Beats Novedades

This split release unites two female underground acts, both of whom have recently become pivotal parts of the contemporary electronic musical landscape in Japan. Hot on the heels of the acclaimed PAREDO EP compilation (TAL12), which has been released in May 2019 (and also includes contributions from Lena Willikens and Miki Yui), the SUPER MILD split album is the second outing by KOPY and TENTENKO on TAL. Their newest works punctuate their highly individual approaches to contemporary experimental dance music.

TENTENKO is a Tokyo-based electronic music producer. Her career began in 2013 when she joined the mainstream idol group BIS. Immediately after her departure from BIS in 2014 she commenced work on her solo project under her artist name TENTENKO. Since then she has radically reinvented her music away from glossy J-POP towards weird and industrial rooted dancefloor. TENTENKO first made a name for herself on the alternative Japanese music scene with a steady flow of live performances as well as collaborations with members of the legendary Japanese noise band HIJOKAIDAN.

For a few years now KOPY has been an unpredictable and charismatic part of the vital electronic music scene of Osaka. She has quickly garnered a reputation for creating her live sets exclusively with borrowed electronic equipment. Her name KOPY very much originates from this "concept". Apart from a few performances at Düsseldorfs famous nightspot SALON DES AMATEURS, she has been invited by LENA WILLIKENS to her showcase at the MEAKUSMA FESTIVAL in 2018. Her sinister dancefloor mystique is heavily steeped in the free spirited noise and rhythm cultures of her hometown.

A malicious statement of intent from Pact Infernal’s Altar label, Mors Omnibus I is an assemblage of amenable architects of dread summoned together to create a collection of ominous rhythmic rituals.

Silver / Gold C90 Cassette in J Card.

Chambre Noire Records is a new label out of Montreal, managed by Peter Bunzinelli. It is the continuation of a mix series and a radio show on N10.AS, active since 2017. For its very first release, it features Puma & The Dolphin’s debut record, the Primitive EP, including a remix by Michal Turtle. P&TD is a Bulgarian producer based in Sofia. The Primitive EP focuses on firedance grooves, exotic percussion along with a dub and post-punk approach.
A1 - Jungle Futura The EP open With this wild chugger. Layering jungle sounds with loose hand percussion, the mood is at the crossroads between Latin and oriental influences. As the track progresses, the rhythmic section is enriched by skippy snares and a variety of vocal samples, sweeps, and melodies, with undeniable firedance-inducing results. A2 - Camel in Dub
Darker and more synthetic in some regards, this track is closely aligned to the post-punk paradigm with its bass guitar and Linn Drum groove, and dub techniques skillfully used by the producer to create a rather psychedelic mise en scène. After laying down the foundations of this plodding rhythm, satellite voices, rhythmic and melodic elements follow one another, taking the dancer on a real trip. A3 - The Dress With vocal samples and a bass guitar at the forefront interspersed with minimalist but highly efficient rhythmic elements, melodies and other bleeps & bloops engaged in ear-catching interplay, there is something loose, sensual and slightly hazy about this track. B1 - Cobra Dance Taking a similar yet slightly different approach to the post-punk sound of previous tracks, this tune features a catchy bassline and groovy percussion of a rather Latin persuasion, alternating between vocal samples, melodic elements, and rhythmic phrases. In a sense, this track is reminiscent of the spirit of Martin Hannett’s work with ESG, that is to say, groovy dance music that feels like the opposite of synthetic.
B2 - The Dress (Michal Turtle Remix) Highly-esteemed British producer Michal Turtle’s remix of The Dress is a stunner. Stripping the track down to its primordial elements and treating sounds in dramatic and psychedelic fashion creates a very mystical and trippy feeling all over the remix which feels eminently balearic but with a unique twist. Light footed and dreamy on one hand, groovy as hell and impossible not to dance to on the other, this is probably what dancing on clouds feels like.

DRNTTCKS return with their fifth full-length release, this time on british tape label Industrial Coast. "White Gaze" takes a grim look at Europe anno 2019: ongoing wars against migration through the EU government and Frontex, the rise of racist nationalist parties all over the continent, a re-installment of identity politics and re-legitimation toxic masculinity. Things are fucked, but maybe they are as fucked now as they were in 1910 or 1986, because the regime has been mostly the same. It’s the panoptic stare of white, wealthy and more than often male, heterosexual cis bodies. Who still set the rules. Who still distribute the power.

All graphic work on this release is done by artist Elisabeth Thoma. The photos used for "White Gaze" were taken in the ethnographic departement of a natural history museum. There were no white bodies objectified or exhibited.

2x12"



Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it and curate sonic conversations from others.

Disc 1 contains the very first and last known recordings of Burgess's voice alongside domestic incidents, rehearsals and answering machine messages, while Disc 2 invites 23 artists and musicians to remix the rare material into a unique Burgess portrait far beyond 'A Clockwork Orange'.

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917, Anthony Burgess was educated at Xaverian College in that city and at Manchester University. He served in the army from 1940 to 1946 and as an education officer in Malaya and Brunei from 1954 to 1959. He published more than 50 books (including 'A Clockwork Orange' and his masterpiece, 'Earthly Powers') and composed around 250 musical works. He was created a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by President Mitterrand of France and a Commandeur de Mérite Culturel by Prince Rainier of Monaco. He died in London in 1993. His books are still read all over the world.

Alan Dunn is an artist and curator based between Liverpool and Leeds, where he is a reader in Art & Design at Leeds Beckett University. His projects have been presented at Tate Britain, ICA, Liverpool Art Prize, BBC Radio and Bluecoat.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester is an independent educational charity which encourages public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.

The fourth Plafond sees fine-crafted contrasting pieces complement each other in courtesy of Ulla Straus and Oceanic. Along the wide arbitrary landscape of listening or 'ambient' music, it is a delight to have two artists, separated by the vast Atlantic, contributing quite opposite interpretations of such to the series. Perceptual time feels as a recurrent theme which binds them, albeit in a whole different modus operandi. In her iconic tactile productions, Straus excavates levels of advanced musical complexity in the seemingly most simple. Throughout two tracks her crude and beautiful technique riffles, compositions that remain prone to the transient, combining field recordings with morphing saxophone and guitar. This is deeply evocative music that turns its recipient into a mode of contemplation. 'I Forgot to Take a Picture' breathes melancholic romanticism, 'Becoming Warm' feels lorn yet hopeful. Pastoral haze over a rouge-tainted barren, the crackling insides of a wooden forest house. Picturesque and minimalist, Pennsylvania's Straus manages to temporarily stop the sand from gravitating downwards. Oceanic antagonises Straus with the triptych 'Three Sides of a Shell', recalling different emotions adhering to the fourth dimension. As a performing artist Oceanic masters the element of suspense. Here, over the course of nineteen minutes, a three-note sequence is explored within the producers imaginatory, chapterised, providing moments to navigate through his fictitious galaxy. Stuttering melodies across azure waters, synthesised bleeps as flickering stars over a moonlit mountain pass. Oceanic's music feels advanced through actively incorporating contemporary futurism, whilst never losing the glacial glance that is so familiar to its early nineties foregoers. It is as if listening to 'Three Sides...' heightens the senses, towards possibility, innovation even, triggering illusions of time dilation, shattering the hourglass. Comes in hand printed dreamy, pink sleeve, including Obi-strip, by the BAKK Innerspace Ink Station.

Shukai is psyched to announce our second release - music for the animated television film Alice Through the Looking Glass, which has never been released before. The music was recorded in 1981 and the film was broadcasted on Soviet television in 1982.
Alice Through the Looking Glass created by Kyivnauchfilm studio and directed by Efim Pruzhansky is a colour animated film based on the novel by Lewis Carroll.

Volodymyr Bysrtiakov is a Soviet analogue of French Vladimir Cosma or Italian Ennio Morricone. Great soundtrack composer whose most active years were 80-90s when he worked at the Kyivnauchfilm studio which audio department was like the British BBC Radiophonic Workshop at those times.
The soundtrack for the animated film Alice Through The Looking Glass is an attempt to create a psychedelic electroacoustic piece with victorian flavour. The film animation style is similar to Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoon clips. You can find it on Youtube by the way.

Rites Of Passage' traditionally refer to rituals distinguishing movements from one period of life to the next. Solitary Dancer's debut LP evokes a retrospective of these experiences, organized into four acts: coming into being, detachment, liminality, and re-incorporation of the self. This narrative calls for a self-exploration of moral corruption, loss of innocence, social rebellion, and societal disillusionment.

Deathprod, a.k.a. Helge Sten, has been deeply embedded in the Oslo music community for decades, but his brooding soundscapes and deliberate process make him seem sometimes like a phantom. Sten is a founding member of Supersilent, adding his sounds and treatments to the avant jazz leanings of that powerful collective, and he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Biosphere, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
But Occulting Disk is the first new Deathprod album in 15 years; his attention to detail is next level, and the darkly powerful soundscapes arch and swell like the shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Raw, emotional, political and deliberate, this is ambient music with deep intention.

Fans of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Steve Reich, Autechre, Swans, and GAS will all need this record – Deathprod makes some of the most powerful experimental ambient composition of our time. His last LP, Morals and Dogma, from 2004, was listed as one of Pitchfork’s top 50 ambient albums of all time. FACT calls Sten the “dark ambient master.” The New York Times said “Sten loves to summon up thick, often ominous clouds of sound, gesturing at everything from avant-garde composition to black metal without ever quite revealing his hand.”

Take your phone, your tablet and your TV and throw them out the window! That’s the spirit and the idea uniting the eight tracks of the album “Out the Window” by Christopher Schwarzwälder & Iannis Ritter. Listening to this otherworldly piece of downtempo electronica will make you feel relieved and excited, as if you had actually removed your electronic shackles for a little while. This album is light and heavy at the same time, it’s in your room and outside, it is loud and quiet like an extroverted introvert.

