Beats News

Plants Dub is an art project of the homonym collective based in Lecce - Italy formed by Maria Teresa Santoro, art historian and light designer, Francesco Andriani De Vito aka Dubin dj and producer, and Andrea Presicce aka NoFinger Nails, dub master and producer. They work in Plants Dub project in a mutual exchange of skills so as to be able to research in a way where art and science has no borders. Plants Dub connects electronic music and bio-acoustic researches. Through samplings and synthesizers Plants Dub produces an inter-species communication in order to form a complete human-plant audio exchange. The album was composed using melodies generated by plants thanks to a special sound device that allowed the translation of the plants' electrical impulses into sound. Plant sounds were recorded between March 2018 and July 2019 in Salento. The musical production has followed a double register: in Acanthus Mollis, Morus and in Phoenix Canariensis the vegetable melodies overlap to specially composed dub rhythms, in Laurus Nobilis, Olea Europaea and in Quercus, the tree melodies are translated into ambient sounds.

“…Voices Heard From The Year Of Thirteen Moons…”
Beyond the decay of ruins hums the subtle sound of Vapor, a suite of dystopian instrumentals by Italians Do It Better visionary Johnny Jewel. His trademark analog synthesizers have never sounded more crystalline, their landscape never more evocatively barren. Chiming bells slowly twirl like the rusted music box of a child’s nightmare, a pitch-black bleak that is utterly frightful — Jewel channels the beauty & horror of a world that long ago abandoned its own destiny. This is a fever dream flashback. The kind that strikes you in the blur of night & refuses to weaken its grip until the sheets are drenched in sweat. This soundtrack is as elegant as it is violent, conjured in the deepest blacks & most vivid reds. These 21 celestial tracks clock in at just over an hour. Warping wind from a spiraling pinwheel…The sound of dust in the Garden of Hera, walking the tightrope between Life & Hades. The thin line that divides the Heavens from the Earth. Breathe Deep.

Produced & Mixed By Johnny Jewel
Mastered By Mike Bozzi At Bernie Grundman Mastering
Cut By Bernie Grundman In Hollywood
Artwork By Johnny Jewel

Was the acronym WTF! first emitted in anticipation of trying to describe Berlin label Kashual Plastik

Label owner Frans Ambient himself morphs, swapping aliases, as his releases shape-shift, the imprint single mindedly crafting it's own sound world. With early releases by NY duo Georgia; a mixtape by DJ Richard; the multi-discipline compilation EP "A Weird State Of Experimental Experience' - housed in a grass matting cover, embellished with a screen printed itinerant monk; something akin a postal sack (screen printed again) containing early tape works of Australian electronic pioneer Any Rantzen; and the sharp, wire-bound hand-made EP by magical Japanese electronic / art duo group A.

Mind your fingers, filling is hot!

Kashual Plastik 007 is more than just a double agent, it's a costume changing fifth columnist, destroying and reassessing how we could or should release music in this spoon-fed era.

Established scholars Georgia, alongside freshers NAR, Paul Arambula and KC, mix drinks with F_ingers (a combo of Carla dal Forno, Tarquin Manek & Samuel Karmel (CS + Creme); A.K. Klosowski, the 80´s experimental tape artist from Hamburg, rubs shoulder pads with Brannten Schnüre fresh from their blinding album via Low Company; Nadine Byrne from Swedish noisesters Ectoplasm Girls; Andre Uhl, musician and futurologist - there's plenty of seats on top. The busload of creators on this anthology weave a psychedelic, dream-like state, with drones, opiated melodies and stellar visions. A pox on your coffee-table music, this wooden beast is both table and feast.

Greg Hates Car Culture was Venetian Snares' first ever vinyl release. Long out of print, it came out in 1999, as the third release on Minneapolis label History Of The Future. Aaron Funk's hallmarks were there from the start. His absurdist sense of humour, the razor sharp edits and his use of odd time-signatures. There is a rawness here, not often captured on later records, where you can imagine Aaron playing live in front of a room full of young breakcore fanatics. Indeed most of the tracks here were recorded live, tweaking his effects and EQ on the fly, to DAT from his Amiga. The album opens with "Personal Discourse", recorded in 1997, which samples Aaron calling into a Dominatrix live on community cable TV, while "Fuck A Stranger In The Ass" samples from the film The Big Lebowski. The track "Aqap" has a different sound to the others having been recorded later, in 1998, on Aaron's first PC.

We have also added three hitherto unreleased 1997 tracks to this reissue. Two of them "Eating America.." and "Punk Kids" appeared on Venetian Snares rare self-released 1998 cassette Spells and the long sought after "Milk" was only passed around by his friends.

Greg Hates Car Culture lets you hear the raw energy of a musician at the birth of his sound.

SC-164 is a project based out of Brooklyn, NY. The Channel series will include music exclusively by Greg Schappert aka Donor, under his SC-164 alias, and will be focused around Electro, Industrial and Experimental music.

