Techno Новости

Written and recorded at Cats Abbey in November 2016 by Anthony Child and Daniel Bean.

Anthony and Daniel played the Buchla Music Easel, harmonium, shruti box, bass guitar, hurdy gurdy, symphonie, glockenspiel, hand bell, Electro Harmonix 45000, Strymon Blue Sky, Strymon DIG, and Roland RE 101 Space Echo.

Front cover image by Ali Wade

Rear cover image by Cathrin Queins

Design by SOMA

The title of the debut lp from The Transcendence Orchestra outlines the modus operandi of this pairing of Anthony Child and Daniel Bean. Recorded in a remote English rural setting over a period of 24 hours this is an apt location for a recording that eschews time and space in favour of methodological displacement and deep psychological navigation.

Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals is an experiment in acoustic and synthetic symbiosis which is deeply influenced by the atmosphere and acoustics of the rural location of Cats Abbey resulting in a set of recordings which can aid to the transformation of consciousness. Deploying a range of ancient and modern instruments and effects including Buchla Music Easel, harmonium, shruti box, bass guitar, hurdy gurdy, Electro Harmonix 45000, Strymon Blue Sky and Roland RE 101 Space Echo among others, Child and Bean conjure an audio experience which encapsulates elements of drone, trance, pulse, rhythm and melody subtly shifting all into a psychologically penetrating experience beyond the aesthetic and into the comforting unknown.

Simbad (aka SMBD) is a stalwart of the underground music scene in UK and because of his vast arrays of releases it's very hard to put him into any box or music category. Since his 2007 album Supersonic Revelation & his worldwide acclaimed dancefloor hit Soul Fever, the London based frenchy has been constantly travelling the five continents entertaining delighted clubbers with his super energetic dj skills or producing and recording various artists from many different genres including deeper Dubstep don Mala (DMZ), UK Hip Hop star Roots Manuva, Cuban songstress Dayme Arocena, Detroit House producer Kai Alce, Berlin based deep Techno artist Fred P, Seun Kuti from Afrobeat's most famous family, Brazilian superstar artist/actor Seu Jorge and being production mentor for the king of cool, radio DJ Gilles Peterson (who made him one of the resident at his Worldwide Festivals). With the Moon Theory EP Simbad demonstrates his talent on some deep analog frequencies for the very solid & ever growing label that is Apron Records. As the music wizard puts it himself : 'im just trying to make some timeless shhhhh man, soul in all forms really, trying anyway ! And I guess that the best is yet to come.

New Abdulla Rashim!!!

Outer worlds explored from inner space. Profound, meditative, organic sounds involving singing bowls, gongs and bells.

"Kazuya Nagaya is a Japanese artist who creates immersive, ritualized compositions through the use of bronze bells, gongs and singing bowls. Since releasing his first album 'Utsuho' in 1999, he has composed music for a range of projects, ranging from collaborations with Tibetan Buddhist monks to a remix for Plastikman. Nagaya uses bronze bells, gongs and singing bowls which are mostly used in Buddhist or Hindu rituals in Tibet, Bali and Japan. He creates unique ambient music by mixing these sacred instruments with modern instruments.

Nagaya`s music is rooted in philosophies and sensibilities unique to Japan. Both Japanese Buddhism -the likes of Zen- and Japan's exquisite forms of artistic expression, such as ink paintings and haiku, all put high value on extreme simplicity entirely free from ornamentation, and indeed it is in their simplicity that they express, paradoxically, the profundity of their spirituality. In this same sense, the ambient music produced by Kazuya Nagaya aims to convey profundity of spirit to the listener by virtue of its very simplicity."

Argentinian producer Xhei who already released his music on labels such as Micro.fon, CLR, Afu and many more is back with his first EP on Nachtstrom, including an amazing remix by Christian Wunsch (Polegroup, Tsunami, Soma, Modularz, Faut Section). Limited clear transparent 12'-vinyl. Huge early support by Chris Liebing, DVS1, Oscar Mulero, Rodhad, Len Faki, Exium, Pfirter, Damon Wild, Bas Mooy, DJ Emerson, Raiz, Truncate (Audio Injection), Drumcell, Nihad Tule, Gayle San, Keith Carnal, Dubfire, Paco Osuna, Henning Baer, Kyle Geiger, Thomas Heckmann, MTD, Hans Bouffmyhre,

