Beats News

Black Truffle is pleased to announce the latest offering from underground legend Richard Youngs. Hyperactive since the late 1980s, Youngs is widely celebrated for his remarkably extensive and varied body of recordings. His works range freely over a vast terrain, wandering from tender acoustic balladry to raging psychedelic noise and orchestral D-beat, always imbued with his distinctive, often mournful, melodic sensibility and irrepressible sense of joyous experimentation.

Comprised of two side-long pieces, CXXI carried on the experiments with chance operations used to generate material on many of Youngs’ recent releases. On ‘Tokyo Photograph’, a slowly changing, randomly generated sequence of 121 minor chords played by sine waves and accented with a brushed snare hit on every change provides the harmonic foundation for Youngs’ fragile yet impassioned vocal performance, shards of field recordings and electronics and Sophie Cooper’s long, tape-echoed trombone notes. While the melancholic drift of the chords calls up prime Robert Wyatt sides like Old Rottenhat or Dondestan, only the most vestigial sense of song remains here, as Youngs arranges his minimal ingredients over a spacious fifteen-minute expanse that often drops to nothing more than the rich hum of sine waves.

‘The Unlearning’ carries on directly from the first side, presenting another, more harmonically varied, sequence of randomly generated chords played by sine waves, distressed with tape echo flourishes and sparsely sprinkled with electronic touches. Like some of Youngs’ most single-minded instrumental works in recent years, such as his recordings of foot-played guitar or his shakuhachi pieces, ‘The Unlearning’ is deeply meditative but entirely remote from ambient or minimalist cliches.

Named after the number of chord changes on the opening piece and (Chicago-style) the number of records Youngs has released, CXXI arrives in a striking monochrome sleeve featuring play-along chord charts for both pieces. Both rigorously conceptual and endearingly off-the-cuff, CXXI is classic Richard Youngs.

Xochimoki - celebrated American ethnomusicologist Jim Berenholz and Aztec descendant / wisdom keeper Mazatl Galindo - traverse millenia with career compendium Temple Of The New Sun, an album recorded in New Mexico in the mid 1980’s but tracing a lineage back thousands of years.

Xochimoki summon feathered gods and animal spirits. They incant mythological folktales of celestial glory and supernatural dread. Their songs are sung in Pre-Columbian Central and South American languages, including Nahuatl, Maya, Purepecha and Quechua.

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.

With 10 years in the 'biz' firmly under his belt, Jiah Wells is poised to release the first full-length LP of his Galtier project, Pulchra Es Elementis. Whilst Galtier is arguably one of the originators of the percussive style that would eventually fall under the Hard Drum label, the heightened theatrics of his recent output have seen him channel Blade Runner-styled sonics and move further away from absolute club functionality. Whilst Galtier's output often seems to soundtrack hypothetical, off-planet words, Pulchra Es Elementis turns the focus inwards: towards Wells' own emotional constellation, his evolving spirituality and his attempts to tap into planes of existence beyond the tangible. The album's Latin title translates to 'Elements are Beautiful' and encapsulates the artist's belief that there is grace in all of life's aspects; pushing past what we deem as good or bad, minuscule or massive.

Pulchra Es Elementis begins with Crystalised Larva, a brooding opener of breathy pad synths and expansive kick drums which reverberate through the mix as if the hits originate from the bottom of a valley. There's an indistinct sense of tension on this track, in part due to a central melody, which never resolves but only descends lower in pitch. This tension turns to explorative wonder on Wilfull Saviour, where a mirage of musical ideas come in and out of focus. Although the sonic worlds Galtier explores are internal to him, Wilfull Saviour still possesses that sense of a cosmic journey we've come to expect from Wells; an ardent fan of dystopian films and literature.

Continuing this emotional odyssey, Bruised, But Not Broken sees the artist push deeper into the psychological undergrowth; its murky tonality juxtaposes crisp, Reggaeton-inspired drum patterns with a heavily compressed one-note synth line that modulates wildly - cutting through the mix like a nagging thought that won't leave your mind. Next up is U Were, U Are & What U Will Be, one of the more club-ready tracks of the LP, which gets us moving with a snarling bassline and layers upon layers of percussive hits and inflections.

At Pulchra Es Elementis' mid-point is the LP's title track, a drumless interlude where blissful, shimmering synths create a patchwork of intensities. Galtier's approach to songwriting shines through here; ignoring musical pragmatics, he opts to feel his way through his compositions without knowing where they might end up. Following on from that weightless breather, Phantasiai turns up the freneticism with its head-spinning mix of drum programming and a glitched-out synth line that yo-yos up and down octaves. Things get even more furious on the Superficie-featuring Cavernam, a hollow Hard Drum banger inspired by Eskibeat sensibilities and designed to create a sense of self-implosion.

The album's penultimate track, (U Are) Beautiful, is a tale of two halves: beginning with a moment of serenity as synthesizers swell like an ocean tide before evolving into a marching crescendo of raw energy. Rounding off the album, Shine Forth hurtles through pacey drum work and all manner of strange zaps and klaxons before giving way to a final dose of nebulous ambience.

