Hip-Hop News

Before there was Rimarimba, Suffolk-born, Felixstowe-based musician and home recording enthusiast Robert Cox assembled a cast of friends, some musicians and some not so much, for an experiment in group exploration and ecstatic expression under the name The Same. Sonically and gravitationally defined by Cox's collaboration with guitarist Andy Thomas (a partnership which formed in 1976 to record as General Motors), Sync or Swim, The Same's one and only album, also featured keyboards by Florence Atkinson and Paul Ridout, and vocals by Robert's sister Rebecca. Originally released in small cassette and vinyl quantities on Unlikely Records, Cox's imprint and a meeting point for many other musicians found at the fringe, the back cover of the original album jacket is as much a map of the personnel, place, and process fundamental to Sync or Swim as it is a table of contents for DIY music-making at the beginning of the 80s: "Recorded in peaceful Wiltshire between September 18th and October 6th 1981 (using a miscellany of home made devices) onto a Teac A-3300SX via a Teac A-3440. No noise reduction systems were used." Cox's own definition of British psychedelia is "folk music meeting technology and going bonkers." It's by this definition that Sync or Swim takes unexpected forms, from tape-speed tomfoolery, concrète sound collage and analog delayed marimbas, to the colorful spectrum of interwoven guitar play between Cox and Thomas reminiscent of Ghanaian Highlife but more accurately indebted to Jerry Garcia. On the album's culminating final track, "E Scapes," all of these elements are brought together in twenty-minute journey through layers of chiming guitar loops and spritely solos, keyed percussion, and tape experiments, all played as though the sun were rising over the standing stones of Salisbury Plain. Cox would later go to similarly greath lengths with certain solo sound endeavors, but the confluence of musicians on "E Scapes" pushes the piece to exceptional, unforgettable heights. Transferred and remastered from the original tapes, The Same's Sync or Swim arrives on LP July 16th, 2021 on Freedom To Spend, just in time for the album's 40th anniversary.

Nach drei hochgelobten Alben “Oracle” (2017), “Dance Of The Demons” (2018) und “Worshippers” (2020) gibt es tolle Remixes einiger Top-Produzenten:
Ein uplifting Disco House Groover vom legendären Mousse T., den Louie Vega bereits 3 x bei seiner Worldwide Radio Show gespielt hat. Dann ein Tribal Afro House Re-work der New Yorker Legenden Hector Romero & Ayala, ferner Avantgarde Broken Beats und eine gediegene slowmotion Version von “Land Of The Arum Flowers” von Italiens Khalab, der mit Fresetyle, Trap und jazzy beats bereits enormes Aufsehen erregt hat, und ein episches Downbeat Monster vom Wiener Beatbastler URBS, und ein chilliger Dub Remix von München’s Beat-Wunderkind L One. Eine Allzweck-12”, die ein wunderbar breites musikalisches Spektrum bietet.

Discos Transgénero re-issue the Marnie Weber classic first solo LP, “Songs Hurt Me” originally from 1989. This seminal record was an important part of the Los Angeles post-punk performative art rock scene. Brooding synthesizers, heavy bass, strange melodies, and poetic lyrics lead you through an industrial journey. These songs were born from Weber’s earliest performance art characters: a deer, an old woman, a manic courtesan, and a butterfly. Songs Hurt Me was originally co-produced by Phillip Drucker AKA Jackson Del Ray of Savage Republic and 17 Pygmies fame.

Marnie is a pioneer in art rock from the 80’s in Los Angeles. She emerged early in the music scene as the bass player in the Party Boys, a formative and important Los Angeles post-punk downtown art scene band. During this period, the Party Boys performed shows with The Minute Men, Savage Republic, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fourwaycross, The Blue Daisies, Perry Farrell’s first band Psi Com, Camper Van Beethoven, and many more. Bruce Licher of Independent Project Records, whom Marnie met in art school, released the first Party Boys record. After performing with the Party Boys, Marnie went on to become a noted solo performative art musician in her own right. She has released five solo records and numerous group album releases.

As a visual artist Marnie created the cover of Sonic Youth’s A Thousand Leaves album – interesting to note Marnie is the hamster girl on the cover. She also designed posters for Sonic Youth and did a co-release of her second album with Thurston Moore on his label Ecstatic Peace. Expanding from her musical roots, Marnie exhibits artwork, films, sculptures, collages, sound installations, and costumes internationally in museums and galleries. She has had two extensive survey exhibitions of her artwork ­– most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva.

Songs Hurt Me was remastered by Mark Wheaton at Catasonic Studios Los Angeles using the original tapes for an unprecedented restoration of this historic album. Discos Transgénero has thoughtfully designed and pressed the reissued LPs in Germany. This unique edition of Songs Hurt Me is a limited release of 400 copies distributed worldwide.

Ultra rare tracks that represent the sound of the postpunk Dutch band Necronomicon and their label Fetisj from the period 1981-1982. All selections have been mastered from the original released cassettes and unreleased demo-cassettes. * Features 2 Remixes.

New label on the block Raakvlak returns for its second release, this time brancing out into more local territories. Deze Hoofden Praten is a vast recollection of the idiosyncratic work of spoken-word guru Rik van Boeckel.

Next in line for Raakvlak is a recollection of the wicked work of poet, spoken-word expert and all-round expressionist Rik van Boeckel. Deze Hoofden Praten is the result of two mid- eighties tapes released on Kubus Cassettes, the same label that accommodated the work of subterranean ambient wizard Enno Velthuys. Although van Boeckel’s oeuvre contains some similar elements, the outcome here is much wilder; a musical hodgepodge of new wave pop, ambient and quirky dub. What’s more, emphasis is just as much on the Dada- bordering poetry at present as on the sonical equivalent. Think Ton Lebbink’s cousin if he would’ve been into new age instead of punk.

