Beats News

Brussels-based string quintet BOW celebrates musical freedom. Juggling between their own written music and pure improvisation, the ensemble has worked since its creation on a personal and modern approach, digging into their instruments' capabilities and blending a large scope of influences. Its debut eponym LP, due to be released on Sub Rosa, gathers five instantly-composed pieces that were recorded live by Christine Verschorren in the Echo Collective studio in Brussels. During the day, BOW repeated musical concepts, textures, and interactive games. Then, during the night, with the machine already well-oiled and the musicians free of all expectations, the ensemble embarked out into the unknown, discovering with wonder unexplored sonic territories, delivering a deep and profound music woven with five strands of yarn.

Over the years, BOW has collaborated with artists such as jazz singer Melanie De Biaso, Composer Laurent Plumhans, Vj Dirty Monitor, Théâtre de l'Ancre and most recently with the gypsy guitarist Myrddin De Cauter as well as Aidan Baker. A first EP was released in 2019 on Icarus Records, a live radio session duplicated on limited cassette edition.

BOW is an ensemble made up of the musicians Margaret Hermant (Echo Collective) and Benoit Leseure on violin, Jean-François Durdu on viola, Marine Horbaczewski on cello and Cyrille de Haes (Otto Lindholm) on double bass.

After "Divertimento for tenor saxophone and small ensemble" (Alien Transistor) and "The Anatomy Of Melancholy" (Disko B) the two members of the Tied & Tickled Trio Johannes Enders and Carl Oesterhelt now publish their third collaboration HEART OF DARKNESS (Themes and Variations). 16 compositions, variations / improvisations for duo or chamber music ensemble;

"Extremely interesting blend of jazz and non-jazz; Great ad hoc jazz improvisations on jazz-informed patterns " (Thomas Meinecke)

Johannes Enders - Tenorsaxophon
Carl Oesterhelt - Keyboards, Perkussion, Analog Synthesizer, Treatment

Gertrud Schilde - Violine
Joerg Widmoser - Violine
Andreas Höricht - Viola
Klaus Kämper - Violoncello
Thomas Wollenweber - Violoncello
Benjamin Schäfer - Kontrabass
Stefan Schreiber - Sopransaxophon
Salewski - Perkussion
Zoro Babel - Perkussion

“Don´t go out there, you might get shot” was the warning from Donna Maya relatives when she visited Detroit two years ago. That makes her even more curious to explore the city. Disturbed by, as well as fascinated from the dystopian state of Detroit she recorded many places that made (industrial) history, including the Ford factory, the world’s tallest, now abandoned central station and the once magnificent Michigan Theater, that was brutally converted into a parking garage. Donna Maya transformed the sound recordings into artificial sound sculptures combined with electronic beats. Every track is dedicated to one of those places and makes it musically alive. With her theremin Donna Maya guides the listener deeply inside. The result of Donna Mayas 6 weeksstay in Detroit is her album “Lost Spaces -> Detroit". “Lost Spaces ? Detroit” is about how to handle crises, how individuals get along with it and the relationship of society to its culture. Donna Maya understands Detroit as a perfect example for what capitalism does when people give up cultural values. With “Lost Spaces ? Detroit” Donna Maya draws a musical picture of how she experienced Detroit that shows that not only a city got lost, but a living space for everyone: Pure urban experimental electronics with theremin.

Sound performances in public spaces. An urban soundtrack for Vienna.

Julia Bünnagel creates concrete records from molds of sidewalks and street surfaces in Vienna's urban space. The Cologne based artist brings Viennese architecture to life in her live DJ set (turntablism). The turntable's tonearm reads the architectural texture. The cast surfaces of the streets that are inscribed on the records mix with the sounds of the city during the performances SOUNDS LIKE… VIENNA. - flooding the square - an architecture rave for Vienna.

Conservatory of Flowers is the second album by a Siberian-born, Moscow-based musician and composer Maria Teriaeva. Following her solo debut Focus in 2017, Conservatory of Flowers focuses on rhythm and percussive elements, cutting down ambient passages and leaning even more toward traditional song forms, structuring compositions into pop-length pieces. Recorded over a period of three years, mostly composed during one summer at her dacha (cottage in Russian) just outside of Moscow, resulting in a vibrant and light sound inspired by her surrounding nature.

In addition to analog synthesizer, the album also features Nikita Shishkov on trumpet, Vasiliy Yanik on saxophone, Yana Chekina on cello, Sasha Elina on flute and Vadik Korolev on vocals, with the album closing off with a remix by Sapphire Slows.

With the composition series ›Intermorphologies‹, I explore multi-dimensional sound mutations and musical causalities generated electronically in realtime.
Everything you hear – every aspect that constitutes each sound, how those sounds resonate both individually and in combination, how they react and change with each other, how they are rhythmically / temporally organized, and how these sounds move through acoustic space – have been subjected to gradual change operations. All sounds synthesize themselves and each other into existence, evolving sometimes into a new, unknown formation and sometimes into a predicted identity.