A musical journey unlike any other 'club music' albums, Pulchra Es Elementis is an LP that demands to be consumed in one sitting. Reflecting on his place within the universe and the musical landscape, the album could be viewed as a musical exorcism which sees Galtier working through and shedding huge chunks of his ego that stuck to him out of fear of the unknown. Pulchra Es Elementis begins on an insecure, overwhelming or, even, existential note before rounding off with a related sense of vastness seen with new, more positive eyes. It's a voyage we hope you will join him on.

Ugo Busoni's “Valvole” is a classic example of the so-called library music records released – between the end of the Sixties and up to the Nineties – in Italy as in the rest of the world, in order to provide 'background music' to be used in the editing of news broadcasts, radio and newsreels. These were records made by highly experienced composers and musicians who, in a very short time and with limited or non-existent budgets, had to make music to be synchronized to images. For obvious reasons, they had to be tracks of short duration, characterized by a certain didactic 'formalism' that allowed an immediate choice for their main use.

The titles given to the compositions had to recall a specific topic or setting that would make the choice of technicians easy for synchronization. Tokyo, Uscita Da Scuola, Raid, Polvere Cosmica, Su Una Nuvola, Controspionaggio and Starne are, not surprisingly, some of the titles of the tracks of this album published more than forty years ago by Nuova Idea. Sounds from the Far East, folky and rock guitars, psychedelic rhythms, avant-garde tunes, cosmic echoes and much more are some of the elements of one of the most indecipherable records of that historical period, reissued for the first time on vinyl by Musica Per Immagini with a brand new artwork.

Matière Mémoire present the new work of Phill Niblock: EXPLORATORY. One of the most beautiful and powerful works that Phill Niblock has ever offered. Phill reinvents and probes the oceans of drone music possibilities deeper than ever. This piece has been performed and recorded for over a year by many great musicians around the world, under the supervision and direction of Phill: Arditti String Quartet, David Watson, Lucy Railton, Phoenix Ensemble Basel, David Maranha, Ben Richter, David First, Andre Goncalves, and many more.

Matière Mémoire is now releasing the first two volumes by Arditti String Quartet, David Watson (Vol. 1) & Phoenix Ensemble Basel (Vol. 2).

A work that literally immerses the listener into an acoustical substance. The sound becomes almost like matter, like jelly. Soon, you're swimming in sound, getting lost inside it.

With the Sonic Waters project initiated in 1978, my aim was to situate field of electronic music within a liberating and futuristic experience, outside the concert halls and in sync with the development of new instruments - in particular the Synclavier digital synthesizer, the first model of which I acquired in 1977. As concert space, the Pacific Ocean seemed to me to be the ideal experimental medium for both acoustic and cultural reasons. I then developed the aesthetic and technical elements that would contribute to the conception of Underwater Music. Numerous performances would follow spanning four decades, in natural sites or in large public pools such as those of Sydney, Paris or Venice during the 2006 Biennale.

Michel Redolfi (1951), French composer and sound artist, is the founder of Underwater Music. The natural elements captured and highlighted by experimental technology are a constant in Redolfi's catalogue: many compositions explore the earth environments such as in 'Pacific Tubular Waves', 'Jungles', 'Desert Tracks' (re-released on Sub Rosa records) and especially with 'Sonic Waters', a work that literally immerses the listener into an acoustical substance. During the mid-seventies Redolfi carried out his electro-acoustic research in the United States, with major electronic music centers including the California Institute of the Arts and chiefly the University of California in San Diego. As invited resident of their studios, Michel Redolfi launched the underwater music concerts, with the series 'Sonic Waters' performed in the Pacific Ocean. Michel Redolfi's underwater creations have since been regularly programmed by major international festivals, with multi-media installations held in ecological marine reserves or in historical city pools. Among them, the Sydney Festival, Paris 'Nuit Blanche', Ars Electronica in Linz, the 2006 Venice Biennale (nominated Golden Lion) and lately the 2018 Ars Musica festival in Brussels. This record presents different variations of Sonic Waters from 1980 to 1987, alternating studio mixes with their re-recordings in the depths of the Pacific. Michel Redolfi CD's and LP's are currently published by Sub Rosa, INA-GRM and Radio France.

Constructive Music is proud to present some radical reinterpretations of four tracks from Takuma Watanabe's debut album 'Last Afternoon'.

'Clouds Fall x Tactile'. Like taking a widescreen trip through Takuma's perfectly constructed digital worlds. Loops of conversations, sheared sounds and bursts of low-end frequencies fill the air. All underpinned by those unmistakable strings.

'Text x Bruges'. Hyper chemistry of rhythmic urgency and Joan La Barbara's vocals. Cut up and used as percussive ammunition.

Originals by Takuma Watanabe. Deconstructed by Delay. Artwork by Joe Gilmore. Mastered by Joe Talia.

