Beats News

Nídia flashes peak time dancefloor chops on a club-ready partner 12” to her superb 2nd album.
Where the album explores slower, melodic taraxho and R&B, Nídia’s 12” is built strictly for the rave with four tracks of proper dancefloor shapes made in her own style of electrifying body music compatible with heat from Nigga Fox to Nazar and the kind of style you might hear in a Shannen SP set.
‘Chef’ boots off royally with militant snares and rave fanfares locked to a churning technoid flow somewhere between Kuduro, Baile Funk and EBM trance, while ‘Hard’ rolls out on a stentorian, rictus march recalling vintage UKF, and ‘Jam Master’ strikes up high intensity trance riffs synched to industrial strength rhythms a la Nkisi, and the tumbling drums of ‘Munun’ sidewinds off along rhythmelodic vectors recalling a tempered Shackleton piece or a prime, deep Peder Mannerfelt workout.

Really strong, multi-layered new album from Olan Monk, released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. label/collective of which he is a co-founder and featuring vocals from Maria Somerville and James K, plus additional mixing by Xao.
Highly recommended if yr into John Maus, The Normal, Actress, Eartheater, Suicide.
In possession of its own unusual pace and styling, Love/Dead is a weird and brilliantly addictive gothic pop experiment that takes The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ as its starting point and builds from there in an asymmetric formation that feeds in elements from Suicide, Nine Inch Nails and John Maus, slows it all down and spits it back out covered in heaving subs, doom metal dynamics and distorted, angular electronics.
For goth credentials, Monk recorded the album between the west coast of Ireland and a coroner’s court and mortuary in south London, and if that seems a bit heavy handed - the music is anything but. Monk writes hooky, layered and memorable songs, something that’s so often missing from electronic music producers who mature (in the worst sense of the word) into working with vocalists as a mark of some dubious respectability.
Monk’s background isn’t in electronic music though, and so his imagination extends further out into the aether - guided by the three singular artists with whom he has already collaborated - Actress, Ashley Paul and Elvin Brandhi, with Actress in particular introducing Monk to electronic music “as its own process of creation, beyond production”. So although it’s the electronic treatments that startle, it’s Monk’s songs that hook and poke, making ‘Love/Dead’ a singular and strong addition to the C.A.N.V.A.S. label’s small but already beautifully formed catalogue of releases.

Pontiac Streator, Ulla, exael and Special Guest DJ convene as virtualdemonlaxative for this unhinged West Mineral.
The only info bundled with this one-off grind-trash sesh from the West Mineral crew is “cybergrind, danger music, FTP”. Through hoarse coughs, toxic belches and searing digital noise we’re introduced to
virtualdemonlaxative - a crude effigy with one foot firmly lodged in Napalm Death’s genre-defining “Scum” and a bloody stump cauterized in the smoldering ashes of John Wiese’s painfully underrated “Soft Punk”.
Arrhythmic blast beats collapse into digi-spliced howls, pre-COVID crowd hum echoes beneath anxious alien babbling, searing feedback wails to a disconcerting climax. If the rest of the West Mineral catalogue is simmered in psychedelic sensuality, virtualdemonlaxative is a rare antivenom; it’s the disquieted sativa
to Pontiac Streator, Ulla, exael and Special Guest DJ’s undulating indica. We’ve been informed informally that ‘Cruisin’ (forty seconds long) was performed and recorded in a moving vehicle, almost causing a car accident. There’s a metaphor here, but we’re tired - listen loud and fxcking riot.

Tape / Cassette
Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the crown of the Muku tree?

Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist, composer and an attentive listener based in Berlin. She plays her found native Australian wildlife archive and other field recordings, either through a stereophonic system or often via hand-made speakers and found objects – exploring the timbre and forms of found and self-recorded animal voices while mimicking biophonic patterns to create minimal quasi-bioacoustic environments.

"Tracks on Creepy Crawly were made between 2017-19. Samples were taken from found animal sounds and field recordings made in Berlin and trips to Japan and Australia.Some of the material was played live along side my collaborators in duo projects Native Instrument (Shelter Press, Entr'acte) and Plants and Animalia."

Five compositions are perfect gateway to the Mangan archive, which is rather embedded aural illusion- speculative echo of spieces than a reproduction of rural soundscape.

Felicity has presented projects in many different settings from galleries, gardens, clubs and festivals throughout Europe. Including National Gallery Denmark, Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW and Sonic Act Academy.

The Oystercatcher is the first collaborative LP from Cucina Povera (Maria Rossi) and ELS (Edward Simpson) Recorded in London over two days, hours’ worth of improvisations have been edited down to form these six tracks. A fragile interplay is at work between Maria’s drifting vocals and the ominous churn of Edward’s modular synth. Each sonic element takes a turn at leading the way.

The opening track ‘Mantle’ is formed from sparse, monolithic electronics, woven gently with a thread of vocals. In the closing track ‘Eon’ Maria’s voice shepherds spontaneous bursts of sounds, almost Rave-like if order were imposed, through 15 minutes of turmoil and resplendent until the end. Maria’s vocals make their own trails amongst the noise, bringing to mind the the exploratory language from Ursula K. Le Guin’s album ‘Music and Poetry from the Kesh’, recalling the same understated mystery.

The overall effect of this collaboration is a completely unique creation albeit within a recognisable lineage of predecessors. The artwork reflects the vision of these two artists, collaged together. Both images are from a trip to Helsinki. Edward’s photograph of Tulips caught after dark are reviled by a flash. Maria’s seemingly abstract drawing is a graphite rubbing taken from a granite slab of a pavement somewhere in Kallio. Together the two images represent two different methods for capturing a city’s haptic landscape.

