Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 247 Items

Melissa GUION’s second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016’s Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: “I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.” Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: “lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.” Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard.

Artwork made in The Designers Republic™

Dan Barrett—the man behind Have A Nice Life, Giles Corey, and Enemies List Home Recordings—has unveiled his sophomore album as the electronic project Black Wing on The Flenser. No Moon is a gorgeous chillwave / post-punk record with nine bleak yet blissful songs and is a fitting close out to the year 2020. Written over the course of the last few years, with about half of the songs penned over the last six months (mostly due to pandemic “free time”), No Moon is a heart-wrenchingly honest outpour of emotion. Throughout the writing process, Barrett was having recurring dreams and felt a strange sense of timelessness—that, combined with quarantine is what he simply describes as “a weird experience.” Barrett explains, “Quarantine was profoundly isolating. With writing this record, more than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could make something out of it. That ended up being a lot of songs about feeling isolated, a lot of ‘trapped in my own head’ moments. I think that was a lot of people’s experience as well.” Barrett formed Black Wing in the mid-2010s as an opposite to his project Giles Corey; where Giles started as “only acoustic instruments allowed,” Black Wing started with only digital instruments. In 2015, Black Wing released its first proper full length, …Is Doomed, to great critical acclaim. Much like that album, No Moon bubbles with electronica and indie-pop with earworm melodies and affecting lyrics. But No Moon is a transitional change from Black Wing’s debut; the songs here are a bit more experimental and there’s a significantly wider emotional range to them. The lyrics are haunting and personal and resonate deeply with the listener. The nine new tracks on No Moon are gloomy yet glorious, heavy while ambient, overwhelming yet alluring, and offer an earnest and honest look into one’s self during such a troubling and confusing year—something everyone can relate to.

Flabaire’s third album draws the attention away from the dancefloor with ambient psychedelic tunes. In his own words: “These tracks are live improvisations that have been recorded during the worldwide lockdown of 2020 and are an expression of what I felt then, during a few weeks where time seemed to have slowed down.” Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Copy is close to NM!

Record is slightly warped but still enjoyable.
Still shrink wrapped but opened.
Cover as new with slightly dented corners.

The Avalanches are set to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their debut album ‘Since I Left You’ with the release of a deluxe edition this June.

Released in Australia in 2000, and in the US and UK in 2001, ‘Since I Left You’ was hailed as a boundary-pushing release comprised of over 900 individual samples.

The forthcoming deluxe release – out June 4 – features a plethora of additional bonus tracks, including previously unreleased and fresh remixes by the late MF Doom, Black Dice, Leon Vynehall, Sinkane and Carl Craig to name a few. The CD version will also include some of The Avalanches’ remixes of Belle & Sebastian, Manic Street Preachers, Franz Ferdinand and more.

Beyond the Cycle', is the first LP of Sunhiilow, also known as Valerie Magisson, a french musician who is living in Finland. The tracks were recorded with a warm sounding synth, Moog Mother-32. 'Beyond the Cycle' is an ethereal ambient music, following the earlier album ‘Whispers of a Dream Wind’, which was her first step into the analog synth music. Sunhiilow has learned how to catch the emotions and transpose it through the music. The artworks on the sleeve are also made by her.

A decade after releasing their debut EP through Planet Mu's Timesig imprint, Speed Dealer Moms—a collaborative electronic music project with a fluid line-up commonly made up of Aaron Funk, John Frusciante and Chris McDonald—are set to make their long-awaited return this summer with a new offering entitled Sdm-la8-441-114-211. The 3-track EP, arriving June 11 through Evar Records, offers a glimpse into the treasure trove of Speed Dealer Moms' unreleased material, with each song title alluding to the date in which it was recorded and in how many takes.