Van Boeckel initially made name as a famed spoken word artist, doing rounds in the Dutch pop venue circuit. One of the first ones to notice his Dada-bordering poetry was Rob Smit, musician and overseer of Kubus Cassettes, the label that already been home to the mind- stretching ambient of subterranean-chill pioneer Enno Velthuys. It did not take long for Smit to think up the musical backdrop to van Boeckel’s words, adding bright synths, tranquil guitars and the more off-side sounds that Kubus was known for.

The result? One odd hodgepodge of new wave pop, quirky ambient and new age sounds, spearheaded by van Boeckel’s surreal tales about Dame Nature, travelling and other everyday nonsense. Two cassettes came to fruition, both released on Kubus Cassettes, both in the mid-eighties, of which Raakvlak now has cherry-picked some of the finer moments.

Certainly one to turn heads and ears alike, this may serve as a (re-)introduction of a singular mind to the wider universe.

lushly layered and delicate songs from this new artist..tip!

You could think of the collection of tracks here as a library record of sorts, and each track inhabits its own universe. Tropical fits various moods and situations, and it could soundtrack any number of activities at home or on a dancefloor - whether real, imaginary, or hallucinated. Strangely enough, it sounds like it could have been constructed from obscure Italian library breaks, when instead every instrument has been played and panned, several times over, across magnetic tape.

The genesis of many of these tracks began when CV Vision moved to Berlin in 2014. His flat had a small chamber where he could fit a drum set, so he treated the walls with foam, and in true DIY style, dived headfirst into recording these tracks. It was the natural next step on an audio adventure that first began when CV Vision picked up the guitar in his teens, and a couple years later started recording with friends in his home town of Bayreuth. Fast forward ten years and here is his debut - a culmination of practising chops and learning instruments, mastering recording techniques and fine-tuning the CV Vision sound.

It’s a sound that condenses elements of acid rock, psych soul, library funk and new wave oddities into a movie soundtrack for your mind. It’s a journey from ‘60s west coast LSD-drenched excursions to ‘80s synth and post-punk mutations. Tropical is a plunge into another time, another music you can simply swim around in and explore.

Side A opens up with Tropical Tune In, which rides in on a clave and a warm wind, blowing a distinctly herbal aroma and recalling exotica dons like Les Baxter and Martin Denny. Following on with the aural equivalent of a sea breeze through your mind, Spaziergang am Meer blows away the cobwebs and conjures some nice library moments like Stringtronics or F eelings . Next, Ba_c_k(Lava) bounces out of a cold wave post-punk melting pot and crashes through the speakers like a blazed Zebedee, with some sweet eastern synths for added flavour, before the rolling bass licks of Der Böse Schamane take us into another dimension, landing somewhere between a psych rock freak out and a Black Ark dub session. Mr Maze channels the arpeggiators of synth outsiders like Mort Garson and Bruce Haack, creating a glorious interlock of robotic electronics and freakbeat vocals. The side comes to a close with the guitars of Der Strand (außer Rand und Band) letting loose like syrupy springs, and setting a languid mood like the bedroom scene in Bedazzled (1967 version). Side B kicks off with Parallel Universum, which comes through like a woozy krautrock workout, all ducking synths with big chord shifts to create an epic deranged beehive of a soundtrack. Im Land der Ameisen evokes the spirit if not the sound of White Rabbit, when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead, before waking up and wandering through the side alleys of Marrakech with the West Coast Pop Art Ensemble and the Electric Prunes, as Ritual (No. 4) blares out the speakers of passing tuk tuks. Ein Wasserfall plumbs the deep synth depths, like Raymond Scott in scuba gear, modular rack strapped to his back delivering oxygen as he swims between connector cables and seaweed forests through a watery underworld. Banana King sounds like a lost soundtrack to Donkey Kong or Mario Cart, if the cart radio was tuned into a synth

documentary hosted by James Pants, while Das Kloster am Berg takes the baton from Brenda Ray and her Naffi cohorts, all dubbed-out niceness and post punk swagger. The LP closes out with Tropical Drop Out, a dreamscape rather than a wake up call, coaxing you deeper into the trek across the desert of your mind.

And that’s Tropical in its essence: capsules from another time, snapshots of another sound, messages from another mind - all in the service of inducing the visions in your head.

written by Max Cole

Limited Edition LP.


High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.

Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

"My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born—white!"

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

— W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920)

New release by Boston-based songwriter and instrumentalist Judd Stone and vocalist Jayde Lee.

Sixteen unheard works from Mexican jazz synesthete, Germán Bringas. Bringas plays with a delicate balance between experiment & pastoral spaciousness, sounding like Coltrane scoring a Tarkovsky film. To Accompany this release, we’ve made a documentary about Germán’s life.

Tunel Hacia Tí (Tunnel Toward You) is a collection of early compositions by Germán Bringas of Portales, Mexico City. This album features songs from his lost cassette ambient jazz opus, "Caminatas" (Hikes), it’s spiritual successor, "Exposción Al Vacio" (Vacuum Exposure), and unreleased works created between '91-'00. Every instrument heard on this release was played by Bringas, and recorded in a studio in the back of his home.

Germán’s pieces are informed by his synesthetic experience. As he plays, he witnesses color coordinating with each note. His earliest experience of this cross-sensory ability came from playing his parents piano when he was young. Exploring the keys, a spectrum of color presented itself, and he began searching for colors he preferred. He discovered an enticing shade of blue, which unbeknownst to him at the time, was a jazz chord. In the following years, he attended school at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and was classically trained in piano and composition. The Conservatorio was extremely demanding, and didn’t appreciate his innate talents to play by ear. He was fed up with the indoctrinating way they taught, which coincided with a lecture he attended by Carlos Casteñeda. Inspired by the teachings, he left school behind to start a group with his friends to practice meditative exercises loosely based off Casteñeda’s Tensegrity movements to expand the body and mind. His friends and he spent years going into the woods and training as quasi-disciples of the Castañedian path. In those times, Germán developed a new approach to music, letting go of the formality of his classical training, and rediscovering his childhood experience to play from feeling. Learning trumpet, saxophone, and native Mexican instruments all to his own design, he followed his synesthetic experience to guide his compositions. He was compelled to record the discoveries he was making, so he produced a string of cassettes, only enough to pass around to friends & local collectors.

