Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 413 Items

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.

The Berlin based duo Itchy Spots combine falling words with tricky rhythms. Their music concerns the simultaneity of intensity and nonchalance, feverish high speed drumming, static sounds and tribal hypnosis. The vocal performance seems to stand alone, it is independent from whats happening rhythmically, yet it all melts together perfectly. Grooving skeletons of songs, rituals and shamanism. Itchy Spots are James Main (former singer and lyricist with Wild Daughter) and Ansgar Wilken (Ilse Lau, Feedbackorchester, Happy Zloty).

The tenth studio album by Bjork on cassette tape.

each album always starts with a feeling
that i try to shape into sound
the feeling was landing
( after my last album utopia which was all island in the clouds element air and no bass )
on the earth and digging my feet into the ground
it was also woven into how i experienced the "now"
this time around 7 billion of us did it together
nesting in our homes quarantining
being long enough in one place that we shot down roots
my new album "fossora" is about that
it is a word i made up
it is the feminine of fossore ( digger, delver, ditcher )
so in short it means "she who digs" ( into the ground )
so sonically it is about bass , heavy bottom-end ,
we have 6 bass clarinets and punchy sub
i would like to especially thank bergur þórisson and heba kadry
and side project , el guincho , hamrahlíð choir , soraya nayyar , clarinet sextet murmuri , siggi string quartet ensemble , emilie nicolas , serpentwithfeet
viibra and last but not least : sindri and dóa .
visuals were made by viðar logi , james merry , m/m , nick knight , andy huang , edda , isshehungry , tomi , sayaka , sunna , sara and heimir
and my ever so loyal and magnificent team : derek , rosamary , catherine , chiara , hilma and móa

BodyMoves returns under the moniker Enver Goyken for his second full length beat tape on London-based label Shapes of Rhythm. Ozan (meaning travelling wise poet in Turkish) is a 21-track exploration of the Turkish side of his heritage, and the alias which is his birth name. Enver's biological dad was from Istanbul, and unfortunately the beat-maker didn't have a relationship with him for most of his life. When he died in 2016, BodyMoves was advised to use his passion for music to explore Turkiye and its culture as part of the grieving process, and to better understand that part of who he is.
"Amongst other things, my biological dad was a musician who first played a part in Turkish rock n roll history, and then as a producer who pioneered modern studio set ups in Turkey, so perhaps I was always going to be obsessed by music myself"
"As a beat maker, my dive into Turkish music inevitably led to identifying samples in the music I was digging into, and although it's been quite a long process, it has resulted in this beat tape project coming together."
Alongside digging into the musical side of Turkiye's culture, it also presented an opportunity to explore thousands of years of history as the bridge between East and West. It's for this reason that the tracklisting reads like a history lesson, referencing famous people and places across time, from archaeological sites and ancient statues to empires, Sultans, armies and tribes of people.
The music on Ozan is loosely framed around hip hop but is unrestricted by tempo. Using his trusty Sp404 (championed by people like Ras G and Madlib), and a stack of records and historical references these are raw, raw beats and grooves. The departure from 2017's Cariño beat tape is that here there is a much more global approach to the sound sources. The opener Göbekli Tepe welcomes you in with an introductory stringed instrument fanfare before a whirlwind of polyrhythms move around a swinging, unquantised beat.
Urfa Man quickens the tempo with hand percussion samples and urgent vocal chants and calls, whilst a bassline moves nimbly around joined by a lush Rhodes line. Achaemenid is a lower affair, underpinned by a repetitive dusty piano sample and clacking wooden percussion. In classic BodyMoves style the duration is short but the ideas within it are many. Constantine I is all woozy sub bass and neck-snapping snares, whilst a hypnotic set of hand drums work their way through your brain. Sasanian is a complete assault on the senses with its swirling effects and minimal percussion.
Byzantium is the beat tape's longest and possibly grooviest track, led by a bassline and a reflective keyboard sequence. İznik is another track underpinned by Rhodes and punctuated by an urgent, looped up vocal hook.

