Restock 2023. Tokyo quartet Minamo occupy a privileged place in the Japanese music scene.They remain one of the few ensembles to consistently produce work that simultaneously refines and expands upon their existing themes and aesthetics. Their largely improvised interactions have produced a collection of recordings that benefit equally from considered listening amongst the groups members and a willingness to stray from the path without warning.Documental, their new edition (a follow up to ‘A Pat…
Restock 2023. I visited Saya and Ueno at the Majikick house in June last year to catch-up, hang out and chat about what another record from them on ROOM40 might feel like. I'd come fresh from RM40 HQ in Brisbane, working with Lawrence on Noriko's 'U' and was packing a clutch of his recent solo stuff. The house was fascinated with 'Studies for Stradbroke' a CDr released on Wind Measures of hydrophone recordings made in the gorgeous natural lakes on Stradbroke Island, just off the coast of Queensl…
Restock 2023. Between his reputation as swift shifting improviser, concréte composer and turntable deconstructionist, Marseilles based artist ERIKM has earned himself an enviable position in the European music community. With Stéme, his most ambitious and fully realised compositional work to date, he devolves and recontextualises the boundaries between sound source and sound media.In essence, Stème originates from a selection of ten one minute long sound pieces burned on a CD which was deliberat…
Tip! "Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing holds for anyone, any time or anything.
As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper thin crust, the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable.
There are moments though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the surface of the planet si…
LP1 is the debut edition from London based artist Mirko Vogel. Recorded across almost three years, the record is a sprawling mass of ambient texture, remote harmony and uneasy pulse. Initially born out of extended periods of intense touring with Cut Copy, the earliest recordings were an antidote to the nature of repetition on the road. In the blur of travel, Mirko found a particular pleasure in an attempt to slow or pause time through sound. Moments of this hazy slowness have lingered and found …
Tip! A reflection on the absurdity of life with its paradoxical contrapositions: light and darkness, peace and despair, joy and sadness, all mixed together in a chaotic and ridiculous "circus", where, inexplicably, we all find ourselves in. The undeniable overwhelming beauty of it all is a constant source of puzzlement and delight where laughter always finds its way.
In outer space, music does not exist. Only in a thin layer of atmosphere, wrapped around the planet earth, humans can live and breathe. With all their power and creativity, they have exploited and eradicated an unspeakable amount of fellow animal beings. As Arvo Pärt once put it: also with music, you can kill – because with music, you touch the medium of life, the air itself. In this sense, music is not condemned to express the inner life of homo sapiens. