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limited edition 2x12" now !

‘Light filtered through light filtered through light filtered through water.

Process oriented harmonics from SALELE. Pure computer music. 10 tracks running at a hard 30 minutes.’

Very limited!

San Francisco’s Xyla is a queer BPoC classical musician-turned producer, heavily influenced by footwork, R&B, club and orchestral music.
 ‘Ways’ is Xyla’s Leaving Records debut. Echoes of
sweaty rave anthems and classic IDM head trips
can be heard strewn throughout the album’s eight
compositions, awash in deep ambient swirls and
intriguingly twisted samples.
 For fans of Bochum Welt, Aphex Twin, Four Tet,
Barker, Matmos, Plaid.
 Tip-on jacket with gloss finish and black polylined
inner sleeve.

Leaving Records introduces San Francisco’s Xyla to the world. The classical musician-turned-producer’s debut full-length Ways presents a fresh, electronic yet organic sound that deftly skates over and around genre limitations into a deeply felt, lush and hyper-futuristic group of songs. Echoes of sweaty rave anthems and classic IDM head trips can be heard strewn throughout Ways’ serpentine compositions, awash in deep ambient swirls and intriguingly twisted samples. Of the album’s title, Xyla states, “Sometimes you think of how things could’ve been. There are a million different ways that things can go.” The eight tracks on Ways each feel like a uniquely personal expression, heavy feelings processed by the producer’s classical music training and extrapolated through exciting self-taught production methods.

The trajectory of Ways covers many different moods and atmospheres. Early standout “Now” inhabits a reflective space, emotive vocal samples mingling with a variety of expressively filtered synths. Xyla states, “It was a very vulnerable time when I was making this music. It was winter, I quit my job, and I had lost a few close people. I just really felt like, ‘Now that I need you, where are you?’” The devastating “Cold” mirrors its title with thick smears of psychedelic pads, abetted by deliriously sliced vocals stabs and a ferocious acid bassline. Title track “Ways” straddles the line between footwork and ambient, a stuttering, endlessly listenable track that unfolds new and unexpected sounds at each turn.

The pairing of Xyla and Leaving Records is a natural one, with the label and producer sharing an affinity for adventurous musical styles that defy easy categorization. Xyla states, “I listen to so much music, and I really feel like my music is all over the place … I was having an identity crisis, and then Leaving Records announces the mantra ‘All Genre, All Genre, All Genre,’ …… ‘yes, that’s me.’”

Andrew Tasselmyer is a musician from Baltimore, MD currently living in Philadelphia, PA. He utilizes samplers, field recordings, and lo-fi recording techniques to make textured and tactile sounds.

In addition to his solo catalog on labels such as Seil Records, Eilean Recs, Constellation Tatsu, Home Normal, and more, he is a member of Hotel Neon, Gray Acres, and Mordançage

Reinhold Weber, born in 1927, was known as a pioneer of electronic music. In his compositions, Weber placed a focus on twelve-tone music, he became increasingly fascinated in the field of computer music since the 1970s. He produced numerous works at the Studio for Electronic Music at the University of Karlsruhe.

Reinhold Weber was born in Gießen on July 18, 1927. He studied at Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf (including composition with Jürg Baur, piano with Max Martin Stein) and passed his exam in composition, theory, piano and ear training with distinction. He completed further masterclasses with Wolfgang Fortner, Hermann Heiss, Oliver Messiaen (composition), Kurt Thomas (choral conducting), Andor Foldes (piano) and Gerhard Nestler (electronic music). Reinhold Weber was a professor at the Baden Conservatory of Music in Karlsruhe and also worked in the Studio for Electronic Music of the University of Karlsruhe. His works have been performed in numerous concerts and were broadcasted by SDR, WDR, NDR, HR, SWF and Radio Bremen. Reinhold Weber died March 25, 2013.

Actor Kurt Müller-Graf was born in 1913. After visiting the Theater Academy of Baden in Karlsruhe, he appeared on stage at National Theaters of Karlsruhe, Kassel and Munich since 1935. During World War II he performed in about 10 feature films by Bavaria Film Munich. After 1945 he played at National Theaters in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and at Theaters in Nuremberg, Cologne, Munich, Mannheim, Baden-Baden and Burgtheater Vienna. Furthermore he had guest performances in Zurich, Basel, Salzburg and Heidelberg. Kurt Müller-Graf was touring and had broadcasts on radio and television shows at home and abroad. Kurt Müller-Graf died August 10, 2013.

Polymer Boulevard, the third release of The Ebertbrothers on Mindwaves Music, merges darkened cinematic ambiences with intricate rhythms and textures.
Each of the eight tracks offers a distinct approach to contemporary electronics, surprising the listeners with unusual sonic width and breadth, taking them on a memorable musical roundtrip.
Utilizing an extensive range of synths and techniques, The Ebertbrothers deliver a rich, intense and finely layered album that is well worth one’s attention

On Delta Estácio Blues, São-Paulo-based singer, composer and actor, Juçara Marçal delivers an electric, unflinching take on contemporary Brazil where samba, tropicalia and maracatu are reimagined via hip-hop production techniques.

Created under an oppressive political climate as Brazil suffered from the pandemic, pain, anguish, chaos and anger run through Delta Estácio Blues. Co-produced by Marçal with fellow Metá Metá founder Kiko Dinucci the album was partly inspired by Danny Brown’s 2017
leftfield rap masterwork ‘Atrocity Exhibition’.

