Beats Novedades

Günter Schickert, krautrock maestro of echo-driven psychedelia, returns on Marmo one year and half after the release of the Labyrinth LP. Mauerharfe consists of old and special material, which has officially never seen the light before. It is due for release on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall, as 12” LP with CD, CD and digital formats. The physical versions contain exclusive pictures, liner notes, a prose poem by Peter Unsicker and some draft writings by the artists with reflections on the project.

Berlin, August 1990, first post-wall Summer. Two friends, the locals Günter Schickert and gallerist Peter Unsicker perform a spectacular yet symbolically intimate interpretation of those epochal changing days by building a sound installation with a damaged piece of the Berlin Wall. They persuade the patrol “Feliks Dzierzynski” of the DDR army to transport and relocate a the piece outside Peter's Wall Street Gallery on the Zimmer Strasse, in the borough of Mitte, where only a few months back the intact structure actually passed through.

Once the wall was positioned, they bend down the bars of the iron structure that crop out the concrete, bind piano chords to them, stretch the strings down to the bodom base of the construct and connect guitar amplifiers to the set up. The Berlin Wall is ready to be played as a harp.

Günter Schickert's Mauerharfe are executed between August and October 1990, resulting into three long field recordings.

As Günter Schickert claims, the idea behind the project was the one of representing, in a personal musical way, the feelings and sensations that he – as well as many others experiencing the division and eventually the removal of the Wall - felt through the decades around the presence of this monstrous separator. The wall becomes an instrument, seen both as an object and executor of the experiment, while the human and artistic presence almost vanishes. The atonal and harsh sounds embody the ugliness of an inhuman separation, the terrible echoes of prisons and the lament of its prisoners. The pulling of the strings suggests the repression of a regime, while releasing these it indicates a dash of freedom.

You can get lost into the intensity of the Mauerharfe, find always new sensations and a countless amount of details. If you approach the listening with adventurous spirit and a good dose of curiosity, it can really throw you back into the past, a past of segregation, austerity and suppression, yet of an urging desire of liberation.

The tracks:

Side A features a 19 mins long piece. The tape-induced background noise lays down a carpet of haunting atmospheres and introduces the experiment. Günter starts to test the chords by pulling out, with his fingers, dry and acid timbers. The warm up evolves by investigating wider sinusoidal waves and dilated metallic riffs. The track takes the form of a more conventional music narration, as the artist bangs the harp with a sort of rudimental violin bow creating marching percussive paderns. Layers of psychedelic ambience take over the scene before mixing up with roaring industrial spasms. Lunar sceneries seem to emerge, paving the way to sudden strings feedbacks, crackling distorted clicks and menacing reverbs.

Flip-side, a similarly long take opens up with ferocious urge, like being catapulted into a warfare between iron and cement, sounding like a real military operation. As the strings get hit and pulled, the metal seems to crash into thousands of pieces, dissolving into merciless distortions. Yet it is intriguing to notice how these dynamics of madness occasionally generate wavy and gentle sub-harmonics. This piece adds up intensity in comparison to the previous one, containing enhanced abrasive and distorted frequencies. The final part is marked by monstrous echoing rhythms, before drijing back to a chaotic rumble of fire, metal and concrete.

The third piece, Mauerharfe 3, is a 30 minutes long performance dated August the 13th 1990. As Schickert recalls, 29 years before exactly on that same date, the construction of the Berlin wall was accomplished. This take appears exclusively on CD, with copies included inside the vinyl package and as a separate CD format release. The recording is cleaner than the previous two, giving more width and definition to the sounds. As opposed to Mauerharfe 1 and 2, where the wall of sound is overwhelming, in this 3rd take human presences can be heard : fragments of women voices, a baby crying, the siren of a police car. The compositional approach is more sober, the tones of the harp warmer, closer to an actual one, its notes more gentle, discrete and meditative, sometimes resulting into deep, gong-like percussive timbers.

Editions Mego is proud to present the latest addition to the compelling discography of Thomas Brinkmann. Throughout his career Brinkmann has focussed on the human operating amongst industry alongside rhythms that manifest as a result of technological advancement. With this new release Brinkmann makes a u-turn, looking back to the early industrial age. Comprised of recordings of various looms, Raupenbahn investigates the sonic properties and consequences of the first automatic loom as constructed by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1745. Thomas Brinkmann once again adheres to his tendency for clarity and simplicity whilst further investigating not only the sound and rhythms of the machines (looms) but also what role they serve in society and what consequences they have on the environment. Raupenbahn presents 21 tracks in total, 11 feature on the vinyl, the remaining 10 as digital bonus tracks. The majority of recordings were undertaken by Brinkmann in 2017 with a Neumann KM 184 stereo set. Additional recordings were sourced with permission from Monika W. recs. from 2014 Central Museum of Textiles Łódź, Poland. Each piece presents a diversity of material which borders on the breathtaking and beautiful in richness and complexity. The various looms unravel rhythms and patterns unexpected from machines of the early industrial age.

The loom holds a significant role in shaping our world being the catalyst for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine which, alongside the subsequent work of Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, paved the way for modern computing. There is a linage of the loom that fits succinctly in Brinkmann's overall argument. Here we encounter a parallel between machine driven economies and the music that rose from such places, consider the Sheffield steel industries, the Manchester weaving industry or the Rhineland / Düsseldorf loom and machine industry. Is it a coincidence that the practice of such machines in the environment gave rise to today's predilection for electronic dance music, in pop, soundtracks, etc.

Raupenbahn features no treatment or processing and explicitly displays varying tempo and timbres which ascertain a wide range of acoustic structures. The artwork features Ingrid Wiener, Rosemarie Trockel and Alexandra Bircken, three different generations who would with ideas of fabric weaving, loming and the like. This exceptional release works on a number of levels alongside it's striking sonic palette.


i 9 Günne (Irmscher) BO Möhnesee / D

Previously unreleased recordings by various lineups drawn from Derek Bailey, Tristan Honsinger, Christine Jeffrey, Toshinori Kondo, Charlie Morrow, David Toop, Maarten Altena, Georgie Born, Lindsay Cooper, Steve Lacy, Radu Malfatti and Jamie Muir.