The album moves with a feeling of transience, which is no surprise given that the idea to collaborate was formed in Helsinki, realised in London and edited together in Rotterdam. The Oystercatcher tells a fragile tale, one that spins out into the unknown. A cold union of voice and machine, still tentative and probing, learning to co-exist. A kind of fundamental shift whereby shared moments have been turned to sound. The Oystercatcher is a bird that can freely travel between the earth, sea and sky. The motif is taken from a Tove Jansson short story. A dead bird washes ashore, two different versions of events are presented to how the bird came to die. The album feels like two different stories being presented on top of one another but ultimately coming to the same tragic conclusion.

R&S present the eponymous, debut, full length album transmission from Lost Souls Of Saturn.
Epic in scope, time and space, this multidimensional mind trip is for fans of Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore', David Morales' Red Zone dubs, Don Cherry's 'Organic Music Society', The Orb's 'Ultraworld' and KLF's 'Space' and much more besides.
This ambient house masterpiece combines flavours gathered from across the galaxy, stewing them up into a delicious primordial soup. Old sci-fi soundtracks, acid, free jazz, avant garde, musique concrete, world music and more all whirl around an underground-dance-music axis.
Primarily LSOS are Seth Troxler and Phil Moffa, plus further opaque participants congregating to combine music, imagery, and storytelling into an inextricably linked whole, all wrapped-up in a philosophy of their own making.

SYNTAX Electronix (Valencia, Spain) continues with its second release based on Electro tunes.

Finders Keepers Records’ continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani’s key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world’s most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers’ decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani’s versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line.

The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne’s first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne’s proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it’s advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani’s globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer Ilhan Mimaroglu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer’s determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla’s production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. “Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano,” explains Suzanne in 2020. “It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA,” she laments. “If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola,” she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small’s aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. “I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent,” Suzanne explained. “He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself.” The basic brief around Suzanne’s musical journey was to be “The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain,” which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions (“I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn’t get street hassle on the way home”), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer.

The release of Blessed Repair is a grand experiment for the Baldi/Gerycz Duo. The duo consists of Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz, both of whom are members of the acclaimed rock band Cloud Nothings. With Baldi on saxophone and Gerycz on drums, they deliver an album that steers away from the process of slowly crafting lyrics and instrumental components. This time, their project is grounded in the gravitational pull of both of their instruments; two people creating and releasing tension in real time. Blessed Repair is an album that romps with the spontaneous energy of free-form jazz.

Baldi and Gerycz are quite familiar with each other as musicians, proving to be an advantage as they navigate the strange yet exciting new waters of Blessed Repair. Primarily, they work as bandmates in Cloud Nothings, but nothing resembles their improvisational work as a duo. In Cloud Nothings, songs are written beforehand and rehearsed, but as the Baldi/Gerycz Duo, they just play. Which is how the project first came to fruition — they are two friends who organically wanted to see how far they can take their music together.

The project uses two iconically jazz instruments, nudging Blessed Repair into the free-jazz realm. The saxophone soars and tumbles and the drums build and scatter, but both instruments are more linked by their playful experimentation and synchronicity than anything else. While they are fans of improvisational jazz music, neither Baldi nor Gerycz had formal jazz training past high school, making this album authentically experimental for them both. That being said, Baldi does recount that his first official gig as a musician was playing jazz music in the background of a wealthy Clevelander’s dinner party in 2008.

The Baldi/Gerycz Duo have taken the opportunity to harness the liberating energy of improvisation in Blessed Repair. And ultimately, they’re two friends exploring and pushing the boundaries of their music.

Dick Verdult, a.k.a Dick el Demasiado is the Philip K. Dick of multi-disciplinary art, the Moby Dick of “cumbia lunática”, and the Charles Dickens of literature and experimental cinema. He first fell in love with cumbia when he heard his nursemaid singing the classic “La pollera colorá”. From this moment on, he adopted the genre and reinvented it, in a perpetual degeneration called Cumbia Lunática, twisting up the elements of traditional cumbia, the “cumbia of the mucamas”, to create an anarchotropical vertebral rhythm, one which supports every moving part.

Celulitis Illuminati is the powerful debut of the anarchotropical gentleman knight of the abstract, Dick el Demasiado, eight dangerous tracks recorded for the first time on vinyl, songs that, upon listening, will liposuck all that grotesque accumulation of adipose tissue out of buttocks and brain. They interweave an amalgam of South American folklore and the cables of electronic music, the plugged-in Ranqueles indians, as in “Asi Que Los Que Sí” (“So That Those Who Yes”) on Side A, surrealist and lugubrious beats, poetry made song and “the dead man’s drool is good for painting watercolors”, as he sings in “Búho Sin Un Ratón” (“Owl With No Mouse”).Euphony that will abduct you away to a viscous street party with “Son Cosas De Hoy” (“They’re Things For Today”) and to an eclectic and excessive dimension with “pero bien bweno” (“but very proper”).

Side B is pure dynamite: “Mecha flan” (“Pudding Fuse”), “Sábado cultural” (“Cultural Saturday”) and “En la jeta” (“In the face”) represent the perfect blend of Lucho Argain (La Sonora Dinamita) and Muslimgauze (Bryn Jones). On top of this, the album includes an as-yet unheard gem, “Llama Mi Abogado” (“Call My Lawyer”), produced by Dick himself and Manuel Schaller, the telepathic mage of the Theremin. When the Dutchman stepped off the boat and onto the block, as well as offering us the TV set, the sculpture of a deranged English woman who devours islands like they were sandwiches, the synthesizer, the sound effect, the African drum, the maraca, the indigenous whistle, he obtained for us the song and the stanza, he provided us with the language and the poetry, the truthful, the epic of the ugly. Cellulite for mortals, cumbia lunática for the enlightened ones! Alfredo Padilla (Trans. Komurki)

Berlin, spring 2020

Written and produced by KTL, Stephen O'Malley & Peter Rehberg

Recorded & mixed at MOM Paraverse Studios, Berlin, March & May 2020

Engineer : Andi Toma (mix), 2nd Engineer : Constantin Carstens (recording)

Mastered at Zino Mikorey Mastering, Berlin, May 2020

Cover art : Nina Hartman, Untitled Capsule, 2020 (Resin, paper, toner, pigment)

Photographed by Joe Levenworth

KTL photograph : KM

A new timley studio album from the duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O'Malley. Recorded and mixed during an unexpected extended stay in Berlin when the borders of the world suddenly closed. The claustrophobic urgency of this scenario is seared into the colossal vibrations set into this vinyl release.

