Beats News

Racah is an on-going collaboration between South England based sound artists RSPTN (f.k.a. Rasputin) and The Bricoleur. Their Summoning / Edge Lands is the 6th entry into the Bladud Flies! Abhorrent Jukebox 7" series. Selected from over four hours of continuous music, these two short tracks are microcosmic distillations of the nighttime recording session as a whole, downbeat, fugue state ambience occasionally boiling over into pulsating blasts of noise.

The claustrophobic Summoning takes some cues from dub with a distant bass line propelled by a slow lurching beat and spluttering space age electronics, while Edge Lands is an even more disparate and dissonant affair. Murky, blown-out tones shift into pink noise as the childlike chimes of a carillon lullaby echo sinisterly in the background.

The 7" lathe comes housed in a beautiful screen-printed sleeve with yellow paper inner. A particularly elegant touch is the BF! logo and catalog number that has been engraved on side A.

This LP focuses on recorded sound and structures made with recorded sound. How the original sound was produced and the objects used in the production of the sounds is of secondary interest. Tiny details in the sounds are important and what might appear to be insignificant, dull or uneventful is often salient. Acute, obsessive listening brings these elements to the fore. 
In the process of making these structures, meaning begins to emerge and unfold. This is always highly subjective, ambiguous and uncertain and might fleetingly resonate with many ideas, objects, narratives and situations that are not connected with sound.

Inspiration often comes from existing music but also from the entire history of ideas and, again, a tiny detail might produce a kind of creative resonance. Curiosity is predominant and drives forward the process of composition.

"Can a music made with the modern tools of digital music and contemporary production sound eerily as if created with the same equipment that Stockhausen, Henri and Berio all availed themselves of in the radio studios of the 50s and 60s – and yet sound bright and fresh to the ears of today's listeners? Robert Worby shows us how, with Factitious Airs." — Carl Stone

THE NEW SELECTA VOL. 1 is the first of 3 new records to be released by Richard Wilson under his Rognvald moniker via WIFETRAX on Love Love Records.
The New Selecta is an explosive exploration into uncharted territory of the deepest and dankest UK jungle using a 'future-old skool' template. Deep, gut-busting bass fires down through swampy ambient clouds while hyper-edited breaks crack like lightning, swelling into moody skanking grooves. The hyper-retro-futurist junglizm of The New Selecta rushes too relentlessly to have been put out all at once so listeners will get their fix in 3 instalments in order to prevent fainting.

Stacked Up At Zero is the new full length instrumental LP from London based artist / musician Ross Downes and is a carefully crafted record fluctuating between calm solace, foreboding tension and ambient longing. Fundamentally an electronic record, synthesisers create a darkly ethereal setting, evoking entranced contemplation that regularly gives way to more shadowy territories. From comforting to concerning, it captivates through an inventive combining of genres.

Stacked Up At Zero is an intensely intimate and personal record. A place that Downes built to occupy, wander and give voice during a difficult year. It’s a record of psychological landscapes, between truths that need comfort and fictions that give escape. The influence and love of cinema permeates the record. Downes builds a world, creating an environment influenced by soundtracks, potential narratives and a propensity for the dramatic.

Evocative sound design and field recordings provide atmospheres that accompany, place and shroud the melodic and compositional preoccupations of the record. The influences, from a multitude of approaches and styles, contribute to a dynamic collection of shifting densities that reference minimal, ambient, industrial and contemporary classical music.

Drones shift and fluctuate whilst a myriad of synthesisers propel, distort and drift. Expansive groaning bass frequencies lay ominous foundations for progressive lines, vast sci-fi pads, digital ticks, sampled strings, disembodied voices and sparse percussion immersed in cavernous echoing reverb.