Journalists often make the brief history of Free Improvisation conform to the idea that the history of music is a nice straight line from past to present: Beethoven… Brahms… Boulez. Thus Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Stevens — together with Brötzmann and co across the Channel — were the trailblazing ‘first generation’, forging a wholly new language alongside contemporary avant-garde and free jazz. Figures like Toshinori Kondo and David Toop, willing as they were to incorporate snippets of all kinds of music, were the pesky ‘second generation’, happily cocking a snook at the ‘ideological purity’ of Bailey’s non-idiomatic improvisation.
‘Company 1981’ shows up the foolishness — the wrongness — of such storylines. Check the eclectic collection of guests Bailey invited to Company Weeks over the years. He had clear ideas about the music, but he was no ideological purist.

One of the founders of Fluxus, Charlie Morrow injects blasts of Cageian fun into half the recordings here, whether blurting military fanfares from his trumpet, or intoning far-flung scraps of speech. Cellist Tristan Honsinger and vocalist Christine Jeffrey join in the joyful glossolalia, while Bailey, Toop and Kondo contribute delicious, delicate, hooligan arabesques, by turns.
The remainder are performed by a different ensemble: Bailey, bassist Maarten Altena, former Henry Cow members Georgie Born and Lindsay Cooper on cello and bassoon, the insanely inventive Jamie Muir on percussion, and trombonist Radu Malfatti, showing his mastery of extended technique. Were that not enough, there’s the inimitable purity of Steve Lacy’s soprano ringing high and clear above the melee. Glorious!

There’s always been this idea that Free Improvisation is somehow Difficult Listening, but when the doors of perception are thrown open and prejudice cast aside, you realise that it’s not difficult at all. “Is it that easy?” chirps Morrow, at one point. Indeed it is.
Enjoy yourself.

Repress

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases
Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and
power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still
exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however The Drought
demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a
grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.
Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles
Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within
the self towards preservation. The traumatised body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured
memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and
control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice
centred on first person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources
Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.
“To Possess Is To Be In Control” makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or
a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while “Red Desert,” named after Michelangelo
Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces.
The seven-minute epic “The Size of Our Desires” acts as the emotional tipping point of the record;
amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics
reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted
through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part
of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of
industrial music. The Drought chronologises the artist’s transformation through a psychological
famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

Dimitris Papadatos is a composer, musician and sound artist based in Athens, Greece. The main concern in his work is an apposition of disparate elements that assume a re-appropriation of historically applied methodologies while questioning forms of empowering them. The biggest body of his work reflects issues as copyright, spirituality and originality, undergoing a constant state of transfiguration of its outsourcing. His project, Jay Glass Dubs, is an exercise of style focusing on a counter-factual historical approach of dub music, stripped down to its basic drum/bass/vox/effects form.

VAGAROSA

"Bad Weather" is a performative sound art event of a group of performers engaging with reconstructions of Baroque theater noise machines. The project started in 2017 when Lithuanian artist Arturas Bumšteinas teamed up with theater carpenter Ernestas Volodzka to re-create wind, rain, sea and thunder imitation devices, identical to the ones whose canon settled in European theater in the 17th century. Commissioned and produced by contemporary music theater production house Operomanija, "Bad Weather" events have since been presented in Lithuania and Poland. During each performance, the ensemble plays the machines in keeping with meteorological maps and charts from various centuries that serve as scores. Contemporary artist Ivan Cheng was invited to write and perform a libretto that is integrated into every performance in different ways. In the Baroque era, the noise machines constituted only a small part of the theatrical illusion, lurking behind the scenes, invisible to the audience. Meanwhile in "Bad Weather", they take the spotlight and become generators of conceptual climate.

"Bad Weather Long Play" is a collage of sound materials from performances, rehearsals, soundchecks and other occasions related to the project, as documented with various recording devices between 2017 and 2019. The sides of the LP don't function as A and B sides but can be played in any order. The LP is presented in a full-color sleeve with a printed inner sleeve containing photos of the various stages of the project and liner notes by Salomé Voegelin. An included 8-page booklet reproduces Ivan Cheng's libretto.

"Produced from a selection of recordings made at rehearsals, workshops and performances with an alternating team of seven performers, Bumšteinas convokes a work that sounds its process on the mobile blueprint of meteorological maps as scores. Creating a mis-en-scène of invisible occurrences that talk with each other in the language of a storm that is brewing, raising and petering out, and that leaves a trace in our ears, an imprint and a movement that might only clear the next day." (from the liner notes by Salomé Voegelin)

Arturas Bumšteinas (b. 1982 in Vilnius, Lithuania) is an artist working within the intersections of sound, music and art. His practices include performative sound art, radio art, exhibitions, experimental acoustic and electronic music. He started exploring theater noise machines in 2012 when he was commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur to compose "Epiloghi. Six Ways of Saying Zangtumbtumb".

Faitiche welcomes two young artists from Canada: Jonathan Scherk and Daniel Majer hail from the post-rock and experimental scene in Vancouver, where they shared a studio for several years. In artistic terms, too, there is a surprising coherence: on 'It's Counterpart', their solo work naturally blends to create a joint album, making it hard to distinguish between their contributions. Majer describes his part as a shadow-like reflection to Scherk’s brightly meandering collages. The album’s title refers to this: 'It's Counterpart' presents two solo artists who have met their match in one another.

Scherk and Majer produce contemporary sound collages on samplers, laptops etc. using raw material drawn from YouTube videos, field recordings, cassettes, and LPs from the dollar bin – the kind of rightly forgotten obscurities that have long since lost their audience, if they ever had one. In the hands of Scherk and Majer, they become abstract sound objects. The two artists don't concern themselves with the material's original context – the sound's character is most important. This sets them apart from other collage artists. Their work might be called a contemporary upgrade of the classic tape collage: here, channelling a wealth of information is the main focus. So are these collages that trigger neither associations nor contexts? Au contraire! 'It's Counterpart' is like an overheated centrifuge whose spinning extracts and joins together all of the harmonies ever pressed on vinyl. Melodies run amok.

Second LP release by The Oval Language on Edition Telemark after "Hibernation" in 2017, this time showcaseing Klaus-Peter John's Waldkonzerte (woodland concerts), recorded in 2016. The Oval Language is an autonomous art project founded in 1987 in Leipzig, East Germany, by Klaus-Peter John and Frank Berendt. Since Berendt left in 1995, it has been continued by John, sometimes with collaborators, but recently mostly for solo activities. Its fields of activity have included sound-noise performances, conceptual works in open spaces, installations, land art projects, photography, and more.