In his earliest works, you can hear the influence of his time spent in the tranquility of the woods colliding with the frenzy of the city he grew up in. Combining inspiration he obtained from ECM Records virtuosos, Mexican Rock-in-opposition, visionary jazz artists, and otherworldly sci-fi films like Blade Runner and Stalker, his songs ebb and flow between serene synths and chaotic bursts of emotive horns. In addition to these compositions, he started an experimental music club in his house in Portales called Jazzorca. At Jazzorca, which is still running to this day, he would share his pensive movements with a small group of dedicated music lovers. Germán truly created a world of his own through these works, and his sound is singular when held up to Mexican music from the same era.

Currently, Germán makes drums out of propane tanks in his backyard, he produces experimental CDs under his own label, and plays live regularly at Jazzorca. You might catch him strolling through his neighborhood in Portales at sunset, soaking in the influence of the city sounds and their associated colors he witnesses.

'Music For Theatre And Dance – Volume Two' is the second in a small series of EPs that will focus on music which was initially created for or inspired by dance and performance. Created as a dialogue with the avant-garde and highly experimental work in dance, theatre and art evolving at the time, the music was in turn at times greatly innovative.

That it was created for a dance or performance though means that such music was also often highly rhythmic and a number of pieces from this time stand out and seem greatly deserving of a new context.

Whether it's more ambient or atmospheric works or whether it's in the more rhythmic or percussive pieces, Music From Memory brings together another selection of tracks that aims to highlight this highly innovative direction in music.

*This is the 2nd edition (does not come with original fold out insert)* 1 sided LP, comes with an additional info card. Another stunning extraction from the hallowed archive of late Serbian musician, Mitar Subotic (AKA Suba). Here the 'King Of Illusions' demonstrates the art of burial and reveal over an expansive 23 minutes. A master mix. Date of recording unknown (It sounds like his mid/late 80s output, but this unconfirmed).

Norwegian duo Lost Girls, artist and writer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, release their first album after collaborating for more than ten years. Volden has been playing regularly in Hval's live band for more than a decade, and their duo project goes back to an acoustic collaborative album from 2012, using the moniker Nude on Sand. Instead of resurrecting the previous band, Hval and Volden opted for a fresh start for their 2018 EP Feeling, taking nomenclatural inspiration from the 2006 graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and comics artist Melinda Gebbie. For their first LP, Hval and Volden booked an actual studio (Ora studios, Trondheim, Norway), which they had never done before. Recording sessions took place in March 2020, even if they felt like the material wasn't really ready for recording. This left a lot to improvisation, and so Menneskekollektivet was created in-between set structures and the energy of collective exploration. Perhaps this is what makes Menneskekollektivet unique: The quality of trying something, to see if the structures fit. In a way this is a more physical version of what Hval has been exploring lyrically over the past decade in her solo work. The title is Norwegian and translates to human collective, which adds to the feeling of a recording made as part of a strange, improvised performance project. The music flickers; between club beats and improvised guitar textures; between spoken word and melodic vocal textures; between abstract and harmonic synth lines. Throughout the piece, Volden's guitar and Hval's voice come across as equals, wandering, wondering, meandering. Sharing the space. The writing process began with short, more concise forms, but then Volden brought in experiments with seasick synth loops and drum machines, and the work went off on a longer durational tangent, inspired by chance and intuition. This allowed for an unfinished, raw feel, and the song structures and words were expanded and improvised in the studio. Hval says: "There are lots of late night ideas at work, begun as half-asleep, slack vocal takes on top of something really strange Håvard has sent me. We both record before we know what we're actually doing."

Compilation of all new productions from a wealth of international talent, put together by Knekelhuis.

Label Text "This is a story of friendship, about how it grows stronger through the years. But it’s just as much about fledgling togetherness and shared art in times of crisis. The result is an introspective document of contemporary music, in spirit of Eno and Hassell. A space where we embrace our differences and speak the language of collectivity together, where we reflect, adapt and value each artist's contribution equally. To witness a multitude of cultural backgrounds that speak one like-minded language. Soothing and illuminating. And felt like...

Mastered by Amir Shoat and artwork by Keziah Phillips and Steele Bonus."

CZN stands for copper, zinc and nickel the raw path of materials used by percussionist and sculptor Joao Pais Filipe, composer and drummer Valentina Magaletti (from the great Tomaga) and producer Leon Marks. This is ritual music for the whole family.

Recorded in Porto at Oficina João Pais Filipe.
Mixed by Leon Marks
Mastered by Enrico Mercaldi
Artwork by Nicola Giunta
Sleeve by Patrick Keuthen

Poole Music is thrilled to announce its inaugural commission, the Habu, the latest full-length from Belgium’s Lieven Martens. For the better part of two decades, Martens has been expanding his Aloha-bedecked musical vision, transitioning from the basement tape environments of his Dolphins into the Future project to the rich compositional tapestries of more recent post-exotica modernist works.

The Habu represents a true culmination of these identities in one of his most ambitious works to date. The album’s three pieces cast an omniverous net that explores those fragile tendriles between imagined and real, natural and fabricated, unity and chaos; concrete sounds enabling abstract inner landscapes. With the ecstatic revelry of Marco Polo returning to his queen, Lieven brings us gems from all corners of the navigable world: tales of an impossibly guilded Portugese palace, a fertility tonic conjured from a poisionous serpent, a simulacrum of Honolulu. At a moment when the world is more geographically isolated than it has been in generations, Martens’ the Habu is a welcome odyssey, a Charybdian travelogue of the psyche. About face.

' Far away and yet so close: the first release of „dispari“, a freshly launched venture
by Hamburg based artist Phuong-Dan, is transitionally sublime. The vinyl record
composes inherently different, distinct elements into one bewildering story arc.
There is no A or B side; endlessly endless, both sides transmit transcendence. One
side brings An Afterthought – an almost eight minute long infinite, ambient musing
by Greek producer Anatolian Weapons. The short-termed opposition features
French composer Hector Zazou with US-American artist Laurie Anderson, diving for
a brief 53 seconds Into Your Dreams. Two disparate sides, which manifest
„dispari’s“ desire to follow the extensive path of music and not the narrow road of
style. It hopes to open doors for a variety of outlooks on the language of sound and
beyond. For „dispari“, any format appears interesting, and with the potential for
collaboration. Interdisciplinary projects in disparate media natures like text and
film, or simply unfathomable phenomena, are all possible future propositions.
Maybe the next signals will come as an auditory publication, an art space
performance, or just as a night in a bar, where dissimilar atoms dance for similar
desires. For now, length eats briefness and brevity defeats the epic in a dream of
strange disparity, walking on weightless soles, aglow in starry zones. '
Michael Leuffen

ww.dispari.de

This is the first ever vinyl release of the now defunct Parisian formation None, whom have left very few traces of their recordings apart from a furtive tape appearance; keeping true to their name by favoring the intensity of their live performances to conventional sound fixations. Although only one single recording remained following the band’s dissolution back in 2019, the oddly titled Khneï Khneï Thnacapata Thnacapata is a compelling demonstration in self-restraint as well as one of the very few relics left to cherish of the short lived group. Arranged as a forty minute long movement, the posthumous album swallows us through free improvisation, jazz and post-punk in a composed mayhem that echoes their equally intense live conduct where steadfast drums and far out cassette manipulation meet head-on with troubled saxophone blows, lonesome crippled guitar action and unintelligible vocals in which to lose one’s mind.

Geins't Naït returns to Offen, this time he enlists Scanner (living experimental electronics legend , Robin Rimbaud) to join him in his land of loop. These two veterans have clocked up many combined decades of experimentation between them, and this their first jointly composed material, has the feel of wisdom at work. It's a huge pleasure for Offen Music to release this special record.

The larynx or voice box is a small organ located towards the top of the neck in humans and some other animals. Constructed largely of cartilage, it houses the vocal folds that allow for the manipulation of pitch and volume, which are essential for the phonation of spoken speech. It is also involved in bringing air to the lungs when we breathe and it protects the windpipe when we swallow. However, those unfortunate to experience the potentially fatal malignant tumours of laryngeal cancer will have their larynx removed, resulting in a traumatic loss of speech; thankfully, as this rare record issued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1964 demonstrates, removal of the larynx does not necessarily spell the end of speech for such blighted individuals. Instead, through developments in artificial voice creation, patients could learn to employ modes of vocal communication again. The album was recorded by physician Harm A. Drost at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear, Nose and Throat Dept of the University Hospital, Leiden, in the Netherlands, working under the direction of Professor H. A. E. van Dishoeck. As the advances were fairly new and surprisingly varied, Drost felt a phonograph album demonstrating the techniques would be useful for those in the field. The album thus features a narrator explaining aspects of several different techniques, followed by examples of patients employing them. Buccal speech (limited to certain consonants), parabuccal speech (collecting air in a space between the upper jaw and the cheek), glosso-pharyngeal speech (a method deemed obsolete where air is forced between the tongue and the palate), esophageal voice (made by reconditioning one’s esophagus via swallowing, suction or injection), various injection techniques and devices such as the larynxophone, pipa di tichioni and “western electric” are all explored here, along with other aspects of the larynx and its absence. Speech After The Removal Of The Larynx is definitely one of the strangest albums ever given a commercial release!

This is the first ever archival collection of material from the Italian Minimalist Tiziano Popoli, featuring fourteen previously unreleased recordings for installations, theater, and radio broadcasts spanning from 1983 to 1989. Featuring extensive use of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, TR909 drum machine, and early sampling techniques, these recordings trace the organic, hybridized elements of Italian experimental music as it convened in the hands of Tiziano Popoli and his friends, uniting elements of pop music, minimalism, and manipulations of found sound. Popoli's first album, Scorie, recorded with Marco Dalpane, is a highly sought after LP, and was finally repressed in 2018 by Italian label Soave. "Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983-1989" is a joint release between RVNG Intl. and Freedom To Spend, and was compiled from hours of material unearthed by Tiziano Popoli from his archives, and then meticulously remastered from original sources by Rashad Becker. The 2xLP and CD include printed inner sleeves and booklets with extensive liner notes written by Bradford Bailey, archival photographs, and ephemeral enrichment. RIYL: Philip Glass, Franco Battiato, Lino Capra Vaccina, Oren Ambarchi, RAMZi, Roberto Musci, Faust, CAN, Art of Noise, Durutti Column, Roberto Cacciapaglia.

Lucrecia Dalt is a Colombian recording artist, songwriter, and producer. After studying civil engineering in Colombia, Dalt worked at a geo-technical company for two years and has since lived in Barcelona and Berlin, where she currently resides. She has released six solo albums and has collaborated with musicians Aaron Dilloway, Jan Jelinek, and Gudrun Gut, to name a few. No era sólida is Dalt's seventh solo record, and her second on RVNG Intl., following the release of 2018's Anticlines. No era sólida is an introspective venture into visceral sonic terrain, as Dalt sets out to capture the moment when one becomes pure sound. The album observes a transition in Dalt herself through the emergence of an alternate ego / state of self named Lia. Each song identifies a different state experienced by Lia, opening with Disuelta (`dissolved') and transforming through pieces such as Seca (`to be dry'), Ser boca (`to be mouth'), Espesa (`thick'). Lia's poetic reflections on the panspermia echo her origins, having come from some other ether. As a lifeform seeded through sound, the very essence of Lia is embodied in the exploratory instincts of her creator Lucrecia Dalt, an artist whose innate sonar system traces the far reaches of musical experimentation.

