Beats News

On Friday 2nd October 2015, Coppe' releases her 16th full album titled '20rpm' as a stunning super-deluxe, double transparent-red vinyl + DVD collection, alongside a CD+DVD and standard digital editions. Featuring all new collaborations with another star line-up with guest stars: Plaid, Chris., Kettel, Atom TM, Chris Mosdell, Terry D, and many more.

Launched in 1995, Mango + Sweetrice Records celebrates twenty years of Electronic music's most colourful, diverse and prolific collaborations, thanks to the charm, charisma and passion of one woman: Japanese singer, musician, producer & multi-media artist, Coppe'.

The one-time Japanese child-star, MTV VJ and FM Radio DJ decided to turn her back on her native commercial profile to begin recording her own material and forge long-lasting, collaborative relationships with some of the leading names in the emerging 90s IDM / Electronica scene.

Over 15 albums later, plus countless collaborations with the likes of Plaid, Atom TM, DJ Vadim, TheOrb, Kettel, Nobukazu Takemura, DJ Swamp, Kit Clayton, Christ., Barbara Morgenstern, Shipmate, Chris Model, DF Tram, Modified Toy Orchestra, Back Ted 'N' Ted, Nico No U-Turn, Addictive TV, Minotaur Shock, Terminal 11 and so many others, Mango + Sweetrice Records now celebrates its twentieth anniversary in style for 2015.

'Bottle Rain Smoke' premiered on The Creators Project/Vice (video below)

Much of Crewdson's singular sound can be attributed to his musical (instrument) inventions. Via these vehicles, Crewdson crafts skewed sonics that boggle the mind.' XLR8R

'Toys' is the follow up to producer/instrument builder Crewdson's debut album 'Gravity' on Slowfoot Records in 2011 and is a stunning album which is at once archaic and futuristic, folk and tech, accessible and experimental, danceable and introspective, naïve and sophisticated, heart-felt and humorous.

'Gravity' drew huge acclaim from the likes of Gilles Peterson, Clash, XLR8R, Time Out, BBC, Future Sequence and The Fader to name but a few.

The album is a highly skilled and inventive production that draws on a myriad of post-rave styles - garage, dubstep, techno, broken beats - and comparisons can be made to the electronic explorations of the likes of Flying Lotus, Polar Bear, Fourtet, plus contemporaries Mount Kimbie, Micachu and Jon Hopkins' work with King Creosote.

The weird and wonderful hardware electronic musical instruments invented include the The Odd Box, The Concertronica, The Eggiophone and The Sonic Bonnet and the album owes much to these instruments, which have increasingly become central to his production methods and sound, as well as the album's title and imagery. They also provide a clue as to his music's direction. Where the music on 'Gravity' blended jazz inflected harmony and concrete soul with his trademark skewed electronics and tumbling beats, 'Toys' is more informed by the harmonic, lyrical and sonic ideas found in folk music and his instruments perfectly reflect this meeting of folk and technology, the archaic and the futuristic.

In between his debut and this album Crewdson found time to release records as one half of electronic soul duo Eckoclick, be Matthew Herbert's right hand man both on and off stage as well as running his Accidental Records, write music for prominent designer Paul Smith, collaborate with London's National Centre for Circus Arts on a bespoke performance, work with fashion designer Jodie Cartman to create a range of playable musical headpieces, go on tour as tech support to Thom Yorke AND contribute sounds to the rescoring of the first ever British sci fi movie 'A Message From Mars' as a part of The New Radiophonic Workshop in collaboration with the BBC and the BFI.

CLASH: Fragmented post-dubstep with jazz leanings, the producer's work was imbued with a wonderfully engrossing sense of space'

The EC Band is a collaboration between American Brussels-based painter, former grindcore singer and musician Luke Calzonetti and Belgian visual artist, performer and percussionist Stijn Wybouw. Their first EC Band outing sees them conjure up four transcendent tracks driven by improvisation. The instruments used and the way the EC Band naturally and fluidly edit their musical output, make for flickers of musical mirages, infusing everything with a sense of space and abstraction. On the edge of what is recognisable emotion and perspective, Calzonetti and Wybouw are soft-spoken yet confrontational.

