remix from the popular Japanese Electronic duo 80KIDZ, who had brought him over to do his debut shows in Japan together.

Mutant jungle forms, hazy glitch experiments and trance inducing downtempo collide with sharp percussion and dense low end on this latest Alter 12'. Helm's recent 'World In Action' EP for The Trilogy Tapes is reworked by a whole host of favourites including Laurel Halo and Parris who offer up two distinctly different takes on 'Blue Scene'. No Symbols boss Beneath turns his hand to title track 'World in Action' with that typically murky, deconstructed club aesthetic whilst Parisian mainstay Low Jack gets deep on the A2, his five and a half minute version of 'Candy' sounding like a cross between Nuno Canavarro and Whitehouse. Delivering what might well be the records most subdued moment, Brussels' Sky H1 slows 'After Dark' way way down with some barely there auto-tuned vocals helping to bring things into the fold.'

TERRENG - a constitution of an open-ended landscape of contrasts defining space both in time and depth. a set of structuring elements forming by its positionally interaction a common platform created through its dimensional properties.

The drums and electronics on TERRENG trade off each other at times creating a sense of improvised space, but also comes together in parts to form a narrative structure of almost concrete sensibilities. Where the instrumental identities gradually bleed into each other to form a flowing texture of sonically defined terrain.

The multi-layered structure of the two tracks presented here draws upon a well of material, sources and references. Pandi and Wesseltoft build up a detailed and idiosyncratic work by the use of their constructive material. In parts quiet and open. In other parts chocked with information and intensity. Beautiful and fractured. Chaotic and meditative. TERRENG is a highly dynamic blend of improvisation, and a narrowly constructed electro-acoustic narrative.

Balazs Pandi is a versatile drummer with an almost encyclopaedic level of experience ranging from improvised music and modern jazz, to metal, noise and experimental electronics. Here he at times performs the role of improvising drummer trading off the collaborator, and at other times creates an almost ritually constructed sense of rhythmic space perfectly embedded within the overall structure.

Jon Wesseltoft is a musician and composer with a long history of work within the often overlapping fields of improvisation, sound-art, noise and electro-acoustics. He has a longstanding interest in musical systems and its concepts of representation, and psycho-acoustics and the phenomenology of sound and its narrative power. He has explored this interest in various forms ranging from solo work to various collaborations and projects to larger ensemble work.

After the release of ‘Hello Darkness‘ in 2017, a collaboration with Dag Rosenqvist, ‘Uzonia’ is the fourth solo album of the Scotland-based composer Matthew Collings. His acclaimed 'audio-visual opera’, ‘A Requiem For Edward Snowden’, for strings, clarinet, electronics and real-time visuals was premiered to a sell-out crowd in October 2014, and has been performed at Glasgow CCA, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Utrecht's Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL). He’s responsible for several installations using custom-made software, which have been exhibited at Burning Man Festival in San Francisco or Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts. His work for films includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic, ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ and an invitation to work on ‘The Invisibles’, a commission from Amnesty International.

Matthew about his concept and the initial ideas to write ‘Uzonia’:

‘Usonia’ with an ’s’, was a term coined by architect Frank Lloyd Wright about an ideal view of America, and of living. There is something very optimistic about the idea, not only architecturally but aesthetically, which other people have picked up on over the years. With the name ‘Uzonia’ I’m almost imagining someone appropriating the phrase for their own means; respelling and reselling it, in the same way that ideas, and facts seem fluid and up-for-grabs these days, in our post-Trump, post-Brexit landscape… the symbolism of anything can be shifted, manipulated into another idea for political or social means at any times. As a meme, as an agenda, as a pseudo-fascist icon. So the phrase sums up, for me, this balance between something utopian, and something potentially dangerous, and/or meaningless, which feels like a good analogy for the time we are living through.

The feeling running through the record is of energy, of trying to find something positive in dark times, of being confronted with vast forces, often beyond your control, surveillance, social media, climate collapse. It ends with a question mark, and has energy but also an aspect of despair; to me at least.

I generally make lists of interesting ideas, concepts and phrases which pick up from all over. I then just assign a title almost randomly from the list when a piece is coming together. I think there is more truth in this stream of loosely grouped concepts than a conscious choice of a title with a piece of music (which is always abstract for me, no matter what). Since a lot of my work and reading is focused around technology, most of these relate to this. There’s a lot of exciting things in tech these days but a lot of very scary things. There are incredible things happening these days but so many terrifying things beyond our control. It’s as if there is a terrifying cosmic balance.