Very Ltd Edition 12"EP on this highly intriguing label.. TIP!

Hailing from the Ruhrgebiet and now based in Cologne, sound enthusiast and percussionist Tulips is cofounder of the free-wheeling improv kraut group NASSSAU, plays together with TRJJ (of Belgium’s Stroom crew) in the duo P.VEE, and is part of Cologne’s dub-minded jam hounds MONTEL PALMER.

Produced in his bedroom, the sonic palette for this EP derives from primitive key improvisations to talking percussion worlds as part of extended cosmic excursions to unknown paramós. All tracks on ​Matas Flores y Algo Más ​ were jammed and recorded between late 2018 and early 2019, using an array of digital and analog synthesis, such as the Juno 106 and Yamaha DX7, and the Korg Wavedrum and Pearl SC40.

The opening track ​Self Similar Melodies ​ carries itself with a certain weightlessness, as drifting keys and oscillating bleeps grasp for an unreachable climax somewhere on the horizon. As the synth layers gradually build throughout ​A Bird Feeder, ​ electronic tones chirrup like chaffinches, while the distinct feeling of sunrise breaks through the music.

On the B side, ​Retrograde II ​ winds on a syrupy slow garage lean with bright riffs and interlocking percussive signatures. The marimba tones and loping bass of ​Same Scene conjure up tropical twilights from a Ballardian dimension, and the EP closes with Matsutake ​ , a twisting rhythm in conversation with itself amid a mirage of lurching synths and pitch-shifting modulations.

An exploratory record that dances across time and genre, guided by fidgety miniatures and jazz inflected collage. Throughout, the band pool together their instrumental chops, moving from fluid and serpentine R&B to meditative, minimalistic piano, evoking a contrast of virtuosity and self-surrender.

While constructed from the inspiration of soul, funk and film music, BÉE mediate those influences having first digested them through the productions of Madlib & the RZA.
A sticker on the sleeve tells us Self Help “combines jazz-funk and mysticism,” a signpost to where its musical and spiritual concerns align. The jazz-funk component translates to arresting hooks in sideways song forms: echoes of Gainsbourg spooled through Azymuth-style Brazilian jazz and punctuated by the whip and snap of Steely Dan. “The Sound Where My Head Was,” the instrumental centrepiece, exemplifies present-wave jazz but also ancient sounds, giving off the mothballed air of a Hiroshi Yoshimura record in a library-music archive.

Self Help’s mysticism emerges in broad and specific ways, denoting not only a search beyond cliché and intellect but also an inquiry into the beat, the spirit, the one will. This isn’t new territory for them: Turnbull—the artist formerly known as Slim Twig, who writes and performs with U.S. Girls and various other Toronto concerns—named the group’s Nature, Man & Woman EP after the Alan Watts book. Building these songs from his drafts over three weekends at Toronto’s Palace Sound studio, the ensemble was free to tap out of the city and into some other place, taking up residence in a collective mind maze. The album produces, in equal measure, familiar surprises and the surprisingly familiar. Intoxicated jazz riffs swerve left at phantom intersections. Rhythms cut loose and tie you in knots. But wired in to each song is a sense of gentle accumulation, making every featherlight flourish weigh a ton. U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy brings serenity to “Sing a Silent Gospel,” and wears its antic melodies lightly. The soul shimmer of “Unity (It’s Up to You)” lets the players pool their R&B chops into something fluid and serpentine while, on guest vocals, the musical performance artist James Baley issues urgent declaratives: “Water must pool, as a rule, before tasted/Or else the water is wasted.” The words throughout the record complement the ensemble music while riffing on the precarious nature of unity itself. Then, closer “Extinct Commune” finds Turnbull deserted at the piano, playing phrases of meditative minimalism taking after the composer Joanna Brouk.

For all the record’s reach, it is these contrasting quiet moments that bring Self Help’s communal spirit into focus. A note on personnel: Badge Époque Ensemble now has a seventh member in Karen Ng, the saxophonist and sometime collaborator of Do Make Say Think, Feist, and others. In BÉE, Ng joins Chris Bezant and Giosuè Rosati, her bandmates in the Andy Shauf live band, as well as U.S. Girls co-conspirators Turnbull and Ed Squires, and other Torontonian cross-pollinators listed below. Guest vocalists across Self Help include Meg Remy, who sings with Dorothea Paas on the opener, James Baley, and Toronto singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle on the remarkable “Just Space for Light.” Words by: Jazz Monroe

TERRENG - a constitution of an open-ended landscape of contrasts defining space both in time and depth. a set of structuring elements forming by its positionally interaction a common platform created through its dimensional properties.

The drums and electronics on TERRENG trade off each other at times creating a sense of improvised space, but also comes together in parts to form a narrative structure of almost concrete sensibilities. Where the instrumental identities gradually bleed into each other to form a flowing texture of sonically defined terrain.

The multi-layered structure of the two tracks presented here draws upon a well of material, sources and references. Pandi and Wesseltoft build up a detailed and idiosyncratic work by the use of their constructive material. In parts quiet and open. In other parts chocked with information and intensity. Beautiful and fractured. Chaotic and meditative. TERRENG is a highly dynamic blend of improvisation, and a narrowly constructed electro-acoustic narrative.

Balazs Pandi is a versatile drummer with an almost encyclopaedic level of experience ranging from improvised music and modern jazz, to metal, noise and experimental electronics. Here he at times performs the role of improvising drummer trading off the collaborator, and at other times creates an almost ritually constructed sense of rhythmic space perfectly embedded within the overall structure.