For fans of: Metá Metá, Moor Mother, Kiko Dinucci, Damon Locks, Neneh Cherry

Four years on since the portal to Glasgow outsider artist Kay Logan's Otherworld creaked open for the first time, we sit back and admire 'Mad Wee Light' in newly remastered form. Committed to both black and white vinyl editions, her masterpiece glows like a restored AI generated painting, binary scrubbed and winding with fractal strangeness towards its core.

Praise for Otherworld, from Boomkat:

"Stunning, perfectly zonked and secretive drone visions from Kay Logan's Otherworld for her Anxiety bandmate Michael Kasparis' ever-surprising Night School - a real shout for fans of Zoviet France, Two Daughters, Coil, Kevin Drumm

A lowkey jaw-dropper ... The music is really of the rarest drone ambient ilk, spun from real instruments and tape loops with a sort of supernatural, atavistic and prelinguistic quality that gets us slack jawed and heavy-lidded in the most special way.

Spanning tracts of scudding windswept ambience recalling the lushest sort of loopy ambient regressions of Zoviet France, to rawly Scelsi-esque one note drone intensities and the kind of acidic didgeridoo scapes Coil would dream of, Otherworld is making exactly the kind of quietly immanent, life-affirming, expansive musick that we need right now..."

Otherworld is Kay Logan, a multi-disciplinary artist, instrumentalist and sound engineer from Airdrie, now living in Glasgow. Her guitar and bass work in sweaty, thrashing outfits like Herbert Powell and Anxiety are an inverse corollary to the curious tapestries in which Otherworld takes shape. The preternatural stylistic sensibility Logan exhibits in all of her work isn't limited to sound, either – she's a prodigious visual artist with the kind of signature sartorial sensibility that could launch a thousand ships, or lookalikes. Logan's Otherworld project is a musique concrete excursion likely to appeal to fans of Zoviet France or Coil.

On steady rise following two sublime singles over the past year—Sagano b/w Haru Wa Akebono and Karakuri b/w Michinoku—Tokyo-based artist Hoshina Anniversary elaborates his eccentric musical point-of-view even further with a debut album for the ESP Institute entitled Jomon. Fourteen tracks stir a melting pot in line with our obsessions, a variety of styles which often stay in their own dedicated lanes while here their trajectories collide in demonstrable fusion. Hoshina gleans borderline absurdist qualities from late Jazz hero Chick Corea (evident in his wild and meticulous keyboard runs), calls upon ancient Japanese instruments, shrines and mythologies, and makes sideways nods to early minimal synth productions, yet all of the above are sifted through some granular equalization, an abstract veil that smooths the skin of Hoshina's mutant creation. A weight of experience pervades throughout, a requisite education in the electronic realm and a deep reverence for Jazz and its masters, and in turn this confidence transfers a sense of ease which leaves us poring over alternative approaches to otherwise familiar tropes. Once this conversation with the music is established, a subliminal push/pull tension toys with us across the length of the album, undulating our sense of space. The tonally rich, dynamic and melodic side of the works present a cool sense of depth but are violently contrasted by a slew of over-saturated punches, and at some point an inevitable alchemy casts these disparate expressions into a haunting monolithic array. Some are glistening and smooth, others are porous and jagged, but all amount to a staunch and cohesive work with the ability to transport listeners to regions unknown.

Marie Davidson is a Canadian electronic producer and performer who
released ‘Working Class Woman’ on Ninja Tune in October 2018. This
album is now being released on clear vinyl.

 ‘Working Class Woman’ is Marie’s fourth and most self-reflective record to date. Italo Disco, proto-industrial and electro influences leaden with gut-punching weight that makes the record more visceral than any she’s released before. Industrial heaviness is balanced by Marie’s spoken text (rather than spoken word); dark, textured soundscapes are counterweighted by statements that carry a darkly humorous edge, making observations on both aspects of club culture as well as more oblique critiques of the modern world.

 “As her production taps out cross-rhythms like a flock of woodpeckers, Marie Davidson’s spoken words demand nonstop work: a gig-economy ultimatum.” - New York Times (‘Work It’, #14 in 65 Best Songs)

 “Marie Davidson’s voice is one of the biggest pleasures in contemporary electronic music.” - The Guardian

 ‘Working Class Woman’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize and included in many 2018 End Of Year lists.

 First single ‘So Right’ was remixed by John Talabot.

 Legendary Belgian duo Soulwax remixed ‘Work It’, which was nominated for Best Remixed Recording at the 2020 GRAMMY Awards, and for Best Independent Remix at the 2020 AIM Awards.

 Davidson has previously performed live at internationally renowned
festivals such as SONAR (Reykjavik and Barcelona), Primavera Sound, Dekmantel, Lowlands, Flow, Melt!, Dour, ADE Live, Red Bull Music Festival, SXSW, The Warehouse Project, Parklife and Field Day and supported Eric Copeland.

 She headlined shows across the UK, including XOYO with Hunee and a sold out Electrowerkz (London).

 For fans of Essaie Pas, Nina Kraviz, Lena Willikens, Not Waving, Axel Bowman, Mano, Le Tough, Optimo and Sasha.