Over the years, Speed Dealer Moms have considered various ideas on how to release more of their unorthodox recordings in unconventional ways, with their latest to arrive in the format of a limited edition vinyl pressing. Although a lot has changed since first sharing their intricate creations with the world in 2010, Speed Dealer Moms have routinely gotten together whenever schedules and circumstances allowed, picking up wherever they last left off creatively and adding to their growing archive of recordings. While there are plenty of reminders that time is both irrelevant and an illusion—especially in the fickle music business where trends are fleeting—the chemistry these collaborators exhibit in the studio has no expiration date, offering a purity in approach that reflects the cherished importance of creating in the moment and subsequently celebrating timeless music.

During the writing process, which includes in-depth discussions and days of programming, Speed Dealer Moms record live to stereo with no overdubs or edits, improvising arrangements that often feel composed. In the same spirit of prodigal IDM acts such as Autechre and Luke Vibert, each Speed Dealer Moms session pushes the limits of what an arsenal of modular synthesizers and other machines are capable of, creating tracks that are driven by mathematics, mechanical understanding and musical spontaneity alike. As exemplified by their forthcoming Evar release, each recorded session captures an undeniable magic that is both distinctive and hard to describe, creating a listening experience that transcends genre lines and sonic boundaries.

Medieval Femme, Fatima Al Qadiri's new ten track suite inspired by the classical poems of Arab women, invokes a daydream through the metaphor of an Islamic garden, at the border between depression and desire, where the present temporarily dissolves, leaving only past and future. Mixing neon drones and the faint outlines of Arabesque melody, `Medieval Femme' reveals a fully-realised, dreamlike setting, shaded with colour and subtle friction. Conveying a thematic state of melancholic longing, Fatima seeks to transport the listener to a place of reverie and desolation, to question the line between two seemingly opposite states and rejoice in celestial sorrow. `Medieval Femme' takes instrumentation from music of the Middle Ages, recast in a futuristic setting; soft-synth lutes, organs and pipes reverberate in space while gauzy pulses ripple in response. Fatima's vocals of repeated, mantra-like phrases are sometimes pitched and altered, drawing out increasingly intense peaks, angelic choruses and yearning incantations. On `Tasakuba', Kaltham Jassim's recitation of a couplet from the 7th century poet Al-Khansa', the sorrow of her words are given a turbulent, hallucinatory setting, before the album resolves on the final song, the limpid, airy `Zandaq'.

Gudrun Gut and Mabe Fratti have worked together on a powerful hybrid album, where taut rhythms fuse with haunted vocal melodies and spoken word, and field recordings meld with extended ambient pieces. As part of Umor Rex’s 15th anniversary, we here present an album that builds a dialogue between two lands and two unique artists. Mexico is the origin and conceptual residence of our label, while Germany is where we produce and manufacture our records (Berlin functions as the center of distribution and logistics, thanks to our friends at Morr Music). The intertwining imaginations belong to German producer Gudrun Gut (Malaria!) —a notable figure of the subculture and the German music scene since the early 80s, and also a founder of Monika Enterprise and recipient of the ‘Listen to Berlin’ Award in 2019— and singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer Mabe Fratti (originally from Guatemala, now based in Mexico City). We knew about "Let's Talk About The Weather" from the beginning, and since the moment Gudrun and Mabe made us part of their project, our excitement could not be greater. The process started with Gudrun and Mabe having long distance conversations, asking about their whereabouts and discussing the weather. This might seem rather commonplace, but it works as a key thematic component for the entire album. The weather as the new great unknown, perceived through the optics of everyday life. Sound files were methodically exchanged, with Mabe exploring words and vocals, and Gudrun working with field recordings taken from each city. In the end, this joint musical venture would provide a healing effect for both artists during life in quarantine. "Aufregend", the opening track of the album, reflects upon a general lack of excitement in modern life. It wonders what the future might hold. Is it cold? Is it warm? Will it be the same? "Air Condition" is an eerie, dazzling collision of climates: the hazy warmth of Mexico City, the deep cold of Uckermark. The last track, which gives the album its name, is a long ambient piece composed of four parts: sound sculptures, field recordings of city life, news and weather forecasts, and private conversations about the climate. It's kind of a collaborative diary, obsessed with a single, all-encompassing subject. Produced and recorded by Gudrun Gut and Mabe Fratti between Berlin, Uckermark, Veracruz and Mexico City. Mixed by GGut at Stern Studio Mastered by John Tejada in Sherman Oaks, USA. Artwork & photos by Daniel Castrejón in Mexico City.