Recent musical activities from Downes have included compositions for large European art installation projects. During 2019 he contributed a piece to Mischa Kabul’s long running installation Res-o-nant at the Jewish Museum, Berlin. In 2018 he composed a lengthy work for his collaboration, with Cologne based, artist Sebastian Freytag on an ambitious light/audio installation titled Sygnal for The Museum Slaskie, Poland. He has recently completed work on soundtracking Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost's Sydney Bienalle exhibition which opens this Spring.

The first commercial release from sound artist Samson Stilwell, Signals was produced combining synthesized sound and field recordings to take the listener through a rich, dynamic soundscape, melancholy yet uplifting, contemplative yet buoyant.

Interdisciplinary artist Sébastien Robert strikes an emotive and explorative tone on his debut album Emerging Threshold, interpreting and layering field recordings and adding swathes of synthesised sound to conjure up an experience that reads and sees the cosmos in the mundane. The album touches upon kosmische musik, but does so in modern and updated form. This is ambient music that digs beyond the ambient perspective as the intensity of all tracks is mostly subtly confrontational and leaves little room for distance.
Robert investigates disappearing indigenous rituals, exploring their sonic, visual and contextual characteristics and translating them into works of art. Emerging Threshold is the result of his sonic exploration of the western flank of the Sierra Neva volcano in Chilewhere he recorded its immersive geological activity and natural echo, all the while experimenting with the tonal variations that can be produced by the trutruka, a traditional wind instrument of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile. Capturing the landscape's complexity and focusing on the subtle modulation of different physical states, Robert plays with the ostensible randomness apparent in his recorded material, igniting an interpretative stance on field recordings that is subtle and openended. Emerging Threshold is both intensely intimate and cinemascope.

Mastered by Robin Koek / Distribution by Crevette
Photography by Sébastien Robert , Artwork by Anatole De Benedictis, Layout by Jonathan
Castro Alejos

Soccer96 is made up of two thirds of The Comet Is Coming, currently whipping up a cosmic storm on their Mercury Prize nominated album Channel The Spirits.


Their bold approach to improvised composition, recording processes and experimentation is reminiscent of Flying Lotus, Can, Thundercat and Gaslamp Killer.

STATIC (ORIGINAL SURF SOUNDTRACKS VOL. 1) released this Spring serves to stir up the wanderlust for those new frontiers.

Ethereal soundscapes, lo-fi guitar excursions and rising orchestral, neo-classical moments summon images of the wild, awe-inspiring surf destinations - Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, The Faroes and beyond. Aficianados of cold water cinematic adventures will already be familiar with CJ's work. The album is a selection of 8 tracks, each originally composed for one of a number of award winning surf films scored by CJ Mirra over the past four years. The light, the landscape, the size of the waves and colour of the water all had an influence on the sound,' says CJ on harnessing the essence of these cold water locales.

A musician and composer, CJ Mirra's entry to the world of surf film came through acclaimed director Chris McClean after Chris heard an early track that was leaked online. This led to a unique partnership that has produced over 20 short films screened at festivals worldwide from SXSW to London, as well as the award-winning live A/V show 'Chasing Zero'. The critically acclaimed 'Edges Of Sanity', with poetry by Dan Crockett narrated by Charles Dance, features on the album alongside a series of evocative and ethereal tracks taking the listener on a journey across an epic surfscape.

CJ Mirra will be on tour in late April / May. The new live band features renowned surfer/ musician LeeAnn Curren and will be accompanied by visuals from Chris McClean.

The latest entry into Bladud Flies! Abhorrent Jukebox series denotes something of a departure for Hastings based producer The Bricoleur. While Path of the Nyau Perpendicular To Everything shares a similar headiness to The Bricoleur's previous introspective drone work, this latest offering is a far more confrontational and spontaneous affair, bristling with punk rock energy.

On Path of the Nyau heavily manipulated gamelan samples trigger in flurries that overlap and intertwine, bringing to mind Harry Partch's microtonal compositions for percussive instruments, Wolf Eyes in-the-red industrial brashness and fellow British explorers Liberez. Perpendicular To Everything sees long lost snatches of naively prophetic and desperately paranoid radio transmissions disintegrate into a molasses-slow hip-hop beat.

Combining ethnic and electronic music into impossible clamorous forms, The Bricoleur offers a brief yet beatific blast of ritualistic noise.

Thames presents diverse sound interactions along the River Thames that surprise with their musicality. As we travel from central London to the river’s furthest estuary, it feels like we’re travelling back in time. We hear the sounds of nature and industry in competition, from the pitched, quasi-musical sound of Tower Bridge lifting up, to the marsh frogs of Allhallows. 
“This collection of field recordings by the London Sound Survey brings the Thames to life through sound. Over many years Ian Rawes has made an audio mosaic reflecting this extraordinary landscape, from Tower Bridge to estuarine marshes and a now-lost oil refinery, allowing listeners a unique insight into the experience of these places.” — Rachel Lichtenstein, author of ’Estuary: out from London to the sea’ (Penguin, 2016)

Since 2008, Ian Rawes’ London Sound Survey has documented the changing sound of the UK’s capital through a huge array of new field recordings, capturing every aspect of London life. Ian began making field recordings of London street life partly because he believed the city’s rate of change was quickening.

The London Sound Survey went online in 2009 and has grown since to include much sound-related historical material as well as over 2,000 modern-day recordings. As the project has progressed, the soundworld of London has changed, with familiar sounds becoming extinct imperceptibly, never to be heard again.

Im Hag is the debut Ghost Box album from Berlin based Sebastian Counts' ToiToiToi.

Following on from his single for the label's Other Voices series in 2015, it's very detailed and lovingly produced music, crafted from electronic, synth, sampled and acoustic sources.

Its a wunderkammer of an album crammed with original ideas. All at once managing to be witty, spooky, melodic and abstract.

The music and design explores the polarities of folklore vs modernity, and wilderness vs civilisation.

It's an album about German culture but it pre-empts a nostalgia for the vanishing concept of internationalism, once exemplified by town twinning. It's also a warm-hearted record, hopefully a tiny morale booster against Europe's resurgent spectres.

As always the beautiful CD and LP packaging is designed by Julian House. The 180gm LP includes a free download card.

Cracking stuff. Guy Bartell is a genius.'
Andrew Male, Stuart Maconie's Freakier Zone, BBC 6MUSIC

A very fine and accomplished thing.'
JONNY TRUNK Record Collector

A beautifully realised soundtrack.' NORMAN RECORDS

* In United, her debut LP as UCC Harlo, classically-trained musician Annie Gårlid distills hauntological pop, sound art, medieval and baroque music, and left-field club production into a series of ecclesiastical-wave ventures.

* Written over six years in Germany, United began on train commutes during Gårlid's stint as a violist in an opera orchestra near Cologne and developed further during her time in Berlin. Through gestures such as reframing music by Bach and Magister Zacharias through DAW experimentation and field recordings, United proposes sonic reconciliations between the old and the new.

* United also reflects the idea that sound and music always exist in broader, complex contexts loaded with historical and environmental information and mediated by internal emotional landscapes. For Gårlid, this acknowledgement is a metaphor for our urgent need to be attentive to non-human agencies and voices. United acts as a means of claiming a right to obscurity and of 'sounding' ambivalence, doubt, and messiness in an age that demands transparency and clarity.

* Annie Gårlid is a New York-based writer, musician and musicology researcher concerned with our ever-shifting, tenuous relationships with ecology, technology and care.

* Creating and discovering links between the old and the new, Gårlid operates equally in the realms of experimental, club and early music. She is a member of the Holly Herndon Ensemble and the band Songs, has collaborated with Caterina Barbieri, Bill Kouligas and Emptyset, and has performed with ASMR-artist Claire Tolan. She works regularly with an array of composers and artists, and performs as a viola player and singer in both Europe and the USA.""

