Search "Six Organs Of Admittance" 447 Items

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Icelandic musician Gunnar Jónsson Collider debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with an expansive trip through six fictional environments, brought further to life through an accompanying video by artist Arna Beth.

Inviting escapism through detailed, glacial textures, S.W.I.M. elevates a traditional beatless spectrum into a first-person narrative, moving across burning wastelands, miles-high sundown, a dizzying night sky, subterranean exploration, and more beautiful, natural phenomena. Subtle changes in tone and texture across each of the six environments provide a signal of the destination’s energy and the intended perception of the traveler. At times, elated and dwarfed by nature’s surrounding grandeur. Other times, bestowing a sense of apprehension and unknowing.

Best absorbed through the accompanying visual album by fellow Icelandic digital artist Arna Beth, S.W.I.M. is an immersive jump into a majestic sci-fi world, placing you front and center in both sound and visual.

Mastered by Franceso Fabris, S.W.I.M., will be available on limited edition 12” and digital.

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12" | 2023 | EU | Original (Sure Thing)

Mist006

12,99 €*

2LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Karl)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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My Own Mirror To Stay is a brand new and first-ever compilation from the Sure Thing label. It finds them carefully curating six new artists and welcome them to the family, each with their own personal reflections of the dance floor. Lukas Urban kicks off with supple, seductive and stripped back techno while Soreab layers up prickly percussive layers and Sanguine sinks you into a dream state with his lush ambient pads and skeletal rhythms. The flip side features three more elegantly designed and meticulous bits of techno sound sculpture. The always exceptional Neel has mastered this one too.

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Schneider TM

Ereignishorizont

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Umor-Rex)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"The event horizon gives the black hole its size; behind it hides the singularity. And the more extended it is, the more massive the black hole is. But the event horizon is also invisible; if matter or light passes through it, there is no turning back.“ (Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer, Max-Planck-Institut f ür Radioastronomie) Ereignishorizont is Schneider TM’s new and with a duration of over 80 minutes truly epic album: experimental guitar, technological innovations and excursions into musical territories beyond the usual. Available as 2x LP / 2x CD / DL.

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Entidad Animada

Pruebas De Existencia

Dommedagsnatt Grey Vinyl Edition

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Marcos Díaz has been part of Buenos Aires underground for many years, being in projects like Bosques and making solo music under the pseudonym Entidad Animada (animated entity). Under this project, Marcos has explored sounds that involve a mix of feedback/distortion through synthesizers, guitars and drum machines that hint at the influence of Stereolab, Spacemen 3, and mid-nineties shoegaze. However, there are also ambient soundscapes with a slight rubbed of the ritualistic psychedelia of the Popol Vuh. The display of colours in his music comes together in the midst of a playful, relaxed and optimistic environment that is simultaneously melancholic. Because of the nature of those pieces, but also because in Entidad Animada there is also space for collage sounds that blend randomly with textures of a primitive analog sound, which inevitably causes a paradox between what is alive and what is inert. And it is because Entidad Animada is precisely that, a spectrum or a vision, a ghost. And these sounds are proof of his existence.

Pruebas de existencia (proofs of existence) is a collection of recordings that Marcos has made in recent years and that we have selected for this album, his first work on Umor Rex. A couple of these pieces were only released digitally, while the others have been on ltd cassette editions through Fuego Amigo Discos in Argentina. Pruebas de existencia is an Umor Rex compilation and remastered edition.

Guitar, sampler, synthesizer, organ, bass, drums & electronic beats, vocals, recording and mixing by Entidad Animada in Buenos Aires. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, NY. Cover photography Natch Tablescape (1979) by Langdon Clay. Layout by Daniel Castrejón, Mexico City.

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Thorr's Hammer

LP | 2004 | US | Reissue (Southern Lord)

35,99 €*

Even Parker & George Lewis

Release: 2004 / US – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Limited grey vinyl.A more than timely reissue of Southern Lord's very first release. This is an awesome runic doom bauer of a record. Featuring Stephen O'Malley, Greg Anderson and a then 17 year old nordic vocalist, Runhild Gammelsæter. Thorr's Hammer was active only for six weeks during which it played two gigs and recorded a demo and "Dommedagsnatt". The band disbanded after Runhild's return to Oslo, Norway. Burning Witch was formed fromthe ashes of Thorr's Hammer and Runhild has currently teamed up with James Plotkin (Khanate) to form Khlyst. Long out of print and released on 180g black vinyl with new art work in a gatefold sleeve. Thorr's Hammer features Stephen O'Malley, Greg Anderson (Sunn0))), Burning Witch) and Runhild Gammelsæter (Khlyst).

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From Saxophone & Trombone

LP | 2024 | EU | Original (Otoroku)

Home Recordings, 1978-1980

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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First vinyl re-issue of Evan Parker’s duo with George Lewis. Transferred from the original masters, we discovered that the original Incus LP was cut at the wrong speed - and so, we present the first vinyl issue of the correct masters, or ‘mastas’ as Adam Skeaping, legendary engineer who is also responsible for Six of One and Compatibles, fondly calls them.

Skeaping, always working with the latest in recording technology for the time, has a knack for gaining access to remarkable spaces. Good spaces that were cheap because no one else had discovered them. The Art Workers Guild is a Georgian Hall in Bloomsbury, London, with lofty ceilings and hard wooden floors. It’s the perfect room to exercise an instrument to its full length, to ‘run the full length of the staircase’ in Parker's words. Two bells to ring off the floor and remain in dextrous, airy resonance. Recorded at 30ips on enormous reels, the recording captures all the fine filigree detail so celebrated on Parker’s later ‘Six of One’, though here we are treated to tenor as well as soprano, plus, of course, George Lewis’ trombone. Parker and Lewis first met at Moers festival, Lewis having just played excerpts of Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ with Anthony Braxton. Living in Paris, it wasn’t so hard for a young Parker to invite him for a session on his new imprint, Incus. Though having been part of the Aacm, toured with Count Basie and made records for Black Saint, this would be Lewis’ first foray into British improv, excited by the idea the Bailey and Parker were attempting to open up the notion of improvisation to include “the freshness of the immediate encounter”. Lewis had not long recorded his solo, which mixes lively hints of Ellington and tender lyricism with total experimentation in three part overdubbed trombone. From Saxophone to Trombone veers towards his wilder end of technicality, some of Lewis’ rarer, starker improv - all avant garde burbles and bubbles, breath control and scalar flights. It’s a recording of two young masters, documented beautifully, and released for the first time on vinyl at its intended speed.

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The Fast Set

Tape | 2024 | UK | Original (The Tapeworm)

9,99 €*

Toru Yamanaka & Teiji Furuhashi / Dumb Type Theater

Release: 2024 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"In 1978 I started making experimental home recordings with my old schoolfriend Alan Clark. We both had Akai 4000ds reel-to-reels, which made for easy swapping of locations and ideas. We would meet most evenings to record – for the best part of two years. Much of the music on this tape comes from those experiments.

Some of my solo pieces on this cassette were on a compilation cassette I made for my friend Brad Day, who in 1979 was working at Beggars Banquet record shop in Earl's Court. He happened to be playing it in the shop when co-manager Peter Kent walked in and asked who it was. From that I was offered a 7" release on the Axis label Peter was starting with his colleague Ivo Watts-Russell, and my first gig was organised at Mayhem Studio in Battersea, supporting Vice Versa. With another schoolfriend, Steve Player on guitar and Stylophone 350s, my 16-year-old brother Peter Knight on backing tapes and backing vocals, and me on Vcs3 and vocals, we put a set together within a week. The filmmaker John Maybury projected Super-8 films over us at the gig, and suggested we call ourselves The Fast Set – as all three of us were rooted static to the spot with nerves. The name stuck, and it now seems appropriate to retrospectively apply that name to our previous untitled endeavours.

This cassette release is a 'patchwork' I constructed back in 1980 of the late-70s home recordings – both solo or with Alan. There were two projects back then – the experimental pieces, and the electronic 'pop' songs. This release consists of the former, which I feel age has been kinder to. The tapes had remained untouched for over 40 years until I baked and transferred them recently, so please excuse the hiss, distortion, pops, crackles, and wobbles, as I wish to maintain the integrity and home-made feel of the original recordings." – David Knight, London, 10 January 2024.

London-based musician David Knight has been a member of/worked with: The Fast Set, Five Or Six, Shock Headed Peters, Left Hand Right Hand, Arkkon, The Amal Gamal Ensemble, The Stargazer's Assistant, and Lydia Lunch. He wrote and recorded with Danielle Dax throughout the 1980s, and currently works with Stephen Thrower (Coil, Cyclobe) in UnicaZürn.

Recorded between 1978 and 1980 in Battersea, London on an Akai 4000ds and later a Teac 3300sx. Instruments used: EMS Vcs3, Roland System 100, Hohner K4 String Machine, Dubreq 350s, Piano, Guitar, Percussion, Roland Re201 Space Echo, Colorsound Ring Modulator, EHX Small Stone Phaser, Ibanez Standard Fuzz. Written, recorded and performed by David Knight and Alan Clark. Compiled and mastered by David Knight.

Artwork by Danielle Dax.

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Plan For Sleep

LP | 1984 | JP | Reissue (Conatala)

28,99 €*

LP | 2024 | EU | Original (Hallow Ground)

Release: 1984 / JP – Reissue

Genre: Organic Grooves, Electronic & Dance

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In the performance of this work, "Plan for Sleep" (1986), created simultaneously with “Every Dog Has His Day” (1985), Yamanaka took on the role of sound operation. The performance begins with a minimal piece where the tones of the electronic organ and striking phrases from the piano and saxophone race forward in syncopation. Following this, various sound fragments drift over a deafening industrial beat reminiscent of machine noises. There are also pieces that transform the typing sounds of a typewriter into rhythm, showcasing a range of experiments inspired by the then-novel sampling technology, beautifully intertwining with the physicality of the performance.

Additionally, influenced significantly by film music, Yamanaka incorporates a rich tapestry of colors through melancholic melodies that evoke various scenes, from secular jazz to other influences. This work constructs a uniquely original and sophisticated worldview that stands out even when surveying the canon of avant-garde performance art from around the globe in the postmodern era.

Dumb Type is a multimedia performance art group based in Kyoto that was formed in 1984 and continues to be active at the forefront of the art scene. We are excited to announce the simultaneous release of two cassette book works produced by musician Toru Yamanaka and the late Teiji Furuhashi, a central figure of the group, for works from the early Dumb Type Theatre era: "Every Dog Has His Day (recorded in 1985)" and "Plan For Sleep (recorded in 1986)," now available for the first time on vinyl.

Since the founding of Dumb Type, Yamanaka has primarily been responsible for music production, while the late Furuhashi played a crucial role in translating Yamanaka’s compositions into stage direction. Their collaboration began with previous groups ORG and R-still, and was influenced by the NEW Wave and progressive rock trends they were pursuing at the time, as well as by artists like Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, who fused minimal music and avant-garde performance. Moreover, their bold incorporation of cutting-edge sampling and house music during that era laid the foundation for Dumb Type's sound, marking an important intersection in the history of minimalism, ambient music and performance art in Japan.

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Miki Yui

As If

LP | 2024 | UK | Original (Drowned By Locals)

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Miki Yui is a musician, artist, and composer, originally from Tokyo, who has been based in Düsseldorf since 1994. Her whose work has long explored multiple forms of media, while documenting liminal zones of perception. On her latest album, As If, Yui creates a subtly connected suite of electronic music, drawn from improvisations and randomised processes that she has engaged with modular synthesis. Deeply poetic in its expression, even at its most minimal, the six pieces on As If have a curious tenor – they are, each of them, intensely sensuous, almost haptic listening experiences, as though the laser focus that Yui displays towards her compositions allows her to engage them as almost physical presences in the world.

One of the keys that unlocks the intimate complexity-in-simplicity of As If was Yui’s encounters with the Amazonian rainforest in Manaus, Brazil in 2018. Finding that the sounds in the rainforest both shadowed and echoed the music she had been making for two decades, she embraced the possibilities of modular synthesis, the sounds of which she discovered “have astonishing similarities to the sounds I experienced in the rainforest.” There is, indeed, something natural about the way these sounds bloom in real time; in their dedicated focus to the subtle development and mutation of several discrete parameters of sound, they grow slowly, gradually, their rhizomic structures suggesting that we are always situated within the middle of sound.

Sometimes, the material here has a kind of febrile energy, as on the ticking, clacking electronics of “Generativ”, a track that seems to rotate in the air in front of the listener, the light reflecting off its multiple surfaces as we catch the intricacies of its micro-patterns. Elsewhere, we slide into a cooled but welcoming environment, like the late-night fire-fly horizon of “Song 4”; there’s also the humid, dripping tropical sunset that’s documented on “Summernight”. It’s a music that’s hard to locate external coordinates for, though there are, perhaps, some parallels with the work of Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radigue’s Vice Versa, and Pauline Oliveros’s “Roots of the Moment”. But As If is an extraordinary collection of naturally developing, rich studies for slowly mutating, enveloping, elemental electronics.

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Hulubalang

Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal

LP | 2024 | EU | Original (Futura Resistenza)

Release: 2024 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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In Kasimyn's own words, the phrase "bunyi Bunyi Tumbal" signifies a "Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice," encompassing the emotions born out of a deep dive into the Indonesian war archives. These archives include a trove of photographs documenting the era of Dutch rule, captured through the lens of the colonizers themselves. It is from this point of departure that the project Hulubalang was born.

Hulubalang's gaze is drawn to the peripheral figures populating these historical records. These secondary characters, devoid of individual significance, bear no names, receive no recognition, and serve as props in the broader narrative of history. Simultaneously, they become indispensable instruments in acquiring "lessons learned" from the perspectives of both the victors and the vanquished. Within this framework, the notion of Tumbal, the non-belligerent "sacrifice," assumes a weight surpassing its translation. Tumbal neither acts as a victim nor martyrs itself for its cause. It hauntingly reminds us of the systemic curse perpetually engendering disillusionment.

Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is a personal act of catharsis stemming from a long lineage of anger. It stands as a tribute to a village whose ritualistic dance, one night, was disrupted by external forces, causing the tune to shatter and leaving the dance caught in a space between innocence and pain.

╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳

Artist Bio

Aditya Surya Taruna (aka Kasimyn) is one half of the Indonesian electronic duo Gabbar Modus Operandi known for their acclaimed records Puxxximaxxx and Hoxxxya (out via Yes No Wave and Svbkvlt, respectively) and overwhelming, hyper-active and unprecedented live experiences which have made them a popular act on several festivals of experimental music. In 2022, Kasimyn contributed with beats on Björk's latest album, Fossora, featured on three tracks: "Atopos", "Trölla-Gabba", and "Fossora", joined Björk on stage in Tokyo, Japan in March 2023 as part of her live tour Cornucopia, and appears on two of her album's music videos Atopos and Fossara. After joining Björk on her Cornucopia tour in Japan, Kasimyn is announcing his solo album on Drowned by Locals under his new project Hulubalang.

Text for Album by Riar Rizaldi (translated from Indonesian)

Kusnah walked slowly on the edge of a sand dune, across the coastline. It's safer here, she thought. On the horizon she saw a mirage, a fata morgana. In her mind, thinking of fata morgana as a destination is a better objective than the fact that she has to stay and live in the village: her body is needed for offerings, perhaps for the gods who are thirsty for the anatomy of human body or for the cults of development that is built by blood and the construction of fractured human bones. Perhaps as a political sacrifice too. For her, in a landscape where politics is intertwined with zoē, that's where the world really is at work.

While gazing at the piles of oysters on the beach, in her head she heard a peculiar party music with dank beats and messy strings. An umwelt. This was a victory song that she often plays loud in her mind when she feels defeated—however, not losing, but giving in. In her life, she spent more time giving in. She looked at the pile of oysters. Why do humans see oysters as lowly creatures compared to more advanced species like them? Oh more precisely, she remembered Plato's comparison of a hedonist man with an oyster. Live only in the moment of the here and now.

But Kusnah felt she was a hedonist. She lives for the here and now. She lives not for progress. To hell with the progress and development. She lives to experience time. She lives for jouissance. So for her, Plato had a point. As she looked at the oyster again very carefully, the weird music in her head transmitted louder and louder. She asked herself: as hedonist animals who just stay quiet and experience the waves, do these oysters also have music that revolves around their bodies and makes them feel victorious amidst an ocean of defeats?

Kusnah's gaze grew intense. From behind, came the sound of human footsteps running in a crowd. One, two, three, four the familiar sound of boots stomping. Five, six, seven, the clapping of ugly flip-flops. The fata morgana on the sand dune was instantly broken up by a bloodthirsty mob. As time went on, she heard faint screams. "That's her!" sounds vague but firm. The steps became louder. The music in Kusnah's head played louder. It didn't take long for her to start dancing. Like a possessed ghost, many people say. She wasn't in a trance, she was just enjoying the music playing in her head. Tens of people started to look in high-definition when Kusnah opened her eyelids.

"We will offer you to the gods of progress!" shouted the men with machetes and cleavers in their hands. Kusnah dances like she is out-of-body possessed. "Come on! Take her!" the men rushed to Kusnah, carrying ropes to tie her up. Kusnah smiled widely, while unable to control her dancing body.

"Take my body, but I will never share the hulubalang that roars in my mind!"

Kusnah's head separated from her body, right after she shouted those words.

Riar Rizaldi
Written while listening to Hulubalang's first album

Original Text:

Kusnah berjalan lamban di tepi gumuk pasir, di sebrang pesisir pantai. Di sini lebih aman pikirnya. Di garis horizon dia melihat hamparan fata morgana. Di pikirannya fata morgana jauh lebih baik sebagai tujuan ketimbang dia harus diam dan menetap di desa: tubuhnya diperlukan untuk persembahan, mungkin buat para dewa-dewa yang haus akan anatomi dan spirit dari human being atau buat pembangunan yang dibangun oleh darah dan konstruksi tulang-tulang. Mungkin juga sebagai tumbal politik. Pikirnya, di tempat dimana politik berkelindan dengan nyawa, disitu dunia betul-betul sedang bekerja.