Red Vinyl

Fictional larger than life characters come in all forms and ways but no one expected East Rome acid minimal synth-punk duo Holiday Inn to spread their cult in such a distinctive manner, overthrowing all sets of rules in the peninsula’s stuffy DIY circuit and uniting techno-industrial enthusiasts, hardcore noisers and theatrical dark wavers. At some point though someone just had to do it!

Co-released by Avant! Records and Maple Death Records, Torbido is Holiday Inn’s debut full-length and by all accounts their strongest manifesto yet. A collaboration between Gabor (Aktion, Metro Crowd) on voice and Frenchman Bob Junior (Trans Upper Egypt, Bobsleigh Baby, Hiss) on synth and drum machine, they leave their best on stage, live shows have cemented their ill reputation: Gabor is a lanky dude and struts onstage with a boxer’s pre match ritual dance, ready to vomit words in your face while Bob’s composure never fails to spread misery and mystery through his vintage noise assault setup.

Torbido kicks off with She, a hallucinogenic dub infused punk anthem, Dirty Town is an industrial boogie for wide eyed dreamers, Feel Free! is an electro jungle b-boys rhythmic speed induced breakbeat tune for the future. The feverish magic happens on No Speaking, where Holiday Inn turns an acid techno tune into a circuit breaking warped frenzy.

Holiday Inn are shaped and scarred by the unauthorized development of buildings once considered a sign of gleaming growth in the Roman suburbs. It’s nostalgic and nasty, and will not have a bright future and let’s not forget that Torbido means murky and sinister, so come on and take a plunge into Tevere’s mudbanks.

Third album of this post-punk/avant-rock french project.

RIEN VIRGULE is before everything else musically, the meeting of four people, islands of desires, tentacles that embrace each other. Or “the meeting of a soldering iron and an iceberg, a pigeon asleep in a packet of chips, a smashed path in a debaptized city” (according to J. Burgun).

For 8 years, two albums and numerous concerts, they have been peddling a generous, graceful and cold, intensely vibrating music.

In a radical and deviant approach to Pop music, the classical structures of verse-chorus serve as a playground and experimentation, where rhythmic, melodic and noisy functions merge.

In June 2019, Jean-Marc Reilla passed away. His homemade instrumentarium and laughter continue to resonate for his loved ones, and his memory lives on in the music of RIEN VIRGULE that has become a trio.

The Cool Feedback Quartet’s music is quite similar to a philharmonic orchestra manipulating new material:
feedback, or in other words, the unexpected beauty of sound when it is let loose. Becoming its master so as to make the
best use of it, like a new instrument, the guitar pick up plays again on request. Harmonizing sounds like a string section
gone wild would, like light piercing through ether, tearing up the background and taking us for good to unknown territory.
The bandleader, Grégoire Garrigues, who first got the idea of the concept and got the ball to roll, is a well-known and
respected French guitarist.

The Oystercatcher is the first collaborative LP from Cucina Povera (Maria Rossi) and ELS (Edward Simpson)

Recorded in London over two days, hours' worth of improvisations have been edited down to form these six tracks.

A fragile interplay is at work between Maria's drifting vocals and the ominous churn of Edward's modular synth. Each sonic element takes a turn at leading the way.

The opening track 'Mantle' is formed from sparse, monolithic electronics, woven gently with a thread of vocals. In the closing track 'Eon' Maria's voice shepherds spontaneous bursts of sounds, almost Rave-like if order were imposed, through 15 minutes of turmoil and resplendent until the end.

Maria's vocals make their own trails amongst the noise, bringing to mind the the exploratory language from Ursula K. Le Guin's album 'Music and Poetry from the Kesh', recalling the same understated mystery.

The overall effect of this collaboration is a completely unique creation albeit within a recognisable lineage of predecessors.

The artwork reflects the vision of these two artists, collaged together. Both images are from a trip to Helsinki. Edward's photograph of Tulips caught after dark are reviled by a flash. Maria's seemingly abstract drawing is a graphite rubbing taken from a granite slab of a pavement somewhere in Kallio. Together the two images represent two different methods for capturing a city's haptic landscape.

The album moves with a feeling of transience, which is no surprise given that the idea to collaborate was formed in Helsinki, realised in London and edited together in Rotterdam.

The Oystercatcher tells a fragile tale, one that spins out into the unknown. A cold union of voice and machine, still tentative and probing, learning to co-exist. A kind of fundamental shift whereby shared moments have been turned to sound.

The Oystercatcher is a bird that can freely travel between the earth, sea and sky. The motif is taken from a Tove Jansson short story. A dead bird washes ashore, two different versions of events are presented to how the bird came to die. The album feels like two different stories being presented on top of one another but ultimately coming to the same tragic conclusion.