Rail Cables present a unique series of seasonal compilations featuring new music inspired by train travel. Ambient Works and Field Recordings unpack on beautifully packaged records. The Winter Collection is a split LP from Scanner, Dru$s (Gnod), Ran Slavin and Greg Fox. Presented in a screen-printed sleeve.

Vox Populi Field Works Vol.II is the second part of a broader project entitled 'Field Works', in which the label travels to different locations in the world in order to collect sounds, eventually creating an archive of some of the finest and humblest musical traditions. Inspired by academic methods proper to ethnomusicology and ethnography, this project's aim is to showcase the diversity of our human cultural heritage, which is threatened by accelerated globalization and homogenization of the worldwide musical spectrum.

This record is the result of a twenty-day trip to Japan. Led by anthropologist and label founder Fred Scharf and his Vox Populi Records crew, this is the second instalment on the 'Field Works' series. This 12'' vinyl release is a collection of field recordings, jam sessions, studio recordings, street soundscapes, religious rituals, fighting championships and wedding ceremonies, all of which were remixed and reinterpreted by Japan Blues, Tim Karbon, Hiroaki Oba & Shizka (aka Inoue Shirabe), delivering tracks whose core represents a wide array of traditional Japanese sounds.

tracks by add n to x, hairy butter, stereolab u. a.

Time Released Sound is pleased to be releasing the new album "Allusionen", from German modern classical artist, Himmelsrandt. The nine tracks on this moody, wintry and melancholic beauty feature the artist Peter Honsalek either on piano and viola, and on four tracks, he additionally plays the mysterious early electronic synthesizer called the Volkstrautonium. This is a somewhat dark and introspective journey through the shortest, coldest days of the year, please pull up a chair by the fire, and put your headphones on!

As Peter says, "The album in general deals with the topic of "allusion". The piano songs reflect the period in which the viola songs were invented (between the years 2019/2020). The viola songs themselves are allusions to certain styles and epochs. To notice this and to classify correctly is the job of the listener.

There are also allusions (music for Piano and the rare Volkstrautonium), which are not intended to refer to specific styles, epochs or compositions, but only to allude to specific cold and snowy days between the years 2019/2020. The aim of the album was to capture the creation of contemporary music in its entirety and make it audible. This includes not only the result, but also the external (musical and non-musical) influences that shaped it.

Tina Turner. Princess Diana. Johan Cruijff. Jesus. Abba. Spider-Man. Jerry Springer. Mormons. A brothel. Monty Python. A gay remake of Shakespeare. Anne Frank. Nothing and no-one seems to be able to escape the fangs of the musical industry. So it's no real surprise that the last woman standing, DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess, has also fallen victim to this evil fate.

The album, after last year's 'Explain The Food, Bitte' her second release with Berlin label 'Play Loud! Productions', is as surprising and up-to-date as ever. Marcelle's productions come into existence quite quickly, like sketches capturing a moment. Take, for example, 'The Quarantine House Party Try-Out', a bouncy track dealing with those illegal parties people organised in their own homes during the covid period.

With the pandemic now hopefully over, the dj/producer travels the world again. Marcelle deals with this in 'Soups On Tour', related to a link on her website where she documents all soups she eats on the road (and in restaurants). It’s this individual approach to her creative process that gives her artistic fulfillment; her D.I.Y. attitude is inherent to everything she does and is reflected in her creative process as a whole, from the music itself to how it i presented: on the sleeve of 'DJ Marcelle: The Musical' we see her literally 'dropping' a musical.

The freedom she grants herself is essential, she never had the difficulty of coping with certain expectations or being stuck with a certain perceived musical (ha!) profile, because she has always been able to make sure people didn’t have any anticipation of where her music (and dj-sets) would go in the first place. So it's no real surprise that, following danceable tracks like 'Voted Best DJ School ( 25% Off') and weird album opener/warning 'This Record Is Scratched' on side A, we get only one track on side B: the 17-minute-plus technoid stomper 'Smacznego!' (Polish for 'enjoy your meal'). It's a hypnotic, continually shifting track which, even when it ends after such a long time, leaves you hungry for more. The hilarious promo video of the song hopefully satisfies this appetite.