With each installment of a piece in the series, I examine different possibilities of these artificial relationships, mutations, and causalities. I regard these realizations not only as systematic investigations into possibilities the instrument may bear, but more so as multiple ways to explore what shapes music can have. How do different sonic renderings and organizations differ in terms of neurological, emotional and physical response?

Next to the relationships between sounds, I also investigate the relations between the machine and myself. Besides preforming with the computer, I also listen and react to whatever the machine proposes.

In this instances, my software is not solely an object but is becoming a subject. Instead of solely being a music which furnishes listeners an object to perceive, I am interested much more in music that is as much reliant upon the process of perceiving, intensifying the perceiver’s and my personal awareness of our own role in the genesis of an aesthetic experience in the here and now.

a A1 Hydrogen & Helium +







i C4 + Helium & Hydrogen

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[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Intermorphologies [Excerpts]

color limited vinyl

With the composition series ›Intermorphologies‹, I explore multi-dimensional sound mutations and musical causalities generated electronically in realtime.
Everything you hear – every aspect that constitutes each sound, how those sounds resonate both individually and in combination, how they react and change with each other, how they are rhythmically / temporally organized, and how these sounds move through acoustic space – have been subjected to gradual change operations. All sounds synthesize themselves and each other into existence, evolving sometimes into a new, unknown formation and sometimes into a predicted identity.

With each installment of a piece in the series, I examine different possibilities of these artificial relationships, mutations, and causalities. I regard these realizations not only as systematic investigations into possibilities the instrument may bear, but more so as multiple ways to explore what shapes music can have. How do different sonic renderings and organizations differ in terms of neurological, emotional and physical response?

Next to the relationships between sounds, I also investigate the relations between the machine and myself. Besides preforming with the computer, I also listen and react to whatever the machine proposes.

In this instances, my software is not solely an object but is becoming a subject. Instead of solely being a music which furnishes listeners an object to perceive, I am interested much more in music that is as much reliant upon the process of perceiving, intensifying the perceiver’s and my personal awareness of our own role in the genesis of an aesthetic experience in the here and now.

a A1 Hydrogen & Helium +







i C4 + Helium & Hydrogen

a A1 Hydrogen & Helium +







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]







[i] C4 [+] Helium & Hydrogen

[a] A1 Hydrogen & Helium [+]

[a] A1 Intermorphologies [Excerpts]

Siavash Amini returns to Hallow Ground with ‘A Mimesis of Nothingness’ his fourth album for the Swiss label. Following up on ‘Harmistice’ together with fellow Iranian artists 9T Antiope, the six tracks were conceived in close collaboration with another artist and see the prolific composer intensify his interdisciplinary approach. The six tracks enter a dialogue with the photographs of Nooshin Shafiee, an acclaimed artist whose work capturing their hometown Tehran becomes the starting point for one of Amini’s most visceral and haunting records. »A Mimesis of Nothingness« translates the ephemeral situations and melancholic moods of Shafiee’s pictures into suspenseful soundscapes that masterfully navigate between the concrete and the abstract. ‘A Mimesis of Nothingness’ is a disquieting record precisely because it is a quiet one. Working with field recordings, Amini sculpts dynamic portraits that create an atmosphere of tangible suspense that is never fully released. Even when string-like sounds enter the picture as they do on the third track ‘Moonless Garden’ or when the abstract and glacial noise on ‘Observance (Shadow)’ demand the listener’s attention, the six pieces take hold of the subconscious rather than trying to be direct and confrontational. It is sound conceived not as a description, but a circumscription of spatial relations and the eeriness embedded in them.

DJ Support from Optimo, airplay on NTS radio.

Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Pressed at Gotta Groove, Ohio, USA. Housed in recycled, die-cut paper jacket. Edition of 333.

»Sonic Healing« is the third full-length release by Martin Steer’s Bad Stream project. While the concept was started by one person in response to a singular situation, it fully came to life as a product of collective imagination. For the album, Steer sent a single guitar loop to twelve musicians from the extended network of his ANTIME label who improvised with the recording, which was later collaged by Steer into a single, 39 minute long track that stylistically ranges from feverish jazz to brooding ambient and abstract electronica. Together with the Iranian artist Arash Akbari’s vivid animations based on generative algorithms and real-time processing, »Sonic Healing« does not ask how one person can deal with turmoil in their life alone, but how we can create new forms of being together with art as a mediator.

John Cunnane joins AF taking the drum-science to a higher level with four hybrid cuts of jungle / IDM.

Faitiche presents a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization. Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.

abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.

The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.

The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Isolating is the industrial solo alter ego of London-based, Stephen Hindman, one half of The Golden FIlter. Coming off of their moody 2020 debut EP on Optimo Music, On August 28th, Isolating will release an analog, lo-fi, gritty full-length LP called Perennial on their own 4GN3S label. Disquieting and dystopian, the album shifts from the beatless drone of ‘Mortification’ to the IDM inspired electro in ‘Sacrament’, each track melding into each other with an unsettling anxiety.

The LP mirrors the concepts behind ’Perennial Philosophy’ by Aldous Huxley. Solitarily created in London room on a Modular system, ‘Perennial’ tackles the perspective in spirituality that views all of the world's religions as sharing a single, metaphysical origin, with a nod to the Lucretius quote; “To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.” The album photography of Stephen is by Agnes Haus.