A key player in the New York scene and boss of her own Dusk & Haze label, it was Francis Harris' Kingdoms that initially released Sophie Saze's standout two-part album, and that is where this forward looking package of highly original remixes lands. First up is German artist Roman Flügel, who’s responsible for a myriad of musical aliases and just as many different sounds. Here he is in experimental electronic mode and reworks 'Cure' into an elongated groove with twisted synth lines layering up over the shimmer, shadowy beats. It's a ghoulish track with a creepy atmosphere.
Swede Anthony Linell makes tripped out, heady techno on Northern Electronics, always with a stylish aesthetic. That continues here as he reimagines 'Aliens' as an absorbing cosmic soundtrack. Supple, rubbery drums bubble down low while broad pads and astral motifs colour the airways above and sink you into a state of trance. New York beat maker and Blueberry Records boss FaltyDL then steps up with a remix of 'Self'. It is a typically off-kilter groove that seems to float on post-jungle drums while distant synth details make for a dreamy atmosphere. Closing out this killer package is Saze's original track 'Dreams', an intense techno cut where coarse textures peel off the industrial clatter of the drums.

Radically shapeshifting and surrealist, as spinning sonic prisms taunting the ears, 'Cercle Vicieux' and 'Cercle Vertueux' channel Fluxus artistry, straying past jazz-licked drones, avalanching low end and blood red scatting. Scenes both condescending and anxious -- this release is carried by its interwoven conflicts, where strange attractors reveal knots at each listen. The fifth Plafond is a special joint project tying the synchronicity of two contemporary minds. Both Zoe Mc Pherson and Rupert Clervaux are known to actively transgress art forms, reconstituting production methods through respective audiovisual and literary pursuits. The listener is relocated in their musical interzone, bordered by avant-garde experimentalism on one side, and bass-heavy club mutations on the other. This ambiguation lays out a gateway, one through which modern producers can re-adopt the revolutionary energy of those who unraveled conventions on music and sound in the first place -- a 'Cercle Vertueux', indeed. Comes in a hand printed sleeve with multiple tints grey and silver, including an Obi-strip, by the BAKK Interzone Alcazar.

Strafe F.R. are from Dusseldorf, Germany and have been releasing albums through Touch on and off since 1986...

Shasta Cults is the musical project of Canadian electronics technician Richard Smith. For almost two decades, Smith was the official Buchla & Associates go-to repair person for studios, collectors, and musicians around the world, having worked with artists like Aphex Twin, Suzanne Ciani, Mort Subotnick and institutions like NYU, The Library of Congress and Mills College in Oakland, Ca.

Recording demonstrations of the rare equipment that found its way on to his workbench is how Smith describes the origins of Shasta Cults. Although sounds have been trickling out for decades via Soundcloud and other outlets, it wasn’t until 2017 that Smith recorded his first album using one of these rare instruments – the Buchla 700. Configurations, released this past September by Important Records, features eight tracks of heavily-modulated, wave-shaped explorations drenched in effects, and was the catalyst for his latest releases.

Recorded over the span of 3 months in the fall of 2018, this album was programmed solely on the only fully-functional Buchla Touché. Developed in the early 1980s with hardware by Don Buchla and software programmed by musician David Rosenboom, the Touché features waveforms generated internally by twenty-four digital oscillators using frequency modulation and sophisticated digital and analog signal processing for timbre and output assignment, all of this controlled via a six-octave black and white keyboard, unusual for a Buchla instrument.

This LP is a continuation on themes first heard on Configurations, with more consideration given to the generation and capturing of the pieces. This album is less dark than previous releases, showcasing the incredible fidelity of the hardware used and Smiths evolution as an audio engineer. Put on some headphones, find a comfortable chair, and let this LP transport you to the mystifying southern cascades of Siskiyou County.

CA2+ first appeared on last years compilation Scandinavian Swords II and Gait Cycle EP further showcase excellent, sterile and cerebral noise rhythms from this upcoming Stockholm producer.

Make Noise Records is excited to announce our upcoming release of Brett Naucke's "Electronic Hypnosis Program" EP.

Recorded in Chicago on a Eurorack system full of Make Noise modules, "Electronic Hypnosis Program" presents an eclectic collection of experimental electronic works for sampled voice, field recordings and synthesized sound.

"Electronic Hypnosis Program" follows Naucke's acclaimed 2018 release "The Mansion" (on Spectrum Spools), and continues his exploration of marrying an ever-evolving practice of advanced synthesis techniques with personal and conceptual narratives. Beyond live performance, Naucke has provided the original scores for several films, sound design for interactive gaming, and presented many works for multi-channel audio installations.

" Music may not actually have height, width or depth, but Brett Naucke's certainly feels three-dimensional. Using synthesizers, field recordings and a variety of other sources, the Chicago-based artist crafts expansive pieces that are like physical spaces you can enter and explore."

-Marc Masters, NPR

"Electronic Hypnosis Program" will be released on November 1st, on clear 12" vinyl in an edition of 300, with full-color artwork by Chicago-based visual artist Bill Connors.

Contagious is a solid blending of avant-garde experimentation and electronic music. Formed by two innovative voices from the Improvisation scene of Berlin (Andrea Neumann and Sabine Ercklentz) and Mieko Suzuki, a well-crafted and creative DJ and musician who’s operating in Berlin venues and festivals since a long time.

Contagious is one of the most forward thinking, mind-melting projects to hit the electronic music scene. Intense and powerful, yet rooted in a tradition of crafting and sculpturing of in the most creative ways, all this building up within a solid structure of instant composition and improvisation. The trio plunder each other’s musical spheres, appropriate them and switch roles. Andrea Neumann on her infamous Inside Piano, an instrument she pioneered and crafted, is applying the most creative feedback processing to simple piano strings and sending them occasionally to Mieko Suzuki’s processing rig, who also uses her own pre-recorded sounds and her skills on turntables, while Sabine Ercklentz’s trumpet sounds blast through her processing system and altogether the three musicians communicate into logics of composition and futuristic structures, where fragile sound textures and pulses become monumental.

