Beats News

The ambient / cross-genres label Concentric Records launches its first solo release as a special edition LP written and composed by the celebrated and influential techno / experimental producer Tobias. It is the first strictly-ambient solo album of Berlin's Tobias. aka Tobias Freund.

Entitled Hall Ov Fame, the 42min. full length album is a rare ambient journey into a sonic world that is full of narrative and cinematic imagination, blurring boundaries between perceived and staged reality, past and future memory.

“I have movies in my head” describes Tobias Freund the source that inspired his new album to fill it with a fantastic life of its very own. Consequently, each of the eight tracks represents a scene out of a fictitious short film, some of them with a claustrophobic and tense atmosphere while others appear light and hopeful on the screen of imagination. What they have in common is an adventurous spirit that is inherent in and played out by three main characters: repetitive electronic and acoustic patterns, voices from far away and field recordings of obscured origin. All the episodes combined introduce this “Hall Ov Fame” as a psyche-cinematic event which resonates with “ambience in its natural shades” to evoke the whole range of sensations that make a proper, suspenseful mind movie.

Tobias. (Freund) is long established as an influential artist and has - since the early 1990s - been working as a professional producer, sound engineer, label owner and strictly live musician. The Berghain resident constantly keeps exploring the vast synth-driven Techno, Experimental and Ambient territories on journeys in-between genres, both as a live act and on his countless releases.
Besides his early solo projects (such as Pink Elln, Metazone or Phobia) he’s also been collaborating with Dandy Jack (as Sieg Über Die Sonne), Ricardo Villalobos (as Odd Machine), Max Loderbauer (as NSI.), Valentina Berthelon (as Recent Arts) and AtomTM to only name a few. With his vast experience, diverse output and interests, Tobias. doesn’t tire to actively push against existing boundaries and explore new areas of electronic music. By this he stands in a long tradition of electronic music, scrutinizing the self while reaching out towards the unknown, approaching sound with an appetite for the new, in the tradition of true innovators.

Hall Ov Fame follows a compilation in three parts that introduced Concentric Records’ roster and exploratory sonic realm over the past year and half, featuring unique and wide-ranging works by (in order of appearance) Pole, Daniela Huerta feat. Cornelia Thonhauser, Samuel Rohrer, Vladislav Delay, Jake Muir, Hotel Neon, Soundwalk Collective, Etapp Kyle, Tragic Selector (Daisuke Tadokoro & Terre Thaemlitz), Kareem Lotfy, Christina Vantzou, Jana Winderen, Echium, Max Loderbauer, William Selman, Petre Inspirescu, Supply, The Waves, HOLOVR, ASWA.

Written and Produced by Tobias Freund at Non Standard Studios, Berlin. Mastered by Tobias Freund. Lacquer Cut by Mike Grinser. Cover Image: TV Caption of Marcello Mastroianni in 'La Città delle Donne' by Federico Fellini, 1980. Artwork by Blackbirds Inc.

Third time’s a charm. Or a chant in this case.“Antologia De Música Atípica Portuguesa” is back.Following two sold out volumes, the unplanned trilogy comes to a close with chants and hymns whilst continuing to merge music genres and presenting them as a world building concept.

If the first two volumes were dedicated to work (“O Trabalho”) and regions (“Regiões”), it only made sense to close the trilogy with ceremonial music, connecting the real – each musicians’ creation – with a fantasied celebration of Portuguese folk, traditions, and ghost methods within these unusual anthems.

If you’ve listened to Niagara before, you probably felt this whole ceremonial thing going on. A perfect opener then, for this volume with Niagara’s deep dive into proto religious-ambient music with “Paulo, Apolo e Pedro”. It sets the tone for the next 35-minutes of ethereal like songs. Either you listen to musicians working within their natural habitat (João Pais Filipe or Filipe Felizardo) or feel them exploring new areas in their realm (Niagara, Joana Guerra or Serpente), this third volume manages to combine eight of the best underrated visionaries working in current day Portugal.

In the past, “Antologia da Música Atípica Portuguesa” created an imaginary folktale where current day creations could live with the idea of archive or fake-folk. This volume forgets the world building and actually lives in it. Because this is the real Portugal. This is our folk. These are our chants. Embrace the otherworldly.

The Zru-esque adventure takes its suite with a full-length LP recorded in adventurous (avant) times. No time left for the deliverance of these melodious flights, playful tribalistic cadences and surrealistic lyrics. Art-Funk duo Zru Vogue tackles avec grand-chic inner themes in order to let the listener get lost in the domain of dreams and spirituality. Surfing on Californian rocks, Andrew L. Jackson & Rick Cuevas affirm here their heretic talent in an non-angular form. Zru is a (post) 'beat' poet.

Composer, electronic music innovator, and Pere Ubu's original synthesist Allen Ravenstine returns to Waveshaper Media with the diptych LP (comprised of 1 EP per side) Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir, the final two parts in Raventine’s Tyranny of Fiction series. Waveshaper Media first came into contact with Ravenstine when we interviewed him in 2012 for our modular synthesizer documentary I Dream Of Wires.

Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir brings together 21 of the prodigious composer’s recent lyrical and abstract compositions collectively comprised of the sounds of analogue and digital synthesizers, alongside traditional acoustic instruments. The first 10 recordings, subtitled Nautilus, are found on Side A of this LP while the second 11, Rue Du Poisson Noir, comprise Side B.

Using a singular blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, each track on Nautilus, weaves its own wayward travelogue amidst stray bits of audio verité and wafting musical fragrances—by turns tropical and foreboding. Rue De Poisson Noir takes cues from its fragmentary companion both in palette and approach, slithering between cinematic intrigue, off-brand jazz, avant-garde mischief, and fried electro without ever batting an eye. Together they form a beguiling collection of hyperrealist miniatures that remains strange, restless, inquisitive and — most of all — evocative throughout.

For those in the know, Allen Ravenstine has been one of the most creative synthesizer players of the past forty-plus years. Ravenstine started out in the mid-1970s experimenting in his Cleveland apartment with an analogue EML 200 synthesizer, eventually creating a piece in 1975 that became known as Terminal Drive. While he had no intention of releasing his compositions, word got out about the kind of sounds he was experimenting with, which led to an invitation to join pioneering “avant garage” group Pere Ubu for the recording of the group’s first 45, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.” He soon joined Pere Ubu full-time, bringing to the band’s sound unpredictable textures, effects, bleeps, squalls, pulsating washes of sound—whatever he felt could enhance the soundscape of the band’s performances and recordings.

By the early 1990s, Ravenstine had grown sick of the road, band infighting and the music industry in general. Deciding a change was needed, he opted to forego music altogether, making his living as an airplane pilot. His music career remained in limbo until 2012, when an interview for the I Dream Of Wires documentary, alongside Robert Wheeler who had succeeded him as Pere Ubu’s synthesist, turned into a recording session for the duo, leading to a series of collaborative releases. As well as having his 1975 Terminal Drive recordings released to great acclaim in 2017, Ravenstine has been prolific in recent years, with Nautilus / Rue De Poisson Noir now marking his 4th solo full-length.

‘Dekalb Works’ is the collaborative project of Austin Peru (Vision Fortune) & Daniel Creahan (Sweat Equity / Alien D). Born out of a shared deep sociological interest of dialects and cultural frameworks, and the effects these have on meaning within modes of speech, the pair here delve into the dialects of their own beginnings, mining US/British regional accents and weaving these situational scenes through a textured, intentionally disjointed, hand made soundscape of bass tension and fleeting, glistening melody – adding additional layers of emotion and meaning to everyday observations of language.

‘Duologue’ intends to blur the lines between perceived and constructed reality, occupying a gauzy, dreamlike space shared by the likes of Hype Williams & James Ferraro, where foggy sonars & deep subs provide the backbone to both eccentric and mundane ephemeral flutters of dialect.

‘Duologue’ revels in its variance of linguistic stylings – from the deep US south religious lament of ‘of a’ hovering above an ambience of Zither & Bells, to the doom laden sax skronk and vocal stutter of ‘with’, to the creeping stripped micro dub of ‘only’ which allows the familiar hue of the British news reader and typical West Midlands dialectical moments to clash – aptly documenting of an impending collision.

This is certainly one for heads into all things slow & spacious - for sure there’s a lot to digest and get lost in here across the records quite intentionally intoxicating ark, where touch points and historical nods range from Laraaji’s signature ambience to Ernest Hood’s visionary ‘Neighbourhoods’, filtered through modern outer sound explorers such as John T. Gast, Mark Lecky, and the bass minimalism of SND.

After his debut LP ‘Temmuz’, released at the beginning of last year, Houschyar is back on Macadam Mambo with his new album: a less danceable but more personal opus. Being locked up on the rooftops of Istanbul, Houschyar repurposed a satellite dish, making use of its perfectly round and concave shape to create strange metallic-sounding percussive loops which he painted with sonic atmospheres that contained diverse shades of blue. ‘Mavi’ is an introspective pallet of emotions condensed into 7 hybrid compositions highly improvised which divagate into a very jazzy modern state of mind, jamming with pianos, electronic organs and rhythm boxes to produce another type of spiritual music that sounds absolutely timeless. In a very prolific year - with his release with DJ Sofa and Okay Temiz on Music from Memory and the initial EP of Raphael Kosmos’ newborn label Späti Records -, Marius Houschyar leaves no doubt about the level of his talent and him being part of a new generation of artists to keep a close eye on. To discover as soon as possible!

Im Mai 2020 erschien das Doppelalbum Figures der legendären belgischen Band Aksak Maboul. Nun folgen gleich zwei Alben mit Remixen, Coverversionen und neuen Versionen von fünfzehn ganz unterschiedlichen Musiker*innen auf Vinyl (jeweils streng auf 500 Exemplare limitiert). Betitelt sind sie Redrawn Figures 1 und Redrawn Figures 2. Mit von der Partie sind u.a. The Notwist, Cate Le Bon, Felix Kubin, Tolouse Low Trax und Matias Aguayo. Zu ihren Versionen kommen vier weitere von Aksak Maboul-Gründer Marc Hollander selbst. Wie im Albumtitel bereits anklingt, bat Aksak Maboul die Musiker*innen, sich nicht nur die Musik, sondern auch das von Véronique Vincent gestaltete Artwork von Figures vorzunehmen. Die daraus resultierenden sechzehn Bearbeitungen zieren das Cover von Redrawn Figures 1. Das Cover von Redrawn Figures 2 wiederum stammt vom französischen Maler Hervé Di Rosa, einem der Mitbegründer der "Figuration Libre"-Bewegung.

