Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 337 Items

The Invisible Architect is the third full-length album by like minded production duo and long-term friends 1000 Names. Unlike their previous releases, which focused more on technology and machinery, they drew their inspiration for this album from the unconscious moments that just happen during live shows or studio improvisations, those happy accidents when the music emerges out of the chaos with no traceable origin. In these unconscious moments, it seems, the invisible architect – a mysterious natural power – creates this untouched and raw music, almost like the geological formation of rocks in a mountain or the trees in a forest are formed by the fundamental forces of nature.
In their own words: “It’s a mystery where the music comes from and why it sounds the way it does. We look for the answer in the garden of the invisible architect – and try just to be…“

Join 40 Winks on a road trip to anywhere. Bring your music player and tell your honey you won’t be home for dinner. It’s the trip, not the destination.“
About 40 Winks:
No hay banda! (“there is no band”, Mulholland Dr. 2001) pretty much sums up where 40 Winks aims to go with its instrumental hip hop: meticulously chop and paste samples together, to create an atmosphere of beats and vibes which steps beyond unimaginative loops. 40 Winks hit the scene in 2002, with a whole slew of laidback beats. Eager to share their sound with the world, they released a couple of albums independently. The attention they got from this, allowed them to build with people from around the world. One of these independently released albums, More Than Loops, got reissued in Japan on Swamp Records, after that the ball kept rolling. On their first worldwide release, Extended Pleasure on Escapism Records (2005), they reached listeners well beyond the (instrumental) hip hop community with the song “Melancholia”. After appearances on compilations, like Weapons Of Hope on Little-D (2006), they got a chance to do their thing on the renowned label, Merck Records with Sound Puzzle (2007). All this led them back to Europe, where the German based Project: Mooncircle welcomed them with a spot on the compilation Heart On The Right Spot (2007) and a full album The Lucid Effect (2008). In 2009 they took some time off, doing solo stuff and remixes. In 2011 40 Winks is back with a double LP called It’s The Trip (2011) on Project: Mooncircle.
Artwork By Afreux.

Join 40 Winks on a road trip to anywhere. Bring your music player and tell your honey you won’t be home for dinner. It’s the trip, not the destination.“
About 40 Winks:
No hay banda! (“there is no band”, Mulholland Dr. 2001) pretty much sums up where 40 Winks aims to go with its instrumental hip hop: meticulously chop and paste samples together, to create an atmosphere of beats and vibes which steps beyond unimaginative loops. 40 Winks hit the scene in 2002, with a whole slew of laidback beats. Eager to share their sound with the world, they released a couple of albums independently. The attention they got from this, allowed them to build with people from around the world. One of these independently released albums, More Than Loops, got reissued in Japan on Swamp Records, after that the ball kept rolling. On their first worldwide release, Extended Pleasure on Escapism Records (2005), they reached listeners well beyond the (instrumental) hip hop community with the song “Melancholia”. After appearances on compilations, like Weapons Of Hope on Little-D (2006), they got a chance to do their thing on the renowned label, Merck Records with Sound Puzzle (2007). All this led them back to Europe, where the German based Project: Mooncircle welcomed them with a spot on the compilation Heart On The Right Spot (2007) and a full album The Lucid Effect (2008). In 2009 they took some time off, doing solo stuff and remixes. In 2011 40 Winks is back with a double LP called It’s The Trip (2011) on Project: Mooncircle.
Artwork By Afreux.

Into his 25th year as a DJ, Aardvarck comes with his second full length album for Eat Concrete Records. Much in the vein of his Bloom series, but in an album context with songs and lush internoodley bits.. currently on rotation from Thom York.. TIP!
With 'Choice', Aardvarck has created one of his finest selections to date. The 22 tracks go in all directions Aardvarck is known for: from bass-heavy dub to lush soundscapes, broken beats and soul vocals. After a few introducing words by Gaslamp Killer, the beautiful 'Lucky Shot' features vocals by Alexandra. The following cinematic and hypnotising ambient-like pieces are sometimes reminiscent of Boards of Canada and the Aardvarck classic ‘Find the Cow’. From then onward we are treated with songs similar to some of the recent 'Bloom' releases, displaying a taste for heavy bass, beats and dub samples. Yet 'Choice' has more to offer than dj-food alone; the album flows like a mix and keeps a light and fresh vibe along the way with lots of sketches and interludes. Aardvarck also offers some definite classics with 'Heal' and 'Find the Cow Almost', featuring guest vocals on both tracks. Timeless.