Contagious is also the debut album recorded and produced by Rabih Beaini. The Trio wanders in new aesthetic areas, sound is a texture where the processing rigs are constantly developing new forms and evolutions. Structures and grooves implode in noisy fragments, growing into a deep trance state.

moonraker's second full-length release comes as a split-LP: Unvarete I and II. The duo continue to develop their inimitable approach to extended thematic development, melodic and rhythmic counterpoint, and chromatic harmonies.

10"

Roving punk ethnomusicologist Julien Hairon aka Judgitzu delivers fire on Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes with two cuts of high tension, cheek-pulling club G-force.
After spending the past 6 years recording soundscapes and traditional musicians across Asia,
Oceania and Africa, and releasing them on his Les Cartes Postales Sonores label (along with reissues of tape and CD discoveries on his petPets label), Judgitzu’s finally presents his first electronic music productions as the result of his residency in Tanzania since 2017. Clearly inspired by the domestic, hyperlocal sound of Singeli, but more stripped and tipped towards minimalism, the results have been lighting up clubs, back-rooms and festivals from Kampala to Salford and beyond over summer 2019, and are only set to go further with this full release.
‘Umeme’ is grade A rocket fuel that runs at 180bpm for nearly 7 minutes of unyielding, panic-inducing stabs and undulating bass rhythms. It starts up ferociously and does not let go until the end, sustaining a state of high alertness that will leave even the most reckless ravers breathless but ready to go again. ‘Kelele’ follows with equal regard for your heart rate and rave health, but this time by stealth and less in-your-face, filtering the drums with field recordings of revving
motorbikes and squawking animals in an ebb and flow of pilly rushes and tropical hyperdelia.
Hands-down it’s one of 2019’s deadliest dancefloor sessions and hopefully the start of many to
come from an exemplary new producer.

New York based Irish artist Orlando drops Happy Bossman, three different styles of bass cuts with the A1 "Happy Bossman" on a more grime club sound tip aswell as "Orogony" and "You Still Echo In Me" on the more experimental side. The b-side features two tripped out mixes by WhereTheTimeGoes head Lastminuteman known for his excellent tape series."

Clear Vinyl

Regarded by Dominik Fernow as the “best US noise project in terms of texture and composition”, Skin Crime return to Hospital Productions with an immanent inversion of noise convention
exploring ideas of tense, slow-burn patience instead of aggressive intensity.
Brutally active between the early ‘90s and mid ‘00s, Skin Crime took a 12 year hiatus until 2016 and the bloodshed of their instantly sold-out, 20CD boxset of archival material. That same year they
also issued ‘Ghosts I Have Been’, a crushingly bleak album inspired by Japanese mythology and ghost stories which have paved the way for this new one, where the band’s Patrick O’Neil and Mark Jameson continue to refine their instincts into the dankest brand of organic ambient noise.
In key with their ghostly Japanese muse, specifically the “Bakaneko” or “Ghost Cat” movies of the ‘50s and ‘60s, as well as the writing of Lafcadio Hearn aka Koizumi Yakumo - author of ‘Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things’ - Skin Crime’s music in ‘Traveller on the Road’ is all about presence and the suggestibility of hypnagogic and half-awake states. Their cold-fingered sleight of hand is applied to exceedingly fine layers of textural enigma in long, unbroken tracts that hold the listener’s gaze with frightening power.
‘Avoid Large Places At Night’ takes hold with intravenal potency, very subtly drawing eyes to half-mast with its mechanical womb-like ambience, and stealthily introducing subharmonic rumbles
and peripheral rustles that suggest unseen spectres lurking in a thicket of ghosts. A lack of sudden movement only ratchets the threat levels to seat-edge. Likewise with its deeply soporific subs
and texturhythms, the B-side’s ‘Black Cat From The Grove’ continues to numb the senses in a noise style, but eviscerated of all open aggression, preferring a dense mode of suggestion that only emphasises the unheimlich nature of their music.
It’s a masterclass in saying it without saying it, and effectively amounts to a missing link between Kevin Drumm, Painjerk and Mika Vainio, or even Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement and Meitei, that should not be missed by any fans of the above.

First reissue of this long time looked after Japanese experimental gem from the 80's !

A walk in Paris somewhere between the 30's and the 50's made by a Japanese lost soul. "Montparnasse" by Yoran is a surreal journey into an era which has maybe existed but long gone. A melancholic phantasy about a time you'll never know and can only smell the atmosphere. Memories and flashes come from an ancient time, cobbled streets where heels crack far away surrounded by the tickle of a street musician, a classical dance class directed by some piano notes or an announcement from an old train station. The cryptic french spoken-word infuses the extracts and sound collages taken from different french movies looped into a broken tape player. The result is one of the most mysterious and looked after japanese 80's underground record.This reissue is pressed for the first time on 12" at 45 RPM. Remastered and limited to 500 copies.

Utter presents 'The Saturn Star', a score to an imaginary film by music producer and visual artist Jorge Velez.

Inspired by The Third Ear Band, late-period Coil, Carlos Peron's lurid soundtracks and European folk music, Velez's score accompanies the evocative tale of a 16th-century physician-alchemist hunted down by The Inquisition in western Europe.