Orange Vinyl

"Following on our first EP, 'Collisions', we wanted to explore the use of modular synths, and also hardware, in more depth. Exordium was crafted from countless modular jams, passed back and forth between London and Liege, and polished into a piece of work that captures our love for club music, with an experimental edge. We wanted to get out for a moment from the 170 which we are a bit more known for. Hopefully you will enjoy this exploration into our shared sound and influences as much as we enjoyed creating it."
- Fearful & Mtwn

Para One, whose real name is Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, releases " Shin Sekai ", the new extract from the upcoming SPECTRE: Machines of Loving Grace. The " Shin Sekai " video is directed by William Laboury, who created a visual tryptic around Para One's SPECTRE: Machines of Loving Grace.
Resonating percussions by Wadaiko Hama and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares ethereal voices frame Para One's ever evolving electronic music, drawing a new frontier in the artist's musical landscape, bringing together his experience as a film composer and his career as a dj and performer.
The original track comes with 3 remixes: British producer Actress (Ninja Tune) uses Arthur Simonini's strings as the backbone to his emotional climb, German musician Alva Noto (Noton) gives a minimalist stripped down version of the score, while speakwave, the new moniker of French artist dynaRec, proposes a total remake of the melody, the harmonies, and the rhythmic structure of Shin Sekai.

Let's face it, no one really knows where they're going, so the best we can do is enjoy the ride - a sentiment captured perfectly by the high altitude ambient of 'Flights',
Double Geography's new release on the Growing Bin.

Embracing the unpredictable, Duncan Thornley married melodic fragments with semi-generative computer process and random filter interactions, an aleatory approach to music therapy during the existential funk of the first Lockdown. The unhurried melodies, weightless within plumes of reverb and delay, conjure the feeling of long distance air travel with All Nippon - that pensive delirium stimulated by varying air pressure, broken sleep and the most welcome pause in your everyday life. Remote snippets of news reports, street noise and conversation, plundered from cassette dictaphone and a Spanish language tape the artist found in the loft sit low in the mix, the barely audible sound of the pilot and passenger, extras in your everyday experience.

Contemplative and comforting, 'Flights' is a gentle reminder to be present, delivered with a rare beauty.

Saint Petersburg-based Kuzma Palkin returns to GOST Zvuk with a new series, Memont. GOST has been expanding its presence for several years through sublabels Instrument and Archive, as well as releases from GOST family members on their own labels. Flaty's experiments can be found on the ANWO label, while OL has issued a number of releases through Asyncro. For Palkin, Memont represents a return to his roots. The artwork for the first release, stadion sever, features the original packaging of Moment universal superglue, something that will be familiar to every Russian who lived through the 1990s. The album is named after the eponymous stadium in Palkin's hometown of Severodvinsk, which is displayed on the back cover. Sever represented a kind of playing field in childhood, but has now come to stand in as a metaphor for daily life. The visual landscape of modern Russian life points back to Sever.

Musically, stadion sever is also a return to Palkin's roots. The echoes of early IDM that kickstarted his career in the beginning of the 2000s are on display here. While the music is thoughtful and attentive to detail, traces of irony can be identified among the seriousness, not least in the title of the series and the track synth1 power user. The same ironic touch makes its mark on the album's sound. Palkin borrows the recognizable textures of club music, but drastically modifies their context and transforms them into something altogether more thought-provoking and inscrutable. Palkin's unique sound and the beauty of his music can be found in the balance between retrospection and looking ahead, where austerity meets humour.

In the intricate panorama of Italian library music, the themes of city, factories, metropolis, work, urbanization and technology have always been among the most fascinating (and used), relying on dozens of
fundamental records by composers such as Alessandro Alessandroni, Farlocco, Gerardo Iacoucci, A.R. Luciani, Narassa and many others. The attempt to provide a plausible soundtrack to a continuously and
rapidly ever-changing world, especially in the hectic seventies, has often produced masterpieces that combined avant-garde techniques with sounds, risky experimentation with easy-listening songs, the traffic chaos and assembly lines with the silence of the night, the end of the work shift with Sunday’s rest.
Piero Umiliani’s L’Uomo e la Città perfectly fits into this rich and varied field, an album where our Man is accompanied by a jazz musicians sublime parade that includes celebrities like Bruno Tommaso, Oscar Valdambrini, Dino Piana and Nino Rapicavoli, here delivering the most of a sound that is highly based on the richness of the wind instruments and on the rhythm of the Umiliani-led ensemble.
L’Uomo e la Città is a less risky effort when compared to other releases by Piero Umiliani, but that’s in favor of an extraordinary jazz tightness (Rete Urbana, Quartieri Alti, Città Frenetica), but the wish to amaze appears when least expected in the two excellent renditions of Centrale Termica and Suoni della Città, among the best tracks of the album

‘Uwalmassa shape their relationship with various forms of musical heritage into technical and stylish forms on Malar, marrying acoustic sonics with a contemporary outlook that reflects their Indonesian identity; evolving, mutating, and scavenging traditions to draw parallels to dance music, and to test the adaptability and flexibility of those sounds.