Utter presents Danny Wolfers' aka Legowelt's cult spywave album 'Schaduw Horizon' on vinyl for the first time. Initially released on CDR on Wolfers' Strange Life label back in 2008, this DX7-drenched soundtrack was influenced by real locations near Wolfers' coastal dune studio in The Hague.

Set in the depths of the cold war at an abandoned zoo, it scores the imaginary story of Percival, a NATO animal parapsychologist researching the extra-sensory powers of a Siamese cat and a chess-playing chimpanzee named Albert. After the Soviets discover the project, Percival's team members are assassinated one by one, forcing him and his animal friends to escape in a small sailboat towards a mysterious island...

The album has been remastered by Wolfers then transferred and cut by Helmut Erler at D&M. It is housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve that opens to reveal detailed stories behind each track, while the entire back cover is a life-size chess board for any budding Alberts wishing to play a game. A special 'confidential documents' envelope completes the package and contains a map of the abandoned zoo, a top secret letter including coordinates of the locations featured in the story, DX7 schematics, foldable chess pieces and a 'Schaduw Horizon' sticker.

Crazy collab between G. Angelis, M.Sanheira et Z'EV. Noise sounds of course, arhythmetic.
Inspired from Scottish writer Ian Banks : the nothing makes some noise. A guy prisoner of a giant bridge architecture... Coma is the way of no-way.

Upsammy returns to Die Orakel for her second EP entitled Branches On Ice – four tracks full with crystal clear, multi-layered textures.

Nous'klaer & RE:VIVE present two scores by Thessa Torsing (upsammy) and Tammo Hesselink. Torsing's is a 27-minute piece, composed for a collage of archival footage of the Dutch ship MS Oranje. The short film explores the lifecycle of the ship, from production to usage and to the fire that ultimately destroyed it. Hesselink's is a 17-minute piece for the pioneering short film, Ballet Mecanique (1924), a rigid composition of sharp notes and twisted drum patterns that hypnotically evolve accompanying the film's staccato rhythm.

Emotional Response is delighted to announce Foreign Affairs - a limited edition special remix 7-inch single featuring reworks from Alexis Georgopoulos & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's "Fragments of A Season" album by Woo and Felicia Atkinson.

Last year's ""Fragments of A Season"" represented a unique chapter in both artist's canon. Georgopoulos, who released the Arp album "Zebra" in June this year and Cantu-Ledesma, who released "On The Echoing Green" in October 2017 - both on Mexican Summer and to critical acclaim - wanted to stretch out and create a discrete work. A peripheral listen to "Fragments" revealed a resonant album of delicate, ambient vignettes, suggesting a Balearic take on Vini Reilly, Young Marble Giants and other poetically-minded, minimalistic post-punk era bands.

The Brothers Ives aka Woo were a major influence on the album's makers and so AG and JCL are thrilled they've submitted a beautiful reworking of the album's "Marine". Whereas the original sounded like Marine Girls and The Gist getting together for a nice beach day jam, Woo's rework transforms it into pulsating track of glistening proportions. Percolating synths, some guitar and clarinet - the true classic, idiosyncratic Woo-ification - creates a woozy, romantic, impossible to categorize slice of Balearic meets dub atmospherics.

If "Marine" is all midday sun, intoxicating and potently optimistic, Atkinson's remake represents the literal and figurative flip, bringing out the overcast dreaminess to "Cleo". Sounding like an outtake from a Rohmer film, or perhaps Cocteau Twins and Broadcast having a picnic in Biarritz, the version veers between abstraction, celluloid ambiguity and suggested narrative. Atkinson's reworking adds poetry of the tune (quite literally!) with her soft vocal under-gliding to perfection. Representing a temporary idyll, a meeting point where cobblestone streets lead to the sea. At nightfall, a discotheque heard in the distance. The morning mist burns off. Only such memories remain.

An unearthed treasure from the 70's Italian Avant Garde archives. A previously unreleased recording from the legendary Beat72 club in Rome in 1973, featuring a One-Off Italian-American All-Star ensemble with Roberto Laneri founding member of the experimental vocal group Prima Materia, maverick American composer Alvin Curran co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva, Trombone specialist Giancarlo Schiaffini from Gruppo di improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Cello virtuoso Frances Marie Uitti, close collaborator of the likes of J. Cage and G. Scelsi, Bassist Bruno Tommaso from the legendary Gruppo Romano Free Jazz and American composer Tony Ackerman from the obscure Suonosfera group. Highly creative music which defies categories and boundaries. A historical document.

Additional booklet contains extensive liner notes and photos.