 Clear vinyl in black paper inner bags, with 12” 12 page gloss booklet in a matte laminated sleeve with spine. Housed in a PVC sleeve with spot white print.

"Four new chapters from Nicolás Jaar in Telas.

Here, again, it’s the odder and more essence-like devotion to sound that is semi-narrative, ambient, and concrète that we heard and were drawn to in Pomegranates. Telas gestures towards a more refined tone, with less sudden shifts and vignettes, incrementally shaping an hour of self-reflective music with tracks building and collapsing across its vinyl sides.

When Telas was first drafted and presented to Mana it felt appropriate to mention a sense of monastic retreat. Where Pomegranates often felt epic-like in its scope and shifting scales, this album conveys images of quieter moments spent tending to a vegetable patch within a cloistered garden, perhaps, or the threading of a tapestry with filigree. Nicolás often moves slowly and deliberately throughout, focused on manipulating gauzy fibres and room tone or fluttering around other cryptic actors, so that when bursts of clarity and emotion appear they take on a deeper character.

There’s a greater sense of contemplation and patience in the album’s logic, pointing to a conception of art, melody, and sound which is continuously under construction. In relationship with sister-album Cenizas and surface qualities of recent Against All Logic material it feels that there’s a centre being defined and meditated upon.

Telas was made between December 2016 and January 2020."

Tom Middleton is focused on the future in many ways. His new alias GCOM is an all-new, 21st century redesign of his original Global Communication concept and collaboration with Mark Pritchard. The new album E2-XO is some of the most advanced music he has ever made, both in sound and concept. signifying a technological, creative and philosophical evolution into the new era; from planetary communication and understanding to Galactic Communication.

Featuring: Deena Abdelwahed, Rabih Beaini, Fari Bradley, Dieb 13, DJ Sniff, Gavsborg (Equiknoxx), Electric Indigo, Donzilla Lion (Nyege Nyege), Marina Rosenfeld, Microhm, Muqata’a, Bob Ostertag, Rrose

Project presentation:

Sampler / Sampled is an album made of two interdependent parts rather than a double-album.

The first part of the project, Sampler, is a trumpet solo album that catalogues the unique sounds and extended techniques that Mazen Kerbaj developed for the instrument in the past 25 years; it consists of 318 pieces ranging from less than a second to forty seconds each, and presenting different sonic materials. This catalogue of sounds works on various levels: first and foremost, it is a trumpet solo that could be played in its original order, or in random mode to create different pieces of music. But it is also a collection of samples that could be used for various applications (ringtones, phone sound effects, cinema…) and, of course, to create new pieces of music based on sampling.

The second part of the project is the composition Sampled for a musician working with loops and/or samples. The composition has one instruction: create a piece of music using solely tracks from Sampler as your sound source (with the possibility to use all kind of effects or treatment). Each interpreter/musician becomes thus a co-composer who appropriates the piece and makes it their own. In this regard, the musicians that were commissioned to play Sampled were chosen from different geographical origins and musical genres to create highly different and personal pieces of music.

One important output of this project is putting in practice the overused idea of music as a universal language. This idea is very present in “free improvised music” where musicians from different origins can meet for the first time and make music together without the need to adapt to different musical traditions. But here, the collective part of creating music in real time is not involved. It is rather the contrary: it starts with one middle-eastern musician creating a new language/vocabulary for his western instrument, to be later used by other musicians from around the globe who will appropriate this vocabulary and use it with their own language/grammar.
The final output of this double faceted album that was recorded during the Covid lockdown proved to be a very efficient new way to collaborate from a distance in times of world isolation, and ultimately put in practice the universality of music by breaking the boundaries of genres that are the most difficult to break.

"Absence of the loved one is a theme running through both films, but during the creative process we never discuss with the Havels the themes, symptoms or attributes of the characters. We do not specify any meanings. Our collaboration is intuitive, based on interconnectedness. We neither explain things to each other nor analyse. From the outset we have a common goal: to quieten the viewers’ perception, to attune them to certain vibrations by visual, musical and acoustic repetitions, thus enabling them to focus on every tiny detail, every subtle aesthetic quality, so that by the end of the film they have a sense of reconciliation. In fact it is a state similar to meditation or prayer. The aim is being shown Mercy. Each time, the linking of the filmed images with Irena and Vojtech’s music has uncovered a new quality that we have named: a commentary on eternity. Characters cease to be determined by their senses, psychological motivations, or the times they live in. They find liberation in the stream of eternal time." /Václav Kadrnka

"We would like to thank all our friends, sound engineers and musicians. The main thanks go to director Václav Kadrnka, his family and all his collaborators for the precious opportunity to assist them in creating both films. We have worked on our music for the film Saving One Who Was Dead for three years. We met with Václav, discussed the screenplay while it was being born and many other things. We have gradually prepared several working versions that included compositions for piano, Indonesian gamelan, gongs, Tibetan bowls, bells and mini-bells. Yet, step by step, we made it simpler and simpler and eventually only kept violas da gamba, organ and chanting. Everything else was redundant. We made most of the recordings of the compositions for viola da gamba in a church in Prague. The composition for organ was recorded in Milan where we performed a concert shortly before the pandemic arrived in December 2019. We tried to record it in various churches in Bohemia but it was not until the church in Milan that we found the best sounding organ.

As for Little Crusader, we recorded the music for the film after it was completed. We had several versions and used the piano version for this album. Together with Václav, we searched for instruments that would work the best for this Medieval story. Eventually, we opted for harmonium with simple chanting which accompanies the character little boy Jenik. Violas da gamba intertwine, move close and then apart from each other the same way as paths of little boy Jenik and his father who is searching for him. Simple chanting and Tibetan bowl accompany scenes with little boy Jenik’s mother who awaits them at home. Trombone and saxophone are like metal swords and the knights’ armor. Violoncello and viola da gamba walk in the rhythm of horse’s hooves, in the rhythm of heartbeat of both the horse and his rider – a father searching for his lost son."
/ Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi

REPRESS!

Liam Blackburn's transformative 'Night Of Visions' LP as Ancestral Voices forged a bold new sonic identity for an influential figure on the electronic music scene. From his groundbreaking work as Indigo and onto the success of Akkord's hybrid electronic melting pot (with Synkro), the quest for forward movement is intrinsic to everything Liam produces. To further celebrate the 'Night Of Visions' LP release, we asked some of our favourite producers to reconstruct some of 'Night Of Visions' highlights in their own style.

Samuel Kerridge requested to use elements from 2 tunes and marry them in one remix. Elements from 'Sleepless Night, First Light' and 'Ritual Terre' are dissected, reversed and used as haunting ghost like layers that coil themselves around an assortment of off kilter drum hits, guttural murmurs and sound effects that often feel like they are designed to test the flexibility of your speaker cones. 'Vine Of The Soul' gets the Pact Infernal treatment - all rattling percussion and high drama, there's a sense of dread that dominates the atmosphere, but this time it's combined with a ghoulish operatic layer. Perhaps the most overt of all the Pact Infernal productions, it just may be a forecast of what's to come for the debut Pact Infernal LP, due in late 2016.

Lucy, Svreca, Eomac, Neel, Tommy Four Seven, Cio D'or, Shapednoise, Paula Temple, DJ Pete and more.

Lucy Absolutely stunning release. Really top of the top.'

Paula Temple The Samuel Kerridge is something else entirely, a very special track, wow.'

DJ Pete Nice remix competition ... won by Pact Infernal.'

Tagliabue’s cosmic music is a transcendental journey through introspection and imagination. The latter has no limits, when stimulated by sounds that slowly shade and snake deeply in the listener’s conscious.

With “Ambiente Sonoro” the Milan based DJ and producer now introduces his debut mini-album. The concept is inspired by the Italian library music of the 70s from Daniela Casa, Egisto Macchi and Piero Umiliani, characterized by the extensive use of electronic, experimental and psychedelic sounds. It is arranged and produced in a contemporary way, alternating dark ambient, tribalistic sounds mixed with abstract electronic and IDM influences from artists such as Biosphere, Higher Intelligence Agency, Global Communication or Coil.

His experience as a music selector and his previous works anticipate the character of this concept album. A record that cannot be placed in a specific genre.

Ancestral rhythms, post-industrial waves, apocalyptic chants and drones, suggest a mental projection into a new planetary system consisting of six bodies with different landscapes kept in orbit by a cosmic sound perturbation. A dreamy state of emotional, protracted and reflective abandonment.

Early support: Vladimir Ivkovic, Cosmo Vitelli, Alexis Le-Tan, Tolouse Lowtrax, Odopt, Ransom Note, Whypeopledance

Interior sounds from Madalyn in an album that flits between eerie ambience, environment, and hermetic logic. The music’s timing and sequencing feels distant, the elegant constructions conjured and organised semi-consciously, drawing the listener deeper into the dream and towards a zone where watch hands tick forward accurately and their perception of time unspools. Here each neatly tuned conversation and clockwork assemblage harmonises, spinning tantalisingly just out of range and understanding.

“Puzzle Music is the desire to create images out of diverse pieces of sound. To collect timbral colours in a gradient procession and connect them until they create reason. Principally not knowing how the image will turn out, or what the picture even is. It is the act of placing sound shapes next to one another in the hope that clarity will gradually be revealed.

When grouping the songs together I was thinking of them as mechanisms in a timepiece. I have something of an obsession with Swiss watchmaking, although I think this stems from a desire for creative mastery and the design of an energy source independent of electronic needs. Hopefully the songs all serve a purpose towards the end goal of the album... but also, the way the Oberheim Xpander pans sounds is in a very clear circular pattern, which makes me think of gears turning.”

"A singular document of misunderstood minimal wave. A moment of pure DIY genius on this self-titled privately-released one off LP from San Francisco group Batang Frisco, recorded between 85-86".

Geo Rip is John Jones (Dope Body, Nerftoss) with Aaron Leitko and Mike Petillo (Protect-U). Broken samples and electronics improvised live to tape.

Their first time on vinyl, following an ‘insane’ cassette on TTT in 2019 and releases on their own Washington, D.C. based U-Udios label.

Limited!

'Yet today is all we have In silence she speaks The rivers below Valleys and peaks As a pale shelter once cherished The shadows we mourn Have all but perished '

'A Pale Shelter' is a trio collaboration between zake, City of Dawn, and Ossa. Two tracks feature close friend Benoît Pioulard. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

Over a year since we last heard from them, Huerco S’ West Mineral imprint shimmers into view for their first release of 2021 - a lush, jittery high of aerosolised ambient thizz and top shelf electroid steppers from Ben Bondy, highly recommended if yr into Perila, Jan Jelinek, Second Woman, Kindohm or Uon.