Here the collective go dark and deep in their first album-length collaboration with Mana, casting long shadows and moving snake style at speed across nine tracks. Using a mix of synthetic and acoustic instruments - the texture of Malar feels enigmatic, occasionally industrial, and the result magical in its mystery and fluctuating impact.

Uwalmassa is the name with which DIVISI 62, arts & music collective from Jakarta, Indonesia, perform and produce music.’

LP including two inserts. On her debut album Belgian-based multi-instrumentalist Ann Eysermans explores the possibilities of the train as a music instrument: a deep quest into a fascinating and mesmerising world.

Laurel Halo delivers two wonderful remixes of Bendik Giske’s Cruising, the centre piece of his upcoming album Cracks. The two remixes perfectly interprets - and reshapes - the scope of Giske’s mesmerising and hypnotic original piece.

Peak Oil is proud to present Invariant, the first LP in three years from Russia's best kept electronic music secret: Hoavi. Originally intended for pre-pandemic release, this collection of emotive and intricate homages to the slippery nature of genre has only intensified in relevancy and urgency. From alt sci-fi dimension floor-filler "Streamline" to "Dver", a contemplative evocation of a world in which time collapsed in on itself and liquid had embraced footwork, to the propulsive modular dub-tech evisceration of "Tessera" closing out the LP, Hoavi adroitly demonstrates why he should be considered amongst Russia's finest cultural exports. A gifted producer with a workaholic drive, these eight tracks are but a sample of his prodigious breath and grasp on the electronic music continuum, a clear harbinger of auspicious things to come for Hoavi.

Autarkic (Nadav Spiegel) is known for his impact on the Leftfield/Electronica scene, and on this LP he is taking a turn back to his roots - Songs in Hebrew, guitars, synths and samples wrapped with Lo-fi esthetics that he's recognized with.

Incoming, a massive EP from Anderson.

After his recent easter eggs EP, this four tracker is a blend of trance, breaks, drum & bass and experimental electronica.

Starting off the A side with the ‘Jelly Bean (Virus Outbreak Mix)’, this monster of tune will rattle your subs (and brain) with his crunchy kicks and trancey sequencing. This track will blast you off into oblivion eventually bringing you right into A2, ‘Level Quest’, a trancey chugging progressive tune building energy from the moment the first kick ignites.

After a much needed break, the B1 puts you in an immediate trancestate lasting just a few minutes and before you know it you will be blasted into drum and bass land with ‘Tasteful Nudes’ closing out the EP.

See you on the other side..

Bochum Welt's 2019 LP 'Seafire' and its accompanying remix album are two of the Central Processing Unit label's most beloved releases. However, links between the two parties run far deeper than just those records.

You see, the tracks that Gianluigi Di Costanzo cut as Bochum Welt in the 1990s and 2000s are in the very DNA of the celebrated Sheffield imprint. Bochum Welt's drops on labels like Rephlex made for some of the most celebrated electronic music releases of the era and went on to influence producers the world over - including many of those who have turned up on CPU since it launched in 2012.

As such, it makes sense that two of the most crucial EPs from Bochum Welt's first wave are now being given new life by CPU. 'Desktop Robotics' and 'Feelings On A Screen' initially emerged in 1997 via Aphex Twin's Rephlex imprint. Now, Di Costanzo has curated this special CPU release to celebrate both of those EPs making it to 25. This is a reissue with a twist, though. While 'Desktop Robotics / Feelings On A Screen' features many crucial cuts from the original pressings, the record also serves up other gems gathered from Bochum Welt's original master tapes - all of which have never previously been released on vinyl.

The 'Desktop Robotics' cuts which make for the record's first half are dreamy, impressionistic things. On this quartet, Bochum Welt plays painterly synth work off of idiosyncratic drum programming to illuminating effect. The opening title-track, for instance, blooms from a clattering, distorted beat into an icily beguiling electronic soundscape, a vibe which carries through to following number 'HMT (202 Mix)'.

Things become more weightless on 'Leafs Brought By The Wind', a potent vignette where you can almost see the leaves falling amidst its reverb-drenched haze. We then get ethereal 'Marylebone (Demo Version)'. Anyone who's heard the iteration of 'Marylebone' which appeared on Bochum Welt's 2017 LP 'April' will be pleasantly surprised by this alternate mix. Here the track pulls away from pretty post-minimalist piano composition to widescreen ambience - it's so warm and intimate that it feels like peeking behind a curtain to observe an artist at work.