Struggle Artist is the new album from Justin C. Meyers, the Minneapolis-based composer, artist, and head of the Sympathy Ltd. label.
Meyers is a unique, underappreciated talent in contemporary electronic music. His greatest strengths are twofold: his compositions have a meticulous structural logic, revealing a hermetic and austere formalism; concurrently, his compositions have a deep, introspective narrativity grounded in his lived experience, evoked with a mature clarity. Together, they make Meyers one
of the most interesting electronic musicians working with cutting-edge sonics today, unlocking their latent powers of metaphor and figuration.
Struggle Artist portrays Meyers' expectations and disappointments arising from making art in his free time. Created initially during lunch breaks and in hospital waiting rooms, and finished after being laid off from his job, it catalogues the despondency of the precarious life. If Negative Space was about the fallible body, Struggle Artist is its violent collision with late capitalism. He sets up scenarios that anticipate some musical event or flourish, only to renege on them with stark
about-faces or resolutions into dissonance. These rhetorical figures reproduce the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity and motivation while working a day job and dealing with chronic illness..
The impression is not entirely bleak. Meyers' sound design is buoyant and luxurious with its clean edges and lush tonalities, such as in 'Draw Distance' or the 'Expectations' diptych. This is Meyers' most playful record, albeit always gesturing towards its melancholic narrative. This guarded, dark humour is alluded to in his sleeve art and track titles.

We should be grateful to live in the same era as Spencer Clark, in a time when we hear that there's nothing new to be done or discovered, his musical career has shown that there are myriad worlds available to be found. Earlier this century he created a sound phantasy with Skaters and after that he pursued a new alchemy under various aliases (Charles Berlitz, Fourth World Magazine, Monopoly Child, Typhonian Highlife, etc.) and projects (like Egyptian Sports Network, Tarzana or The Temple Defectors). If in Possible Musics Jon Hassell began creating sounds for his Fourth World', Spencer has been creating possible worlds' where his music can exist in his own Fourth World'.The different aliases aren't a mode of dispersion or to create onfusion, they're setups for the different possibilities he imagines for music. Make Mine, Macaw (previously released in 2010 as a limited CDR on Pacific City label) references a large long-tailed parrot, common in Central and South America. Make Mine, Macaw is part of a trilogy about birds, Spencer's Tropical Bird Romance Audio', which also includes, Bamboo For Two (Olde English Spelling Bee, 2010) and The Garnet Toucan (Underwater Peoples Records, 2012).

A deep dive into this record makes it clear why it should be re-released. Spencer's chaotic and mysterious approach to releases, made some really hard to find or listen to due to the nature of them and how they were made available. Despite his career not being very long and that the internet has made it easier to trace most of his back catalogue, in order to understand Spencer's work some archaeology needs to be done. To better understand his own Fourth World', or his alien language music, and to expand its vivid musical colours, records like Make Mine, Macaw need to have the special treatment and attention they deserve.

Let's just say that in the field of experimental-tropical-cocktail music, no one does it like Spencer Clark, especially through his output Monopoly Child Star Searchers. Make Mine, Macaw explores the best cocktail recipes through five colourful pieces, using Clark's premium technique of blurry repetition and dreamy percussions. It's Fourth World' is one fulfilled with many dimensions that needs the attention you give to a Rubik's Cube when you play with it for the first time. After that it gets better and better. A tropical fantasy that starts in your ears, feeds your brain and changes your life. You won't know what a pacific city sound vision is until you see one. Make Mine, Macaw makes you see one clearly.

After several acclaimed EPs, including Risk in a New Age(Desire Records 2014), License To Desire (Desire Records 2015, reissued by Aurora Borealis recordings in 2017) andWeehawken (Clan Destine Records 2016) – Orphan Swords’ debut LP, Ascent, finally arrives. In recording the album, the duo took the radical decision to interchange their usual respective input in the creative process, which resulted in a revelatory piece of music, one that functions as an initiatory narrative summarized as follows:

Ascent is the story of an enigma vanishing into a mountain, somewhere undefined. You left your home long ago but still you endeavor to solve this mystery. At last, today you reach the highest town in the mountains, the ultimate refuge before the loftiest peak. You prepare yourself for the culmination of your search, the ascent.
As you climb, the path gets steeper and steeper, the air thinner and thinner. Exhausted and out of breath, you push on. Surrounded by clouds and ice-cold stone, through the haze of your confusion, you’re struck by the thought that the object of your obsession, the missing entity you’re driven to find, is a part of you. It was lost long ago along with every memory you had of its form and shape. Nevertheless you know for sure it’s what you seek.