Crack is the new album from Shampoo Boy on Blackest Ever Black. The Vienna-based trio's second LP to date, following 2013's crushing BEB debut Licht, Crack finds Peter Rehberg (Editions Mego), Christina Nemec (comfortzone) and Christian Schachinger leaving behind the post-everything in search of their very own neo-something: a powerful alloy of extreme electroacoustic music, luminous ambience and the mineral fundaments of rock and black metal. As before, they're staring down the void, but this time they're looking beyond it, too, for the fissures and faultlines that might let some light in.Opener 'Spalt' immediately signals a departure from the monolithic doom of Licht, conveying instead a sense of adrenalised movement, of acceleration towards an ever-receding horizon. There is no percussion, yet Nemec's chasmic bass and Rehberg's protean electronics eddy and modulate to give rise to an unstoppable momentum. 'Spalt' becomes a peculiarly wracked Autobahn chase, one where you're uncertain if you're the pursuer or the pursued. There seems to be some promise of escape in Schachinger's highly lyrical, spiralling guitar improvisations, which nod to Fripp and Goettsching, but Shampoo Boy's vision of the cosmos is more hard-boiled and unforgiving than that of their forefathers. There are some furies that can't be outrun. If 'Spalt' dramatises a failed getaway then 'Riss' considers what happens if you do get away, only to find your hiding-place isn't quite as safe or secure as you had presumed it would be. Slow, ceremonial downstrokes suggest a return to the vast and uncanny woodland landscape in which the events of Licht unfolded. This time, though, the city intrudes upon the scene of pastoral unease: Rehberg seems to be scanning the airwaves, picking up unintelligible snatches of conversation and machine noise. These mingle with nameless natural currents to create pernicious hybrid forms, which curl and ricochet about the stereo field. Subterranean bass tones, meanwhile, seem to reverberate from an ancient and appalling source. The accumulation of noise and energy across 12 minutes becomes unbearably suspenseful; a reckoning seems inevitable. It is typical of Crack's unorthodox Weltanschauung, however, that just when we think the game is up, we are faced not with oblivion but with potential absolution: 'Riss''s closing section is a gravely serene tone-painting that clearly suggests the possibility, if not certainty, of rebirth and renewal. Perhaps you can start again after all. But of course the game isn't up, and all roads lead to Side B: given in its entirety to the three-part 'Bruch', the most potent and pugilistic manifestation of Shampoo Boy's brute psychedelia to date. Part 1 is a near-gothic assemblage of tortured computer processing, abyssal drones and stray industrial noise. This gives way to the calm but agonised concrète of Part 2; sparse, minimalist and dub-damaged, it's the sound of Part 1's traumas remembered through a fog of painkillers. Before long, however, the medication falters and those traumas come back in to focus: so much so, that the broiling digital synthesis and annihilating slow-motion riffage of Part 3 come as a relief. For a while the thuggish monochord attack here feels almost Stooge-ian - grungy, swaggering, sewer-savvy - but it doubles back into abstraction, subsuming itself into the Shampoo Boy's larger, gravity-defying architectures of feedback. By this point it has become impossible to distinguish individual instruments, processes or contributions; the group mind has taken over, the third eye is on fire, and the album climaxes in a black flash of negative ecstasy. Epic in scale, complex in mood and dazzling in technique, Crack is a momentous achievement from three improvising musicians at the height of their powers. A lived-in and emotionally-charged work, harrowing but energising, it digs deep, deep into the underworld to open up new lines of space-time enquiry. It is also a sustained achievement of arrangement and post-production remarkable even in light of its makers' pedigree: the harshest and heaviest passages are rendered with a sense of space and richness of detail that is truly otherworldly. Russell Haswell's astute mastering amplifies this, resulting in one of the most exhilarating and rewarding entries in the Blackest Ever Black catalogue. Click here for high res cover JPG, Click here to listen to 'Spalt'

Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld, working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless, exploring the meaning of natural', listening for the pulse of the ancient, using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age. Coloccia and Barnett's ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of 'Truth Teller', moving through the agitated wormhole techno of 'Dreamsnake', to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of 'Healer'. 'Blight''s zero-hour synth pulsations are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones, 'AM Horizon' is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread, 'Agate Cross''s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield of pure tone. 'Ash Grove' and 'Rose Eye' are exhilarating exercises in contemporary musique concrète: complex timbral constructs in which Coloccia's disembodied glossolalia, swooping strings and other nameless sonic spectra conspire to evoke extra-dimensional space and the highest spiritual drama. Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K's Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra's recent work, Conrad Schnitzler's more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.

Licht is the debut album by Shampoo Boy, a new guitar, bass and electronics trio from Vienna, comprising members Christian Schachinger, Christina Nemec and Peter Rehberg. Schachinger and Rehberg have played together in various projects over the last 25 years, most notably Peterlicker - see Last Slave (2010) and Nicht (2011), both released on Editions Mego. Schachinger was also involved in Der Scheitel, their album In einem Haus das Liebe heißt being a classic of German 'Schlagermusik'. Rehberg currently operates the Editions Mego family of labels and is a member of KTL, R/S and Fenn O'Berg as well as working on theatre productions with Gisele Vienne, and with choreographer Margret Gudjonsdottir. Nemec's background is in avant-rock and industrial outfits such as Bray and her own performance group SV Damenkraft. She remains highly active as a solo artist, both as Chra and under her own name, and she has performed on several occasions with Lydia Lunch. Licht is made up of four improvisations recorded and mixed at Twisted, Wien between April 2012 and January 2013. Mastered by Noel Summerville at 3345, London. Artwork by Stephen O'Malley.

Last handful of this triple monster masterpiece of drone.

A limited re-press of the horn-drone extravaganza, originally recorded in 1974. Combining four of Wada's self-made "pipehorns" (made from plumbing materials, over three metres in length), with an electronic drone tuned to the electrical current of the performance space, this is a lost masterpiece of early minimalism, placing Wada rightfully in the pantheon with LaMonte Young, Phil Niblock, Maryanne Archer and Alvin Lucier.

Recorded in Syracuse, New York, this recording captures the room-filling complex overtones generated by the ever-shifting interplay of the breathing horns and the constant electronic drone. This is a music of ritual hypnotic power, its heavy low end mass and sense of change within constancy engendering a meditative transcendency.

"Earth Horns with Electronic Drone" is the fourth and ultimate release in Em Records' Yoshi Wada series, a must for all fans of minimalism, heavy drones, ritual, mystery and world-shaking transcendence. From an original performance of almost three hours, the CD features a 77 minute excerpt; the full performance is featured on the triple LP set. From Earth Horns to beyond the firmament: prepare to be elevated!This edition comes with full colour inner sleeves, including many unseen rare photos from mid 1970s performances and facsimile concert posters.