From the beginning, the space or location itself has been a central aspect within many of their site-specific sound-noise performances. When working at a certain location, the performers tried to not bring in anything from outside, but exclusively use material already available at the space. This way, it becomes possible to thoroughly feel out and explore the site, allowing a distinct site-specific sound to emerge that is integrated into the performance. Throughout the 1990s, the sites used often were abandoned buildings in Leipzig, available in nearly unlimited quantity, from vacant factories to unused former public bathing facilities. During the recent years, Klaus-Peter John has focused on a minimisation of means and developed a unique vocal technique without amplification that he has used in a number of performances. In 2016, he attempted to integrate his voice into pure nature, in his own words the biggest challenge to date. His goal was not to perform any kind of singing or the like, but to use voice as a means similar to the site-specific tools used in previous performances by The Oval Language. He performed five concerts without audiences in a forest ravine in Döben, near Grimma, between June and November. The concerts parallel the course of the seasons and their related acoustic changes and conditions.

This double LP is presented in a die-cut single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. The inner sleeves contain one photo made during a Waldkonzert on each side. By switching the order of the inner sleeves, four different front sleeves can be generated. Edition of 200.

Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition—staged by Anne Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live event.

Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of power and paradise. The music for Faust was written in a band-like process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to
its premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice.

From the chaos of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque intricacy, each track a testament to the energy that brought it into being.

Faust is anchored around three pieces—Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen Song—written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner, whose sonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new
arrangements that couple the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the studio Throughout the album and culminating in it's closing act — the brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last
Song, a pulsing canon of looped and layered voice pierced by black metal screams.

Faust is the record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice. Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began
in 2013, and this generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently her performance trilogy Sex (2019).

Michael Speers impresses with a debut LP of absorbing “synthetic listening environments” for
C.A.N.V.A.S.; the London-based co-op behind Elvin Brandi’s cracking ‘Shelf Life’ EP and the group-
show ‘Cipher’ comp starring Flora Yin-Wong and Object Blue +++
Stemming from Speers’ background as a percussionist, his first LP ‘xtr’ctn’ pairs software
processed, nanoscopic recordings of electronic equipment’s internal behaviours with samples
of the natural world and feedback from no-input mixers to yield a visceral and inventively
personalised view on sound phenomena and resonant spaces that lay beyond the threshold of
human perception. In the process he effectively amplifies and renders the infrasonic world as
tangible yet abstract, meticulously arranging his unique palette of field recordings, SFX library
and YouTube samples, and original instrumentation by Olan Monk and Flora Yin-Wong, into non-
linear, non-narrative structures that invite the listener to immerse in a form of sonic fiction which
highlights the fine line between referential, objective reality and pareidolic subjectivity.
Distinguished by an otherworldy, meta sense of detachment shared with music by Giuseppe Ielasi,
Mika Vainio, and :Zoviet*France:, the four pieces form a fascinating sonic weltanschauung that
acknowledges and articulates the complex role of non-human and material sound generators upon
the self. From the way seagulls resemble death metal screams in ‘obturo’ to the uncanny manner
how a Olan Monk’s piano pulse and samples of Liam Byrne’s viola de gamba in ’tombeau’ recalls
a scene of ravenous whistle and horn blowing at The Eclipse in Coventry c. 1992, each piece is
densely packed with acousmatic data that will stimulate a broad range of reactions as listeners fill
in the perceptive gaps according to their own sferic conditioning and grasp of worlds natural and
synthetic.
Where the first two pieces steer clear of any blatant emotive cues, the fragged shrapnel that
opens ’sul. locus’ initially does the same, but changes at the mid-way point withe suggestively
gloomy strokes of Flora-Yin-Wong’s Kemençe, a stringed middle-eastern instrument held in
subtle contrast with the sound of ice hacking circa 1984 taken from a BBC SFX library sample to
sound like a location recording from an alchemist’s lab, or passages of When’s proto-BM classic
‘The Black Death’, follows with an eerie vent of sounds ranging from a percussive improv to the
sound of filing metal, and a pressure washer that recall the lurching rhythm and gauntlet grasp of
textures also found in the remarkable debut by Cairo’s 1127. It all points to a penetrative pair of ears
and mind that sees the world differently, and should inspire listeners to pay closer attention to the
world around themselves.

PAN inaugurate Entopia, their highly promising, soundtrack-focussed sister label, with the
tremulous beauty and dreamy ambient detachment of Tujiko Noriko’s ‘Kuro (OST)’
Realised alongside musicians Sam Britton and Will Worsely, experimental J-popstar and composer
Tujio Noriko conceived the ‘Kuro’ soundtrack for the eponymous 2017 film which she wrote and
directed with Joji Koyama, and in which she also plays the lead role. The film follows the tale
of Romi, a Japanese woman living in the suburbs of Paris with her paraplegic lover Milou. Told
through personal anecdotes and myths, the story soon turns ominous, reflected as the narrated
story and the visual story diverge to reveal an ambiguous space which is subtly coloured
and accentuated by the soundtrack’s suggestive daubs of ambient electronics and burnished
instrumental tones.
The music was composed during the editing of the film, mostly by Tujiko, but with integral
assistance from both Sam Britton and Will Worsely, and her co-director Joji Koyama. Perhaps
glibly known as “the Japanese Björk” for her spellbinding, etheric touch, Tujiko brings a wealth of
experience to helm in the soundtrack, steering fathoms wide of her pop-related output to work
with filigree, layered electronics, organs that are occasionally and imperceptibly meshed with
diegetic, rustling sounds from the film. The resulting atmosphere is intoxicatingly gentle yet
elusive, evoking themes of claustrophobia and haunting beauty that also lie behind the imagery.
‘Kuro (OST)’ is an ideal first release for Entopia, the soundtrack-focussed offshoot of PAN. Taking
its meaning in context of Ekistics - the idea of world-building - and in respect of creative
communities both visual and music-oriented, Entopia proposes a promising new space - neither
utopian nor dystopic - where the boundaries between installation works, theatre, dance and
fashion will fall, just as they have with PAN the parent label.

Beacon Sound and Jacktone Records are pleased to announce a limited edition joint vinyl release by Hugo RA Paris titled Threaded Habitat. The new LP from Paris follows two of Jacktone’s most popular releases: Mystique Youth (2015) and Horizons Beneath The Surface (2016), which appeared under his alias, Lavender.

The transition to the Hugo RA Paris moniker with this album marks a more personal shift in approach. Threaded Habitat combines ambient textures and techno rhythms to reflect tension between humanity and nature—particularly the cyclical nature of collapse and renewal. It also marks Jacktone's first collaborative release with the record store and label Beacon Sound, which has put out works from veteran experimental musicians like Terry Riley and Colleen. Beacon Sound is an important node in Portland, where Paris also lives and developed the flagship modular product for leading Eurorack manufacturer 4MS: the SWN.