Ascent is the story of that search for inner unity, through transience, emptiness, and finally, acceptance. Through profound introspection we ascend.’

Ascent is the first part of a diptych. Breach – also recorded during the same period – will follow and conclude the two-part conceptual series at a later date.

* The second chapter in Petit Singe's travel through Akash Ganga comes in the form of four remixes curated by members and friends of the Haunter Records extended family. They all applied their peculiar agencies and experience to the original recordings.
* Danse Noire boss and spiritual explorer Aisha Devi combined elements from all the tracks of the album with her own production to assemble Necromedia', a powerful take on the sidereal source material. Haunter veteran Weightausend delivers a psycho-dub version of the frantic OXO', while Zuli (of VENT and UIQ fame) deconstructs the same track turning into a kind of post-human and post-colonial beat he labeled Astrogangsta'. The final track is an alteration of the album's finale 27.09.87' by Canadian experimenter Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, who let it mutate like a self-sufficent biodigital organism, opening it up for new experiences.

Philip Jeck works as a composer, multi-media artist, choreographer, but above all, he is most well-known as a turntable manipulator. At the end of '90s, he produced something which later would be considered a cult piece - his four part masterpiece Vinyl Coda.

It is probably his most important work and the peak of his art, it defines not only his musical language, but also the entire turntable culture, as well as the deconstruction of vinyl. The work is nothing less than a powerful lo-fi symphony which, through magical looping, allows the listener to hear things they otherwise wouldn't hear.

Realistic Monk is the new performance project from Carl Stone in collaboration with artist and composer Miki Yui. Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music and has been composing electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. The Village Voice has famously hailed him as 'the king of sampling'. Miki Yui is an artist and composer who develops pieces of music, drawings and sound installations that start from a perception of the faintest sounds and noises and subtly reference existents. Realistic Monk has previously released the recording of their 2017 live performance at Caf Oto, making Realm their de facto debut album. Over the course of five pieces, they focus on small sounds, often at the edge of perception, aiming at a deeper listening and perception of their musical stance and technique. Soundscapes that play with enchantment and disenchantment, emerging out of voices, noises and field recordings and acoustic feedback, their work is as subtle as it is fearless. Realm's play with musical and other signifiers make the album into a highly relevant and even outspoken take on electronic music today.

NOTE: The tracks on the 12" are exclusive to the format not available on any digital format.

Recorded Dec 2019 - Feb 2020. Mastered Mar 2020. Published by mute song.

Used = ADDAC Systems, ALM/Busy Circuits, Cwejman, Epoc Modular, Expert Sleepers, FANCYYYYY Synthesis, flight of harmony, Make Noise, Tiptop Audio…

Coventry's most notorious export celebrates 50 years of existence with an expansive new set on Editions Mego. Spread across 2 x vinyls (LP and 12") and digital formats. Please note the 12" tracks are exclusive and do not appear on the digital release.

Having spent decades carving out his very particular niche which takes influence from a vast range of extreme music this is Russell's nostalgic nod to his influences whilst forging onwards with his perpetually unforeseen experience. Working in a variety of media over decades Haswell's belligerence towards his craft and critique of others has allowed him to operate in a zone outside of peers. As daunting as it is refreshing Haswell's output is always on the very edge of genre.

2001 saw the release of his first audio documentation with Live Salvage 1997→2000, a compact disc that compiled a series of ferocious live performances.Paradoxically precise and reckless, Haswell's music has an uneasy relationship with the predictable but acknowledges being birthed from a variety of 20th Century radical forms such as metal, noise, electro-acoustic, power electronics and techno.

Haswell's ongoing output resides as a continuously in-flux, inquisitive and predominantly improvised exploration of the extreme limits of machine based art. Haswell has never been a 'studio artist' or 'producer'.

12" channels the original role of the medium with 2 tracks of beats that present themselves in unpredictable ways. 12" also features the head shattering bonus cut, Always Check Their Instagram. LP cut at 33rpm allows explorations into broader territories with deep ambience running into twisted acid and splattered shapes bouncing amongst rapid fire rhythms,

This set is both a celebration of new forms whilst making many a sly nod to nostalgic influence throughout.

LP+12" and Digital is an unexpected experience from one of contemporary music's most ruthlessly exhilarating and uncompromising figures. Raise a glass and listen LOUD.

Gel Stations Past brings together tracks from three shadowy self-released cassettes by Russian Tsarlag: Decrepit Gas Station, Living in the Past, and Dipped in Gel. Dubbed in minimal quantities and cloistered for private worship, much of Russian Tsarlag's recent output remains hard to find. Each of these albums dispersed instantly among friends and fanatics and receded into legend.

This record consolidates the great pieces of crooner dejection that typify Tsarlag's recent music. These are his saddest and slowest-burning songs, drawn in dour guitar, sweeping keyboard, and sedated vocals that teeter well below mid-tempo. Many share a somber two-chord schema that slips in perfect doses of dissonance and distortion. The results are at once refined and totally ragged, seductive, woozy, and smeared in Tsarlag's shapely four-track atmospherics.

The gun tune to end all gun tune, ‘The Guncontrolla’ is a righteous pacifist dub statement from
the Seekersinternational posse, who go about field recording a workshop on a classic firearm
disassembly and reassembly demonstration conducted by a Cold War veteran at a military surplus
shop; a practice known in the community as “field-stripping”.
Armed with a battery-operated 1987 Tascam Porta Two 4-track recorder and a Shure SM57
cardioid microphone, the SKRS dismantle the disassembly of a Colt British Service Pistol, a Glock
34 Competition Pistol, a Kalashnikov 1967 Soviet Rifle, and a Springfield M1 Garand Rifle, in a
temporal warp of dreamlike dread tension, where, crucially, not a single shot is fired.
It’s clear and fair to say the SKRS treat their subject carefully to avoid any sort of romanticisation
or fetishisation of guns or violence. Instead they carefully but ruggedly use dub’s transfigurative
techniques to turn the workshop recording into an absorbingly abstract warning shot coaxed out
of their mythical echo chamber.
Drawing on ideas of metaphysics, metallurgy, and telekinetic mysticism, the results are
fascinating, conjuring some imaginative intersection of a back yard GRM and the Black Ark,
and characters from ‘The Harder They Come’ spliced into scenes from ‘Falling Down’, fed thru
psychodelic, dematerialised concrète that intends to defuse and diffuse the curse of gun violence
with the black magick of dub musick.

The Amorphous Androgynous return with the symphonic, 40-minute prog/space-rock concept album ‘We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal’. The album contains 5 epic parts, featuring the legendary Peter Hammill (the Van Der Graaf Generator) on vocals alongside a host of musicians including: Paul Weller (piano and guitar), Ray Fenwick (Spencer Davis Group/Ian Gillan) onlead guitar, Brian Hopper (Caravan/Soft Machine) on sax.The Chesterfield Philharmonic Choir and a 25-piece live orchestral string section round out this sumptuously-recorded album.

‘We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal’ opens with the 13-minute epic of the title track (written with Peter Hammill and Paul Weller).The themes of mortality/immortality are then musically and conceptually catapulted to the far-flung corners of the AA sonic multiverse over 40+ minutes. Channelling A Space Odyssey,the dystopian choirs and moog of ‘Hymortality’ crash full-force into the John-Bonham-like drums of ‘The Immortality Break.’Meanwhile, ‘Synthony On A Theme of Mortality’ lives up to its name, utilizing the classic 70s Yamaha CS80 synth before progressing to a female wailing aria against classic vintage guitar rock. The whole cosmic trip cascades finally into the harp daydream reverie,choir and romantic strings of ‘Physically I’m Here, Mentally Far, Far Away.’

2 broken tunes, with one very The DEEP or Melvins style on the A Side, oldschool crossover Noisy/Industrial broken beats and one electronica hip Hop instrumental on the flip. Brain dance.

In summer 2015 Andreas Oskar Hirsch finished constructing the Carbophone, an electroacoustic invention pushing the concept of the African Kalimba or Mbira. Vertically set up carbon rods, metal bars as well as a rubber band gamut make up this plucking instrument which opens up a whole variety of sound possibilities and features rather particular overtones.

Initially, Early Carbophonics was produced upon invitation by Radiophrenia, a Glasgow based temporary art radio station run by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns, and the pieces were broadcasted for the first time in late summer 2016. Here, Early Carbophonics are compiled on vinyl, and in contrast to the digitally distributed tracks, the pieces are mixed into each other on the record. Sketches from the rehearsal room are combined with more refined pieces through editing processes, sampling and effects resulting in electronic music with a warm analogue lo-fi feel of its own. Straightly rhythm driven tracks are followed by ambient oddities like the promenade of an octopus or a probably senile shipwrecked robot that emerges from a castle moat and starts speaking to you with a haunting voice. Occasionally, the Carbophone is accompanied by some other instruments like a Morse key, a Moroccan flute or the Electric Palm Leaf.

recorded and produced by christina nemec in vienna and horner wald 2016
mastered and cut at dubplates & mastering, berlin 2017

artwork by susi klocker

On her latest release, chra aka Christina Nemec is sketching out a psychogeographical map, that guides you to the border of the internal and external world - 'on a fateful morning' lets you enter a sphere where the imaginary and the subliminal cross. Evoking abstract images that transcend reality, chra installs an autarchic time-and-space-continuum of vague, nocturnal beauty. Pastose bass drones, airy ambient synths and processed audio-samples form a hypnotic stream that lets you enter an altered state of mind. By subtly intertwining musical and non musical sounds chra is weaving an intensely atmospheric, poetic tableau of emptied spaces left to our imagination. It's the pulse of arcane memories that is filling these sonic landscapes, operating deep within our subconscious.

'on a fateful morning' is haunting music to play in the dark - conspirative, uncanny, with a dystopian smack.

Boredom, anxiety, pain killers and frustration make a heady mix for both reflection and action. For three weeks I stared out of the window of the tower block onto the tall brick towers of the old asylum chimneys. The past was a strange land suddenly out of reach, the present confusing and claustrophobic, the future something I could only visualise and idolise.

From the balmy Autumn day of my release a light was switched on, buzzing urgently like a neon street light on my path. Life took on new vigour and meaning. Pleasures starkly illuminated, annoyances inconsequential. Old work was re-examined and appreciated. Machines were treasured and connected. My basement filled with ever greater warmth and excitement.

The toy towns of our inner minds are constructed of a million tiny building blocks of experience. But there's a freedom that comes from realising what might have been. Peace in reflection, untethered from the everyday distraction and I take pleasure in the hum drum. Unhampered by trends, untethered to a scene, stripped back to essential carnal influences and desires. Who are we but the sum of our experience.

'Everything Is Quite Now' meanders through a reimagined landscape of personal history, releasing musical fragments to dri* amongst soaring treetops, hollowed lakes and labyrinthine concrete structures, liberated from genre and form - alive at last. In these great expanses, light and dark are presented not as polar opposites, but as a limitless, unified whole.

References to EBM and industrial techno manifest within the sporadic percussive framework whilst gauzy ambient backdrops form an entire world of their own, constructed from the gentle hiss of a looping tape, the booming caverns of a muffled kick, the vivid distortions of a crystalline synth. In the depths of a misty forest, warmth permeates, absorbing inside it all of the darkness, pain, romance and beauty from before.

Prequel Tapes is a work of deep synthesis. Fragments of melody and memory orchestrated into densely layered tapestries; a deeply emotional study on a life characterised by a shi*ing relationship to electronics. The pieces serve as a chronology of desire and reflection, reconciling a nascent passion for industrial music with a history in the club. Oscillating between utopian to claustrophobic, the evolving synth work, deep techno atmosphere and traces of clangorous energy of early European ambient and industrial tell a distinctly German tale, forged between the forest and the autobahn.

Everything is quite now. What else can it be.

First time available on vinyl LP (with limited edition color variants - black and clear) and on digital formats.- Artwork packaging by artist J.S. Aurelius (Ascetic House) with reflective linear notes by Ragnar Grippe. - LP comes with download

Recorded between the release of Sand (1977) and Lost Secrets(1981), Symphonic Songs is a formerly unreleased work that chronicles the dynamic shift and development in experimental Swedish composer Ragnar Grippe's canon.