Midwife is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston. She lives and works in San Miguel, New Mexico by way of Denver, Colorado, where she spent the better half of the past decade developing her experimental pop project. As a self taught guitarist and recording engineer, Midwife explores dark subject matter in her anthemic, soft-gaze hits. Self-described as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation - catharsis.

When 2020 began, Johnston had several national and international tours planned, but the pandemic shifted her focus back to recording, and back to her internal landscape. Midwife’s third full length record, Luminol, was written and produced during quarantine.

Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators to reveal trace amounts of blood left at a crime scene. When it reacts with blood, luminol emits a chemiluminescent blue glow that can be seen in a darkened room. In the same way this chemical reveals evidence at a scene, Midwife is interested in profound truth - turning trial and tribulation into sources of light.

Luminol navigates themes of incarceration, locus of control, clarity, self harm, confinement, agency, and truth-seeking, all erupting in a bioluminescent Rothko color-field of blue.

The Luminol album cover shows a dark figure standing at the edge of a body of water. It symbolizes the way humanity had been on a precipice throughout 2020, to later find out they had been there all along. Being one of Midwife’s most personal records, Luminol's cover artwork is a picture of Madeline Johnston's mother taken in the 1980’s, when she was the same age as Madeline at the time of recording. By redacting the figure, Johnston hopes that anyone could see themselves there, by the water, as a form leftover when all the elements of their lives are stripped away and what is left is a host.

Luminol features collaborations from Tucker Theodore, Angel Diaz (Vyva Melinkolya), Zachary Cole Smith, Ben Newman, and Colin Caulfield (diiv), and Dan Barrett (Have A Nice Life).

Dancing On Waves Working his mellow magic on the Growing Bin, Sorcerer entertains your inner child with eight tracks of instrumental west coast pop suitable for dancing, dreaming and surfing a wave or two. While Basso sat in a Teutonic treehouse, feeding his head with the sounds of the woodland, Dan Judd danced on the sands of San Francisco’s Baker Beach. Stretching between them, like the world’s longest tin can radio, was the Dream Chimney. This legendary forum, run by Ryan Bishop, better known as The Beat Broker, helped to launch a thousand labels, and the Growing Bin is one of them - all hail the Chim! Here, Dan, naturally mystic in his Sorcerer guise, satisfies all our sensory needs with a Kinder Surprise of sweet melodies, coastal cool and playful rhythms inspired by his children’s earliest responses to music. Following his feelings and avoiding overthinking, he creates open, enticing and accessible cuts; each living and breathing that mellow magic you only get on the West Coast.

Sasha introduces LUZoSCURA, a new compilation that hasevolved from the thriving eponymous playlist. Featuring adiverse package of original works from a host of fresh talent, aswell as established artists and Sasha himself, it traverse selectronica, ambient, breaks and techno. Meaning light and dark, LUZoSCURA began on Spotify as a stash of tracks sent to Sasha which didn't meet the pace of his clubsets nor suit his venerated label Lnoe, LUZoSCURA came into itsown through 2020 as Sasha gravitated toward more mellowed sounds while being off the road, and clubbers diverted their ears to home listening. Gaining a renewed source of energy inconnecting with more gifted, budding producers and seeing the project blossom, the idea for the compilation came off the back of doing a live stream solely featuring tracks from the playlist. Meticulously compiled to flow like a DJ mix for home listening, Sasha kicks it off with the buoyant, breaks-influenced 'Corner Shop', the first of his three tracks on the compilation. MJ Cole is among the established artists to feature with blissed out track 'Maestro', while The Micronaut, a multi-instrumentalist whose back catalogue was a favourite of Sasha's through lockdown, offers an immersive trip in 'Koelsa'. Lau.ra, lead singer from British experimental rock band Ultraísta, evokes a sense of spiritedness in 'I'll Wait' before we hear again from Sasha with another breaks-loaded trip in 'hndi' and a collaboration withB ritish producer Franky Wah. Closing the odyssey with a stirring, expansive soundscape is synth duo Felsmann + Tiley.

