Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 285 Items

Wa Wu We is the artist alias and vinyl only label from Sebastian Mullaert. This is the third chapter, crafted in the Swedish woods. The first 6 episodes of the Wa Wu We label will form a collection of records, united by their significant and unique cover art and the way they’ve been recorded; this being the focus on improvising expression, resting in meditation and the nature surrounding Sebastian’s studio. All 6 of these episodes will be released as vinyl only and will be limited to 500 copies each.

Blue Sky Black Death is a name that pulses throughout the underground hip-hop community. The production duo is widely credited with being architects of the popular cloud rap sound. Now, Young God, one half of this innovative team, is releasing a boundary-pushing body of instrumental work under the alias Televangel, entitled Anthropocene Blues. Much like the cinematic style he created with his partner Kingston in BSBD, Televangel combines haunting and ambient sounds with atmospheric, melancholy arrangements and carefully-placed drums. The end result is more reminiscent of post-rock such as Godspeed You Black Emperor! than any hip-hop artist. Televangel plays every instrument heard on the album, making Anthropocene Blues a cohesive soundtrack that is much more than a beat tape.

Skee Mask’s endless search and fascination for fresh music, weed and burgers channeled into his own vision of sound. Enjoy the ride through his second album, a detailed experimental universe of a young dedicated hustler.

A download code is included.

All formats contain the full version of „Rausch“. The album is meant to be heard from beginning to end as a whole. It has been track marked or separated due to format restrictions. Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be / Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames / Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear / The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves / Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end / Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts / Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing / Once upon a time there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago / Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere / Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut / The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head / Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas / A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats / World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite. Wolfgang Voigt 2018

Future music duo Second Woman’s sophomore full-length for Spectrum Spools further hones their distinctive fusion of shapeshifting software sculpture and tessellated footwork. Shivering digital textures oscillate with and against algorithmically mapped percussion samples; smeared synthetic chords levitate in the distance; stabs of digital noise punctuate the mix in twitchy, time-distorting patterns. Their anamorphosis verges on ascetic: stark, splintered waveforms rendered into unique fiber optic hieroglyphs.

Multi-instrumentalists Josh Eustis and Turk Dietrich share a deep history going back to their days in the New Orleans ambient electronic community, as part of Telefon Tel Aviv and Belong, respectively. Even so, S/W pushes beyond their combined discographies to date, flexing impossibilities, building rhythms from arrhythmia, teasing veiled emotion from bold iterations of cold code.

Ethereal Icelandic goddess Björk new album, Utopia.
It features artwork by Jesse Kanda, who has previously designed cover art for FKA Twigs and fellow Björk collaborator Arca.

Mister Mellow moves further away from the synthesizer-heavy sounds of the recent Washed Out releases and more band-driven sound of his work on iconic labels Sub Pop in America, and Domino in Europe. On Mister Mellow, Greene draws from the experimental collage techniques of musique concrète and plunderphonics artists such as The Residents. Combining styles as diverse as free jazz, house, hip-hop and psych together with interlude-esque voiceover samples, often pulled from anonymous YouTube vlogs, he creates a busy, chaotic, and caricaturish mix that mirrors the claustrophobic, hyper-stimulated psyche so familiar to young adults.

As he continues to carve out his innovative sonic identity, influenced by the world around him but unafraid to buck trends, it’s fitting that Greene has partnered with legendary hip hop label Stones Throw Records, long a home for beat-loving musical rebels. His approach to releasing music is every bit as individual, too: in an environment where compiling singles into an album format or working with a single video director are the norm, Greene has chosen to commission eleven different artists to bring the visual aspect of his fully-realised album project to life.

On Mister Mellow, Washed Out steers clear of emotion to empathise with the minutiae of the world around him. “I’ve been much less interested in sentimentality and emotion for the past couple of years,” says Greene, “In some ways, I think its a reaction against getting older and having more responsibilities. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time in my life where I could just relax and block out the world for a moment.” Though Mister Mellow is an intensely personal album, its ideas and observations speak to the lived experience of so many young adults, an experience that we come to see as both funny and sad.

The release comes on 180g vinyl. As Far Out's in-house producer his work is a key component in the consistency and transience of the label's sound, with key albums include Azymuth's Fenix, Marcos Valle's Estatica,Sabrina Malheiros' Dreaming and Far Out Monster Disco Orchestra. His latest credit on the catalogue is the next chapter of his Dokta Venom alias, Moodswings.

DJ stickers.

Heavyweight double gatefold vinyl with remastered audio and new and updated artwork reworked by the designer of the original sleeves

Second Woman is a collaborative project featuring Turk Dietrich of Belong and Joshua Eustis of the renowned Telefon Tel Aviv. As one would imagine, »Second Woman« is a nonpareil debut of futuristic electronic music fusing the coveted genetics of the duos respective previous endeavors into an alluring new enigma of ASMR-inducing kaleidoscopic dub. Second Woman is a fully realized entity; a well-crafted sound world and a refreshing shared effort which is inspiring in its purity and painstaking in its design.