The nature of this album is organic and analogue and simply weird - it’s a juxtaposition of well-known, homey sounds and the strange. The intro “Snow Broom” feels like waking up on holiday, where you hear the familiar sounds of your loved ones in the kitchen, however they are in a new kitchen, so it feels alluringly different. The title track “Out the Window” seems to conjure the listener and you will find yourself spacing out as if you were smoking really good sativa for the first time. Electron (feat. Mo) is another highlight, with its different characters it resembles an audio book of “The Neverending Story”. The vocals in “Make things smaller” and “Safe Place” feel hip-hop influenced and ancient, like someone rapping in-front of an open fire.

“Out the window” is an album for late summer, autumn, winter time or any time that you like to look out the window and inside your own mind.

Some time around 20 years ago, the artist known as Dub Surgeon made an absorbing album of beautiful dub infused with ambiance, found sounds and horizontal rhythms. The Lost Future was recorded at the former Amsterdam Film Academy where Dub Surgeon. The recording engineer for the project was Ricardo Villalobos. Dub surgeon and Ricardo Villalobos then mastered it together, putting it through several vintage mixers and recording it to 2 inch tape. Then, tragedy struck: a storm surged and ignited a fire that ravaged the studio. The master copy was thought to have been lost forever. Dub Surgeon stopped making music and disappeared into the shadows after just two EPs on Future Dub in 2002/3. But one day 15 years later, totally out of the blue, he received a demo of The Lost Future. "Pay attention to this," it said. Attached was a demo version of the long lost album and now, finally, it has a perfect and impossibly poetic home on Dubai's Ark to Ashes, which is named in homage to the story of Lee "Scratch" Perry burning down his Black Ark studio to rid it of demons. Sounding as fresh as ever, The Lost Future is an authentic dub experience with a story as special as the music itself

Shackleton works up a hypnotic group energy alongside avant-goddess Heather Leigh, percussionist Takumi Motokawa, and mallet player Raphael Meinhart in their debut as Tunes of
Negation for Shapednoise’s label; Cosmo Rhythmatic
‘Reach The Endless Sea’ is a heady blast of lysergic, chromatic colour and syncopated rhythms that partly imagines an alternative musical timeline where the Hawkwind and Ashra Tempel fans,
proto-Humanoid types, and new age travellers who made up the UK’s rave vanguard prevailed against the law to enact a freely psychedelic dance music. The album follows in the vein of
Shackleton’s previous trio of vocal-focussed trips for Honest Jon’s and his Woe To The Septic Heart! label to find the mystic pied piper’s spirit bolstered and tempered by a collaborative, multi-
directional flow of energies.
Gushing in five durational parts running between 10-15 minutes each - or long enough to draw listeners into their dilated temporality - the music comes in waves of pointed, timeless intensity and illusory suggestion, subtly shifting pattern with an acid-dosed logic. Following her triumphant ‘Throne’ LP’ in 2018, Heather Leigh provides sacral vocals to the canto couplet of ‘The World Is A Stage’ and ‘Reach The Endless Sea’, providing an elevated constant between its moire of possessed vibes and lilting rhythms, before the trio of instrumentalists take the reins on a mazy trajectory between the harmonic lather of ‘Tundra Erotic’, thru the sanguine meditation of ‘Nowhere Ending Sky’, and an epic, 15 minute invocation of ancient Indian raga traditions and mountaintop kosmiche in ‘Ruckschlag Rising Then Resonant’, before they all come down together in the Amazonian delta flow and oozing sprawl of ‘The Time Has Come.’
While no single description will sum up the potency and conviction of Tunes of Negation, their mission can be summed in a line from a poem by 13th C. mystic Jalalu’I-Din Rumi which inspired the album’s title, stating that ‘Reach The Endless Sea’ strives to “aid transmutation and enter into the light.”

The band TORSO is Ken G and Orie. Ken is from Tokyo underground rock band Group, who have previously released on P-Vine Records.
Summoning the vibes of Arthur Russell, and minimal composition, the duo use cello, flute, glockenspiel, piano and soprano sax to hone a warm, organic sound, already getting airplay on Japan Blues' show on NTS radio.

ANAMAI is the experimental folk project of Anna Mayberry and David Psutka - soft sounds to dent skin and flesh. The music is naked and exquisitely personal, threatening banality, but mainly an embrace of the commune. Dramatic and confidential anthems of divine insignificance. Across three studio albums the project has explored the nature of intimacy with tiny confessions released into vast lakes of sound. Simple songs punctuated by clusters of detail. The project is built on contradictions: traditional yet modern; miniscule yet infinite; proud but deflated. Something for everyone and nothing to no one. A search for peace?
ANAMAI will release their third album, Dream Baby, on Halocline Trance this fall. Listeners will hear residue from Psutka and Mayberry’s other projects - the scratchy expression of HSY + the functionality of EGYPTRIXX + the baroque digitalia of ACT! but ultimately the record breaks new ground in a long-running series of collaborations.
9 tracks of liquid sonics suggest an antecedent in early Harold Budd or a spiritual homage to the performative intimacy of Bossa Nova artists Joao Gilberto and Gal Costa. Drips of colour across an axis of sound, dimension and human experience.

ehind Dosage there is Sayoko, a Japanese woman living in Paris, who works with a rich, organic, yet destabilized musical style, but with a pulsating life that makes her pieces fascinating.