Staying true to beat tape tradition Ozan is released on limited white cassette (and digital) with extensive contextual and historic liner notes plus map. Limited to 75 copies.

Slowly's Masato Komatsu and Ryo Kawahara have launched their chill-out alias Lost Weekend! A fictional soundtrack to a weekend lost to the Corona disaster.　The mellow melodies are endlessly mellow, and the soundscape is lo-fi with dubby effects. A collection of works created at once by pulling various materials from their vast drawers. The mellow Lost Weekend Suite is a suite of parts 1 to 4 and is the highlight track of the album. The exo-mood music samples of Sunshine is Golden and Sweet Thing are impressive. It's Not Over Yet", a reworking of the smash hit Not Over You under the Slowly moniker and finishes with "At Last I Am Free", an original song by Chic, also known as Robert Wyatt's masterpiece. . A new masterpiece of exo - Balearic and chill-out music is born. Also released simultaneously on cassette tape in a first complete limited edition.

A series of slow chords and gestures, doomed and endless, colored right between major and minor, vibes and guitar, rotating around each other like planets, resonating in an enormous space. Tape delay creating shadows and environments to swim around in. Titles evocative of tunings, playing styles, and improvisational strategies. Matter of fact collaboration between two searching musicians." (Koen Nutters) --- Julia Reidy makes music for acoustic and processed instruments, mostly guitars. Their recorded work can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched, episodic forms. They have released several albums on labels such as Black Truffle and Editions Mego. Morten Joh is one of the many aliases of Norwegian percussionist and producer Morten Johan Olsen, known from bands including MoHa!, N.M.O., Naaljos Ljom, and Splitter Orchester.

Third and probably last volume from Gonçalo F. Cardoso’s most disillusioned moniker, Prophetas.

Where the first tape, Reveal, Accept, Remember, Forget, revived mid 50’s ideas of weird hope (ufo sightings, suburbia, space race) and the second, Maury Island Reverie, explored early 90’s disillusionment through a sound world of mall culture, late night cable TV and rampant consumerism, this new work concludes de unplanned trilogy with a more randomised yet no hope approach to the sentiments and concepts explored previously.

Produced over what we call now the pandemic years, and pressed just before the outbreak of yet another war, the feeling here is schizophrenic to say the least : full channel surfing, all tabs open, zero attention span and out of control consumerism has settled into the music (and our lives), the new normal, no time to think, no time for much really, keep going, feel sorry, carry on and die.

The Fake prophets have now established their claws firmly in every corner of our societies, ripping all of our planet benefits whilst leaving nothing in return, the world is now a gigantic cash dispenser, a credit card landfill, everything is up for grabs as long as it can turn a quick profit. Technology? Science? Art? Who needs it when we can just use it to exploit, to make a other quick buck whilst keeping tabs on the population. All this whilst appearing as humanity saviours? I’ve got a plan, it’s ok, let's all go to Mars.

Secret and not so secret wars have been raging since this work was completed. The old present has finally cancelled any possible future, thank god we have the past to look at and wonder… like this tape does, all hail the ubiquitous fake prophets of the 21st century, it’s us!

‘Bring to the storehouse a full tenth of what you earn…I will open the windows of heaven for you and pour out all the blessings you need’ – Malachi 3:10

What shall we sing? Folklorist Derek Piotr presents the third and final installation in the Bare family trilogy, this time highlighting lesser-known and garbled versions of local folk tunes, and again braiding the past with the present by incorporating his own contemporary fieldwork of the Bare's living descendants.

Track 1 recorded by Herbert Halpert in Maryville, TN, April 23, 1939.
Tracks 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, and 12 recorded by Herbert Halpert in Elk Park, NC, April 12, 1939.
Tracks 5 and 13 recorded by Herbert Halpert near Morganton, NC, April 19, 1939.
Track 6 recorded by Derek Piotr in Morganton, NC, April 11, 2022.
Tracks 7 and 10 recorded by Derek Piotr in Vilas, NC, April 18, 2022.

Cover image of Mrs. Sabra Bare Hampton courtesy of Della Ruth Harshbarger.

Collins Dictionary Example sentence: „Other ocular signs include involuntary rhythmic movement of the eyeball.“ Someone in the editorial department wasn‘t paying attention and involuntarily spoke a deeply buried truth: The movement from the eye to rhythm and from there to sound is sometimes a small, puny one. Now Infuso Giallo provides the proof at the same time and implements his live show for last year‘s debut album „Ocular Soda“ as an audio-visual show, as intertwined senses. Visible sound, audible images. Such ideas only last when they are put to the test and scrutinised by several experts.

The duo Globus, which consists of 2/5 of the post-hardcore band Pttrns, examines the synth hook of the second part of the double-opener „Every Waking Hour Pt.2“ by playing it, varying it, letting it sway.

In contrast, Anatolian Weapons from Athens can‘t help but immerse the ambient, Soft Machine-production-like first minutes of „Every Waking Hour Pt.1“ in a sinister black light. Staggering into a basement club filled with nocturnal shadow people and indulge in carousing. Cautiously at first, then more and more determinedly.

From Hamburg and Berlin, the „Mole Gaze“ gets a special treatment. The trio Love-Songs drags the number off to Hamburg harbour, packs it onto a steamer, deep into the bow and lets it operate the sonar there. Conrad Schnitzler would have been delighted. Infuso Giallo, meanwhile, realises that there is nothing more boring than standing still, so he revamps „Hello World“ and gives it a rear spoiler that keeps this number in lane even at club speed. Speaking of „keeping in lane“: Niklas Wandt, the magician, doesn‘t even try such tricks. He simply throws an acid bolt on the closer „Ocular Soda“ and waits to see what happens. Alongside breakbeats from nowhere, Albert Hoffmann himself appears on a bicycle. „Ocular Soda Remixes“ is the first tape on the Kame House label, so there‘s only one thing to do: open your eyes and listen!

Artificial Dance founder Interstellar Funk releases Live At The Rest Is Noise - Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Limited to 150 cassettes, the recording documents Interstellar Funk’s performance at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw concert hall in October 2021. The 45-minute set ebbs and pulses, leaving behind Interstellar Funk’s penchant for hardwearing club sounds in favour of melody and texture. Some passages mirror elements from the studio album Into The Echo (Dekmantel, 2022), but the live setting allows Interstellar Funk to expand and explore richly detailed sonic spaces that highlight his skills as a composer-performer.

Full of dreamy textures and languid melodies, Xoomin is a soundtrack for drifting off into the abyss, but in the hands of Alloy Sea (a.k.a. Mor Elian), that journey feels downright playful. Although the Berlin-based producer is best known for her dancefloor-focused creations, 2020’s Petrichor (a 50-minute composition that officially debuted the Alloy Sea project) showcased an unexpected talent for abstract soundscapes and arrhythmic jitters, hinting at ambient techno but ultimately offering something much more adventurous.

Xoomin—an album that was specifically written for Paralaxe Editions after label founder Dania Shihab reached out to Elian about working together on a new Alloy Sea release—ventures into similarly ethereal waters as Petrichor, but it’s also brighter and more colorful than its predecessor, its gleaming FM synth improvisations flanked by scuttling rhythmic bursts and the occasional wonky bassline, not to mention celestial snippets of Elian’s own voice. It’s not pop, but it’s not quite ambient either, floating instead in a nebulous (and sneakily fun) zone that borrows from new age, IDM and the weirder corners of bass music.