Unlike many of their releases this is a studio record made unto itself as opposed to the many soundtracks they have made for theatre works and the like. It also stands as one of their most fully realised releases to date.

Proceedings are launched with The Director. Sitting somewhere between contemporary classical and doom this is a sliding and menacing mass of sound, more Masque of the Red Death than The Decameron. Silver lining is an alarming swooping buzzing track, looming and lowering only to rise and descend again. A delicate play with the Shepard-Risset glissando manifesting a delirious swarm of sound. Lee's garlic orbits into a short fragmented zone with bursts of harsh feedback and crashing fx, all manner of audio enters and is discarded with an underlying sense of despair and frustration. Proceedings continue on Side B with Tea With Kali where a calmer plateau is embedded with oscillating guitar and fluttering electronics. Beating sine waves envelop the listener in a meditative thought piece of sound. Frostless concludes this epic dispatch as a subtle and gentle foray into twitching electronics as a light buzzsaw drone swirls as around your mind.

The interplay of sources (guitar, electronic equipment (hardware, software, speakers) is so entwined it's often difficult to discern who is doing what amongst the broad sound field. KTL VII is instrumental music as visual narrative resulting in an exquisitely crafted release full of sophisticated and sublime illusory effects.

Repress!

Faitiche presents the release of a new album by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek (faitiche13). Since their debut (Bird, Lake, Objects, faitiche03, 2010) they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo's second album.

"The river, forcing its way through veins between the outposts of the forest, was a great heart. Placidly as it flowed, gently as its descent beat against its vague banks, it brought and gathered sustenance for the busily mediating humus that swelled sunwards in the strangest cell configurations, trees, plants, animals. The silence all round was uncanny and stuck on the ear. Spasmodic squelches, a gurgling in the muddy hollows of the bank beneath overhanging shagginess, the slurping of ominous cavities, that shot out now and again between the long-spun threads of time, like something detonating, testified to the steady monotony of the process. From the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the mighty Pan could still be heard to rumble." - from the novel Tropics by Robert Müller (translated by N. Grindell)

*****

Dear Masayoshi Fujita,
many thanks for the audio files. Your additional vibraphone recordings go wonderfully with the material we have already. Preparing the vibraphone with more percussion instruments was the right decision. Combined with my tightly woven synthesizer and sample loops, the result is a fragmented sense of space. I have taken the liberty of manipulating certain recordings. One might now say that our joint recordings are both a basis for further processing and new pieces in their own right.

While listening through our improvisations, I noticed a tendency towards atmospheric sounds. I am almost tempted to call them tropical. This has strengthened my resolve to work with dense background textures - among others, I'm using material produced in connection with my radio pieces Kennen Sie Otahiti (Do you know Otahiti SWR2, 2012) and Dialoge zur Anthropologie (Dialogs on Anthropology, SWR2, 2013): artificial field recordings, jungle and rain forest settings that do not hide their staged, fictional character. They are synthetic and speculative. As you know, I have long been obsessed with the tropics. This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness, hostile to life but also excessively productive. I am fascinated by the idea of installing clear minimalist forms amid such luxuriant tropical growth. Perhaps my image of the city of Brasilia is a good example: the utopia of elegant and ascetic modernism, surrounded by rampant vegetation.

Corresponding to this, I would like to expand our liner notes to include a quotation from Robert Müller's novel Tropics - an expressionist travelogue published in Germany in 1915. It goes without saying that this work cannot be wholeheartedly embraced: its imperialistic fantasies of omnipotence and its 'master race' posturing, characteristic of that time and place, are, of course, intolerable. Please excuse my casually dismissing this, but it is not what I am interested in here. Tropics is fascinating as a nervous jungle phantasm that openly indulges in exoticism at the same time as deconstructing it. In this way, the main character's adventure becomes a journey into the subjective. It resembles a feverish inner delirium, exposing exoticism as a simulated, utopian perspective. What it boils down to is insubstantial, nothing but foam and froth.

7"
(This is...) one of Sascha Müller's weirdest, most experimental musical ideas brought to life as a limited, hand-numbered edition of 100 gold vinyl 7"es. Following the concept of recording crackling run-out grooves from various classic Pop albums and glueing them together into one crackly mess of a megamix this one is a collectors novelty piece for those searching for the most extreme, unusual vinyl releases they can get hold of. Expect looped crackles, pops, surface noise and all the good stuff related to listening to vinyl on a regular but do not expect any kind of structure or user friendly listening experience at all. This is for the die-hard collectors and vinyl freaks only.

"On this seven track album we hear MinaeMinae (alias Bastian Epple) playfully scurry through his dense soundscapes on a tightrope. The sounds lying somewhere on the crossroads of psychedelic trance, exotica, ambient and melodic dance music – veering further off orbit with nontypical rhythms and dystopian percussive patterns.

MinaeMinae understands musical material similar to documentary footage which he would cut up, repitch, and rearrange freely. Most of his tracks are a mix of analog, synthetic sounds and recordings of ethnic percussion and guitar. Recently Bastian began experimenting with modular synthesis and self made tape echoes - seeking a more reduced and minimal composition style compared to his earlier quite whimsical tunes.

