Aigners Inventur – February 2025 8 Items

The naturally open-ended navigation of themes in
Seven Reorganisations
is exemplary of an artist whose
thoughtfully considered catalogue is hailed among the most notable in modern experimental music. Beatrice
Dillon’s first entirely acoustic composition allows her ideas on fundamentals of space and light, structure and
tone, to unfold in beguiling, inspirational new directions unveiling whole new facets of a musical vision that
continues to reveal itself with each new release.
Derived from a Mark Fell commission, the album features a version recorded in a London studio setting, and
another taken as a live recording made at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2023. The same compositions are here articulated
by the same performers, distinguished by subtle alterations of atmosphere and dynamics on each side.
The studio parts remain tethered to Beatrice’s practice with the use of discrete edits of drily close-mic’d
parts judiciously rearranged across the stereo field with a near-hallucinatory minimalism. In exquisite
juxtaposition, the live iteration relinquishes that control to Explore Ensemble’s sextet of players cycling the
piece’s musical cells in a reverberant room. The recordings encourage listeners to revel in psychoacoustic
frissons of overtones and microtonal, timbral intricacy, whilst also highlighting the way her score appears to
prompt the performers to stop, breathe, listen and look around them, before deciding where to go next.
The schisms of fixedness and ephemerality to
Seven Reorganisations
are surely in keeping with Dillon’s
enduring obsessions with structure and motion in organised sound, but can also be attributed to an ever
expanding grasp of interrelated artforms. Extramusical cues from W.R. Bion’s psychoanalytic assertion
“Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available”, and the deconstructionist philosophy
of S. Korea’s Byung Chul-Han’s statement, “Leaving things out, to better hear what’s kept in”, are guiding
principles as much as the misty depth perception found in Hasegawa Tohaku’s C.16th Japanese folding
screens, or the shifting focal points of Terri Weifenbach’s photography (as featured on this album’s cover).
Perfect metaphors for the way the composition and mixing seduces you into its filigree detail and use of
negative space - the listener activating its latent detail.
Comparable to Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ in its etheric, harmonious beauty, or Pascale Criton’s ‘INFRA’ in how
the music feels out the spaces in-between, Beatrice’s clean diversion from club music exposes a related,
but whole other, architecture of sound that propels the imagination, embodied in reverie. Close listening
rewards with passages of frankly astonishing iridescent beauty in the arp flutters of ‘Seven Reorganisations I’
andsublime tension of its lulled lacunæ in ‘Seven Reorganisations II’, with an absence of repeating melody that
makes return journeys feel like revisiting a perpetually unresolved, waking dreamscape.

Superior Viaduct and our new artist label, W.25TH, are proud to continue to be the home for Cindy Lee with the physical release of the celebrated album Diamond Jubilee. Universally praised, shortlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, and already hailed by Pitchfork as the 3rd best album of the 2020s, anticipation and conversation around the record has been high.

Cindy Lee is the performance and songwriting vehicle of Patrick Flegel (who previously fronted influential indie group Women). Over several albums, Flegel has combined delicate melodies and sheer beauty with moments of experimentation. With Diamond Jubilee, Flegel’s undeniable songcraft comes to the foreground, embracing a more instant connection and accessibility. Timeless tales of love and longing, surrounded by sticky hooks, take the listener on an unforgettable journey.

Diamond Jubilee was written and recorded over several years by Patrick Flegel in Toronto, Durham, Calgary and Montreal at Realistik Studios. The album was mixed by Steven Lind, who also contributes to several tracks and co-wrote “Baby Blue,” and was mastered by Joshua Stevenson. Triple LP on black vinyl comes with 24” x 36” poster.

The electronic album you’ve all been waiting for has arrived! Detroit-born drum slayer Gerald Cleaver is making this summer even better with the upcoming release of a new, mysterious electronic ensemble that takes us to the next level of his unique avant-garde approach. Known for his ability to use the unpredictability of improvisation to deliver an unbelievable experience, Cleaver explains that the theme of The Process is the “celebration of the freedom and power of the Black American male.” Its very name bears the idea of persisting, of becoming everlasting. He likens The Process (both the album and his methods) to the evolution of Detroit’s robust music scene, highlighting the importance of reaching a younger audience to keep its “Electrifying Mojo” alive and thriving. Every note on The Process weaves together Gerald’s deep love and appreciation for the city that shaped him, its rich culture, and his relentless passion for creating transcendent yet relatable music that is to be felt (not only heard).