With Contemplative Figuration we see Broshuda pushing his amorphous, impossible-to-pin-down music in exciting new directions. Stitched together in various European cities over the last few years, it is the artist’s most dynamic and ambitious release thus far, drawing equally from musique concrete, beat research, ambient, tape collage, and spoken word. Episodic in nature, the collection functions well as a sort of impressionistic travelogue, with romantic, hazy atmospheres coaxed from borrowed equipment, serendipitous recording sessions with old friends, and even a drum sequence programmed with Mario Paint, among other curios and sleights of hand. Broshuda deftly wrings bonafide cohesion and balance from these disparate source materials, tools, and locations, as on opener “Kakigori,” which allows a snaking harmonic drone the space to evolve before exploding it into a sort of seething, dubbed out pointillism. Later, “Lied Für Hase” concocts a potent, humid atmosphere of beautifully evolving acoustic piano loops and elegant narration. Taken as a whole, Contemplative Figuration is a weightless, transportive record, one that is bursting at the seams with ideas, mischief, and a restless spirit.

Mastered by Helmut Erler at D&M, Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

Soda Gong presents a razor sharp collection of rigorous and imaginative new music from Moscow-by-way-of-St.Petersburg-based musician and producer Flaty. "Generic TARGZ" places Flaty's precipitously complex drum programming and keen ear for atmosphere and space at the forefront, offering up a dynamic array of techno, ambient, generative footwork, and other tougher to pigeonhole rhythmic experiments. It is a dizzying and cohesive document in which ethereal productions, such as "Praaai" wherein a bewitching vocal pad hovers over delicate, pin-prick percussion, sit comfortably alongside tightly controlled chaos, as with the synapse-knotting "Thread" and heavy-hitting "Horn of Plenty".

Over the past few years, Flaty has released a wealth of diverse and uniformly excellent music under monikers such as AEM Rhythm Cascade, Dada Ques, and Wrong Water. He is most closely associated with the influential GOST ZVUK label, but his work has also appeared on imprints such as 12th Isle, Muscut, and his own ANWO Records. Although Flaty serves as his primary alias, "Generic TARGZ" is only the artist's second full-length under the moniker, following 2016's "New Suggestions", a high-water mark in the impeccable GOST ZVUK catalog. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M. Artwork and design by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

UK producer Dennis Huddleston goes by the artist name of 36. He is a much-loved producer with a fine back catalogue which is investigated here with The Box, a new collection of his earliest and perhaps most admired works. They were all written between 2005 and 2012 and are drawn from albums such as 2009's Hypersona, 2010's Hollow and 2012's Lithea. The bumper six vinyl collection also features a bonus album, Orphans, of all new and previously unreleased tracks. There is a real depth of range and emotion to these tracks so it is no wonder the artist says they are some of the most personally cherished works he has written.

9T Antiope have made a name for themselves in the vibrant experimental music scene of Iran over the past years. Now based in Paris, Sara Bigdeli Shamloo and Nima Aghiani are expanding their stylistic scope and team up with long-time friend Siavash Amini for their debut release on Hallow Ground. After 2017’s »TAR« and »FORAS« the year after 2018, »Harmistice« is Amini’s third LP for Hallow Ground and his first in collaboration with other artists. Recorded in Paris and Tehran, the four tracks are the result of »all the long hours of speaking online, being kilometres away, it is a love child of those short times we actually got to be physically in one place.« Vocalist and lyricist Shamloo enters a dialogue with Aghiani and Amini’s sound art, which is from restrained but interlocks voice and noise with striking subtlety. »Harmistice« seamlessly blends the visceral with the sublime, the abstract with the oh-too-real.

From the very first second of »Blue as in Bleeding«, »Harmistice« evokes a sense of suspended terror. Shrill frequencies and aleatoric bursts of feedback give way to a hard-hitting bass drum until Shamloo’s voice arises from the chaos with an uneasy clarity. It’s the perfect opening for a record that is built upon stark contrasts like this one. Amini and Aghiani bring together synthetic sounds with acoustic instruments, creating a tangible tension on which Shamloo’s sometimes sensitive, sometimes emotionally detached delivery thrives. »It’s all based on a dream, a nightmare about war,« she says in regards to her lyrics that move between poetic abstraction and first person prose, blurring the lines between lived experience and sinister premonition. »Harmistice« takes inventory after the oneiric damagehas been dealt in real life.

As a whole, »Harmistice« is thus as ambiguous as its title suggests. As an all-too-lucid dream about unspeakable things that are being lent a voice it overwhelms the senses with an unheard-of volume. Drawn from the depths of the subconscious, »Harmistice« may just be the most challenging album in either 9T Antiope or Amini’s discography.

A surreal mosaic of eerie chant processionals, tape-rot trickery, and panicked oud madness. These are sonic forgeries of atavistic heritages, recorded by analog means using esoteric techniques."" They have been known by many names: The Givers of Illness; The Bandylegged Riders of the Ill-Promised Sun, etc_ Honed and expanded through their travels, Ak'chamel's singular sound comprising desert-scorched psychedelia, post-apocalyptic shamanism, and bizarre ritual folk is as unique as the physical theater of their otherworldly live performances.

For 46 minutes Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures our perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He’s assisted by three additional percussionists - Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay’s Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive whorls.

The piece is frankly astonishing in its grasp of the maelstrom. Initially tentative, searching, with higher register hits like moths butting lone lightbulbs in an abandoned apartment block, the distant, plangent peal of twin brass wafts between rooms to impart a distinctly floating, OOBE- like feel for space. The brass recedes while the drums’ low end thickens and roils like a gamelan tempest, blurring impressions of knackered buildings or the temple rituals of ancient epochs, with sounds wafting in from other rooms to mess with the stereo field like ghosts of worshippers doing their thing. Remarkably, it conjures a fever dream miasma of ricocheting, thunderous polymetric clatter and proprioceptive fuckry without ever losing its head.