Cucina Povera is Maria Rossi - Vocals
ELS is Edward Simpson - Synthesisers
Recorded in London across two days during the Summer of 2019
Mastered by Russell Haswell

The Other End Of The Circle by OPICA

The second release on Nikolaj Jakobsen/Sugar's new Perfumery label is a complete departure from the signature Copenhagen fast techno sound, and unequivocal notice of the varied and experimental plans he has for the imprint.

OPICA is Anders Bo Eriksen, a cimbalom-, tuba player, percussionist and producer, who has created an ambitious, diverse and mind warping debut album ranging from soothing acoustic ambient pieces, electronica-esque live-drum cut up tunes, mutant house music, and 180 bpm breakbeat madness.

In this goodiebag there's something for everyone, so don't be shy! In the making of this album OPICA is featuring vocalist Astrid Engberg, drummer Anders Vestergaard, and Sven Dam Meinild on sax and flute, and the album is co-produced and mixed by Nikolaj Jakobsen.

This album is for the late night acid fueled deep listening sessions!

AMSIA is one of those hidden representatives of Basque experimental music that happened and disintegrated long ago.

Called "The other musics" or "Risky music" it originated two decades ago in the slaughterhouse of the Basque town of Azkoitia (Gipuzkoa).
This native music scene was an attempt to summarise the evolution of contemporary pop/experimental/ contemporary music, rather than an attempt to generate something new.

Its character is solitary and its nature is electronic; the result is a sound collage of MIDI orchestrations combined with synthesized sounds, vinyls and sampler libraries.

The sound of it is chaotic, unpredictable and strangely beautiful.

Galcid - Hope and Fear is the long awaited sophomore album of Japanese techno-artist galcid. Although completed in 2019, the release date of the album was delayed by COVID-19. This was due to both practical and artistic reasons—the titles and identity of each composition reflect various ways in which galcid reflected upon the pandemic.

Music is by galcid
Produced by Hisashi Saito

In the 4 years that have passed since galcid’s debut album hertz (2016), galcid worked on various EPs and albums as SAITO. Juxtaposed to the black and white minimalism of hertz, the palate of Hope and Fear is decidedly more colourful, laden with emotional undertones. The depth of the sound created by galcid’s exclusive reliance on analogue machines invites the listener to follow their own journey along the resulting soundscape

One year after the release of Verraco’s debut album, the reinterpretations descend to Insurgentes. For the first time, establishing a bridge between South America and Europe, the colombian imprint presents IDM, Breaks and electronica of the highest order from Chevel, Stenny, Konx-om-Pax and Mari Herzer.

Following on from the acclaimed Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion LP (BT028), Black Truffle is thrilled to present two major new instrumental works from legendary sound artist and experimental composer Annea Lockwood. Demonstrating the ever evolving and radically open nature of Lockwood’s practice, these two recent works were developed in close collaboration with their performers. ‘Becoming Air’ (2018), developed with and performed by trumpeter Nate Wooley, uses extended technique and electronics to interfere with Wooley’s virtuosic control over his instrument, pushing him into areas of fluctuating pitch and timbral instability. Motivated by a desire for ‘the letting go of sound to be itself’, ‘Becoming Air’ unfolds as a series of texturally distinct moments separated by pauses, each fixing on a particular approach to the instrument (long tones, upper-register whistles, breathy wooshes) and maintaining it in an essentially static fashion, focussing our attention on subtle changes and variations. Dipping into near-inaudibility in the fragile high tones of its opening section, the piece dramatically increases in volume and intensity in its final third, climaxing with a passage of roaring distortion, where the interaction between feedback and trumpet pitches calls up the shuddering interference effects of Robert Ashley’s Wolfman.

‘Into the Vanishing Point’ (2019) is a collaborative work developed with New York piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, who have performed work by major contemporary composers such as Olivia Block, Catherine Lamb and Klaus Lang. Carrying on the ecological and environmental concerns of some of Lockwood’s previous works, ‘Into the Vanishing Point’ was inspired by a devastating news article on the global collapse of insect populations. Discovering that the four members of Yarn/Wire had also read this text, Lockwood mapped out a loose structure for the piece that would allow the composer and four performers to explore their ‘feelings about what is happening ecologically’. Working with a huge variety of instruments, objects and techniques of sound production, the resulting work is an alluringly lush, organically unfolding tissue of unorthodox textures and haunting tones. Though not intended to sonically represent ecological issues in any direct way, its unique sound world of rubbed piano strings, gently handled objects and chiming pitches often calls up natural images: of insects and frogs, wind rushing through trees, a bird’s wings in flight. Presented in a stunning gatefold cover with liner notes by Lockwood, Wooley and Yarn/Wire, Becoming Air/Into the Vanishing Point is a testament to the generosity and experimentation that continue to characterise the work of this extraordinary artist, active for over fifty years.