The album's closing track was entirely composed on a SWN prototype and recorded in one take. In fact, much of his work is done in layers of single takes with minimal processing to preserve its raw emotion and embrace minor imperfections. As an MIT-trained engineer and physicist, working with hardware—from modulars to guitar pedals and tape loops—is essential to his process of not only making but exploring sound.

Threaded Habitat captures moments of claustrophobia and bliss in seven tracks and three accompanying videos directed by New Zealand artist Sam Hamilton. Visual art plays a central role in many of Paris’s projects, which include intricate audio-visual performances and scores for full-length films like The Modern Jungle (La Selva Negra) and its forthcoming follow-up.

The LP will be available to pre-order on July 1st with a limited, exclusive content sample pack. The handmade vinyl package features photography by Sam Hamilton and will be released July 19 through Jacktone and Beacon Sound’s webshops, with worldwide sales beginning August 2nd. A remix release will arrive later in the Fall.

Ross Alexander first came to our attention with Memorias Vol.1 - Bugandan Sacred Places, released back in 2017 on Sucata Tapes, it featured a mind altering mix of recorded sounds from a series of visited sites considered sacred within the Bugandan kingdom and session recordings with Ugandan musicians Albert Sempeke and the Nilotika Collective layered with his own original composition using the Yamaha DX7 and programmed FM synthesis. The result being an unique reconfiguration of new age vocabulary with East African traditional sensibilities. The tape quickly sold out and the new Volume of Memorias presented here arrives now on the mother label Discrepant, on Vinyl with an expanded sound palette appropriate to the format.

Memorias Vol.2 - High Atlas To The Sahara Desert is the logical progression of Volume 1. - based on a series of field recordings Alexander made during a trip through the High Atlas Mountains and into the Sahara Desert in 2018. The aim of the trip was to visit a gathering of nomadic musicians at an oasis close to the Algerian border. Like Memorias Vol1. the recordings made on the trip were then later processed, layered and arranged with original compositions. Where Vol1. had clear nods to New Age music this volume explores the more ambient side of 80’s Industrial sound.

Aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness and our planet, nimiia vibié sounds
the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and
microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling
messages from entities that usually cannot speak.
However, it is also an alien of our creation. Drawing on nimiia cétiï, Jenna Sutela’s project on
machine learning and interspecies communication, the record manifests a more-than-human
language. This language is based on the computer’s interpretation of a Martian tongue from the
late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela, as
well as the movement of Bacillus subtilis, an extreme loving bacterium that, according to recent
spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The bacterium is also present in nattō, or
fermented soybeans, a probiotic food considered as a secret to long life. Beyond Bacterial-Martian
culture, or Martian gut bacteria, the project attempts to express the nonhuman condition of
computers that work as our interlocutors and infrastructure.
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living materials. Her audiovisual pieces,
sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material
moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and art
contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo,
and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology
(CAST) in 2019-20. The project originates in n-dimensions, Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-
residence program at Somerset House Studios. Machine learning in collaboration with Memo
Akten and Damien Henry. Miako Klein in the contrabass recorder and Shin-Joo Morgantini in the
flute, with sound production by Ville Haimala.

’Shock Industrialization’ pits modern masters of industrial noise, Japan’s Linekraft and key Hospital
Productions disorderly Alberich, in a killer, pummelling split session.
With blatant disregard for your aural health, the pairing pull no punches in four torrents of
acrid filth seemingly wretched up from the belly of the beast. For those concerned, ’Shock
Industrialisation’ highlights the contrast between American and Japanese noise conventions thru a
prism reflecting on Cambodian civil war and it’s arguable predecessor of the Korean war.
Linekraft’s side speaks to a sense of psychotomimetic chaos with the howling bitterness and
astringent textures of ‘Bunch Of The Serve The Enemy’, while ‘History Of My Betrayal Act’ opens
with intelligible vocals that become mired in waves of attrition, joined by cranked-up sirens and
consumed by tarry bass distortion.
Alberich’s side is arguably more linear, sputtering and railroaded like Kareem’s most brutalist
clatter, but also distended with blown-out noxious clouds ofdistortion in ‘Tube-Ni mine Shaft’,
before offerign a sort of vocal response to Linekraft’s call in ‘Mountains Of Soul’, burying his
signature, hellish voice in clambering, white hot noise.

Exercises in Estrangement is Marcus Fjellström's first album, initially released a decade and a half ago. Listening back to it now only re-confirms the unique mind of the Swedish composer, who sadly died in September 2017, only 37 years old.

Marcus was an avant-garde composer and audiovisual artist exploring the edges of classical music. The word "classical" here means nothing in the usual sense, as he would bend the rules to his liking - and hence create a completely own sound that is hard to define. A student of the conservatory in Piteå, Sweden, Marcus´ path was unlike most composers with similar backgrounds. His love for the bizarre and macabre would send him on a descent into the darkest corners of musical experimentation. A trajectory that resulted in some of the most peculiar and fascinating sound documents created in the last two decades.

For his debut album, Marcus made a record that not only lives up to its name, but really is a profoundly mind expanding listen that might sound even more intruiging today than back in 2005. With titles such as Planchette, Kandinsky Kammer or Anstice reflections on everything from spirituality, resurrection and abstract art is being undertaken, all while adding a big dose of the absurd. As Tiny Mix Tapes wrote back in 2005: ”Marcus Fjellström's Exercises in Estrangement is an unsettling, visionary work of modern composition that falls soundly within the idiom of contemporary electronic music yet evokes the darker aspects of the work of many of the more brooding mid- to late-twentieth century European classical composers.”

Marcus worked with the Swedish Royal Ballet, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Sinfonietta Cracovia as well as numerous other orchestras, ensembles and soloists, artists and filmmakers. He spent the last half year of his life scoring the AMC series The Terror. In his works, Marcus often aimed to combine opposites so that they don’t contradict each other, but rather fuse into a natural, third element - “High” and “low” culture, the naïve and the sophisticated, good and bad taste. These are all elements that comfortably blend together in his works. Musical influences range from electronic acts such as Aphex Twin and Autechre to 20th century composers such as György Ligeti and John Cage. Further influences include impressionist composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy as well as film music composers Bernard Herrmann, Angelo Badalamenti and Zdeněk Liška.

Vinyl edition ltd. to 300 copies, incl. 8-page 12" booklet with drawings by Marcus Fjellström.