Hungtai’s canny use of contact mic feedback drone and cymbal saw gives the whole thing a sense of gauzy delirium that unites the grouches like mildewed grout and cobwebs, coarsely gelling the elements in a way that resonates with Pauline Oliveros and co’s Deep Listening band acousmagique as much as Basil Kirchin’s keeling ‘World Within World’ classic, the ghosts of Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’, the possessed atmosphere of the cabin where Harley Gaber recorded ‘Wind Rises in the North’, and no doubt Harry Bertoia’s massive metallic sculptures, agitated at midnight.

Humid, menacing, and wraithlike, the album’s’ sense of keening chronics belies a visionary hand at the tiller, here tightened by Rashad Becker’s mastering, which faithfully brings to light, and shadow, the depth of perception and wild but concentrated energies at play, sealing in place a truly staggering session for adventurous ears, cineastes and Lynchian acolytes alike.

Recital is honored to publish composer Allan Gilbert Balon’s first full-length LP. Born 1986 in Les Abymes on the island of Guadeloupe, Balon is an artist (exhibiting at MoMA PS1 in 2022) who publishes beautiful handmade books and audio on XYÄ Edition run with Uta Guan Hyë in Créteil, France where he now resides.

The Magnesia Suite harbors an unhurried, coastal tranquility that flows lucidly as an album. Though prominently a pianist, a breadth of Balon’s musical spheres are visited on this record. Disparate elements of percussion, reeds, organ, voice, and tape recordings are all cast together. Each slowly excavated, surveyed and then set away.

“Stella Maris” opens with an organ and voice procession in the vein of a Charlemagne Palestine singing piece. “Lustras” is a patchwork of various tape captures (a la Alvin Curran, Rip Hayman, or André Thomkins); piano clusters dredge into xylophone by night with cicadas swimming in radio transmissions. First hearing the track “Pleuro Delez Waltz” is what made me approach Allan about making an album for Recital. The proximity of the voices against the small percussions, all laced with Balon’s piano stylings. I’ve not really heard anything like it before. The album ends with “Ogadia,” a gentle piano march with soprano saxophone and electronics. Feels to me like a Dave Burrell-infused rag played slowly, beautifully resolving the outsider-jazz-sound-art-poetry-collages of The Magnesia Suite.

The LP includes a booklet of quiet texts and beautiful graphic scores.

With their third album on Heavy Psych Sounds Records, Alunah have wasted no time in a post-pandemic haze since their last release, balancing being on the European festival circuit alongside touring the UK. However, in a Birmingham rehearsal room away from the outside world, everyday life and online noise, their latest full length "Fever Dream" has been quietly brewing waiting to see the light of day. Forged from a period of extensive jamming and soul searching "Fever Dream" digs into the core of what makes Alunah tick, being in a room together making the music they want to hear. Recorded during the winter of 2024, the atmosphere of the historic Foel Studio allows groove to flow alongside riff, heft and melody in equal measure. The brooding progressive majesty of the title track, the eastern soundscape of "Sacred Grooves" and the doom and roll of "Far From Reality" each highlight the album's ability to surprise and deliver in equal measure throughout the emotive journey of its nine tracks. Let yourself fall deep into the "Fever Dream".

»Cosmogonical Ears« is Amosphère's first album for Hallow Ground. Following her contribution to the Swiss label’s »Epiphanies« compilation and her 2021 full-length debut »More Die of Heartbreak« on 33-33, it features three expansive pieces. The Paris-based composer and multidisciplinary artist delves deeper into themes of time, space, cosmology, human perception, and psycho-physical effects, crafting profound sonic meditations. Drawing on a minimalist approach while blending electronic and acoustic elements, Amosphère’s long-form compositions are living, breathing entities whose sonic richness and evocative power unfold gradually over time, putting »Cosmogonical Ears« in direct kinship with previous Hallow Ground releases by artists such as Kali Malone and FUJI|||||||||||TA.

The album opens with its longest piece, »Land of eternal delight,« composed for the Buddha10 exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Orientale in Turin. Written during three years of isolation—a period in which Amosphère explored meditation practices and diverse belief systems—it merges mythology with personal transcendental experiences, reflecting on a challenging time for humanity. »By blending Buddhist philosophy and sculpture with my own meditation practices, I sought to explore a way for people to transcend the boundaries of space and time—not as a believer, but as an observer,« she explains. Featuring handmade ceramic instruments and recorded by Thomas Lefevre, the piece combines Amosphère’s electronic organ with Marc Lochner’s flute contributions, creating a sound that is simultaneously minimalist and expansive.

The concept of teleportation and how it challenges traditional notions of time and space serves as the foundation for the second piece. »Recent advances in quantum physics suggest that teleportation might be possible through quantum entanglement,« Amosphère notes. »What if science fiction is becoming reality—or has already existed in ancient times?« Drawing inspiration from theories proposed by physicists such as Roger Penrose, Amosphère again worked together with flutist Lochner, this time using her VCS 3 synthesizer. »Teleportation« weaves single notes into intricate, non-linear patterns that defy conventional logic, creating a complex auditory tapestry. The last piece »Black hole in, white hole out« was recorded on Corsica and features Miao Zhao’s bass clarinet drones alongside Amosphère’s church organ. It imagines the possible sound of crossing a black hole while also suggesting the study of its theoretical exit and its potential applications for large-scale time and space travel.

The questions posed by »Cosmogonical Ears« do not yield straightforward answers. Instead, Amosphère’s restrained yet intricately layered compositions require full immersion and concentration from the listener. As expressed by the album’s title—which envisions the birth of a new universe through listening—»Cosmogonical Ears« offers an experimental approach to auditory perception as a tool for seeking truth, freedom, and harmony between the outer world and the inner self.