Much like his acclaimed 'Hassan' soundtrack, Velez purposefully limited the amount of equipment he used to create a cohesive sonic environment, this time restricting himself to a Korg MonoPoly and Prophet 6. The music flowed quickly, with the entire project recorded and mixed within two weeks. The resulting work veers from moments of unsettling intensity to blissful beauty, underpinned by a lingering sense of mystery and paranoia.

Velez is also an avid illustrator and a new 8-page riso-printed booklet titled 'Systema' is included within the LP sleeve. It's intended as a 'guide for self-transformation', with each image to be taken in slowly alongside the music. For Velez, sound and vision are closely intertwined:

"Making music is as visual a process for me as making a drawing. A piece of music that's working is able to take on some fantastic shapes or evoke entire scenes or environments. Creating a story, characters and scenes that vary in intensity make the process of building a score for an imagined film tremendous fun. Listening back to 'The Saturn Star' I can still see those 'film scenes' in my mind..."

For the uninitiated, Velez has been producing music since the mid-90s - his early work was compiled by Rush Hour on its dedicated 'MMT Tape Series' releases - and has been prolific since, with releases under his own name on L.I.E.S, Berceuse Heroique, Skudge and Crème Organization coming in quick succession. He has also produced under a number of aliases such as Professor Genius, Bridge & Tunnel Kids and Duermo for Echovolt, Italians Do It Better and Borneo. His collaborators include Willie Burns, Gilb'r and Acid Arab among others. He currently lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

*Limited to 250 copies - includes 'Systema' A5 booklet*

"Are you still there?"
"Yeah so she said the body is the mind's measuring instrument or something - the mind renders information registered on its sensory surface, combines it with old info from the same source and keeps the whole accumulated stock poised to guide action"
"Hence why it sounds like this?"
"Yeah exactly"

8 Spinhaunt Coil

'Verzamelen I' is the first volume in a retrospective series in which we look back at the work of Wouter van Veldhoven. Throughout the past decade, the Dutch composer built an impressive catalogue of music in which tape loop and modular synthesis experiments hold a central place. Both collaborations and solo-work saw the light through some distinctive labels such as Slaapwel, The Tapeworm, Umor Rex and Digitalis among others.

With this series we want to dive into some work which slightly went under the radar. The pieces are collected from several releases and are re-mastered for the occasion. Some of them were never physically released before.

Marcus Fischer and r beny kindly joined this trip by offering two new reworks which close this first volume.

Songs taken from ‘A head stuck in tapes’, ‘Een paar schetjes en optredens 2005-2006’ & ‘Slow lullabies for babies’.

LIMITED TO 300 COPIES - HAND PAINTED BORDER

The sounds Jan Harder and Steve Hartmann discover in their studio sessions unravel their power between the notes. What they capture is for us to marvel at. The eeriness, the beauty. Like observing a ghost in the headlights.

Terry Fox was a first generation Bay Area conceptual artist. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked extensively with sound, especially the use of piano wires detached from their native instrument and anchored between opposing walls of the performance space.

Linkage, Fox's first album, was originally released in 1982 to accompany an installation at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. The record would mark Fox's first attempt to realize his groundbreaking and visceral piece "Berlin Wall Scored for Sound."

Side one links five ways of playing the piano wires: drumming, pulling, bowing, beating and scraping. The room itself acts as a type of natural resonator as Fox moves the wires with padded mallet, his bare fingers, violin bow, wooden shish kebab stick and rusted metal rod. The effect of such plain arrangements can be utterly hypnotizing.

The second half of Linkage was recorded in the attic of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, West Berlin, in May 1981. A thirty-three meter long wire was held in contact with a sardine tin. Over the course of 20 minutes, pulsating drones dissolve into rhythmic patterns that sound almost synthetic in origin. As noted in the original LP pamphlet, all these sounds were strictly acoustic; the only electronics involved was the recording equipment.

In an introduction for this edition, Marita Loosen-Fox and Ron Meyers write, "The desire to eliminate any barriers between the art and the viewer/audience connects all of Fox's situations/actions/performances. The ultimate goal is to communicate as directly as possible, which finds its most concentrated expression in the artist's works with sound."

This first-time reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with booklet.

VIAJE" is the debut album by Swiss musician Roland Bucher and was produced with an instrument developed and built by the artist himself, the noise table. VIAJE presents the culmination of almost a decade of exploring the possibilities that the curious device offers. Combining the physicality of the improvisational praxis with a classical approach to composition, these five songs highlight the emotional, narrative and atmospheric potentials of granular noise. VIAJE was not only produced with an unheard-of instrument, it also comprises music that no-one ever has heard quite like that before.

Combining the reacTIVision software with Max/MSP programming, the noise table is both a controller and a granular synthesis sampler. This makes it possible for Bucher, a seasoned drummer in bands like Blind Butcher or Kion, to improvise freely in front of an audience. Small musical instruments and everyday objects provide the input for the samples. Those samples are then connected to objects that Bucher moves around on a glass window inserted into the table which is being filmed from below, thus controlling the output. Starting from improvisations much like in his live sets, VIAJE slowly took form during Bucher’s 2018 visits to Chile and Brazil as part of a scholarship programme which also saw him perform several times to South American audiences.