So now we have DJ Marcelle also being exploited as a musical. There is one consolation, though: 'DJ Marcelle: The Musical' happens to be the first instrumental musical in the world!


Resident Advisor: “Satisfying and hypnotic.”

Julie Andrews: “This is really the sound of music.”

The Wire: “Both dazed and elated.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber: “Marcelle embodies the future of the musical. I can take a step back with confidence.”

Dekmantel: “The Amsterdam artist can go anywhere and does not exclude anything.”

Liza Minelli: “Life is a cabaret? Life is Marcelle!”

Orange Vinyl

The Light Inside, The Dark Outside is Italian ambient duo ILUITEQ's third full-length album.
The Light Inside, The Dark Outside is out on May 6th on limited edition orange vinyl (plus download card with bonus track)
Influenced by the uncertainty and precariousness of the current times, the album was conceived as a means to nourish the light inside all of us, no matter how difficult and dark the reality can turn out to be.
Such "light" is reflected in the album's widescreen and hopefully ardent ambient. In contrast to their previous albums, The Light Inside, The Dark Outside is permeated by a strong sense of motion. The Light Inside, The Dark Outside is an evolution for the duo, themed by the inner need for brightness and hope.

After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway.

Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with Lasse Marhaug. An esteemed avant-noise artist, Marhaug envisioned making music that would fall loosely in line with Throbbing Gristle. Kelly, on the other hand, had planned to create something inspired by Enya, an artist who has had an enduring impact on her creative being. They met each other halfway, pairing tough, industrial sounds with ethereal Celtic mysticism, and creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release.

One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her ‘eighth album’.

After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway.

Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with Lasse Marhaug. An esteemed avant-noise artist, Marhaug envisioned making music that would fall loosely in line with Throbbing Gristle. Kelly, on the other hand, had planned to create something inspired by Enya, an artist who has had an enduring impact on her creative being. They met each other halfway, pairing tough, industrial sounds with ethereal Celtic mysticism, and creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release.

One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her ‘eighth album’.

‘Reality Tunnels’ is a concept that was originally introduced by Robert Anton Wilson in his 1983 book ‘Prometheus Rising’. In essence, the concept of a reality tunnel relates to an idea on how we create our own perspective – the subjective filter that we each apply to the world around us; the things we perceive and what our consciousness deems worthy of attention, IE what we see and hear is entirely relative to what we do not.

At points angular and uncompromising with levels in the red, frequencies pushed out and EQ curves stretched into strange new shapes, Pinch mixes both low and hi fi on this boldly distinct sonic statement. It sees him flexing years of production skills – but unconventionally so – knowing well that safe predictability and rounded polish don’t get the most interesting results.
Dark trip hop Bristolia segues into blistering jungle on album opener ‘Entangled Particles’, before planet-hopping onto the spiky insidious grimestep of ‘All Man Got’, featuring the rugged rasp of OG warhorse Trim.
Beginning a triptych of future techno, ‘Accelerated Culture’ offers the album’s most relatively straightforward moment, albeit one of scorching, anthemic dancefloor heat. Delving deeper into the vortex is the synapse sparking wobbler ‘Returnity’, before ‘Finding Space’ reaches to the cosmos’ far-flung, glowing outlands.
Back to an urban reality is ‘Party’, where a subtly menacing sense of dread is ignited by Killa P’s incremental flow, which ramps-up and pairs-back the intensity in unexpected ways. Still moving freely between different realities, ‘Back To Beyond’ is beautiful gloaming ambience, executed with equal fine-tuned grace as the genre’s masters.


