Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 491 Items

What remains when light fades ? Gil Barte, co-founder of Meth O Tapes and Kump Records, brings an answer in sketches with this new release. Faithfull to his previously developped style made of musical miniatures, he draws a diagonal throughout the abyssal void of the unknown.

As a catalogue of apparitions, « Transmutation » turns shadows into presence all along these pages, sometimes breaky, sometimes ritual, haunted with glitches and drones, reminding us enchanting sightings then losing us in sticky dark ambient margins, in a forest of walls with faces, in deep corridors, whispering under. Everything rustles here in spectral encounters, blurry, storyless figures barely named in titles. It's music for sleepwalkers, for those who know how to cross by to the other side, to the black screen of darkness and set what they have to give there.

Fractured" is about moments that come and go, bits that connect and shatter in the prism of a lifetime inside a metropolitan landscape.

Muwosi is the project of Cincinnati-based vocalist & song-writer Monica Windom – her Of Compassion is a now-needed contemporary R&b / Jazz / Hip-Hop / Electronic production that gracefully culminates into the good vibe. The EP is equally due to Muwosi’s musical relationship with the songs of Stevie Wonder as it is with the avant modernity of Solange, and speaks of summer-time with layered vocal harmonies over Rhodes piano that are fine-tuned with the chops of LA producer/keyboardist Lionmilk. Mixed & mastered by rising LA engineer Swarvy slides the cherry on top of this difficult-to-deny glimpse at something larger on the horizon..

AV Moves is the project of LA’s multi-instrumentalist and experimental composer John Jones, previously known as Nerftoss (see Spirit Advantage Lr034 2014).

Originally written during relocation from Baltimore in Spring 2019, In A Pause is ripe for relevant release in our 2020 larger picture. In collaboration with filmmaker Corey Hughes, time and uncertainty have defined this 35minute-long Audio/Visual ambient textural travel that is In a Pause - out November 6th Leaving Records All Genre Q4 2020.

from the author: "I became more intrigued by the idea of the visual context redetermining how a sound is perceived. It was a bit of an obvious observation, but one that I hadn’t fully explored in the process of writing music. I began creating sounds with the intention of aiding a moment, interacting with light, and enhancing the sensory experience. Gradually the sounds I created became defined by these ideas. Through melody, I found ways of deepening these imaginary scenarios. Melody has a way of extracting an emotion that each individual responds to differently. My intention with the melodic elements on what became “In A Pause” was for it to feel deeply personal but in a way that was relatable.
“In A Pause”, as a title, plays against the underlying motives of the album but is especially in reference to where I was in life when choosing it. Most of what was written happened to be during a transitional phase of my life, the months leading up to moving from Baltimore to Los Angeles. In many ways, I felt I had hit a giant imaginary pause button to prepare for the transition. Unintentionally, the title has taken on a much larger meaning as 2020 has produced various tragedies and injustices. Time and uncertainty have slowly redefined my previous perception of the music."

Introducing Baltimore's Colloboh - experimental producer Collins Oboh. Born in Nigeria, raised in the DMV, and now at 26 years of age, Colloboh asserts himself as a no-nonsense contender of electronic music composition utilizing modular synthesizer. Entity Relation is the 5-track EP out world-wide September 3rd 2021.

Blackbird Belle’s third album Microcosm, continues the evolution of an artistic mind focused on tone and clarity of detail—a feat only possible when you move from surface level experience to something much more immersive: a world within a world. The grooviest of any previous Blackbird Belle releases, Microcosm dives deeper into the spectrum of mood, giving the listener the feeling of reaching a rare altitude.

Lifted by a beautiful and soulful airiness, the opener Jubilee is a sunbeam, optimistic and pure. Champagne Birthday, ushers in more heart-warming sentiment as we begin to explore Blackbird Belle’s sonic world-building. One might find themselves in a blissful trance listening to tracks Kyoto Recall and Illuminance. Moving to the end, a stretch of softer, almost melancholic tracks in the form of Embryonic and Null & Void are contrasted with the uplifting beatstrumental Apollo, a nice closer for the album, bringing things full circle. Microcosm is a portal to small and seemingly insignificant worlds, where untold grander truths have yet to reveal themselves.

Color of Time is a long distance, ambient and drone project featuring Kevin Sery (From Overseas) and Nick Turner (Tyresta). Created with guitar, synthesizers, Mellotron and effects, their music focuses on themes of impermanence, loss and the impact that humans have on each other and the planet.