Over the last decade, M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in both solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Expressed, I Noticed Silence, Gengras’s third release on Hausu Mountain, exemplifies Gengras’s penchant for constant self-reinvention and genre-defiant exploration within a catalog whose every release carries his essence as a composer and synthesist while surging forward into new ideas and territories. With Gengras’s slowly unfurling ambient landscapes and his signature approach to rhythms animated by cyclical basslines and the layering of high-definition synth voices, Expressed, I Noticed Silence builds on the precedents set by his recent output while digging deeper into melodic sculpting and lush harmonic architectures than ever before. The presence of Gengras’s brother Cyrus Gengras (who has worked with artists like Kevin Morby, Amen Dunes, and Jessica Pratt) on electric guitar, casting off glistening lead melodies and webs of clean-toned arpeggios, cements the connection to the delay-drenched guitar work of precedents like Manuel Göttsching and Robert Fripp. The album’s zoned atmospheres and slow-building tiers of synth call to mind the interplanetary explorations of astral electronic music composers like Klaus Schulze, Michael Stearns, and John Serrie. More than anything in Gengras’s recent catalog, Expressed, I Noticed Silence continues along the arc of more modern post-kosmiche contemporaries including Emeralds, Bitchin Bajas, and Hausu Mountain label-mate Pulse Emitter. The album testifies to M. Geddes Gengras’s skill not only as a sculptor of tone and texture, but as a storyteller in the medium of electronic music — using the tools at his disposal to conjure complex moods and emotional spaces that lay out vistas looking across zones that approach the distant horizon.

Liberamente' is now available for the first time on cassette. Dawn Chorus and the Infallible Sea create soft-textured and slowly unfolding sonic landscapes, somewhere between guitar-oriented drone music and modern classical. Liberamente is the kind of album that demands attention and patience from the listener, yet it's ultimately a very rewarding one. Stylistically Dawn Chorus and the Infallible Sea sums up several decades of American soundscape and drone music, taking threads from Windy & Carl, Auburn Lull, and Stars of the Lid then weaves them into a contemporary, and sonically adventurous whole. On the surface it suggests simplicity, but dig deeper and the seven pieces on Liberamente reveals a rare compositional dexterity. This is minimalism at its finest.

During the later stages of 2020, Damien Duque (City of Dawn) and M Cody McPhail (atop) decided to begin writing a collaborative album together. Their styles, although different, compliment each other extremely well and it became apparent that this project would end up flowing out of them with ease. They shared wav files and recording parts individually at each other homes over a few months. City of Dawn's smooth reverbed tonal compositions mixed with ATOP's rougher and meandering synth lines gives the Starwind lp its expansive and cosmic qualities.

“Have you ever really loved a human? Have you ever come across the wisest of them? They will slip right through your fingers, leaving the most unimaginable impression.”

Jupiter’s Purse is the debut EP by Dallas, Texas-based artist Mattie on Leaving Records. Produced in conjunction with fellow Dallasite Black Taffy, Jupiter’s Purse is an expansive and unique work of experimental soul. Featuring 2021’s lauded single “Human Thing,” Jupiter’s Purse broadens a window into the fresh and exciting vision of Mattie. Explaining the EP’s theme, Mattie states, “I’m very fond of the planet Jupiter in the astrological sense because Jupiter represents expansion. It also represents the planet that takes everything that it is that we desire to see for ourselves in this life and it expands it, right? I was inspired to call it Jupiter’s Purse because it also reminded me of a female womb in a sense, the incubation process that happens within the womb, and kind of the purse being the womb of Jupiter. And the planet is basically holding our things and incubating them until it’s time to expand them.”

Of collaborating with Black Taffy, Mattie says, “I felt like his melody and my pen, and the voice that was coming through me and what really wanted to be said through the lyrics, it’s like they just found a home together. And it was so effortless to really just kind of dance with his melodies and write these lyrics and these stories. So that’s basically how we kind of started working together, and yeah, I think we made a baby. A studio baby.” The EP’s five cohesive tracks loosely follow the story of a narrator named Mhuv. Mattie states, “It’s really a story of myself as Mhuv, and how it’s felt for me to be at times identified with the body as a person, and then other times being able to observe the body, and know myself as that as well, and what that has felt like, kind of being in this sense of duality. Jupiter’s Purse is basically a vocal representation of a lot of duality that I experienced. In coming to know my true self, that duality kind of came more to the forefront, so I started to write from that, and to really understand the power in the duality, while returning back to myself as source.”