Following his seminal release Sandin 1977, Swedish experimental composer Ragnar Grippe worked on various art and performance commissions, often returning to Stockholm during the summer months to focus his efforts on his compositional practice. It was there at the famed EMS Studioswhere he began employing the Buchla synthesizer and the facilities multi-tracking capabilities as new instruments to map his mining of sound and movement.

During the late 1970's, Grippe formed a creative collaboration with choreographer Susan Buirge, specifically writing compositions for her works Restes and Tamis, thus pushing Grippe to start working in a more intricate studio environment. These passages inspired Grippe into a more complex layering process that focused more on placement and structure, rather than the aural floods and flourishes of his previous Sand album, eventually germinating in his first full 24-track composition entitled Orchestra.

After debuting Orchestra in 1980 at the Electronic Music Festival in Stockholm, Grippe holed up at EMS Studios with those lessons and the fussy Buchla synthesizer, in which Grippe affectionately recalls needed to be tuned and calibrated every 20-30 minutes. He emerged with a new commission for Susan Buirge later formally titled Symphonic Songs and used in her avant-garde theater piece Ci-Déla which debuted in Paris in 1981.Symphonic Songsshowcased Grippe's sound au courant, pushing dense against sparse, calm into cacophonous, using each track as its own intersecting plane. Using the machinations of studio and structure to drive Symphonic Songs' voice, Grippe culled a haunting, often cinematic electronic work that dots and darts into unexpected corners with curious aplomb.

Listen to the words, both terms have their root in classical music, but not in its form but because now I had so many more stems or voices that could be played simultaneously compared to my earlier pieces. Coming from a classical background, but with big nostrils for pop and jazz music, I can now see a thread in which classical got a new costume, dressed up in Buchla synthesizer and real bass sounds Grippe says. Since its live theater debut over 37 years ago, Dais Records releases for the first time Symphonic Songs, one of Grippe's most ambitious compositions, as a deluxe double vinyl LP (with limited edition color variants) and on digital formats. Artwork packaging by artist J.S. Aurelius (Ascetic House) with reflective linear notes by Ragnar Grippe. e

RATTLE is an ongoing musical project concerned with experiments in rhythm, metre and tension. Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley make up the duo from Nottingham, who with just drums and occasional vocalisations weave an expanse of percussive vortices. Their songs swirl and envelop with all the physicality and drama of another world pulling together around its own shifting centre of gravity. The drum beats phase and sidestep, they trade accents and overlap, providing a suitably alive terrain for the vocals to explore similar tendencies of pattern.

Rattle's debut album was released in 2016 through Upset The Rhythm / I Own You and was greeted with much critical praise, this often singled out their hypnotic minimalism and ecstatic regard for the dance floor. The following six months saw Rattle support Animal Collective on their UK tour before heading out around Europe with The Julie Ruin.

Rattle used these opportunities to try out new material and unconsciously began writing their next album. Brown recalls that 'hearing our drums in these larger venues, with amazing sound, made us excited about how beautiful and magic the drums sounded, we were quite spellbound by how they were able to fill a venue so completely.'


'Sequence' was written in much the same way as their debut, with the duo facing each other over their shared palette of drums, allowing songs to develop naturally and suggest their own direction. However, Brown and Wrigley were more confident of what they wanted to achieve with this follow up, having already proven the concept watertight through their debut and subsequent concerts. They knew they could wrestle songs out of the silence with such a setup, so afforded themselves greater time to explore extended, long-form composition. 'Sequence' is composed of four tracks, each clocking in around 10 mins or over and focused squarely on a deeper resonance with the creative act, illustrative of how ideas build from scratch, of how music can grow out of repetition. Recorded at JT Soar in Nottingham with Phil Booth and Mark Spivey (Rattle's live sound engineer), the album developed out of these four points, with Rattle honing their sound with detail. Everything was stripped back to just the drums and Brown's voice. Percussion flourishes were deemed unnecessary, overdubbed layers of vocals were kept to a minimum. As a result, this quartet of songs are more meditative and aware than previous efforts, with the duo's attentions spent tapping into each track's potential, mapping out expeditions in tempo and making much of the journey over destination.