His songs - since they are songs here - on the edge of pop music, are made for re-listening; each passage revealing new secrets hidden in the complex mechanics of his compositions. Evidence is never at the rendezvous, and yet the pleasure of listening, the joy of being carried away by texts that border the surreal without ever complacent, grooves that always seem on the verge of "collapse without ever poking the nose, this pleasure and this joy, unique, do not leave us from one end to the other of this theory of the pink, UFO album, for those who seek this, and to surprise the others too.

Sayoko: voice, piano, bass, electronics;
Buz: battery; Franca Mai: poems;
Dirty_Pink: guitar;
Gaspar Claus: cello;
Vincent Epplay: electronics;
Nicolas Laffererie: guitar;
BN Würtz: electronics, bass, composition;
Simon Takahashi: electronics, composition

The collaboration between influential German artists Klaus Schulze and Pete Namlook led to the famous The Dark Side of the Moog series. The sixth part in the series offers more of their breeding music, although it’s one of the more experimental records from the series. The Final DAT starts with distorted text fragments and during the different parts of this recording an amount of techno is added to the musical layers. The volume shows the different directions the two composers headed two during their careers.

The pioneering composer Klaus Schulze created over 60 albums during his career, which started back in 1969. Pete Namlook is another German composer, who played an important role in the increasing popularity of electronic music.

Black Truffle is honoured to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom’s legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975 and here expanded to a double LP with the addition of over 40 minutes of contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems.

Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long opening piece “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones”, four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analysed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In “Chilean Drought”, three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. “Piano Etude I (Alpha)”, the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom’s “On Being Invisible”, in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones” but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the ‘performer’s active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge.’ Enriched with archival images and new notes from the composer, this expanded reissue of Brainwave Music is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of live electronic music and alive to the possibilities it might still contain.

You go 1500 km from Moscow in Siberia direction and you find Orenburg, the city located in the vast steppes, where «Serenades» come from. Started as a local music community, «Serenades» became a real hotspot involving dozens of international musicians and djs with podcasts and parties. Being true aficionados of music which lays between ethnic and electronic, «Serenades» have created a real oasis in Russian snow.

In 2019, «Serenades» continue their story with the first ever release - a big & eclectic compilation where every track is exclusively produced for the label concept by musicians from all over the world.

Shamanic ambient, percussive drums, slow industrial beats from the compilation clearly represent Serenade's taste in contemporary world music.

A collection of bedroom-engineered rhythms, psyched out slow jams and 4-dimensional steppers by GF. Very low business risk. Brought to you by Max & Can. Fictional Background: The cinematic vision of an unfinished short film project entitled ULAM SPIRAL served as the main inspiration for the score composed by Gerry Franke. Farcically over-dimensioned, the film was impossible to realise from a financial and practical perspective - a psychedelic blast of visual concepts, that lead to the unique narration style in which Franke tells an exotic story of death, a madness created by obstinacy, intrigue and coincidental creation. In 1963 Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909-1984) discovered a remarkable spiral formation while sketching with numbers during a mathematic lesson. He drew the natural numbers starting with 1, continuing in a left spiral and highlighting all prime numbers. Soon an unexpected pattern emerged from the sketch: The Ulam Spiral. An unexperienced director, who everyone referred to only as "Stab", was determined to realize an optical idea that alledgedly came to him while being on a trip to Jordan reading about Ulam and his spiral discovery, which initiated ideas of the connection between regularity and coincidence in Stab's mind eventually leading to the abstract script for the short film in 1993. When Franke was approached by Stab to compose the score of the film, he loved the wild imagery and the complex themes and decided to record music for ULAM SPIRAL in early 1995. A few months later Stab disappeared and Franke took a break from producing the soundtrack to focus on his band. In 1998 Stab reappeared with new ideas and convinced Franke to proceed with the score for the film, only to vanish again a couple of weeks later. Fed up with the inconsistency of the project, Franke decided to finish the soundtrack for his own listening pleasure in 2001 and kept it a secret - until today.