Growing up in a small village in southern Germany, Bastian was never interested in kitschy folk sounds that everyone would mindlessly clap and sing along to, rather he took solace in the time he would spend delving into patterns and repetitions that pleased him. His guitar strumming and what sounded to his mother like a young Philip Glass on a cheap Casio keyboard encouraged little Epple to continue on this self-taught path of developing his musical language. He then started to experiment with a tape recorder and layering sounds with non-musical samples, which his former village friends found too weird – then to eventually working with a small freeware DAW. Bastian went on to study Media Art at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe – initially enrolled in music but the frustration and doubt of not being able to produce the music he wanted led him into film and documentary media. During his studies, Bastian was living with Florian Meyers (Don’t DJ) for several years where they would philosophize life and music into the wee hours – he encouraged Bastian to start sharing what he’s been quietly working on all these years and slowly emerge from this anonymity which eventually led to his first release on Human Pitch last fall.

Disproportionate forms, color changes, backdrops weaved into the foreground, all lay the dense earth for Gestrüpp through Benjamin Kilchhofer’s artwork."

clear vinyl

"Kapital Band 1 – Internationale Solidarität” is the third album of Martin Brandlmayr & Nicholas Bussmann. Since their first album “Kapital Band 1 – 2CD" in 2004 the duo explores the possibilities of improvising music with machines. Investigating parallel existences and mimetic affirmations of machine structures and human patterns. For their third album they revised their experimental settings once again. “Internationale Solidarität” is a search between impulse and logic, algorithms and attitudes, false random and real mistakes.

Martin Brandlmayr – drums
Nicholas Bussmann – robot controlled grand piano "the automat”
“the automat” is made by Winfried Ritsch

Martin Brandlmayr is a composer & drummer playing with Radian (Thrill Jockey), Polwechsel and Trapist. He has been working with ErikM, Christian Fennesz, Howe Gelb, Klaus Lang, Dieter Kovacic, Billy Roisz, Sachiko M, David Sylvian, John Tilbury, Ken Vandermark, Otomo Yoshihide, Mats Gustafson and many others. He has released almost 30 albums and toured on all continents. For his radioplay "Vive Les fantômes” he received the Karl-Sczuka-Prize for radio art 2018.

Nicholas Bussmann is musician and artist. As a musician he is playing Telebossa and his multi-language choir "Cottbusser Chor”. He has been working with numerous musician and artist: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Butch Morris, Chico Mello, Van Dyke Parks, Lucile Desamory & Lindy Annis. As an artist he showed his work at Museu Serralves Porto, Hangar Bicocca Milano, Taxispalais Innsbruck & Shanghai Biennial.

A stunning 17-minute-drumming-trip from feathery spheres through bold grooves to a dense thundery finish by Simon Popp and Sebastian Wolfgruber, the two drummers known for channeling World Music, Afrobeat and Jazz drumming in solo projects and with Munich-based Jazz quintet Fazer.
The B-side holds a rework by fellow Munich producers Zenker Brothers. The Ilian Tape heads and notorious audiophiles put their drum machines aside and weaved the recordings with layers of mystic synths into a tingling organic IDM tune.

(Record Store Day 2020) Hip re-works of the Amsterdam based afro-funk styled unit

3x12"


We're celebrating our 30th release and we have done it in a big way, gathering a handful of like-minded friends, close and far!. This triple vinyl album contains a selection of 12 catalog tracks, receiving free and stunning treatment from masterminds like Venetian Snares, Samuel Kerridge, OM Unit, DgoHn, Plaid, Etapp Kyle, Dwaallicht (WISP), Humanoid (FSOL), EOD, Konx-Om-Pax, Radioactive Man and Anthony Baldino. Not many words are needed except this powerful release expands the AF sound palette from different approaches, making it, undoubtedly, in one of our essential records of the year. Packed in gatefold deluxe sleeve designed by Geometric Love studio.

Like the Grass documents and reimagines a warm summer's evening in Basel, Switzerland, in June 2018. Four musicians convened: Johannesburg composer and bow expert Cara Stacey, South African violinist and composer Galina Juritz, German harp player Antonia Ravens and Swiss guitarist and sonic explorer Beat Keller.

Together they improvised using a graphic score titled "Luhlata njengetjani" ("Green like the grass" in the southern African Siswati language), inspired by the rivers of eSwatini, blackbirds in the parks of Basel and the evocative, red-flowered umcinci or erythrina tree. The South African umrhubhe mouthbow's dense harmonics folded around skittering, fractal violin loops; temperate swells of guitar were punctuated by agitated harp pings and the hearty thuds of Ugandan and Mozambican lamellophones.

This joyous, unfettered outpouring criss-crossed between southern Africa and Europe, forwards and backwards, for the following two years. The fruits were unpicked and rewoven into new mosaics by Cara, Galina, and two of our favourite recording artists, Object Agency and Hello Skinny.

Recorded as part of Cara Stacey's studio residency in Basel, Switzerland, supported by ProHelvetia Johannesburg.

Repress

Founder of Modern Obscure Music, Pedro Vian, drops his debut longer player 'Beautiful Things You Left Us For Memories'. Having previously released on well respected labels such as Hivern Discs and Mathematics Recordings, Vian brings things in-house, with 12 tracks that push beyond simple categorisation. Travelling through abstract, sonic labyrinths, taking in ambient, techno and even pop, this release is a kaleidoscopic work that demands the listeners undivided attention.

Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross (recorded by two core members of the Ever Present Orchestra, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom it was composed, on Black Truffle 033). Through the use of e-bows, the guitars take on a role akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier’s works since the early 1980s, but with added harmonic richness. Like much of Lucier’s instrumental music, the pieces recorded here focus on acoustic phenomena, especially beating patterns, produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches. The work presented here is some of the richest and most inviting that Lucier has composed. Though all of the pieces clearly belong to the same continuing exploration of the behaviour of sound in physical space and make use of related compositional devices, each takes on a strikingly different character. Titled Arc, for the full ensemble of four guitars, four saxophones, four violins, piano and bowed glockenspiel inhabits a world of sliding, uneasy tones, punctuated by a single piano note. Where Double Helix, for four guitars, rests on a pillow of warm, low hum, EPO-5, for two guitars, saxophone, violin, and glockenspiel possess a limpid, crystalline quality. Accompanying the four new compositions are two adaptations of existing pieces for radically different instrumentation, demonstrating Lucier’s excitement about the new possibilities suggested by this dedicated ensemble. Works for the Ever Present Orchestra is an essential document of the current state of Lucier’s continuing exploration, as well as offering a seductive entry-point for anyone who might yet be unacquainted with his singular body of work.

Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier. Includes a download code featuring hi-res vesions of the LP material. The download code also includes the bonus Adaptions for the Ever Present Orchestra featuring two pieces (“Two Circles” and “Braid”) that are not included on the LP version. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

Limited Edition of 500 handnumbered Box Set including 4LPs (180g), 1 CD, Download Coupon and a high quality 120 page booklet. NOTE: BOX IS SHRINK-WRAPPED BUT WILL BE OPENED FOR SHIPPING TO AVOID SEAM-SPLIT.

Black Truffle Together With Bernhard Rietbrock And Zhdk Are Honoured To Reissue This Stunning Boxset Celebrating Alvin Lucier's 85th Birthday Celebrations Which Took Place In Zurich, 2013.

Alvin Lucier Is One Of Most Important Figures In More Than A Half Century Of Avant-garde And Experimental Sound Practice. He Has No Equivalent. He Is Among America's Most Important Composers - A Towering Pillar Of Intellect, Creativity, And Beauty Realized Through Sound. His Singular And Unparalleled Body Of Work, Focused Around Acoustic Phenomena And Auditory Perception, Which Included, Among Many Others, The Groundbreaking Works Bird And Person Dyning, Music On A Long Thin Wire, And I Am Sitting In A Room, Each Quietly Shifting The Understanding Of What Music Could Be - Deceptively Discrete Gestures, Laying Their Mark On History And The Expectations Of Nearly Everything To Come, While Radically Expanding The Field. It Is Such A Life, Defined By Such Striking Accomplishment, Which This Release Celebrates Across The Four Lps, Cd, And Book Which Make Up The Lavish Illuminated By The Moon Release.

Recorded In October Of 2016 At The Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Festival At The Zurich University Of The Arts, The Box Gathers A Remarkable Range Of Performances Of Works From Lucier's Life In Music, From The Iconic To The Lesser Known. It Begins With Wonderful Stagings Of I Am In A Sitting Room And Music For Solo Performer Performed By The Composer, Before Presenting The Work Charles Curtis Performed By The Cellist For Whom It Was Composed, And Double Rainbow, A Recent Work, Performed By The Incredible Joan La Barbara. Over The Course Of The Set's Many Discs, We Encounter Works Ranging From Nothing Is Real (strawberry Fields Forever), Braid, Two Circles, Hanover, Step, Slide And Sustain, And One Arm Bandits, Performed By Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'malley, And Gary Schmalzl, With Further Contributions By Charles Curtis And Many Others Involved In The Celebrations Of Lucier's Life And Work. The Collection, By Offering An Expanse Of Material Otherwise Unavailable In The Composer's Discography, Opens A Rare Window Into The Breadth And Range Of Territory Which He Has Approached, As Well As Into The Unique Humor Which Has Quietly Bubbled Through His Entire Career. It Is A Singular Recording Event, The Likes Of Which Are Unlikely To Be Repeated.

A Worthy Tribute To One Of The Last Century's Most Important Composers, Offering Insight, Recognition, And Critical Investigation, Long Overdue And Lovingly Produced. Including An Extensive, Lavish 120 Page Book, With Numerous Unseen Images. Pressed On 180 Gram Vinyl, This Limited Edition Of 500 Individually Numbered Copies Is Unquestionably One Of The Most Beautiful And Important Releases Of 2018.

Key Selling Points: - Limited Edition Of 500 Handnumbered Units From Legendary Electronic Music Pioneer Alvin Lucier

- Lavish Box Set Including 4lps, 1 Cd, And A High Quality 120 Page Booklet.

- 180g Vinyl

- Incl. Download Coupon To Redeem All Tracks

- Over 190 Minutes Playtime

- Remarkable Collection Of Performances Of Works From Lucier's Life In Music, From The Iconic To The Lesser Known.

- Mastered & Cut By Helmut Erler At Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

ROW goes back to a collecting of field recordings that Hirsch took for Oerol, an annual theatre festival taking place on the West Frisian island of Terschelling / NL.
The recording was taken aboard the ARAD, a lifeboat of the Dutch rowing team Roeiteam Ter- schelling Recreatie during a training exercise on 25 April 2011. The course stretched from the harbour of West-Terschelling out into the Wadden Sea and back again. The focus is on the coxswain's commands which resemble a funk singer's ones and which make the team become one body working their way through the waters.

After numerous concerts and performances throughout the last years, Summe 1 is Andreas O. Hirsch's first release on makiphon. The album concentrates on peculiar soundscapes and drony pieces, carefully inter- woven by means of pitched harmonicas, electric guitars, mini fans, de- lays and the electric palm leaf, an electroacoustic invention of the artist. The eight titles evoke a space somewhere between interstellar geography (Maxwell Mountains - a plateau on planet Venus), abstract physics (Teilchenbeschleuniger), botanical scenery and animality: Kemeri 5 am features nocturnal crane calls that Hirsch recorded on a bike trip in a swamp near Riga while he was busy with decoding bird messages via morse code. Opossum Pravda is dedicated to the tenacious marsupial that likes to wander around at night and which is able to hang from trees by its tail. Kautschukwaage seems to suggest an exotic setting and provides a link to the rubber bands which one hears resonating in the miniature.
Sleeve designed by the artist. 300 copies. Mastered by Joseph Suchy.