Faitiche presents, for the first time on vinyl, a selection from the 84-track (!!) remix project originally released in 2013 as a three-tape set by Trip Shrubb aka kptmichigan aka Michael Beckett. Known to many from bands like Tuesday Weld or The Schneider TM Experience, Beckett remixed his way through Harry Smith’s famous Anthology of American Folk Music – a compilation of American folk, blues and country recordings released in 1952, soon to become key point of reference for the emerging folk revival movement. Having translated the title into the local dialect of the part of Germany where he lives, Beckett began reinterpreting all of its 84 tracks using sampler, effect pedals and loops – sometimes making several tracks in a single day. A colossal undertaking whose results are beyond accomplished and that is summed up in the selection of thirteen tracks on 'Trewwer, Leud un Danz'.

Murray Royston-Ward writes about 'Trewwer, Leud un Danz':

"Total sacrilege ... A collection of remixes of tracks from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music which was originally released in its entirety. The album is titled Trewwer, Leud un Danz (sorrow, song and dance) which is drawn from an endangered ‘Low German’ dialect (lippisch Platt) and is poetically approximating Smith’s volumes Ballads, Social Music and Songs.

The hardware employed encompasses analogue, virtual analogue and digital. A primordial soup of electrical fields, striated granulation, micro-circuitry, molecular oscillations and mathematical manipulation; communicating directly with the guitars, zithers, mountain dulcimers, fiddles, jaw harps, banjos, harmonicas and human voices of 1930’s America: itself a reterritorialization of African and European folk traditions that reach back farther and farther into our collective pasts. (…)"

Bridge was to be the Edinburgh-born Kieran Warren’s debut release circa 1994 on Metatone - a short-lived techno label by J. M. Adkins (Electro Music Union) and Damon D'Cruz (Jack Trax, Chill). As fate had it, Metatone folded before the album got printed, and the music was lost in time. That is, until Adkins tipped the Cold Blow boys off while they were working on his anthology, the 2019 double LP "Electro Music Union, Sinoesin & Xonox Works 1993-1994". Atonal’s Cithare EP last year was the world’s first glimpse at the fuzzy, warm techno archives of Kieran Warren. As a sequel, Cold Blow has restored and compiled their vision of the ‘94 “Bridge” while tapping into the same demo archives that were being scoured through by Metatone in their day. Essential for the fans of early Aphex Twin, the album moves between warm melodic techno cuts and nostalgic ambient pieces before reaching the grand finale of Arkanoids, an 8-minute ambient epic straight from the school of Selected Ambient Works 2.

Housed in full, cosmic artwork designed by Ed Cheverton. Mastered by Keith Tenniswood.

Ceremonia ("Ceremony") is the first collaborative release between singer songwriter Luvi Torres, and producer Chancha Vía Circuito. Combining exceptional voicework with powerful creative rhythms typical of Chancha, the lyrics include mantras Luvi uses in their therapeutic exercises, thereby immersing us in a healing musical world.

Taken as a whole, the album's four tracks, Abro ("I Open"), Creo ("I Believe" or "I Create"), Sano ("I Heal"), Amo ("I Love") encourage sensitive receptivity. Luvi's vocals are enveloped by lush ambient dub. Chancha's rhythms and vibrations create a comforting and calming soundscape that invites a sense of timelessness and expansion.

At times Ceremonia spirals hypnotically, blurring the distinction between inner and outer worlds. This music calls for attentive listening and encourages active individual and collective reinvention.