Things ramp up a notch with the tracks taken from in and around 'Feelings On A Screen'. The title cut kicks off the record's second half in limber fashion, its nimble percussion programming dancing around a pulsing bassline. Like A Tim's mix of 'Greenwich' is still as much of a party-starter as it was on the original 'Feelings On A Screen' release, with the Djax-Up-Beats veteran setting buoyant rhythm work against a playful, eccentric lead-line.

Between these tunes we are treated to one of the gems of the Bochum Welt discography. In 2007, Di Costanzo split an EP with Heinrich Mueller, an artist best known as Drexciya's Gerald Donald. That record featured Mueller's 'Z Version' of Bochum Welt's 'Saint', and the track's appearance here, with machine gun bass burbling alongside strange textures, joins the dots between Di Constanzo's style and the pulsating machine-funk that Donald helped popularise. Things close out with 'North', a frostily beautiful ambience which makes for a fitting bookend to this album when taken alongside 'Desktop Robotics'.

This 25th anniversary re-release of Bochum Welt's 'Desktop Robotics' and 'Feelings On A Screen' EPs reminds us that, while time may have passed, the appeal of Bochum Welt's electronic music remains as strong as ever.

RIYL: AFX, Mike Paradinas, Boards Of Canada, Mrs Jynx

2023 Clear Vinyl Repress

In hindsight, the pairing of Chris Madak and Donato Dozzy was inevitable from the moment when the two connected on Mount Naeba, Japan at the storied party Labyrinth last fall. Both artists have worked to craft singular visions unlike anything else happening in electronic music today, yet despite each producer's unmistakable indivuality there is a deeper reservoir of shared sensibility between them which makes "Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask" feel like a logical and necessary event.
2012 saw the release of Madak's monumental "When We Were Eating Unripe Pears" album along with the astounding "Vaporware" 12" for Room 40, the title track of which opened Bee Mask's Labyrinth performance to memorable effect. Dozzy had an equally massive year thanks the release of the acclaimed "Voices From the Lake" album with Neel, which set the bar for intricate, subtle, and forward-thinking contemporary techno at a new high. Both artists have pushed the respective boundaries of their work to arrive at the point of this crucial and welcome overlap: a double album of material from the "Vaporware" sessions, re-imagined as only Dozzy could do it.
Initially commissioned for a single remix, Dozzy found so much possibility in the source material that he turned in over an hour of material, making a standalone release the only reasonable course of action. The results are absolutely divine, a suite of seven pieces of time-stopping bliss in which the structure and melodies of "Vaporware" glitter through the prism of Dozzy's singular production style. The meeting of these powerful minds provides evidence of an unparalleled organic chemistry. When listening to these works we hear the worlds of Bee Mask and Donato Dozzy bleed into one another, creating a new sonic entity with a life of its own — one which with any luck will not end at this release.

Emerging from Lower Franconia's hidden reverse, Johannes schebler, known as ambient-poltergeist "Baldruin" and surreal folklorists Christian Schoppik & Katie Rich of "Brannten Schnüre"-fame have puzzled and amazed outernational audiences from the stranger end of the avant/lo-fi spectrum in recent years. The trio is now collectively dreaming as "Freundliche Kreisel",reaching for terra incognita rather than common ground on their most bewildering and accessible outing to date. Arch-pontifices of the electro-acoustic and outsider-art realm, they fill in gaps and invent missing links on the go with somnambulistic ease, confusing the hypersensitive and hyaline timbres of contempo-electronic aesthetics with the naïve charm of Germany's obscure Kassettentäter and mutant-NDW.

Think Daniele Mana and Lorenzo Senni digitally rewiring the 4-track recordings of Gareth Williams' Flaming Tunes or sometimes, much scarier, it feels as if it's the other way round. There certainly is an air of whimsical yet post-ironic romanticism to the songs contained here, a madcap, tongue-in-cheek ghost story as filtered through the transcendental senses of a childhood perspective. This attitude is best personified in the disarming innocence of Katie's vocals whose intonation touches on nursery rhymes as much as on dirges and bizarre 'schlager' kitsch.

Heirs to the tradition of magic realism, examining fragments of an arcane sacred mundanity like a crack in the concrete of everyday life, Freundliche Kreisel dwell on this often neglected microcosmic topography, yielding an adventurous and visionary piece of a decidedly Franconian next-level post-modern folklore.

White Vinyl

Remastered reissue of Het Zweet's 1987 self-titled LP + a bonus LP, consisting of previously unreleased material.

Marien Van Oers work under the name Het Zweet (“The Sweat” in English) originally came out in the 1980s (specifically 1983-1988), but listening to the new reissue of this self-titled album from 1987 can feel like one is listening to something that’s both much more current and also much, much older than that. Van Oers, who passed away in 2013, made music that tended to get classed as “industrial”, and tracks here like the steady, clanging churn of “From the Lowland” or “On Earth” show why, but he was as or more inspired by tribal music intended to produce trance-like effects via rhythm and (percussive and vocal) repetition. Using instruments made by himself out of anything from shopping carts to cardboard tubes, the music of Het Zweet locks into grooves that somehow feel more elemental and physical than many of his contemporaries. It never quite feels like Van Oers is emulating or echoing the music of any particular region or tradition so much as trying to synthesize all the ones he’s heard into some sort of ur-pulse, an overtone so powerful as to compel the “Massive Trance” the title of the last song on the record evokes.