Sambil menatap nanar tumpukan tiram di pesisir pantai, di kepalanya terdengar musik-musik pesta dengan dentuman nakal dan dawai berantakan. Sebuah umwelt. Lagu-lagu kemenangan yang sering ia putar keras-keras dipikirannya ketika ia merasa kalah. Bukan kalah, tapi mengalah. Dalam hidupnya, terlalu banyak waktu dia bagi untuk mengalah. Dia melihat tumpukan tiram dengan miris. Dia berpikir keras mengapa manusia melihat tiram sebagai makhluk rendahan dibandingkan species lebih advance seperti manusia, oh lebih tepatnya, dia mengingat perkataan Plato bahwa manusia hedonist sama saja dengan seekor tiram. Hidup hanya dalam momen hari ini dan saat ini.

Tapi Kusnah merasa ia adalah manusia hedonist. Dia hidup untuk hari ini dan saat ini. Dia hidup bukan untuk progress. Persetan dengan progress dan pembangunan pikirnya. Dia hidup untuk menikmati waktu. Dia hidup untuk bersenang-senang. Jadi baginya, Plato ada benarnya. Sambil melihat lagi si tiram dengan sangat teliti, lagu-lagu di kepalanya terdengar semakin nyaring. Dia bertanya pada dirinya sendiri: sebagai hewan hedonist yang hanya diam dan menikmati deburan ombak, apakah para tiram ini juga memiliki musik yang berputar dalam tubuhnya dan membuat merasa menang diantara lautan kekalahan?

Tatapan Kusnah semakin intense. Dari belakang terdengar bunyi suara langkah manusia-manusia berlari bergerombolan. Satu, dua, tiga, empat bunyi familiar sepatu lars. Lima, enam, tujuh bunyi derap sendal jepit. Fata morgana di gumuk pasir buyar seketika diterobos gerombolan haus darah. Semakin lama semakin ia dengar samar-samar suara teriakan. "Itu dia orangnya!" terdengar sayup-sayup tapi mengeras. Langkah-langkah itu semakin kencang. Musik di kepala Kusnah pun semakin kencang terdengar. Tak butuh waktu lama hingga ia mulai menari. Seperti orang kesurupan kalau kata banyak orang. Tapi dia tidak kesurupan, dia hanya menikmati musik yang berputar dikepalanya. Berpuluh-puluh orang mulai terlihat secara high-definition ketika Kusnah membuka kelopak matanya.

"Akan kami persembahkan kamu kepada para dewa pembangunan!" teriak para lelaki dengan parang dan golok ditangannya. Kusnah menari seperti kerasukan. "Ayo! Tangkap dia" para lelaki itu bergegas mendatangi Kusnah, membawa tali tambang untuk mengikat dirinya. Kusnah tersenyum lebar, sambil tidak bisa berhenti menari.

"Ambil tubuhku, tapi aku tidak akan pernah membagikan hulubalang yang mengaum di dipikiranku!"

Kepala Kusnah terpisah dari badannya, persis setelah dia meneriakkan kalimat tersebut.

Riar Rizaldi

Ditulis ketika mendengarkan album pertama dari Hulubalang.

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Sarine

Asas Terrenas

LP | 2024 | EU | Original (World Wide Web)

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance

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Mariano Melo, also known as Marian Sarine, is a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist based in Sao Paulo, specialising in percussion and drums. His latest album, Asas Terenas, is his first under this name and started with organ recordings made with Felipe Pato in late 2019 and was completed with additional instruments added in the years that followed. Asas Terenas features a mix of rhythmic improvisations built on modal scales, combining dynamic interplay between notes and percussion. Drawing inspiration from artists like Charanjit Singh, who merged traditional North-Indian ragas with electronic music, and African organists like Hailu Mergia, it combines old and new sounds, merging spiritual elements with energetic rhythms. As Sarine himself says, Asas Terenas is a sonic mixture that moves the feet and lifts the soul, creating an experience that is both pristine in sound and transcendental on the dancefloor.

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The Nightstalker

Isoutopic Fantasia

16,99 €*

Box Set | 2024 | UK | Original (Präsens Editionen / Gang Of Ducks)

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The Nightstalker - Mystical sounds from the shadows of the night The Zurich duo The Nightstalker, consisting of producers Dan Piu and Popshop (Gary Rich), create a cosmos of sound that plunges deep into the darkness and unfolds an almost magical attraction.

After two acclaimed albums on the Berlin label Childhood Intelligence, they now invite us on a sonic fantasy journey with their new mini-album ‘Isoutopic Fantasia’ on World Wide Web Records.

With six tracks that oscillate between danceable darkness and playful, surreal moments, ‘Isoutopic Fantasia’ embodies a seductive fusion of mystical depth and bizarre beauty. The sounds are addictive and lead us through a musical dream realm where each beat reveals a new twist and the melodies unfold into sprawling, unexpected dimensions. A sonic fantasy carried by the shadows of the night, in which light and darkness unite in a hypnotic dance.

All tracks written & produced by The Nighstalker (Dan Piu & Gary Rich)

Mastering by Johanz Westerman at Ballyhoo Studio (NL)

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Spalarnia

Paradoks

59,99 €*

Dessogia / Queetch / Fauch

Release: 2024 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Box set (incl. CD, Large white size long sleeve shirt, bag, and booklet)

The titular paradox of spalarnia's new album, Paradoks, lies in its ability to be both soft and intense. Incessant, hypnotic rhythms and massive synths are woven into a state of constant becoming, perpetually tense and earnest. Amidst these soundscapes—at times sparse, at times grandiose—spalarnia's voice oscillates between singing and speaking, seemingly calm and warm yet dark, like an underwater cave on a summer day where secrets can be shared. In his Polish lyrics, spalarnia delves into themes of love, pleasure, desire, and the accompanying fears, abandonments, and emancipations. He crafts a world that is deeply personal and intimate, yet communal, euphoric, and hopeful. Like all sincere emotional landscapes, it is a paradoxical world. spalarnia is the music project of Wojciech Kosma, a performance artist known for his intimate, quasi-theatrical works. Drawing inspiration from Eastern European spirituality, folk traditions, eurodance, and R’n’B, spalarnia creates a unique brand of hypnotic and poetic emotionality—both in his recordings and live performances, as well as in his many collaborations. He has performed widely, including at Tate Modern, Cell Projects, Camden Arts Centre, Galerie Molitor, 90mil, Ephemera Festival, Komuna Warszawa, and numerous DIY venues across Poland. His music has been released by Dym Recordings, enjoy life, ehh hahah, Alicja, and his own imprint Poza.

* Edition of 100 box sets (incl. CD, long sleeve shirt, bag, and booklet) * Jointly published by Gang of Ducks from Turin and the Switzerland-based Präsens Editionen * Artwork feat. illustrations by Polish artist Mania Łukaszewska * Including download codes

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Limpe Fuchs / Mark Fell

3LP | 2024 | EU | Original (Black Truffle)

42,99 €*

LP | 2024 | US | Original (Not Not Fun)

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch Iii’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

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Sip

Leos Ultras

LP | 2024 | Original (Rumi Sounds)

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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A full four years after Chicago organ maestro Jimmy Lacy’s legendary maiden voyage as SiP, Leos Naturals, he returns with its lush, layered, long-awaited sequel: Leos Ultras. Conceived and recorded in a corner of a large floorplan warehouse-turned-sound lab called Homan Gardens, the album radiates a rare joy and color, projected through a technicolor slideshow of cosmic keys, clarinet, kalimba, sax, melodica, flute, tambourine, and drumbox. The songs feel warm and weathered, like familiar garments treasured through passing seasons.

Many seasons did pass while these songs took shape, spiked with seismic changes – Lacy’s first daughter was born, followed 17 months by a second. Daily routines grew denser, but he never lost faith in the melodies simmering in the periphery of his thoughts: “I knew the music would be there whenever I had the time. It felt good to stay calm about it.” Patience paid off; Leos Ultras is indeed the ultimate SiP statement to date, rich with detail, discovery, beauty, lofted improvisation, and shades of spiritual jazz. It’s music both casual and cosmic, playful and poignant, channeled from long shadows and wordless hours in celebration of life, love, and Leo.

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Schnieke

Hediye

LP | 2024 | US | Original (Recital)

Release: 2024 / Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Schnieke is rich and fruitful, yet carries a sadness within. A 5-string violin charts its melodious journey from Istanbul to Belin, accompanied by electronics, breakbeats, live drums and percussions. An authentic oriental funky mood keeps you in a trance or gets your body moving tribally…

This is Schnieke, a.k.a. Özgür Akgül, with his first studio album Hediye, or Gift. The album is intended as a gift to Özgür's grandmother, Hadiye, who was very important to him and to whom he dedicates a song. But his debut album will also come as a gift to anyone interested in how a sophisticated musical sensibility brings together electronic elements with stringed instruments of all kinds. Özgür plays the violins himself, as well as the analogue synths and drum machines. Guest musicians include Hasan Gözetlik (trumpet and trombone), Göksun Çavdar (saxophone), Korhan Erol (electric guitar and bass), Burhan Hasdemir and Baris Güney (live percussion), Zafer Tunç Resuloglu (live drums), John Gürtler (church organ) and the Istanbul Strings, Turkey’s most vibrant string ensemble.

Their diverse influences create a wide emotional range on Hediye - sometimes dark and melancholic, sometimes wild, groovy and danceable, somewhere between jazz, dub and electro, each song surprising in its own way. Despite the variety of the individual songs, a captivating pulse runs like a thread through Schnieke's first album. Incidentally, Özgür came up with the band name during a night out in a bar, when a friend explained to him what Berlin slang he absolutely had to know. He liked the sound of the word ‘schnieke’ – it means something approximating ‘snazzy’ - and perhaps he secretly also wanted to flatter himself a little! Well, shouldn't we all do that much more often?

Hediye consists of eight tracks, three of which are traditional: Aman Doktor comes from Istanbul, Özgür's birthplace, and is a homage to his own origins. Kadioglu comes from the Aegean region and features the zeybek dance form which, despite its ‘standardisation’ in recent times, still summons up the ecstasy, inspired improvisation and musical finesse of its historical roots. The other five tracks are Özgür's own compositions, with Pasali providing the soundtrack for the 2010 Turkish feature film Memleket Meselesi. Creating compositions for film has been Özgür’s primary passion since his time as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. You can hear that in his music, because on his debut album Özgür does completely without vocal support, the instrumental depth stands for itself, and, in the style of The Cinematic Orchestra, space is created for us to develop our own images while listening – it is a soundtrack for the film we want to make of it.

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Allan Gilbert Balon

The Magnesia Suite

34,99 €*

12" | 2024 | EU | Original (Les Disques Du Crochet)

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Recital publishes composer Allan Gilbert Balon’s first full-length LP. Born 1986 in Les Abymes on the island of Guadeloupe, Balon is an artist (exhibiting at MoMA PS1 in 2022) who publishes beautiful handmade books and audio on XYÄ Edition run with Uta Guan Hyë in Créteil, France where he now resides.

The Magnesia Suite harbors an unhurried, coastal tranquility that flows lucidly as an album. Though prominently a pianist, a breadth of Balon’s musical spheres are visited on this record. Disparate elements of percussion, reeds, organ, voice, and tape recordings are all cast together. Each slowly excavated, surveyed and then set away.

“Stella Maris” opens with an organ and voice procession in the vein of a Charlemagne Palestine singing piece. “Lustras” is a patchwork of various tape captures (a la Alvin Curran, Rip Hayman, or André Thomkins); piano clusters dredge into xylophone by night with cicadas swimming in radio transmissions. First hearing the track “Pleuro Delez Waltz” is what made me approach Allan about making an album for Recital. The proximity of the voices against the small percussions, all laced with Balon’s piano stylings. I’ve not really heard anything like it before. The album ends with “Ogadia,” a gentle piano march with soprano saxophone and electronics. Feels to me like a Dave Burrell-infused rag played slowly, beautifully resolving the outsider-jazz-sound-art-poetry-collages of The Magnesia Suite.

The LP includes a booklet of quiet texts and beautiful graphic scores.

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Flow-Er

Blossometry

14,99 €*

Megalithic Statues Of Vishapakar

Release: 2024 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"Blossometry" is the new EP from French beatmaker Flow-er. In a chill and downtempo atmosphere inspired by Kaytranada, Moonchild, and Dam-Funk, the six tracks oscillate between neo-soul and modern-funk. Several guests enhance this release, including US female rapper Tanajah, already noticed in North Carolina. "Luxuriant Excursion" highlights the guitar and future beats inspirations of Pomrad and the groove of Vulfpeck !

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Andra Ljos

Tape | 2023 | US | Original (Not Not Fun)

9,99 €*

Box Set | 2023 | EU | Original (Mecanica)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The fourth album by Vilnius-based composer Aleksandra Evseeva aka Andra Ljos is as runic and ritualistic as the Bronze Age monoliths for which it’s named: Megalithic Statues of Vishapakar. Found mainly in the Armenian Highlands, vishaps are cigar-shaped slabs of stone carved with fish heads or snakes, depicting a sacred serpent of Armenian folklore thought to protect sources of water from drought and ruin. The music evokes a similarly arcane and devotional air, between raga, séance, and 4th world hallucination.

The track titles allude to significant vishap discovery sites, spanning lakes, bays, mountains, and temples. Wood block percussion wobbles beneath lattices of looped keys, golden organ, synthetic strings and flutes, distant birds, muffled voices, and the soft wash of restless waters. Evseeva’s muse may be mined from her Armenian heritage but the songs conjure a mood more elusive and expansive – pensive pastorals for a land of long shadows and ancient fears, strewn with cryptic relics swiftly dissipating into myth.

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Deutsch Nepal

Vol. 1

148,99 €*

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Black Truffle)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Peter Andersson, aka Lina Baby Doll, is the man that sustain the heavy structure behind Deutsch Nepal. A legend in the scene of industrialism, avant-garde, music and art in general. He is capable to re-create and re-design old school industrial and electronica, taking elements from apparently dissimilar concepts such as Dadaism and Tribalism, or “contradictory” ideas such as Heathenry and Christianity and converge them into a typical cocktail blend that characterises a unique and now famous style. Manic rhythmic redundancies, strange indefinable samplers, metallic sounds, distorted guitar chords are common elements found in all his works. His main goal?. Mesmerize the listener to subjugate the mind and put the spirit into reverberation mode.

It is difficult to reduce his works to a simple description. All of them seem to be the evolution of an early idea, a baby that grows old, getting monstrous and divine while doing so. The music itself is a never ending universal paradox in where beats and rhythms have a primary role. Deutsch Nepal is surreal landscapes strongly conducted and cut through with the violent and precise pounding of the repetitive aspect of percussion. It’s a black and white obsession, changing shapes and tonality.

This boxset compiles the first five albums released by Deutsch Nepal throughout the 90’s (“Deflagration of Hell”, “Benevolence”, “Tolerance”, “¡Comprendido!… Time Stop! …And World Ending” and “Erosion”) plus an extra record (“Dystopian Selection”) with a selection of tracks taken from old compilations. Limited edition of 535 copies with six vinyl records on individual sleeves, three postcards set, numbered certificate and a sticker.

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Richard Youngs

Modern Sorrow

23,99 €*

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Nahal)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The endlessly prolific and unpredictable Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with Modern Sorrow. As any Youngs fan knows, one of the great pleasures of following his career comes from not being able to predict what the next entry in his inexhaustible string of releases will bring: Unaccompanied voice? Country songs? Shakuhachi? Guitar pieces played with his feet? Shredding fuzz bass over the top of hyper-speed distorted drum machine beats? Continuing in the grand Youngs tradition of exploring new techniques, instrumentation and approaches while bringing to all of them his idiosyncratic touch, Modern Sorrow serves up two sides of twistedly elegiac, radically stark takes on contemporary pop production. The side-long title track is built from a piano sample, synthetic bass notes and organ swells, and an iterative blurt that seems to have wandered out of a 90s jungle track. Eventually joined by a shuffling drum machine, the track moves very slowly through a series of chords, each delayed long enough that its arrival comes as a major event. Over the top, Youngs’ heavily pitch-corrected voice is heard. The processing paints his signature wandering melodic improvisations with shades of contemporary R&B; at the same time, it cuts the natural swoops and glides of Youngs’ melodies into rapid microtonal trills, giving his voice a quavering, middle eastern feel. Unfolding languorously over more than 17 minutes, the piece’s final minutes make room for an extended drumless coda, returning to the stark palette of its opening moments. On the second side, the two parts of ‘Benevolence’ push this minimalism ever further, its first half consisting of nothing more than a remarkably slow drum machine hit, bass-heavy chords and pitch-corrected voice, here so heavily processed that it starts to resemble a shawn solo. In its second part, the harmonic foundation drops out from under the piece while two more voices join; at some moments the voices pause, leaving nothing more than isolated, metronomic drum hits. Though Youngs has explored the sound worlds associated with dance music and contemporary pop in previous work, here these elements are radically reduced, foregrounding a meditative bed of silence with a boldness equal to any more academically inclined contemporary composer. Embracing the accessible digital tools of contemporary music production just as at another moment he would pick up a kazoo, like much of Youngs’ work Modern Sorrow uses simple DIY tools to generous ends, producing formally radical music that remains both free from pretension and deeply moving.

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Uzhur

S/T

LP | 2017 | EU | Reissue (Aguirre)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Phases of a journey beyond space-time references, the six tracks of UZHUR's first eponymous album, summon as many post-apocalyptic visions as there are brains to imagine them — a blackhole where Emptyset, Godflesh, Ben Frost, Khanate and Whitehouse are mixed with a very particular grace, a poetry which takes the time to navigate the extreme and evoke in its turn moments of cinema. In a stream of total improvisation, everything that emanates from the sessions recorded by this mysterious duo of sound engineers and musicians (who recently produced Oiseaux-Tempête's last opus) feeds an eminently organic matter, which while giving voice to the machines, touches a little more closely what makes us human. Then, amidst the strange vocoder mantras, the hissings, and the interferences, through the wire of settings and textures which interlock and startle, you fully let yourself be immersed in their film, and in a certain idea of disaster which extends its shock wave into the crevices of the spaces we live in. Featuring Mondkopf & Arnaud Rhuth (Le Réveil des Tropiques).