The Dalmarnock Tapes is a collection of previously unreleased tracks by Cucina Povera. They were recorded in 2017 during snowstorm flurries in Dalmarnock, in the east end of Glasgow, Scotland. Cucina Povera is the alias of the Glasgow-based sound artist Maria Rossi, who is originally from Finnish Karelia, the European region that borders Finland and Russia. Cucina povera refers to a style of southern Italian traditional cooking evolved out of precarity and making do. Rossi’s music shares that same ethos of simplicity. Her experimentations with voice and field recordings create gossamer loops – heavenly repetitions and soporific undulations; an utterly sublime and ethereal language that is all her own.

This new series features stunning, celestial vocalisations from Rossi over eight tracks. The recordings were made in the dark, winter months when she was briefly renting a very cheap, rundown studio space in a damp, old warehouse in Dalmarnock. She made it there every day despite bad heating in the building. The snow piled high that year. It was also a period in Rossi’s life when she was moving house every couple of months. The tracks reflect that mildly disturbed and displaced feeling, with a sense of aloneness at their core.

Layering her own harmonies to create a mystical solo choir, Rossi builds an echoey wash of soft sound, using her dreamlike voice as the main instrument and Finnish as the main language. They are spontaneous vocalisations, recorded on the cuff, riffing on a very simple idea or pair of words, such as ‘I hear the floor creaking next door’ or ‘Alone at night’. Her stripped back, ultra soothing meditations take on an almost spiritual quality, ebbing and flowing in waves of warmth and purity. The lapping, lilting motion of her cycles of song has a gentle, comforting quality despite the sense of isolation that inspired them.

Hypnotic shimmers of sound wrap around rhythmic samples of clanking metal in ‘Kahleet’ (‘Shackles’’) creating a ritualistic or ceremonial feel. Elsewhere in ‘Yksin yöllä’ (‘Alone at Night’), her gentle refrains become an otherworldly lullaby. Much like simple Italian cooking, the minimalist approach generates powerful results, distilled with depth and intensity.

Faitiche releases an album version of the radio piece Vom Rohen und Gekochten (The Raw and The Cooked) originally composed and produced by Jan Jelinek for the state broadcaster SWR2. The album The Raw and The Cooked brings together five sound collages that deal with the consistency of material and its mutability.

Solid, raw, boiling, powdery, liquid, broken and folded - categories which describe the nature of material. They can also be read in a chronological sequence: solid becomes broken becomes liquid becomes powdery... Material tells of its essence as it drifts through its states, always in correspondence with external energies. The Raw and The Cooked observes the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius as they design their paper and metal objects and the artist Peter Granser as he ritually prepares Japanese tea, it shatters glass, bends metal and burns wood. The resulting audio documents capture processes of material transformation as sound.

The Raw and The Cooked was created with the help of ITO Raum Stuttgart and Thomas & Renée Rapedius. Originally produced for radio broadcast on Südwestrundfunk in 2020 it contains a variation of the collage Zwischen/Raum that was made with funding from Musikfonds. Many thanks to Eckhart Holzboog and Beatrice Theil, as well as Frank Halbig/SWR.

Mimsy describes himself as someone with many interests and few skills, and sure, you can put it that way. But more precisely, he is a seeker and finder who has always felt more at home in the intermediary spaces. Since his first releases on Karaoke Kalk under the names Saucer, Motel and Wunder in 1997, he has mostly been active as Wechsel Garland, working with samples beyond recognition and thus blurring the lines between his own songwriting and the musical material he uses.

In 2011, he ended the project with the album »Dreams Become Things« and is now opening a new chapter as Mimsy with »Ormeology.« The album was ten years in the making and saw the producer work with sounds, voices and text fragments that were gathered over time. The twelve pieces—based on guitar pickings, looped textural sounds, rhythm boxes and shimmering organ sounds—install themselves in the unconscious through sound, melody and subtle rhythmic shifts to send the listener’s perception on a journey into the unknown.

The name Mimsy is a nonce word coined by Lewis Carroll in his famous nonsense poem »Jabberwocky,« a combination of »miserable« and »flimsy,« while the term »Ormeology« refers to the Italian film »Le Orme« (»Footprints on the Moon«), in which the main character is haunted by memories of a fictional film of the same name. While this alone creates a rich thematic frame of references for the album, it does not at all define its themes. Instead, the references are reflected in the methods with which the pieces on »Ormeology« were designed—sound and language orbit freely around one another, images within images are being layered, following their path unconsciously. In »Sans mobile apparent,« the lyrics get to the heart of this: »die Widersprüche aushalten / die Folien übereinanderlegen« (»enduring the contradictions / laying the foils on top of each other.«) Creative frictions emerge not out of binary decision-making patterns, but from additive layering.

Mimsy followed traces forth and back through time and space, collaborating for a few tracks with set designer and musician Lydia Schmidt and letting Wolfram Wire record various lyrics based on automatic writing that were gathered by Mimsy. Furthermore, he asked the photo blogger Lilia Katherine from Brazil and the Canada-based Andrea Hernandez to translate and record his lyrics in their own respective languages. Human global coincidences resulted in collaborations which are presented as discrete and thus make the album as a whole and even more complex meditation on the interplay of the concrete and the abstract. This is best exemplified by the song »Ginster,« throughout which Schmidt and Mimsy’s voices overlap more and more until they enter a sort of call and response pattern, although they never seem to address each other directly.

»Ormeology« is an album that whirrs and flickers, seeking to mediate between the tangible world and the intangible by blurring the boundaries between words and sounds and space. It is an archipelago that is in many ways connected to what surrounds it, while at the same time opening up a space of its own.

Italian experimental music is notoriously resistant to definition and location. If ever there was an object to encapsulate the spirit of that movement, it is the composer and musician Roberto Musci’s debut album from 1984 - The Loa Of Music. Recorded after a decade travelling the world - drifting between African, Indian, and the Near & Far East - studying music, making field recordings, and collecting instruments, not only is it a perfect culmination of such an experience, but a lens into the rigorously democratic and international spirit of the generation of artists to which Musci belongs. Phenomenally ambitious,The Loa Of Music entirely refuses the well trod path - distilling a remarkable range of sonic reference and reality. A work of field recording, musique concrète, electronics, synthesis, and instrumentation, pulling from countless musics from across the globe, the result is nothing short of brilliant and stunningly beautiful. A near perfect work - an egoless gesture, which rather than attempting to find consensus, offers every voice equity and cohabitation - harnessing the history music, with all of its cultural diversity, as a vision for a more ideal future. Geographies and their sounds intertwine, while Musci’s interventions and instrumentation thread a path. Ambiences ripple, sounds and voices converse in a vision of unity that may only exist within sonic realms. Unquestionably seminal, and one of the most important works to emerge from Italy in the last 50 years. Never before issued on vinyl since it’s original release, and surely not to be around for long, this is one not to miss.

New York electronic experimentalist Nicky Mao's 4th full-length, Silvercoat the throng, emerged against the backdrop of lockdown, compelled by an intuitive directive: “resist the urge to fill the space.” Compositionally this translated as a simmering, shadowy energy, veiled but variable, traced in a composite of strings, synthetics, rhythm, and voice. The title alludes to a poetic notion of “possibility, rescued from darkness,” which aptly evokes the shape-shifting, devotional feel of these ambitious and elegant sound designs, crafted in defiance of impermanence, driven by the pursuit of becoming “more and more articulated, differentiated.”

Collaborations with travis from ONO, Speaker Music, and Muqata'a further expand the album's lyrical, liminal palette, meshing elements of experimental techno, spoken word, neo-classical, and industrial noise into a fluid, encrypted dialect all its own. Mao speaks of creative strategies of solidification and reification, encounter and transformation, pure being and punctuation – a multitude

of sparks, fuses, and forking paths leading across fresh thresholds and twilit terrain. Taken as a whole, Silvercoat captures Hiro Kone at the peak of their powers, alchemizing disruption and decomposition into regenerative interior worlds: “Within the darkness and absence is an opportunity for discovery.”

Double 12” Vinyl (L12MUTE629)

Side AB transparent orange vinyl

Side CD transparent blue vinyl

Packaged in a sleeve with artwork by Pockets Warhol and 3 complimenting metallic inks.

Includes high definition audio download code

Hailing from Suuns, Canadian Ben Shemie offers up his first solo work, 'A Skeleton' - an experimental pop album of cold synthetic sounds with touches of psychedelia.

Based on his live, itinerant experiments, the whole album was recorded in a single take with no overdub. Shemie has left traces of the atmosphere of each recording space, adding an element of chaos and unpredictability alongside his masterful/dexterous manipulation of the equipment.

The voices and instruments sound as if they were drawn from a not-too-distant future in which artificial intelligence has taken over human life and mutated into an artist. The album recounts the random wanderings and metaphysical rêveries of a skeleton - the fantasy muse of the machine, devoid of sex or race, a neutral entity.

The refined, minimal sonic narration is executed with astonishing precision and sensitivity. With 'A Skeleton', Shemie has definitely painted us a refreshing avant-garde picture.

Claudio Mate and Francesco Mazzocco after and hard work which took lot of time to put out this beauty, after making also an hard work of selection about the music... they are so happy to introduce for the 5th release of Dub-ito , Wolfgang Reffert well known As Dark Star since the end of 80's.

' MIX TAPE ' 1989 -1991 is a collection took exclusively from Dark Star past tapes works... Dark atmosphere influenced by Post Punk , Ebm Noise Industrial music is the typical Wolfgang 's music trademark in over 30 and more years of career , which for the first time of ever makes his debut on vinyl. The last touch comes by Dietrich Schoennemann remastering the trax directly from original tapes . This amazing collection for sure can not be missed for the
fans of 80's sounds.

Truly adventurous and life enhancing music that invigorates your soul. TIP!

Press Release:

Gordan join traditional Serbian singing with abstraction, energy and minimalism. Their music is marked by radical reduction, seemingly endless ascension and a passion for experiments.

The Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić is an internationally recognized and acclaimed artist. She, like almost no other contemporary singer, is a master of all the complex local stylistic variations of singing from Balkan music. Guido Möbius plays bass and various electronic sound generators. Additionally he uses guitar amps, microphones and effects to provoke feedback which either harmonize or are juxtaposed with the song. It is a dialogue between sound and noise which is accentuated or fragmented by means of Andi Stecher’s expressive drumming. With a rich pool of ideas the percussionist drives the sound forward breathlessly and grounds it. Together the trio form a dynamic body of sound.

Gordan recorded their debut during the first wave of the Covid19 pandemic in Europe in March 2020. Due to the lockdown in Berlin at that time the city didn’t have many distractions to offer, so the trio just concentrated on work. The atmosphere of being isolated in a recording studio had a big impact on the musical results. All three band members came up with ideas for new pieces, which were immediately tested, worked out and recorded. On abstract instrumentals provided by Stecher and Möbius, Svetlana Spajic sometimes reacted with personal interpretations of serbian traditionals, and the other way around. Most of the time it was as if the music just happend to the band; playing together felt natural from the first moment on.

Some of the old serbian traditional songs that Spajic sang are extinct forms with a specific local melodic mode. The skillful improvisation of their lyrics and ornaments was of great importance and very estimated among village singers. The title song Down In The Meadow for instance originally is a love song from the village of Odevce in eastern Kosovo, Serbia. The singing manner is of a great intensity and sonority, with lots of specific local ornaments. It disappeared along with the village communities from the area. Oh, my Rose flowers is from the region of Kopaonik mountain (southwest Serbia) and the mode, scale is known as ”kopaonički glas” (Kopaonik mountain air). Svetlana adopted the style from the late singer Veličko Veličković from the village of Ostraće. It is an old mountain solo chant, rich in fast ornamentation movements and microtonal intervals. Don’t ask how I live is Svetlana’s homage to the new popular folk music movement from the 80ies known as Južni Vetar (Southern Wind) led by a musician and composer Mile Ilić, known as Mile Bas (“Mile the Bass”) which revolutionized popular music introducing tabooed oriental music and original arrangements.

All music by Spajic Stecher Möbius except ‘Don’t Ask How I Live’ by Miodrag M. Ilić, original title Što me pitaš
All lyrics are traditional, except ‘Don’t Ask How I Live’

Svetlana Spajic — vocals
Andi Stecher — drums & percussion
Guido Möbius — bass, feedback, electronics

Recorded by Alberto Lucendo at UFO sound studios Berlin in March 2020 mixed by Morphosis
Mastering by Neel at Enisslab, Rome
Artwork by Lorenzo Mason Studio

grey marbled vinyl

"Artificial Intelligence has been a fascinating area for me since 2017, and Cypher is a body of my work, an album, that draws heavily on it for inspiration. I tried to combine classical elements and modern techniques as much as possible when creating it, so that it has both a sense of the familiar and the new. I created the artwork by programming a GAN algorithm using face-transfer concept in combination with a street-art dataset from Istanbul."

- GRANUL

Radio support from: 96 Back, Emerald, Breaka, Kessler

Hmot Aka Stas Sharifullin Is Siberian-born, Moscow-based Musician, Curator, Educator And Multi-disciplinary Artist From Siberia. Using Modular Synthesizer, Field Recordings And Visual Programming Languages, Hmot Collects Sounds And Organizes Them Into Structures, Pushing Traditional Electronic Music Genres Beyond Their Comfort Zones. permanent Imbalance' Is His Ep Debut On The Berlin Imprint Oqko Following A Single Contribution To The Label's form_1' Compilation.
Structurally, permanent Imbalance' Is Disorderly And Elusive, It's A Techno Record Which Has Undergone A Gregor Samsaesque Metamorphosis. Embedded With Dizzying Polyrhythmics, The Discontinuity At The Heart Of The Record Might Also Be Its Central Directive - Interrupting The Ecstatic Clubbing Experience In Favor Of A Contradictory Reality Which Is Impossible To Describe With Regular Rhythms. Boldly Submitted To The Niche Of Dance Music Deviations, permanent Imbalance' Also Reveals Techniques Directly Derived From Early Institutional Electronics And Musique Concrete. But Where Others Would Pile On The Layers,
Sharifullin Keeps It Trim. These Are Just Some Finishing Touches Enhancing His Rickety And Multifaceted Soundscapes.
Subject To Constant Deviations Of Its Own Temporality, This Music Proves To Mirror The Crisis In Which Modernity Resides - A State Of Life Out Of Balance Which Now Appears To Be Permanent As Never Before.

The new SYNTAX Electronix Sub-Label is called SYNTAX Down and it is born with this EP manufactured by “InHum’AwZ”, a French couple who are making their way into the international electronic circuit.
Her musical proposal is open and varied, but one of her axes is in the lower areas, very complete compositions with psychedelic messages and a great work of stereos, her set up is completely analog and her desire to remain in this electronic circuit is intense and sincere.