We Jazz Records is delighted to share the first edition of our new series of reworks with you . Our aim is to invite some of our favourite artists to take a fresh look at our album releases with the interval of 10 full length album releases. In other words, the invited artist has complete freedom to choose (or not to choose) any sample material from their allocated range of ten We Jazz Records albums, and there are no artistic boundaries of what they should do with the material. Each artist will then create a new musical piece based on the sample material and whatever instrumentation they wish to add to it.

As our first guest, we have the great Finnish producer Timo Kaukolampi who goes by his last name only when creating deep and mobile soundscapes, that never fail to evoke emotions and thoughts in the listener. We have long been fans of his work, released under Kaukolampi, Kaukolampi & Puranen (a duo with Tuomo Puranen), and on the vast discography of kraut-informed space rockers K-X-P.

As this is the first of our new series, Kaukolampi's task at hand is to dive deep into the first 10 We Jazz LPs, ranging from WJLP01 Bowman Trio released in 2016 to the 2018 release WJLP10 Alder Ego "II".

With the initial edition of any series comes the freedom and necessity of defining a new direction. We trusted Kaukolampi would be the right person to show us what the idea will be, and we were right. He premiered this piece at the We Jazz Festival back in 2018 and developed his ideas further during several studio sessions later on. The finished product opens things up with a bang and shows the value in going deep. Kaukolampi manages to distill new music from the source material, twisted and strecthed into dimensions beyond what is usually there. "Ambient Dub"? Perhaps at times. "Drone"? Maybe also. And then some.

To complete the idea, we invited the visionary graphic designer (and K-X-P drummer) Tomi Leppänen to "rework" the graphics of the source albums to construct the base of the design, which you see envelop the LP sleeve.

On Delta, a dozen artists across four continents freely interpret Fountain across a double LP, again featuring Donna Huanca’s surreal artwork, and the unearthly graphic manipulations of Nufolklore Studios. Remaining faithful to Fountain’s presentation, Lyra’s curation reflects her commitment to stylistic diversity, with the old guard and the next wave alongside each other. Where some artists chose to rework existing works, others composed new material from fragments found across the record. The results showcase the very themes of wordless identity conflict and technological concerns that Lyra and her foremothers have projected.

Agoria’s ‘.dev’ album saw the French polymath known for his forays into visual arts and tech, as well as electronic music production and DJing, deliver a project that dropped on vinyl, digital formats, and an AI player created by Arca and Jai Paul collaborators Bronze.

Michel Banabila is an indispensable part of the Dutch experimental music scene, where he has acquired a special place with many, in the 40 years that he has been releasing music. Michel is also just as active as a composer for the theater and ballet world, as well as for TV productions, to considerable fame. The threat of drowning in the sea of his oeuvre is real in view of the unprecedented amount of output, but once sailing unmissable monolithic rock formations loom up rapidly. 'Echo Transformations' is one of them. It's a magical album, where everything falls into place in a rich domain inspired by the Fourth World dimension. A world of sound arises from our imagination, stimulating the senses. A concept album where every sigh has its place and where no superfluous tone can be heard. What remains is to embrace the inevitable surrender that accompanies unstoppable change. This is Banabila at his best.

New York painter and musician exploratory industrialist Tor Lundvall initially envisioned his 14th album, Beautiful Illusions, as an entirely instrumental affair, "inspired by memories of sitting in a church or cathedral watching the shifting sunlight through stained glass." Although he ultimately chose to wreath the majority of the tracks with hushed, poetic vocals, his original muse still resonates. These are certainly songs of shadowplay and vaulted skies, the quiet grandeur of dusk deepening on the horizon. Lundvall characterizes the lyrical subject matter, too, in ways both specific and surreal, exploring "the doubts, the anxieties and even the bleak fantasies the mind spirals into during moments of isolation, separation and distance." Tricks of the eye, mind, and ear, magnified by silence and the looming long winter. Shivering pulses and muted bass lines tread the twilight while icicle synths and wiry guitar map the melody until the voice enters, narrating oblique moods of essence and absence, tenderness and truth. Glimpses of dark humor flicker in the wordplay but the greater sonic landscape is one of falling leaves and failing light, small gestures rendered as revelation, cloaked in reverb and spatial fog. Lundvall's mastery of nuance and negative space continues to heighten, whispered brushstrokes of the invisible and the unsaid, what lies beneath and what lies beyond: "Behind the shields and false fronts is usually a sadness. The heartbreaking reflections of what might have been."

Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. After the Re-release of the legendary album “Biokinetics", which is superb subaquatic dub techno, we re-release Porter Ricks first album on Mille Plateaux. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkyness with an underlying almost organic rhythmight. But still its not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkyness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.

Repress

Themed around events in nthng's life, Unfinished is a deeply personal journey, yet there's something very relatable to the world he has conjured. Lockdown has forced us to look inward, explore realities within ourselves and the fragility of our forgotten world. The album is a series of peaks and troughs - hopeful words, ominous tones and other-worldly soundscapes, giving way to a journey in no way linear - but a true reflection of our times.

The title track sets the scene perfectly, while Son features deep bass notes, dreamy keys and spoken word - creating a visceral and unsettling scene. Subnautica resides in the fringes of ambient and techno - as tribalistic drums are suspended in our new rendered reality.

The marching bass and howling synths of Wrath of the Demon lull conspicuously in a vacuum, while the hauntingly beautiful vocals featured on Disappeared But Not Forgotten evoke a poignant, powerful reaction across the record's B-side - "Everything stopped, you just disappeared..."

At its most tranquil Our Time offers a sense of rest - a space to appreciate, as we leave the window open, peer outside and feel the gentle breeze brush across our face. Saafe continues this theme, and feels like a warm embrace - "She saved my life in a matter of speaking, when she gave me back the power to believe."

Ending Theme is beautifully organic as you hear the sound of the piano pedal touch the floor, tones are introspective and vulnerable - while the looming presence of uncertainty subtly takes form in thinly layered pads.

The album also sees the release of a digi only bonus track Only a Flash of Light and invites you outside while the stars are at their brightest.

Limited Edition. No. 0331.
Small light scuff on side 2.
Inculdes poster and DVD in NM condition.
Obi included with small tear.
Hardcover book as new with a dented corner.

Vinyl with a couple of small marks on Side D, otherwise NM.

'You Are Eternity' is the third album to be released on Stroboscopic Artefacts and comes from two of the minds who have shaped the label since its earliest days: Dadub. Recorded over a period of two years, but containing fragments and ideas that stretch back a decade 'You Are Eternity' has been mixed together to form a continuous piece rather than twelve discreet tracks. The effect? An immersive journey that encompasses the descriptors brutal, ferocious, ambient and aqueous.

In the afterglow of her acclaimed 2020 album Silver Ladders, Los Angeles-based harpist Mary Lattimore returns with a culminating counterpart release, Collected Pieces: 2015- 2020. The limited-edition LP features new and previously unreleased material, Bandcamp-only singles, and other obscurities alongside standouts from her 2017 tape Collected Pieces. Beyond the vinyl compendium, an expanded tracklist on the cassette/digital version brings more of Lattimore's archives together for the first time. Lattimore has described the process of arranging these releases as akin to "opening a box filled with memories," and here that box continues to populate, accessible for both the artist and fans. Evocative material separated by years, framed as a portrait of an instrumental storyteller who rarely pauses, recording and often sharing music as soon as it strikes her. Seemingly in constant forward motion for the last five years since her Ghostly debut, Lattimore glances back for a breath, inviting new chances to live in these fleeting moments and emotions; all the beauty, sorrow, sunshine, and darkness housed within. A trove of pieces are collected here, most recorded in the moment, just Lattimore and her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand Harp, contact mics, and pedals. Like her most affecting work, these songs showcase Lattimore's gifts as an observer, able to shape her craft around emotional frequencies and scenes. Her power as a musician is rooted in how she sees the world: in vivid detail, profoundly empathic, with deep gratitude for nature and nuance.