While the 1987 Het Zweet has four track titles per side, and on listening you can discern some segues and places where it feels like new movements do shift into place, it’s fitting to have this record on vinyl where the listener is encouraged to experience each side as one uninterrupted piece. The bonus material included on this reissue expands Het Zweet from one LP to two, the second LP consisting entirely of previously unreleased material. This bonus LP is sequenced similarly, with three untitled tracks and two live excerpts presented as side-long experiences that belie their disparate origins with a unity of sound and purpose. Van Oers’ percussive nous and distantly yelled chants certainly sound capable of working up a sweat in both the performer and any movement- minded listeners, but maybe the most striking thing about Het Zweet is how vital it still sounds, despite its age and relative obscurity.

mono no aware is the first compilation released on PAN, collating ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists. Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called 'ambient', to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term. "Mono no aware", `the pathos of things', also translates as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera". A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life's transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present. The album features photography by Molly Matalon and layout by Bill Kouligas.

Transmigration welcomes Seofon, custodian of the chill out room and sonic healer. The Delph EP features three revisions of tracks originally released on San Francisco based Visible Records in 94'. Music that goes beyond the confines of a genre and transcend any trends - submit yourself to the sound.

It’s been a decade since Andy Stott released ‘Passed Me By’, a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of “physical and spiritual exhaustion” (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodelling: ‘We Stay Together’ (2011 / slow and fucked,
for the club), ‘Luxury Problems’ (2012 / greyscale romance), ‘Faith In Strangers’ (2014 / destroyed love songs), ’Too Many Voices’ (2016 / 4th world Triton shimmers) and ‘It Should Be Us’ (2019 / the club, collapsed) - a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work - somewhere between sound-art,
techno and pop.
In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table - personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed
drums, wondering flutes - whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them - in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry.
With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year - taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful - often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months:
Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, Nídia, Prefab Sprout - the unusual, the familiar.
And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on ’Never The Right Time’ seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener ‘Away not gone’, to the clattering linndrum pop of ‘The beginning’, through ‘Answers’ angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits ‘Hard to Tell’. These are songs fuelled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention.
A 10 year cycle, complete.

Limited & Numbered to 100 copies.

Defenitly a Deluxe record.
But also defenitly a record for passion. Or even devotion i would say.

Extremely punk breakz, abstract crazyness, un-continuously experimental and complexe.
A pure Digging thing... to be put aside with No-Tek 19 from La Peste...

SUPERB !

What does a contemporary album mean to us? Marc Pinol and Hugo Capablanca asked themselves this question when faced with the challenge of recording their first C.P.I. LP. To find the answer they went back to some of the most important records in their lives and listened to them from start to finish. At a time when the whole concept of an album might be at its lowest ebb for decades, they wanted to return to the old way of telling stories, recreating the notion of a narrative "journey" but doing so in their own original manner. 'Alianza' displays a wide range of emotions through only a few elements. There are no structures, barely any drums. It's a puzzling journey that moves through darkness and light, happiness and despair, hope and menace, as it unveils its own mysterious universe. Every track is a world in its own, yet all of them are linked by an invisible energy that reflects a coherent constellation. To achieve this, Hugo and Marc used a broad array of vocal timbres, including their own drone-treated voices, digitized vocals from an old vector synth, and those of several contributors. Most of the sounds on the album come from digital devices, as they wanted to "prove themselves" in the studio "by doing something as warm as we could while trying to avoid analogue if possible? The major part of 'Alianza' was recorded during the spring of 2018 in Barcelona, with further takes and additions recorded in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Switzerland. It features contributions from Spacemen 3's Will Carruthers, Tanja Siren, Veronica Vasicka, Anna Homler, Demetrio Martini and Pablo Sanchez. The album was mastered by Gordon Pohl in Dusseldorf. The artwork is by Dominic Brucia and features a picture by Tanja Siren. The album was created with the support of The Richard Thomas Foundation.

Libertine welcomes Dj Overdose for the second release of ''X'' series, featuring 6 sick cuts between experimental electro and wave sounds.

Driftmachine Plays Marien van Oers' is a parallel physical output to the concert 'Massive Trance: Interpreted by Driftmachine,' which was performed during the 2019 Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam. Both the concert performed at Muziek Gebouw aan 't IJ and the album take their cue from a cassette produced in 1983 by the Dutch experimental composer Marien van Oers (1955-2013). The original cassette states Van Oers' following intentions: "The basic idea of the performance is experiencing a constant repetition of sound (=rhythm), which can result in the spectator taking action through movement or getting into a form of trance." His percussion based pieces are all but industrial; the self-built instruments and repetitive chanting aim to achieve a physicality that is closer to tribal music. Van Oers has mainly performed as his solo act, Het Zweet, which was active from 1983 to about 1988. This interpretation of Marien van Oers' music by modular synth duo Driftmachine is not a blind restaging of Van Oers' original recordings, but instead actively reinterprets the piece on the level of its composition, performance, and mixing. Taking the piece's ultimate aim of 'attaining trance' as a starting point, Driftmachine accordingly works towards a new coherence that features a repetition of organic syncopations by using two racks of modular systems. The liner notes detail how this record came to be, analyze the early work of Marien van Oers, and place this project as a curatorial practice of Ongehoord label initiator Jeroen Vermandere.