Where Is Your Toughness Now (No Forgiveness) finds the listener surrounded by a sense of dread and imminent doom, a collection of shrilling glimpses and brooding ambiances, distant broken memories made sound and sudden disturbances. At the end of the track added piano notes will increase the creepiness, preparing us for what will come next. More More More More (Courting Insanity) dwells in deep power electronics territory, and we will find ourselves in a bleak sea of chaos and madness. Obsessive rhythmic patterns and majestic effects impose a robust march, evoking a mechanical world inside our vicious mind. Just when you think this is it an eerie melody complete the scenario. Breasts In Sight (Demand A Choice) surprises with delicate ambient synth sounds and crystalline atmospheres in a droning course, reaching after a while a stomping movement with martial innuendos and distorted kick drums. The listener finds himself in a complex mix of emotions underlined by melancholic notes and ominous soundscapes, perhaps showing us personal facts from the author’s life.

Lifestyle (After The Rise Comes The Fall) is a rhythmic noise affair with cinematic elements and abrasive atmospheres with suspended parts and heavily manipulated vocals. A nightmarish voyage into anarchic assaults and controlled darkness reaching orchestral greatness. Monogamy Rules (Not Belonging To Anyone) uses suspense as a device showcasing broken sounds and shrilling lines, conjuring an alarming sonic world for us. The tension grows as the highly cinematic crescendo reaches an industrial climax with sci-fi qualities. Inner thoughts and ideas become a compulsive soundtrack to the demise of our preconceptions and in-built credos, leaving us with a sense of uneasiness. The last track Masculine Norms (The Many Faces Of Manhood) drives the message home by the means of eerie soundscapes and cut-up sounds, giving us a crawling movement with sparse rhythms and soothing hidden melodies. Distant laments evoke a deeply disturbing portrait of struggle and mixed emotions.
credits

Imagine Plantasia was an animated film narrated by Jacque Cousteau and the musical score reminds you of your favourite library record. “Ambitus Of Beauty” invites you on yet another beautiful and timeless full-length journey through various magic moments, scenes and soundscapes created by Natureboy Flako. You will be floating on a vast stream of memories, ideas, thoughts, wishes and feelings translated into sound while your mind starts dancing gracefully and is likely to drift into nothing and everything at the same time. Carefully crafted with a great sense of oneness, this album is offering a mind travel to focus and re-calibrate. Music Heals!

For fans of Plantasia (Mort Garson), Brian Eno, Suzanne Ciani, Vangelis or Ryuichi Sakamoto.

The debut offering from Shakey, a new project from Silvia Kastel and Lizzie Davis (Wilted Woman). Shakey, then, is a syncretic meshing of both artists sensibilities, encompassing both’s love of digi-dub, jungle, musique concrete, and the fusing of ambient textures with abstracted rhythms.

Front cover and label artwork by artist Chris Lux.

Mastered and cut by Simon Davey.

CYCLE 1 is Standard 's debut album, the result of numerous "jam sessions", from which François Giesberger (François Ier) and Baptiste Malgoire (half of the duo Supernaive ) isolated the most conclusive elements, pushing their potential to the point of obtaining tracks with complex but resolutely accessible structures. The result, fruit of a permanent dialogue between the two musicians, is an album with diverse influences and a pronounced melodic dimension, navigating between electronica, ambient, breakbeat, acid and downtempo... CYCLE 1 , scheduled for release on October 30th, 2020, will thus introduce the first cycle of Standard Records ' activities.

In 1991 Coil released the third of their early classic full-length albums “Love’s Secret Domain”, seemingly casting aside the gloom
and funereal beauty of its predecessors in favour of a painstakingly multi-layered hallucinogenic electronic beast, which unlike
some of their fellow ex-industrial contemporaries’ releases of the time wasn’t an attempt at easy accessibility or (the-godsforbid) danceability, but a vibrating psychedelic masterpiece unrivalled in their discography and still a landmark album.
To mark its 30 year anniversary Infinite Fog are beyond proud to present an expanded, fully remastered re-release of this fan
favourite available for the first time ever in its entirety on vinyl with 10 rare and mostly unreleased tracks and alternative
versions from the period added as a bonus to a luxurious 3LP/2CD set.
Love’s Secret Domain contains among its many highlights the Lynchian William Blake tribute of its title track and the
intoxicating single “Windowpane”, original versions of the later Coil live staple “Teenage Lightning” and the majestically warped
classicisms of “Chaostrophy”. Marc Almond guests on the typhonian “Titan Arch” and This Heat’s Charles Hayward provides
some amazing drum stylings.
This album is Coil pushing their sound ideas and probably their sanity to their very limits. Beyond the iconic Steven Stapleton
cover art here reproduced in unseen definition the doors of perception still open wide for both long-term Coil aficionados and
new-comers to this supremely innovative release to explore unknown depths. The long-overdue re-release illustrates how far
ahead of the curve Coil were with the sounds on this album, which still sounds as fresh and mind-blowing as it did back in the
early 90s.