Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 413 Items

Based in the South Moravian city of Brno, Finnish multi-instrumentalist Simo Hakalisto aka Shakali crafts surreal terrariums of strings, synthetics, wood, and wind, teeming with bio-electronic synchronicities. Rihmastossa further finesses the project’s eclectic lexicon of electro-acoustic world-building, utilizing a gallery of instruments both ancient and advanced: solar-powered sine wave generators, singing bowls, metallophones, microtonal synths wired into tree slabs, lap harps, amplified found objects, percussion filters, flutes.

This is world music in the most naturalistic sense – subtle spatial ecosystems of climate, vibration, landscape, and species, as alluded to in the track titles about fungal colonies, extinct birds, rare worms, and pine forests. Hakalisto’s work in various exploratory duos (Gnäw, Lunar Horns, Thistle) has honed his instincts for atmospheric improvisation, but when alone he embeds even deeper into the terrain, acting as conduit as much as creator. Across seven free-flowing fugue states of texture and resonance, his touch simmers beneath the surface, guided by shifting light and hidden hands.

When Russian musicians Vladimir Karpov (X.Y.R.) and Dmitriy Borodin began making hushed, liminal, ASMRbient dream pop together in the late 2000’s, the underground landscape was thick with artists using mystical monikers, so they chose to troll in the opposite direction: 2muchachos. Although the original intent was to filter out listeners “who judge by name or cover,” they were soon joined by Aleksandra Evseeva (aka Andra Ljos), rendering their banner even more incongruous and comical.

Titles aside, the collaboration was fruitful, spanning nearly half a decade of steadily refined activity. Natura 2009-2012 collects 76 minutes of the trio’s most cloaked and bewitched recordings, evolving from the “northern environmental folktronica” of their early years through to the whispered fairytale ambient voyaging of 2012’s haunted swansong, Forest Is Not What It Seems.

The tracks are sourced from an array of digital singles, compilations, and self-released CD-Rs, mapping a non-chronological odyssey of the group’s skeletal, subliminal songcraft. Karpov’s signature Soviet Formanta synth weaves within windswept guitar, fragile percussion, and field recordings of forest birds and endless steppes, occasionally accented with Andra’s glimmering, ghostly voice. It’s music of isolation and introspection, poetic and remote, murmuring through mists and long winters, flickering with the color of springs yet to bloom.

Potapanje Brodova, Hrvatski for “sinking ships”, is a follow-up to Robert’s intricate 2020 album Finomehanika “wherein piano, field recordings and synths are made indistinguishable from one another”, as described by The Wire. The A-side on Potapanje Brodova is compiled and reworked from a soundtrack for an installation of the same name in Rijeka in 2005, about the Croatian port city’s post-war industrial collapse. The original hour-long soundtrack played on a loop during the month-long exhibition, and today resides on a USB stick housed in a rusty steel case with silver ship engraving—a limited edition of 1 copy that is now the property of Rijeka's Museum of Contemporary Arts. The B-side offers a monumental 25-minute prepared piano improv piece recorded in 2004, followed by Hodnik, a track from Finomehanika sessions.

The new album The Commune Of Nightmares by noise artist David Wallraf is a tapeloop- based musical game of cadavre exquis, a technique developed by surrealist artists. David Wallraf is a noise artist and theorist living in Hamburg. His artistic work deals with the repressed and uncanny sonic residues of quotidian life, crafting soundtracks for the creeping disaster we inhabit. His works have been released on numerous international tape labels. A recent interest of his is the live scoring of silent films, including works by Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and Jean Genet. His PhD thesis Grenzen des Hörens. Noise und die Akustik des Politischen (Limits of Hearing. Noise and the Acoustics of the Political) has been published in German, an English translation is in progress. The Commune of Nightmares stems from the idea that nightmares are the logical reverse of ‘capitalist realism’: an uncanny undercurrent of daily experiences and an algorithmic haunting of dreams that at the same time is a shared – communal – experience of everybody. All songs are based on tapeloops that were cut arbitrarily from a stash of cassettes, some of which found on the street, others from a stockpile of 4 track tapes recorded in the late 90s and early 2000s – a musical game of cadavre exquis played with random strangers and former versions of DW.

The Trilogy comes to an Epic end! Raydar delivers the final chapter to Evil Squad. Enjoy!