Following their second album 'Demiurge' released in May 2011, 'Medium' arrives as the first non-studio based production by Emptyset, recorded on location in the remote Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire. The collection of tracks explores the duo's preoccupations with the elemental properties of sound and bare rhythmic structures and overlays it onto the textural possibilities of space and material. The project marks their first act of adapting their analogue-based studio system into an architectural intervention, pushing extreme bass and feedback into the irregular spaces of the unfinished building. The rural mansion, which remains an incomplete remnant of the Gothic revival and a place studied by both architectural researchers and psychic investigators, provides a rich source of texture as the sparse palette of sine waves and noise is adorned with the intricate details of the space. 'Medium' emerges as an act of translation remodelling the house through sonic impulses into a state of audio, a fluid transformative gesture and a process mirroring the sonar impulses of the bats residing within Woodchester's rooftop sanctuary. The project, supported by the Woodchester Mansion Trust, was provided technical support by the renowned Bristol based sound engineer Mat Sampson who managed the array of vintage microphones and preamps distributed within the building along with the central monophonic sound system. The completed release is presented as a CD and a limited vinyl 12' which includes a special poster of analogue processed imagery by Clayton Welham and Sam Williams, who developed the recent Emptyset video for Function and who will once again be producing a short piece for 'Medium' using video feedback applied to footage captured within Woodchester.

The Paris based producer and DJ NxxxxxS’s delivers a new 13 track album offering a fresh and summery vibe. Shaped by his wavy trademark sound, which mixes techniques from genres such as, vaporwave, phonk, trap, hiphop, R&B and future beats

With 'Piscolabis', Golden Bug delivers a new UFO sound oscillating between electronica, robotic vibrations and psychedelic dub. Piscolabis embraces all the styles important to Antoine Harispuru and emerges as an astonishing opening onto new worlds. And he invited an impressive number of guests to his 4th studio album:

The French from The Liminañas or Tim Glass, the Japanese Vega Voga, the Australians from Funboys, Spanish singer Pajaro Sunrise, it is because this project was born out of the turmoil caused by opposition.

'Colibri' is a psychedelic labyrinth, a sentimental and hypnotic ascent that radiates on the dancefloor. 'Variation Sur 3 Bancs' featuring The Liminañas, immerses us in the world of acid western and psychedelic pop and makes you want to hitchhike on the road. On 'Tokoyo No Kuni', Golden Bug invites Japanese singer Vega Voga to create a musical epic worthy of an imaginary soundtrack by Toshiya Fujita. With its slow rhythm and spellbinding melodies, 'La Boite Noire' explores Berlin electronica immersed in chloroform. 'La Goutte D’Eau' takes off, dark and throbbing. The fluid rhythm is left behind by hypnotic patterns that push the listener into their sofa, which will not come out until the very end of the interlude.

'Fata Morgana' excites with its dirty rhythm, hypnotic arpeggiator and cosmic sound effects. 'Nid de Guêpes' interstellar flute wraps around slowed dub effects, like a 7" in speed 12", and evokes emotion by repeating its heady loop, an obsessive and mutant vision of music. 'Bring The Light' with the support of Spanish singer Pajaro Sunrise is an ideal springboard to touch the stars and explores the clear face of Golden Bug by merging choppy oriental guitars, solar vocals and dub rhythm. Without interruption, 'Kotodama' continues the journey on an unknown planet, on which Vega Voga comes to pose her suave voice on dark electronic arrangements, transforming itself into indescribable and harmoniously eccentric binary code. To end this journey, 'Le Chant Des Sirènes', carried by the voice of Frenchman Tim Glass, plays along the lines of scintillating and nebulous pop.

Vocal textures with robotic vibrations, complex and indescribable psychedelic music are Ariane's thread of this new sensory and universal album. Music to listen to, see and feel.

* Continuing Subtext's exploratory electronics and devastating sonics is the expansive Ego De Espinhos, the debut full-length from twenty-two year old Porto, Portugal-based artist Gonçalo Penas.

* Described by Penas as a series of 'self-exorcisms,' Ego De Espinhos is the cathartic outcome of a highly introspective process. Shaped by opposing forces and instincts, the LP touches on themes that are at once intimate, yet omnipresent. Splendor confronts destruction; id confronts super-ego.