'DJ' is the first part of the album to unfold, its insistent, rotating beat slowly morphs into an avalanche of shimmering cymbals, before a plateau of echoed rim shots cools all to the core. Throughout, Brown's wordless singing tethers the song to its atmosphere, an effect similarly employed to perfection in 'Disco' which follows. 'Signal' unfurls as an odyssey of rhythm, it's tumbling beat, punctuated by shivers of hi-hat bluster and mesmeric tom fills. 'Put your ear to the ground, it's an incredible sound' confesses Brown in her most telling lyric from the album, leaving you convinced that Rattle are somehow channeling all this music from a quiet, elemental other-place. 'The Rocks' concludes the record with sparse assurance, it's an exercise in magnified scope and altered states. Wrigley and Brown divide duties across all these tracks, with the cadenced, dynamic shifts of hi-hat and cymbal being Theresa's domain, whilst Katharine holds down the toms and snare. Brown notes that 'each song can be seen as representing a different drum in my set up'. 'DJ' is an exploration of her snare, whilst 'Disco', 'Signal' and 'The Rocks' are based around the floor tom, rack tom, and bass drum respectively. All of this is complemented further through the production interventions of Mark Spivey, who wanted to capture Rattle's huge live sound on tape for this album with all its incurred dub-delay trippiness, taming and melding.


'Sequence' is a liminal album, thoughtfully crafted with themes of transition and realisation at its heart. It feels like a trance or ritual if you give yourself to the recording.  It urges you to step outside and listen deeper. Rattle are seeking out a vivid array, an order from the noise, a pattern that unlocks the next.  This album is the nurturing of intention and when we walk to its beat we arrive anew. 'Sequence' will be released on November 2nd by Upset The Rhythm on LP, CD and digitally.Running Time:  41 mins

Waves 1 is the rst release of Curd Duca since the legendary Elevator series (1998-2000). Waves is an album trilogy. Waves 2 and 3 will be released on Magazine in 2021.

If we think of Curd Duca’s Waves in terms of sound, rather than in terms of form, each track on Waves is actually like the large, illuminated, richly decorated initial letter that introduces the narrative of so many medieval manuscripts. It is as if Duca was collecting extraordinary letters, opening up an alphabet of sounds, and developing a musical phonetics between adjacent terms. From gong to gone; bell to bells minus drone; dome to father.

The real beauty of Curd Duca’s cycle lies in the fact that it opens up differently from so many perspectives. That we can understand it as a collection of treasures, as a commentary on our acoustic environment, as an attempt to dissect the world and stylize its parts. Much like a printer's typesetting box, Duca proposes an inventory of everything that sounds. Some of the pieces are exaggerations. Some allusions. Others abstractions, parodies, and trans gurations. It is often not even clear whether the music is based on a recording or a synthetic sound. Is the nightjar real or is it a synthetic imitation? Did Duca really use brass and zither sounds or simulate them on the computer? The hermaphroditic nature between reality and arti ciality is a central aspect of Duca’s sound world.

There is only one thing you must not do with this music: trivialize it or underestimate it. With Waves, Duca is exploring the very essence of sound, and its possible meanings and contradictions.

Ruben Üvez aka Konduku (a former resident of sadly closed De School in Amsterdam) delivered this extended play: a Şeker-meditation resting in itself: You always know where you are while having no clue where it’s coming from!
Rooted in steppy beats, these 5 variations of the same insult towards your having-something-better-to-do-state-of-mind will convince you that there is more out there! Something deep, something to be explored, maybe it’s dark, but it’s definitely something connecting you to the interdimensional sphere of progression within the human-designed world-consciousness-interface of communication through music!!
Not any music but the intricate kind of one you want to experience through a club sound-system (in case you do have neighbours and spent less than 3000,- on your home-system (…or really good headphones for that matter))!

For the cover we owe eternal gratitude to Sophie Schmidt, an artist from Munich, who apart from amazing paintings sometimes delivers breathtaking performances - and we can not recommend highly enough experiencing one of those!!! Honestly: Watch them if you get the chance: You’re unlikely to experience that kind of intensity anywhere else!

Who is the mysterious Hezziane?

Cold Recordings is proud to present two scorching floor bangers from this unknown entity, Hezziane.

“Aciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid!!!!!!!!!!!!”

‘KV-08’ thumps and bangs with all the movement and makings of a classic to come. There’s acid 303, there’s break-y cuts, thumping 4/4 kicks and dark side bass. This is a surefire roller that you will definitely keep coming back to.

‘Flip then for ‘Pivot’ which keeps the acid theme running but moves with a slightly more electro-aligned twang to it. UK- Chicago connection in sonic effect. Another reliable banger!