The quiet moments on these five tracks are all part of a greater dynamic, one that is thoroughly composed by still marked by the physicality of how the sounds were achieved. The juxtaposition of the abstract and tangible is mirrored by reality effects that create moments of irritation. After "Acamar" opens the record with a crescendo of harsh electronic sounds, "Curinanco" seems to draw on natural sounds and even birdsong. Can this be… real? And if so, what about the raging jazz drumming of "Ircan" - is all of that played by hand, or just something that Bucher triggered by moving around some objects on a piece of glass? Also "Praecipua" and "Cau-Cau" surely do not answer these questions. Both under five minutes long, they however brilliantly prove that a complex entity like Bucher’s noise table can yield very different, direct emotional responses. After the blistering first three tracks, they serve as a melancholic coda to an album like none other.

Multivocal is a polyphonic maze that unfolds to both the body and the mind. A generative take on rhythm and spacial perception, it presents the same events in different configurations. The two pieces of the album, "Solid of Revolution" and "Never Odd or Even", mirror each other with the same principle in different musical scales: steady pulses with one millisecond difference in tempo start beating together, then slowly phase organically and progress into ever-changing rhythmic patterns until they finally return to unison.

Multivocal emphasizes shifts of attention in the listener’s experience and plays with the expectations that frame it. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, the pieces reveal the many different aspects and modes of perception that can arise within the same sequence of notes. In this way Multivocal is influenced by concepts of gestalt psychology such as multistable perception - a term describing ambiguous patterns that offer multiple interpretations at once. The minimalism and repetitive quality of the music also refers to trance-inducing and collective music practices, driven by the strong bodily affects induced through the use of rhythms.

Jessica Ekomane's debut LP, Multivocal, is brilliantly original but will also appeal to fans of Caterina Barbieri, Alessandro Cortini, Shasta Cults, ELEH and the strand of minimal electronic music that runs through the Imprec catalog. Pressed in a first edition of 500 copies.

Those two compositions were recorded live during Ars Electronica 2018 at the occasion of the sleeping event "Sonatas for Sleep/less", curated by multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang and cultural theorist Matthew Fuller.

Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.

Jessica Ekomane is one the six composers chosen as collaborators by Natascha Süder Happelman for her installation at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019. She’s also part of the SHAPE Platform roaster of artists for 2019. Her work has been presented in various institutions worldwide such as CTM festival (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), Dommune (Tokyo) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha).

Black Vinyl 2x12"

‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is NYC mutant Madteo’s incredible new album of trigger-happy club graffiti on Demdike Stare’s DDS, weighing in a keenly anticipated follow-up to 2012’s cult-classic
‘Noi No’ LP for Sähkö Splitting at the seams with deviant funk and irrepressible attitude, Madteo’s first LP in 7 years forms a fractal, mixtape-like mosaic of asymmetric techno informed by skewed traces of rap, House, R&B and dancehall. Its 12 tracks are delivered in an enviably nonchalant, freehand style that’s become the Italian-American artist’s ear-snagging signature since 2012’s ‘Noi No’ and ‘Mad Dip Revue’ albums, and also a dozen 12”s and mixtapes over the interim; all of which exerted heavy inspiration for everyone from Andy Stott and Joy O to Demdike Stare over the past decade, making this new LP a perfectly unusual fit for the anything-goes DDS aesthetic shared by label alumni including Mica Levi, Equiknoxx, Iueke and Shinichi Atobe.
Without beating around the bush, ‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is a straight-up masterpiece of cut-up sampledelia bound to make the club dance differently. Crammed with sawn-off edits that never lose the thread, its wild and effortlessly inventive turns of phrase are anathema to linear club music convention, generating fizzing alchemy from mutually exclusive bedfellows such as dancehall and techno, or R&B and noise that could really only be executed by a producer of Madteo’s calibre. Yet for all its singular nature, the album is also patently symptomatic of the times,
sub-consciously parsing a gripping intimacy, personality and urgent yet elusive psychedelia from ubiquitous media overload.
Kicking off with another *****-sampling zinger ‘1 4 U’ (following his infamous use of ‘Marvin’s Room’ on ‘Noi No’), and ending up mired in the melancholy gauze of ‘The Lies That Bind’, at each step the
album effortlessly resists a struggle to square the nature of artistic expression. Fragments of gospel blues noise intersect gauntlets of filtered house fuckry, while restless Autechrian electro rubs up against uncoiled trap and needle-worrying levels of textured bass turbulence, leading to an outrageous turn of stuttering ragga-tekno in ‘Resident Alien (Broke-’n-Steppers Reluctant Club Mix)’ and a final side of collapsed, post-club styles that will leave listeners wondering wtf just happened, and ready to do it all again.

Yellow Vinyl 2x12"

‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is NYC mutant Madteo’s incredible new album of trigger-happy club graffiti on Demdike Stare’s DDS, weighing in a keenly anticipated follow-up to 2012’s cult-classic
‘Noi No’ LP for Sähkö Splitting at the seams with deviant funk and irrepressible attitude, Madteo’s first LP in 7 years forms a fractal, mixtape-like mosaic of asymmetric techno informed by skewed traces of rap, House, R&B and dancehall. Its 12 tracks are delivered in an enviably nonchalant, freehand style that’s become the Italian-American artist’s ear-snagging signature since 2012’s ‘Noi No’ and ‘Mad Dip Revue’ albums, and also a dozen 12”s and mixtapes over the interim; all of which exerted heavy inspiration for everyone from Andy Stott and Joy O to Demdike Stare over the past decade, making this new LP a perfectly unusual fit for the anything-goes DDS aesthetic shared by label alumni including Mica Levi, Equiknoxx, Iueke and Shinichi Atobe.
Without beating around the bush, ‘Dropped Out Sunshine’ is a straight-up masterpiece of cut-up sampledelia bound to make the club dance differently. Crammed with sawn-off edits that never lose the thread, its wild and effortlessly inventive turns of phrase are anathema to linear club music convention, generating fizzing alchemy from mutually exclusive bedfellows such as dancehall and techno, or R&B and noise that could really only be executed by a producer of Madteo’s calibre. Yet for all its singular nature, the album is also patently symptomatic of the times,
sub-consciously parsing a gripping intimacy, personality and urgent yet elusive psychedelia from ubiquitous media overload.
Kicking off with another *****-sampling zinger ‘1 4 U’ (following his infamous use of ‘Marvin’s Room’ on ‘Noi No’), and ending up mired in the melancholy gauze of ‘The Lies That Bind’, at each step the
album effortlessly resists a struggle to square the nature of artistic expression. Fragments of gospel blues noise intersect gauntlets of filtered house fuckry, while restless Autechrian electro rubs up against uncoiled trap and needle-worrying levels of textured bass turbulence, leading to an outrageous turn of stuttering ragga-tekno in ‘Resident Alien (Broke-’n-Steppers Reluctant Club Mix)’ and a final side of collapsed, post-club styles that will leave listeners wondering wtf just happened, and ready to do it all again.

Recorded by Randy Williams in 1997 at home studio in San Francisco, California, after a two year stay at Camp Darby military base near Pisa, Italy and some occasional off-duty visits to Giancarlo Lobel in Rome and Marina di Pisa. The encounters made in that period were inspiring for Williams to create a strange and personal style upon his return to the United States. Released and distributed privately in Italy and USA to group of artists and appreciators as compact disc after spectacles, and as music library soundtrack.

Pivotal Iranian artist Ata Ebtekar mounts a head-buzzing debut for Diagonal, pushing microtonal tunings and timbres into mind-bending geometrical designs that echo the modular synth + strings formulæ of Dariush Dolat-Shahi for Smithsonian Folkways, but keen much deeper into noisy, uncanny valleys of modernist perceptual exploration
‘Parallel Persia’ presents the latest iteration of Sote’s restlessly searching sound which has been in action for 30 years now. Commissioned for an AV performance at Donau festival in 2018, the album is a natural extension of his stunning ‘Sacred Horror In Design’ LP with Opal Tapes, feeding classical Iranian music tropes into a computer and modular synths to diffract and detach their meaning
and operation, open them up to strange possibilities of electro-acoustic practice in the process.
But more than ever in ‘Parallel Persia’, his focus turns from percussion to tonal relationships, combining various synthesis techniques and instrumental recordings at the service of a holistic
voice and “locked timbre”, or more simply a poetic way of uniting his sounds into a brilliant aural energy.
As Ebtekar explains, “Conceptually, Parallel Persia deals with the illusion and creation of an artificial hyperreal culture manipulated and controlled by an imperious agency somewhere within all galaxies. Like all realities, greed and arrogance channels destruction of life. However, the path to havoc includes resistance via beauty, grace and symmetry. Snapshots of an apocryphal Iran is presented via sonic schematics for a synthetic “Meta-Persian” experience. This experience can be in our present day life or maybe somewhere else somehow differently in a parallel world…”
In this surreal noumenal space, Sote triggers a series of beguiling chain reactions that resonate throughout each track, with electronic frequencies modulating the acoustic and vice-versa in a dizzying and mathematically sound “euphonious complete whole.” Here, the Tar and Santur initially sound like themselves in ‘Modality Transporter’, but by the end of this opener they are transformed into ribboning tendrils of extruded electronics, and continue to morph in fascinating ways, joined by unearthly voices in ‘Brass Tacks’, and pulled into bittersweet taffy on ‘Atomic Hypocrisy’, while utterly upending our proprioceptions in ‘Trans Force’, and ancient-futuristic chants and dance rhythms working in parallel dimensions to Rashad Becker in ‘Pipe Dreams’, until he’s speaking in a purely singular language of unique intonation and shatterproof, beatless rhythm on ‘Pseudo
Scholastic’.

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: DOME (July 1980), DOME 2 (October 1980) and DOME 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, WILL YOU SPEAK THIS WORD: DOME IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.

These albums represent some of the most beautifully stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.

Previously issued in the out of print DOME 1-4+5 box set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card

Tokyo based H.Takahashi follows up his ‘Raum’ LP for Where To Now? with ‘Sonne und Wasser’, a continuation & development of his unmistakable brand of meditative Pulse Minimalism.

Where ‘Raum’ was concerned with architectural space and energy, ‘Sonne und Wasser’ turns its focus towards the lives of the plants & flowers that live amongst us. This LP has been born from a deep adoration of Horticulture and the microscopic lifecycle of the plant world, where themes of vitality & slow growth are explored through Takahashi’s gloriously delicate & considered movements.

In his own words… “I wanted to express the plant that was slow, quiet, powerful, and full of vitality. In an attempt to express the world of one plant, the four songs that make up this album are all based on the first one, ‘Nymphaea’… The melody, chord and tone throughout become familiar, and each change of scene is expressed by subtly changing the arrangement and development of sounds. This is intended for when you want to feel like a plant, or as an indoor soundtrack - I want the music to be played so that it decorates the plants within a room.”