Black Truffle are pleased to announce Undercurrent, the new LP from the long-running Milanese duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Following on from high-profile releases on Boomkat Editions and Shelter Press in the last few years, the eight untitled pieces making up Undercurrent continue the pair’s hypnotic and disorientating practice of improvisation based on tape loops. Often sitting halfway between electro-acoustic technique and beat-based production, the music of Bellows obliquely recalls aspects of hip-hop, dub, and techno while skewing their rhythmic foundations. While consistent with the distinctive language the duo have developed over the last decade, Undercurrent moves away from the explicit references made to club music in their recent releases. It presents a suite of pieces that are markedly more minimal, at times reminiscent in their haunted introspection of the legendary Tolerance records on Vanity Records. The pieces here often dwell for minutes at a time on single repeating tones, reverberating like distant bells in desolate landscapes of looped tape hiss. Where previous releases were primarily based on samples, Undercurrent uses recordings of the duo playing various instruments (guitar, drums, synthesizer) cut into tape loops and then used as the bases for song-length tracks, each of which establishes a central repeating motif while also opening up on close listening to reveal multitudes of improvised detail and subtle shifts in tone, texture, and tempo. Beginning with the mournful sliding tones and obscured fragments of field recordings on the opening track, the LP moves from lush synth pads to super-minimal pings and haunted drone. On ‘6’ and ‘7’, spacious, hanging guitar figures give the music an elegiac quality recalling the work of Dean Roberts and Ielasi’s own earlier guitar-based music (such as the classic Gesine, released on Häpna in 2005). The record subtly builds to its final track, which works the barest of elements – a slowed-tone loop of steel drums, a distant whistle, beeping electronics – into a piece somehow imbued with a quiet grandeur, a fitting conclusion to a record that, like all of the duo's work, is both sonically exploratory and immediately accessible.

Italy's Cristiano Deison enriches the experimental sound and noise art community with his releases and various collaborations (lately with JJohn Duncan, Gianluca Becuzzi and K.K.Null) for more than 20 years, but seems to be still undiscovered by too many listeners. "Substrata" collects three extremely crystalline and immersive drone pieces based on prepared tapes, metals, strings, wires and electronics... imagine a forest glade in moon-light with cold white sonic radiations, half-frozen calyx are clanging at each other, liquid metallic forms appear and disappear, hypnotic slow motion pulses suck you into.. "something"... these are incredible strong, deep and complex drone compositions, drones with the spirit of the "Noise Culture" - using "fragmentation, collage, arrangement and layers", as Germano-Chinese philosoph Lutz Schridde puts it. Sounds of elementary transformations, metamorphosis, and overcoming the usual sense of time:

"...where sounds are conceived as they are “excavated” from the earth beneath our feet “Terra Firma” (erosion) and then taking to the light (awakening); it describes its interior solid surface (“Prima Materia”), the primitive formless base of all matter similar to chaos, the quintessence or aether." - Cristiano Deison

Jeremie Mathes is a French field recording artist (known for some excellent CDs on Unfathomless) living in Cambodia since some years. For "Arkhaios" he combined cavernous object drones (recorded at an abandoned factory site) with various instrumental sounds from ancient Khmer instruments (Tro u, Khim), all highly processed. You get the impression as being under the earth in a place populated by metallic amoeba or other smallest creatures, inside sewerage ducts or an deserted mine, exposed to the circulation of air...

This is the spirituality of the underworlds! "Dissolving time, space, mangling sounds collected into a simulacrum of altered realities. A oneiric junction between the concrete world and other unknown territories." - Jeremie Mathes

Black Truffle is very proud to present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring.

Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from rooftop to church, from stasis to flares of momentary romanticism. Peaks considers summits as being both above and below, reframing the idea of apex from a more intimate perspective. Hamann considers how our domestic and personal geographies might form their own apogees, meridians, or nadirs.

Assembled in 2019 while an artist in residence in Krems, Austria, Peaks begins with Hamann’s more familiar cello but soon unravels into resonant electronic interiors; Southern California nightscapes heard through windows, San Francisco bathroom fans, snatches of recordings of friends, hand organs, and engines. signal/centinela draws primarily on recordings from Hamann’s time living in San Diego, and carries with it a certain sense of nostalgia in the sense of homesickness, longing, and displacement of distance and time. Side B is composed from recordings gathered on a different continent, Europe, weaving piano with recordings of sleep, breath, church organ, and the act of climbing. under/over emerges as it recedes, overlapping moments of arrival to create another kind of ‘spire’ in the sense of spir (breath). Peaks, with its omission of any recordings from Hamann’s home of Australia, hints at how the very construction of home itself, might be restless, untethered, changeable, and malleable.

On Peaks, Hamann interrogates tropes of ambient concrète musics, intentionally pivoting formally around material which teeters on the edge of cliche. This exploration asks whether familiar frames of harmony, field recordings and narrative trajectories can excavate new territories, or be ruptured. Peaks untangles a very personal sense of tension between beauty and shame in experimental music: treating lushness and harmony as possessing potentially muscular musical properties that might wrestle with or construct senses of belonging and home.

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that digs into us. It disorients us, plays with us, but without malice. It is like a nocturnal butterfly whose wings reflect a dark light, thus projecting fleeting hallucinations, which nevertheless persist on the surface of our retina. Its trajectories, too, are unpredictable. But such disorientation is not that of a chaotic space, it is rather a mysterious reason that presents itself to us, an imperious unfolding whose logic escapes us, but which nevertheless fascinates. It is also a history of shapes and their becomings. A story, also of their own vanishing.

Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher's work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one.

These two pieces have this in common, but each with their own agenda, that they evolve with grace and inspiration in the vast domain of the sound world and it is a great pride for us to present them in this new collection.

Released in association with Editions Mego.
Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier

Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

2x12"

Milan Zaks' latest solo effort is coming out on Help Recordings.

Six compositions pressed onto two pieces of vinyl.

Assume your position, plug in or put on, play and await what could be described as the midday rebooting of your mental-balance. This work has not just one function. But it functions nevertheless. How? Find the time to time the find.
No one else will do it for you

71 minutes with full-on daydream catalysing, consciousness examining, sonic explorations that will take you in, out, to and through.

Recorded and produced in the Safe Studios during December '18 - March '19

Distributed by Triple Vision

Artwork by DJ C

Composed as a means to map the cultural translation between Chinese culture and European traditions, Piotr Kurek’s A Sacrifice Shall Be Made / All The Wicked Scenes is comprised of pieces composed between 2016 and 2018 specifically to accompany theatre performances directed by Tian Gebing (500m and The Decalogue) and Grzegorz Jarzyna (Two Swords). Kurek attended performance rehearsals in Beijing and Shanghai, with additional preparations and recording sessions taking place back in Warsaw.

While most of Kurek’s past work is unaccompanied by other musicians or outside help, A Sacrifice Shall Be Made / All The Wicked Scenes features various Polish and Chinese musicians both from classical and experimental scene (Barbara Kinga Majewska, Grzegorz Hardej, Łukasz Rychlicki and Hubert Zemler) as well as by actors of Paper Tiger Theatre Studio from Beijing. This approach of Kurek exploring new players and places is further juxtaposed as Kurek recycled samples from his own past, including various recordings with musicians he did throughout years, found sounds from the Internet, or cannibalised old solo work.

Recorded over the course of several years, this aural report of a monumental multi-disciplinary venture is in the end an enthralled and enthralling survey of a contemporary composer who is unencumbered by geographic or cultural boundaries. Concurrently, ditching any resemblance to local musical traditions and rearranging the compositions for all three performances, Kurek has formed an architecture that allows the phases of rituals to unfold while projecting social structure assumed in myth making. The regrouping of different moments in these stories is a curious way of narrating another myth — a synthetic, polyvalent story set in a city that strangely reassembles Beijing, Giza, and Prague at the same time.

Piotr Kurek is a Warsaw based musician and composer who straddles the world of electronic music taking inspiration from various genres but fitting comfortably in none. Through his unconventional use of a wide array of instruments both electronic and acoustic, he built a reputation for himself as a qualified inventor of hypnotic worlds drenched in uncanny arrangements.

Kurek has already released a range of idiosyncratic, forward-thinking works on a variety of imprints (including but not limited to Sangoplasmo, Black Sweat Records, Hands In The Dark, Dunno Recordings, Crónica, Foxy Digitalis) and participated in numerous music festivals including Unsound, CTM, OFF, TodaysArt and UH Fest as well as participating in extensive tours in Poland and abroad. In 2014 and 2015 he opened for Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s two European mini-tours. In 2016 he has been selected as a part of Shape platform for innovative music and audiovisual art from Europe.

Following on from his sort of nihilistic but also maybe kind of apocalyptic Inherit The Earth LP (April 2017), Slugabed's Pandæmonium EP appears to be the result of him tumbling deeper into his own insides and nding some pretty hellish things. It has a nice front cover, painted by Parker S Jackson. Look him up on the internet!

Pandæmonium is the Capital City of Hell, according to John Milton's Epic Poem, Paradise Lost. It is all full of beasts and demons and stuff. It's AWFUL! But it's also very well designed (by an architect from Heaven, no less!) and fairly well-run. There's a nice John Martin painting of Satan, like, presiding at, um, the infernal council. It's based on Paradise Lost. This EP is about fallen Angels and stuff. Big, grand horridness. The devil in us all, or something. There's a track called Boney Horse.

There's some jazzy bits, sure. There's some noisy bits, yeah. Overall, a slightly unsettling atmosphere, okay! But it's also quite a beautiful lil record, and I'm hoping Slugabed has worked through some stuff and feels a bit better. Pandæmonium features two remixes from Sluga's sworn enemies, Kai Whiston & IGLOOGHOST respectively.

The overlap between the organic and the synthetic is Vlad Dobrovolski’s stomping ground. Digitally organised sounds melt into squalling melodies that grow and stretch over and under each other like the fractal leaves of a fern, spiraling inwards and outwards into a tesseract of connective tissue. “The more carefully you listen, the more you hear,” explains the Russian-born sound artist. “No two moments are exactly alike in nature. The song is always changing. I find myself listening in ways I never have before. The scale of my perception has changed. Small, subtle sounds have become singular events. The space around me seems larger than I had realized.”

“Natursymphony No.1 — Spring Music” compiles fleeting waves of thought and feeling into sonic networks that embody the sinew shared by a sprawling forest, the patchwork quilt of human memory, or the post-organic logic of digital collage. Rays of rising sun and fresh air buoy this audio landscape, brimming as it is with synthetic tones and bitcrushed rhythms emerging from surrounding computer caverns. Field recordings are organized in harmony with processed acoustic instrumentation; gongs, flutes, and distorted percussive rhythms.