Sutja Gutierrez is back on Lumière Noire. The finesse of his productions and his implacable stage performances have given him a special place within the Parisian label. In 2017, he released the EP "The Legend of Time" and one year later, he appeared on the compilation From Above with his track "Allodoxaphobia". He comes back here with an LP entitled PHYLAX SOCIETY, which confirms that Sutja Gutierrez is indeed an artist in his own right. Phylax means guardian in Latin, and the album’s title is directly inspired by the “Phylax Society”, a group of people who, in the late 19th century, wanted to create the ultimate canine breed, but who due their lack of consensus failed and dissolved. Later on, an ex-member eventually bred the very first German Shepherd. On this heartfelt record, as emotional as it is catchy, the artist deals with the feelings that come after the loss of a loved one, chiefly nostalgia and melancholia. The result is an ardent record where crooning is sincere and never a posture. The artist’s lo-fi psychedelic pop trademark oozes in every track of this album. Many of these songs feature his vocals, often doused in ethereal echoes or even shrewdly chopped and distorted in a way that reminds us of the great musique concrete experiments of the past. A DIY approach sometimes indebted to punk and post-punk music, all mixed with a vast variety of traditional pop instruments such as guitar, bass, electric keyboards and real drums, but also drum machines, synth bleeps, found sounds and other strange but fascinating samples. EMPTY FLOWER POTS, which was released as a single ahead of the LP, is definitely one of the album’s standout tracks. This catchy mid-tempo song is the perfect entry point into Sutja’s finely twisted world. A world in which you can find that particular balance between nostalgia and optimism. Oh, life is great, what is life? Life is death. . he sings. It is one of those songs that stays in your head for a while. Do not let the idea of alternative pop fool you, it is quite impossible to listen to any of these songs without reacting in some way or another through moving, dancing or thinking, regardless of the tempo or meaning. I’M DIGGIN’ might be the perfect example of this. Deceptively simple and far removed from dance music, this rock-infused number will not only have you singing along instantly, but you will also find yourself dancing and responding accordingly to the energetic mantra of this song... I'm digging for the truth, I am so diggin' into it. Truly, the dance floor is never too far, sometimes quite blatantly and sometimes in a more oblique fashion. Another case in point is PHYLAX SOCIETY, the eponym track which closes the album, a song in two parts, where a slo-mo club groove carries Sutja’s trademark singing to yet another level of uniqueness, with his surreal soundscapes, twisted melodies and everyday life sounds. An ode to humanity and an homage to the ones who are risking their lives every day in the mediterranean sea. It is rare to encounter an album which is immediately satisfying on one hand but also reveals more and more beautiful secrets with each listen. PHYLAX SOCIETY is clearly one of those special albums.

New record from Mitro - a moniker of Natal Zaks. 6 experimental, downtempo, ambient, IDM-ish cuts.

Geyser » is french musician Annabelle Playe's third album. Multidisciplinary artist, singer, writer and electronic performer, Annabelle Playe composes with Geyser a two pieces album mostly electronic and electroacoustic with influences from the GRM (Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche Musicale) to noise and industrial music. It reveals an universe made as well of distortions than atmosferic landscape. She describes her work as : "An electronic journey questionning what move inside and bring us beyond. Questionning detail, speed, fragmentation and continuum.

For over two decades now, Martin Maischein has dedicated himself to all things meditative and adventurous on release for labels such as Editions Mego, Force Inc. or Position Chrome. Before making his distinctive sound heard on Techno floors around the world once more with a dubbed-out rework of Matrixxman's "Beacon" in the summer of 2017, Maischein released a small-run cassette release on Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions under his Goner moniker. "Yogascum" will now be re-released on vinyl by the Switzerland-based Hallow Ground imprint. Maischein started working on "Yogascum" in 2014 with the intention of pushing the boundaries of his signature sound even further. Having received a grant by the Musicboard Berlin, he developed an audio-visual show around the three tracks at the core of "Yogascum", all of which feature instruments and sounds previously unheard of in Maischein's work. While the Berlin-based noise cellist UnterLala weaves her signature screeches into the pulsating drones of "YS-1" and "YS-3", zK member Mark Godwin on "YS-2" injects the subtle influence of a band whose records he has been working on as a mastering engineer, Coil.