The beauty of Takahashi’s work lays in his commanding ability to stop you in your tracks via a force that is barely there, embracing the use of space & silence to deliver a deep & considered trip. Back in 2017 we said of his then LP… “The music is to help us function - it's music to work to, to sleep to, to help us find a sense of space and oneness within a world that is increasingly wild and untameable.” A Couple of years down the line and our World has continued on its mad path, and it is a true privilege to enable a healing output, & to encourage a global opportunity to switch off and immerse oneself in H.Takahashi’s flourishing Fauna phantasm.

“Takahashi draws cues from a melting pot of closely connected yet wholly individual strands of Minimalism - from the Japanese Minimalist works from the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa, to masters such as Erik Satie and John Cage, and Ambient leaders Brian Eno and Roedelius, Takahashi soaks this historical influence and rings it out it through a modern filter to create stillness, ethereal beauty, and transcendent energy.”

Mad Habitat returns with a serene full-length from Eye Nono. Channeling the more progressive side of American New Age and 80s Public Access soundtracks alongside the rich tradition of Australian ambient music, the record is awash with dreamy melodies and drifting pads. Evoking days spent by the water along the coastline, the album is a beautiful synthesis of the ocean's abundant natural beauty.

“Experimental trio Giraffe crystalize time on ‘Desert Haze’, their new LP on Marionette. Giraffe is the musical project of Sascha Demand (guitar), Jürgen Hall (keys), and Charly Schöppner (percussion). Sascha Demand is a composer that comes from a contemporary and improvised musical background, collaborating with the likes of Ensemble Integrales and Vinko Globokar. Jürgen Hall works in electroacoustic experimental projects, theatre and film scores, with releases on Staubgold and Edition Stora. Charly Schöppner is known for his popular music releases such as Boytronic on major production companies in the 1980´s and composes for theatre, dance, and film scores. With only a couple of releases to date on the wonderful Meakusma imprint as well as an EP on Marmo, little is known about Giraffe. After letting go of other artistic projects, the trio now focuses solely on Giraffe by continuously searching for and finding their own unique language.

Sascha, Jürgen and Charly have quite diverse musical backgrounds, though morphing into Giraffe they tower into one single composer. Their music is a critical statement, not in a political sense but rather an artistic one. Being mindful about what it means to create and how to position themselves as artists nowadays (without the constant hassle of being en vogue and short-lived trends) shaped their rather rare and stoic artistic stance. It is refreshingly honest to see their expression develop so naturally.

On Desert Haze, they’ve created a vibrant and minimalistic tribal sound that feels inspired by the Saharan traditional music of the Tuareg, Jazz, and German psychedelic krautrock. Giraffe themselves also list the radical music of the Viennese School (Schoenberg along with his pupils Berg and Webern) as well as the Köln School with its early electronic experiments as their main influence and inspiration. More precisely the composition process and the organization of musical material within space and time, where a conceptual and intellectual approach melds with an experimental yet expressive sound searching method.

Side A focuses on the trios studio work; it is built around tone color and pitch analysis of resonating prepared guitar sounds. Through a unique mixture of free improvisation and a serialism "rule set”, they develop instrumental layers and structures to form their tracks. Side B sees Giraffe playing more freely with a reduced setup - representative of what you may hear when listening to them live.
Desert Haze, along with its track-titles, showcases an almost mimetic approach to art. The haptic music grabs the listener not as a passive recipient but as an active resonant body to vibrate through. One can almost feel the Elements, pressure and heat forming a diamond, hypnotic overtones ringing through windy caves, shamanistic rhythms conjuring up mysterious and ancient landscapes - where the constant cycle of sedimentation and erosion reveals structures of fragile beauty - always gentle to the hand’s touch and the mind’s eye.”

How could we describe multi-instrumentalist Penelope Antena ? From her Lo-Fi sounding EP ‘Down the Habit Hole “, to her soul infused duo “Honey Drips” with Swiss producer Deheb, to the fragile and tormented melodies of “33-1 Oak” her first single out on the new Parisian label Kowtow Records.

Penelope can proudly say she takes from her mother Isabelle Antena when it comes to cross musical genre. Though the commun thread between all the worlds she cleverly navigates, would definitely be her vocals. Experimenting instinctively with different techniques, Antena uses her voice as a harmonic lab of emotions. Sometimes intimate, sometimes haunted. Always Original.

Her first LP Antelope - entirely self-produced - comes as proof that the music she makes changes and evolves to perfectly match her personal story. After a painful heartache, Antena settles alone in her parents house, lost in the woods somewhere in the south of France. Surrounded by her grand father’s instrument (Marc Moulin- great Belgian Composer from the 70’s ) she writes this 10 tracks album field with melancholia and broken love. Like on the branches of the Cedars around her house, It’s a folky electronic breeze that hallows onto this record.

New sound, same familiar feeling when listening to Antena (be it Mother or Daughter) : acoustic and electronic have rarely been so intertwined, beautifully combined. And if Bandcamp placed her song “Abuse” as one of the best of 2018, 2019 is sure set out to be a good year for this multi-facetted artist with narrative propension.

In her most personally narrative work to date, A Fossil Begins To Bray is the follow up on Dais Records for NYC producer Hiro Kone, furthering the dialogue set forth on her 2018 release, Pure Expenditure. While the statements on Pure Expenditure rallied behind a point of dangerous excess and injustice, the material on A Fossil Begins To Bray embark upon a journey of discovery and selfanalysis, proposing a potential reorientation towards absence in hopes of illuminating potential futures.

