Subtext HHV Records 6 Items

Emptyset present ash — a new collection of sound experiments developed over the last three years and assembled in Bristol during summer 2023.

The work draws on the project's roots in structural percussion and physical sonics, employing spatialised recording techniques and an array of analogue hardware,evoking the transformative and sculptural properties of sound.

The release marks a return for the collaborative duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, following Ginzburg's work within the exploratory performance group Osmium and Purgas' extensive research into the history of India's first electronic music studio. It brings them back to Bristol where the project first began, channeling the echoes of the city's sound system culture and resonant musical continuum, anchoring their sound within its formative origins.

Zuli's widest-reaching and most ambitious album to date, 'Lambda' is a conspicuous left turn for the Berlinbased Egyptian producer. Draped in gauzy, granulated textures and woven with enigmatic vocal flourishes from collaborators Michaelbrailey, Coby Sey and Abdullah Miniawy, it's a vivid, soul-searching set of polychromatic reflections that sets fire to the boundaries between ambient, trip-hop, industrial music, chamber pop and symphonic noise.

In some aspects, 'Lambda' reveals Zuli's softer side; gone are the earth-shaking chopped rhythms and stopstart outbursts of corroded static that characterised his last full length, 'Digla Dive - Live'. But peer beneath the brain burrowing vocal melodies, mangled instrumental loops, anxious poems and subtle, harmonic synth washes and a new kind of intensity lurks in the shadows.

Since his early releases on Lee Gamble's UIQ label and his 2018 breakout 'Trigger Finger', Zuli has notched up major global acclaim for his futuristic, kinetic musical diversions. He cut his teeth supplying beats to local rappers back home in Cairo, soon shifting his attention to the city's burgeoning dance underground, promoting events, DJing prolifically and tirelessly supporting the scene's most experimental fringe. In 2019, Zuli teamed up with Rama to curate the irsh series of video transmissions, evolving the project into a label shortly afterwards. And now situated in Berlin, the duo have extended the concept to encompass an ongoing sequence of genre-averse club nights. All this experience and constant creative motion is etched into the foundations of 'Lambda'. It's an album that plays liberally with euphoria, but feels constantly precarious, intrepidly peering out from its tense internal world.

Alexander Tucker has announced details of a new album, Fifth Continent, a posthumous collaboration with Keith Collins (1966-2018). The album, which pays homage to Keith Collins, his partner and collaborator Derek Jarman (1942-1994), and the Kentish headland, Dungeness – will be released on Subtext Recordings on February 24th, 2023.

An accompanying anthology, Fifth Quarter, will be published on the same day. The book will collate new and archive work by artists, photographers and writers reflecting on Collins, Jarman, one of England’s most unique landscapes, Dungeness and Prospect Cottage, their former home and sanctuary.

Artistic collaborations don't have to be exhaustive, competitive or combative. And for Berlin-based producers James Ginzburg and Ziúr, their work together as myxomy has been almost effortless. Both artists bring with them a deep history of recording in vastly different circumstances: Ginzburg has worked on bass music, folk, experimental techno (as half of Emptyset) and experimental drone, while Ziúr played in a number of bands before settling into her current explorative electronic mode. So when they started working together in 2020, it was their respective backgrounds that provided the touch-paper for an explosive artistic head-to-head.

Ginzburg instigated the process by sending Ziúr beats he'd made in Bristol in a former life, and Ziúr, fresh from finishing her PAN-released third solo album "Antifate", set about sculpting them into completely new forms. In response, Ziúr dispatched vignettes to Ginzburg and he did the same. As they exchanged ideas back and forth and lapsed into absurdity, the songs followed suit, evolving from raw concepts and loops into proper songs as both Ziúr and Ginzburg traded melodies, lyrics and production tricks. The duo's fragmented sketches and scribbles took on new life, channeled, refined and re-invigorated as they developed into anxious, hybridized pop jewels.