A Huge moment for NRW. Presenting the debut album from Pylot. Axiom is a power-packed project that harnesses many facets of synth and delivers them with glorious, well rounded execution. Boasting encapsulating melodies and rhythms, Axiom is an album that all synth enthusiasts and Audiophiles will enjoy. Pre-Order Today!

Pulled straight down, deep beneath the twisted megastructures of the Lost, in search of an unreachable answer. To turn his back on everything, and pay the ultimate price.

Disappearing into a dimension of unknowable size where time ceased to exist, his mind fractured into pieces.

Embraced by reflections, old voices, memories and nightmares disguised as dreams, he vanished.

The Void takes many forms.

Who knows what you’ll witness, where souls come to bear their all.

Hazy, gentle almost euphoric explorations and improvisations made in Leeds and Manchester throughout 2019 and 2020. Sam and Chris understand, lean in to, and translate those wonderful relationships and historic personal moments that smudge in to your DNA forever. Their language is of classic genre playing and hardware samplers, and they’ve made a record about low down personal shit; our deep trauma, beautiful platonic love, isolation, connection, it's all there; Blunches look and listen to the world around them and have created their own version of it. It’s like those summers watching skate videos, feeling upset all the time, getting into bed at 4am, being with your mates, just getting through it. This record doesn’t have a lyric in it, yet it speaks to me as a kid from a grey-ass town as clear as any pop song ever has. I dare you to play this and not feel it.

Riyl/ffo - 90s skate videos, jazz, hop hop, fourth world, Eno, Hassel, Sanders

LBD Sounds present the new album from World Wild Web. Based in Berlin, this one man band machine from France offers up a beautiful collection of balearic jams, soaked up with instrumental psychedelic keyboards, influenced by traditional music from all over the world. 10 organ-based tracks sound like a dreamy new age voyage from the 70s, yet this music is very here and now.

All the little live jams that this album comprises of have been tweaked and edited, some more and some less, but the feeling of raw improvised music has remained untouched. These don't mean to be no chart hits, actually quite the opposite. It may almost be called a set of B-sides and it would still carry this badge as proud as it gets. It's simple and complex at the same time, this collection has a potential to suck you in, take you for a ride through places unknown and spit you out at the other end.

Was that a dream?

Hailing from Baltimore, Punjabi-American sitar player, songwriter and ambient musician Ami Dang unites the disparate worlds of Indian classical music and dreamy synth-infused song composition on beguiling new album The Living World’s Demands. Envisioned as a lament to the challenges to which humanity has subjected the world and itself, Ami Dang’s newest album builds on the floating, blissful ambience of 2019’s Parted Plains and the vocal-led, pop structures of 2020 collaborative release Galdre Visions (a bona fide ambient supergroup also featuring Green-House and Nailah Hunter). The Living World’s Demands is an immensely evocative and expressive collection, just as complex, nuanced and precious as the living world in its title. Within are themes of trauma, survival, resistance, desperation and righteous vitriol, responding to greed, fear and injustice, yet the music is often euphoric, disarming and breathtakingly beautiful. Lilting sitar lines sparkle about an unpredictably broad spectrum of synthesis; Indian classical percussion rattles and snakes through its drum programming. And atop, Ami’s astonishing singing voice - with lyrics of English and Punjabi - deftly weaves her two worlds together with silken threads of both contemporary and traditional textures. Amrita “Ami” Kaur Dang has studied North Indian classical music (voice and sitar) in both New Delhi and Maryland, and she also holds a degree in music technology & composition from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Following in the footsteps of artists like Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, she seeks to advance the sound of contemporary experimental, pop, and electronic music with the sounds of South Asia—through vocals and sitar, ragas, and sampling. She has collaborated with Animal Collective, William Cashion (of Future Islands), James Acaster, Thor Harris—to name a few. She has performed onstage with Beach House, black midi, Grimes, Lower Dens, Florist and more. The Living World’s Demands is a co-release between Phantom Limb and LA’s Leaving Records.

Constellation Tatsu has been mad busy of late with a great series of tapes dropping at the start of 2023. Next up is Strategy aka Portlander Paul Dickow with his new album Graffiti In Space, which is perfectly titled. If finds him making a widescreen and wide-eyed exploration of dub techno's outermost galaxies. He foments a unique style all his own with the empty iciness of 'Remote Dub', the frosted-over darkness of 'Fountain Of Youth' and watery liquid dub of 'Daydream Space Graffiti'. Things get psychedelic on 'Message From Ouroboros', more playful and bubbly on 'In Space No One Can See You Your Screen' and uplifting on ' Surface Worlds.' A fine record.

