Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 363 Items

In a city famed for its disparate and varied musical excellence, the Detroit-based alignment of feted electronic artist and producer Shigeto aka Zach Saginaw and rapidly rising Bruiser Brigade member ZelooperZ is an entirely natural thing. Introduced by mutual friends in the city, an instant bond was formed, and ZGTO was born. A Piece Of The Geto is out August 4th on Ghostly International, with a limited edition vinyl pressing by Third Man Records.

For Shigeto, this is the first time he's musically stepped out of the box of a solo artist and worked with a vocalist on a project. There is a ''less is more'' philosophy with the production where the vocals of ZelooperZ are seamlessly interlaced into the fabric of the beats. It's minimal in a sense, but the emotion felt through the words of ZelooperZ makes the songs as a whole intense and heavy with sentiment.

WM009 is the debut album from White Material co founder Young Male. A collection of dark ambient and textured experimental songs created as a personal soundtrack for life in uncertain times. Paranoia, lust, virtual experience, and tension/release are themes explored in this tour through a dystopian American landscape.

Blood Debts' is the compulsive debut album from Years Of Denial, the alter-face of London-based French musician/producer and DJ, Jerome Tcherneyan. Though his formulative Marseille youth was spent exploring the darkest corners of post-punk, New Wave, not to mention Public Enemy and the inspirational Mille Plateaux and Basic Channel labels, Tcherneyan, already an extremely capable drummer, quickly extended his sonic palate toward and beyond the bass-heavy electronic isolationism, insistent beats and drone experimentation that's still very much prevalent in his work today.

This collaborative project between Mats Erlandsson and Yair Elazar Glotman draws on their respective musical backgrounds to create an imaginary, dislocated "folk" music for the current dark ages. The project brings together instruments out of their historical or national contexts and focuses on local sounds that have lost any connection to locality or folk and transforming them through current production techniques.

Music From Memory continue their 12” series with the release of an EP from St. Louis outfit Workdub, taking four tracks from across the groups elusive privately released albums; ‘Workdub I’ (1989) released on LP and ‘Workdub II’ (1992) which was a cassette only release.

Left Ear are re-introducing another ten lost tracks from Nicholas Georgieff and Virgil Work, St Louis' basement electronics duo Workdub.

The release spans material from 1989-95 and includes recordings from their sole LP and both cassette albums. Workdub’s music hardly fits into a vacuum and some might even say it’s otherworldly. Tracks like “Reach for the Stars” and “Lunar Module” reflect dreams of space-age exploration, all the while their investigation into drum machines, synthesizers, samples and digital fx’s matched with their organic live instrumentation work to create a unique atmospheric dubbed out sound.

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.

There’s a myth about music critics that says we are frustrated, wannabe performers. Evidence to the contrary: Vivien Goldman. Ever since she migrated from pitching editors on the little-known music of Robert Nesta Marley to becoming one of the foremost chroniclers of the perfect storm of reggae, punk, hiphop and Afro-Beat, the London-born, New York-based Goldman has made documenting music her primary life work.

When Theodore Adorno opposed the new musical paths heard in concerto rooms, in his “Philosophy of Modern Music”, to those of mass culture, he did not anticipated that from this antagonism would emerge artist that, from the new resources of the so called classical music, would produce a sound capable to encompass and instruct itself through the musical scenario consumed by the masses. The XXI century music is born with the sign of the harmonization of these two tendencies that the former century insisted in separate and oppose. Among the artists in the threshold of the millennium, Vitor Araujo is one of those capable of articulate the Brazilian and world- wide classical music avant-garde with the undisputable artistic conquests of experimental-pop music of his time.

A download code is included. Following their much-acclaimed surprise debut album Vermont from 2014, Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Danilo Plessow and Innervisions' Marcus Worgull reunite for more synth daydreaming on the suitably titled “II”. The new outing continues where the first full-length left off, strolling further down the luminous and undulating path that the duo turned into, influenced in equal measures by kosmische, krautrock, minimal wave and synth soundtracks.

Andre Gough debuts on Avian as Verge. The Irish producer joins Shifted’s label with an extended EP of exquisitely crafted, deeply emotive Noise trips. Echoes of bonafide Industrial, more experimental post-Punk and New Wave run deep through Gough’s warping eight track debut for Avian, and while listeners might find the principle emotion evoked by the heady, droning synthesis and warping guitar tones a palpable anxiety – at the base of each wide angle ‘scape there’s a glorious, overriding sense of melancholy.

Spaceous and oblivious FM-synthesizer based New-Age & Dark-Ambient LP collaboration by Vera Dvale & Psykovarius. Dusty cosmic sonics interfere with slow growing pads, one-hit-percussions, metalic clanks, synth-flutes, psychedelic-SPA-melodies, dark long driven drones with monophonic bass drops, deep church organs and arpeggios. Execute time to listen to fog and space.

The world is already fallen and the temples are all new again.

Originally released on limited 10" double-pack in 2017, 'Luxor Necropolitics' was once again produced by Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv, and includes a super rare remix from Female of Sandwell District fame.