* Created solely with digital instruments designed and built by the artist, Ego De Espinhos is the result of Penas' improvisations. Tracks such as 'Introdução, Umbigo' and 'Tecto Falso' were recorded in one take, and evidence a stark, dramatic emotional palette.

* The release begins as Penas chooses to reject rigidities, customs and conventions of experimental electronic music. Of his process, Penas says: 'Personally, I feel that creation should come from a completely free act of will. It is a place where there should be no rules, no expectations, no rights and no wrongs.'

* In Ego De Espinhos, Penas turns away from his own technical background, and towards a journey of forward experimentation. This follows his education in Music Production and Technologies at Porto's School of Music and Performing Arts. For the first time, he finds the freedom to articulate himself sincerely, unearthing beauty and acceptance amidst wreckage and devastation.

Ambient artist Takahiro Yorifuji created Ruminating on What Was Unsaid during the sweltering Tokyo July of 2019. On this record, a wistful and mesmerizing piano loop crescendos into a rippling wall of sound to create a mood of reflection. For Yorifuji, it calls forth nostalgic dreams of summertime in Japan.

This release marks the long-awaited return of Yorifuji’s record label Tobira Records, which he halted in 2011 after relocating to Tokyo. It also marks an exciting new venture for the artist, who in June 2020 will open his very own record store in his hometown of Kasai, Hyogo Prefecture, under the Tobira Records name.

It joins a string of other Hakobune releases put out this year, including The Last of Our Time Together from Past Inside the Present, A Fan, Strings, and Two Guitars from Patient Sounds, and Rain Studies from Constellation Tatsu.

Harglow is a musical project composed of Colin Nance and Eric Gorman. After bonding over a mutual love of horror and working in several music projects together, the pair embarked on an experiment to combine their love of horror and music. Harglow was the result. Originally based out out OKC, the record started as a series of stand alone sessions. After Colin relocated to Austin, the process evolved and became a satellite project, leading to the remainder of the record being completed over several months of file sharing. This is their debut record.

Record concept:
The songs contained on this record were originally discovered on two 1/4' tape reels with a single word written on them; "Harglow". The tapes were initially discovered during the estate liquidation of a well afflunced, yet eccentric, gentleman believed to be highly involved in the occult.

Based on additional material found along with the tapes, the sounds collected on this record appear to have been used as a soundtrack for the man's grotesque rituals, and the original creators are unknown. Notebooks and additional articles were also found that could point to connections to a larger occult involvement. This has yet to be confirmed.

Slowfoot Records is proud to introduce Hello Skinny and the self-titled debut album. Hello Skinny is the brainchild of in-demand drummer extraordinaire Tom Skinner, who's other current involvements include Sons Of Kemet, Mulatu Astatke, Matthew Herbert, Eska, Finn Peters and The Owiny Sigoma Band amongst many others.

Subtext presents ​Hydrangea, the debut album from writer and artist ​Holly Childs and artist ​Gediminas Žygus formerly known as J.G. Biberkopf.

Initiated in 2017, ​Hydrangea grew out of a series of performances emphasising conspiracies and the designer realities that they generate. Navigating a tangle of digitally induced subjectivities and relationships, ​Hydrangea sees Childs & Žygus amidst a continuously evaporating world in which narratives dissolve, leak, fold in on themselves and loop.

Childs & Žygus ask: As individuals are siloed online, can rifts in reality ever be reconciled? Is history a form of science fiction? And are narrators ever reliable? The process of creating ​Hydrangea was defined by the search for a form to bind fiction, poetry, and musical experience. Its narrative is influenced by technical instructions, lectures and whispered conversations, in which slippage and floating focus can create new meanings in the listener that weren’t intended by the speaker.

Childs & Žygus employ a musical language that layers their cumulative practices and experiences. The compositions are cinematic and spatial, working with the illustrative qualities of Disneyesque string melodies and taking cues from Maurice Ravel’s impressionistic piano works.