Alvars Orkester was formed in 1987 in Johannishus, a small village in the south-east of Sweden by a group of young boys interested in the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, industrial music culture and the power of sound. For the first very creative years, Alvars was very active within the independent cassette culture scene releasing their stuff (that quite soon drifted from the industrialism inspired by Test Dept, TG, SPK and z'ev to an atmospheric, psychedelic and quite ambient version of noise) on small labels in Italy, Portugal, USA etc.
Joachim Nordwall writes: "1990-1991. In the middle of all teen confusion going on, me and Zwarre had a long creative time together. Recording every weekend, connecting with like-minded (or at least we thought so) people around the world and trading tapes with whoever. Our world was analogue synths, Party Zone late Friday nights on MTV, zines and out-there experimental music. By then, we had a few tapes out and had "Nobody Finds Nothing" being released on the Italian super-label (in our opinion) Biotope Art Organization. We were in the midst of something and recorded "Nuthull" for another Italian top level label called Old Europa Café. However, they did not like it and the tape was abandoned and forgotten. Then years and years later, close to present time, Zwarre was in touch with OEC for some reason and had the master returned." - Joachim Nordwall, Gothenburg, 21 February 2023

Manhattan’s resident innerspace organist Zack Tornaben centers the third installment of his ongoing Rules & Chance series on breath, tone, and the ancient Qigong practice, “Eight Pieces of the Silk Brocade.” Working once again with the classic Golden Hallway Music palette of a pair of reel-to-reel tape machines, a 49-key Acetone combo organ, and an 80’s synth clone, he records everything live without overdubs in sprawling séance sessions, then digitally transfers them for distillation into choice excerpts.

Swirling, shivering reveries of skylines and stained glass, Tornaben’s process prizes intuition, intimacy, and “feeling around in the dark,” inspired by a pantheon of greats from the grand tradition of harmonic divination – Young to McClellan, Brouk to Battiato. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 gently expands his evolving lexicon of daydream minimalism, levitational and limitless, born of passing thoughts and everyday joys, rippling in the mind like light on water.

"The New World" is the second album by Bologna Violenta. Released for the first time in 2010 by Bar La Muerte, it is a record that in just over 20 minutes tells in a grotesque way the atrocities of the world in which we live. The extreme sound is underlined by samplings that bring to mind the narratives that accompanied the much reviled world movies of the 60s in which the oddities of the human being followed one another on the screen between the serious and the humorous, between the horror and the eroticism, between news and fiction, seamlessly.

Edition of 70.

Art by Thilo Jenssen Layout by Kin40k & Semj

“A Magnetic Road to Hell” is Robert Millis and Bardo Todol’s first release as a duo. Recorded transcontinentally throughout 2021 and 2022 they traded sounds and ideas between Cordoba, Argentina and Seattle, USA with a stop in Mexico along the way: screamings, rivers, kids, radios, mellotron, records, 78rpm shellac, wax cylinders, field recordings, birds, electronics, guitars, percussion, haze, static, a destroyed Indian piano, talkative violins, talkative people from the 1920s, talkative black and white dreams, tin cans from the streets, Argentinian children's tales about cows being teachers, and more. You’re riding on an unspooling reel of tape, through sounds real and imagined, the tape flapping dangerously, shredding; we are all of us magnetized, attracting together, pushing apart, unwinding onto the floor, stumbling along the road to hell. Robert Millis and Bardo Todol have each released music on many different labels: Sublime Frequencies, Dinzu Artefacts, The Helen Scardale Agency, Discrepant, Abduction Records, Dust-to-Digital, Fire Breathing Turtle, Sub Pop, and Ikuisuus.