Joachim Nordwall digests and mutates dub in unique industrial style on The iDEAList’s almighty
follow-up to a tape and 7” in this killer mode, bringing guest vocalists, JA’s Nazamba and polymath
John Duncan, for a deeply crooked ride worthy of rinse & repeat
Picking up where his raw ‘Early Tactical Experiments In Techno & Dub’ left off in spring 2019, the
rugged styles of ‘Say Yes to No’ poses only slightly less risk of contracting salmonella with a more
stewed and treated suite taking in proper songs starring Nazamba and John Duncan amid all
manner of virulent, wayward electro-dub variation.
As with his superb tape for Industrial Coast, that wicked 7” with Genesis P-Orridge, and even
his recent albums as Joachim Nordwall - ‘Conventional Wisdom’ with John Duncan, and the
collaborative CD ‘Communication Is Key’ - The iDEALIST naturally highlights fundamental links
between dub and noise - the core principles of manipulating sound in space - with a critical blend
of tactile playfulness and rigorous pressure.
The two vocal cuts are outstanding in their own rights; ‘Bigga Boss’ features Kingston-based poet
and playwright Nazamba utterly possessing the opening shot with his baritone growl, rooting the
LP at one pole, while John Duncan’s equally compelling appearance on a similar riddim in ’Tough
Doubt’ comes to epitomise the project’s direct approach toward alloying and allying styles with
alchemical suss comparable to The Bug, Ossia or Andreas Tilliander.
Vocals also spill out into the LP’s other tracks, but here they’re more textural and elusive,
scudding thru ‘Everyone Fucking Relax’ in a way recalling DJ Scud’s thudding remix of Bong-Ra,
or masticated into intelligibility on the amorphous dub-noise lurch of ‘Inner Space Dub (Insane
Version)’ and the LP’s cataclysmic closer ‘Say Yes To Dub’, which are all held tight in contrast with
the more defined techno and electro-dub structures of the LP’s club-ready highlights, ‘The Ecstasy’
and ’Shit Skull/Golden Mind.’
It’s a hugely enjoyable album - one that leaves bits in your teef and gets up in your head like a
healthy dab of shatter.

Fromtheoldtothenew was originally released in 1996 and is the second full length on Peacefrog from Steve
'Stasis' Pickton.
Growing up as a teenager in East London, break-dancing and writing graffiti with B12's Mike Golding, Steve
Pickton's musical education moved along a familiar path, from hip-hop to Electro and onto Techno. Schooling
himself in music theory and purchasing a sampler Pickton set about making his own music.
Releasing on a whose who of seminal UK electronic labels including A.R.T., Likemind, Otherworld and B12 under
various pseudinums Pickton's UK take on lush Detroit melodies fused techno, funk, hip-hop, dub, blues and jazz
into a dense concoction all of his own making.
Fromtheoldtothenew saw Pickton slip off his earlier techno shackles and head for uncharted electrconic waters.
The echo chamber dramatics of Gun and wayward lurch of Ale House Blues were a long way from Detroit, while
few tracks have demonstrated the sheer breadth of electronica more dramatically than Utopia Planetia. All in all it's
more jazz, less tech without losing the soul

Full spectrum double 12' from Garies - eight tracks running from bittersweet beatdown-ish bits to slow-burn electro to second wave-inspired techno, injected with funk, melody and an MPC-mindset. Garies = New Jackson (All City, Hivern) + Lumigraph (MPR, Opal Tapes). Full colour cover. Mastered by Thomas P Heckmann. Cut at Schnittstelle. Pressed at MPO. Artwork by Mel Keane

Part One Of A Three Volume Compilation Project By Tunisian Collective Arabstazy, Establishing A Picture Of The Contemporary Electronic Music Scene In The Arab World. This Musical Journey Stands For The Diversity Of This Scene, And Deconstructs The Occidental Perceptions That Sees The Arab World As A Culturally United And Homogeneous Entity. It Is A Manifesto For The Burgeoning Wave Of Post-revolution Futurism.
Arabstazy Is A Multidisciplinary Artistic Platform With Bases In Tunis, Paris And Berlin. It Is Dedicated To The Research Of The Connection Between Heritage, Identity, Culture And Digital Arts. Founded As A Collective By Tunisian Electronic Musician Mettani, It Has Since Then Relentlessly Questioned The Meaning And Relevance Of The Supposed Arabic Unity. Following The Arab Spring Events That Brought A Major Change To The Maghrebi Cultural And Artistic Ecosystem, The Collective Explores How The Arab World Is Perceived And Perceives Itself, And Lays The Foundations Of What Could Be Part Of A New Wave Of North African And Middle Eastern Futurism.

Arabstazy's Vision Is To Create An Autonomous And Singular Form Of Mindset, That Is Aware Of Its Representations. An Identity Quest Immersing Its Roots Into The Future, While Highlighting And Transmuting Its Traditions. This Mindset Is To Evolve Into A New Artistic Language, That Would Have Been Released From The Colonialist And Orientalist Perspectives. A Process That Will Eventually Focus On The Interactions And Connections Rather Than Shape Or Style. With This Objective In Mind, The Idea Of A Musical Compilation Emerged. It Would Be The Assessment Of How Diverse, Shattered And Intricate The Arab World Actually Is. Paradoxically, It Would Be The Cement Of An Independent Arabic Underground Electronic Scene. A Scene That Doesn't Need Common Aesthetics Nor Similar Codes To Build A Sense Of Belonging, Because That Belonging Eventually Relies On The Similarities Found In The Constant Struggle From Which The Creative Process Arise. In The Frame Of Political, Social And Religious Dictatorships, This Is A Creative Process That Is Born Under Frustration.