Last year's "Sibling", released on Special Guest DJ's Experiences Ltd was one of the year's subtle standouts, but Bondy's music refuses to tether itself to one sound or another, instead hovering around the fertile area between experimental ambient and outre club modes. "Glans Intercum" paces further sideways, toying with dub and drone ideas and sandwiching these sketches between buzzing drum workouts that squeeze texture from collapsing beat templates. Oscillating piquant shocks of vibrant energy with steeply opiated hypnagogia and OOBE-like sensations, the results locate a mind in flux, torn between the need to flex hyper-articulated limbs and becoming lost in discretely introspective ambient interzones.

The eight tracks course from a sort of kaotic power ambient energy to a lushly unresolved daydream serenity through alternately convulsive and temple-smushing turns. ‘Rest’ opens with a bitter explosion of digital scree that escalates into pill-belly jitters, and ‘Ash In Emerald Casing’ keeps toes off the ground with Rian Treanor-levels of pointillist hyper-footwork tekkers, contrasting with the DJ Python-esque slithering vox and atmospheric mulch of ‘Spangled (With Stella).’ From the skittish ‘Drip on Nape’ his circles start to bleed into one, with the aqueous shimmer of ‘Ven’ and Stella’s vocals returns on ‘2404’ to blur the lines between up/down, where ’Skizz’ enacts a sort of perpendicular grime and he ultimately comes to bliss out in the fragile glassine fractals wilting from the closing title tune.

Club or bedroom, this one’s for the dreamers.

With Violet Opposition, Van Wey floats the project into murkier waters by adding a layer of overdriven gilding to his trademark sound. This sound is a texturally fibrous take on ambient that Brock has been experimenting with recently. As a result, the bvdub peaks and valleys you know, and love, are even more arresting with the added grit and brume.
Violet Opposition is four achingly impelling tracks smeared across a double LP in violet and yellow swirl, each song taking its time to evolve and cradle you in sinewy tones. Violet Opposition is out on February 4th. The double LP is limited to 500 units worldwide.

Beautifully serene and contemplative, ‘Landscape Architecture’ sees classical minimalists Christina Vantzou & John Also Bennett describe quizzical scenes on their follow-up to a sterling 2018 debut for Shelter Press, all mixed and self-released on the duo’s Editions Basilic imprint and now available on vinyl for the first time. It’s a suite of blurry dreamscapes made with flutes, piano, hazy environmental recordings, subs and subtle fx, a perfect companion for works by Félicia Atkinson, Alice Coltrane, Jim O’Rourke, Luc Ferrari, Deaf Center, Pan American.

Reprising the lucid dream-like dimensions of their debut ‘Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface’, CV & JAB assuredly trace a line between etheric whimsy and a spellbinding sort of atmospheric mastery on their sophomore sequence. Fashioned from petalled classical and jazz keys blended with woodwind, richly enigmatic electronics and gently aleatoric intersections of street noise and bird song with water sounds, the album’s 10 parts and bonus track limn a drift through what they evocatively term as “remote thought gardens and conceptual collonades” to deeply trippy effect.

Recorded over the course of three days during a residency in Brussels, the album is detailed with a sure-handed directness as ephemeral as spring light, appearing like a dream that lingers on the mind’s eye with its own perpendicular sense of time and space. That effect has long been key to Christina Vantzou’s work, from solo to collaborations with The Dead Texan and Heinrich Mueller, and it’s now clear that JAB shares this gift for elegantly supposing and luring listeners into their ever-curious explorations of ambient classical metaphysics.

The duo recall the rapt effect of Félicia Atkinson’s poetic compositions in ‘Down a passageway’, while the brooding allure of ‘Phantom Tunnel’ remind us of the quizzical nature of Catherine Christer Hennix’s style, whereas the more explicitly electronic works such as ‘Pungent Lake’ and ‘The maître d’ is dead’ capture the sort of laminal ooze and woozy effect of Jim O’Rourke’s amazing 'To Magnetize Money And Catch A Roving Eye’ 4CD in a more concentrated form.

Lawrence English teams up with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart once again for another voyage into ambient music's punishing underworld. It’s their gloomiest slab to date - unfurling nightmarish Lynchian drones and seismic, overdriven rumbles that sound like a Thomas Köner and Wolf Eyes soundtrack to Dante's Inferno.

If the gaseous, clouded noise of 'Material Interstices' sounds as if it could be snatched from one of David Lynch's most unsettling dream sequences, we have to assume that's completely intentional. The inspiration for the album came from two of English's recurring dreams, one of which had recently re-emerged. When English chatted to Stewart about it - a labyrinthine subterranean horrorscape of concrete and iron underneath his house - Stewart related to having unusual sleep patterns. So the music emerged from this midnight realm, and illustrates English's Tetsuo-inspired industrial fantasy in grim detail.

Those expecting the beauty and charm of English's lighter material might be in for a shock. This is vantablack level darkness, inspired by 1980s industrial tape music, blurry noise and the darkest of dark ambient records. Think the bleakest end of Dean Hurley, Maurizio Bianchi, Lustmord or The Haxan Cloak, but assembled to trigger near hypnagogic states. There's an intentionality about "Material Interstices" that feels knotted to its nocturnal inspiration - English and Stewart simultaneously invoke nostalgia, dread and wonder, recalling industrial music's rich legacy but suggesting its future might not be entirely written just yet.