DJ Nigga Fox’s most substantial release to date sets a new benchmark for Lisbon’s revered underground ghetto dance scene, pulling traces of jazz, acid house and cinematic sound design
into his deeply rugged and exceptional sound with effortless style. Highlighted as one to watch in Lisbon’s virulent club scenius since appearing on the ‘Bazzerk’ compilation which introduced many
ravers to Kuduro in 2011, DJ Nigga Fox’s productions have become acclaimed for a mix of abstract weirdness and proper dancefloor impact that’s hit ‘floors hard across the world. Following 2018’s
‘Crânio’ 12” and remix of How To Dress Well, he now returns to the Príncipe powerhouse, home of his first trio of 12”s, with a definitive statement that arguably ranks among this year’s strongest,
rhythm-driven LPs, bar none.
In a way that mirrors UK dance music’s transition in the ‘90s from hardcore jungle to garage and D&B, or in the ‘00s from grime and dubstep to more “sophisticated” styles of deep house,
broken beats and UK Funky, Nigga Fox’s longest release to date appears more layered, plusher and, ultimately “musical” when compared to his earlier work. Using sparing but knowing dabs
of noirish jazz keys, live-sounding double bass and expressively off-kilter synth tones, he binds rippling, colourful flesh to his flexing, bare bones drum torque in a way that boldly blazes a trail for his local scene without ever losing sight of what makes it so thrilling in the first place.
This inch-tight refinement of Nigga Fox’s already distinctive style is characterised by the twisting,
unpredictable arrangement of ’Sub Zero’, where stealthy waves of swingeing drums and vintage horror movie tropes are ramped with feral electro scuzz to killer effect, or equally in the freaky tension between lissom jazz chords, jaws-harp buzz and wild acid lines on ‘Faz A Minha’, and likewise the way he meshes roiling drums with complex, asymmetric electronics on ‘Vicio’, or simply forges his own, outstanding form of slow, psychedelic dance-pop replete with his own,
Quasimodo-Styled vocal in the shocking closer ‘5 Violinos.’
By any measure ‘Cartas Na Manga’ is a singular album-length EP that stands miles out from the crowd. Its only comparisons really lie within Lisbon’s club scene, with the likes of DJ Firmeza,
Marfox or Nervoso. As such it’s best taken as symptomatic of their collective scenius, and is keenly ready to be mixed with music from all corners of the Black Atlantic.

Genre defying, post-industrial adventures from France Sauvage, a DIY trio mixing outsider art, collage and darkwave influences in their own style of “Free Rural” and “Bruit Concret” music for
Paris-based label; In Paradisum France Sauvage play their own custom-built instruments in a way that shirks showing-off and
doesn’t pay heed to trend, while fully entrusting in the power of their collective instinct. ‘L’Homme À Zero’ is the band’s cyborganically diverse debut LP for In Paradisum and their first record since 2015’s ‘Jeux vocaux des bords de Dronne.’ It yields a half-true image of the band in action, using edited recordings to construct an album that demonstrates their tastes for off-kilter, hypnotic sounds and rhythms between the piercing folk rituals of ‘La folie chez les animaux’, the black metal techno grind of ‘Parle-toi de nous’, and the Ghédalia Tazartès-like avant-chanson of ‘Je suis sorti de ma maison.’
Essentially the band specialise in avant-garde music without pretension. There are no grand concepts or to fall back on or mask a lack of original music. On the contrary, ‘L’Homme À Zero’ is fizzing with effortlessly tight and playful invention and tona contrasts. From the cyber-folk fanfare of their puckered intro, the album saddles up a trip of Jodorowskian dimensions; traversing from desert-at-night scenes in ‘Brex me down’ to passages of psycho-cinematic harps and something like trembling R&B emoted by John Duncan, and sideways, ever sideways into chunks of Pan Sonic-like gristle and disorienting field recordings that recall a 4.1 world parallel to David Toop’s General Strike.
While narrative form surely emerges from the album’s mazy structure, it was never intended as such. It’s more testament to the band’s loose yet focussed intuition and naturally sprawling,
explorative tendencies that a surreal tale emerges which will have different meanings for every listener.

Junes Kicks Off A New Imprint, Dote, With A Full-length Exploration Of The Direct Yet Dreamlike Sound He's Made His Own. With His Usual Flair For Crisp Grooves And Ghostly Palettes, A View Reveals A Broader Range Of Nuanced Vibes. Second Wind And Stop, Elate Show A Playful Buoyancy, And A Sense Of Discovery In Tracks Like Balancing Act And Two-sided Embrace Add A Narrative Pace To The Collection. There's Time For Some Of The Creeping, Spaced Out Atmospheres That Hallmark Some Of Junes' Previous Best, But With Tracks Like Packaging, The Realisation Of This Sound Is Richer Than Ever. There's A Restless Feel Throughout The Work, Too - Especially Evident In The Closer Spooked - And A Feeling That We've Been On A Trip That Doesn't End Here.

Günter Schickert, krautrock maestro of echo-driven psychedelia, returns on Marmo one year and half after the release of the Labyrinth LP. Mauerharfe consists of old and special material, which has officially never seen the light before. It is due for release on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall, as 12” LP with CD, CD and digital formats. The physical versions contain exclusive pictures, liner notes, a prose poem by Peter Unsicker and some draft writings by the artists with reflections on the project.

Berlin, August 1990, first post-wall Summer. Two friends, the locals Günter Schickert and gallerist Peter Unsicker perform a spectacular yet symbolically intimate interpretation of those epochal changing days by building a sound installation with a damaged piece of the Berlin Wall. They persuade the patrol “Feliks Dzierzynski” of the DDR army to transport and relocate a the piece outside Peter's Wall Street Gallery on the Zimmer Strasse, in the borough of Mitte, where only a few months back the intact structure actually passed through.