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Enhet För Fri Musik

Inom Dig, Inom Mig

LP | 1989 | EU | Reissue (La Scie Doree)

Release: 2017 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Folk unit originated in the Swedish underground Enhet för Fri Musik -- featuring members of Sewer Election, Ättestupa, Neutral, Makthaverskan, and Blod - continually re-inventing what music is about through free improvisation and lengthy folk meanderings.

Embedded in the ever exciting Swedish underground scene Enhet För Fri Musik continues the quest for innovation numerous legendary Swedish bands started during the 70s, Pärson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Arbete Och Fritid. Taking the ideas of communal music craft and experimentation, on this album the group comes to a unique combination of Jandek-like atonal guitar, organ, tape effects, field recordings, saxophone and Sofie Herner’s amazing loner voice running over it. Adding another inspiring document to the world of open-minded music.

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Nikolaus Utermöhlen

Karlsbad

25,99 €*

CD | 2023 | US | Original (Important)

Release: 1989 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness.

The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais. Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

Thank you Wolfgang Müller, Radek Krolczyk, Jeffrey Babcock and… Nikolaus…

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Razen

17,99 €*

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Razen's Postcards From Hereafter was recorded using a 17th century organ tuned at 398 Hz (meantone) in a Belgian cathedral erected in 1305. The ensemble explored, with rich results, the organ's strict and limiting tuning with an arrangement that included hurdy gurdy, recorders, chalumeau, violone and nyckelharpa.

The pieces on Postcards From Hereafter explore the crossover between this world and the next with improvised spiritual, religious music.

Brussels-based ensemble Razen use the unique timbral and drone characteristics of their chosen string and wind instruments in improvised, instinctive music that mixes pre-industrial, spectral and ethnic dreamtones with trance and medieval mysticism. The group includes Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour as well as Pieter Lenaerts on 5-string double bass and sarangi, Paul Garriau on hurdy-gurdy, David Poltrock on ondes-Marthenot, Berlinde Deman on serpent and Jean-Philippe Poncin on chalumeau and bass clarinet.

“an intoxicating sauce of stark and tripped out ritual music... which conspires to keep listeners in a semi-permanent trance state” Julian Cope / Head Heritage

“a heady brew of deep listening music that is almost medieval in mood and wholly reverential in technique” Edwin Pouncey / Wire Magazine

“Razen push the drone potential of medieval instruments like hurdy gurdy as well as shawm and recorders... into realms of total sensory overload” David Keenan / Volcanic Tongue

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2LP | 2023 | UK | Original (NTS)

Ascend

39,99 €*

LP | 2023 | UK | Original (O___o?)

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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In the early 1990s, a handful of black metal artists were enticed by the possibility of conjuring new fantastical worlds from the deep isolation of their home setups. Rather than the dense metal sound of their existing projects, this new direction would be centred around intimate synth soundscapes: forlorn organs and otherworldly Midi theatrics.

The music on Ascend is predominantly from self-produced, self-distributed releases, typically manufactured in small numbers. Though some artists producing this style of music, most notably Mortiis and Burzum, gained wider recognition outside underground circles, it is only in recent years that the sound and its influence has really been appreciated. This is particularly the case with the late Matthew Davis and his recently reappraised Secret Stairways project, whose song ‘Lammas Tide’ (from the 1997 Enchantment of the Ring album) appears on Ascend. A simple home recording on a Yamaha Kx-w392 manages to be both elegant and tortured, ambiguously devotional and recalling latter years Popol Vuh.

This battle between dark and light is a constant thread through Ascend, with simple minimal synth lines that can be both delicate and menacing. Compilation opener ‘The Dark Dreamquest’ from Italian black metal group Evol is loaded with occult warning, and Finnish act Kadotus 609’s ‘The Summoning Through Crimson’ is languid, twisted and dark. In spite of the darkness, several pieces of the music on Ascend have formal similarities with the sometimes saccharine new age music that rose to prominence in that era: but to a rougher, darker ends. The closing song from Darkthrone icon (and past NTS radio host) Fenriz, under his Neptune Towers pseudonym, pulls us further out, with ‘To Cold Void Desolation’ — an astral synth project, akin to ’70s kosmische muzik masters Harmonia.

The gentler side can often amplify an uncannily sinister edge, heard in German act Dolch’s ‘Tumulus’, where orc marching horns contrast against delicate rompler harps and softly whispered chanting. It hammers home a deep loneliness and detachment constant throughout Ascend, made possible by these unusual contrasts, both unsettling and otherworldly.

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Skins

Never Cursed

LP | 2023 | UK | Original (Shelter Press)

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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’Never Cursed’ is an unpredictable introduction to skins’ ethereal, drifting meditations. A onetime producer for Metro Zu and Goth Money, his early, collage-style productions are here mixed with a palette of piano, organ, violin, guitar and washed-out effects. The flux of styles reflects a life in transit from his parents’ home in Jaffna, Sri Lanka to Toronto, CA, where the instrumental parts were recorded at St. James Cathedral, and ultimately to London, where he is now based, and whose mutant underground patently informs his nods to the post-everything scuzz, the radical ends of rap, and ambient-pop-noise. As debut statements of intent go, ‘Never Cursed’ leaves a heady impression. The plangent, instrumental blooz of ‘my life, my soul, and all that i sacrifice’ sounds like some Sade breakdown wafting over a Cocteau Twins instrumental from another room; harmonised, cascading guitar and whirling sax - blissed and immeasurably sad. From here, the album runs like a downbeat mixtape, submerged hip hop drums, melancholy, psychedelically-activated texturing. ‘Thick skin’ could almost be Honour jamming with Grouper, and the grungy swag of ‘tidying a tide’ feels like Yves Tumor on a downer, while ‘skin extract’ or ‘hide’ land in the midst of Oxhy or Felix Lee’s emo-tronica. The final transition from ‘when will the leaves at my window turn green’ to ‘my looking glass’ and the heart-in-mouth denouement of ‘at the altar’ exemplify a knack for harder-to-place, mutant ambient chamber musick á la the c.a.n.v.a.s. label or even James Ferraro. Like pretty much everything we’ve heard from the shadowy O___o? stable, it comes shrouded in a peculiar fog of mystery and romance.

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Kassel Jaeger

Shifted In Dreams

Tape | 2023 | US | Original (Not Not Fun)

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with his new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Over the years, Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press on different projects, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), a theorist (The Music To Come) or as Director of parisian institution INA GRM (spectres, Recollection GRM, Portraits Grm). The common axis of all these actions is the exploration of the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances. Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research but takes a somewhat deviated path. If we use the metaphor of music as a paradoxical mountain — an unreachable “Mont Analogue”, then this record tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler and marked out by the distinct presence of familiar harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear: its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. We grope our way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. We leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce. Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro- editing and asynchronous looping. Mixing the electronic waves of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with resonances of a Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sounds produced by complex modular synthesis patches, among other things, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation. Shifted in Dreams, despite its title, is not a dreamlike record. The dream here does not designate the symbolical space of interpretation and reinterpretation of reality through cultural patterns. It designates the intermediate, blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency, while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious. The reality of demons

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Golden Hallway Music

Rules & Chance Volume 3

12,99 €*

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Marionette)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Manhattan’s resident innerspace organist Zack Tornaben centers the third installment of his ongoing Rules & Chance series on breath, tone, and the ancient Qigong practice, “Eight Pieces of the Silk Brocade.” Working once again with the classic Golden Hallway Music palette of a pair of reel-to-reel tape machines, a 49-key Acetone combo organ, and an 80’s synth clone, he records everything live without overdubs in sprawling séance sessions, then digitally transfers them for distillation into choice excerpts.

Swirling, shivering reveries of skylines and stained glass, Tornaben’s process prizes intuition, intimacy, and “feeling around in the dark,” inspired by a pantheon of greats from the grand tradition of harmonic divination – Young to McClellan, Brouk to Battiato. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 gently expands his evolving lexicon of daydream minimalism, levitational and limitless, born of passing thoughts and everyday joys, rippling in the mind like light on water.

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Roxane Metayer

Perlée De Sève

15,74 €* 20,99 € -25%

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Orange Milk)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"In the midst of a wave of hybridizing ambient, drone, folklore and experimental electroacoustic music, Roxane Métayer has gained a cult following with only a couple of releases to date. Following her debut album (Éclipse Des Ocelles) for Morc with a split EP and a limited cassette for Wabi-Sabi, Roxane now turns to Marionette with her intimate narrative based multi-instrumental recordings, a match made in the heavens if you ask us. With her violin, woodwind, voice and various effect pedals, Métayer takes the listener on a newfound journey into the ancient, medieval, and primordial.

Perlée de sève is Métayer’s second full length, a sophomore to the critically acclaimed Éclipse Des Ocelles, where Métayer continues to sonically realize the map of the fictional habitats that inhabit her mind. Coming from a background of studying narration and different animation mediums, it’s no surprise that her recordings evoke vivid imagery and carry a trace of the environment they were conceived in. The instruments morph as extensions of her body and ultimately become new organs, a means of communicating these bio-memetic stories and creating a dialogue between herself and her surroundings. Meandering melodies intertwine with accompanying drones, mantra-like fragments and a handfeel percussion lend themselves as living and breathing elements in Roxane’s beguiling and spellbinding anecdotes.

Roxane is an observer of the world, her projects conceived from elements that inform her reality, such as the organic imagery and sounds of nature, then transforming that into a strangely familiar parallel universe that would not exist otherwise. Whether it's active research or taking her instruments to the forest, Métayer opens up her imagination by taking this mental journey to discover locations, creatures, and time periods then channeling that into her own fairy tales. The album and track titles act as a portal into those worlds, like chapters in a book where the protagonists are animalia, plantae, and fungi. As Métayer wrote in an interview: “Stories are a privileged way to create an awareness of a specific subject.”

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Nico Niquo

Esperanto

23,99 €* 31,99 € -25%

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Morphine)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Nico Niquo’s ‘Esperanto’ sees the Australian artist return to Orange Milk Records six years since his album ‘In A Silent Way’, and on this new release, Nico builds upon the framework of his last two records for the label: still, ghostly Grime, retro-futurist synthesizer arpeggios, and flourishes of New Age ambiance. As per Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Esperanto’, Nico’s own ‘Esperanto’ bears palpable influences from the incidental music and audio that surround us in the everyday, and attempts to bend them into something both tender and bizarre. ‘Epistrophy’ twists a sandbox baroque of jingles, alerts and notifications into a whirring cacophony of bells, synths and faux bird calls, whereas ‘My Home In The Storm’ takes the ‘Gliding Square’ synths of early Grime instrumentals and abstracts them into a serene rumination more akin to the earlier works of Arvo Pärt. Across the record, tracks like ’Paper Peony’ and ‘Blue Ecco’ draw disparate, unusual threads together into patterns that don’t spell out something specific, but more so gesture towards something ineffable. Emile Frankel, writing for Disclaimer, posed that Nico’s music is ‘a grimoire to stillness, work that can make you feel both remote and motionless, and its companioned reverse: helium-ballooned, rising, incredible loveliness, dear and held …’ and it is the quiet, patient pursuit of these sentiments via Nico’s unusual means that typifies this record, too.

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Gamut Inc

Sum To Infinity

12" | 2023 | EU | Original (Subject To Restrictions Discs)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance

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Excellent works here, do not miss! TIP!

The sum to infinity of a sequence is the sum of an infinite number of terms in the sequence. It is only possible to compute this sum if the terms of a sequence converge to zero. “Sum To Infinity” is also the second release from Gamut Inc, the retro-futuristic ensemble around composers and curators Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki.

This second album by Gamut Inc combines custom-built autonomous music machines with haunting classical synthesiser sounds to create a dense musical kaleidoscope.

The core of the album is formed by Risset rhythms – cyclic accelerations and decelerations, in which rhythmic layers repeatedly fade in and out, setting in motion a seemingly endless process of rhythmic movement. The motifs are taken from geometric and arithmetic series that create urgency and restlessness. The rigour of the construction is obscured by an orchestra whose timbres are reminiscent of a retro-futuristic indigenous ensemble. Gamut Inc translate strategies of electronic music like pulse-width modulation to music machines such as automated accordion, automated percussion or glockenspiels and create an intense atmosphere that is idiosyncratic, original and modern at the same time.

Gamut Inc build their music machines, play electronic music festivals internationally, curate the Aggregate festival for automated pipe organs and composes for film, radio drama, and theatre. Their first opera, “Rossums Universal Robots”, premiered in 2022. Since 2011, at the intersection of electronic club culture and experimental music, they have produced live music, music theatre, film and theatre scores (including for the Junge Staatstheater Berlin) with their specially developed musical robots. They composed for ensembles like the Rias chamber choir or the robot orchestra Logos Foundation and received invitations and commissions from international festivals and venues such as Sónar, CTM, Berghain, Sonic Acts, Technosphärenklänge or Numusic (no). Gamut Inc has received numerous scholarships, including the Villa Kamogawa scholarship from the Goethe Institute in Kyoto, Japan, 2022. Their first release, “Ex Machina” was produced exclusively with music robots and released in 2014 in cooperation with Bôłt Records.

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YNV

Western Paradox EP

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Ideologic Organ)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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YNV joins Subject To Restrictions Discs with six unique tracks. Following his releases on Lurid Music and Neubau, Western Paradox is YNV’s third vinyl release. The EP traces back to his Middle Eastern roots, featuring his own signature twist. Despite the completely analogue approach, the music sets a warm tone and engages with the listener’s emotional state. Each track explores a specific rhythm with the intention of finding the right pattern to put us in a pleasant state of trance.

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Attila Csihar

Void Ov Voices: Baalbek

34,99 €*

All Hands Bury The Cliffs At Sea

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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This is the first ever solo album from the legendary cult singer Attila Csihar, known for his work in Mayhem, Sunn O))), Plasma Pool and Tormentor. For this album Attila traveled to the Monolith of Baalbek archeological site in Lebanon and conducted two sessions. The first was an all night session situated directly across from the massive trillion stones of the Temple of Jupiter. For the second session he recorded directly on one of the 900 tons trillions a few km from the temple site. A work in progress for ten years, I am deeply honoured to have the chance to present Attila's work on Ideologic Organ. He has continued to be an inspiration of what is possible to surprise and develop within the extreme sides of music, in a radical and intelligent way. To say he has been a fundamental inspiration of art music creation is an understatement.

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Wanderwelle

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Important)

30,99 €*

7" | 1988 | EU | Original (Empty)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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After last year’s LP Amsterdam-based collective Wanderwelle presents the second entry of their trilogy for Important Records, which is dedicated to telling the story of the climate crisis and its effects on coastal areas around the globe. For this album the artists incorporated the sound of a dying organ, fatally wounded in a climate related event. »All Hands Bury The Cliffs At Sea« consists of electro-acoustic threnodies for an environment at risk due to the effects caused by receding coastlines around the globe.

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Doc Wör Mirran

Deadthings In Love

10,99 €*

The Abyss Between A And B

Release: 1988 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Original old stock. Six-track single from 1987, by this free-form collective led by Joseph B. Raimond (treatments, drawings, guitar, dulcimer, synth). Limited edition of 50 copies, somehow still available.

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Noha

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (A Beautiful Place)

17,99 €*

2LP | 1972 | EU | Reissue (Distance)

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Panick Panick' head 'Noha' presents his debut album 'The Abyss between A and B' on his newfound label "A Beautiful Place". Born and raised in Rome and now based in New York, Noha is a painter and musician crafting delicate and expressive electronic music. By launching his 'A Beautiful Place' imprint with the new album 'The Abyss between A and B', the artist reveals a new approach to music when encapsulating his newfound freedom of expression. This manifestation goes further than producing music, he also painted the cover for that beautiful piece of art. From the ambient bliss on the opener "Today' through to the broken beats, warped electronics, and emotive pads on the closing track 'Romantic Loops', Noha's debut album is a triumphant display of considered production, vast soundscapes, and emotionally charged musical output. Distilling a wide range of influences into six inspired tracks, he delivers a deeply personal yet inviting look into his invigorating musical worldview.

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Don Bradshaw-Leather

Distance Between Us

37,99 €*

CD | 2022 | UK | Original (Room 40)

Release: 1972 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Reissue of this cult 1972 album which featured on the infamous Nurse With Wound List.

During the long, dark hangover of the Summer of Love, the classically-trained Essex prodigy approached CBS Records with demo recordings. A forward-thinking A&R executive must have seen a potential revenue stream in Don Bradshaw-Leather's avant-classical noise. The artist was given an advance to record an album. He used the funds to create a large studio in Sussex with many instruments including an actual church organ. Here, on his own, without the use of any electronic sequencing, he recorded "Distance Between Us" using simply multitrack tape, layering each part of the composition. Upon hearing the product of their financial investment - four side-long tracks of blurry organ drones, frantic piano tinkling, and ritualistic percussion - CBS got cold feet.

The album was self-released on Bradshaw-Leather's own Distance imprint; a vanity label established for the sole purpose of releasing the album. The sleeve art is full of mysteries, from the misspelling of "Bradshaw" ("Bradsham"), to the coal-blackened visage of the bohemian madman on the cover (dbl himself?), to the rear photo collage depicting the same madman accosting a nude woman. The music isn't any less mysterious; shapeless symphonies of smeared-out Mellotron, tribal drums, and wordless vocals. Don Bradshaw-Leather passed away in the 90's.

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Brad E. Rose

Annular Silhouettes

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Rvng Intl.)

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Digitalis's Brad E. Rose (aka The North Sea, Charlatan etc) debuts on Room40 with his most rapturous collection yet - six tracks of bewitching, blissed-out synth drones that bear up to comparison with AFX's "Selected Ambient Works II", Steve Roach's "Structures From Silence" or Brian Eno's "Apollo".

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Brad E. Rose has been quietly churning out music for decades at this point, working under so many different monikers and in so many different outfits it's been hard to keep track. Apart from heading up the beloved but now defunct Digitalis imprint, Rose also runs The Jewel Garden, where they've been releasing mostly their own private press-style material since 2020. "Annular Silhouettes" is Rose's first non-Jewel Garden solo drop in ages, and sounds like a subtle summation of their recent loose musical threads. Written in "the depths of 2020", the material is Rose's attempt at creating a love-letter to the place where they grew up, created in the house where their grandparents lived for over two decades, only a few minutes walk from their childhood home.