Jon Wesseltoft is a musician and composer with a long history of work within the often overlapping fields of improvisation, sound-art, noise and electro-acoustics. He has a longstanding interest in musical systems and its concepts of representation, and psycho-acoustics and the phenomenology of sound and its narrative power. He has explored this interest in various forms ranging from solo work to various collaborations and projects to larger ensemble work.

Furtherset returns to -OUS with his album 'To Live Tenderly Anew', following his EPs 'To Alter and Affect' and 'Drawings of Desire and Hate'. He notes: "I think of my previous two EPs for -OUS and this album as a trilogy, where this album is the final chapter".

Furtherset returns to -OUS with his album 'To Live Tenderly Anew', following his EPs 'To Alter and Affect' and 'Drawings of Desire and Hate'. He notes: "I think of my previous two EPs for -OUS and this album as a trilogy, where this album is the final chapter". Furtherset is in search of hidden connections beyond harmonies and rhythm. Melodies are repeated until they reach their breaking point. Moments of relief are drowned out in densely packed sound. Intensity is maximized to the nth degree, creating a crest point that threatens to overwhelm pre-existing traces of activity completely.

The opening track 'To Live Tenderly Anew' begins with a fragile melody, only to erupt into pulsating synthesizer figures that continuously expand, before pulverizing into sharp, noise-flecked fragments, and finally dissolving into an ambient pad. Midway-through 'The Logic of a Secret', the music finally sparks into Furtherset's signature arpeggio patterns, sprinting over a powerful bassline. The album finally climaxes with 'Choirs of Deception and Truth', a beatless rave hymn, before it, too, dissolves into deep space. Using only synthesizers, Furtherset creates metamorphic music, drawing on ambient, modern classical and rave, and building on his individual approach to composition, where long fades and periodic cuts continuously transform the scene.

The album's title references Amelia Rosselli's 1956 poem 'Diario in tre lingue', in which the experimental writer - who was born in exile in Paris, moved to the UK after the murder of her anti-fascist activist father, was educated in the US and finally settled in Rome - charts relations between the Italian, the French & the English. This poem laid the groundwork for her singular trilingual poetry, a body of work engaged in the research of tradition, and how tradition is passed on in disjointed manifestations.

Bruno Duplant’s music often explores the memories of things, moments, and spaces. For this volume, he realizes the idea by religiously recording old electronic devices like VHS, old computer, floppy disk while it’s operating, during several months in 2019, and collected it. Per the artist statement, (e)rase is a reflection on the premature and programmed obsolescence of all of our products, mainly electronic, but also questions on the future of stored data (why, how, for how long, at what price for the environment, etc.). While seems paradoxical, it is an effort of a self-critique which at the same time sculpting a commemoration on the temporal relationship between human and technology.

For this volume, Sydney duo Andy Rantzen and Jochen Gutsch team up with Brisbane-based Lawrence English to create a new trio work, themed around the ideas, life, and personality of a German philosopher, poet and thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer. Based on Rantzen’s spoken words and English’s haunting sine waves, Gutsch structured the piece by adding piano, trumpets, wailing guitar, and thumping percussion, arranged as the original composition “On the Completion of My Master Work”. On the flip side of the tape, comes the reimagined version of the title piece. Both pieces appear as reflections to each other, maybe challenging each other, making conversations and questioning each existence.

This selection of ultra rare tracks represents the sound of the postpunk Dutch band Necronomicon and their label Fetisj from the period 1981-1982. All selections have been mastered from the original released cassettes and unreleased demo-cassettes

Mannequin Records is elated to present a double-LP compilation of the Dutch industrial-experimental heroes Doxa Sinistra.

Preciously selected by the expert ears of Frank Brinkhuis, head of Trumpett, "Universo" is spanning from 1982 to 1988 through their entire discography.

Doxa Sinistra was formed in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, early 1982. On the strength of live performances at Paradiso and Ultra venue Oktopus, the two piece band was invited by Trumpett to record an album in the Freakowitz & Einstein Studio in Den Burg on Texel. Armed with their Korg MS-10 and Korg MS-20 synths they took the ferry to the West Frisian island, and spent a week recording in the legendary Trumpett HQ. The result, the debut cassette Via Del Latte, was released in June 1982. Just months later band member R. K. kidnapped the band name, formed a new duo and played one live date. After that the project fizzled out.

Until early 1984, when Trumpett and Doxa Sinistra received an invitation from Italian cassette label ADN to record a new album. The invitation was accepted and Doxa Sinistra Mark II was born. Conveyer Belt, recorded between June 1984 and February 1985, appeared as an ADN/Trumpett co-release in August 1985.

After the move of the Trumpett Studios to Amsterdam late 1986, Doxa Sinistra started demoing a new album in the Summer of 1987. California based Undergroud cassette label Ladd-Frith were keen to release the ultimate results. Recorded early 1988, Newsflashes, the group's third and final album, was released as a Ladd-Frith/Trumpett co-release in the Summer of 1988.
Limited edition of 300 copies.

"“Als das Kind Kind war, wusste es nicht dass es Kind war” the opening words of “Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)” by Wim Wenders are so incredibly simple and innocent that they strike you down like the most murderous thunderbolt: “When the child was a child, it didn’t realize it was a child”. Are these words the fantasies of an adult or are these words the adult cogitations of a child’s brain?

Legitimately available again on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1983, Outernational Sounds proudly presents a major statement from a crucial figure on the Los Angeles jazz underground – pianist Nate Morgan’s spiritualised deep jazz classic, Journey Into Nigritia.