Probing our consciousness – or perhaps self and spatial awareness – propel forward the seven opuses of “Natursymphony No.1”, like the experience of an awakening itself. Stemming from an awakening of sorts for the artist himself, suddenly alivened in his ability to perceive his surroundings and create musical ecosystems, the nature to be found in this music is a parallel reality in miniature, with its own dusks and dawns, its own blossoming and extinctions, all delicately nurtured by an artist stumbling into a creator role.

Over two decades, Vlad has explored improvised and generative music, sonic collage, and released solo music under a variety of monikers and in various collaborative projects — such as his cassette tape soundscaping duo with Vasiliy Stepanov, S A D. The “Natursymphony” series comes following his personal landmark album, “Non-Deterministic Polynomial Poems” (Klammklang). Vlad has also participated in residencies and performances throughout both Russia and Japan.

Mit dem 6-Tracker „Desire EP“ kehren Bob Moses zu ihren ursprünglichen Club-Wurzeln zurück!

Mit „Desire“ kehren Bob Moses zu ihren ursprünglichen Club-Wurzeln zurück. Eine prägende Zeit, in der sie ihre frühen Singles auf dem einflussreichen NYC-basierten Label Scissor & Thread veröffentlichten und in Clubs und Warehouses spielten.
Die Lead-Single "Desire" ist eine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Grammy-nominierten Produzenten ZHU. Die EP wurde von Mark Ralph (Daniel Avery, Dusky, Hot Chip, Georgia, etc.) abgemischt und soll als ein kontinuierlicher DJ Mix erlebt werden.

it's been a while since we decided to open and launch this new project, we were just waiting for the right moment, and maybe we waited too long. or maybe not. we were a little stucked by the indecision of when to put it out, how to contextualize, and all the usual "psychological" practices that one faces before starting a new journey. but ever since we received the masters of this wonderful concentrate of different minds, we have been looking forward to smashing it out. and whether it's the real right time or not, it's now finally here! the true meaning behind this capsule is not so definable in words, perhaps because it is an attempt to look back and forth at the same time, without getting lost in a one concrete definition. but when we got to the tracks, first individually, and then together, it came spontaneous to glimpse something new and unconventional as a whole. we are therefore proud to present another of our musical journeys, this time in certainly more experimental and odd territories. the sounds you hear can definitely be taken as the true manifesto of this new chapter. proto? post? everything in between. ENTER >

Veteran NYC based Scottish electronic musician Drew McDowall's latest work is his loftiest, most liturgical, and least industrial outing to date —and potentially the apex of his recent discography.Named after an ancient Greek word for votive offering, Agalmaexudes a hooded, devotional aura, creaking and keeling under vast rafters of stone, stained glass, and shredded wires. It's a music of majesty and mystery but also modernity, McDowall's refined modular system shape-shifting strings, piano, pipe organ, and choral masses into disorienting synthetic mirages of the sacred. He cites the intersection of “joy, terror, and the elegiac” as a centering inspiration –or, phrased more bluntly, “that 'what the fuck is going on' feeling.”



As a career collaborator himself, with stints in Coil, Psychic TV, and countless other shorter-lived partnerships, it's telling that McDowall chose this project to gather such an impressive spectrum of peers. Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalistRobert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi cameo across the album's 42 minutes, contouring McDowall's nuanced negative spaces with shudders, shadows, and shivering flickers of serenity. Each of them shines in their spotlight, elevating these elusive alchemical states into surreal revelations of texture and transcendence.



McDowall's original working title for the record is revealing: Ritual Music.He speaks of his creative practice in ceremonial terms, negating binaries by seeking the middle path to anuminousequilibrium that erases the distinction between the inner and outer worlds.These compositions feel similarly processional and intuitive, at the crossroads of holiness and hallucination, the sacred vertigo of yawning naves rising into untouchable night skies. It's a vision of industrial music as enigma and invocation, cryptic hymnals of shroudedbeautysummoned in catacombs and crumbling cathedrals.



Despite its depths, Agalmais also an album of immediacy and emotion. Celestial laments of and for times of unrest and suffering. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this music as an to attempt to convey experiences he felt incapable of putting into words: “To try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”Agalmamore than acknowledges the ineffable –it embodies it.

Veteran NYC based Scottish electronic musician Drew McDowall's latest work is his loftiest, most liturgical, and least industrial outing to date —and potentially the apex of his recent discography.Named after an ancient Greek word for votive offering, Agalmaexudes a hooded, devotional aura, creaking and keeling under vast rafters of stone, stained glass, and shredded wires. It's a music of majesty and mystery but also modernity, McDowall's refined modular system shape-shifting strings, piano, pipe organ, and choral masses into disorienting synthetic mirages of the sacred. He cites the intersection of “joy, terror, and the elegiac” as a centering inspiration –or, phrased more bluntly, “that 'what the fuck is going on' feeling.”