The work is also influenced by both artists’ lifelong experiences of rave culture, beginning for Žygus during childhood in newly independent Lithuania, spending time juggling Disney and happy hardcore cassettes on the family stereo, and for Childs as a preteen in Australia, tagging along with her sisters to doofs and warehouse parties. Initiated while the artists were both working between Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 2017, the work also draws on Dutch gabber music.

Hydrangea’s development has been influenced by collaboration with artists and filmmakers ​Metahaven, who created the album art.
Holly Childs is a writer and artist. Her research involves filtering stories of computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry, and light. She is the author of two books: ​No Limit (Hologram) and Danklands (Arcadia Missa); and has presented her work at ICA (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Trust (Berlin), Elam School of Art (Auckland) and more.

Gediminas Žygus is an artist working within the fields of sound, documentary and performance. Their practice assembles a spectrum of influences deriving from architecture, ecology, ethnography, science studies, and media theory. As J.G. Biberkopf, their releases have found homes on Knives and Danse Noire. Žygus has performed at Barbican Centre (London), Berghain (Berlin), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), and Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others.

Two musique concrète symphonies of industrial sound, in which musical relationships emerge from sounds more often regarded as noise. All the sounds were recorded by Sounds of Changes, a pan-EU project capturing obsolete and endangered industrial and domestic sounds. 
It’s hard to know when a sound is endangered – we never know what technological changes are around the corner. My work as a composer is concerned with environmental sounds and the sound of industry and machines. I use these sounds as the compositional building blocks of my music, and manipulate and compose with them. The source material is recognisable throughout, even when manipulated, juxtaposed or overlaid.

Sounds are disappearing without us even noticing. From the gradual evolution of everyday tech sounds to the sounds of old Routemaster buses, whistling kettles being replaced by hot water filters, we can’t notice the changes while we’re in the midst of them. Sounds of Changes is an epic project documenting these endangered sounds before it’s too late.

The Eccentric Press / Die Exzenterpresse focuses on recordings in Germany, made with the LWL-Industriemuseum in Dortmund. The sinister opening atmosphere of Wuppertaler Schwebebahn Station in western Germany gives way to the rattling tones of a button sewing machine. We’re in an industrial space soundtracked by machines. The chugging rhythm of a steelwork furnace is interrupted by the punch of a time clock. Pitched material is overlaid to create unexpected harmonies, whilst technology from different eras is coerced into a propulsive rhythm. This piece was commissioned and broadcast by Westdeutcher Rundfunk, Cologne on 9th April, 2016, and was a finalist in that year’s Prix Palma Ars Acustica.

Maudslay Engine was commissioned by ABC Radio National, Australia in 2016, and draws on recordings from Sweden, Belgium, Poland and the UK. Interlocking movements form a 20 minute composition, beginning with a Saab fighter jet, and ending with the eponymous 1838 steam engine built for Kew Bridge. In between, the background pitch of a metal cutter is shaped into a high frequency melody interrupted by a mortise machine. A stray pitched metallic sound from a linotype machine is transformed into a melodic interlude, superseded by the drone of a grain dryer – a huge machine that creates animal feed. The last melodic movement derives from the start-up sound from a vintage 1991 IBM desktop computer, before a fire truck siren closes the piece.

Memory Palace is the debut album by Argentinian electronic artist, jazz drummer and composer Carlos Falanga under the IHHH moniker.

Recorded in Barcelona’s La Isla Studios using mainly an Octatrack sampler, Falanga attempts to break from traditional sequencing by combining modular drones and rubato rhythms: a phrasing technique that accelerates and slows parts of a piece without altering the overarching pace. With a focus on off-the-grid rhythm and a high resolution digital sound, the complex loops unfold to reveal a trance-like quality.

The term Memory Palace refers to an easily recalled visual memory, with the album taking inspiration from hypnagogic symbolist painter Odilon Redon, even lifting a track title from a painting: 'When Life Was Awakening In The Depths Of Obscure Matter'. Falanga aims to highlight the void between the mundane and the magical, the everyday and the unexpected, by manipulating traditional sounds, structures and tempos into new forms.