Tape

The occult and folk music have been friends for a while. In the 21st century, hauntology and the resurface of some cult soundtracks from the 1970s and 1980s helped to create a new sense of folk, not associated with the typical acoustic feeling, but more relatable with library, krautrock/kosmische and industrial music. João Kyron and Tony Watts, long time collaborators since the late 1990s with their band Hipnótica, and more recently with Beautify Junkyards (Ghost Box) are well acquainted with this friendship. Hidden Horse is their new project as a duo and “Opala” their first release.

With eight tracks and almost thirty minutes, their first release explores dense and greyish urban utopias. The song titles explore ideas that mix sci-fi, horror, science, space and urban phobia, and the music Kyron and Watts create delivers, using electronics and drums with great relish. Their relationship as musicians, which spans more than two decades, can be felt in the way their music flows with a continuous dialogue.

“Opala” is always keen to take you to another dimension. It lives in its own twilight zone, where the obscure entangles the most obvious senses of reality. It sounds like Jacques Tati “Playtime” with a hauntology soundtrack: it kind of feels that this imaginary world is real, but it’s not. And it sucks you in to be a part of it and enjoy it: close your eyes and let yourself go while listening to “Levitação Magnética” or “Fantasmas do Planeta”. You will feel like a foreigner in a new city.

Well this is brilliantly bizarre; pivotal US underground mail-art and poetry figure John M. Bennett spills his guts on Middle America and other matters in a compendium of perplexing and peculiar
performances set to fractured flute, marimba, concrète tape works and FM synthesis in a way that reminds us of Laurie Anderson’s hyper-influential ‘Home Of The Brave’ via Fluxus, Max Headroom,
Burrroughs, Kurt Schwitters.
All newly remastered by contemporary avant conduit Jack Callahan, ‘A Flattened Face Fogs Through’ yields a fascinating cross section of JM Bennett’s vast catalogue, selected and sequenced by John
Also Bennett (JAB) from some 15 hours of cassette recordings issued 1986-1995. Encompassing fleeting glimpses of warped and processed tekkers thru to relatively straighter recitals, each
juxtaposed with dizzyingly imaginative instrumentals that account for half the interest, the set plunges us into a highly personal perspective on American life in the ‘80s/‘90s, salvaging a poetry from its mundane, “corn walled, strip mall infested landscape” that resonates with Lynch’s evocation of the surreality underfoot USA, and dovetails with early dada and fluxus movements explored by Burroughs (whose manuscripts he edited) and the work of Bennett’s contemporary
Richard Kostelanetz.
Flattened Face includes recordings of classic Bennett poems like “The Shirt The Sheet”, “Last In Line”, “The Transmission”, and “The Blur”, the sound works presented here were made with a spirited cast of collaborators and conspirators - Byron D. Smith, Ficus Strangulensis, Mike Hovancsek, and Jack Wright to name a few (not to mention JMB’s oldest son William E. Bennett, then a child). They represent a fraction of John M. Bennett’s massive output in this marginal but fertile artistic community, and should stand as a testament both to it and to the underlying strangeness of language, the American Midwest, and of being itself.”.

Yellow Vinyl

The first Documenting Sound release to appear on vinyl (we’re just doing a handful of them on wax) is this obsession-forming fever-dream recorded in Kallista, Dandenong Ranges / Autumn 2020 by Jonnine Standish of HTRK, newly mastered and featuring completely genius new meta-artwork/painting by Gian Manik. Anyway, you either altready know how good this one is, or else yr about to find out…

The other week we dreamt that we asked Jonnine aka Jonnine Standish of f#cking HTRK to make some music for a tape series. She ended up sending us what was essentially a 9 track album of new songs featuring Jonnine on bass guitar, a Mopho synth, a wave drum and an electric wind instrument, plus her vocals, clicks and garden chimes, and contributions from Conrad Standish (of CS + Kreme) and mixing by Tarquin Manek. Oh wait…

We approach all of Jonnine’s music with caution cos - hooks - she warned us about them. When her last record 'Super Natural’ was released last year the ohrwurm wasn’t for leaving us in peace, for real it was almost too much - and this time, if you can believe it - it’s worse.

You get 9 songs - 9 - songs - there are chorus pedals and strings and endless atmospheres. The opener is a dream, blurred vision - heartache. The title track - pan flutes - this is basically The Cure’s ‘Dressing Up’ remade. Except Jonnine has never heard ’The Top’. It’s all v weird and auspicious, a complete heartmelt. Also, somehow, real?

Fresh from an appearance on Space Afrika’s 'Honest Labour’ album, collaborations with Klein and Lol K and a placement in the Dazed 100 list, LA Timpa finally offers his head-turning 'Equal Amounts Afraid' album on vinyl following a short CD run just before the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Served up on promising yung London label O___o, and made with additional mixing from Solange collaborator Kwes and mastering from sometime Dean Blunt engineer Amir Shoat, ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ is a beautiful smudge of pop experimentation riddled with timeless musical soul. Following from his 2016 debut ‘Animal’, and guest production for Cold Specks’ trip hop sound, LA Timpa’s gently reserved and melancholic productions push an intimate pop vocabulary into spectral, dreamlike dimensions.