Once the wall was positioned, they bend down the bars of the iron structure that crop out the concrete, bind piano chords to them, stretch the strings down to the bodom base of the construct and connect guitar amplifiers to the set up. The Berlin Wall is ready to be played as a harp.

Günter Schickert's Mauerharfe are executed between August and October 1990, resulting into three long field recordings.

As Günter Schickert claims, the idea behind the project was the one of representing, in a personal musical way, the feelings and sensations that he – as well as many others experiencing the division and eventually the removal of the Wall - felt through the decades around the presence of this monstrous separator. The wall becomes an instrument, seen both as an object and executor of the experiment, while the human and artistic presence almost vanishes. The atonal and harsh sounds embody the ugliness of an inhuman separation, the terrible echoes of prisons and the lament of its prisoners. The pulling of the strings suggests the repression of a regime, while releasing these it indicates a dash of freedom.

You can get lost into the intensity of the Mauerharfe, find always new sensations and a countless amount of details. If you approach the listening with adventurous spirit and a good dose of curiosity, it can really throw you back into the past, a past of segregation, austerity and suppression, yet of an urging desire of liberation.

The tracks:

Side A features a 19 mins long piece. The tape-induced background noise lays down a carpet of haunting atmospheres and introduces the experiment. Günter starts to test the chords by pulling out, with his fingers, dry and acid timbers. The warm up evolves by investigating wider sinusoidal waves and dilated metallic riffs. The track takes the form of a more conventional music narration, as the artist bangs the harp with a sort of rudimental violin bow creating marching percussive paderns. Layers of psychedelic ambience take over the scene before mixing up with roaring industrial spasms. Lunar sceneries seem to emerge, paving the way to sudden strings feedbacks, crackling distorted clicks and menacing reverbs.

Flip-side, a similarly long take opens up with ferocious urge, like being catapulted into a warfare between iron and cement, sounding like a real military operation. As the strings get hit and pulled, the metal seems to crash into thousands of pieces, dissolving into merciless distortions. Yet it is intriguing to notice how these dynamics of madness occasionally generate wavy and gentle sub-harmonics. This piece adds up intensity in comparison to the previous one, containing enhanced abrasive and distorted frequencies. The final part is marked by monstrous echoing rhythms, before drijing back to a chaotic rumble of fire, metal and concrete.

The third piece, Mauerharfe 3, is a 30 minutes long performance dated August the 13th 1990. As Schickert recalls, 29 years before exactly on that same date, the construction of the Berlin wall was accomplished. This take appears exclusively on CD, with copies included inside the vinyl package and as a separate CD format release. The recording is cleaner than the previous two, giving more width and definition to the sounds. As opposed to Mauerharfe 1 and 2, where the wall of sound is overwhelming, in this 3rd take human presences can be heard : fragments of women voices, a baby crying, the siren of a police car. The compositional approach is more sober, the tones of the harp warmer, closer to an actual one, its notes more gentle, discrete and meditative, sometimes resulting into deep, gong-like percussive timbers.

Fresh, fried, and freewheeling debut by Owosso/Lansing, Michigander Cameron Weede aka Cammi checks every SILK box in the book: teen MPC experiments, thrifted hardware jack, tape noise dumpster dub, longform luxury house, department store boogie, standup comedy groove, etc. Tracked in fits and starts over the past eight years, Look At The World runs on immediacy and intuition, man/machine symbiosis at its loosest and most liquidated. Early years spent jamming improv trombone with free jazz hillbillies eventually led to a love of classic house and cheap gear, with a special fondness for “ugly 90’s FM/romplers and digital synths because it’s all I can afford.”

But limited means don’t mean limited ends: across 54 minutes Cammi cuts a sweaty swath of raw rhythm, busted bass, and plastic passion, from outer rings to inner circles. Take a Look: “I just do whatever’s in my head, it’s all subconscious. I’m def not a purist – about anything, really.”

Skin/Glove is the second LP by Belgian musician Mathieu Serruys, following the release of his B.A.A.D.M. debut On Germaine Dulac back in 2014. Compiled over the course of a fortnight, the record features material recorded over the past five years: creaks of ice buckling under heat, thick hums like nauseating headaches, plumes of evaporated organ hymns, frostbitten crackles of dying tape loops. These disparate sources are unified by the pervasive corrosion of pain and time, which presses into the surface of every sonic object. Melodies splinter under the strain of being pulled apart; drones tremble under the gathering gravity of fatigue; dissonances flicker like candles on the brink of extinguishment. Yet despite the emotional density of the material itself, the process of composition provides a route toward comprehending how these sounds and experiences are connected. Skin/Glove reads as a constellatory map of adversity and grief, beautifully coalesced through the cathartic distance of retrospect, haunted by the sibilant whispers of distinct memories in dialogue, latticed by lesions that fatefully and poignantly intersect.

With over 2 decades of formal exploration and exhilarating abstraction Get On is, somewhat surprisingly, only the fourth solo Pita full length. Peter Rehberg has always been vouched for pushing the very limits of the technology du jour, be it software or in recent years a complex modular set. Rehberg’s motives are one of unbridled exploration often resulting in extreme and exhilarating audio works.