Tulsa is a complicated city with often uneasy politics, but Rose's view is holistic, empathic and sensitive - their memorial is melancholy and sometimes even cold, but never lacking hope. The album is split into six separate pieces that play together as a whole, all made in the same style with the same instrumentation. It's more of a continuing thought than an assembly of different tracks; Rose acknowledges that they enjoy the feeling of not completely knowing what they're doing, and letting their subconscious thoughts guide the creative process. Certainly that gives the music a level of spiritual kinship with Aphex's seminal "Selected Ambient Works II", which was allegedly partly written in lucid dream states. Rose's compositions are nowhere near as dark, but strike a similarly ambivalent mood that feels nostalgic, but not completely rooted in the past.

"Annular Silhouettes" sounds like an elongated take on Brian Eno's "Apollo" classic 'An Ending (Ascent)', and Rose uses the soft-focus synth tones to represent the sun rising and setting across Tulsa's wide, flat plains. It's hard not to be moved.

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Kate NV

Wow Yellow Vinyl Edition

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Rvng Intl.)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Kate NV's WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. WOW is Kate Shilonosova's fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for Rvng Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments. It's difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova's voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect's perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as "funny tiny sounds." WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation's Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW's patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova's friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It's central to the record's internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn't, broken, what is, and isn't, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility. Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone. With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV's deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to "accepting randomness." She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new. Kate NV's WOW will be released on February 10, 2023 on vinyl and digital formats. On behalf of Kate NV and Rvng, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

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Kate NV

Wow Black Vinyl Edition

2LP | 2023 | UK | Original (Good Skills)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Roe Deers

Salt Town Boy

38,99 €*

Release Spirit Black Vinyl Edition

Release: 2023 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Roe Deers presents his fascinating debut full-length Salt Town Boy, a leftfield collection of wild sonic tales filled with dusky moods and punk attitude. The first LP to be released on Good Skills, the label Roe Deers runs with Bdhbts co-conspirator Titas Motuzas, the album brings together tracks produced in his Vilnius studio over the past six years. It also features a series of unique storytelling vocal contributions from an international list of friends and colleagues.

Roe Deers is a Lithuanian-based project led by Liudas Lazauskas. A regular at Vilnius institution Opium and a key member of the city's fertile scene, he's long been breaking the rules of genre in his explorations of the uncharted territories of murky electronic music, releasing on labels like Omnidisc, Turbo, Nein Records and Throne Of Blood.

The Salt Town of the album's title is Druskininkai, the Lithuanian spa resort where Roe Deers grew up and first began DJing at a venue run by his parents. The breadth of styles and moods he was exposed to from an early age can be heard across these 12 intriguing tracks, which blend elements of beat science, electroclash, post punk, italo, krautrock and EBM into a deliciously intoxicating brew.

The skewed motorik pulse of opener and lead single 'Trident', featuring apocalyptic intonations by French-Canadian lyricist C.A.R., sets an offbeat, ominous tone that prevails for the rest of the album. Vocal contributions from Israeli producer Niv Ast ('Late Night Tale'), Norwegian troublemaker Sex Judas ('Rodeo King') and Berlin-based singer Aquarius Heaven ('Walking Down The Streets') each bring out the moods - vampish, febrile, industrial - that permeate Roe Deers's textured, percussive productions. At the album's centre are two tracks that point to the past and possible future of the Roe Deers project: first, 'Theme' features French post punk band Order89 in a compelling disco-noir moment that recalls his earlier club EPs; then, regular collaborator Palmes Ziedas provides Lithuanian vocals for 'Tarp Raudonu Sviesu' ('Between Red Lights'), a frenzied howl of a track that fits an entire film score into its short three minutes.

The instrumental pieces on the album have their own stories to tell, from the dusty dive bar meditation of 'Flying Carpets' to the paranoid proto-techno pulse of 'Celebrity Theme' and the 11-minute cyclical epic 'Never - Ending -'. As the last moments of cinematic closer 'Fin' play out, we realise that our trip down the twisted paths of Roe Deers's beguiling sound world is coming to an end; but we also know that to go back in again all we have to do is press play.

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Khotin

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Ghostly International)

Always Waiting At Shibuya Station

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Canadian producer Dylan Khotin-Foote has kept his Khotin alias going for the better part of a decade; the impressionistic electronic project shifts with the movements in his life. Sometimes it leads, like when the club-friendly grooves of 2014's Hello World immersed him in the heart of Vancouver's underground dance scene, and sometimes it follows, like 2018's Beautiful You, a downtempo salve for DJ fatigue His melodic sensibility and playful ear for atmosphere remain the rippling core of the project's fingerprint; whether beat-driven or ambient, a foggy smear or a dusted and pristine print, a Khotin track has a distinct and instantly recognizable swirl. During and after the 2020 release of Finds You Well, his second LP on Ghostly International, Khotin-Foote settled back into a slower vibe in his hometown of Ed- monton. Even before the pandemic, his pivots to softer production, and away from DJing, left him with fewer opportunities in Vancouver and club bookings overall, and as a self-identifying introvert, he was fine with that. But the change of pace did open space for Khotin-Foote to grapple with concepts of adulthood and career. At his lowest, he almost walked off this musical path altogether; instead, he doubled down on the craft _ the tone, pacing, and dynamism of new material _ arriving at a definitive full-length. With Release Spirit, Khotin releases himself from the pressure of expectation, fusing and refining everything we know about his music. The warmth and familiarity of Khotin's dreamy, dulcet style meet new ideas and frameworks, a natural progression, a modest revelation; Khotin confirms it is okay to move slowly and he's never sounded better doing it. The album title borrows from the "release spirit" mechanic in the video game World of Warcraft. When players die, they are prompted to release their spirit and return as ghosts to find their corpses and come back to life. Khotin sees it as a worthy metaphor for the impending change his return home presented and the resulting process of purging artistic expectations to find his creative self again. On this go- around, he is freer, more playful, and more intentional within his palette of warped synth, breakbeats, and piano sounds _ including the classic Casio Sk-1 presets he's used since the start _ mingling with wistful samples, field recordings, and other abstract snippets. For the first time, he enlisted Nik Kozub to do the mix and assist with sequencing. Khotin-Foote has long worked with the Edmonton-based musician and engineer in the mastering phase, as well as their days co-running the label Normals Welcome, and this time was able to involve his ears earlier given their newfound proximity. "I think it's my best sounding record to date." We begin on "HV Road" or Happy Valley Road, where Khotin-Foote spent time during a family vacation in British Columbia's Okanagan Lake. His plans to record crickets at night are quickly foiled by his younger siblings; the cute exchange orients the listener to a core memory of sorts, setting the tone of universally understood warmth and wonder that has defined some of Khotin's most transportive tracks. Hazy percussion takes hold, and we are swept further into the wisp of "Lovely," a grooving, melodic standout built on the interplay between the beat and human voice-like hums. Khotin knows this zone well; equally suited for a reverie or a club warm-up. The bubbling atmosphere and absurdity of "3 pz" offer a cosmic/comic interlude and also speak to reflections on his family's move to Canada two generations ago, and the audio tutorials they used to learn English. "I can only imagine my grandpar- ents repeating some of the bizarre phrases." "Fountain, Growth" finds Khotin in collaboration with Montreal's Tess Roby (Dawn to Dawn) for the project's first-ever vocal track. Roby's soft cadence echoes atop spiraling air pockets of rhythmic production, lending a breezy, almost shoegaze pop feel. Throughout the single and the album, wind gusts between the compositional layers, akin to the roaming spirits of its namesake, curving around the birdsong of "Life Mask" and seamlessly reaching "Unlimited <3." The latter bumps in slow motion; disembodied whirrs from his Casio collide with 808 drums and sub-bass for a vibe that teeters on trap and instrumental hip-hop. Release Spirit rests in a dream sequence. Oscillating synth lines dance around the heartbeat of "Techno Creep," a hyperactive REM state before the digitized ambient sprawl of "My Same Size." In the final pass, Khotin imagines transcontinental travel from the glow of his screen. He recorded "Sound Gathering Trip" to soundtrack a genre of YouTube videos he's taken to that follows train routes through Europe and Japan. The scene is serene and moving; piano keys warble as static-filled sound design shimmers off the rails, from cityscapes to the countryside, an introspective ride through a world beyond his bedroom. It doubles as an apt parting image for Khotin's project as a whole: dreaming big but happiest when riffing on the details, shaping environments from the inside out. Over the last decade, he has stretched from his core in Edmonton, leaving a trace in Vancouver and beyond; but when all signs point home, he loops back to see it all from a different vantage, revitalized, refined, and free.

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Shibuya Station

10" | 2022 | UK | Original (Polytechnic Youth)

17,99 €*

Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light Clear Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The last Polytechnic Youth release for the foreseeable future (not a final closure point, more a case of let’s see…) is an absolute beauty. A 6 trk 10” mini-LP from Shibuya Station, an all-analogue synth project founded by Marc Schaffer (aka solitude fx, Endphase, Twins Natalia, as well as being the founder of the Anna Logue Records and Nadanna labels). Finding his inspiration in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s synth music and the machines of that period, Marc recorded a few tracks back in 2013 which were further developed by fellow musicians Stefan Bornhorst (The Silicon Scientist), Dave Hewson (Poeme Electronique), Orpheo Weidelt (solitude fx), Kriistal Ann (Paradox Obscur) and Erik Söderberg (Kinder Aus Asbest) over the following years. As Marc says: “Six tracks made it eventually onto international compilations “Tunes That R Attractive!”, “Sie Hat Schenkel Wie Godzilla”, “Jubilee Jamboree: 10 Years Of TuT/RuR” and “Synthesizer Music On Tape” vol.3, which are now presented on a 10” vinyl via the renowned Polytechnic Youth label, who say it’s their last release for awhile, as they concentrate on their new label, Feral Child. Instruments used were Amdek Percussion Synthesizer Pck-100, Boss Voice Transformer Vt-1, Casio Vl-1, Crumar Performer, DSI Mopho, Korg Kr-55b, Korg Ms-20, Moog Little Phatty, Moog Voyager, Novation Bass Station II, Oberheim Dpx-1, Roland Cr-78, Roland Sh-2, Yamaha Cs01, and VST synthesisers ARP Odyssey, EKSSperimental Sounds Es101, Korg Ms-20. The project name is reference to Hachikō, the dog who continued to wait for over nine years following his owner’s death at … Shibuya Station”.

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Bell Orchestre

LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Erased Tapes)

Segue To Infinity Galaxy Vinyl Ediiton

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Erased Tapes are immensely proud to announce the reissue of the debut album Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light by Bell Orchestre. To honour the album"s original recordings the album is also seeing its first vinyl repress since it was released in 2005. Originally formed in 1999 whilst studying at university, the first music Bell Orchestre made was live scores for contemporary dance performances. A few years later, the studio sessions for Recording A Tape.. took place simultaneously in the same studio as when Arcade Fire were recording their eponymous debut album Funeral. The two Montreal-based bands took turns to record their albums but due to the growing interest in Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre was put on hold as band members Parry and Sarah Neufeld quickly became occupied with Arcade Fire"s busy touring schedule. "The Bell Orchestre album was almost done, but it kind of sat there. We were just sitting on this album that we were really proud of, but we didn"t have anyone to pay attention to it" Parry told Pitchfork in 2005. The album was released to critical acclaim and has since received cult status among fans. Bell Orchestre is a collaborative instrumental group based in Montreal. Its six members come from wildly divergent musical backgrounds, and the unlikely chemistry that results from their collaboration is the very thing that sustains their connection. It"s as if the group as a whole has tapped into a very particular, very distinct energy: like that of an approaching storm. In many ways, Bell Orchestre is the sum of not only its parts, but the sum of its influences and inspirations. Among those influences can be listed such diverse artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, Arvo Pärt, Charles Mingus, and Talk Talk. But ultimately they work together to create something that none of them has quite heard before. Bell Orchestre has been known to retreat into the woods to make and write music: from a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, to the forests of Quebec and Vermont, and back to their hometown of Montreal. The specifics of time and place, the elemental forces at work outside, and those forces that exist inside, all come into play within Bell Orchestre"s musical process. This particular music could be made by no one else at no other time in history. The experience of listening to Bell Orchestre, whether live or recorded, is almost that of experiencing a form of synaesthesia: the result is a collage-like construction of not just sound, but visual elements as well. From a herd of elephants to that approaching storm on the horizon, from a quiet forest in the country to ice forming on a city street, from watching vapour trails disappear in the sky to watching the changing light of dusk through a window. The result then is not so much cinematic as it is evocative: Bell Orchestre have not just written the music to the film - they have created an invisible film that only comes to life in the listening

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Laraaji

4LP | 2023 | US | Original (Numero Group)

97,99 €*

Kali Malone with Stephen O'Malley & Lucy Railton

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The definitive collection of Laraaji's earliest works, Segue To Infinity compiles his 1978 debut Celestial Vibration and six additional side-long studio sessions from previously unknown acetates from the same period. A lengthy essay by Living Colour's Vernon Reid chronicles the origins of Edward "Flash" Gordon, illustrated with dozens of previously unpublished photographs that capture this beautiful and elusive young artist. Full of discovery and wonderment, Segue To Infinity is a miraculous chronicle of new age's most fabled artist.

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Does Spring Hide Its Joy

3LP | 2023 | EU | Original (Ideologic Organ)

45,59 €* 47,99 € -5%

Transition Colored Vinyl Edition

Release: 2023 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O'Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone's experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener's attention.

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Havenaire

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Past Inside The Presen)

33,99 €*

Totem Society White Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Stockholm's Havenaire follows up a series of head-turning ambient releases on the likes of Shimmering Moods, Polar Seas and Glacial Movements with a limited new long player on Past Inside The Present. Across six slowly shifting soundscapes he layers up his misty-eyed chords into music that is designed to empty your mind but that also gently sweeps you heart. There is subtle hope and optimism amongst the ambient fog here that leaves you feeling cleansed and soothed. All six pieces have their own character but are very much united by a sense of calm and serenity that is utterly captivating.

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Sabla & D.K.

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Worship)

19,99 €* 24,99 € -20%

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Now pressed on vinyl after an elusive run on tape earlier this year, D.K. meets downbeat mystic Sabla for a devotional offering on his fledgling Worship label; a smoky, moonlit, dubbed-out special, like some lost mid 90’s Mo Wax x Chain Reaction collab.

Offering an absorbing switch-up from the musclier ‘Gate of Enlightenment’, Sabla here pulls D.K. into a far more furtive parallel dimension where their familiar ingredients of tuned percussion and pads take on a more brooding character, one akin to Sabla’s ace debut LP ‘Music For Melted Floors’ as much as Đ.K.’s more reserved, yet richly atmospheric works for 12th Isle and Good Morning Tapes.

Call it trip hop, illbient, ambient beats, or whatever you like, ‘Totem Society’ is patently built for introspective times and not for club use. Across the six tracks we can isolate residual traces of experimental post punk from the likes of 23 Skidoo and O Yuki Conjugate feeding forward via the squashed beats of DJ Spooky and even Muslimgauze’s more opiated, somnambulant works to limn a place and time out of joint.

The stark gamelan dub of ‘Ocra Flat Lands’ sets shadowy parameters where the drums of ‘Dove’ bounce off the walls to contrast with ‘Bamboo Houses’ style synth progressions, and ‘Nubes Shepherd’ lightens it up a smidge with something like a quasi-speed atmospheric D&B production, before nastier neurotic acid line complicates the feel. The penultimate ‘O’ likewise dials up jazz-fusion influence via Source Direct-on-quaaludes sorta vibe, and ‘A Minute’ beautifully sees it off with more impish synth voices hinting at Coil-esque zones.

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2Tape | 2022 | UK | Original (Kashual Plastik)

Field Of Progress

Slumberland & Sainkho Namtchylak

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Wind and cars hum in harmony. Ancestors croon in the factories of the future. Hippos in swimming pools, dancing on mechanical milker rhythms. Cows rehash in the melodic air of church bells. A melodeon sobs in a vague radio broadcast. Someone warps a present, while a data processor calculates his own death. Can frogs talk to the machine? Sacred chants sang about their conversation. That night when the jungle cried. That night when whales hummed waves of sadness. A klaxon symphony on tribal grooves, street talks in Brics countries. Someone flushes the gig economy, while the dishwasher gently weeps. Kashual Plastik been in the fields, bringing home the true fake, that surrounds us every day, everywhere, hidden in the sounds of many. A phonography compilation, that comes in two chapters: Document 1 and Document 2. Nothing authentic, yet genuinely realistic. Recorded in the global economy grasslands. On the fly and thoroughly planned. Netted by mindful observers, who respire the ambient noise for a better tomorrow, that might never come. Snow reaches out to the Tuatara, while in Berlin Spandau trains plow through the afternoon. Somebody comes home from a walk, engines squeal, tailpipes buzz in distance. Let’s fill up a glass of rum and toast on organ harmonics, sitting on a random platform at Tokyo’s Chōfu railway station, seduced by train announcements. Does a quiescent room breed noise? Analogue living in old towns, down there, where working on Sunday is the new Monday. At London’s Kingsland High Street religious rhythms cut the street noise. Nearby, in a local pub, a beer concert cheers millions. A Method To Exist, Malvern Brume, Susannah Stark, Jamie Burke, Laura Not, ML, Nika Son, Felix Kubin, or Red Brut, they all listened and absorbed. And many more too. How does the ambient sound to you? Never asked yourself this question? “Field Of Progress” hands out 28 ethnomusicological answers. They can polish the senses. For the fables of the environment. For the folklore of atmosphere. Bio music for data bodies. Wind and cars hum in harmony …

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Lightkeeper

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Morphine)

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (C.A.N.V.A.S.)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance

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- expect the rattling drones of motorized chanters grinding against the unearthly sounds of a Siren -

Morphine Recordswith a massive loader from Slumberland’s self-made instruments sounds, from the ''to sewing machines and self made organs - all combined with legendary Tuvan throat singer, Sainkho Namtchylak. Lightkeeper was recorded and mixed by Lebanese-Canadian artist ,Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Constellation Records), adding his distinct touch to the production of this roller-coaster of sounds. Belgian musician, composer and instrument-maker, Jochem Baelus, has been unleashing his obscure, hypnotic krautrock embellished with distorted exotica upon us as Slumberland since 2013. After creating his signature battery of sewing machines, projectors and dismantled mechanical objects, Baelus immersed himself into the world of 64 year old voice-artist Sainkho Namtchylak and assembled a new sound sculpture inspired by her colour.