Their surprising stylistic choice is revealed immediately on opening track 'Sloppy Attempt', a fractured mood stabilizer that dissociates from Bristolian trip-hop into glossy android pop. Ziúr's singing voice carries the track into a sonic black hole, mutated into an alien gurgle as she gently coos the prophetic words, "a sloppy attempt won't cut it, no no." And as Ginzburg takes the reins on 'A little opaque', singing over Ziúr's twisted neon electronics, it's clear that both artists have pushed each other outside of their comfort zones, providing the reassurance and comfort necessary to evolve.

On 'In and Until', they find an exact median between their two most recent albums. Twanging hurdy-gurdy sounds remind of Ginzburg's 'crystallise, a frozen eye', compelled forward by brittle foley percussion we last heard on "Antifate". A scalding industrial boil of deranged synthesizer squeals and rolling drums parts like the Red Sea on 'Toxin Out', cooling to a crust for Ziúr's half-sung words to echo overhead. "Burn the bridges it's a choice, eat the rich, and throw up on the fuckbois."

"Myxomy" isn't an overtly political album, but driven by a desire to create and a shared philosophical space, Ziúr and Ginzburg are naturally outspoken. Their vision of pop is twisted through history and floated on frustration, growth and constant reinvention. It's a unique mix of polar elements - light and dark, noise and silence, joy and melancholy - that centers itself on one important theme: together, we're far more powerful than we ever could be alone.

Roly Porter returns to Subtext with 'Kistvaen'. The LP takes its name from a type of granite tomb found pre-dominantly in Dartmoor, an area in southwestern England. Scattered across the moorlands, the kistvaens were often found covered in a mound of earth and stone. They housed dead bodies, allowing them to lie facing the sun.

With 'Kistvaen', Porter speculates on the burial site as a mirror, or a gate in time. Excavating stories and images of ancient burial rituals, the record teases out similarities in emotional and social rituals between the Neolithic period and today. While a myriad of social, cultural and technological factors drastically differentiate our contemporary period and the end of the Stone Age, certain affinities may still be found in experiences of death across eras.

Venturing across histories, Porter soundtracks a moorland burial unanchored in time. Raw, unprocessed vocals are folded into field recordings made in the area, wordlessly relaying tableaus of burial rituals in Neolithic Dartmoor. 'Kistvaen' features three singular vocalists—Mary-Anne Roberts, from medieval Welsh music duo Bragod; Ellen Southern, of Bristol's Dead Space Chamber Music group; and Phil Owen, a singer and researcher in vocal traditions.

Recorded in part at BinkBonk studios in Bristol and during various performances and rehearsals, 'Kistvaen' is Roly Porter’s fourth solo studio album and his first since 2016’s 'Third Law,” released on Tri Angle. It follows previous releases on Subtext such as 2013’s 'Life Cycle of a Massive Star” and 2011’s 'Aftertime.'

The pieces that comprise 'Kistvaen' were developed for an audio visual piece of the same name with visual artist MFO, which has appeared at Unsound, Berlin Atonal, and Sonic Acts amongst others.

Başak Günak is a Istanbul-born, Berlin-based sound artist and composer, also internationally known as AH! Kosmos in the field of electronic music. Her work includes sound art, performance, sound installation, composition for theater & contemporary dance. In her forthcoming solo album ‘Rewilding,’ Başak Günak has worked with the themes of (auto-)rewilding, foraging and decay, while also incorporating sounds she has gathered from her sound art and sound installations. Rewilding embodies the sounds of whistles, whispers, a deconstruction of a South-Eastern Anatolian folk song and the instruments; organ, bass clarinet, halldrophone, Buchla 100 and a broken piano. As foraging does not require territorial exclusivity, Başak Günak weaves together three songs from her sound installations presented in 2020 and 2023. While reimaging whispers, whistles, murmurs and sine waves as the auto-rewilders of the soundscape of the album, Günak creates a soft and porous medium that later disappears into the swamp. Sometimes these whistles take the form of a distant sound of a murmur that tends to disappear and then reaches to the surface again and overflows into audibility.