How many 16 year olds would have the confidence to walk up to a revered bandleader at a gig, and inform him that one day they’d be playing together? As improbable as it sounds, this is how pianist Nate Morgan introduced himself to the great Horace Tapscott, founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The teenage Morgan had heard Tapscott’s Flying Dutchman LP The Giant Is Awakened being played by Greg Kufahamu on local Los Angeles radio station KUSC, and Arthur Blythe’s wailing sax had gone ‘straight to the heart. It was a spiritual experience.’ Morgan showed up to all the Arkestra shows he could find. He was already studying with Joe Sample and Hampton Hawes and playing in local bands, but the draw of the Tapscott’s band was too much for the gifted young pianist:

‘I could only take about two or three more concerts before I had to run up on stage. When I first introduced myself to Horace, he tells everybody that I said, “Yeah, I’m Nate Morgan. I’m going to play with you all.” Not that I want to, but that I’m going to.’

Over the next decade and beyond, Morgan would become a central figure in Tapscott’s UGMAA (Union Of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension’), bringing new figures into the fold (it was Morgan who first hipped Jesse Sharps to Tapscott’s circle; they were lifelong friends), running jam sessions, and eventually being given the task of organising the Arkestra songbook. During the early 1970s he also worked commercially, doing a stint with Rufus and Chaka Khan and appearing on Willie Hutch’s Foxy Brown soundtrack. Into the 1980s and 1990s he remained active, keeping the UGMAA flame alive in late night jams and private sessions, and working tirelessly around LA, including collaborations with Bone Thugs N’ Harmony; he was also part of the early 2000s LA jazz collective Build An Ark. A true musician’s musician, Morgan died in 2013.

Journey Into Nigritia, featuring firebreathing reedsman Dadisi Komolafe, was the first of two LPs Morgan recorded for Tom Albach’s storied Nimbus West imprint. A committed, spiritualised work that showcases Morgan’s heavy composing as well as his McCoy Tyner- influenced and technically flawless playing, Journey features dedications to Coltrane (‘He Left Us A Song’) and Cecil Taylor (‘Study In C.T.’). Surging, modal jazz from the LA undergound, Journey Into Nigritia is a crucial recording by an unsung jazz legend.

Absorbing new album from this very special artist. Hand printed sleeves. Very limited edition.

Marta De Pascalis is an italian composer living and working in Berlin. Her solo works employ analog synthesis and tape loops, incorporating free playing into steady, repetitive patterns. She has produced two albums of Berlin School minimal synth excursions: the self-released Quitratue (2014) and Anzar (The Tapeworm, 2016). Her new piece ‘Her Core’ has been published on spring 2018 by The Wormhole. Marta creates densely layered collages of glowing melodic shards and growling bass lines, her hypnotic minimal synth figures warping and whirling around each other before dissolving into entropic oblivion. For her compositions she uses improvisation on a tape-loop system, in which patterns of repetition create a sense of a dense, dynamic and cathartic distance.

All music by Marta De Pascalis Recorded at WORM Sound Studios in Rotterdam, artist's studio and Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, between 2019 and 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Lorenzo Mazon Studio. All rights reserved to the respective owners. doser039LP - Morphine Records 2020

New Fries has never been interested in being a band. What we mean is a spirit of abandoning ideas of what songs should be, how they should be performed, and by whom. We’ve never been interested in the tradition of songwriting—though we’re interested in musical elements like repetition, space, and dynamics. We have wanted our music to make people dance but have also wanted to produce the feeling of that being taken away from a room. We often work around these sorts of energy transfers (whether or not we name them this way). This space to make music in has felt wild and free. We have also contradicted ourselves. We are also always changing. In 2018 Ryan Carley (synthesizer) left the band and we found ourselves at our first juncture to restructure and re-evaluate New Fries. This is such a classic boring story, we know. But immediately we knew that as a three piece (the band’s original formation) we had to turn to something new and open—the way some describe “beginners mind”. Anni grabbed bass (which was new to her), Tim grabbed guitar and a sampler as a new juggling routine, and Jenny reduced her drum kit to three pieces. We wanted to create a structure that allowed us to be curious about being in transition.

Much of this record sounds and reflects on this in-between. It’s anxious in its repetitions and unsure of genre. It rejects a singular character or emotion and attempts to instead act as a container for many. Anni’s lyrics state this directly: “it lacks a mood, it lacks definition” / “curiosity beyond expectation”. Her lyrics describe the spaces, objects, people, and situations that embody an in-between—her grandfather who worked as medium, the ecology of the foreshore, Mount Tambora’s eruption in 1816 that produced the Year Without a Summer, and mesh (the fabric). The result is a collage of 6 songs and many otherwise quick ideas.

Much of this collage was testament to the work of engineer/musician Carl Didur. Carl (Zacht Automaat, formerly US Girls) is a long-standing pillar of Toronto’s experimental music community. He is also a tape expert, which we knew these songs needed entering the recording process as mostly bare grooves. The result was less that of hiring an engineer than it was working with a collaborator. His musical ideas are all over this record. ‘Is the Idea of Us’ is the situation of musicians/non-musicians making music together perhaps completely illegible in the music on this record and to the random listener who doesn’t know our story in South Bend, Indiana (how did you find us?!) But with this title we name this absurd gesture, through our changing relationship to making music both as a unit and as individuals. There are enough bands out there; we insist on do it differently.

‘’Ruff drum computer- and bubbling ambient excursions from Bonn, Germany, making their first appearance on vinyl for the new decennium’’.

Newly established label Raakvlak plucks a lush synth gem from the depths of 80’s D.I.Y.- cassette culture for their inaugural release. Heil Eris / Enjoy sees the first-time reissue of the work of German synth-wizards Overflow. The group, conceived as the session band of cult tape label Brainstorm-Studio, merely released two cassettes within the timespan of one year, of which Raakvlak now has culled some of the finest moments.