As a career collaborator himself, with stints in Coil, Psychic TV, and countless other shorter-lived partnerships, it's telling that McDowall chose this project to gather such an impressive spectrum of peers. Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalistRobert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi cameo across the album's 42 minutes, contouring McDowall's nuanced negative spaces with shudders, shadows, and shivering flickers of serenity. Each of them shines in their spotlight, elevating these elusive alchemical states into surreal revelations of texture and transcendence.



McDowall's original working title for the record is revealing: Ritual Music.He speaks of his creative practice in ceremonial terms, negating binaries by seeking the middle path to anuminousequilibrium that erases the distinction between the inner and outer worlds.These compositions feel similarly processional and intuitive, at the crossroads of holiness and hallucination, the sacred vertigo of yawning naves rising into untouchable night skies. It's a vision of industrial music as enigma and invocation, cryptic hymnals of shroudedbeautysummoned in catacombs and crumbling cathedrals.



Despite its depths, Agalmais also an album of immediacy and emotion. Celestial laments of and for times of unrest and suffering. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this music as an to attempt to convey experiences he felt incapable of putting into words: “To try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”Agalmamore than acknowledges the ineffable –it embodies it.

Suction Records presents the first new album since 2014 by the legendary, and somewhat underrated electronic project of Mark Van Hoen, Locust. The album is called "The Plaintive". When Suction was formed in 1997, we were deeply enthralled with the UK “listening” electronic scene, otherwise known as electronica or IDM, but besides the obvious icons - Aphex Twin, Autechre, and other luminaries of labels like Rephlex, Warp, and Skam Records - one of our heroes was the lesser known Locust, whose productions were murkier, more hypnotic, and deeply organic sounding. Those early Locust records - released via R&S/Apollo Records - were, and have remained, firm favourites. Pouring through the Locust album liner notes back in the ‘90s, it was the first time we’d ever read of a “techno” artist using modular synthesizers to make modern music.

Earlier this year, Locust released “The Plaintive” as a 15-track CD/digital album, part of Touched Music’s “Touched By Silence” boxset, and the CD was sold out in a matter of hours. Having heard Locust’s contribution to the set, we were immediately smitten with the material, which sounded very much unlike the Locust of old, yet absolutely complimentary to Van Hoen’s murky, analog-synth past. Produced intermittently over a 5-year period, the tracks were created with a largely-digital eurorack modular system, alongside a selection of analog synthesizers, notably a newly-acquired Prophet 12 polysynth. While tracks like “If You Knew” and “Out Here” are reminiscent of classic Locust, much of “The Plaintive” shows us a new side to Locust - melodic, playful, and melancholic, with clear nods to the melodic electronic sounds of early pioneers like Cluster, early-Kraftwerk, or even OMD’s late-70s output.

For Suction’s vinyl release of “The Plaintive”, we’ve chosen 10 highlights from the original 15-track digital release, housed in a stunning The Designers Republic LP jacket, and limited to 500 copies.

Suction Records presents the first new album since 2014 by the legendary, and somewhat underrated electronic project of Mark Van Hoen, Locust. The album is called "The Plaintive". When Suction was formed in 1997, we were deeply enthralled with the UK “listening” electronic scene, otherwise known as electronica or IDM, but besides the obvious icons - Aphex Twin, Autechre, and other luminaries of labels like Rephlex, Warp, and Skam Records - one of our heroes was the lesser known Locust, whose productions were murkier, more hypnotic, and deeply organic sounding. Those early Locust records - released via R&S/Apollo Records - were, and have remained, firm favourites. Pouring through the Locust album liner notes back in the ‘90s, it was the first time we’d ever read of a “techno” artist using modular synthesizers to make modern music.

Earlier this year, Locust released “The Plaintive” as a 15-track CD/digital album, part of Touched Music’s “Touched By Silence” boxset, and the CD was sold out in a matter of hours. Having heard Locust’s contribution to the set, we were immediately smitten with the material, which sounded very much unlike the Locust of old, yet absolutely complimentary to Van Hoen’s murky, analog-synth past. Produced intermittently over a 5-year period, the tracks were created with a largely-digital eurorack modular system, alongside a selection of analog synthesizers, notably a newly-acquired Prophet 12 polysynth. While tracks like “If You Knew” and “Out Here” are reminiscent of classic Locust, much of “The Plaintive” shows us a new side to Locust - melodic, playful, and melancholic, with clear nods to the melodic electronic sounds of early pioneers like Cluster, early-Kraftwerk, or even OMD’s late-70s output.

For Suction’s vinyl release of “The Plaintive”, we’ve chosen 10 highlights from the original 15-track digital release, housed in a stunning The Designers Republic LP jacket, and limited to 500 copies.

After his debut album for Discrepant (Papillon, 2013) and a couple of tapes for Dinzu Artefacts (Aqueducts, 2017) and Sucata tapes (Cercueill Flottant, 2019) Papillon aka Gonçalo F. Cardoso returns to the wax treatment for one last hurrah into the depths of tropical disquiet.