The core duo of Max D and Matt Papich debut on Peak Oil following full-lengths for Future Times and PAN with a fresh suite of tactile, diffuse fusion. Half the collection emerged from a 2021 session at Tempo House rounded out by Dustin Wong, Mezey, and Jeremy Hyman, while the rest took shape in moments both collaborative and isolated, collaged together with CDJs into something more liquid and liminal than the sum of its parts.

Across fractured jazz, pitch-shifted downtempo, revelatory guitar, and interstitial interplay, Lifted’s sound is one of flux, fragments, and filigree. Oblique harmonic synergies dusted in chance encounters and rogue acoustics. Diverse moods mapped with split strings and the space between notes. Music untethered by form or expectation, snaking like an ungrounded cable through a geodesic dome of deep-listening.

On his latest full-length, Low End Activist swerves towards weightless grime and suspended hardcore miniatures to tell a very personal story. The UK-rooted producer continues his habit of zeroing in on a distinct approach for each release, leaving a logical breadcrumb trail of soundsystem science in his wake as he channels decades of bass absorption into 14 atmospheric cuts that prize patience and precision over obvious club functionality.

Municipal Dreams plays out as a semi-autobiographical tour through the Blackbird Leys estate that the Activist grew up on. It’s a lived reflection on inequality and the ripple effect it has in working class communities, using the sonic palette to set the mood and scattering pointed samples throughout to spell out the story.

In sampling the exhaust of a stolen Subaru Impreza, ‘TWOC’ looks back to the recreational car theft which was standard entertainment for the kids in his community. There’s an underlying idea that this ‘council estate sport’ wouldn’t have been so prevalent if there were public services and opportunities presented to the scores of disaffected youth looking for somewhere to direct their energy and frustration.

In ‘Just A Number (Institutionalised)’ LEA alludes to the shattered juvenile detention system, growing up seeing friends and family members locked up at ease with little to no support on being released back into society, just meant that the same cycles of behaviour would play out over and over.

‘Violence’ samples from a short film shot by the drama division of the Blackbird Leys Youth Club to evoke the physical threat which formed a background hum to life on the estate. The industrial mechanics of the local car factory, which served an integral role as a workplace for many in the community, gets sampled in ‘They Only Come Out At Night’ while the ‘Everyone I look up to are either junkies or criminals’ sample in ‘Broke’ looks to a lack of positive role models.

Municipal Dreams isn’t a one-note indictment of life on the estate, ‘Innocence’ captures the simplicity of a child at birth before their environment has time to shape them. The Hope interludes cut through the grim honesty of the longer tracks while a subtle thread of wry humour finds its way into some of the talking heads cutting through the signature LEA murk.

But honesty is the operative word here, and the message feels all the more meaningful at a time when the UK’s social divisions are laid bare in the wake of a devastating stretch of austerity. Returning to Blackbird Leys to shoot images for the photo-zine and album cover, the Activist found the local community centre being demolished. The local pub stands derelict, its faded Welcome sign a grimly ironic portent of the options facing children of the estate in the wider world.

Funnelling his memories, hopes and fears into a singular twist on the bass weight tradition, LEA captures evocative scenes that land somewhere between kitchen sink realism and rave futurism.

The Well is the second album by the duo So Sner, composed of Susanna Gartmayer (bass clarinet) and Stefan Schneider (electronics). Recorded over nearly two years in various studios and spaces, the album reflects So Sner"s extensive touring across Europe. The final mixing took place in Vienna at the studio of Martin Siewert, who served as both co-producer and mastering engineer. Known for his meticulous attention to sonic detail, Siewert brings his unique techniques and distinctive sound enhancements to the album, resulting in a work that is both stylistically cohesive and daringly uncompromising.

Highly regarded as a former resident at Salon Des Amateurs at his native Düsseldorf, Tolouse Low Trax/Detlef Weinrich has carved one of the most distinctive sounds in contemporary leftfield club music thanks to his deeply unusual grooves and hypnotic arrangements over the past 15 years as a solo artist. Fung Day is his first album with entirely new material since Leave me alone which was released through Bureau B in 2022. Fung Day was written and recorded over the course of two years, slowly mutating and progressing from one state to another. Mixed, produced and finally mastered in Paris, his new domicile by choice.