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33-69

33,99 €*

Paloma Clear Vinyl Edtion

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi aka 33’s killer debut LP of sharp cuts between hardcore rave, DIY classical chamber music, Trance arps and performance art punk - think a Duma throwdown with Diamanda Galas and yr halfway there.

Pitting Anne Imhof-collaborator Billy Bultheel in a ravenous session with Iezzi and a host of input from Naked, Dylan Kerr, Ivan Cheng, and Patrick Belaga; ’33-69’ stages an opulent complex of numerological enigmas and swarming spirits unbound from tradition. Disrupting disciplines and paradigms in each cut, they enact a ravishing rush of dancefloor drama and tormented cabaret that feels like the 1920’s rushing into the 2020’s, resulting in a time-sick and urgent avalanche of ideas from Leider or Baroque barbed in noise and hardcore rave alacrity, like a performance art piece held in the midst of Berghain or Kit Kat club’s most spangled, gloriously messy moments.

As the first C.A.N.V.A.S. release of 2022, ’33-69’ builds on the sprawling ideas and feelings outlined by Olan Monk, Lugh, Elvin Branhdi, Michael Speers and Alpha Maid since 2018 with a strident confidence that meets the new decade head-on, face-first, as it gets to grips with new cultural schisms and energies. Tearing out with the shearing digital noise and soaring elegance of Ivan Cheng’s vox on ‘369’, it prangs out between machine-gunned trance techno in ‘Fireworks’ to operatic pipe organ and string processional ‘Sexus’ starring countertenor Steve Katona (collaborator of Pan Daijing and specialist in Bach recitals), beside an extraordinary mauling of industrial and BM ritualism on ‘The knife’ featuring a feral Naked in its seat-edge first half.

The second half slips below the belt with a virulent thrust in the panel-beating techno tribalism of ‘Pigeons’, and hinges around brusque techno triplets with the cabaret keys and Italianate trance motifs of ‘Sirens’, before PAN’s cellist-composer Patrick Balaga helps pull it back from the brink in ‘Thomas The Obscure’, lending a fine temper to the crazed/reflective narrative before it launches in a full out techno assault on ‘Heaven’s blade’ and the smoky, distorted growl of ’Speed and beer’ makes perhaps the most unhinged and ultimately moving use of a brass section you’ll likely hear for time.

Stunning.

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Laila Sakini

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Modern Love)

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance, Classical Music

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When Laila Sakini's debut album ‘Vivienne’ arrived in 2020, it felt like the record we were waiting for to map out our tangled reactions to an uninvited reality. Never self-consciously strange, it revealed itself slowly and cautiously, like a shadow in the corner of the eye, or an alchemical symbol in a bowl of alphabet spaghetti. This time around Sakini has worked her unique world-building to an even finer point, forming six tracks around a theme that's so close to our heart it's almost beating in time. Initially inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1991 arthouse classic "The Double Life of Veronique", the cult Polish director's enduring modern fairytale that serves as a cosmic rumination on identity and choice. Detailing two identical women - both singers, both in love - the film lets one live as the other dies, forcing us to consider the implications of art and endurance in the face of life's myriad challenges.

Sakini takes Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's influential score for the film and uses it as a jumping-off point for ‘Paloma’, bending the more grandiose moments into baroque awkwardness on opening track 'Fluer D'Oranger' and evoking the mood of scene-setting cues 'Weronika' and 'Véronique' on the recorder-led 'The Light That Flickers In The Mirror'. And while Preisner's score zeroed in on the musical virtuosity of the film's lead characters, Sakini reinterprets that as a metaphor for self-discovery. Playing piano, violin, glockenspiel, timbale, recorder, and occasionally singing, Sakini captures a mood of innocence that immediately transports the listener back to simpler times. Her music isn't self-consciously simplistic, but forcing herself to interface with instruments impulsively rather than studiously, her sounds are all heart, no filigree.

In spirit, it reminds us of cult Canadian album "The Langley Schools Music Project", a collection of 1970s recordings of school kids singing rudimentary renditions of pop songs in a school gymnasium. That album's genius was in the bottling of hope and innocence: the feeling of joy from hearing and wholesomely interacting with music that's known and loved without a sense of hierarchy or desire for cultural clout. Sakini subtly subverts this by evoking the amateur spirit in the most bewitching way; instead of sourcing her ideas from Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys, her stock is the established art canon, and by reforming those sounds she makes an insightful comment on intellectualism and access. European classical music is all too often trapped behind the frosted glass of respectability and assumed skill - craft replaces spirit, and technique replaces soul. By approaching these gestures from a different angle, Sakini softens the edges sonically and intellectually, finding music that bubbles with emotion, and most strikingly - hope.

Her choice of instruments and the way she interacts with them allows us to feel as if we're not only listening but contributing. It's a bottom-up way of absorbing art that's traditionally been top-down, and a reminder that we're all part of the experience, whether we're humming along to the remnants of a theme as it dribbles out of an ear in the shower, or dreaming of spotlights in a parallel life that may or may not be real. Sakini's music is nostalgic in a sense, but nowhere near the buttered popcorn and high-fructose candy migraine of the Netflix/Spotify algorithm generation of regurgitated churn. She makes sounds that remind us of what time and experience may have stolen from us, and how we might recover it. We're gagged.

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12" | 2022 | EU | Original (Mind Dance)

Mystic Minds Volume 2

13,99 €*

12" | 2022 | EU | Original (Soft Raw)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Mind Dance returns with the second volume in their ‘Mystic Minds’ VA series. Launched last year as a way to continue the strong collaborative nature of the electronic music underground, each instalment will shine a light on local Australian talent and their cross-continental contemporaries.

Continuing this mission with a new batch of friends, family and former label mates in tow, round two rallies six artists from home soil and overseas for another deep excursion into the vast expanses of dance music.

From across the pond we have Dutch producer and Music From Memory regular Dazion who kicks off the VA with a wonky slice of rhythmic downtempo, and Phran, a Barcelona-based artist and member of Ivan - a duo alongside Ivy Barkakati - who puts his foot on the gas with a stomping techno cut.

Closer to home we have Aussie dance veteran and the man behind Mind Dance’s last release, Andy Rantzen, deliver a tight bleep-soaked acid jam, followed by Leo James and Mousse flying the flag for Melbourne with twinkling IDM and laid-back vocal house, respectively. Finally label boss Furious Frank closes out proceedings with a downbeat percussive house number to usher in summer, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere that is...

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Slacker

Damage To Be Undone

13,99 €*

12" | 2022 | EU | Original (R.i.O.)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Soft Raw is a new label from Danielle – a natural extension of the Bristol-based DJ’s expansive tastes within contemporary club music. Over the past few years the NTS resident has become a leading light in the multifaceted world of modernist techno abstractions, ably balancing soundsystem pressure and propulsive rhythmic intensity with experimental textures and explorative energy variations. Soft Raw seeks to continue that mission with releases which will progress stylistically from one approach to another, taking in exciting, emergent producers unique in their approach but bound together by the idiosyncratic curation of Danielle – a faithful reflection of her proven skill as a selector.

The label launches with a six-track drop from Slacker. Sam Black has been winding up a potent strain of needlepoint techno which leans towards jungle and half-time D&B in its tempo and structure. Across a selection of various releases, Black’s sound has evolved into an accomplished and detailed style which draws on moody atmospheres and advanced engineering in the grand tradition of UK soundsystem music. Across this EP the Slacker sound matches up to the spirit of Soft Raw, balancing fierce kinetic energy with delicacy and finesse and leaving some space for outright ambience. At times he locks into a half-step warm-up mode, while elsewhere the amens creep in for a more pronounced jungle rinse-out.

It’s a strong opening statement for this new label, but crucially this doesn’t spell out the future in absolute terms. True to Danielle’s broad outlook, subsequent releases are set to take in everything from straight up 4/4 and acid to footwork and electro, with a narrative binding each release together according to her internal logic and the tension between soft and raw qualities explored across consistently cutting-edge tracks.

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Benedikt Frey

1987

19,99 €*

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Mana)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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When British Airways got privatized and listed on the London Stock Exchange, somewhere in Canada the first Starbucks outside of the US opened, and the Walt Disney Company signed an agreement with the French Prime Minister to construct Disneyland Paris. In the sky above southern Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, northern Somalia, and the Atlantic Ocean a hybrid solar eclipse materialized for 7.57 seconds, whilst Margaret Thatcher performed for 45-minutes on Soviet television. Some days later, The Simpsons cartoon first appears as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, Diego Maradona wins his first Italian soccer championship with Napoli, and Eighteen-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow. In the mists of the world's first conference on artificial life at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mainland China opens in Beijing, and Prozac gets approved for use as an antidepressant in the United States. Much give way for the future, down there in 1987, the year that marks the title of Benedikt Frey’s freshest mini album, out into the world on R.i.O., the label he runs with some pals in the North of Berlin. It’s a dubby melancholic conqueror, wistfully, repetitive, drilling, absorbing, spooking. It makes you dream. Not particular of the year 1987. But it’s all there: The Red Square, the untouched land of the Val d'Europe, Diego on fuego. Six dark-ish tracks in trance, melancholic dub, downbeat heaven, journey music depths, all full of light and yet so dark. Futuristic dramas linked to a speculative past. In our dreams all might look different. The eclipse may last 27- minutes. You meet Neuromancer cyberpunks and blade running Ghost dogs, all taught to hack by Phrack. Cristal clear melodies, sampled voices, and veiled basslines, analogue scopes, and digital ropes, longing for a past that storm into the future. A time where deep listening widens the acoustics into infinity, while neon glows charm the light smog. Benedikt Frey been down there. Or maybe not. His latest music tells stories from the bygone, vested with the forthcoming. Come in and look out. There is nothing to see, yet so much to hear.

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Aylu

Profondo Rosa

23,99 €*

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Big or profound sensations from small gestures which are carefully arranged. Using a mixture of sacred and profane, or classical and prosaic sound sources, knitted into intricate, fleet-footed compositions that virtually spring into the ear. Profondo Rosa is composer Ailin Grad’s first vinyl album following years embedded and loved in the Argentinian experimental music scene, with past treats on labels Krut, Sun Ark, Orange Milk Records and her own label Abyss, devoted to ‘connecting Latin Juke with the world’.

There’s a playfulness at the heart of Profondo Rosa that’s immediately charming, with a sense of scale and spatialisation in the sounds being toyed with, exploring the strange pleasures and satisfaction in her approach to delightful and fresh feeling sound design. Aylu is known to be as likely to deploy the sound of a finger click, a fizzy drink being cracked open, or a fly buzzing past the ear, as she is drawn to sampling gorgeous strings or instrumentation. Her debut album for Mana constantly builds territories that tug at your heartstrings and then have you grinning five seconds later. This versatility and acceleration has often resulted in her music being compared to footwork, alongside collaboration with other producers experimenting in that sphere; in 2017 she and Foodman put together a dizzying hour of sounds for NTS.

Her miniaturisation of rhythm and ringtone-like sample size could also bring to mind SND circa their warmer softer glitch Tenderlove phase, or perhaps the approach that Teenage Engineering take to designing tools for music making. Each are deriving pleasure from small and satisfying shapes, as well as advocating an object-oriented philosophy and minimalisation in their work that sidesteps a draining of colour. Sound is fun, and in Profondo Rosa it sounds like Aylu has that at the forefront of her mind.

Her hyperreal sound and its link to the languages of electroacoustic or computer music are clear, but she outmanoeuvres many of the overly-academic and formless examples of those genres. Profondo Rosa’s skeletal assembly of objects becomes tunes in an elegant, almost understated way; tactile elements quickly combine and roll into deeper and persuasively emotional places. These compositions give off an air of being very free, very experimental, despite being meticulously artful and studied arrangements on precise and nimble coordinates.'

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Metal Preyers

Shadow Swamps

Tape | 2022 | UK | Original (Ecstatic)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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^Following 2019's acclaimed self-titled debut album, Metal Preyers take the left hand path into a gloomy backwater filled with haunted creatures and fraught with peril. "Shadow Swamps" again finds London-based Jesse Hackett handling the music and Chicago's Mariano Chavez fashioning the album's visual identity, which this time includes a short film and book for a fully immersive experience. "Shadow Swamps" is the soundtrack to a pitch-black fairy tale about a father and daughter as they journey through a swamp avoiding gremlins, red swines and crater creatures. Musically, it pivots between the clattering Czech new wave experimentation of "Valerie and her Week of Wonders" composer Lubos Fiser, or the magical, eccentric lounge of Birmingham's Broadcast, and the grinding industrial grot of Italian pioneer Maurizio Bianchi.This time around, Hackett has roped in production assists from his six year-old-daughter wonder Nyasha hackett who used phone memos to record herself singing - veteran Metal Preyers collaborator Lord Tusk, and Manchester-based painter, DJ and producer Richard Harris, aka Sockethead. The crew inks an unsettling, richly textured sonic landscape, with claws of rhythmic smoke curling around chiming otherworldly xylophone, disembodied fiddle drones echoing over screwed 'n chopped beatbox dirt and half-heard magical vocals buried under clouds of white noise.

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More Eaze

The Joker

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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mari maurice aka more eaze returns to Ecstatic with a tenderly gorgeous solo side after her standout claire rousay collaboration last year for the same label - a big recommendation if yr into Elysia Crampton, Mica Levi, MBV, Vegyn, Organ Tapes, Grouper, Dntel, Nozomu Matsumoto, Rainy Miller.

Nestling in the space between ambient, indie-/synth-, and what’s now termed hyper-pop, more eaze specialises in lower case songcraft that effortlessly gets under the skin. Featuring notable guest input by Spivak, Dialect, and Pam3, ‘The Joker’ is perhaps more eaze’s most significant long player, forming a filigree distillation of soft-touch, emo-core pop styles wreathed in fractal electronics and blessed by a gentle sensitivity that feels like micro-dosing with mates on a sunny day.

’The Joker’ was inspired by more eaze’s experiences travelling extensively during 2021-22, absorbing and transmuting time spent meeting new people, seeing new places, and watching established relationships change. Like regular spar claire rousay, ‘The Joker’ finds micro-insights crystallised to odd-pop imperfection, merging ohrwurm hooks with field recordings and traces of electronica, R&B, reggaeton, and classic indie-rock chops to divine a personal truth that should resonate with lovers of low key ambient as much as hi-key poptimism.

Through nine subtly effected snapshots of daily life, mari somehow encapsulates the feeling of trying to endear yourself to someone new, the tactility of another’s touch, chuckling at misfired jokes. Beginning with fractured toytronics and autotune vox in ‘yours’, melodies spill over from the Dntel-like licks of ‘fall apart’, to the mutant shoegaze bliss of ‘vindictive’ (it properly sounds like an autotuned version of MBV’s ‘to here knows when’), plus E+E-via-Palmistry reggaeton of ‘hablar contagion', with Spivak lending featherlight vox to ‘a chat’, while ‘comedy’ dials up a sense of outsider irony with a wry shrug.

Liverpool-via-Brooklyn’s Dialect helps seal the deal with the burbling touch of ‘eyeliner’, a fittingly hypnagogic ending to a dreamlike album whose effect lingers like latent fractals of a therapeutic psilocybin session.

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The Greatest Switch Vinyl 5

2LP | 2022 | EU | Original (541 Label)

Les Prières Liquides + Sacrilège Vénération Volume 5

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Including wanted vinyl tracks by New Order, Roni Size, Laurent Garnier, Buraka Som Sistema, Kid Cudi, Rudimental, Le Youth, Donna Summer and Major Lazer.

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DJ Fusiller X Fusiller

2Tape | 2022 | UK | Original (Editions Gravats)

Upon This Fleeting Dream Feat. David Sylvian & Kazuko Hohki

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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DJ Fusiller plumbs the depths of the french avant garde with a mad double tape of dream-woven collage and original material, where the binds of sur/reality get deeply frayed - a strong Riyl Luc Ferrari, Ghédalia Tazartès, Oï les Ox, ÉLG, Bzmc, Dominique Lawalrée

Sister in spirit and scope to the mind-bending mixtape ’Sacrilège Vénération Vol.1’ (2020), this ‘DJ Fusiller vs Fusiller’ double tape clasps the aspects of Jo Tanz’ practice as DJ and musician (with the likes of Reines D’Angleterre and Opéra Mort) in a properly mystifying session of psychedelic storytelling.

The session spreads across 66 minutes of enchanting, glued-together concrète ephemera and wigged-out original material that possesses similarly bewitching, bezzzzonkkkked qualities primed for intrepid listeners. They hail an unmistakeable sense of authority to his mixtapes while betraying a background steeped in the contemporary avant alongside fellow visionaries Ghédalia Tazartès & ÉLG, both carrying a torch of inspiration from classic french philosophy and mindsets that’s long expressed itself thru France’s interrelated, syncretised frameworks of art, literature, film, and music.

On the first tape "Les Prières Liquides" features Fusiller with 30 mins of original music flowing deep into the tenderised subconscious thru its matrix of synth textures and spangled electro-acoustic wizardry. In 10 parts he probes and torments finer integers of emotion, fleeting from horror score organ soused in salty noise to passages of bittersweet noise and rapid ear/eye movements that jog the memory’s nether regions in a persistent flux of wonder. We wager that a dose of your preferred HD goggles will enhance the effect, but are not necessary to get right inside the work, which keenly projects and imprints itself on the fantasy mindset.

The second tape is the 5th volume of DJ Fusiller’s french-music-only mixtape series, here deploying a reverie of allusive sonic signposts that act as an ideal counterpart for the album. Via avant cinematic jump cuts from field recordings to cosmic noise, mythologic alpine sirens and voice-in-your-head intimations, he conjures impossible leaps of the imagination that recall the poetry of Luc Ferrari as much as Trevor Duncan’s ‘La Jetée’ soundtrack in his beguiling, non-linear logic and lushly immersive scene-setting for what’s to come.

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Twinkle3

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Cortizona)

25,99 €*

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (B.F.E.)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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On ‘Upon This Fleeting Dream’ Clive Bell’s Twinkle3 embraces medieval and 16th century Japanese poems and haiku about death and saying farewell. Twinkle3, consisting of Dave Ross and Richard Scott besides Clive Bell, expand their sonic borders to unknown territory: bringing these pithy epigrams to a new Fourth World where electro-acoustic sounds glitches into an hypnagogic, if not unconscious level of fragile beauty.