Amulets is the solo project of Portland-based audio and visual artist Randall Taylor. Amulets employs handmade cassette tape loops and live processed guitar loops to create live, lush soundscapes and immersive drones. Through the recontextualisation of cassettes, sampling, field recording, and looping, these long-form compositions blur the genres of ambient, drone, noise, and electronic music. Amulets has steadily built a catalog defined by tactile intimacy and patient exploration. Deeply immersive, the album navigates the dreamy boundaries between the tangible and the ethereal, where sound behaves as memory itself: unstable, layered, and quietly transformative. Known for his ability to weave soundscapes that evoke powerful emotions with minimalistic instrumentation, Taylor's newest project is a masterful exploration of mood, atmosphere, and texture.Throughout the ambient soundscapes is introspection, melancholy, and an almost hypnotic calm. The album resists forward motion, instead inviting the listener to linger inside its evolving textures, to sit with what's left behind rather than rush toward resolution. Central to Amulets' identity is Taylor's insistence on working, quite literally, outside the box. While many contemporary experimental artists rely heavily on software, Taylor's process remains rooted in physical interaction with sound. "This album differs from previous albums because it's a lot of found sounds, song fragments, and other samples that I have that I wanted to fuse together. I also heavily relied on a lot of ambient guitar and live guitar recording to marry all the sounds together." (Randall Taylor) FOR FANS OF Tim Hecker * Ben Frost * Lawrence English * Alessandro Cortini * This Will Destroy You * Mono * Windy & Carl

Minneapolis' Chris Bartels aka Blurstem, and Philadelphia's Andrew Tasselmyer of the likes of Hotel Neon and Gray Acres have hooked up once more for a second collaborative album Midnight Letters. This album's starting point was original concepts played out on guitar which were then processed and experimented with through an ages-old analog tape machine. Add in an array of iPad audio processing apps, samplers, and Ableton software and you have a perfect mix of tools to serve up a sonic journey that perfectly merges the old with the new. The resulting ambient soundscapes are immersive and sparse but packed with subtle details that convey all manner of emotions.

Anglo-Norwegian ensemble celebrating the work of Nordic poet, Nils Christian Moe-Repstad. With Jan Bang (live sampling, samples & programming, synthesizer), Michael Francis Duch (double bass), Erik Honoré (live sampling, synthesizer), David Toop (paper, cardboard, leaves, friction, activated objects, air, aerophones, bone conduction, cassettes, vibration, voice), Mark Wastell (tam tam, gongs, sticks, beaters). Recorded live at Punkt, Kristiansand on 31 August 2023.

Time and duration are core themes in the work of both William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of eight years from start to finish. In that time, our collective perception of time has at times become disorienting. " . . . on reflection " remodels that instability as an exquisite work of art - one that is unmoored by time or space. Limitation breeds creativity, revealed as an expression of minimalism and close focus. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging an iridescent flurry of flickering melodies. The sounds of various birds heard from late night windows on tour can occasionally be heard throughout, ricocheting off mirrored facades, reflecting on themselves as they continually reshape their own environments with song. " . . . on reflection " looks backwards, a bustling revelry of positive emotions heard through the aging mirrors of memory. It is a celebratory meditation where sound shimmers through time like the light of the sea's waves glistening as it folds and unfolds upon itself. Created 2014-2022 between L.A. & London. Mixed at Narnia, Walton-on-Thames. For Harold Budd.

When electronic artist Ben Chatwin plugged his Moog synthesiser into the mains at home one day, he was surprised to find the electrics of his home faintly singing. His house was built in the Nineteenth Century and what he was listening to was the building’s natural hum. He boosted the volume and in doing so found the inspiration for his next release, The Hum, out on Village Green.
 ‘The Hum’ is Chatwin's sixth solo album of experimental electronic music under his own name and his eleventh in total. It amplifies the hidden frequencies that swirl invisibly around us in the air all the time but which most of us never hear, including the 50Hz hum of the power grid that producers will know all too well from the studio but is almost undetectable to the human ear. “There are so many sounds around us that are lower and higher than we can hear,” Ben says. “I wanted to make it all audible.”
 Taking inspiration from Mika Vainio’s physical sound worlds and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s immersive soundtracks, ‘The Hum’’s emotive accumulations and caustic textures form dense stratas, with strings and analogue synths harnessed as melodic anchor points among electric storms of pulsating sound.
 After discovering the drone of his home he began extracting and amplifying as many ghost frequencies as he could from other sources to make tracks for the album. ‘Interference’ includes aeroplane communications pulled from the sky; ‘War of the Ants’ resurrects long lost echoes from previously erased recordings on blank tape. At one point, he found what sounded like human chorus in the signals - nobody else could hear it so he also brought in singer Kirsten Norrie (MacGillivray) and buried her voice in the mix among the signals on ‘Creep Strain’ and ‘Snow Crash’. Strings are arranged and performed by Ben’s regular collaborator Pete Harvey (Modern Studies).
 Ben avoided using the computer as a sound source, and most of ‘The Hum’ is completely analogue - it was mixed live and mastered to tape. This record marks a technological and textural leap in his music, as an album that is both made with and is about the hidden sounds of tubes, tape and the air between us all

Electronic songs composed, performed and produced by Benjamin Adams in Cologne 2024/2025. Mastered by Marcus Zilz at Mount Wobble Studio. Song 1, 7 and 8 originally composed for the performance on miraculous things heard by Constantin Leonhard. Song 8 includes samples of the Ringing Rocks of Montana, recorded and provided by Kevin Stahl.