Three introspective instrumental compositions for English horn, flute, percussion, double bass, Hammond organ. Performed, recorded and mixed by Timo van Luijk at Kulta Saha, 2010-2012.

Edition of 400 copies. 3 introspective instrumental (English horn, flute, percussion, double bass, Hammond organ) compositions performed, recorded and mixed by Timo van Luijk during 2010 - 2012 at Kulta Saha. In memory of Hugo Billens, Anja Hiilesmaa, Dirk de Hollander, Ger Boeske, Ourgon and Tosca.

Ah! Kosmos is the moniker of Istanbul-based producer and instrumentalist Basak Günak. Bastards digs deeply into the surface and soon turns that hole into a living space, a home for all. Supporting the likes of Darkside, James Holden, Kiasmos, Two Door Cinema Club, Emika, Daddy G (Massive Attack) in her hometown Istanbul, Ah! Kosmos performed at remarkable festivals as Rock’n Coke, Babylon Soundgarden, Venice Electro Festival, Budapest Punkurica Festival, Piknik Elektronik in Brussels, Tokyo Electronic Music of Arts Festival and CitySonic Festival in Mons.

This limited 7inch introduces Andreikelos with a catchy downtempo tune on which mediterranean flavour meets electronic sounds as the traditional Greek organ bouzouki smoothly flows over an abstract hip-hop beat. Also includes dubstep remix by Earthkeptwarm. Includes free download code with additonal track.

Self-titled debut, Anika, produced by Geoff Barrow of Portishead.

2015, Kenneth Werner aka AS IF has released his first vinyl release with ROHS! - MOMENTS EP. This EP is a pure retro-futuristic Acid-Downtempo vision. Initially it was released on white label 7 inch vinyl of 50 ONLY limited copies. It has been reissued in 2019 with a totally new face/design and on 250 limited copies for the world. This is a pure gold futuristic gem on wax.

A 1994 tape by Ghanaian musician Ata Kak called Obaa Sima is being reissued by Awesome Tapes From Africa.

The release is the culmination of a 13-year story for Awesome Tapes From Africa founder Brian Shimkovitz, who bought a cassette copy of Obaa Sima from a roadside stall in Cape Coast, Ghana, in 2002. The tape was the subject of the first post on his Awesome Tapes From Africa blog in 2006—the blog spawned a full record label in 2011.

Shimkovitz began searching for Ata Kat and says "Google and endless phone calls provided no leads." It was eventually discovered the musician, real name Yaw Atta-Owusu, had recorded Obaa Sima in Toronto before moving back to Ghana in 2006.

The restoration of the tape proved challenging. Only about 50 copies of the original tape were produced, and Atta-Owusu's master DAT had disintegrated, so the second-hand copy purchased by Shimkovitz was used as the source for the reissue.

Automat and Max Loderbauer open proceedings on the new SELEKT label quite masterfully with an auspicious 4 track EP - Verstärker / Hall / Kompressor / Echo. How did this come about? Automat, busy recording their second album, came across Max Loderbauer in

Automatic Tasty tells a tale through his machines of a lonely Wicklow field. Disco-tinged House with an electronica touch!
field from dawn till dusk….disco-tinged House with an electronica touch!

Disco-tinged House with an electronica touch!

Autopsia is a cult art project dealing with music and visual production. Its art practice began in London in the late 1970s and continued during the 1980s in the art centers of the former Yugoslavia. Since 1990, Autopsia has acted from Prague, Czech Republic. Above all Autopsia is not concerned with music. What is Autopsia? Art? Theory? Framing? Projection? Gaze? Autopsia is language is image is sound. Autopsia is a tombstone on the grave of time. Autopsia is archaeology. The discourse of the beginning and about the beginning. At the beginning is Death and the pity of Death. The music is in the pity. The music of Autopsia oscillates from romanticism to avantgarde, from industrial rhythms and dark ambient drones to relentless choral swells and academic minimalism. Autopsia Archive 1982-1995 Engineered & Mastered at Mustakillah Studio Prague, 2017

➤ Limited to 300 copies ➤ Light blue vinyl ➤ Full-color inner sleeve ➤ Professionally mastered for vinyl ➤ 2nd press