Following This Artistic Direction, The Collective Gathered Tracks From Various Artists That Connected In Their Own Way To The Concept Of Frustration Constrained Creation. With No Imposed Genre And The Strong Will To Build A Mosaic Heterogeneous Project, The Compilation Eventually Featured Tracks Ranging From Indie To Idm To Club Music To Abstract Noise. This Is Quite An Unsettling Tracklisting For Those Who Were Expecting The Usual Oriental Electronic Bland Cliche´. This Process Eventually Echoed With The Work Of Parisian Label Infine´. Infine´ Defines Itself As A Space Of Diversity, Away From Any Kind Of Genre Or Ethnic Compartmentalization. Since A Dozen Years, It Has Developed These Values Through Several Projects, Including The Compilation Series « Explorer ». Through This Compilation, They Discovered One Of Their Latest Revelations, Deena Abdelwahed. She Herself Led To The Encounter With The Arabstazy Collective, And The Label Found Much Sense In Supporting The Under Frustration Project, In Professional, Political And Spiritual Ways.The First Volume Pays Special Attention To Tunisia And Egypt, With A Touch Of Paris & Berlin. Alexandrian Band the Triangle, Releasing Their Very First Track, Dramatically Opens The First Side With A Song Evoking War Refugees That Have No Choice But To Abandon Their Homes And Risk Their Lives On Makeshift Boats. ismael, Member Of The Kairo Is Koming Collective, Comes Right After With A Cranky, Cracked Batch Of Grimly Forward Club Music. He Is Immediately Followed By shinigami San, Founder Of The Tunisian Collective World Full Of Bass, With A Metaphorical Experimentation Depicting How A Fragile Melody Can Arise Despite Of Being Crushed By A Brutal Rhythm. Then Comes Mettani, Founder Of The Arabstazy Collective, Showcasing Esoteric And Syncretic Aesthetics, Blending Sacred Church Choirs And Muslim Awakening Call Into Industrial Grooves. Paris-based Artist terra Aziz Closes This First Side With An Very Introspective And Esoteric Track Evoking Iranian Leper Kids. Second Side Starts With muudra, A Moniker For An Artist Who Keeps Himself Anonymous And Connects To Kurdish Culture. His Track's Hypnotic, Mantra-like Beats, Combined With Cinematic Soundscapes, Reflects On The Hemshin Tribes Vibes. Then Comes deena Abdelwahed, With A Very Early Work She Composed While She Was Touring With The Arabstazy Collective. tropikal Camel, Berlin-based Composer And Mc Born And Raised In Jerusalem, Then Seizes The Scene With An Apocalyptic Track Picturing A Hopeless Prophet Whose Heart Is Made Of Smoke. Relief Comes With Beirut-based Egyptian Artist aya Metwalli, Who Offers A Touching Song About Love And Mourning. This First Volume Ends With A Poetic And Abstract Soundwork By Tunisian Artist mash, Releasing Her Very First Piece, Closing The Record Like It Opened. The Spectrum Of The Questions That This Peculiar Theme Arise Is Broad: Personal, Political, Sexual, Religious, Familial, Societal... From Ways To Free Ourselves From This Frustration, To Ways To Accept It As It Is. We Have To Deal With A Lot Of Mutual Misunderstandings, Binary Shortcuts And Manichaean Attitudes That Have Long Proven Unsuccessful To Overcome These Situations.Amongst All Who Experience Frustration, Some Will Cope Through Artistic Expression. We Decided To Relate To This Frustration As A Great Source Of Inspiration. Arabstazy Chose To Give All The Benefits Of This Project To The Lebanese Ngo Basmeh & Zeitooneh, And Most Specifically To Their Yearly Art Event - "seen" - Which Highlights Unseen Artists And Breaks Stereotypes About Refugees.

PAREDO presents new and exclusive works by three female japanese music producers: KOPY, TENTENKO and MIKI YUI who are based in Osaka, Tokyo and Düsseldorf respectively and a radical reinterpretation using elements of the featured works by Lena Willikens, the PAREDO MEGA MIX. All four contributions showcase their highly individual approaches to contemporary electronic dance music. Paredo is directly informed by multi-directional encounters of four musicians and their close observations of musical production and reception in practice.

In 2017 Lena Willikens and TAL founder Stefan Schneider have both, though independently from one another, been invited to Japan under the auspices of the Goethe Institut. While Schneider researched electronic noise music cultures in Osaka, LENA WILLIKENS and her artist partner SARAH SZCZESNY developed aspects of audio mix and filmed footage for their collaborational art project PHANTOM KINO BALLETT while in residency at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto.

"While in Kyoto, we often went to Osaka or Tokyo to explore the diversity of the music subcultures there. It was fascinating to witness how Japanese underground cultures adopt influences from abroad and turn them into something original and very much their own. We also saw live performances by KOPY and TENTENKO whom we quickly befriended."

KOPY is a consistant part of the vital electronic music scene from Osaka. Besides a few performances at Düsseldorfs famous SALON DES AMATEURS, she has also been invited by LENA WILLIKENS to her showcase at the MEAKUSMA FESTIVAL in 2018.

TENTENKO begun to enter into the japanese music scene with a steady flow of experimental cdr productions as well as collaborations with members of the legendary japanese noise band Hijokaidan.

MIKI YUI originally from Tokyo has lived in Düsseldorf for more than two decades now. Besides albums of her solo work for LINE (US), or more recently, for Cusp Editions (UK) she also collaborates with Carl Stone in the duo REALISTIC MONK (on the Meakusma label) and was a member of Klaus Dingers last band JAPANDORF (Grönland Records).

LENA WILLIKENS who has a background in fine art, first honed her unique approach during a long residency at Düsseldorf’s Salon des Amateurs. Outside of the club, the Cómeme label was home to her first EP, 2015's Phantom Delia. In 2017 she has released a remix of Kenyan singer OGOYA NENGO for the ON MANDE EP, TAL02.

"Continental" is the new full length solo record by Milan-based multi-instrumentalist Nicola Ratti, following recent releases on Where to Now? and Room40. Conceived of by Ratti as a "series of big rooms or places to get lost in, full of small details and characterized each by a single flavor or perfume" it is a surprising and vibrant collection of music. Working with a palette of spare, expertly deployed percussive synthesis techniques, Ratti's work here is both labyrinthine and concise. These eight tracks are able to evoke spaces real and imagined with startling efficiency and clarity. Sprawling old world libraries, cliff caves inhabited by dripping water and rock doves, an automaton nearly slipping its axis but recovering just in time and finding a new sense of purpose in the process.

Dinosaur L is an alias donned by Arthur Russell, a man whose contribution to dance music from the late seventies and through the eighties was formidable but only quietly acknowledged. His innovative and left field dance records were way ahead of what people were used to hearing at the time. He was a cellist who studied classical and Indian music. As well as his great strides in dance music he was also involved in the New York downtown avant-garde music scene and produced some albums in a more avant-garde / experimental vein as well as trying his own unique approach to pop. He scored several hits on the underground New York dance scene at clubs like The Paradise Garage (Larry Levan was a huge supporter). His biggest tunes, 'Go Bang!' and 'Is It All Over My Face' were worldwide club hits and are still played today as classics. His records have influenced the scene from his first dance record in 1979 to the present day and his work has been much sampled. Sadly Arthur
died in 1992, but his music lives on and his influence is still felt on the dance music scene, his tunes still sound great and are still moving many dancers around the world, so his spirit lives on. Sleeping Bag Records and Traffic Entertainment Group is proud to present Dinosaur L's '24-24 Music' for the first time ever on double LP. Includes the original album tracklisting plus rare 12'remixes and edits.