Out of a matrix of drum computers, synths, voices, tape FX and a flute come these five live-takes (no overdubbing used!), dedicated to the trio’s mascot Apumé, which was present at all sessions.

Ranging from the aquatic ambient excursion on ‘’Pressure Wave’’ and the existential cold-wave pop of ‘’Take A Chance’’ to the blissed-out downer ‘’Voiceless’’, Overflow shies away from musical expectations and thereby sounds as up to date as ever.
Restored, remastered and available on wax for the first time! Comes with download card plus three digital bonus tracks.

On vinyl in the U.S. for the first time since 1977, this 1975 release includes African, Indian, Arabic and 70's era Miles Davis style electric rock fusions. Featuring contributions from former Ornette Coleman bandmates Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, and liner notes from Stanley Crouch.

Presenting a condensed survey of KRAAK’s recent past and immediate future through a selection of tracks that chart the breadth of the label’s output.

The 18 songs contained within this unassuming piece of plastic speak for a generation of artists whose contribution to the legacy of KRAAK is in no way insignificant: the faded melancholia of Ignatz, the cosmic outlook championed by Köhn, the bejeweled exotica of Bear Bones, Lay Low, the brainwave tingling of Floris Van Hoof... all of the elements and personas that make up not just a community, but a constellation bright and beaming. A new crop of newcomers to the roster (Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Kuupuu and Orphan Fairytale) herald new frontiers within the continuation of narratives that are as auspicious as they are unmapped.

The tracks made especially for this cassette are testaments to the musical kinship as well as camaraderie that KRAAK has always held at its core, and of which KRAAK Festival is the chief manifestation. Reminisce while gazing at what unfolds before you and stay tuned: there is more to come.

“In 1976, the Asociaux Associés (antisocial associates, TN) led by Philippe Doray (Rotomagus, Ruth, Crash), recorded the first of the two albums under their own name: Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires. On synthesiser, Doray fires off his disturbing poetry over psychedelic pop, voodoo rock, off-kilter krautrock, approximate swing … But if the music is iconoclastic (bringing to mind as much Hendrix as Areski, Ash Ra Tempel as Berrocal…), one thing is certain: Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires is one of the best albums of obscure experimental song ever recorded.

It is no surprise that, on the Nurse With Wound List that Steven Stapleton inserted in the first album of his legendary musical project, the name of Philippe Doray can be found between that of the Doo-Dooettes and Jean Dubuffet: his music is genuinely original and, what is more, ahead of its’ time.

It was in 1977 that the first album by Philippe Doray, Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires, was published on Gratte-Ciel, a label created by the journalist from Rock & Folk Jean-Marc Bailleux and run by Jean-Marc Patrat and José Serré. Encouraged by his wild experience in Rotomagus, a formidable rock band which swept through Rouen, for sure, but also further afield – as Julian Cope was himself inspired, years later, by their explosivity – Doray brought a team to this album which was both untamed and ready to fight to defend it’s terrible (and trembling) poetry.

Backed by his ‘Asociaux Associés’ (antisocial associates, TN), our man from Rouen let his fantasy run wild and cried out again: “sing with me, and don’t be afraid to clap your hands!” And so, much of French popular music was shaken: the ball in Doray’s pinball machine had struck Jimi Hendrix then Alain Goraguer, then Ash Ra Tempel and onto Areski, then T-Rex followed by Jac Berrocal…

As far as the texts are concerned, just take a listen. Doray’s poetry is schizophrenic: nurtured in the Normandy countryside, it relates paranoid tales of booby-trapped towns, Levis jeans, Prisunic supermarkets and plastic dolls… Crumbs of reality which he sucked up to create the album that Souffle Continu and Thierry Müller, mastering (with Ruth, Crash, and Illitch too) spit out again fifty years later, with many good memories.

First ever vinyl reissue
Remastered from the master tapes
Obi Strip + Textsheet Insert”

“Between 1978 and 1980, the Asociaux Associés (antisocial associates, TN) recorded the second of the two albums which appeared under their name: Nouveaux Modes Industriels. Philippe Doray, with the help of his 'Associés', evermore iconoclastic and numerous, backs up his anguished poetry with customised krautrock, hallucinatory pop and rock Suicide. Much more than a memory of the then surprising (and disturbing) Swinging Rouen, this album is an intergalactic ambush.

Following the publication, in 1977, of the first of two albums under his own name, Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires, on the label Gratte-Ciel, Philippe Doray didn’t waste any time before writing new obscure and experimental songs. As proof, between May 1978 and January 1980, with his Asociaux Associés (antisocial associates, TN), he recorded ten of them in the farm in which he lived (and shared) close to Rouen.

In 1980, Nouveaux Modes Industriels was published thanks to the support of Invisible, the label of the Société Coopérative d'Ouvriers-Producteurs Artistiques (S.C.O.P.A., the Cooperative Society of Artistic Worker/Producers,TN) run by, amongst others, the ex-manager of Crium Delirium Jacques Pasquier. This meant that Doray had free rein for his electric poetry, his personal delirium, to be heard. He had already shaken up French music with his mix of pop, krautrock and free jazz; a few months later he would undergo a change which would be the precursor of his future projects.

Before collaborating with Thierry Müller under the names Ruth and Crash, Doray let loose one last time, with his Asociaux Associés, his anguished poetry into the face of the urban labyrinth, his nuclear dynamite… It is no coincidence if the album cover is similar to those by Urban Sax, the spirit of the times was anguish as a creator of beauty. Doray’s version had the advantage of still knowing how to sing.

Never forgetting his interest for dance, the musician gets Cluster moving to a boogaloo, foments a Suicide on synthetic jaw harp or invents elevator music for tower blocks… All of which hotchpotch feeds into his Nouveaux Modes Industriels. If the last track of the album states “no after-sales service”, it is simply because there is no need.

First ever vinyl reissue
Remastered from the master tapes
Obi Strip + Textsheet Insert”