The opening "100407jd7" wastes no time exhibiting mastery in both sound and structure, contorting the frequency spectrum into a psychoactive mirage with its mutating tectonics and vaporous tone clouds. Cuts like "200601je6" and "700358bc5" are bar-raising examples of veteran craftsmanship and vision, refining and reengineering the blue prints of their early works to create an original and dynamic album. The deliberation and control over every particle is obsessive, but the end results of each individual track unfold with an organic temperament unparalleled in a grid-locked world of DAW shaped musics and rat's-nest modular aleatory. Words fail where essential sonics are concerned, and this vital new creation speaks for itself.

First released in 2016, »EP 2« was the 2nd volume in Suction Records’ 4-part »EP series« by Rx-101, serving as an introduction to this elusive producer’s vast, mind-blowing archive of unreleased late ‘90s braindance, melodic techno, and IDM tracks. Rx-101 is a previously unknown producer from the Netherlands, Erik Jong, who recorded hundreds of tracks, live to cassette, in a feverish burst of creativity from 1997-1999. Riyl Bochum Welt or Aphex Twin’s »Selected Ambient Works Volume 1.«

POP – the album that has become widely recognized as the defining moment in which Wolfgang Voigt brought us into a clearing of his deep, psychedelic forest. A landmark release in the GAS odyssey that drew international attention, POP was originally released in 2000 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint MILLE PLATEAUX. POP was heralded by Pitchfork at the time of release as being “an exercise in sonic texture… pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth.”

POP has since been reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX” (now out of print) and finally now, POP is released on KOMPAKT – for the first time on CD in its original artwork.

Please note: This CD is a single release of the GAS BOX released in 2016.

Jardín' is Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s debut album, out January 2017 on Stones Throw Records. Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s formidable skills have come to fruition on his Stones Throw debut. “This album came out of wanting to make music that reminds people how beautiful life is and how delicate their heart is,” he said. “I've always wanted to make music that is healing, comforting, and funky. I named the album 'Jardín' hoping for it to create a space for healing when people put it on.
“A garden is full of life, growth and beauty,” Gabriel said of choosing that unifying image as the title for his new album. “It makes me think of green and white and all the colors as they appear in different flowers.” That vivid spectrum bursts forth on 'Jardín' itself and the album contains references to fruit of all sorts, sour mango, juicy tangerines and sweet peaches.
From the heartache and aching vocals that float over the dusty drums of “Crawl” to the stutter-step thump of “Bombo Fabrika” to the high falsetto he nails on “Octave,” GarzónMontano proves himself to already be one of 2017’s biggest breakout talents.

Musiche di L.u.c.a. Produced and written by Francesco De Bellis L.u.c.a. is Francesco De Bellis aka Francisco. Years ago he started putting together some selections for a friend of his: Luca. The intention was to pick songs to be played during car rides, and like any other kind of ritual, this too would come with strict rules. You’d have to go throw the whole selection of 100 tracks without skipping, because every single one was important. Be it the sounds, the arrangement or its creativity, each track was there for a very specific reasons. It quickly became a monthly event which for several years evolved in a deep musical research without genre boundaries: Disco and psychedelic, soundtracks, library music, exotica, electronic and dance music, italo, new wave, pop or prog. Tracks of each and any historical period and provenance had been featured in this special compilations. But it wasn’t always that easy to come up with the right piece and eventually Francesco started producing a few on his own to fill in the gaps. After six tracks, it was quite clear that there was a project developing, one in which he could finally experiment freely, leaving behind the rules that often come with dance tracks. Of course, no name could have been better than the one of his friend that had inspired everything? And so L.u.c.a was born. Now, while preserving the same mind set, L.u.c.a is back with an album that embraces a new-hippie vibe, strongly pervaded by a mystical naturalism. This is a whole new universe in the making, where rumbling magmatic atmospheres evolve gradually in a journey through an idealist new world, celestial interludes revealing a full take over of nature, with a pervasive library feel that dates back to the great Italian masters, carrying on Edizioni Mondo’s legacy.

Electronic musician Ryan West's latest release as Rival Consoles has a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet. - pitchfork.com

Individually, Jim O’Rourke and Christian Fennesz have been responsible for numerous legendary works which merge the traditional avant-garde with contemporary sensibilities. The signature of both O’Rourke and Fennesz cohabit this new release with O’Rourke’s gurgling harmonies swimming amongst the shimmering frequencies and strummed melodies produced by Fennesz. Two side long tracks situate themselves as a warm electronic adventure. Simultaneously radical and comforting these works shift from gentle sonorities to fully distorted explosions all of which reside within a template of tension between musical and non-music matter.

Subtle killer grooves derived from Friedman’s outernational percussions & musics infected works.