In Mao’s own words, “This album considers the power of absence as neither a lack or deficit, but as a quiet, indeterminable force to cultivate in this time of looming and unrelenting techno-fascism. It asks that we take pause to consider our learned languages and actualities and to better consider how desire shapes our recollections and interpretations of this ‘existence.’” This allegory is expertly applied to every song on A Fossil Begins To Bray. Mao has established a long history of employing absence in her productions to maximum effect. With a vast assortment of diverse elements at play, no single track ever feels overly convoluted and further illustrates Hiro Kone’s skillful attention to dynamic tension and flow. Tracks such as “Fabrication of Silence” and “Submerged Dragon” perfectly represent the power of absence, utilized in a matter to create unique amalgams of decisive, cinematic techno rhythms from the electronic void. As the melodic elements contained within A Fossil Begins To Bray begin to unravel and slowly take form, the unaware are rewarded with a driving yet tangible refrain that offers resolve in contrast to the dense, textureladen backdrop that forms the album’s foundation. The first single, “Feed My Ancestors”, expands upon Hiro Kone’s signature take on electronic music structures. Seemingly free from the predictable contracts imposed by any one genre’s stereotypes, Hiro Kone throttles the foreboding bassline in favor of more calculated, abstract cut-ups that gracefully hold the track in place between hopeful utopia and something more ominous.

Nord Noir spins a tale as much as it paints a sonic landscape. Its progenitor Toh Imago took the time to sharpen his artistic chops under a few different guises, resisting the 21st-century affliction that is instant gratification at all costs, ultimately spending over 18 months to develop the narrative arc underlying his first opus. Using the historical context of the north of France's proletariat past, he created a dense, hypnotic, haunted album that will sit comfortable alongside the works of Daniel Avery, Efdemin and Blawan.

12"LP plus 7", ltd copies

ERUPTION is an outburst of creaking energies, unconventional ideas, arhythmic thoughts, cacophonous images and musical phantasms. ERUPTION is also the name of the second album by Kluster, a band project of the musician and video artist Conrad Schnitzler, who died in 2011, together with his colleagues Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. ERUPTION was also the name of a two-day festival that took place in July 2018 at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. For two days, artists and musicians from different generations and working in various fields met here, who were in one way or the other inspired by the comprehensive oeuvre Conrad Schnitzlers’, as well as by his free-spirited thoughts and actions. The result was a multi-faceted programme of concerts, performances, sound and video installations, which resulted in the release of these two special records on Pudel Produkte, the house-own label of the Golden Pudel Club. The single features a previously unreleased piece by Conrad Schnitzler & Ken Montgomery as well as a story told by Asmus Tietchens about his father and Schnitzler, who unwittingly crossed the Atlantic together on the steamboat Bornhofen in the late 1950s, one as an engineer, the other as a heater. The LP brings together the festival's invited artists, Schnitzler‘s contemporaries

such as Ken Montgomery, Wolfgang Seidel and Asmus Tietchens, as well as young artists who developed works especially for ERUPTION. Among them are Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny with fragments from their performance Phantom Con Ballet, the DJ Phuong-Dan who composed a musical collage from the poem About Rhythmus and rhythm studies by Schnitzler, a piece from the performance of Felix Kubin, who uses a light scanner and his modular synthesizer to convert graphic notation into sound, a theatrical sound piece by Carl & Sohn (also known as Les Trucs), the producer and DJ RVDS, who interacted with the piece Tanz im Regen by Conrad Schnitzler and many more. Initiated and curated by Nika Son, a musician and artist based in Hamburg

The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form.

“We were like children playing with new toys,” Daniel recalls of the early days of American Gamelan music. “Though, as we moved into the 1980s, I moved away from Javanese traditional formalism completely, no longer using a constant stream of notes.” Daniel became a father twice over in the early 80s, transforming his compositional voice, finding himself open to new affects. Notably, the Sierra fir species, ‘abies firma’ … “These trees gave me a sense of rising and rising, all their branches reaching toward sun and sky. Looking at them across open spaces, I felt myself part of their upward striving. The tall mountain trees became rising themes and arpeggios, sometimes even sweeping across the six octaves of the gamelan.”

This album holds a variety of recordings including an especially immersive tape-delay piece for the rebab, a bowed Javanese instrument. A sort of Eastern Frippertronics weaving the stereo field. Another standout is a semi-improvised flute and gamelan work, ebbing in slowly like a night’s wind. “Accumulation” and “Abies Magnifica,” the spirited opening pieces, exemplify the precision and dexterity of Daniel’s group, The Berkeley Gamelan, who at this time were constantly performing around North America. Two pieces on the album were co-composed by Schmidt and the late Lou Harrison, who helped conceive of the American style of gamelan and enjoyed a similarly long and varied musical career. “Unempins to Sociseknum” is based on arranging Harrison’s social security number against Schmidt’s unemployment insurance number. A window into the cooperative spirit and experimentation of the late 70s.

With each LP comes a CD including the addition of “One White Crow,” a three-part tapestry of melodic fragments which epitomizes the second phase of Schmidt’s composing; a divergence from both Javanese and European music. Daniel states, “William James once said that one white crow would suffice to overturn science’s assertion that all crows are black. I felt myself to be ‘one white crow’ amidst the prominent, established musical styles.”

Edition of 1000 with 20-page pamphlet holding program notes, scores, & a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms. Including a complimentary CD with additional 20-minute suite

Sean McCann, September 2019