Odd and fluid tape manipulations by Gonçalo F. Cardoso’s most bizarre moniker, Hannibal Chew III. Grabbing the deteriorated recordings left over from his 2017 trip to the title island and letting his imagination and machines run free, the journey here is hectic: mud, rain, radio jingles, crickets, confusing conversations and random mall music resulting in an eternal looping impression from whatever was ingrained. A dream/nightmare logic that manages to never make total sense, we should be thankful for that as nothing, ever is really like we remember so why should this be? ‘’In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost’’ Mark Fisher in Ghost of my Life Based on half remembered memories from the island of Borneo, 2017. All tracks were later re-composed under semi-lockdown in Lisbon, 2020. Pressed on a limited edition of 100 copies Artwork by Pablo Picco

Andean inspired home recordings from Tomás Tello - solo and with friends. ACA (roughly translated as right here) is a new project by Tomás Tello enabling him to collaborate with whoever crosses his paths creating a truly mystifying journey of highland mysticism crossed with late night bonfire jams, whichever way you look at it Tello keeps the South American experimentalism torch flying high above in the starry sky. Tomás had this to say about the album: ‘’Where I live the crickets never stop chirping… and during quarantine they kept going and going and going … Grillito (small cricket in Spanish) was recorded in Tavira, Portugal between 2019 and 2020 in various impromptu sessions. Side A begins, appropriately, with the theme Grillito ... the opening is inspired by the music of the Sikuris. Next comes Yarabits, recorded with Raul Jardín and Aya. I recorded the rest of the side by myself including some field recordings of the Quelccaya glaciar in Cuzco, Peru. Side B extends the concept to its illogical conclusion with an infinity mix between the Quelccaya recordings and various songs that I recorded with Daniel Llermaly on bass and a Nintendo making simple beats...I also decided to include an homemade cover of Olas de Verano by Los Pakines and a cumbia samba by Juaneco y su combo. Eventually the album peaks with a long section I recorded with Laura Robles using the Cajón... I mixed those recordings with others of the Pacific Ocean spray in Lima. It’s really nice to have this music committed to tape because when I started playing music it was with Laura Robles, so it's really special to have recorded this! Grillito, for me, is a displacement between different memories and fantasies that appear when I remember traveling on Peruvian roads... each theme is like looking through a window on a bus...you sleep and wake up and you are in another type of territory...in the desert...in the highlands....in the city... in a small town ... next to the sea … inside your memory... these are long, long trips ... The little crickets are there to remind us that we are not alone... a nature musical gift. ‘’

Josh Burke is a guitarist/keyboardist/programmer from Chicago, USA, who specialises in a music that could, perhaps, best be described as an amalgamation of drone, kosmische and ambient, all with a distinctly euphoric flavour, as though these sounds were channelled rather than thoroughly composed.
He has over 30 solo releases to his name as well as splits with Jeffrey Astin (of Xiphiidae), Spirals and Body Morph, and also - like most of his peers - operates under several additional aliases - Ocean Diamond, Futuresport, The Masque, Silk Fountain, 56K, Sky Limousine and Nehal Shah - as well as ensemble and collaborative projects including Bermuda Link, Cartoon Drips, White Prism, Practical Applications Of The Chaossphere, Starfox, Camp Crystal Lake and Holographic Communications Of The Third Sky.

There was a time when a person would pick up an instrument to compose yet another song for a loved one. A sad figure humming into a microphone, pronouncing the most basic words and forms to convey quantity, quality, fact, statistics and similar sounds describing pain, loss and sorrow. The human brain would perceive the melody sad and perhaps within herself feel a sense of melancholia.

In another parallel world a new composition would then appear. But not one composed on a wooden built instrument, no, sounds made into structures and tables that would assists the listener into providing an additional context and meaning through digital synthesis and quantised harmonies. But who could really tell if these sounds were real? Or where they just sounds impersonating an idea of something?

Rhyme nor reason is as abstract in its shapes and ideas as it is concrete and elegant in its narratives. A carefully crafted wooden cabinet with an over-whelming amount of different drawers and hidden compartments. Each box storing blissful arrangement; a fluorescent stone, a paper note saying something about lunch, some collectible objects, a forgotten token or perhaps an autograph, all so very vibrant and joyful for its possessor.

Deleted files stored on rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. Small, easy to loose SSD memory cards of recorded corrupt files and digital artefacts. Software engineered compositions trying to grasp the shared belief of an upcoming future, vivid and uncertain; birds, waters and long lost recollections. A release unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world. At least not for now.

Marsha Fisher is a Minneapolis based composer and sound artist. Originally from Nebraska, they participated heavily in the Lincoln DIY scene. They bring the DIY ethos into their experimental music practice by using consumer tape players and cassettes to replicate musique concrète techniques in a context more similar to harsh noise. Fisher also runs the tape labels Gay Hippie Vampire and Activated Skeleton and has recent releases on Orb Tapes, Falt, and Full Spectrum Records.