Director Tramaine Townsend provides visuals for the project. Mattie states, “I wanted it to be clean but experimental, experimental and also clean. I wanted it to have that two-fold. I’ve been listening to a lot of recordings from Virgil Abloh, and he inspired me this year to really appreciate the duality that’s in my work. And even in the visuals, the cleanliness of it, but the experimental aspect. The purist meeting the tourist. The purist being that classic approach to visuals, which I appreciate Tramaine for, and then also allowing me as the tourist, the one that is experimental and that wants to have a different experience… Once you see it, you’ll see the beauty, the continuity of what we’re trying to say.”

Mattie concludes, “I feel like what I realized is that there’s a home in me that is comfortable no matter where I’m at. And my life is based on finding that and remembering that home within myself. And so my focus on the external things, even though I keep them up and I maintain the physical things, but I realize that my only purpose, if there was one, is to really remember myself, as if to remember that home within myself, so that I can be comfortable no matter where I’m at. And my music is an expansion of that, that surrender to that aspect of this experience which is to come home and find that home within myself. The music is about going through what it feels like when you are on the path to remembering yourself. What it feels like, that oiliness, that stickiness, that bulldozer, the big explosions, the feeling of ground zero, the feeling of heightened senses, the feeling of being a giant but then also you feel like you are David, and there’s a Goliath. I plan on moving through, which is why the character’s name is Mhuv in Jupiter’s Purse, because I see ourselves, everyone on the planet, moving through these spaces and them not being intended to be a sticking point for us. And so Jupiter’s Purse is what I would call maybe a gateway, a womb to the other side. Jupiter is going to expand this project, because that’s what Jupiter does, and has blessed this project already, so I know Jupiter’s going to expand it to be another side of this, where we won’t be speaking from duality, but we’ll be speaking from our natural state as wholeness.”

Regardless if you immediately associate the term metamorphosis with any kind of evolutionary adjustment, with shapeshifting, the complex transformation of music or if you simply think about the distinctive mark the last two years have left on basically each and everyone of us, it’s easy to agree that “Metamorphose“ is just the perfect title for JakoJako’s debut album for Bigamo.

While others fell into a state of shock, JakoJako has made perfect use of the compulsory extra studio time regulated by the pandemic, developing and specifying a sound she instantly attracted attention with, as soon as she entered the scene in 2019 with her release on Leisure System.

C30 cassette. A download code is included. Arthur Mine is a keyboardist and electronic musician from Kyiv, Ukraine. An ex-member of several live bands from punk to indie and experimental. In 2017 Nikolaienko's collaborator on the Nostalgia Por Mesozoica 7" single. For the collectors of New Age cassettes to put somewhere between Sven Grünberg and Vangelis.

C76 cassette, ltd to 120 copies. „In Macrospace“. The monolithic album debut by Hamburg-based DJ x producer x electronic music activist baze.djunkiii, the essence of 25+ years on the scene and continuous research in sonic fields reaching far beyond your regular club music. A dark and threatening journey through the realms of brooding DeathAmbient, cold, hostile sci-fi atmospheres and an innate feel of darkness, doom, desolation and industrial wastelands covered in toxic fumes and the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Generated solely and exclusively by a process of extensive vocal synthesis the ten tracks on „In Macrospace“ represent a sonic manifestation of vantablack dystopia and mind threatening, braincell eroding claustrophobia, an ode to both minimalist sound structures as well as a maximized psycho-acoustic impact that might overwhelm even those used to stare into and listen to their innermost void for extended periods of time. Not for the faint-hearted. Listener discretion is advised.

Composer / saxophonist / multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bernstein has been an essential part of the Baltimore experimental music scene as a member of avant-rock champions Horse Lords, a frequent collaborator with acts like Dan Deacon and Matmos, and an erstwhile member of the High Zero Collective – Baltimore's premier experimental music presenter. Based in Baltimore for much of the last two decades, he currently resides with his family in Germany. Under his own name, Bernstein composes music focused on the material of sound, typically oriented around the tuning system of just intonation: the selection of notes based on the physical properties of sound which yields frequencies that provide more "perfect" harmonies outside of the capabilities of the 12-tone scales that appear in Western music in idioms ranging from classical / orchestral composition, to mainstream pop, and most everything in between. Bernstein's work can swell into flights of virtuosic sheets-of-sound overload or stretch individual tones into time-dilating durational exercises that emphasize the relationships between overtones and explore the unique harmonic series that he lays out for each piece. Andrew Bernstein returns to Hausu Mountain with a new album called a presentation. Oriented around his long-form, layered saxophone performances and presented with occasional drone-based accompaniment from electronic sound sources, the album finds the artist pushing the limits of both his compositional ideas and the physical reality of his craft. The result proves just as spellbinding as Bernstein's work on the more rhythmically busy side of the spectrum, showcasing his patience as a composer, his deep tutelage in the properties of overtones and microtonal harmonies, and the improbable precision with which he can produce sounds from his saxophone - an instrument not necessarily designed to easily achieve these specific frequencies / pitches - in order to match the ideas in his head.