Taking liberties from Henri Charriere’s book sequel of the same name, Banco, the audio reader here dives straight up/down into a world of random dream logic. The same themes of Nightmare vs paradisiac dreams are present here yet with more nuance than the first volume. The adventure here is more subdued, less spiritual as most of it is lived outdoors, free from the states shackles of abuse. A lighter tone then, for what will probably be the last Papillon adventure. As with the first volume the album counts with contributions from fellow label artists, Mike Cooper, Cédric Stevens, David Daan and Yannick Dauby all feature in a way or another, raw or cooked into a boiling pot of irreverence.

All tracks were composed and edited by Gonçalo F Cardoso in the island of La Gomera, Lisbon and London between 2017-2019.

Composed & Performed by Gonçalo F. Cardoso with guest appearances by Mike Cooper, Yannick Dauby, David Naan and Cedric Stevens*

Special vinyl one time pressing to 300 copies
Mastered by Rashad Becker

Gosha Hniu - objects, toys, percussion, cries and whispers, marching band kazoo
Ran Nahmias - silent cello, theremin
Maya Pik - synths, melodica, rocking chair, flute (3)
Grundik Kasyansky - feedback synthesizer, objects
Amos Ungar - dulcimer, sampler
Tom Wheatley - double bass (1, 2, 6, 7)
Lior Lerman - cries and whispers (1, 5, 6)
Maria Blatstein - piano (2, 5)
Andrea Serafino - drums (1)
Yoni Silver - bass clarinet (1)
Radio interference (7) by Jonathan Shohet and Matthias Moos

Recorded in Cafe Oto Project Space in October 2017. Additional recordings throughout 2017-2019 in Givat Ha-Irusim, Israel and London, UK.

Artwork and inspiration by Danil Gertman. Lyrics are based on the poems by Arthur Molev. Recording, mix, mastering, design & production by Hniu.

Hugs to Ira Gluzman, Tsip Nahmias, David Pye, Zhenya Shmuter, Andrei Yusov, Tony Harris, Luba Tounkoun, Nigel Bewley, Artur Vidal, Joe Murray and Lee Etherington

Transversales Disques is very glad to announce the release of Nuits Blanches au
Studio 116, unreleased rarities from Ariel Kalma’s personal archives recorded in the
legendary GRM’s Studio 116 during the 70’s.
Born and raised in Paris, Ariel Kalma started playing the recorder and saxophone as a
youth. After successive studies of Computer Science, Music and Art in Paris he performed
in various concerts from middle-age music to free jazz duo. Ariel performed and recorded
with several bands (J. Higelin, R. Pinhas, NYL, G. Scornic, Baden Powell…).
After learning circular breathing on soprano sax, Ariel could include those endless notes
into his own long-delay-effect system, dual Revox set-up and two tape machines “chained”
together to form a long delay system.
In France during the mid-1970s, Kalma was staffed as a recording assistant at legendary
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM) studios, where Ariel recorded some of his
compositions in the Studio 116; the same music “concrete” laboratory that spawned
masterpieces by members Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani…

A sort of slowly unfurling raga that plays tricks on your sense of depth and temporal perception, this stunning new album from long-string instrument master Ellen Fullman and cellist Theresa Wong has sent us into a light hypnotic trance with its slowly shifting tonal formations. Rarely is drone music so full of quietly cosmic eruptions - everything stays the same // nothing stays the same - pure aural alchemy.For the uninitiated - Fullman’s instrument consists of 70-foot-long metallic wires, anchored by a wooden resonator, across which she moves backwards and forwards with rosin-covered fingers to create an effect that’s been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. Developed in 1981, Fullman was in search of tonalities that couldn’t be achieved with traditional instruments - and her massively cumbersome instrument has been utilised to that effect ever since.
On Harbors, Inspired by the foggy San Francisco Bay, she’s joined by Cellist Theresa Wong to create elliptical tonal changes and anxiously resonant dissonance that feel like being stranded at the end of the earth. Wong is a Mills College alumnus who has developed highly individual playing techniques that take the cello into areas more closely rooted in the sounds of the natural world, always with a kind of theatrical dexterity.
Split into three movements, the piece is anchored by Fullman’s transfixing and slowly shifting drone, cut and overplayed with an orchestration of aberrant melodies and glistening atmospheres that are shimmering with life. It’s a fascinating addition to Fullman’s catalogue - at once disciplined but also quietly delirious in a way that’s pretty much impossible to describe. Anyway, there’s a video online of the pair of them checking test pressings of this album, gently swaying to the music. You can almost sense them both getting lost in their own mythical dimensions.

EP00001 is the first audio release from Matteo Zamagni's Seven Orbits project. 5 original tracks including a collaboration with Nervous Horizon's TSVI, plus remixes from 33EMYBW, Gooooose and Zaliva-D. Seven orbits is an audiovisual performance designed for immersive sensory experiences. It plays with the senses through vibration, light and sound to induce potential altered states with an emphasis on the transcendental and animistic connection with the natural world and the divine as can be found in past and present rituals around the world. The softwares used to create the experience communicate with each other so that the sound, played live on DAW, drive the real-time graphics as well as physical live elements; Further control of the experience is also achieved by using external physical interfaces.