Jamaican vocalist Inezi lends sweet tones to the slow burning, roots-meets-modern-bass spiritual ‘Change Is A Must’, and on ‘Non-Terrestrial Forms’ an atmospheric, misty steppers intro segues stealthily into fiercely dystopian, amen-fuelled jungle tekno; marking one of several surprise attacks on the album, where a subtle-slight-of hand shoots the intensity level dynamically up.Closing as it begins, the album is bookended by a piece that recalls the dark, intricate soundscapes of Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’ and Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ – found here in ‘The Last One’s scorched, smoky rocker.

Hit the vinyl double pack for an exclusive and quite unique sounding 120bpm glitchy techno roller featuring man like Trim once again and live cello recordings.

The project "Records Without Conception" shows toğrul's process of finding his sound. The album is not based on a concept, a statement or an overriding mood. The tracks are rather to be understood as portraits from protracted explorations of basic patterns in electronic genres and modular sound synthesis. The results are a not self- contained body of work, but rather discussions of various demands on sound and music that were experienced by the artist himself between the years 2018 and 2021. With his debut album, the German and Azerbaijan based producer wants to capture the process of this artistic searching and finding.
Surreal constructions of contrasting sounds evolve between the grids of genres. An experimental style and contemporary references across Contemporary RnB, Electro, Glitch and IDM form a sound logic of its own, which is additionally grounded by the singers Alice Dlugosch & Mariama Ceesay in two independent tracks.

Representatives of Kyiv’s downtempo wave, Kostya Kottov and Techija, have long been probing the ground for launching their own label. The starting point was their joint promoter POVILNO, under the banner of which they’ve been running events for the past few years. Staking on eclecticism and musical diversity, they’re ready to present the first compilation of the newly minted imprint – a collection of slow-burning tracks inspired by the power of organic elements and psychedelic experimentation from artists around the world, including duo Stevie R and Parisinos, Roe Deers, Dan Bay, Colossio, LEONOR and ID_UA.

The compilation opener “Information Society” sees the massive bass lines of UK label bosses Inside Out, Stevie R and Parisinos, their sense of drama and epicism meet the chilling vocals from 70s videos about information overload. The result is a slow but weighty track for early dancefloors and late night hangouts. “People Know” from label mate, Ukrainian producer ID_UA, is a psychedelic stroll under a palm-crossed sky. A tight groove with tantalising synths and a splash of trippy guitar parts. The mood is picked up by the Mexican Colossio with the exceptional diamond collection “Shofar”, a perfect dancefloor piece where guitar and brass sounds intertwine to leave a mark, a constant intrigue and a mysterious atmosphere that hypnotizes you and keeps you moving.

At the helm of the B-side is Lithuanian nightlife powerhouse Roe Deers with “Monotony Killed Dinosaurs”: soft breaks and a tight beat laden with shifting percussion immerse you in the nighttime jungle. “The Darkside of Orgánica” by Frankfurt-based musician Dan Bay is a fusion of the tranquility of nature and a sense of danceable energy; a track that hangs on to raw and dynamic beats and a winding lead, providing a pulsating, hypnotic immersion. Closing the rotation is Guadalajara-based producer Leonor’s ‘RWandaS Bells’, which blends influences of folk music and primal rhythm with a special dub flavour. Close your eyes and embark on a fascinating journey to complete this compilation.

Thomas Leer and Robert Rental’s ‘The Bridge’ is re-issued on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1979, and on CD for the first time since 1992. With Robert unfortunately passing away in 2000, this record, Leer and Rental’s one and only album together, stands alone in capturing the duo’s pioneering capabilities.

 ‘The Bridge’ was originally released on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records label in 1979 and is considered to be an early electronic avant-garde synth-pop masterpiece, seeing the likes of John Foxx, Propaganda, Art of Noise and ABC citing the pair as key influences.

 The release of this album aligns with the longawaited London debut of the exhibition ‘From The Port To The Bridge’ which will be held at The Horse Hospital in central London from 21st January until 10th February 2022. The exhibition, which was previously shown in Greenock in 2018, shares the story behind Thomas Leer and Robert Rental and the making of the album.

White vinyl LP includes sleeve notes and high definition audio download code.