UK techno founders B12 return! The duo's history famously started in the early 90's with their music appearing under a plethora of monikers under the "B12 Records" umbrella - 12" vinyl with notorious cryptic messages engraved in the run-out grooves, before being collected into album form and release on Warp. After a hiatus in the late 90's, the pair resurfaced briefly for some live shows, a flurry of hugely sought-after 12"s and a 7-part CD anthology. They then abruptly disappeared again - this is their first appearance in 5 years, fittingly on Glaswegian imprint Soma. (Their seminal Warp Records album was named Electro Soma...is there a connection?) The Bokide 325 EP Is it a planet to be explored, or the journey through a personal hell? Only a few know for sure but at the end of this voyage expressed in the best way B12 know how, layers of sounds, beats, synths, lush pads, and seductive melodies the hope of a whole new reality is reached. It conjures up foreboding, planetary soundscapes - rooted in the more ambient, filmic side of their output, is it a reflection of recent turmoil within/ the artists personal lives? The EP opens with "Into the Void", whose simple but emotive synth line weaves its way across a variety of beats and sounds, and takes the listener into the depths where the true journey can commence. Onwards, darker and more mysterious notes loom up throughout "Descension" and "Unsound Mind", with pounding bass throbbing underneath, leading further into the world of shadows where the alarming awareness that something isn't quite right never truly leaves you. It concludes with Terra Incognita, the final track of the EP - an unknown place, left to be discovered and completed by the listener.

Yes, double stars do exist. They are a reality. They appear in the firmament – sometimes as an optical and sometimes as a physical phenomenon. Two celestial bodies, working in relation to each other, circling around each other, responding to each other.

Itʼs been five years since the last Belong long player, as the duo works slowly to organize their sound works. Both the time invested, and the wait, have been well rewarded with this return. Common Era shows extraordinary progression from that first album of dense, scorched earth instrumentals, hints of a new direction having been revealed on the Colorless Record EP from 2008 which contained covers of four should-have-been classics from the original psychedelic era. The new material has such common pop elements as “songs”, vocals and drum machines, but the results could hardly be called conventional and are like little else happening on the current “scene”. The songs themselves are akin to radio transmissions received from another time and place, just as likely to be the future as the past, or even from a contemporary alternate universe. They are both passionate and dispassionate, grey yet technicolor, ghostly and palpable, distant yet immediate, grainy and focused. Upon listening these conceptual contradictions are dismissed with ease, as the recordings reveal that they fit all of these descriptors simultaneously, an extraordinary balancing act.

Compilation with remixes of songs from Björk's album "Biophilia". At the time of release all the tracks were previously released in The Crystalline Series and Biophilia Remix Series but they were remastered specially for this compilation. "Sacrifice (Matthew Herbert's Pins And Needles Mix Edit)" is just an excerpt of the original remix by Herbert and it works as an interlude in this compilation.

Deluxe edition. Includes 3 exclusive tracks. Biophilia is an interdisciplinary exploration of the universe and its physical forces - particularly those where music, nature, and technology meet - inspired by these relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena, from the atomic to the cosmic. The Independent on Sunday calls it "brilliantly original and ambitious .

This version of the album is housed in a six-panel cardboard package.

Part of a series of single-sided etched translucent 12” records, each with their own unique etching and die-cut ‘Vulnicura’ wound sleeves, designed by M/M, Paris. “Krampfhaft is someone I have been listening to for few years adoring his hyperbeauty, orchid techno I nickname it in the
vein of plaid and others: brave enough to take joy on in the often rather apocalyptic
environment of electronic music” - Björk. “I was very honoured to be part of this, although it was a pretty daunting task to
rework a song with such an intimate topic! As the original is very stripped down, all
I could think of doing was adding in [even more] tension and drama. So I layered the
whole track on to a bed of heavily compressed cloth movement and gradually built up
the tension from there.” - Kramphaft

Part of a series of single-sided etched translucent 12” records, each with their own unique etching and die-cut ‘Vulnicura’ wound sleeves, designed by M/M, Paris. “Mica is someone I have been following growing since 2008, like a proud aunt, I might even have been at her first concert? Sooo exciting to witness her grow into a full on composer and carry the weight of such things as ‘Under The Skin’... And I still adore her upbeat stuff withTirzah too !!!” - Björk. “I did a karaoke version more than a remix, because I love her string arrangements
and thought it would be an opportunity to draw attention to them. I hope Björk isn’t
offended that I took her voice out, [but] you can hear it in your head - or sing
along.” - Mica Levi