Introspective and avant like Klein’s psyched chop-ups, as sensuous as Blood Orange, but with a taste for expressively harmonised pop refrains that clearly recall Yves Tumor via Richard Youngs, the album unfolds with its own logic, deploying eyelid-tugging levels of hypnagogic charm that practically demand to be heard in sequestered, lowlit situations.

Seducing us to his singular temporality and hazy atmosphere with the vaporous falsetto and ambient soundfield of sirens and groggy bass in ‘Around’, a cut-up interlude leads into fragmented music box melody and intimate plainsong on ‘Fertile’, while ‘Core’ almost echoes the 4AD dream-pop of A.R. Kane, and ‘Give’ beautifully dematerialises indie-pop into ambient gauze.

‘Backyard Exotic’ surfaces his strangest side in a maze of mushied songcraft, ushering a trippier 2nd half where the songs really start to fray between ‘Caretaker’, the smokers’ hymnal vignette ‘Towel Under The Door’, before channelling Thom Yorke in the melting Mbira melody of ‘Rattle Snake’, and spooling out into proper ambient soul with the spine-tracing lines of ‘Tried Ice’ and the smudged magic of ‘Memory Phone’ where he truly divines a strength in his vulnerability in a way that should resonate with the most sensitive souls.

"Four new chapters from Nicolás Jaar in Telas.

Here, again, it’s the odder and more essence-like devotion to sound that is semi-narrative, ambient, and concrète that we heard and were drawn to in Pomegranates. Telas gestures towards a more refined tone, with less sudden shifts and vignettes, incrementally shaping an hour of self-reflective music with tracks building and collapsing across its vinyl sides.

When Telas was first drafted and presented to Mana it felt appropriate to mention a sense of monastic retreat. Where Pomegranates often felt epic-like in its scope and shifting scales, this album conveys images of quieter moments spent tending to a vegetable patch within a cloistered garden, perhaps, or the threading of a tapestry with filigree. Nicolás often moves slowly and deliberately throughout, focused on manipulating gauzy fibres and room tone or fluttering around other cryptic actors, so that when bursts of clarity and emotion appear they take on a deeper character.

There’s a greater sense of contemplation and patience in the album’s logic, pointing to a conception of art, melody, and sound which is continuously under construction. In relationship with sister-album Cenizas and surface qualities of recent Against All Logic material it feels that there’s a centre being defined and meditated upon.

Telas was made between December 2016 and January 2020."

Hi-pressure club futurism from Japan’s Prettybwoy, deploying anxious, metallic, sweaty nu-dance pressure, cooled off by swirling videogame synths and emotional vocals from collaborator lIlI.
Another rapid-fire dancefloor burner from Shanghai’s unreasonably reliable SVBKVLT, ‘Tayutau’ makes a bridge to Japan, curving Prettybwoy’s well-worn raw materials into a pneumatic neon
club structure. He put these tracks together during a time of upheaval while dealing with isolation job loss, burnt hard-drives and almost losing the whole project, the chaos reflected in the album’s
writhing, anxious mood, dipping from mind-throbbing intensity to lithe, poppy delirium. Machine-gun bursts of overdriven kicks and burnt synths form the backbone of ‘Island’, ‘Brontides and ‘Mikoshi’, while ‘Genetic Dance II’ and ‘SLT’ drag the weightless bounce into breathy, florid East-Asian landscapes. Prettybwoy’s confident engineering carries the tracks, and whether he’s exploring the limits of granular ambience (‘ó‹ (Tear)’), weightlessly melting piano and Japanese voices into bouncing subs (‘Isol’) or forming grime-flecked nu-club (‘Rat’s Talk’) there’s the sense that each sound is intricately and meticulously sculpted. The results fall somewhere between
Foodman’s wiped-clean eccentric bangers and the damaged ‘n deranged club philosophy of contemporary prophets like Lee Gamble.

Stunning choral smoke from the ever wonderful Tape Loop Orchestra, here shedding the blissed drone energies of his best known material in favour of a more lucid expression of ideas constructed almost entirely from the human voice and bass pulses. If you were into that amazing Antonina Nowacka album earlier this year, or indeed Kara-Lis Coverdale’s peerless sacred variations, this one comes highly recommended.
‘Liminal Lungs’ finds Andrew Hargreaves shedding his pedals and effects in favour of a more sober take on fizzing bliss, using a palette of sung notes re-shaped into a virtual choir and fed almost imperceptibly thru his tape loop matrix. In the process, he offers a study in the semiotics of emotion; stripping back to a ghostly chorale where the composer is present but elusive, conducting his voices in an imaginary space that comes to life thru a kind of compositional
alchemy.
The results call to mind aspects of Akira Rabelais’ work with processed sound echoes as much as Luc Ferrari’s concrète abstractions or Alvin Lucier’s room recordings, ushering and inhabiting the liminal space of the title with an exceedingly subtle grasp of mysteriousness as the work’s spatial qualities come into play. As it goes on, Hargreaves creates a growing sense of displacement from the original recordings with bass pulses that reverberate the synthesised space, probing the grey area between perception and reality, conjuring an event the listener can’t be sure ever really took place.