Tape / Cassette
OG Evil Rock and Post-Punk Experiments by Phul Recorded between 2018 - 2020 Satanic payment methods accepted

We are extremely proud to announce the return of Pye Corner Audio to Lapsus Records with the EP "Where Things Are Hollow", comprised of four breath-taking songs that transport the listener to a dystopian future throughout its twenty-four minute duration. Martin Jenkins aka "the artist's artist" explores emotive techno in "Resist" and "Northern Safety Route", two tracks that coast through progressive arpeggios, slow pulsating beats and soaring pads. Meanwhile "Mainframe" and "Continental Drift" move through more ambient and melancholic terrains, two cinematic songs that are perhaps reminiscent of works by John Carpenter or Delia Derbyshire. In short, "Where Things Are Hollow" is a beguiling analogue electronica EP that is guaranteed to delight Pye Corner Audio fans and new listeners alike. This special release will also feature the collaboration of two of the country's most prestigious independent graphic artists, Alex Trochut and Basora, whose artwork for "Where Things Are Hollow" is sure to become a collector's piece.

»Efia,« the sophomore album by Rosaceae, picks up where the Hamburg-based sound artist’s 2019 debut on Neoprimitive left off, further exploring the topics that had already informed »Nadia’s Es- cape«. From its confrontative front cover to the eight tracks on the album, »Efia« is fully dedicated to the motif of resistance, but does not exhaust itself in polemics. Rather, it masterfully translates the complexities of its underlying central themes into a visceral narrative.
»Efia« was originally conceived as a commissioned work for the 2019 edition of Hamburg’s Noise- xistance festival and departed from a sentence uttered in the British 1980s TV show »Sapphire & Steel« which inspired cultural theorist Mark Fisher in his analysis of what he had coined »hauntolo-gy,« a term originally coined by the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s: »There is no time here, not anymore.«
The album again showcases Rosaceae’s knack for combining abstract experimental sound art with a form of storytelling that had already been at the centre of »Nadia’s Escape« and which relies on both verbal and musical means of giving a voice to the voiceless. The disembodied voice of - amongst others - Jesseline Preach and manipulated vocal samples blend in with dense soundscapes, elements of Neue Musik and occasional pure harsh noise. It’s a mix that deliberately puts different artistic tradi-tions into a dialogue with each other: the hallmarks of European salon culture are con- fronted with Kurdish wedding music and the unnerving loop of someone demanding a »Zugabe« (»encore«).
Thus, »Efia« not only blurs the lines between cultural and regional traditions, but also conjures up the ghosts of a past, ghosts that are more than ready to haunt the timeless present trying so hard to repress the atrocities happening at its fringes. As a whole, this makes »Efia« both a chilling work of sound art and a vibrant political statement fuelled by burning hot energy.

Amnesia Scanner announces Tearless, the Berlin-based duo’s second LP. As Amnesia Scanner founders, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala watch their icy home country of Finland thaw, the staggering scale of political recalibration and the worldwide climate crisis to come blows open old norms. This album reflects what it feels to experience Earth at a time when collapse is emerging as the prevailing narrative.


The musical scope of the record is expansive, with guest vocalists—the Peruvian artist Lalita and the Brazillian DJ/producer LYZZA—descending into a vast uncanny valley of sound. Tearless follows the 2014 AS Live [][] mixtape, 2015 audio play Angels Rig Hook, two EP’s for Young Turks, and their 2018 debut album, Another Life (PAN).



“There’s a looming sense of radical change,” they note, connecting the present to a fin de siecle horror and curiosity regarding what new world is being ushered in. Someone called Tearless a “breakup album with the planet.” To which Amnesia Scanner responds, on the LP’s closing track: “Youwill be fine, if we can help you lose your mind.”


With the crossfader on Tearless sitting closer to pop than abstraction, so too does the audience for this record widen in scope. Listening through: Opener “AS Enter” sets a sombre tone until the fucking riffs of the second track(the titular, Lalita-helmed “Tearless”) make clear there’s plenty of roaring to come. A feature from metalcore band Code Orange on “AS Flat” follows, along with “AS Trouble” (feat. Oracle, the third, machinic ghost-member of Amnesia Scanner) and together they hit as black-metal-gaze dirges. At the album’s midpoint, Lalita returns for the beautiful, operatic breakdown of “AS Acá” (released as a single in 2019), before “Call of the Center” guides listeners through three club ready tracks—the grain-processed dembow of “AS Too Late” and “AS Going” with LYZZA, and then the ambientheadbanger “AS Labyrinth.” Closing “Tearless” is the sadboy grunge of “AS U Will Be Fine” with a clear statement of intent: doom, despair, insanity, absurdity, it’s all natural, all cathartic, and all OK. Refuse like the ‘90s and party like the ‘20s—if that seems senseless, you are doing it right.

After 2019’s „Our Complex Pleasures“, an exploration of queerness and polyamory through sound, „Neoliberal Folk Songs #2“ again show Sex Und Violence’s love for conceptual work. Recorded between 2017 and 2020 and based on writings by Mark Fisher, PJ Harvey and James Bridle’s „New Dark Age“, NLF#2 is a dark collection of repetitive drum sequences, anthemic drone pop and bits of trap. Songs from the margins of neoliberalism, songs from the eternal present.