Part of a series of single-sided etched translucent 12” records, each with their own unique etching and die-cut ‘Vulnicura’ wound sleeves, designed by M/M, Paris.“Lotic is the one of the first musicians Alejandro introduced me to in Autumn 2013 with piles of enthusiasm: I got immediately obsessed enjoying how always total nature he was!! The most clublike flamboyant anthems of his always seem like shrieks of beasts, dark insects and pagan birds displaying their feathers in a territorial way: a colourful celebration!! The reason why I asked him to do ‘Notget’ was there are certain suspension-like elastic gravitydefying beat structures that him and Alejandro share (each in their total idiosyncratic way though) that Notget has and I had a gut feeling he would take further. Which he did.” - Björk. “When Björk sent over the original track to review late last year, I couldn't believe how well she had intuited that ‘Notget’ was the perfect selection for me. Perhaps it was a bit of coincidence, but I was very much still tending to the scars left from my previous relationship while at the same time nurturing my current one. ‘Notget’ is both the mourning and the eulogy; I knew this meant remixing the song would be difficult, both technically and emotionally. In the end, I felt I had to attempt to amplify both the desperation the song expresses as well as the inspired, reminiscent joy.” – Lotic

Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour lyric sheet / poster exclusive to this edition. After releasing the critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 on the seminal Type label (Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yellow Swans), Richter chose De Stijl for this 2012 album, an American label that had just put out future classics by the likes of Circuit Des Yeux, Hype Williams and Wolf Eyes. Earth is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost visual artists. After hearing Black To Comm's Alphabet 1968 Ho Tzu Nyen invited Richter to accompany the film at Berlin's Asian Film Festival, Unsound in Krakow and several other art biennals and music festivals around the world. In his own words: "Most of the music was composed under the influence of heavy pain killers while recovering from a broken leg (the recordings literally took place in bed). The music (like the film) is about slowness and decay, states of unconsciousness, sleeping and waking up, dying and being reborn. The film is a post-apocalyptic collage based on paintings by classical European painters (Caravaggio, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Gericault) -- the music translates this concept employing corresponding collage-based sampling techniques using loops made from vintage vinyl and shellac records combined with acoustic and electronic instrumentation and voice." From the original De Stijl one-sheet: "Richter’s already formidable expressive power stretches over all of Earth. Reflecting the countless cyclical forces that make up, oh, more or less everything we know and are, the music on Earth is bracing, lovely, bustling and still, and at times bittersweet, a commingling of sensations and emotions that can’t be neatly separated from one another. (Earth is complex, as you know.) Guests on Earth include David Aird, a.k.a Vindicatrix (on the Mordant Music label), contributing startling vocal work; Renate Nikolaus on an array of instruments and noise devices; Rutger Zuydervelt (singing bowls); and Christopher Kline (singing saw). Earth is Black to Comm’s seventh album and his debut for De Stijl, following the acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (on Type) and last year’s vinyl-only collaboration with Mike Kelley of Destroy All Monsters (on the En/Of label)." Alex Neilson in The Wire: "The most marked aspect of Earth is the voice of David Aird, aka Vindicatrix. Imperious and dolorous, he has the gravity of post-Climate Of Hunter Scott Walker, David Sylvain or Klaus Nomi stripped of the pathetic ritz. This is something that's easy to do badly, but Aird pulls it off with aplomb. On "The Children" he breaks into a morose yodel, rolling the words around his palate and colouring each syllable black before gifting them to the air. The meaning isn't understood verbally as much as viscerally. Beneath Aird's ululations, Richter casts handfuls of angelic debris from keyboards and digital devices, generating a celestial electronic tapestry reminiscent of Japanese musician Nobukazu Takemura. Sounds vie and twist at frequencies you can't so much hear as feel in the bridge of your nose, and the variety and full-bloodedness of the accompaniment is what prevents Aird's vocal from occassionally lapsing into shtick."

Violettes Doppelvinyl (180g) Reissue des Blockhead Klassikers ’Interludes After Midnight’ (2012) inklusive Downloadcode.

Simon Green aka Bonobo returns with his fourth, most eagerly-anticipated and most accomplished album to date, the magnificent Black Sands on Ninjaaa Tune!