Nearly all of my recorded music is pieced together from organized edits of various improvisations of some sort, via a composition process that generally involves cut/paste and superimposing those to a point of precision. Over time I’ve been curious about what gets lost in that process, in terms of representing how things develop over time and spontaneity. In 2016, I found myself with a 20-minute improvisation that felt distinguished in it's raw form, mistakes and all. It felt like a more guttural, gritty approach that represents how I actually “play” as an instrumentalist, which is something I’ve consciously downplayed in previous work out of preference for spatial and environmental elements. I sat on the piece for a while, then a year and a half later, when a second improvisation materialized that felt familial to the first, it seemed that a work had completed itself. Voice Damage is a bit of an exposure of the exploratory aspects of my process, where I’m not really thinking in terms of music composition or preconception, just playing in the moment as an instrumentalist. - Byron Westbrook 2019

Brazilian experimental multi-instrumentalist Carla Boregas follows plates for Bokeh Versions and Hive Mind with a ghostly set of deep listening electronics that plays like a symphony for an imagined woodwind orchestra.

Carla Boregas is best known from her tenure in São Paulo's genre-bending experimental post-punk scene, playing in long-running outfit Rakta as well as other related offshoots. Her solo material has been knottier to unpick, here developing ideas from a collection of unfinished fragments and notebook scribbles exploring the possibility of finding a wind instrument that could be played collectively by several musicians. Coinciding with the pandemic, however, she soon realised the inherent risks involved with sharing breath and so the concept took a different direction, with added resonance.

Boregas developed a synthetic alternative, layering vocals and environmental recordings to suggest wind instrumentation without attempting to mimic it. The sounds here are airy, but rarely diegetic - on the title track, Boregas uses analog arpeggios and plucked, sustained tones to approximate the kosmische world of Ash Ra Tempel or more recently Emeralds, as if trapped in a wind tunnel, moved forward by an unseen force.

There's a whisper of the ancient past that harmonises with Wojciech Rusin's speculative medieval gasps, and Bloedneus & de Snuitkever's severely underheard ‘Milli Mille’, an examination of the ancient Greek aulos. On ’Grafia Do Invisível' the sound is completely different again, but the concept remains, using precise analog drones and minuscule timbral shifts to imitate the character of a wind instrument and simultaneously harmonise with the deep listening meditations of Éliane Radigue and Kali Malone.

A voice enters the frame on 'Sopro’, chopped into deviated gulps and syllables, creating a language that's unfamiliar and percussive. The use of breath is subtle, and vocalisations criss-cross between synths and faint whistles, forming an expression that's different from its predecessors but intrinsically interlinked. This is where ‘Pena Ao Mar’ excels, by viewing breath and its application in electronic music from multiple angles simultaneously. Fans of Lucy Duncombe, Lucrecia Dalt, or Sarah Davachi - don't miss this one.

The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas", where a haunting melody hurtling towards its supernova climax felt like witnessing the life and death of a burning star. Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet - a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. The Spirit Exit opens and we fall in.

Phonetic script: Xièxie
Chinese characters: 谢谢
谢谢 ( xiexie / xièxie ) is composed of these characters: 谢 (xie) , 谢 (xie)
English translation: thank you, thanks
to say | to thank | literally means 'thanks'. 'Thank you' in Chinese would be xièxie nĭ (if you thank an individual), or xièxie nĭmen (to say thank you to a group of people).

- Chinese -> English Dictionary


A week before leaving, I bought a dictionary and phrasebook.

Covered in rain, during the days and even the nights, Shanghai was lit in a glow, a mist turning to a constant grey fog. Buildings lined with neon and lcd screens flashed, and from around corners and behind buildings, the night was illuminated much the same as the day. Cars separated the classes, their horns voices punctuating the streets, as pedestrians in groups loosely scattered the streets, talking and walking on speakerphone.

Standing by the metro escalators, there in the square with the overhanging trees of a park, there is construction all around. The buildings seem to be climbing into the darkness at... more

Inner islander Sean Conrad started his splinter ambient endeavor Channelers to make what he calls “essentialized sounds:” loose liquid states of intentional non-intentionality and letting go, conjured with keyboards, bowed guitar, flute, and voice. For Being, his latest, began in 2016 as a series of sessions all sharing this title, as an experiment to “steer my subconscious mind.” Each emerged patiently, from a place of intuition and experiential listening, eventually totaling roughly 40 pieces. Next Conrad cut them down, looping sections through FX and layering in minimal whispers of electric and acoustic textures, seeking to evoke “the simplest conceivable state: being.”

From the chiming horizon infinity of “Tune In” to the stardust planetarium glow of “Through And Through,” the album achieves a unique synergy of naturalist wonder and subliminal bliss, effectively disappearing within its own subdued cyclical serenities. It’s music as refracted light, clouds spilling down peaks to the sea, the molecular resonance swirling inside every cell. Tellingly, Conrad cites the “reclamation of time” as a key Channelers motive, which suits these elusive levitational mandalas, where minutes contain multitudes, time unfolds, and being becomes a shining path. Mastered at The Gentle Ways. Design by Sean Conrad.

Cristopher Cichocki is an interdisciplinary artist from the Coachella Valley, with an extensive body of work that examines transmorphic cycles of decay and renewal. His multi-faceted practice addresses environmental and socio-political disintegration above and beneath the surface of everyday perception.