Solo debut by multi-instrumentalist Manuel Chittka. The Love-Songs, Jungstötter and Pantha du Prince associated drummer creates two compositions of intimate beauty. Eigenmoden is both, rhythm-based, and at the same time softly swayed by modular electronics. Making this release a personal and contrasting accentuation of contemporary Minimalism, Ambient and Jazz. The music was recorded in Hamburg-Altona and Berlin-Marzahn and mastered by Italian film composer Giuseppe Ielasi.

„A layered electro-percussive music that is supposed to flow in a tangible pulse and combines moving textures with detailed events. Mostly tuned metal percussion instruments like gongs, cymbals, or metallophones ring and sizzle together and unfold both meditative and noisy.“ Manuel Chittka

These recordings, made in 2001 in the weeks before September 11, constitute a unique historical document. They are spoken-word adaptations of scenes taken from Destroy All Monsters, the first book by acclaimed writer and 'pop culture alchemist' Ken Hollings. A multistranded postmodern epic, Destroy All Monsters offers a radical retelling of Desert Storm, America's military operation targeting Iraq, using imagery derived from MTV videos, CNN news reports, Japanese kaiju movies and anime, Hong Kong action flicks and tales of alien abduction. The book's entire narrative nervously unfolds in an unstable of world of terror monsters, wrecked cities and dangerously tall buildings: where an event like 9/11 is inevitable. The book was officially launched on September 13, but distribution in the United States was delayed when ports on the Eastern Seaboard were closed to shipping post 9/11, leaving copies of the book stranded in the Atlantic. 'Published the very week of the "attacks on America",' Toby Litt wrote at the time, 'Destroy All Monsters is genuinely, spookily prescient…as a progress report on Planet Earth, it seems to have timeslipped onto the front pages.' Lydia Lunch praised it as 'a hallucinogenic spiral into future nightmare', while The Scotsman called it 'mind bending reading.'

In the summer of 2001, Ken Hollings was approached by sound designer and electronic music composer Simon James, who wanted to create an audio adaptation of scenes from the novel to share with subscribers to a spoken word channel launched by totallyradio. The idea was to record Ken reading his own words and then embed them in a soundscape that evoked the fragmented complexity of the original text. Ken concentrated on a small handful of threads from the overall narrative, while Simon directed and engineered the final recording. This resulted in the two sequences of words, sounds and electronic tonalities contained on this audiocassette: an unsettling portrait of people about to be overtaken by events.

In October 2001, having just got married in London, Ken and Rachel Hollings went to New York for their honeymoon, just as they had originally planned. They spent an unforgettable week in a city struggling to recover from the seismic changes that had just taken place while a sudden wave of anthrax attacks on government and media offices filled the news cycles. Rachel took a photograph of Ken at Ground Zero, where crowds of onlookers continued to gather, and the air still smelled of burning.

Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster whose main concern is the relationship between culture and technology. He has written and presented numerous critically acclaimed features for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Resonance 104.4 FM His other books include Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth, The Space Oracle and Inferno all available from Strange Attractor/MIT Press. His latest book, Purgatory, is due from Strange Attractor in Spring 2022.

Simon James is a producer, musician and sound designer based in Brighton, UK, whose work combines electronic sources with field recording techniques and sound treatments, using sound to transport the listener to fantastical audio worlds. Simon's latest release, Electro Smog, collects electromagnetic field recordings from Shenzhen's electronic markets, recorded while he was in China at the invitation of Musicity and The British Council.

The Destroy All Monsters audio adaptations marked the first occasion Ken and Simon worked together – subsequently they collaborated on the 12-part series Welcome to Mars for Resonance 104.4 FM and Connecting, an audio portrait of the original 'phone phreaks', for BBC Radio 3. In 2021 they teamed up again to make Fast Forward, a six-part documentary series for Kasperksy Lab.

Evan Lindorff-Ellery is a visual and sound artist based in Kingston, New York, and co-owner of Notice Recordings. "No Water Recordings 2011" was created in Ravenswood, Chicago using a hydrophone against a bridge, above water, and a contact mike and ceramic insulator against a brick. The recordings were captured to cassette which was transferred 10 years later by Branic Howard. This album exists as an antithesis of much of Evan's recent fascinations with water, yet accommodates similar poetic endeavours.