Falanga has toured around Asia, America and Europe, supporting national and international artists such as: Colder, Marco Mezquida, Jorge Rossy, Carme Canela, The Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Amparo Sanchez and many others. He has released with Sunlinxx, Emerald and Doreen, Finis Africae and Nein Records.

Six Correlations was originally composed for a commissioned performance in Berlin and recorded in early 2018 over three days. The project explores the intersections between traditional music from various cultures, with a particular focus on Gaelic folk music native to the remote island regions of Scotland, where half of Ginzburg's family originates from.

It incorporates influences of Iranian traditional music, Indian classical and generative composition techniques. Six correlations considers the relationship between the organic and the digital world as a meditation on whether modernity implicitly
represents a long slow goodbye to nature: a long slow goodbye to everything that is not integrated into the networked world. The response to the disappearance of both nature and non-digital culture is presented here as an aspiration to imagine and communicate an harmonious relationship between the organic and the technological.

Produced using a hand drum, piano, voice, shruti box and Roland SH-101, six correlations brings together many of the influences from the Subtext artists Ginzburg has worked with over the last years, such as Turkish artist and percussionist Cevdet Erek and Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro - as well as connecting with his instrumental explorations with Paul Purgas as Emptyset, and recent releases on Arc Light Editions such as 'Salm' - an LP of Gaelic Psalm singing from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
James Ginzburg is one half of Emptyset and founder of Subtext Recordings, as well as co-curator of the Arc Light Editions imprint with Jennifer Allan.

* On Sutarti Joshua Sabin draws influence from the compositional structures and psychoacoustic properties that exist within early Lithuanian folk music, exploring the emotional potency of the human voice through the manipulation of elements of archival recordings.

* Obtaining access to the folk music archives of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Ethnomusicology Archive from the outset of this project, Sabin felt a particular resonance with the extensive library of vocal recordings and specifically the song forms of the Sutartinė. Derived from the Lithuanian verb 'Sutarti' - to be 'in agreement', 'to attune' – Sutartinės are a Lithuanian form of Schwebungsdiaphonie - a distinct canonic song style consisting of two or more voices that purposefully clash creating extremely precise dissonances and the phenomena of aural ‘beating’.

* Inspired by the psychoacoustic research of Rytis Ambrazevičius, whose computer analyses reveal the unique acoustic and harmonic complexities in these archival songs, and transfixed by what Sabin describes as their “arresting and often almost plaintive and minimalistic beauty”, he sought to compose directly with the recordings themselves as a raw material.

* Sutarti exists fundamentally as an emotional 'response', presenting archival voices through radical recontextualisations that Sabin hopes simultaneously express both his personal perspective and experience, and also speak universally to the power and versatility of the voice as a communicator of meaning and emotion.

* Produced with archival recordings, instrumentation including, Skudučiai and Fiddle, and field recordings of Lithuanian forest ambiences.

* Joshua Sabin is an Edinburgh based composer and sound designer, who’s first LP “Terminus Drift” was released on Subtext in 2017.

Piezo returns to Facta and K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint with a 5 track EP of experimental, warping, majestic club music. Since his last outing on the label, the Milanese producer has refined and consolidated his aesthetic considerably: through a spree of crucial releases on his own label, Ansia, and then with the release of his essential debut LP, Perdu (released in 2020 on experimental powerhouse Hundebiss). LSD Superhero sees him bring together the goofy, club-ready aspects of his output on Ansia with the meticulously crafted cybernetic sonics of his debut LP, but with the addition of something new: melody. The title track opens the record with house lights up: glitching percs build around gasseous pads and trembling subs in a drawn out climax that finally collapses into a rolling technoiddembow beat at its midpoint. Next, ‘Unto’ squeezes the producer’s wonky, sub-heavy sonics into a 4x4 template - one of those special 5 am tracks that will appeal equally to dubsteppers and minimal heads. (Remember that time Shackleton appeared on Perlon?). ‘TB2’ - a collaboration with label head K-LONE - balances nectar sweet melodies with bust-up drums and glitching FX hits, while ‘Dijitz’ sees him flex his full melodic knack for an eyes down, half-stepping synth workout. To close, ambient wobbler ‘Xxx^_^x’ refracts bass music sonics into something sprawling and shadowy - like an old Benga track exploded and