Crystal Shards is the debut full-album release from Hamilton Canada based blackwinterwells. This twelve-track collection of songs was built over the course of two years, comprising of previously released songs such as darkkmagician and useless, while also introducing a more eclectic musical evolution in the form of tracks such as vivisect and sulfur (featuring guest artists 8485 & emotionals).

Ohyung is an Asian American musician and artist based in Brooklyn. Their debut album 'Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame)' was released by Deathbomb Arc in 2020, and their sophomore album Protector — also released in 2020, via Chinabot — was an experimental rap cross-genre collision course through distorted 808s, pitch-shifted rapping, frenetic pop energy, and ambient loops. In 2022, Ohyung will release their first ambient album 'imagine naked!' with NNA Tapes. Created in collaboration with poet t. tran le, each song is paired with a line from t. tran le's poem "vegetalscape." t. tran le describes their poem: "most of my work comes back to living with mental illness, snapshots of things I still made beautiful in my own little world despite dealing with something so debilitating. my bedroom garden, for example. also i miss my brother’s voice! & he does take like hour-long showers singing the whole time lol." Ohyung composes music for films and exhibitions as Robert Ouyang Rusli, and their work has been featured at Sundance, BAMCinématek, the Queens Museum, and BAM Next Wave Festival. In 2017, they received a Van Lier Fellowship in Music Composition from the Asian American Arts Alliance. They are a 2021 Pioneer Works Music Resident.

Chicago-based producer Mike Meegan records music under the moniker RXM Reality. Meegan’s three previous albums on Hausu Mountain sketch out an evolving trajectory of omni-electronic rhythmic music that warps elements of grime, dubstep, mutated techno, hyperpop, and noise into unpredictable compositions overloaded with synthetic textures and fast-scrolling beat structures. With the new album sick for you, Meegan pushes the RXM Reality project into brand new zones along multiple intersecting spectrums. For the first time, he incorporates his voice into his work, employing a series of contrasting vocal styles that complement productions which shine with more finely-crafted details and narrative hairpin turns than ever before. The album feels more progressive and overwhelming than any prior output with its pointillistic beat mosaics and melodic arrangements, taking a few steps closer to some vision of contemporary pop music soaked in adrenaline and ballistic energy. RXM Reality’s production thrives on drama, conveyed in mammoth bursts of overlapped drum elements planted over quick-cycling snippets of software synthesis and Midi guitar. The percussive contours and chest-beating energies of sick for you can sound at times like festival-ready EDM or dubstep (even “brostep”) refracted through a funhouse mirror, maintaining a sense of swaggering confidence and bombast even as shards of disembodied beats and synths melt into putty around the edges of the mix.

Symphonic, vast, and emotionally stirring, ‘The Last Goodbye’ is the duo’s most ambitious album to date. Nostalgic yet rooted in the present, it serves as a sweeping sonic experience that speaks to themes of connection and reminiscence. Interwoven with both the new and the old, the album is interspersed with personal audio clips from home video footage, hypnotherapy sessions and even the voices of the duo’s parents, plus features The Knocks, Bettye LaVette, Maro, Låpsley, Ólafur Arnalds, Julianna Barwick, Izzy Bizu and Charlie Houston. These collaborations follow previous high-profile musical partnerships with the likes of Leon Bridges, Little Dragon, Regina Spektor, RY X, Naomi Wild, and more.