The distinctive voice of David Sylvian, who reads the English version of the poems and created field recordings and the artwork for this album, blends in the most organic way with the shakuhachi,Thai reed flutes and mouth organs played by Clive Bell.

The narrative voices of David Sylvian and Kazuko Hohki’s (Frank Chickens, Kahondo Style…) velvet timbre are the cornerstones of this compelling journey while the tangling and abstract rhythms transcending from Dave Ross’ modular synths and Richard Scott’s sampler and analogue electronics, unravel and unfold a mesmerizing universe with unknown dimensions and frequencies of a fleeting dream.

Vinyl edition with printed inlay and extra insert

File under:
electronica, spoken word, fourth world, sound art,shakuhachi, dub,minimal,ambient, abstract and good music

Recommended if you like:
David Sylvian, Japanese poems, Jon Hassell, Pan Sonic, Laraaji, Brian Eno, electronic, organic and excellent music

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Colin Potter

Ago

23,99 €*

Nouvelles Et Anciennes Pratiques De Cartographie Amateure

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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An original and particular approach to rhythmic electronics, with an incredible sound, like in all of Potter's works. Six hypnotic tracks from Colin's archive of rarities, for the first time on vinyl, perfect to play really loud.

These six pieces were recorded between the late 80s & mid-90s at IC Studio, which was then located in Tollerton, North Yorkshire.

“I wanted to make some tracks which were much more rhythmic. By then the studio was a 16-track and I had acquired more equipment for making sounds and changing sounds. There was an Akai S950 sampler, an Emulator II, Roland Tr727 and Yamaha Rx11 digital drum machines, a Roland Juno 60, and some new effects processors. I even, briefly, used an Atari for Midi sequencing, but using a computer in the studio felt a bit weird in those days. Ironic really, given the situation now. There were a lot of new methods to learn and the tracks on this album were the result of some of these experiments, during which I also found ways of integrating the old analog synths with the newer machines. Mixing was still done hands-on, in real-time, with alternative and often radically different takes being made of the same multitrack. Very different to the way things are done now. Better or worse? Who knows? But different.” - Colin Potter, IC Studio, London 2022.

Colin Potter is a sound engineer and musician currently based in London. He has worked within the fields of electronic and experimental music for over 40 years, collaborating with the likes of Current 93, The Hafler Trio, Organum, Andrew Chalk, and most notably as a key part of Nurse With Wound alongside Steven Stapleton. He started the esteemed ICR (Integrated Circuit Records – still active today) label in 1981 releasing a several wonderful home studio recordings of his own, as small run cassette releases.

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Tachycardie

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Kythibong)

CD | 2011 | EU | Reissue (One Little Independent)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Fortified by his collective experiences as a drummer and percussionist on the margins of free rock and improvisation - in Pneu, Papaye, Binidu or La Colonie de Vacances - Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy imagined Tachycardie, a project in which he initiates a paradoxically complex and raw vibratory art where rhythms and drones are born from matter and objects.

For his third disc under his fluttering pseudonym, Geoffroy blurs the lines between compositions/improvisations and field recordings and invites us to prick up our ears in a process of extended listening offering panoramic pieces. These nine practices are so many acousmatic rituals in a semi-natural environment conceived as sound tracking shots which can be listened to as one would apprehend a landscape and its different planes: electro-acoustic panoramas in perspective, at sometimes moderate volume, which invite an increased attention or, on the contrary, a more global listening to atmospheres. It seems that blurring the tracks between what he proposes to hear and the freedom of perception offered to the listener matters to Geoffroy in this compromise between rustic concrete music and rhythmic bas-reliefs played in a crooked way under the shed.

This collection of six pieces brings together nine practices, in formats ranging from a little over two to seven minutes. They function as so many vignettes of "Cinema for the ear" where the little naturalist stories, which we imagine taking place at nightfall, merge with the miniatures of domestic experimental music combining almost fortuitous rhythms and frequencies. The rustling of fauna and flora welcome with open arms the fragile and gently dissonant sounds of Geoffroy. Over the course of the practices, the elements of field recordings seem to integrate the vast palette of the sound director. The pieces thus take on more composed, dense and dynamic turns; we no longer know which of the dog or the synthesizer is barking, whether it's the wind blowing or sticks scratching driftwood, and we marvel at believing everything these concrete, sometimes absurd nursery rhymes tell us.

Three years after Probables, the first discographic manifestation of Tachycardie, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy continues to wander between acousmatic music, minimalism (Tachycardie Ensemble), field recordings and fake traditional music, following a most elusive trajectory. Competing in purity in his sound approach with the picky Ralf Wehowsky, Bernhard Günter, or even Thomas Köner, Geoffroy also maintains a resolutely physical relationship to sound that brings him closer to his peers (-cussionists) Will Guthrie or Eli Keszler. Despite these somewhat futile attempts at filiation, Tachycardie remains, somewhere in Touraine, one of the most exciting living anomalies in experimental music.

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Björk

Biophilia Deluxe Edition

14,99 €*

LP | 2022 | US | Original (Helen Scarsdale Agency)

Release: 2011 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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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.

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Ekin Fil

Dora Agora

LP | 2021 | UK | Original (Chinabot)

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Ekin Fil returns to the guitar on Dora Agora. Her earliest recordings, notably her debut on Root Strata, prominently featured guitar in this urgent expressions of a dreamy dreariness that immediately offered enthusiastic comparisons to Grouper. In her development as composer of ephemeral ghostliness for numerous albums as well as her scores to film soundtracks, that instrument has given way to keyboards, organs, synths, and various mood engineering devices, in her beautifully melancholy pursuits of an emotional emptiness through sound. Yet, the pandemic era gave Ekin pause to reflect on her creative process and she picked that instrument back up to create one of her greatest albums to date. As direct and urgent as these songs can be, Ekin swaddles her acoustic guitar chords in soft-focus reverb and polyphonous shadow, colored with a judicious amount of shoegazing drone and somber atmosphere that speaks to her continued development as a composer. "Ghost Boy" in particular is a bittersweet, wistful tune whose arrangement harkens to Johnny Marr at his peak of effortless downer simplicity. "Farba" and "Yo Feelings" turn the emotional screws with soul-crush crescendos of vocal melodies that build upon Ekin's lonely guitar chords. Again, Grouper emerges as one of Ekin's closest neighbors, alongside Carla Dal Forno, Slowdive's Pygmallion, and Movietone. "I really feel like I've gone back to a time when I was recording songs with a guitar and keyboard when I was very young. It's kind of li ke embracing Ekin from that period with my current ideas & mood. it's an homage, it's a wave, a hug from my present to my past…" (Ekin Fil - Istanbul, August 2022) Mastered by James Plotkin.

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Tafaa

Random Activity (...)

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Cellule 75)

Release: 2021 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Tafaa - Random activity of the work of art, escalates an extension of accepted (unproductive) concepts of art, nature and society' is a sound editing project led by Chloé Delarue, a visual artist based in Geneva (ch) in collaboration with Adeena Mey, a curator, art critic, managing editor of the magazine Afterall (Central St Martins, London, UK) and researcher/teacher at Ecal (Lausanne, ch).

Together, they gathered sound artists Jaeho Hwang, Lafidki of the Chinabot label and the performer-composer Seth Ayyaz in a desire to bring together horizons of thoughts with a singular tonality in resonance with the Tafaa* cycle. The release is a continuation of the deployment of Chloé Delarue's solo show - Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch, which took place at the Villa du Parc - Contemporary art center in Annemasse (fr).

The four compositions resulting from this meeting are materialized in a hybrid compilation. Each of the tracks, affected by the aesthetic spectrum of Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch, results from unique paths that each sound artist builds in their own works. This compilation released in the exhibition space and in its vinyl form, was infused under this particular atmosphere with the aura of sodium, as an echo of the previous opus Tafaa - Acid Rave. The title evokes territories in wasteland and multitude of theaters of an urbanity that has become tropical for one night.

For Chloé Delarue, the environment produced under Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch and its aesthetic feeling is linked with the dissemination of these four tracks. As she says, it becomes “like the deep trance of a noise invisible to oneself but that we perceive thanks to the questioning of its own imperception, the work no longer looks at itself, it injects itself.”

Moult and Dystopia by Jaeho Hwang, Pandæmonium Cctv by Lafidki in collaboration with Ayankoko and Pisitakun (from Chinabot) and Apophenic studies | stochastic iqaat by Seth Ayyaz thus bring out, through their sound characteristics, a powerful emotional expanse driven by their glimpse of the conceptual reconfigurations of a world increasingly accessible through its ersatz.

The vinyl title Tafaa - Random Activity (...) is borrowed from Gustav Metzger taken from an extract from his Manifesto On random activity in material / transforming works of art in July 30, 1964.

Chloé Delarue constitutes what she calls environments under the influence of the Tafaa perception system, an acronym for Toward A Fully Automated Appearance. Tafaa is a conceptual organ that she builds as a cognitive outgrowth allowing her access to the reasoning that feeds her work. It is under this name, indexed by a number or a subtitle, that each occurrence of her work has been presented since 2015. Thus, she probes the ambiguous relations that our society maintains with its multitudes of transfigurations, real or simulated, at the time of permanent interconnections and raises questions relating to changes in perceptions and cognitive transformations of our beings under the visible and invisible authority of cosmotechnics.

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Marc Richter

Diode, Triode

2LP | 2002 | EU | Reissue (Keplar)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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This album presents two multichannel works recorded at the seminal INA GRM Studio in Paris and ZKM Institute in Karlsruhe respectively, mixed to stereo at the composer's Cellule 75 Studio in Hamburg with excellent mastering by Rashad Becker. While his releases under the Black To Comm moniker often touched the fringes of acousmatic techniques and Musique Concrete this is Richter's first foray into a more abstract spatial music.

Recorded in the week leading up to the Paris terror attacks at the GRM studio, "Diode, Triode" (21:57) is loosely based on a reading of (and, in parts, a failure to understand) "Le Parasite" (1980) by Michel Serres, a philosophic metaphor about human interaction and communication (which can also be interpreted as a lyrical essay on capitalism; part confusion, part enlightenment).

As core elements Richter is using speech synthesis and the transformation and distortion of concrete sounds, instruments, voices and breathing. Abstract incognisable sounds are combined with strings, reeds and percussion while dismembered musical fragments emerge and vanish rapidly. Chunks of interfering noise are followed by long periods of silence; chaos and order are alternating. Choirs of synthetic and processed human voices are recounting stock market values, seemingly random sequences of numbers and inscrutable lyrics while parasitic sounds are trying to crack, collapse and fractionise the compositional stream and sonic interactions. Finally, a haunting piano chord is wrestling with a broken Publison machine. Like the book, it's part confusing, part enlightening - and a radical piece of sonic art.

"We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked." (Le Parasite)

"Diode, Triode" was premiered on the Acousmonium at INA GRM's Akousma Festival in Paris, January 22, 2016 alongside new works by François Bayle, Robert Hampson, Leo Kupper and Ragnar Grippe.

The second piece "Spiral Organ of Corti" (17:00) has been composed in 2014 for the 47-speaker Klangdom concert hall at ZKM Karlsruhe at the foot of the Black Forest (where Richter was born and raised).

How does one listen with closed ears? Sine tones, alienated human voices and breathing noises build a labyrinthine puzzle alternating between the natural and the artificial. Human sounds merge with winds and strings, sine tones morph into metal sounds. Acoustic illusions confuse the listener, and dense noise-clouds slowly emerge from deceptive silence. Deep base sounds define space. Temporary focus glides into chaos. "Spiral Organ of Corti" is yet another extended composition that proves Richter is on a path of his very own.

"Spiral Organ of Corti" is dedicated to the late Gary Todd.

"Tongues that came from wind and noise. To speak in tongues after the fire." (Le Parasite)

Marc Richter records as Black To Comm for Thrill Jockey, Type and Dekorder and under the Mouchoir Ètanche and Jemh Circs monikers for his own Cellule 75 imprint. He collaborated with visual artists such as Ho Tzu Nyen, Jan van Hasselt and Mike Kelley. Under his own name he is composing for film and installations.

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Ekkehard Ehlers

Plays

33,99 €*

2LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Kompakt)

Release: 2002 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Ekkehard Ehlers' seminal plays series was originally released on three 12inches (Staubgold) and two 7inches (Bottrop-Boy) in very limited runs. The entire series was previously only available as a CD compilation or digitally. Keplar finally presents it on double vinyl for the first time, featuring a new cover artwork. Domestic ethnology: Ekkehard Ehlers plays. ‘Play’ is a word in English with many meanings attached. Each one sends you down a different cognitive pathway. When I think of ‘playing’, in the sense of a game, I think of an activity involving more than one person. When Ekkehard Ehlers plays, he is very much on his own. Or, at least, alone but at the same time keeping intimate company with the artistic innovators named in his titles. Robert Johnson. John Cassavetes. Albert Ayler. Cornelius Cardew. Hubert Fichte. Is he playing with them, against them, about them, for them, to them? This can never be known. It is certainly a mistake to try to hear the ‘work’ of these originals in the sounds played by Ekkehard. They’re not cover versions. They’re hardly tributes in the conventional sense. Cassavetes and Fichte are not even musicians, although music played an important part in both their careers. Sure, there are little nods and flashes of recognition – tiny guitar licks among the minimal beats of ‘Robert Johnson 2’; rich bowed instruments in ‘Albert Ayler’, recalling the violin, cello and double bass arrangements on Ayler’s 1967 Live in Greenwich Village LP; the elongated organ lines of ‘Cornelius Cardew 1’ gesturing towards passages in Paragraph 1 of the British composer’s 1971 Marxist monolith, The Great Learning. Ekkehard is not so much playing these figures as allowing himself to be played by them. Playing as an activity also suggests freedom. Maybe the only thing all five named persons have in common is that they were all quiet radicals. In music, literature and cinema, they all stepped, without self-promotion or fanfare, into unmapped territories. Once there they found it necessary to invent new languages in order to survive. Necessity was the mother of their inventiveness. They were also uncomfortable avant gardists. Lonely types, fighting their corners out on the margins, with little reward, often misunderstood, ridiculed or ignored. All died unfairly young. Fichte a victim of Hiv/aids, Cassavetes of cirrhosis of the liver. (‘Cassavetes 2’ sounds like a tender farewell played across the 59 year old alcoholic director’s death bed.) The deaths of Johnson, Ayler and Cardew have never been satisfactorily explained, and remain shrouded in myths and conspiracy theories. The pioneering expeditions of all five began in that spirit of playful freedom, but inexorably drew them towards the heart of darkness. So these ‘plays’ are micro-dramas, sonic soliloquies, monolog-ins to the private accounts of various geniuses in Ekkehard’s ‘follow’ list. Hacked sensibilities. Artistic manifestos boiled down and distilled, skinned and dried in the digital smokehouse. (Ekkehard Ehlers Flays.) Each of these plays was originally floated out into the world alone on its own disc. The collected works play well as a team – a tranquil, introspective experience where each artist has his own identifiably unique sound character. As an album, Plays is a ‘Plattenragout’ – a ‘record stew’ – which was the title of Hubert Fichte’s LP review column in the leftist culture magazine konkret in the 1960s. The novelist’s work investigating the cultures of South America and the Caribbean islands has been called ‘domestic ethnology’. The writer himself referred to his ‘ethnopoesie’. Ekkehard Ehlers’s intuitive electronic portraits are a form of domestic ethnology in themselves. Invoking another of Ekkehard’s musical aliases, they are portraits of cultural ‘autopoiesies’ – creators whose works were strong enough to have their own self-regenerating life force. (by Rob Young)

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Kasper Bjørke Quartet

Mother

Meakusma (Generators) Clear Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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For over two decades Bjørke has cut his own path, as a solo artist and enthusiastic collaborator. Bjørke’s Copenhagen home may be one of Europe’s great cultural hubs, and he’s certainly added a paragraph or two to that story, but his music is distinctly international. Even a cursory listen exposes an impressive, ever-evolving career. However, few expected him to initiate the collaborative ambient / neo-classical project Kasper Bjørke Quartet. In 2018 The Fifty Eleven Project was released on Kompakt Records, a deeply personal record that musically documents Bjørkes encounter with, and triumph over, cancer. The album topped many critics' lists, and was included among The Guardian’s Best Contemporary Albums of the year.

Mother, which will be released on October 28th, represents a quantum leap forward. Literally, when you consider the terrestrial shifts that informed it. Six compositions explore what the evolution of our planet sounds like. While Holst may have gotten there first, Mother singularly focuses on the orb where we reside, from its formation, to its likely conclusion. Other artists have tackled song cycles that parallel a day, a year, or even a lifetime. Mother spans a timeframe from 4.5 billion years ago up to humankind’s impending demise. It hints at how that may be sooner than we think, as well as the earth’s resilience, and the promise of another chapter.

Additional gravity comes courtesy of evocative choir arrangements - - and marimba recorded at the Copenhagen Opera House. “Formation” condenses 20 million years of runaway accretion into 20 minutes. It is sublimely padded by feature artist Sofie Birch’s gentle synths. “Abiogenesis” intimates a different type of emergence: the first life to inhabit our nascent planet. The entire cosmos is condensed into the layered vocals of Philip|Schneider. Birch returns on “Miocene,” which signals the divergence of proto-humans from primates not with foreboding, but rather cascaded notes and swells adumbrating a pure and curious being, revealing nothing of what the Catch-22 of knowledge will bring. That’s addressed in the diptych of “Anthropocene” and “Tipping Points,” respectively marking the dawn and foreshadowing the probable downfall of homosapians, through wondrous advancements and their climate damaging byproducts. It’s tempting to think the album’s finale, “Requiem,” implies only a dark conclusion, owing to its sparkling verrillon’s coronach, and the return of Philip|Schneider’s empyrean vocals, but its juxtaposition with revolving, enigmatic piano chords infers the earth will enter its next act.

Mother is a staggering achievement, encouraging contemplative thought. The album is released October 28th on Kompakt Records, both digitally and on limited edition double vinyl. The atwork is designed by multidisciplinary artist Trevor Jackson.