Aqua Vinyl

‘Holy Palm’ is the debut album by Flora Yin-Wong, an artist, writer, DJ and journalist, summoning the ghosts of her life in a masterful meditation on metaphysics, superstition and memory. It’s part collage, part audio diary part reflection; a sort of private ritual purification.
Following her mesmerising turn on PAN’s ‘Mono No Aware’ comp and a string of acclaimed, wildly varying productions and mixes in recent years, ‘Holy Palm’ appears like a woven tapestry of interconnecting
recollections, rendered with and around an extensive repository of field recordings made over the past 6 years.
Deploying production strategies ranging from Max processing to sharp/stitched collage work, Flora filters and tiles aural snapshots of far-flung places - from an abandoned Arctic settlement in Svalbard, to an accidental recording of a monk chanting prayers on a radio in rural Chania, Crete, and drug-fuelled Tokyo club scenes - into an uncanny investigation of how ritual punctuates and gives meaning to life.
With an abundance of references, each piece toys with the imagination’s sense of place; memory is permeable, plasmic and recalled here through abstract, textured sound design. The 10 original compositions flicker to hallucinatory effect, brooding with a dark soul as traces of gamelan intersect ghost radio signals from the Arctic and a windswept Dungeness; real, unreal, surreal.
The final pair of extended ‘Loci’ parts present the source material at its rawest and most suggestive, with fleeting grime & jungle car stereo blasts seeping into Indonesian street scenes, insects in rice paddy
fields, the Chicago subway, thunderstorms, yangqin recordings; gongs, Mariah Carey, a Greek wedding in Thessaloniki, crickets at night, running water, fire safety training, a street festival in Buenos Aires, bubbles, whale calls on a boat in Tromso, wind chimes on a mountain on Teshima Island - snagged in imperceptible transitions that mirror delirious, unfathomable impermanance.
In effect ‘Holy Palm’ perceptively outlines the uncanny magick in the rift between the real world and faithbased beliefs, hyperstizing a personalised, syncretic book of sonic spells.

Red Vinyl

A distillation of cultural memory through electronic process, James Place - the creative guise of New York native Phil Tortoroli, returns with his third release for Umor Rex. The sonic realization of love and loss, re-sculpted for the Post-Modern age, pursuing his glacial take on techno into newly intimate depths.

Departing from a line in TS Elliot's Four Quartets the moment in and out of time', its works take form through the haze of a dream. Over the course of several months Tortoroli tracked heaps of live stereo jams at home, jamming on his drum machine, sampler, polysynth, and effects setup. Poring over these hours of hazy jams, Tortoroli heard himself straining for an additional voice to further emote. Rifling through a vast library of old bounces and experiments, Tortoroli rediscovered the music of Sam Sally to complete Voices Bloom, resampled live and again subdued into explorations of an old practice'.

Voices Bloom is the musicality of cultural collage, immensely personal and intimate, arms stretched out, gathering diverse sonic worlds. The artist and his craft as a self-reflexive lens for an electronic age - a sonic patchwork heard from afar - impressions of memory, drawn close to the heart. Within the album's cool displaced tones, rise nostalgic romances, drifting rhythmic works which defy the beat. A world where time enters multiple frames, those possible, literal, implied, forgotten, and remembered anew. The final results on Voices Bloom are the most reflective yet from James Place. The hopeful kosmische beats and hauntological synth music on previous albums, and more delicate melodies, riding crisp minimal rhythms that flow elegantly from vignette to vignette. Rhythms of abstract techno with glistening melodic lights.

“Unfamiliar Locations” is the solid 4-track EP by Australian artist Mutant Joe that comes as the first Tombolo Records release. Powerful and inspiring beats and samples, melodic lines of those that give you goosebumps on the back of the neck, and even punctual acid gems reminiscent of a good pre-covid raving era. At just 20 years old, Mutant Joe is one of the rising stars of avant-garde electronic music on the electro / breakbeat / techno spectrum. With a sound inspired by US phonk / memphis rap, he has produced artists such as Freddie Dredd or ApocKrysis.

The mastering has been done by Madrid producer Damian Schwarz and the cover has been designed by Javier Rodriguez and Jonathan Castro. Two renowned designers on the scene especially Jonathan having worked on the image of projects such as Boiler Room or De School.

With ‘My Own Imaginary World’ Rachel Lyn presents a home for her unique works of intimate sonic exploration. Musically focusing on art noise, conceptual, ambient, soundtracks, objects and spaces; the imprint facilitates room for creative freedom and improvisational tonal translations of Rachel’s emotions and imaginations: real artistic rawness combined with modern romanticism.

Oh Daydream, Rachel Lyn’s debut album release, introduces her on a personal and sonic level, the blooming of years of introverted development.

