The RCA Mark II
C Spencer Yeh presents an album of electro-acoustic music made on the legendary but defunct RCA Mark II modular synth - nicknamed ‘Victor’ - at Columbia Uni. An ingenious concept, captivatingly executed. “The RCA Mark II is a follow-up to Yeh’s recent vocal work and is focused solely on the non-musical operation of the famed RCA Mark II synthesizer. Built and installed in 1959 at Columbia University, it was the first programmable synthesizer and became the bedrock upon which the Columbia-Princet…
Even when they speak of space
New Giuseppe Ielasi full lenght album. Music for whistling, microphone and digital degradation. Recorded in november 2016 and august 2017. to be played at low volume.
Escaped Language
Recorded during Ina/GRM’s 2016 Présences Électronique Festival in Paris, John Wiese’s “Escaped Language” is a concise and calculated piece which slowly evolved in various settings over a number of years. While 2015’s “Deviate From Balance” 2xLP was expansive and chronicled performances and work employing many other musicians, here Wiese dissects and reassembles portions of his vocabulary alone. Simultaneously dense and sparse, delicate and abrasive, free and tactical, the resulting reco…
Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals
The title of the debut album from The Transcendence Orchestra outlines the modus operandi of this pairing of Anthony Child and Daniel Bean. Recorded in a remote English rural setting over a period of 24 hours, this is an apt location for a recording that eschews time and space in favor of methodological displacement and deep psychological navigation. Modern Methods For Ancient Rituals is an experiment in acoustic and synthetic symbiosis which is deeply influenced by the atmosphere and acoust…
Hesaitix
Further departing from both the cinematic abstraction of Piteous Gate (PAN 066CD/LP, 2015) and the hectic drums of Damaged Merc (2016), Berlin producer M.E.S.H.'s new full-length, Hesaitix, is marked by its hyper-ornamented rhythms and a sense of pensive, moonlit spaces. The atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in strange territories. Shifting from the meditative to states of manic unease, Hes…
Earprints
After a slew of acclaimed releases by Equiknoxx, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Shinichi Atobe and Mica Levi in 2017, Demdike Stare’s DDS start 2018 in typically unexpected style with a remastered reissue of the little known second album from Move D’s Conjoint ensemble. Late night listeners ’n lovers of Miles Davis, Tortoise or Jan Jelinek’s neon Jazz minimalism will love this - in our eyes a total classic.Conjoint was the little-known but hugely regarded ensemble founded by David Moufang two decades …
Satan Im Sattel
Skulking hardware cranks from Hamburg’s Fallbeil duo, cooking up 90 minutes of K-holing, atonal digital noise recursion on tape along with two slices of grot on vinyl, especially for Nina’s V I S label down by the docks in Hamburg. After first appearing on Helena Hauff’s Return To Disorder label with Ultima Ratio in 2016, and turns for Boidae, Hafenschlamm and Mannequin in the meantime, the Fallbeil duo have made no concession to higher fidelities and remain resolutely grubby and visceral on all…
Post Self
Post Self is simultaneously inventive and classic Godflesh. The blue and icy atmosphere of Post Self can reach levels touched on in the happenings of early '90s Norway innovations. From the opening track, it's clear that the vocal performance is Justin Broadrick's best in ages, utilizing new approaches ranging from higher tortured screams to truly brutal and barbaric low roars not heard since Streetcleaner (1989). Within those extremes, mystically effected vocals coming from an industrial …
Exit Stance
Justin K Broadrick puts his club foot forward for Downwards on four trampling techno bombs gathered under the Exit Stance EP. With no prizes for guessing what the title is about, he further girds us against broken Britain’s grim future following his Suicide Estate 2LP for Hospital Productions. This is some of Broadrick’s most direct, primitive, and ruggedly impactful gear, forged in the belly of the black country with charred traces of late ‘90s Brummie techno edged by sparingly used daubs of pa…
Mercury's Rainbow
Zomby’s near-mythical Eski grime concept album was created over an intense two week period around 2008-2009 and features 16 uniquely formulated interpretations of Wiley’s seminal Eskibeat productions. It's been in hybernation ever since and, almost a decade later (and after many aborted attempts), is finally available for public consumption - still sounding like an ancient future. After nearly a decade in the making, Zomby finally dispatches his astonishing take on Wiley’s series of Eskibeat rel…
Papua Land Where Spirits Still Rule
Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s amazing first release is the final instalment in this reissue series remastered by Paul Corley and cut to vinyl for the first time after its initial release back in 2012 as a 4 x Cassette release made in a run of just 16 copies. It features 40 minutes of dank psychedelic ambience, reanimated and spatialized with hi-end studio black magick.Completing the reissue cycle of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s ambient invocations, Papua New Guinea [2012] is rendered …
Taking Place In The Foyer
Taking Place In The Foyer was originally released in a run of just 14 copies on double tape back in 2012 and is now available on vinyl for the first time as part of the ongoing Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement reissue series.The newly remastered, first and last ever vinyl cut of Taking Place In The Foyer forms the penultimate instalment in Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s necessary reissue scheme. Originally appearing second in the series, it then served to only heighten the enigma of a projec…
Worlds Within Worlds
Unwinding history - catching a glimpse of its truths, can be a near impossible task. There’s an understandable tendency to look in the obvious places, seeking generality and concise definition to guide the way. While this presents obvious paradoxes within the fields of avant-garde sound practice and experimental music - territories which, by their very nature, are resistant to genre, categorization, and definition, the impulse persists, allowing strange and singular free-standing efforts to slip…
The Abominable Slowman
This new release by Colin Potter, "The Abominable Slowman", is the logical follow-on from his previous 2015 LP “Rank Sonata”. Like that album, there are elements that were recorded many years ago, but this work also contains new music. Again, the emphasis is on rhythm, although the rhythmic components range from conventional drum sounds to strange electronic and/or mutated outbursts, often accompanied by squalling guitars. As to what this sounds like, keywords would be soundtrack, experimen…
Mnestic Pressure
On Lee Gamble’s stunning first major work since Koch [2014], the rave dreamer reawakens to decode and interpret his hallucinations for Hyperdub, coming to terms with the idea of Mnestic Pressure - a confluence of individual and collective pressures on contemporary memory - in an astonishly febrile, vivid collision and projection of jungle and ambient structures. With his move to Hyperdub following a string of modern classics for PAN, Lee Gamble has effectively reset his sound to realise a …
Durb
Sean McCann on Ian William Craig's Durbē: "Ian shared this live performance with me in January of 2017, while I was living in London for work. I fell asleep countless times whilst listening to this, day and night. After some arm twisting Ian agreed to let me publish it. He had not planned on releasing it officially. Durbē embodies the most elegant and meditative aspects of Ian's music. Live, Ian's music is able to stretch and fold and soak. These long-form takes show how purely structure a…
In Trance
A triple CD compilation put together by Jah Wobble himself that focuses mainly on his earlier releases on his own 30 Hertz label and his more ambient productions. Features tracks from his collaborations with Philip Jeck and Jaki Liebezeit, and Evan Parker. A great affordable introduction by the man himself.labe
Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-1984
Incredible and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Head-vibrating electronic drones conjuring a rare and arcane kind of acousmatic magick, with electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity. An hallucinatory ascent into narcotic-hazed Indonesian rainforest atmospheres which could almost be scoring some Werner Herzog absorbing documen…
Echoes of Harmony - Early Music Reworked
All pieces of the Renaissance Repertoire come from Cancionero de Colombina (around 1470) or Cancionero de Palacio (around 1510). Both sources are well known for their typical Spanish repertoire of this period. Electronic music artist Sylvain Chauveau did new versions of several tracks and added also some drones to the program. Daniel Manhart did the compilation and the additional sound design and mixing. All pieces on this CD are hardly ever performed or recorded -- a fine, sensitive, inter…
Digital Dance 002
After the album Total Erasement (SR 366LP, 2014), that includes the more "professional" studio recordings of Digital Dance, Digital Dance 002 is the re-release of their last cassette tape, originally released in 1981, reflecting another side of their work and the beginnings of what was to come. Stéphan Barbery of Digital Dance on the release: As the first single of Digital Dance, "Radioactivity/Computer Rock" (1979), was far from convincing for us, we created our own label, Digital Records, and …