Incidentally, the last finished track of the album, „Koan For A Careless Cosmos“, was also where the whole recording process began in 2017 – for a sound piece in the wake of Fisher’s death – and the last layer of lyrics was spoken on a hissing tapeplayer just right before the first C-19 lockdown. Meandering in the same vein is the slowly creeping, LFO-twiddling „Mass Unsconsciousness“, referencing 80’s acid as well as S.U.V.‘s deep interest in traditional eastern repetitive music. In stark contrast to these quieter pieces stands the onomapoeitic fallout of „NSFW“, which was improvised and recorded on the spot without any additional overdubs. The album is framed by different versions of the „Anthropocentric Blues“, which highlight S.U.V.‘s soft spot for simple pop melodies. But despite these sensibilities, there’s a constant uneasyness spreading throughout the record. Like Mark Fisher’s ghosts, who walk upon earth, sure to never settle anywhere.

From the numbing frequencies of „Engineering Consent“ to the wordless, minimal trap-take „Verbal Austerity“, these songs are a comment on the endless performances of neoliberal strategies, be it in the emptied out mainstream of social media output, or in the administrations of any given institution – a cacophony of signifiers that never goes anywhere, just as the restless beats of the „Cultural Assassination“. The renaissance of radical right-wing thought, the last rearing of patriarchy’s ugly head – „Neoliberal Folk Songs #2“ is the soundtrack to the collapse we are all witnessing.

The whole album was mastered by Marie Rose, a.k.a. Moon RA, at Fix In The Mix LABS and is accompanied by the radical artwork of Dicey Studios. Total Metaphysical Confidence Now! Unnamed Alienation Now!

This 3rd of the Motordiscs opens with a slow and delighted beat by The JuanMacLean, which turns into an electro mesmerizing track. Is it slow trance or is it some kind of house ? Are we early in the night or late in the after party ? Are we still dreaming ? A2 « Mark 211 » by Javi Redondo takes the energy level up with some acidy synth and punchy snares, proving that the power of a track does not necessarily lies in its speed. It is now time to flip the disc, Naduve takes us later in the night, bringing a murky vibe, thanks to haunting pads and low frequency instruments, picturing a proper underground club. The sun now starts to rise on the Seine river, the last track sounds like an ode to the dawn, where voices and shiny synths will emerge and open the crowd’s eyes. It was « Peppi » by Fairmont. This was a night at Garage

A Colourful Storm presents a new album by Beequeen, the duo of Frans de Waard (Kapotte Muziek) and Freek Kinkelaar (Brunnen). Over two long-form pieces, new material from 2020 and almost-discarded fragments dating back to 1988 are collaged to form a brand new composition. Think woodblock, guitar, static radio signals, ethereal ambience. An honourable addition to Beequeen's discography and a beautiful piece of the Dutch avantgarde with historic ties to Edward Ka-Spel, De Fabriek, Merzbow and Nurse With Wound. Mastered by Peter Johan Nyland with full-colour sleeve photography by Alfred Borland

Over the years, American composer Rafael Anton Irisarrihas become ubiquitous within the spheres of ambient, drone and electronic music. Whether it’s through Irisarri’scelestial long-form albums or his lauded audio engineering credentials for countless artists and labels, Irisarri’s consistent dedication to his craft never wavers from the forefront.

While Irisarri’s compositions typically field an array of modern ambient overtones threaded through oceanic symphonies with tape loops, bowed electric guitar and vast washes of overdriven sound, his recent debut album for Dais Records, Peripeteia, portray these common themes giving way to metal and classical influences that emphasizes Irisarri’s melancholic tendencies. These unique overtures, coupled with his signature layering of distortion and bleached-out textures, fabricate an audible environment that would seemingly be at oddswith, yet gracefullycomplementeach other. In Irisarri’s own words, “My previous works internalize any exterior forces or circumstances, while trying to make sense of the world. Peripeteia reverses that approach, focusing on the personal in order to tell a wider human story.”

The emotional depth found throughout Peripeteia is impeccably on display with the track, Mellified. A collaboration with Spanish composer Yamila, the choral arrangements bring to mind the sacred music of Arvo Pärt, while her voice combines the Andalusian “Cante jondo” style with medieval modes, almost drowning in layers of octave fuzz distortion and dystopian synths patterns. On Arduous Clarity, the bright arpeggiating melody that churns throughout, offers the initial glimmer of optimism in an otherwise decaying tale of personal turmoil. This encouraging glimpse is short lived however, as the song Refuge/Refuseseemingly plummets into the mourning depths of somber despair. A chorus of voices steadily crawls from its desolate terrain –a sea of broken spirits, eternally resigned to strain and bellow their final lament. Fright and Control, a piece which is equally soul churning, seems to possess a satisfying resolve, as if after years of searching, one’s very salvation has been laid to rest through the acceptance of mortality and the enlightenment in death. Irisarri’s complexity is utilized to a forcible success, slowly pulsing throughout the foreground of his audience, further emphasizing the impending dread of resolve.

Artist statement: "Peripeteia is about the last few years, sudden reversals in fortune, illness, and comforting mortality. These sudden changes in personal life mirrors the sociopolitical transformations happening at a larger global scale in countries all over the world. Previous Irisarri works internalize exterior forces/circumstances while trying to make sense of the world. Peripeteia reverses that narrative, focusing on the personal to tell a wider human story."

Multidisciplinary NYC artist Gavilán Rayna Russom launches her own label Voluminous Arts, dedicated to highlight electronic and experimental artists whose work challenges fixed categories of genre and categorization. Her aim is to create a platform for multidisciplinary work and events. The inaugural release being her second solo album as Gavilán Rayna Russom 'Secret Passage', following up last years 'The Envoy, an homage to the East Side Rail Tunnel in Providence, Rhode Island, and the friendships she made there.