While being best known for creating deeply immersive live psychoacoustic experiences, the London based Pataphysical have allowed us to use 'Periphera', the fruits of their debut studio work, as the label's eighth musical oblation. It would have been an exercise in futility to try and replicate the immediacy of their live performances on this record, but we feel that across these 8 disparate tracks inner worlds have been rendered real. Through the careful positioning of field recordings and the creation of soundscapes somewhat reminiscent of heyday Mille Plateau the group have held fast to a desire to craft involved and captivating synthesis.

23 minute drone piece. Another stunning extraction from the REX ILLUSIVII archive.
Previously Unreleased. 1 sided with embossed insert. Very limited. Essential.

-
1
Breach One
9' 36''
2
Interlude One
3' 26''
3
Breach Two
7' 05''
4
Breach Three
9' 32''
5
Interlude Two
2' 29''
6
Breach Four
7' 34''
Breach dives into chaotic systems and reflects on the recent events of protests and riots in the world, exploring the build up and release of tension and energy in a new form of pitch black metal electronics and polyrhythmic structures.

Zeno van den Broek is a Dutch-born, Copenhagen-based composer and artist. Van den Broek works in a multi-sensory way to research and express physical, social and acoustic notions. He utilises audiovisual means to create site and concept specific works. This trans-disciplinary method has a strong conceptual foundation, originating from a background in architecture, which enables Zeno to comprehend and reveal the richness and complexity of spatial, visceral and physical perception. He works with a characteristic artistic language based on minimalist and fundamental elements such as sine waves, lines, noise and grids.

Released on the occasion of Thomas Baldischwyler's booth in the collaboration section at ART COLOGNE 2019.Through a Soundcloud mix by London Crew Front Left Life, Baldischwyler was pointed to the mysterious Laton 12" VI AUX by the Austrian project FON (Formation ohne Namen) which was released in 1997. The project consisted of Johann Groiss und Manfred Söllner, but it was mainly Söllner who was responsible for the production. Baldischwyler got in contact with Söllner in 2018 when he stayed in Vienna and asked him if he could release some of his recent productions, for the second time - after 20 years - on vinyl. While reading a documentation about the SS division "Feldherrenhalle" burning some of the most important works of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (Especially "Schubert at the piano" from 1899) on the last day (May 8th, 1945) of the second world war in the Austrian manor house Immendorf, with this idea, Baldischwyler started to make the artwork and Söllner selected the tracks which are now in the "hidden" grooves beside the recording of a 1969 workshop for fire safety in California, USA.

Repress available in early May.

Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist ASUNA and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto and Kanazawa. ASUNA’s meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek’s pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs.

"Watching the Japanese sound artist ASUNA playing the organ, some people might be surprised. ASUNA is no virtuoso flying over the keyboard in a rage. Instead, with the calm gestures of an office worker, he cuts strips of adhesive tape to the correct length before sticking them onto the keys of his instrument. In this way, large clusters of keys are held down, creating a dense and sustained range of frequencies, while the sound artist continually prepares further sets of keys or removes tape again. I have rarely seen a more convincing performance concept, with such a power to fascinate.

I first met ASUNA when we both gave a concert at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, his home city. He performed the organ drones as described above and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him. Six years and five meetings later, we completed Signals Bulletin. The album includes both joint improvisations and compositions, recorded in Berlin, Kanazawa and Kyoto.

Whether using prepared organ, Casio keyboards or mechanical plastic toys, ASUNA creates rich textures of sound that barely change over long stretches of time. It is a music without breaks. For a while, I was unsure how my loops made using modular synthesizers and live sampling fitted here – until I realized the role I had to take in this duet: I would provide the rhythmically pulsating foundation over which his dense continuums could unfold.

The result is harmonically drifting superclusters that put us into a meditation-like state. It can perhaps be compared to Automatic Writing – a mode of creative expression floating somewhere between concentration and distraction. Both the structure of our pieces and our approach to our instruments allow a similar “absence”: we let the machines play and repeat themselves – while we, in a mild form of trance, adopt the role of observers, intervening only occasionally.

It is no coincidence that ASUNA owns a collection of Doodle Art – drawings jotted down during conversations or while talking on the phone. It is said that works made like this point to the unconscious and reveal pet motifs – because a doodler always inadvertently returns to his or her favourite themes. The artwork for Signals Bulletin features pictures from the collection, in this case sheets of paper from the pads provided in stationery shops to test out pens. The special quality of such doodles is that the jumble of drawings is the work of a collective whose individual members do not know each other. Layer by layer is added, by someone different each time – until it becomes a dense cluster of lines and symbols ..."

Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2018

n 2014, the Resono project was set up to study a number of highly reverberant locations around Scotland, with the aim of exploring and experimenting with the sonic qualities and possibilities offered by each.

Research for the project took place in spaces including a water reservoir, giant sea caves, oil storage facilities, an abandoned munitions factory, an early 19th century ice house and a cathedral. Among them was a 200 feet tall disused concrete silo, built in 1964 by the British Sugar Corporation to store sugar beet, but abandoned just eight years later. With the exception of a brief revival in the early 2000s for grain storage, the structure has remained empty.

The extreme acoustics exhibited by Cupar Grain Silo are an accidental artefact of it's ambitious industrial architecture, with a reverberation time approximating 36.5 seconds. Using impulse responses made within the structure, bespoke music was produced, sympathetic to these acoustics. These compositions were then reamplified back into the space in front of a live audience on Saturday 21 May 2016.

Resono was supported by New New Media Scotland's Alt-w Fund with investment from Creative Scotland.

onylight is Antonio Cavadini, who lives and works in Milano, Italy. He designs, builds and sells his own instruments under the LEP moniker (Laboratorio Elettronico Popolare) He engages in workshops, expositions, installations and performances. His music has a playful, 8-bit sensibility coupled with a darker electronic undercurrent. C40 Cassette Tape / 6 track EP.