Having spearheaded the contemporary electronic sound with his uncompromising explorations of noise, rhythm and extreme computer music, he has also worked with numerous experimental musicians in collaboration. Rehberg stands in the wake of a sonic revolution, once fringe, which transformed over time into the sound of a generation of experimental geeks and club freaks worldwide.

Get On follows on from the 2016 release Get In. As with other titles in his ‘Get’ series we have an unwieldy blend of noise, abstraction, gnarled rhythm and blurred melody. Both analogue and digital tools are deployed as a means of expressing something outside of everyday electronics. ‘AMFM’ launches proceedings with some delightfully disorientating ricocheting electronics setting off a subversive sonic spectrum. ‘Frozen Jumper’ presents some ugly skittering electronics which rotate into exquisitely mangled forms before launching into an unsettling euphoria. The last piece ‘Motivation’ is a towering sensitive work, simultaneously haunted and emotionally moving. Get On marks another monumental work in the ongoing evolution from one of the ground zero pioneers of contemporary radical electronic music. As uncompromising as ever this is Pita in his prime. Emotion rung from the most twisted of frames.

Maybe it’s too much to ask for a moment of your attention. As we grow older and keep
diving into this era of information, disinformation, fake news and all that, we also tend to
take a step back and listen to the intents of those social media adverts that tell us to slow
down, breathe in, breathe out, enjoy everything around you a little bit. So, if it’s not too
much to ask, you can press play and start enjoying “D-A-D”. If you’re doing that, you can
even stop reading this, because you don’t need further instructions.

It’s the second time in less than two years that we release music from London based
Greek musician Tasos Stamou (Athens, 1978). The wordplay of “Musique Con Crète”
(CREP54, 2018) was a backdoor to an adventurous and ‘concrete’ experience with
sound. “D-A-D” follows up on that. Recorded between 2015-2018 as an homage to both
his Dad and the more commonly used tuning on the Greek Bouzouki, D-A-D, Stamou
delivers 40 minutes of music that explores ancient and modern languages, while crossing
his unique instrumentation with celebrations of new/old folk, field recordings and
electronics. In his music, there’s a constant flow of ideas that defy standard tonalities and
the conception of “traditional”.

Improvisation was the starting point for the creation of some of the nine pieces Tasos
Stamou wrote for “D-A-D”. The electronics often serve to interact with field recordings that
are wisely manipulated, while acoustic instruments, like a Bouzouki, build up the
connection with the tradition and the necessity to slow down.

With his unique atmospheres, Tasos is whispering some life hacks to build a better life.
Nowadays, it’s quite rare for a record to organize the way the listener wants to listen to
music, to sounds. “D-A-D” creates a beautiful systematization between old and new,
folk/traditional music and the technology in sound. There’s – still - some boldness in that.

All songs by Tasos Stamou
Mastered and Cut by Rashad Becker

Editions Mego is proud to present the latest addition to the compelling discography of Thomas Brinkmann. Throughout his career Brinkmann has focussed on the human operating amongst industry alongside rhythms that manifest as a result of technological advancement. With this new release Brinkmann makes a u-turn, looking back to the early industrial age. Comprised of recordings of various looms, Raupenbahn investigates the sonic properties and consequences of the first automatic loom as constructed by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1745. Thomas Brinkmann once again adheres to his tendency for clarity and simplicity whilst further investigating not only the sound and rhythms of the machines (looms) but also what role they serve in society and what consequences they have on the environment. Raupenbahn presents 21 tracks in total, 11 feature on the vinyl, the remaining 10 as digital bonus tracks. The majority of recordings were undertaken by Brinkmann in 2017 with a Neumann KM 184 stereo set. Additional recordings were sourced with permission from Monika W. recs. from 2014 Central Museum of Textiles Łódź, Poland. Each piece presents a diversity of material which borders on the breathtaking and beautiful in richness and complexity. The various looms unravel rhythms and patterns unexpected from machines of the early industrial age.

The loom holds a significant role in shaping our world being the catalyst for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine which, alongside the subsequent work of Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, paved the way for modern computing. There is a linage of the loom that fits succinctly in Brinkmann's overall argument. Here we encounter a parallel between machine driven economies and the music that rose from such places, consider the Sheffield steel industries, the Manchester weaving industry or the Rhineland / Düsseldorf loom and machine industry. Is it a coincidence that the practice of such machines in the environment gave rise to today's predilection for electronic dance music, in pop, soundtracks, etc.

Raupenbahn features no treatment or processing and explicitly displays varying tempo and timbres which ascertain a wide range of acoustic structures. The artwork features Ingrid Wiener, Rosemarie Trockel and Alexandra Bircken, three different generations who would with ideas of fabric weaving, loming and the like. This exceptional release works on a number of levels alongside it's striking sonic palette.


i 9 Günne (Irmscher) BO Möhnesee / D

Previously unreleased recordings by various lineups drawn from Derek Bailey, Tristan Honsinger, Christine Jeffrey, Toshinori Kondo, Charlie Morrow, David Toop, Maarten Altena, Georgie Born, Lindsay Cooper, Steve Lacy, Radu Malfatti and Jamie Muir.