In Rayna’s words:
“I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1970’s and 80’s. The booming jewelry and textile industries of the previous decades had pulled out by that point. The Italian mob ran most details of the day to day operations of the city. As kids coming up in that environment, before the internet, me and the people I hung out with didn’t know anything else and we worked with what we had to entertain ourselves. We found places that had been forgotten by market interests and made them spaces of creative community building. One of the most special of these places was the East Side Rail Tunnel. Running for almost exactly one mile beneath the city’s streets, the tunnel and nearby Crook Point Bridge were unsupervised autonomous zones where I tasted the possibilities of a world without surveilance. The tunnel was particularly important in my creative development because not only was it a marginal zone apart from monetized spaces of creative consumption, but it also had specific experiential properties. It had a bend in it which meant that when you got to the middle of it you were in complete darkness, and I learned quickly that when you spend enough time in complete darkness you start to hallucinate, which I liked. The acoustics were also remarkable; long natural delays and harmonic-reinforcing reverberances. Making any sound in there added layers of acoustic effects which made noises physical and fluid and, combined with the complete darkness, absolutely dissolved boundaries between internal and external experience. I started hanging out there when I was 14 and continued to return there regularly until development, gentrification and policing eventually made it inaccessible. By the mid ‘90s it was sealed off with progressively more impenetrable barriers. Nowadays it looks very different. This music is about some of the significant experiences I had in this beautifully neglected place and the people I had them with.”

SWIMS returns with their third release since last summer’s romance with London’s Kit Records which spawned two beautiful albums by Romeo Poirier and Electric Capablanca.

Leaving behind the soothing natural landscapes of the previous releases, Finomehanika is an intricate 42-minute machinist journey combining the frayed melancholia of Vladislav Delay’s recently reissued Multila, with the strangely real-sounding yet otherworldly mechanics of Autechre in their Confield era. However, Finomehanika sounds thoroughly unique. It makes heavy use of the piano and field recordings for depth and ambience. The line between synthesized sound and manipulated recordings blur to a point where one becomes the other. The often subtle use of field recordings prevents us from drifting too far into the abstract, keeping us grounded in a fragmented, confusing but familiar environment.

Finomehanika is Robert’s first solo release in 20 years since 2000’s Albumski on Phthalo. The sleeve was designed by Michael Tan known for his previous work with artists such as Blanck Mass and Dopplereffekt. The album features on piano Robert’s brother Miro, better known for his releases as Qwerty. The brothers also recently collaborated on 2019 album Na Vrućem Krovu by Robert’s art-pop band Marinada.

Sarmacja’s sophomore album ‘Jazda Polska’ follows up on their 2018 debut on Astigmatic Records, ‘Tutejsi’ is being released by London-based label Byrd Out. Above all there is dub on it - however unorthodox - originally captured. Mystical flow, reckless charges and joyful songs - all without restraint and with uhlan fantasy. The spirit of a holy madman in the sarmatian version hovers over the record - the one who after a few glasses of vodka, covered with gasoline fragrance from the barbecue – once being moved, telling about the misery of the nation, and a moment after falling into ecstasy of stories about bravery in battles. Then in anger - when reminding himself how much the neighbour's diesel burns. Bottom line is simple - having fun, especially until dawn. And even if the stories of the holy madman are slightly slacked, even if at times the vibe gets gloomy, and the story isn’t fully true - who cares? ‘Jazda Polska’ got even more colors thanks to the excellent features of Kacha Kowalczyk known from Coals and Muka. She appeared in two songs on the album – Doktor Słowo & Karaoke Dub.The Orb made a remix of Olimpijczyk to end the LP, commenting on Byrd Out’s suggestion of doing a remix “Sounds weird enough”, and The Orb’s Oak Island Remix has a quintessentially Orb feel. The Oak Island reference is a nod to the Knights Templars link to the Money Pit on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Sarmacja is Paweł Bartnik, Michał Kołowacik and (now also) Aleksandra Szalińska aka. FLicker Fox, musicians operating at the forefront of the Polish experimental scene .

Mika Vainio about Tetra album: "This is how it sounds when bacteria sours milk to acid".

The first solo album of entirely new material in more than 15 years from DENNIS YOUNG (founding member of LIQUID LIQUID). This collection of instrumental pieces may surprise those familiar with his previous projects as it charts a new direction in his career. 12 tracks. Pressing of 300.

To anybody with the slightest interest in electronic music and krautrock Hans Joachim Roedelius needs no further introduction: as founding member of Kluster (with Conrad Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius, after Schnitzler's departure as Cluster) and Harmonia (with Mebius and Michael Rother) he is one of the highly reputated pioneers and key figures in both genres. Now in his eighties, Roedelius is still very productive and not only performs regularly but also released an impressive amount of work in the recent years. "Ubi Bene" sees him join forces with Leon Muraglia, electronic artist and guitar player of a younger generation who besides his solo recordings also works as DJ and studio musician. The 12 tracks of the album add up to an elegant musical trip that meanders between moody piano ambient, experimental passages and contemporary electronica that adds a new fascinating chapter to Roedelius' impressive oeuvre.

Lixo - the production alias of Alex Hislop, founder of influential London party collective, GETME! - returns to the crew's label arm with new single 'Writer's Block', featuring 1-800-Dinosaurs signee Trim.

The follow-up to 2015's 'Gloomer' EP, 'Writer's Block' sees Lixo lay the perfect foil for Trim - and his notoriously off-beat flow - to navigate through. Sections of coarse, blacked-out vocal sampling are off-set by warm, tribal bass sounds and fluttery, dreamscape melodies that tug at the more experimental, exploratory corners of London's club music landscape.

With a back catalogue already spanning 13 records - including key releases from the likes of Becoming Real, Slime and Dam Mantle - and a regular slot on NTS Live, London party-come-label GETME! have established themselves as one of the city's key bass hubs over the last 10 years. Formed by Alex Hislop (Lixo) in 2006, the brand now spans events, radio and their aforementioned label arm.