Bjarki returns to with another EP brandishing five restructured doses of IDM from another galaxy. Using marching kick drums as a basis, oli gumm takes references from techno, gabber and trance and morphs them into something far less easy to categorise.'oli gumm 2-2' switches frantically between glistening synth cascades and bouncing kicks. 'fork2-2' is a subdued excursion through ominous, trance-inducing strings and skeletal percussion. Opening the B side, '7 filakaramellur lion bar' spirals through warped vocals and acoustic contortions, followed by 'hatann satann', a high speed voyage through a demonic parallel universe. Closing off the EP, 'sleikjó' uses rolling drums to circle around a pit of sparse sonic oddities.

Orange Vinyl

"Following on our first EP, 'Collisions', we wanted to explore the use of modular synths, and also hardware, in more depth. Exordium was crafted from countless modular jams, passed back and forth between London and Liege, and polished into a piece of work that captures our love for club music, with an experimental edge. We wanted to get out for a moment from the 170 which we are a bit more known for. Hopefully you will enjoy this exploration into our shared sound and influences as much as we enjoyed creating it."
- Fearful & Mtwn

A Walking Contradiction expands its label family with Aa Sudd and Kombe. Having released solely exclusive Varuna material before, the Basel based imprint now welcomes two close friends for the first installment of their Demi Monde series. Three murky slow techno jams in typical Varuna fashion where fascinating eerie atmospheres work their way up through vigorous half paced grooves.

Victory Over The Sun reinterpreted by Wanderwelle, Anthony Linell, Grand River, E-Saggila, Ptwiggs, and Svreca.

First album for Pærer records signed by his owner Jiman. Pærer
confirms his desire to touch many styles of electronic music. This
album is a mix of idm, ambient, futuristic pop, electronica and of
course techno music. Composed during the containment 2020 the
atmosphere is really very special and singular. It traces Jiman's
production years well and takes him to other horizons for the
future.
Vinyl Lp - Mastering By Scan X

Imagination: that was the feeling and the starting point of the debut album Jurgen De Blonde recorded under the moniker Kohn in 1998. Surrounded by an old sampler, an analogue synthesizer, a cheap sequencer, acoustic and electric guitar, bass and an electret microphone he modulated and crafted his own personal parallel universe in his bedroom in Gent. A world where the sound of a skipping cd mutates in a shoegaze vibe, hunted mosquitoes are locked in a psycho-acoustic melancholy or ringing phone songs slides into a brutal grime beat echoing the beginning days of Belgian electronic body music.

21 years on this debut is remastered and released for the first time on vinyl. Recommended if you like early Autechre, Oval, vintage electronics, shoegazing beat, instrumental Death Grips, demented industrial, nostalgia futurica, derailed post rock or excellent music in general. It even helps to cure migraine (for some people).

There is an off-hand, almost unfinished quality to the record that fascinates me every time I press play: someone seems to have arranged a chemistry set with some very personal vials, tubes and ingredients, only to wander away and let it run its course. This person who is 'Kohn' seems to have no interest in seeing the tiny blizzards and blue-phosphorescent stars that pop out of his own chemicals. The whole thing is for us to dissect and admire, I feel certain that Kohn is already onto something new. Probably something so much further out it only exists in the ether.

(excerpt of the included liner notes by Brecht 'Razen' Ameel)

The goal was to make music that was rhythmic but without obvious percussion and drum sounds, to sample anything and hear what was possible or how it would inspire me. No effects, I didn't want to use any effects like reverb or delay, except as part of the sound. I wanted the sound to be dry and direct. No washes of reverb or sounds drowning in echo. This was not supposed to be an ambient record. Only the last two tracks were allowed an exception to this. Sounds belong to the room they're played in. I didn't want them to be in a space before leaving the speakers. Electronic sounds have no original acoustic space nor are they enhanced by a resonant body before they enter the air through a loudspeaker. I wanted the electronic sounds to be raw in that aspect, no polish or fake space. This, the sound of bedroom production.

(excerpt of the included liner notes by Jurgen De Blonde)

Millions Brazilians formed in Portland, Oregon in 2006. Founding members Grant Corum and Suzanne Stone have been central to the band since it's inception, while a rotating line-up backs them depending on the latest vision for the sound. TIP!
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The band carry out their own interpretation of a genre bending ethos that has evolved throughout the American underground. Drifting between boundless compositions, focused energetic improvisations and experimental collaborations that embrace a weird sort of transcendence.

Their next installment Red Rose and Obsidian was recorded in Maine and engineered by Big Blood's Caleb Mulkerin. Both he and the band deliver a powerful yet fragile and personal release. The mythical and evocative recordings are inspired by Maine's rugged coastlines; mournful ripples of sound wash up on the shore, whilst a lonesome, at times harrowing saxophone drifts through the rolling mountains, providing unsettling melodic interludes. Electronic treatments veil organic sounds, a fleeting whistle meets spontaneously with spacey flutes, mutated rock rhythms are topped off with the soaring vocals of Suzanne Stone who leads the listeners into the magical world of the Million Brazilians.