Journalists often make the brief history of Free Improvisation conform to the idea that the history of music is a nice straight line from past to present: Beethoven… Brahms… Boulez. Thus Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Stevens — together with Brötzmann and co across the Channel — were the trailblazing ‘first generation’, forging a wholly new language alongside contemporary avant-garde and free jazz. Figures like Toshinori Kondo and David Toop, willing as they were to incorporate snippets of all kinds of music, were the pesky ‘second generation’, happily cocking a snook at the ‘ideological purity’ of Bailey’s non-idiomatic improvisation.
‘Company 1981’ shows up the foolishness — the wrongness — of such storylines. Check the eclectic collection of guests Bailey invited to Company Weeks over the years. He had clear ideas about the music, but he was no ideological purist.

One of the founders of Fluxus, Charlie Morrow injects blasts of Cageian fun into half the recordings here, whether blurting military fanfares from his trumpet, or intoning far-flung scraps of speech. Cellist Tristan Honsinger and vocalist Christine Jeffrey join in the joyful glossolalia, while Bailey, Toop and Kondo contribute delicious, delicate, hooligan arabesques, by turns.
The remainder are performed by a different ensemble: Bailey, bassist Maarten Altena, former Henry Cow members Georgie Born and Lindsay Cooper on cello and bassoon, the insanely inventive Jamie Muir on percussion, and trombonist Radu Malfatti, showing his mastery of extended technique. Were that not enough, there’s the inimitable purity of Steve Lacy’s soprano ringing high and clear above the melee. Glorious!

There’s always been this idea that Free Improvisation is somehow Difficult Listening, but when the doors of perception are thrown open and prejudice cast aside, you realise that it’s not difficult at all. “Is it that easy?” chirps Morrow, at one point. Indeed it is.
Enjoy yourself.

Repress

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases
Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and
power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still
exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however The Drought
demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a
grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.
Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles
Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within
the self towards preservation. The traumatised body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured
memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and
control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice
centred on first person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources
Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.
“To Possess Is To Be In Control” makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or
a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while “Red Desert,” named after Michelangelo
Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces.
The seven-minute epic “The Size of Our Desires” acts as the emotional tipping point of the record;
amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics
reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted
through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part
of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of
industrial music. The Drought chronologises the artist’s transformation through a psychological
famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

John Chandler expands his timbral horizons with a subtly dynamic suite recorded at INA-GRM, Paris; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; and 1703, Stockholm. “Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition.
‘Tomorrow Is Too Late’ was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette.
Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares
witness to Chantler’s uncompromising sonic articulations.”

Featuring work by a group of 7 international artists, poets, scientists and designers, this record offers a look at the concept of Transparency from a variety of cultural, creative and scientific perspectives. In conversation with Research of Waves curatorial team, 6 of the contributors synthesised their interpretation of the theme within a 5 minute long audio piece, many of them working within the medium for the first time. The front and back cover of the album are designed by graphic designer and digital artist Galina Kruzhilina, creating a visual response to the 6 sound pieces.

Or:la's newly founded Cead imprint is back for its second outing with an EP from the enigmatic Blu Terra, due out in October.

Coming out of Warsaw and with a couple of aliases already under his belt, Blu Terra delivers three tracks spanning aquatic soundscapes and unexpected rave elements.

The A1, Person Sans, mobilises moving pads and punchy synths. 20,000 is a detailed acid exercise with animalistic overtones. Lastly, Western/Eastern is a hard hitting incendiary track which patiently builds to a raving crescendo.

twisted, healing, dark, enlightening. space drum meditation is back with four airy slash pushing cuts driven by otherworldly riddims. expect that breathe-in-breathe-out kinda vibe for both spesh dancefloors and transcendental listening adventures.

Alex Albrecht returns to the Analogue Attic imprint this October under his Melquíades guise; delivering a five-track package in the shape of 'Lanterns'.

Albrecht explains "The concept is a continuation of my last release with AAR and aims to take the listener on a journey to a strange place - Falling asleep, it leads one down a rainy, lantern-lit path and into another world.
At the end of the record, the listener is finally awoken by a familiar voice."

All of the compositions are improvised explorations with field recordings at their core as the framework.
'Lanterns Pt. 1 & Pt. 2' lead, easing you into the project with swirling, hazy atmospherics and ethereal piano melodies floating atop rounded subs and soft percussion.
'Neon Canal' follows, bringing the rhythm to the forefront whilst bubbling bell chimes, warm chords and expansive delays ebb and flow within.
Up next is ‘Cockatoo Horizon’ a Balearic tinged cut employing off-kilter organic percussion, soft guitar licks and airy atmospherics before 'Embers ft. James Harbard' strips things back to floaty chords, bumpy drums and jazzy guitar melodies subtly unfolding throughout.
'Federation Bells' then rounds out the release on beatless tip, laid out over six minutes with otherworldly tones, melancholic piano chords and textural