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Keith Fullerton Whitman

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Nakid)

28,99 €*

The Box Colored Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Keith Fullerton Whitman brings his 3-part Generators series for Japan’s Nakid label to a close with a third and final instalment that ravishes the senses with hybrid analogue/digital systems tekkerz. Hazing into a solemn start of floating organ and slurred drums, the first part fizzes into action with pranging irregularities, tentatively allowing the system to voice varying pitches and nimble rhythms that resemble balletic footwork plies as much as classically-trained instrumentalist flurries. It’s deeply trance-inducing, meditative gear that over the course of 25 minutes slowly gains momentium and complexity, first adding robust arps to complicate the structure, treading the finest line of chaos and discipline. In time, those arps turn themselves into a rhythm track, landing somewhere between Whitman’s earliest junglist works as Hrvatski and a sort of plucked rhythmic minimalism that reminds us of Mark Fell’s Sensate Focus, gliding on natural, brownian motion and flux of texture, punctuated by what sound likes a plucking of a drum machine from the inside-out. In part 2 the mood pools and diffracts in slow-fast meter, bristling ruptures of atonality that send limbs flailing one way and then another, adding subs for a dimensional shift that’s rhythmically fractured but always grounded at the low registers. The wavy embroidery of Whitman’s machines trigger each other in endlessly fascinating forms of gyring workshop ballistics and dub reverberations. A special bonus piece ‘Meakusma (Generators, Soundcheck)’ is the most curious of the lot, with a lone clarinet heard in the air, perhaps a serendipitous inclusion form someone else’s soundcheck, lending an enchanting depth perception to his frolicking bleeps.

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Box Set | 2022 | EU | Original (Past Inside The Present)

272,99 €*

The Soundtrack Of My Home

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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UK producer Dennis Huddleston goes by the artist name of 36. He is a much-loved producer with a fine back catalogue which is investigated here with The Box, a new collection of his earliest and perhaps most admired works. They were all written between 2005 and 2012 and are drawn from albums such as 2009's Hypersona, 2010's Hollow and 2012's Lithea. The bumper six vinyl collection also features a bonus album, Orphans, of all new and previously unreleased tracks. There is a real depth of range and emotion to these tracks so it is no wonder the artist says they are some of the most personally cherished works he has written.

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Kjetil Jerve

12" | 2022 | EU | Original (Dugnad)

19,99 €*

LP | 2005 | EU | Reissue (Keplar)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance, Classical Music

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Home is a powerful concept with an abstract definition. This solo album takes those subjective ideas and unifies them under one roof. Evolving from Jerve’s #dailypiano posts in 2019, ‘The Soundtrack of My Home’ relays thoughts and improvisations that trace his journey from childhood home to adult and now, father. Nurturing a mood or feeling, each song begets a sonorous story of someone close to him, expressed through the language of piano playing.

Jerve makes use of his hands as a human step sequencer, often programming two or more motifs of varying lengths in a polymetric fashion. These melodic patterns and arpeggios evolve at varying rates but grow around clear progressions with standard 8-bar forms.

The first track - ‘Kjetil’ enters with an earnest, gentle and endearing character - like a young river near its source. As with such a river, it will grow to varied sizes throughout the album but must begin as a humble expression from the source. The following titles sketch his interpretations of the people that have made up his home.

There is a theme across the album that unites the songs, so much so that differentiating tracks can at times be difficult. Though, Jerve punctuates this overarching mood with a few distinct structures, as found in tracks ‘Karoline’ (wife), ‘Espen’ (brother) and ‘Sven’ (father). ‘Turid’ (daughter) and ‘Jon Eirik’ (brother) seem less directive and welcome more intrigue, reminiscent of a curious child wandering through the dappled light of a forest.

‘Iben’ (daughter) and ‘Eivor’ (daughter) have a hypnotic, three-pointed melodic structure that leaves the listener suspended; transfixed - while ‘Sussi’ (cat) carries unique momentum and suitably feline autonomy. ‘Mette’ (mother) has a mood of ascending, like that of a child's upward gaze at their maternal carer. Utterly nuanced in structure, Jerve leaves ample space for subjective interpretation and allows the listener to weave their own life into the tones.

As expected from the founder of Dugnad rec - this album signifies a deeply personal sentiment. Sometimes we are forced to confront the music and other times, we are left to wonder. Here, we find a balance and unity that allows little thoughts and worries to drift away, bringing us warmly to rest in the present. The LP edition's bonus track features producer/performer extraordinaire Stian Balducci, drawing a line to the next chapter of piano-based music from Dugnad rec: Tokyo Tapes: Piano Recycle.

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Marsen Jules

Herbstlaub

21,99 €*

LP | 2012 | EU | Reissue (La Scie Doree)

Release: 2005 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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»Herbstlaub,« the third album by Marsen Jules, was both introspective and visionary, modest and ground-breaking. Blending elements of classical music with electronic textures, the German artist created six pieces that draw on the power of repetition, yet are full of internal tensions and sweeping dynamics. Now, Keplar makes it available again on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 2005. This version, remastered by Stephan Mathieu and with a new artwork by Umor Rex’s Daniel Castrejón, shines a new light on a record that paved the way not only for the artist’s later work, but also further developments in electronic and ambient music more broadly.

»The noughties were a special time,« says Marsen Jules today. »It felt like there was a new tool made available practically every day that allowed you to create new musical worlds on your computer.« Hence, this prolific phase saw the emergence of a plentitude of genres and styles that can be traced back to individual records—»precious gems that opened up new possibilities and anticipated a lot of what later would be picked up on,« as he describes them. »Herbstlaub« surely falls into this category, having paved the way for a distinct approach to combining elements from classical and electronic music.

While Wolfgang Voigt was focusing on the marriage of romanticism and techno with his Gas project at the same time, the six pieces on »Herbstlaub« follow a very different concept. Through repetition and reduction, Marsen Jules threw any sense of time out of joint while also inserting an emotional component into the music. »What would remain if you abstract musical contents to this degree, how much of your personality would still resonate in it,« he sums up the questions that shaped his approach. »When will reduction result in monotony, and how could unique, magical moments created through repetition?«

More than one and a half decades later, »Herbstlaub« seems both melancholic and brimming with excitement. This is the sound of an artist experimenting freely with the sounds and structures of two supposedly irreconcilable musical traditions with new and exciting tools, creating something previously unheard of in the process.

All tracks composed and recorded by Martin Juhls. Originally released on CCO in 2005. Remaster by Stephan Mathieu. Vinyl cut by Lupo. Cover art by Daniel Castrejón based on the original by Alphazebra. Text by Kristoffer Cornils.

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Af Ursin

Trois Memoires Discretes

36,99 €*

Seven Up 50th Anniversary Edition

Release: 2012 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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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.

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Ash Ra Tempel

LP | 1973 | EU | Reissue (MG.Art)

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Portraits Grm)

Release: 1973 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance

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After the 2021 Re-Release of “Schwingungen” (MG.ART612) we proudly announce “Seven Up” as Part 2 of the authorised 50th Anniversary “A.R.T.” Re-Edition Series. “Seven Up” is the third studio album by Ash Ra Tempel and their only album recorded in collaboration with American Ph.D. in psychology, Dr. Timothy Leary. The Coverart for “Seven Up” was designed by famous Swiss Artist Walter Wegmüller. Recorded in August 1972 at Sinus Studio in Berne, Switzerland, remixed September 1972 at Dierks Studios in Stommeln, Germany.

First release in spring 1973 by OHR Musik - the first release on the new sub-label "Kosmische Kuriere", Kat-Nr. KK 58001. We release “Seven Up” in a Re-Cut carefully overseen by Manuel Göttsching himself, on September 9th 2022, also being Manuel Göttsching´s 70th Birthday. Our Edition features the full original text for the “7 levels of consciousness” by Timothy Leary in English, i.e. “Instruction Manual for Pleasure Panel” plus a previously unreleased glimpse view of the original scripts incl. notes and mark ups as well as partly unreleased photos from the recording session.

As for the music itself we again refer to Julian Cope´s review and remarks from his book “Krautrocksampler” (published by Head Heritage, 1st ed. 1995): “When the Leary Mob met the Kaiser Gang, the sparks flew ever Up-wards. 7up is a stone classic in every way. Yes, it is unlikely to find Timothy Leary singing lead vocal in a cosmic group, but even weirder that he chose to sing a wild yelping freaked out blues ! Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke had begun their careers in The Steeple Chase Blues Band back in the mid-'60ies, and they quickly felt their way through what Barritt and Leary were aiming for. They reconciled it all as a kind of West Coast chordless psychedelia, where blues riffs sparkle out of nowhere and the sheer weight of synthesizers renders everything with an unreal Pere Ubu/early Roxy Music quality. The greatness of Ash Ra Tempel burned so brightly on 7Up that there is really nothing else like it.

Hartmut Enke and Manuel Gottsching here returned to their riffy roots. It can hardly be called a retro act, though, as the context of music is everything. And with Dierks at the controls, even the New Kids on the Block would have sounded psychedelic. 7Up is like a late night radio show glimpsed through a shattered tuner where all but the most truly dangerous sounds have been allowed to stay, to drift and to dance around the performers. The result is an extreme gem, a flash of hysterical white lightning, and a pre-punk Technicolour yawn in the grandest of traditions. In typical Ash Ra Tempel style, the record is divided into two pieces, “Space” and "Time”. Within this, though, Timothy Leary’s ideas are allowed to free-flow and the two sides are therefore divided into mini-songs all segued together. The highlight of Side 1 is “Power Drive”, a West Coast burn-up that transcends any W. Coast music I ever did hear. Leary and Barritt present the greatest twin-vocal of all time, coming on like Jagger and Morrison but too caught up in their own maelstrom to be anything less than Heralds of the Punkfuture still five years away. In chaos it was conceived and in chaos it was recorded. Yet Dieter Dierks, the great Aural Architect of the Cosmic Couriers, turned 7Up into a personal triumph and a Kosmische dream.”

Ash Ra Tempel – “Seven Up”
TIMOTHY LEARY - voice
BRIAN BARRITT - voice
MICKY DUWE - voice & flute
LIZ ELLIOTT - voice
BETTINA HOHLS - voice
PORTIA NKOMO - voice
HARTMUT "HAWK" ENKE - bass, guitar & electronics
MANUEL GÖTTSCHING - guitar & electronics
STEVE A. - organ & electronics
DIETMAR BURMEISTER - drums
TOMMY ENGEL - drums
DIETER DIERKS - synthesizer & Radio Downtown

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Peter Rehberg

At GRM

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Metaphon)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Shelter Press and INA grm are pleased and moved to present two previously unreleased recordings of Peter Rehberg, two live performances given at the GRM which, each in their own way, vividly illustrate the extent of his sonic palette.

On 22 July 2021, Peter Rehberg passed away, leaving a great emptiness in his wake. Many initiatives have already celebrated or will soon celebrate his memory and the titanic work he put at the service of so many artists - a whole musical community, in fact - through Editions Mego. INA grm, Shelter Press and Stephen O’Malley, who are continuing some of the collaborative Editions Mego sub-labels (Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM and Ideologic Organ), wanted to pay tribute more specifically to the musician Peter Rehberg, and to his immense talent.

Peter Rehberg, as an artist, has collaborated with the GRM on numerous occasions, both with Stephen O’Malley (as Ktl) and solo. This release features two concerts given for the GRM, each time as part of the Présences électronique festival. The first concert, given on 15 March 2009 at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, marked the first collaboration between Peter Rehberg and the GRM and the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship. The second concert took place on 6 March 2016. Between these two concerts, 7 years have passed, 7 years in which the ties between Peter Rehberg and the GRM have been strengthened, 7 years in which Peter Rehberg’s music has flourished. What is striking in these two concerts is how Peter Rehberg’s unique musical sensitivity and ‘grammar’ can be heard beyond the instruments. For while the first concert is pure laptop music, the second is extended to the field of modular synthesis. However, in both concerts, the elements that are so personal to Peter Rehberg’s music are present and combine in a layering of sonic abrasions, raw sensations and a sensitivity that is as much about formal awareness as it is about the invocation of overwhelming emotions, even though a little hidden behind a radicality that is always a bit provocative. Peter Rehberg offers us a “portrait music”, a music that gives some clues about the personality of its author and whose absence continues to deepen an inconsolable sadness.

Live performances by Peter Rehberg at le Centquatre-Paris for INA grm’s Présences électronique festival, recorded on March 15, 2009, and March 6, 2016.

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Johannes Fritsch

Kyo Mu / Hochtöner

25,99 €*

Arnold Dreyblatt & Paul Panhuysen

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Johannes Fritsch (1941–2010) was an award-winning composer, musician, publisher, studio owner, author and music teacher. He studied viola and composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and was member of the Stockhausen Ensemble from 1964 to 1970. Together with Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson (also from the Stockhausen Ensemble) he established the Feedback Studio Köln and the Feedback Studio Verlag, the first publishing house owned by composers in Germany.

Fritsch’s complex musical estate consists of approximately 130 works: it covers electronic music, chamber music, ballet, theatre and film music, organ compositions, an opera and pieces for large orchestras. Although Fritsch’s compositions are varied, all of them convey a strong interest in new sound combinations and sound colours.

‘Kyo Mu’ and ‘Hochtöner’ both reveal a mesmerizing symbiosis of innovative sound exploration and visionary interior music, a sublime compound of fine-drawn intricate arrangements skillfully projected in space and time, or perhaps beyond space and time.

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Duo Geloso

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Black Truffle)

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Black Truffle)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Black Truffle is thrilled to continue its program of archival releases from Arnold Dreyblatt with a recently unearthed concert recording from Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen’s "Duo Geloso". While isolated examples of Dreyblatt’s collaboration with the legendary Dutch multi-media artist appeared on the CD reissue of Propellers in Love and Black Truffle’s wide-ranging archival Second Selection, this is the first release to document the variety and playfulness of the concerts that Duo Geloso performed throughout Europe in 1987-88. Both working across sonic and visual forms, fascinated by numerical relationship and the infinite complexity of string harmonics, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen had a natural affinity for each other’s work, strengthened through Dreyblatt’s many visits to Het Apollohuis, the important experimental art space Panhuysen helped to found in Eindhoven. However, as René van Peer suggests in the liner notes enclosed within this release, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen took very different approaches to these shared interests; the wonderful energy of these Duo Geloso performances results from the meeting of Dreyblatt’s more austere, compositional process with Panhuysen’s spontaneity.

Recorded at a concert at Het Apollohuis in December 1987 (a series of beautiful photographs of which adorn the LP’s packaging), each of the six pieces presented here is distinctive in terms of instrumentation and performance approach. Using electric guitar and bass tuned by Dreyblatt and played using E-Bow and Panhuysen’s motorised plectrums, the opening ‘Razorburg’ moves slowly through a long series of held notes with a madly insistent tremolo that crosses Dick Dale with a mechanised take on the layered guitars of Günter Schickert. The same pair of instruments returns on ‘Duo for Guitars’, where the mechanised attacks dissolve into a harmonic wash, reminiscent of the machine guitar work of fellow Het Apollohuis alumni Remko Scha. On ‘Love Call’, the guitars and bass are accompanied by Panhuysen’s distant warbled vocals, familiar to Maciunas Ensemble listeners. On the remarkable ‘Synsonic Batterie’, Panhuysen begins proceedings with a solo barrage of electronic percussion on the Synsonics Drum Machine (a simple drum synthesiser produced by the toy manufacturer Mattell), joined eventually by Dreyblatt performing his signature percussive natural harmonics on pedal steel guitar. When Panhuysen adds his bird whistle to the mix, the performance becomes the perfect exemplar of the Duo Geloso’s unique mix of studious close listening and subtle absurdity.Presented in a gatefold sleeve with archival photos and illuminating liner notes from René van Peer.

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Alvin Curran

Drumming Up Trouble

Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil Clear Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Drumming Up Trouble, the first release of previously unissued music by Alvin Curran on the label. Collecting works recorded between 2018-2021 and a side-long epic dating back to the early 80s, as the title suggests, Drumming Up Trouble focuses on a hitherto almost unknown aspect of Curran’s encyclopaedic and omnivorous musical world: his experiments with sampled and synthesised percussion. As Curran’s wonderful, wildly sweeping liner notes make clear, his fascination with drumming belongs to the radical investigation of music’s fundamental elements that has marked his output since the beginnings of MEV, who aimed (as he says in a recent interview) to return ‘in some collective way to a non-existent start time in the history of human music’. Whatever kind of music our proto-human ancestors played, he writes, ‘drums were front and centre in the mix. Drums rule!’

In a paradox typical of Curran’s approach, Drumming Up Trouble interrogates this most ancient dimension of music with contemporary technology. On the first side, we hear recent pieces performed using the sampling software and full-size Midi keyboard setup Curran has refined since the 1980s. Two of them are wild real-time improvisations, primarily utilising an enormous bank of hip-hop samples. Building from polyrhythmic layers of drum machine fragments to wild cacophonies of clashing vocal samples, scratching, and frantic pitch shifting, these energetic and at times hilarious pieces occupy a space somewhere between John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, Pat Thomas and Matt Wand in the Tony Oxley Quartet, and the propulsive Kudoro/Grime fusion of Lisbon’s Príncipe label. They are improvisations are accompanied by two austere, minimal compositions realised in collaboration with Angelo Maria Farro: ‘End Zone’ for orchestral bass drum and high oscillator, and ‘Rollings’, where a snare roll is gradually stretched and filtered by digital means into ‘floating electronic gossamer’.

The incredible breadth of Curran’s output makes it pretty unlikely that a listener familiar with his work would be surprised to find it branching out in a new direction. But no degree of familiarity with his work can really prepare for side B’s epic and bizarre ‘Field it More’. It’s perhaps best to let the maestro describe this unhinged and infectious offering in his own words: ‘It features an 8 bar funky minimal riff à la James Brown, played on synth and an-out-of-tune piano, synced to a pre-paid patch on the Roland drum machine. Over this is laid a heavily processed track of the voices of dancer Yoshiko Chuma and movie-maker Jacob Burckhardt discussing an upcoming performance of theirs at the Venice film festival, capped by a track of my playing an increasingly out of control blues over the top of all of the above’. Only Pekka Airaksinen’s Buddhas of the Golden Light comes to mind as a reference point that might even vaguely compare to this wild home-brew of drum-machine funk, mad improvisation and squelching electronics, which eventually dissolved into a massive, layered cluster. Ancient and modern, synthetic and human, hysterical and rigorous, Drumming up Trouble is 100% Curran.