Cichocki is as accomplished in maximalist, immersive composition as he is with painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and Land art interventions. Desert Drone Cycle returns from the Southern California desert and Salton Sea, a region which has long been a subject of his work as well as an integral source for his materials. Water recordings and windstorms are amplified and dilated into thrumming movements of ominous frequencies and hypnotic echo. Cichocki girds such sounds around a somatic rhythm akin to a heartbeat and frames the notion of the ‘drone’ both as the trance-inducing, keening sound, but also as the unnamed aircraft conducting infrared surveillance.

On one level, Cichocki’s sound research and experimental applications highlight the complexities around land use management when humanity encroaches upon sensitive environments. And on another, it stands as a harrowing document of isolationist composition paralleling that of Thomas Köner, Deathprod, Alan Lamb, and BJ Nilsen.

Originally pressed in August 2014 on black vinyl, The Delian Mode/Blue Veils 7” is being re-issued on MAGENTA vinyl.

Delia Derbyshire's work at the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop in the 60's was recognised initially for her realisation of the now iconic Doctor Who Theme which was written for the show by Ron Grainer. More recently though, she has been celebrated for her own compositions and experiments at what was then the cutting edge of electronic music. Here on 7" vinyl for the first time are two of her pieces, one written for a TV documentary in 1967, Blue Veils and Golden Sands, in which she used her own voice and a handy green BBC lampshade: "I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop's famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs."

On the A side is The Delian Mode, which was used as incidental music during The Sky At Night in 1969, finding critical acclaim in Gramophone Magazine's review of the album BBC RADIOPHONIC MUSIC (often known as The Pink Album), in September of the same year: "Structures, Pot au Feu and Tomorrow's World are about equally good, yet Blue Veils and Delian Mode are probably the finest music here. It may be no accident that the latter is reminiscent of the beginning of Xenakis's OrientOccident for Delia Derbyshire follows the analytical approach of the more sustained electronic compositions. If her best pieces seem the most imaginative here—and they are—it is because she more fully explores the implications of her material."

Danish textile texturalist Jonas Frederiksen’s solo endeavor Dreamers Cloth materialized late last decade in response to “a new-old type of sound” then ascendant among the international innerspace cassette community, characterized by bleached drift, miasmic memory, and inexpensive keyboards. Working from a wire-strewn Copenhagen apartment studio alcove, he quickly amassed a tapestry of tapes exploring parallel pathways of coastal fantasia and interstellar hallucination, issued via his own Relax With Nature imprint as well as various esteemed European esoterica outposts like Ikuisuus and Stenze Quo Musik. Frederiken speaks of seeking a sound evocative of daily suburban life while still cloaked in layers of “cosmic radiation, astral projections, crystal caves, shakra energy, dolphin communication, and extra-terrestrial presence.” Vitrospection 2008-2009 distills his dense but concise discography into a patchwork voyager’s hour of highlights, reflections, and reveries, ripped from the original spools for optimal aughts intra-sensory simulacrum. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.

In April of 2018, Drowse’s Kyle Bates left his home in Portland, OR, for an artist residency in barren northern Iceland. Much of Bates’ time there was spent in self-imposed isolation, giving him ample space to ponder the nature of solitude, and what it means to be “closed” or “open” to the world. Upon returning home, Bates worked obsessively. Maya Stoner, his longtime creative partner, sometimes came to sing, but recordings were mostly done alone. The dichotomy of his Icelandic musings materialized in a very real way as he neglected his personal relationships in favor of his art. While he was confronting his life-long fear of intimacy, and reconciling himself to a diagnosis of Bipolar 1, Bates found that the means he employed to conquer these obstacles—self reflection through art—carried with them an equal measure of misery. Light Mirror, Drowse’s second album for The Flenser, is a subtle exploration of these contradictory attitudes and their consequences that can be heard as an artifact of sonic self-sabotage.

Light Mirror falls within a lineage of overcast Pacific Northwest albums (think Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill), but finds Drowse pushing past its slowcore roots. The album’s prismatic sound reflects experimental electronic, noise pop, black metal, krautrock, and more through Kyle’s distinct song-worlds. The lyrics are ruminations on the idea of multiple-selves, identity, paranoia, fear of the body, alcohol abuse, social media, the power of memory, the truths that are revealed when one is alone, and the significance of human contact. They were influenced by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and poet Louise Glück, who both address self-contradiction. Mastered by Nicholas Wilbur (Mount Eerie, Planning for Burial) at the Unknown, the album showcases a striking maturation in sound. Light Mirror is Drowse’s most intimate and desolate work to date.

Drone legends Earth, the Seattle group led by Dylan Carlson, ready their first release on Fire Records. Deluxe Ltd edition 'Dark Star' effect vinyl with matte and spot UV sleeve, DL card. Unreleased live recording taken from their show at London's KOKO in 2016. Includes live renditions of fan favourites 'The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull' and 'High Command'. For fans of: Sunn O))), Sleep, Boris, OM, Spacemen 3, Witch, Hawkwind, Boris, Melvins. Seattle drone-rock titans Earth release their latest live document, WEM Dominator (Live in London NW1, 2016), an unrelenting display of the band's seismic force, recorded during their performance at London's KOKO in 2016. Sharing the bill with legendary heavyweights Neurosis, Earth delivered a set of hypnotic intensity, crushing volume, and towering, glacial beauty. For over three decades, Dylan Carlson and his ever-evolving ensemble have been crafting tectonic soundscapes that defy convention, forging a path between meditative drone and colossal doom-laden riffs. WEM Dominator is an album of mesmeric modal patterns, it's a recording that captures the trio's intricate, slowly evolving euphoria in a period when their experimentation swerved through endless possibilities. From the creeping grandeur of "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull" to the ominous crawl of "Even Hell Has Its Heroes," the album presents Earth at their most immersive and powerful. This record reasserts Earth's mastery of atmosphere and weight, where every note feels tectonic, and silence itself becomes an instrument of crushing tension. It is a hypnotic, stripped down sonic symphony embracing influences as wide ranging as the Velvet Underground, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, a visceral slow-motion reading of the original sound that inspired Sun O))) and the generation that followed. The lineup of this performance was Dylan Carson (guitar), Jodie Cox (baritone guitar) and Adrienne Davis (drums), it was recorded live at KOKO, London on November 7th 2016 and is mixed and mastered by Mell Dettmer at Studio Soli in Seattle.