As part of the 2016 festival Night of the Experimental Film, French duo Opéra Mort (= Èlg + Fusiller) performed a live soundtrack for two films that centre on the paradoxical symbiosis of love and death: ‘The Potted Psalm’ by Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, and ‘Dream Work’ by Peter Tscherkassky. Both films convey love and death as both direct opposites and kindred concepts, turning to cryptic surrealism, poetic hallucinations and flickering alternations between flesh and ecstatic abstraction. Opéra Mort’s sonic accompaniment is a squirming contradiction, fraught with micro-harmonic friction and bleeps of electronic alarm. Is the soundscape melding into a solitary whole or blowing itself apart?

With ‘Film Works’, the duo have adapted their soundtrack into a standalone recorded work. Synthesisers flicker like computers trapped inside calculative loops. Flailing organs knot into tendrils of microphone feedback. Occasionally it’s possible to identify traces of body and voice within the wretched lattice – resting-state heartbeats, regulatory beeps of life support – which are only ever faintly present within Opéra Mort’s transcendent elsewhere, like echoes humming through the membrane between the corporeal world and the heights of ecstasy. Just like the films that inspired it, ‘Film Works’ enacts the strange disputation that defines the climactic extremes of human experience: to love and death, the body is both the fundamental vessel and the husk that is left behind.

According to the theories of Greek/Roman scientist Claudius Galenus (131–216 AD), human temperament has a direct and reactionary link to the world around us. A phlegmatic personality is connected to water and the moist chill of winter; the aridity of summer is associated with fire and human irascibility.

For the B.A.A.D.M. debut of Mattias Gustafsson (aka Altar Of Flies, Ornaments, Cryme), we presented him with this theory of human/world symbiosis and asked him to explore its numerous implications: the transience of environment and being, the regenerative intimacy between life and the earth, the prospect of death and decay as integral components of rebirth.

'Nattmusik' is Gustafsson’s first record under his own name, removing the mediation of the artistic alias to fully embrace the symbiosis between body and environment. Keyboards splutter through bad wiring and wither into despondency, with notes engulfed by the sounds of earthly stir (tectonic rumbles of low frequency, muffled winds of sine wave). Symphonies of piano and electronics start to bloom and then flicker into states of death as the temperature suddenly drops. Body and telluric elements respire into eachother, as the contours of Galenus’ theory ripple with crumbling field recordings and spurts of melodic dejection. 'Nattmusik' depicts a world in which emotional decay feeds the flourish of nature – an earth thriving upon inevitable human decline.

We announce the joyous return of the spacecraft known as IQ+1 to Planet Earth.

After more than six years, which its members spent on experiments, improvisational side-missions, solo excursions, and hunting for material, we can finally welcome a third mission, following on from the highly acclaimed Tvárí v tvár (Face to Face, 2011) and IQ+1 (Polí 5, 2013).

The current line up – George Bagdasarov, Veronika Hladká (PIO), Jaroslav Tarnovski (Gurun Gurun, Wabi Experience, Jipangu), Petr Vrba (Rouilleux, Poisonous Frequencies, PIO), Michal Zboril (PIO, B4), and Katerina Bilejová – adheres to the philosophy of free improvisation. There is no captain to determine its momentary course, nor genre restrictions, nor sonic or musicianly hierarchy. The strategies remain unchanged, as does the instrumental variety, and the authentic excitement of live performance.

Mappa editions presents IQ+1’s third album, titled Conversaphone Plus, as the result of several séances recorded at the end of 2017. Every submersion in its depths is an unrepeatable experience. The organic sonic material is constantly contracting and expanding, adapting itself to the listener’s context, escaping beyond the horizon, creating mimicries, and enticing us to bubbling, popping, and jingling polyrhythms to then release its protective toxins. All six pieces boil on the narrow edge of chaotic decomposition and celestial order in which every sonic detail has its precisely determined position. Field recordings permeate the instruments on an equal footing, making it difficult to identify the sound, instrument, or player, so that each time the record is turned over, a new adventure begins. Federsel (B4, Handa Gote, Gurun Gurun) took care of the connective tissue between the pieces and the balanced post-production architecture.

Avoiding irritating instrumental exhibitionism, and egocentric deafness, Conversaphone Plus is nothing less than an uncompromising electro-acoustic testimony to the vitality of the Czech improvising scene. And it is nothing more than an attempt to connect sonic geology with astral listening.

Open the window a little – a messenger from the spacecraft known as IQ+1 is descending through the opening.

Penultimate, 5th Stage of The Caretaker's 'Everywhere At The End of Time' series charting severe levels of musical/mental deterioration and sensory detachment through four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces.
As we near the end, 'Stage 5' sees our protagonist enter a near-permanent state of confusion and horror. Mirroring the endemic deterioration of dementia's latter phases, were pulled through the most extreme entanglements in the series so far; repetition and ruptures, barely maintaining a connection to waking life and a sense of self.In the most classic sense, we become witness to an abandonment and dissolution of ego,
as the mulch of bygone '78s totally loses itself in a way that connotes misfiring synapses failing to properly relay information at advanced levels of the disease.
It feels as though our skull is being scraped out, uncovering hellish layers of accreted sensation and mulched imagery, occasionally recognising calmer patterns, only for them
to fray into the ether before it's possible to parse and dwell on them.
At this point it's also perhaps worth pointing out the uncannily profound synchronicity between the timelines of 'Everywhere At The End of Time' and Brexit, which both started in 2016 and are due to wrap up in spring 2019. It should be no stretch of the imagination to read into their parallel progression from nostalgia and historic/collective amnesia, to progressive dementia and complete obliteration of (the) sense(s).

It's time for LET Recordings founder JP Enfant to make a mark on his own label again, and he does so across four fantastic tracks of absorbing and moving techno. As a resident at De School Amsterdam he is a pivotal part of the scene and this is his fourth EP on the label since its inception in 2015. His sound is rooted in techno but always comes detailed with elements of breakbeat, ambient, house and dub. This is another EP of innovative music for the body and mind in equal measure.

Decha is Viktoria Wehrmeister, and Viktoria Wehrmeister is Decha. Viktoria is by now known in some circles as the frontman of the duo Toresch (alongside Tolouse Low Trax & Jan Wagner). Under the name Toresch They have released 2 critically acclaimed records on Vladimir Ivkovic's label Offen which brought forward the fusion between TLT's abstract raw, industrial yet sexy beats and Viktoria's dadaist vocals. In Her debut solo LP under the alias of Decha, Viktoria presents 9 songs, more personal, and more abstract (yet always playful) approach to her art then heard on the Toresch records. Hielo Boca is a record that is both enchanting in its minimalism and yet still manages to pour out Viktoria's exploding creativity, each song in its own way.