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Coil

2LP | 2000 | US | Reissue (Dais)

37,99 €*

Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil Black Vinyl Edition

Release: 2000 / US – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Westonsuper-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group's most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines - a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as "an exercise in brutality," born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson's visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, "I Am The Green Child," guided by John Balance's sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, "We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit." But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called "Tunnel Of Goats." Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player's shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

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Coil

2LP | 2000 | EU | Reissue (Dais)

34,99 €*

12" | 2022 | EU | Original (Intergalactic Research Institute For Sound)

Release: 2000 / EU – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Lasha Chkhaidze

Agartha

18,99 €*

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Holidays)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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The Institute is happy to present a newcomer in its ranks: Lasha Chkhaidze, one of the 13 members of collective "If Strangers." Georgia is home to melancholia and many exciting musicians, something we have shown in many of our previous releases. Lasha’s first album is part of this theme. These six tracks gently pull you into a subtle and immersive journey. Listen and soon you find yourself pulled into the beauty of sadness - surrounded by these carefully crafted soundscapes which offer a perfect opportunity for a moment of introspection. The young Georgian delivers ambient and piano at its finest on this first LP. As the legend says, Agartha is a lost kingdom, located in the earth’s core. Only the bravest found courage to go to the journey to find it. As you go deeper, the road gets darker, scarier… The journey to Agartha symbolizes the journey to the untraveled parts of human consciousness, which often frightens us, but as we observe and heal our dark parts we no longer need to compress and hide them. Facing our main fears will make our road mor adventurous, and one day the whole journey will become a tale. Tale of a man who found the lost kingdom of Agartha.

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James Rushford

Block Gifts

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Discrepant)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance, Classical Music

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Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford’s idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds in their own right, creating a further logical layer in Rushford’s compositional world. An intimate, nocturnal, and slightly suffered dialogue between the instrument and the body building a shining and fragile monument to the ephemeral nature of the organ, one of the most intriguing and ancient families of musical instruments in history. Mixed by Joe Talia, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Composed and recorded 2015-2018 at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), California Institute of the Arts (by Sam Dunscombe) and Chinatown Studios, Melbourne (by Joe Talia). Cover artwork and fold out poster by Graham Lambkin.

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Ondness

Oeste A.D.

15,59 €* 23,99 € -35%

12" | 2022 | EU | Original (Atomnation)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves, Electronic & Dance

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Somewhere in the middle of the first track, “Torres e Baldios”, there’s a sudden change of pace with percussion rhythms interfering with the trance-like sound of the first six minutes. It sounds like steps, people running away on a corridor bashing their feet. It dazzles you because of how unexpected it is, how unpredictable those sounds sound like and, most of all, how it makes perfect sense. It is a monstrous piece. And the beginning of a new age for Ondness, in the same year he defied his Serpente moniker to create an absolute classic, “Dias da Aranha”.

What makes “Oeste A.D.” so remarkable is the intangible idea of nostalgia. “Aqua Matrix Alternative Nation” recreates with a slowed down mentality the theme of one of the main events of the Expo 98 in Lisbon. It’s nowhere similar to the original, what it does is to mess around with the global ideas that were such a big part of that event. The Portuguese musicians that were invited to collaborate with Expo 98 were mesmerized by the ideas of union and globalization, creating overpriced music that sounds like shit today. “Aqua Matrix Alternative Nation” messes around with that vibe in a positive way. Think Mark Leckey playing around with his rave memories. Same thing, but in Portugal we had Expo 98.

Jokes aside, B Side is more futuristic with “Torres e Baldios II” and “Endless Domingo”, a nod to “Endless Summer”, by Fennesz, and “Endless Happiness” (from “Beaches And Canyons”), by Black Dice, mashing up – freely - both covers and reminding of how great 2001/2002 was for experimental music. Both tracks are full of sci-fi drama and this sickness of the future that has been travelling with Ondness since its early days. But the approach here is somehow different. Before “Oeste A.D.” the Ondness sound was fragmented, sparse and intensively reflexive. There was this uncertainty to it that made the previously releases so good. But “Oeste A.D.” is full of clarity, the phrases are straightforward, and the music moves in one direction, continuously. Before, there were loads of unanswered questions. The only doubt is when will the world start to care and listen to Bruno’s brilliant music. Now sounds like a good time.

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Argia

Backgammon

14,99 €*

LP | 2022 | UK | Original (Marionette)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Spanish artist Helena Piti continues to establish her artful Argia alias with a mini-album on Atomnation. Across six superb tracks, the formally trained artist brings serenity, musicality and gorgeous melody to her stylishly designed sounds. Piti has been immersed in music all her life. From a young age, she studied piano and double bass at the conservatory before evolving into the electronic world and quickly making her mark. She has released with the likes of Stil Vor Talent, Sincopat and Duat while holding down her esteemed residency at Madrid's well-known Mondo Disko and touring places like Watergate and about:blank. This self-taught producer uses music as a way of expressing a wide range of inner feelings and she has plenty lined up for 2022 including this adventurous new release.

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Razen

Regression

Let's Turn It Into Sound Neon Yellow Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Razen is the collective consciousness of core members Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour, who since 2010 have realized themselves through virtuoistic and highly expressive improvisations with lesser-heard instruments. Experimenting with repetition of tones through controlled breathing and phrasing, Razen arrive at a synesthetic playground of auditory textures and colorful imagery.

The ensemble is carefully orchestrated for every occasion with the intent and desire to escape to environments unbeknownst to them, taking shelter in the fleeting ego-dissolving moments that arise, whether divine or disturbing. While the formula of instrumentation and like-minded peers may appear mundane on paper, it’s Brecht and Kim’s outlook and imagination beyond musical references that’s the immeasurable catalyst to their peculiar pursuits. Conversations about paintings, books, or films ultimately manifest themselves into live performances or album recordings - with the philosophy of embracing playfulness and exploration through the lens of a child’s eye.

Only six collaborators have been invited to their inner circle to date. This is mainly attributed to the rarity of finding spiritual counterparts that are seeking freedom outside the confines of written musical scores. Trading notes and rhythms for strokes and color, the band embodies emotive and meditative drones that demand a deep listening state. Joined by Will Guthrie and Paul Garriau, Razen venture into their vision of Arcadia through Regression, proudly presented by Marionette. On this album, Brecht Ameel turns to his trusty prepared harmonium and celesta, while Kim Delcour controls air and breath on various wind and reed instruments. Featuring Will Guthrie on tuned and melodic percussion (timpani, glockenspiel, marimba, vibraphone), the recordings have a distinct flow and fluid movement when compared to some of Razen’s previous works where rhythm is taking a backseat. Hurdy-gurdy specialist, Paul Garriau, plays accompanying melodies and drones on Moon, Aether and Nebula.

The album's earthly elements deal with survival, timelessness, and simplicity; such as the life affirming rewards of finding refuge and the wonders of observing the interstellar. The unearthly elements pitch this narrative into the realm of mythology and superstition, in the hopes of trying to understand our primeval universe and thrive in the unknown. Regression also addresses Razen’s fascination with inhospitable places and how to adapt to the sorrows that come with this sort of brutalism. The resulting destination is a mind and time bending zone - one that can be reached by riding sound waves that transcend the past, future, and present.'

Razen on this occasion is: Brecht Ameel: harmonium, celesta Kim Delcour: winds, reeds Will Guthrie: percussion Paul Garriau: hurdy-gurdy on Moon, Aether, and Nebula

Mastered and cut by Noel Summerville Artwork by Scott Daniel Ellison Recorded July 2020 in two days at two locations Wood, River, Trout, and Sleep: recorded by Christophe Albertijn Moon, Aether, and Nebula: recorded by Niels Latomme

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

LP | 2022 | US | Original (Ghostly International)

Let's Turn It Into Sound Black Vinyl Edition

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"Art is awe, art is mystery expressed," writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. "Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt." The central mysteries of Smith's ninth studio album, Let's Turn it Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we're feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described "feeler," the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let's Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. "The album is a puzzle," Smith says. "[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them." The energized "Is it Me or is it You" comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets "There is Something" refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing_a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. "I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn't have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play." By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full.

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

LP | 2022 | US | Original (Ghostly International)

Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Alex The Fairy

Tape | 2022 | UK | Original (The Tapeworm)

12,99 €*

CD | 2022 | UK | Original (Past Inside The Present)

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Alex the Fairy is an artist based in Berlin producing music with an emphasis on electronic and concrete methods. Alex the Fairy is also part of the 3Ddancer trio, a live act focusing on improvisation and expression using electronics.

Alex The Fairy writes: "I had sent The Tapeworm tracks before, but I was being difficult so was asked to send a new bunch, with a deadline. I sent the new bunch, a fairly odd collection expecting perhaps some of them to be combined with the older stuff but not seeing any coherence in them. I figured The Tapeworm would find at least something. To my surprise the suggestion that came back was exclusively the tracks I had sent the second time, and, re-listening through the tracks in this new order after returning from a Christmas dinner lying on the floor of my nephews bedroom gave them a completely new context. Despite them being quite varied in terms of age (one had been flung together a few days earlier on the train while another was approaching Schulreife) they seemed to meld together in such a way that I hardly recognised them…

Last year my grandmother died. My last grandparent. I had put off seeing her during corona, as I thought it best not to put her at risk and had almost left to visit her days before her death but had delayed my departure because of a medical appointment. My failure to her weighs heavy on my mind - fates grimacing grin: too little, too late. The approaching march of death, one generation closer was a confrontation I wasn't prepared for.

While clearing out her flat in the following weeks I had kept some of my grandfathers cassettes, live recordings of jazz greats, Pink Floyd, Sade and some classical among them, none originals, several presumably from the radio e.g. a church organ rendition of Bach. At the time I wasn't sure why I was hanging on to them, other than the urge to hoard, and that it felt wrong not at least to keep some. Half a year later, half way through mixing this cassette, suffering from my first bout of Covid, I had the insatiable urge to hook up the cassette player I had received from my grandfather after his death around nineteen years earlier and had been dragging along with me since. I stuck a cassette in only to immediately return to the safety of my covers. I began to work my way into what I had saved, hearing the fruits of my grandfathers labour decades before. It felt like quite an intimate interaction with someone I had long lost contact to/was long gone. Quite a wonderful thing, these time traveling cassettes.

I returned to the tracks to mix them shortly before my corona/cassette experience, with a new mixing console at hand. I had been looking for one for several years, but nothing had ever clicked, until I found this old broadcast desk 30 minutes from my place (it also coincided with a payment from a job the sum of which matched the price identically… fates return). Installing became a massive hassle and I doubted my decision continuously, but the further it was implemented the more it made sense. The first track I recorded with the mixer is on this cassette. Shortly before the mixing I was introduced to an Effektgerät by a friend, Rapha. Another good friend Art lent me their one, and I ended up using copious amounts of it throughout mixing, alongside my usual space creators. All the tracks on this release were mixed again on this mixer and are in a sense all a bit of a dub of the originals. I wouldn't have worked this way without the mixer, and the effect gave me a dimension I hadn't had before, so, from a technical perspective, the mixer and this effect define this release, giving it a coherence, at least for me. Emotionally of course the chaos and turbulence of the preceding year and my newfound appreciation for the medium give it a meaning I will struggle to formulate." – Alex The Fairy, Berlin, 9 May 2022

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Zake

Sound Space Variations

18,99 €*

You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana

Release: 2022 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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"Sound Space Variations" is a delicate and restrained sound bath. A mix of atmospheric, suspenseful drone sounds and meditative aspects. It is an album made for those moments when we just are. zake has managed to capture the moments that lie between sounds; the unagitated murmurs and atmospheric hisses. The artist connects this in-between-world and our earthly one with calm and sonorous scores, making us think about everything and nothing. The six pieces on the record do not seem heavy-headed or overloaded but much more airy, wide and open for interpretations. They stimulate the imagination - in a wonderfully unbiased way. In the last track. James Bernhard mixed and mastered the album, written and produced by drone artist zake, at Ambient Mountain House Studio. zake himself provided the artwork and photos himself."

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Midori Takada

CD | 2022 | EU | Original (WRWTFWW)

18,99 €*

You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves, Electronic & Dance

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Wrwtfww Records and MEG Museum (Geneva) are ecstatic to announce a new full length album by celebrated Japanese percussionist Midori Takada (Through The Looking Glass), in collaboration with Buddhist monks belonging to the Samgha group of the Shingon school of Koya-san, led by Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is available on half speed mastered vinyl LP, housed in a 350gsm sleeve, with OBI, and liner notes, as well as on digipack CD.

Recorded at The Premises Studio (London) and in Tokyo in 2019,You Who are Leaving to Nirvana is a majestic work combining a suite of six Buddhist liturgical chants and a musical creation by Midori Takada. The Buddhist chants come from three types of repertoires: shomyo ("Teisan", "Unga-Bai", "Sange", "Taiyo"), but also goeika ("Kannon-Daiji") and mantra ("Hannya-Singyo").

After supervising the recording of the Buddhist chants, Midori Takada added her own compositions, with subtle layers of percussion and the melodies of her beloved marimba, giving full life to the sacred texts.

Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa explains: "Shomyo is a form of declamation of sacred esoteric texts, inherited over many generations. The power of words goes far beyond their mere pronunciation. I think there is something that words alone cannot really convey. If I recite prayers in a musical way, the feeling transmitted will be even stronger than if I say it normally, in everyday language. I think that the musicality of a work carries a hidden power that cannot be expressed in words alone. The setting of the music has an additional power for you and for those around you who listen to it. The words of a song are not just words set to music. They carry an additional hidden power that cannot be expressed in any other way. Listening to Midori Takada's musical performance, the words truly seem to come alive."

Original recordings of the Buddhist chants are held in the International Archives of Folk Music (iafm) at the MEG Museum in Geneva. The album sleeve features an artwork by famed Japanese sculptor Katsura Funakoshi selected by Midori Takada. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is released in conjunction with Midori Takada's Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter, also available on LP and CD on Wrwtfww Records.

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Midori Takada

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (WRWTFWW)

2LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Aguirre)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves, Electronic & Dance

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Ignatz

I Live In A Utopia

28,99 €*

LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Black Truffle)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Double album in gatefold sleeve with artwork by Zully Adler. In co-production with House Rules & released in an edition of 500.

This sprawling collection by Belgian loner blues savant Bram Devens aka Ignatz encapsulates the mystery, murk, and melancholy of his uncanny craft at its most windswept and wayward. Originally issued via Goaty Tapes in September of 2015, this long-anticipated vinyl edition expands the saga with an additional 17 minutes of archival material. Deven’s palette remains constant throughout: feathery fingerpicking, modal loops, and intuitive six-string navigations interspersed with candlelit passages of mournful voice, alternately whispered, mumbled, moaned. His is an aesthetic of embers and resin, cracked masks and distant lights, of what’s left behind and what lingers on.

I Live In A Utopia was recorded following a relocation from his longtime base of Brussels to Landen, with a second child due soon: “I remember the weather being nice and having just bought a hammock.” The change of scenery seeded a promise of slower days and lighter times – no utopia perhaps, but a sense of faint hope glowing on the horizon. The songs slide between loose acoustic spirituals and smoky basement ragas, late afternoon haze and midnight moons, a seesawing restlessness reflected in the titles (“I Have Found True Love,” “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” “We Used To Smoke Inside”). The fidelity is grainy but vivid, refracted by tape warp and Flemish dust.

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Toshiya Tsunoda

Landscape And Voice

2LP | 2022 | EU | Original (Astral Industries)

Release: 2022 / EU – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Black Truffle is pleased to present Landscape and Voice, a radical new work (and rare vinyl release) from major Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Undoubtedly one of the most influential artists working with location recordings since the 1990s, Tsunoda’s work possesses a rigorously searching quality that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Tsunoda is known to many listeners for the subtle atmospheric poetry of his early Extract from Field Recording Archive series, which focussed on vibrations recorded in various indoor and outdoor environments in his native Miura Peninsula, often inside pipes, bottles and other vessels. In more recent years, his work has explored the implications of his claim that field recording should be seen as ‘depiction’ rather than ‘documentation’. He has explored disorienting editing and processing in his works with Taku Unami, and, perhaps most radically, represented Maguchi Bay as a kind of kinetic sculpture for shaking speakers by removing all but the inaudible low frequencies from a field recording (Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay).

One of the recurrent concerns of Tsunoda’s recent work, as he explains in the crystalline liner notes accompanying this release, is ‘exploring how I can establish a subjective relationship with an environment, rather than seeing it merely as an object to be recorded’. This has taken various forms, from documenting simultaneously an outdoor environment and the blood flowing through the listener/recorder’s body (captured with a stethoscope) on The Temple Recordings, to representing his own experience of the landscape as made up of ‘grains of space and time’ by inserting looped fragments into field recordings in Grains of Spring.

On Landscape and Voice, this meeting between subject and object becomes an almost mystical union between the natural and the human. As with all of Tsunoda’s work, a relatively simple concept leads to compelling, thought-provoking results. Landscape and Voice combines vowel sounds spoken by six voices with short, looped fragments of field recordings, their noise character suggesting consonants: voice and landscape thus join together in something like words. The record consists of three pieces, each using a different, richly evocative field recording, which periodically freezes, catching on a looped fragment to which is synchronised an abruptly looped spoken vowel sound. The lengths between these interruptions vary, as do the tempi of the loops. The interruption of these lushly immersive recordings of the world – bristling with bird song, rushing water, distant traffic, and clinking metal – only serves to intensify them, as if the depicted environment itself had been returned to the listener each time it abruptly reappears. At the same time, the constant interruption creates an uncannily frozen effect, as if the recorded environment were an object rather than a stretch of recorded time. When combined with the bare human presence of the vowel sounds, the result is both austere and magical. Pressed on 45rpm for maximum fidelity, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Lasse Marhaug with liner notes from the composer, Landscape and Voice is a radical proposition from one of the deepest thinkers in contemporary sound.

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Son Of Chi & Clara Brea

The Wetland Remixes

32,99 €*