Brown/Black smoke vinyl. Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method is the fourth full-length studio album by Earth. Contains a special vinyl only bonus track. Comes with 18"x24" poster exclusive to this release. Marking a new direction the band would follow in years to come, Hex stands in stark contrast to Earth's previous works. While retaining the extremely heavy doom/drone metal song structure of epic riffs over simple repetitive drum beats, the guitar was inflected with country influences that favored a cleaner reverb-heavy tone layered with acoustic instruments over the band's previous predilection for distortion. The press release cited diverse influences such as Ennio Morricone, Billy Gibbons, Neil Young's soundtrack to the movie Dead Man, country musicians Duane Eddy, Merle Haggard, and Roy Buchanan.

This is Ecovillage's debut PITP release titled, 'Clouds and Waves' featuring two PITP artists, Gallery Six and Ludvig Cimbrelius. "Clouds And Waves was inspired by nature and the inner journey." White shell cassette tape with black imprinting, housed in a clear norelco box and shrink wrapped. Loaded with FerroMaster C456 super ferric, ultra-high performance type-1 music grade analog tape

Virga I is the first album in a new ambient music series by Eluvium. Matthew Cooper, the composer behind the Eluvium moniker, explains: "I had recently been playing around with various forms of generative music and long-format looping, as well as practicing patienceinteracting with musical systems and recordings, hesitantly dueting with them, trying to keep things minimal while also encouraging as much depth as possible. It was really just something fun to privately experiment with for personal gain. Over time I'd created a group of pieces and had them on various mixes that I would make for myself, but I hadn't really given them much thought. Over the winter, my wife and I were subjected to an unexpected move from our home, into our tiny garage studio as we had some work done on the house. It was a little like an unexpected backyard camping trip but with two dogs and two people in a very small space, with the majority of our belongings in boxes on the driveway all while weathering a snowstorm. It got a little weird in there, but also oddly comfortable. At some point, my evenings became very much about relaxing, stretching, and breathing to these pieces. They gradually fostered a very specific mood that I found intoxicating. The music seemed to enhance the soft orange glow in this small room in the dark of night, with the snow falling just outside. They also reminded me of some of my earliest works, those which were a bit less researched and considered. Perhaps they were simply more "felt" than anything.

It occurred to me that other people might find that peculiar feeling inside these works in the same manner that I have, and that I might enjoy returning to working in this way again soon. I decided it might be nice to start a series inspired by this setup. A place for me to relax and experiment with emotions, and slow movements with various toys in my studio, in honor of strange deep feelings, gentle touches, and memories from a long time ago. I titled it Virga, after the drifting of rain we sometimes catch drooping on the horizon, disappearing before it reaches the ground."

Also Available From Eluvium:
Pianoworks 2LP, CD, 2CD,
False Readings On 2LP, CD,
Life Through Bombardment Vol. 2 7xLP,
Nightmare 2CD,
The Motion Makes Me Last CDEP,
Leaves Eclipse The Light EP CDEP,
Similes CD,Copia 2LP / CD,
Talk Amongst the Trees 2LP / CD,
An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death CD,
Lambent Material CD.

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (b. 1934) is a German composer of minimalist and reductionist contemporary music. Since the early 1960s, he has been developing a unique compositional style that draws on minimalist structures and repetitions, though not in any way related to the so-called Minimal Music, but rather influenced by Minimalism in visual art and characterized by long static tones that slowly change and evolve over the course of a piece. Stiebler has composed for solo instruments as well as for different chamber musical and orchestral line-ups. Many of his ensemble pieces are built around long tones coming together in specific intervals, often alternating between dissonance and harmony, sometimes involving microtonal structures. Often, the single instruments are hard to distinguish, instead the musical space opened up by the complex harmonies, disharmonies and interfering pulses becomes the focus of listening.

This double LP collects four live recordings of pieces journeying "between the tones" ("zwischen den Tönen"): "Intervall 19" and "Slow Motion", composed in 1997 and 2003, respectively, are apt examples of Stiebler's style set for chamber ensembles, with static tones putting every tonal nuance under microscopic view, and slow movement allowing for observation of the slightest variations. The third piece, "Zwischen den Tönen" (1997) is an anomaly in his oeuvre in that it makes use of his distinct techniques but is written for women's choir. The edition is rounded off by a recent recording, "ortung" (2018), again for chamber ensemble, that displays a newfound ease and compositional intuition that has become apparent in Stiebler's recent work. All recordings are previously unreleased.

"With great concentration the essence of sound becomes clear in Stiebler's late work, here in the heyday of his advanced age, and this has brought his music to the listeners and locations of the alternative avant-garde of noise, ambient and the real-time music scene, in which a culture of heartfelt dedication to sound has long existed. The fact that Stiebler's initiation of precise listening also constitutes a challenge to the cultivation of classical music (he is a great admirer of Mozart) has not yet been properly recognized." (from the liner notes by Matthias R. Entreß)

Edition of 300 in single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. Liner notes in German and English by Matthias R. Entreß and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler.

Full tracklisting A Intervall 19 B Slow Motion C Ortung D Zwischen den Tönen