bblisss specialists special guest dj and Ben Bondy’s Berlin/Brooklyn duo, xphresh, debut a lush volley of shatterproof jungle accelerators and RPG intrigued illbient beatdown on the newly minted 3XL division of Experiences Ltd, finding a gaseous spot somewhere between DJ Crystl’s pioneering ambient hardcore and NWAQ x Final Fantasy

‘xephon’ is a dream fusion by two distinctive, dextrous catalysts of the current flux between dance and ambient poles. In five shots they careen from sublime junglist tension to subaquatic dub wooze, disembodied shoegaze and cyberpunk illbient gunk with a wickedly unresolved, fractal quality that’s a real pleasure to sink into. As pillars of a scene that’s emerged and helped reshape, displace definitions of “ambient” and “dance” music over the past few years in particular, their collision of energies here feels to model a lush form of quantum mechanics; evoking the sensation of existing in multiple states of emotional and physical excitement simultaneously.

Scaling between the gyring junglist roil of its title track and the post-club gouch out of ‘eikon’, xphresh hit squarely between their dilated 3rd eyes with a proper, rushy thizz. The ephemeral ballistics of ‘xephon’ are effectively congealed into the charged sot-dubstep plasma of ‘myst’, while ‘luh’ passes out into radiant choral bliss on the “up” side, contrasting with a deep sink into the queasy belly of 4 Hero’s Macro Dub Infection all-timer 'The Paranormal In 4 Forms’ on ‘scum break’, before they yield to the mazy emotional rip currents of their closing beauty. At each stage it’s easy to pick out their reference points, but their natural ambiguity and restless style means their coordinates are never fixed, always in search of an elusive ghost particle that’s in the shine-eye of the beholder.

First ever vinyl pressing of Yellow Swans’ 2007 noise tempest, practically bubbling the lacquer thanks to a great remaster by Rashad Becker that presents Pete Swanson and Gabe Mindel Saloman right at the biting point.

Originally deployed on ultra-limited edition of just 60 cassettes back in 2007, ‘Drowner’ was one of the legendary duo’s fiercest deployments of scorched earth noise-gaze. Originating at the mid-late point of their arc, it kicked at the embers of rock’s funeral pyre, scattering plumes of strung out psych riffage and charred amp distortion at the midst of the fecund ‘00s noise scene. Like the best Yellow Swans releases, it touches places that other bands and records simply don’t reach, overwhelming the senses with chokingly intoxicating levels of emotion that surely live up to the record’s title.

When Swanson and Saloman cooked up ‘Drowner', they were surfing on a wave of interest generated by the percussive noise surrealism of their acclaimed, politically-fanged 'Psychic Secession'. ‘Drowner' was more in line with the duo's shows - all overdriven, tape-fraying melt and psychedelic, feedback warbling. Channelling everything from MBV to the most blistering ends of Fushitsusha with an apocalypse-baiting recklessness, they harnessed keening, magisterial levels of feeling in the process. Anguish, love, panic, the sheer pain of being; the feeling will alter from person to person and listen to listen, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a strong emotion, likely to be frighteningly intensified when consumed thru headphones.

Between their slow, 11 min march into oblivion on ‘Sandwall’ and eventual collapse into tattered tape tekkers and muezzin-like plangency on ‘Disjecta’, the album feel akin to a religious experience, with atavistic psych echoes of ‘Velvet Water’ giving way to the crushing dirge of ‘First Drowner’ and uniquely elegant chamber noise of ‘Isolation Tank’, before ripping your guts out in the ravishing ‘Seafloor’.

Almost 15 years after it was originally released, as the US basement noise scene fades into memory and many of its figureheads wash into the gutters of history, ‘Drowner’ feels more vital and needed than ever. An elegy for the end of days?

Walter Bachauer has been an active part of Berlin's but all in all Germany's electronic and progressive music scene in the 70s & 80s. In the early to mid 80s he got back to compose and play music under the pseudonym Clara Mondshine and this is his second out of three albums from 1983 “Memorymetropolis”. It takes you on a little journey into the cosmic mind of late Mr. Bachauer. Easy listening melodies come in smaller doses here despite his fondness for the pop oriented side of the so called “Berlin School” electronics and the overall time in which he operated this project

Together, René Audiard and Ali Cakir are Düve: The symbiosis of René Audiard's electronic programming virtuosity and Ali’s expressive oud playing. Their first EP on Mesma, “Part 1”, compiles four diverse productions compatible with late night dances as well as escapist mind-wandering. Combining elements of dance music with improvisational oud performance and poetry, Part 1 oscillates between house, experimental music and free jazz. As a return to beat-based electronic music, Düve’s Part 1 reconnects Mesma to its love for moody microscopic house.

The opening track, “Baglama”, introduces Ali’s acoustic presence with an atonal improvisation, soon turning into a rough and upbeat rhythmic jam under’s Soren electronic direction.
“Djinn Tonic” is an intricately layered progression of loops generating an unsettling atmosphere, both futuristic and nostalgic.
Following the introductions, the full breadth of Düve’s project is developed in Avvad: A dark, textured and moody journey into an ever-changing world of echoed and looped oud phrases over a familiar house beat, connecting the whole to smokey underground dance floors.
Finally, “Santr”, the EP’s longest piece, is a hypnotic promenade led by Ali’s voice and oud and accompanied by Soren’s chopped up drums and bouncy bass — an expressive and performative track, evoking dance music only in a volatile manner.