A globetrotter in the most pure and respectful sense, away from the trappings of neo-colonialist ventures and predatory tourism, Discrepant head honcho Gonçalo F. Cardoso returns to his Island impression series to offers us another glimpse of his deep, abstract impressions of (an)other island. After passionately collecting the sounds and lives inhabiting the main Island of Zanzibar, Unguja, released through Edições CN back in 2018, Cardoso now dwells into the Malaysian heartbeat of the Borneo forest through Island recordings made during a trip in 2016. Assembled in situ with meticulous craft from portable recorders, samplers and battery powered synths, these nice recollections conjure the spirits that lurk behind the inhabitable and the communal that are as much part of a personal memoir as an impressionistic portrait open to new meanings. Focused compositions that flow organically, bending the environment in & out of shape into a new dreamlike exotica with plenty of breathing room for every detail, silence and movement to surface. A particular moment suspended in time, haunted perpetually by its bygone existence. Something no postcard or photograph could ever, ever come even close to.

"We’ve reached book IV in Rupert Clervaux’s series of “Zibaldone” audio diaries, at which point we find him telling a different kind of story.

“The first three all had very specific themes, while this one feels a little bit looser and doesn’t have just one thematic thrust,” he tells me, which maybe explains why listening feels a bit like annotating. I’m underlining, emphasizing, drawing arrows from here to there, highlighting symbols and noting motifs, realising, questioning, eureka-ing. An impressionistic meaning’s been encoded in and we’re lucky to be given the space to play that most poetic and boundless of all mental games: narrativization.

There are no wrong answers, but Rupert offers some clues either way. If there’s any cipher here it’s “something like a meditation on the concept of ‘depth’––in all its connotative forms.” Think below the surface, (the) underground, yawning oceans, being ‘down in the dirt’, soil, roots, rootlessness, pulling at the dregs, collapse, profundity, stable and unstable horizons, distance, perspective, intuition, not to mention relative opposites: to be shallow, to be above, to be beyond.

It’s got me thinking of Bresson’s “Bring things together that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.” His: “Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off elsewhere.” Rupert has realized these—two favourite goals of mine!—here.

This is music that catches you at your own periphery, gives pause, has you offering a little “huh” to, asking “I wonder why” to. Again, it’s got me musing on another mindworm, this time from New York publisher and multi-sensory reading room Dispersed Holdings: “Feeling-making-knowing feedback loop; cartography of feeling; water as text, read to know the land beneath and around it, and body as reader.”

Is it ok to offer up these other contexts out of context? I think so, because Zibaldone IV articulates a similarly swirly tone. Like, we’ve got Rebecca Solnit talking through Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” and later calling out to Michael Ruppert a ways away, and “Easy Rider” is playing in the wings. We’ve got Susan Sontag magically contextualizing Mariah Carey with poet Thylias Moss triangulating in order to sketch out (Rupert again) “something a little more interesting than wilful eclecticism or that laboured and patronising kind of pop-savvy.”

Are we following? Whether yes or no Vanessa Bedoret follows on with a performance of a performance of Moss’s 'Water Road’: to be once or twice removed, via strange transitions, purposeful confusions, and, suddenly, seagulls. We’re on a boat with Ingeborg Bachmann—and how I wish I could actually be! But maybe thanks to this music I can as literature, films, friends, lethargy, coincidences, little mental links, eternal wormholes, lingering notions come together to imagine something better."

Text by Natalia Panzer

Michael Rother und die italienische Musikenthusiastin Vittoria Maccabruni, auch privat ein Paar, gehen musikalisch eine bemerkenswerte Partnerschaft ein, bringen in 'As Long As The Light' scharfe Gegensätze aufeinander, fordern, vermengen und ergänzen sich. Im musikalischen Dialog finden sie zu ungeahnten Formen. Die Klangwelten, die sie kreieren, sind geprägt von diesen neuen Perspektiven. Etwas Einzigartiges entsteht. ''As Long As The Light' macht vor allem glücklich.' – Hendrik Otremba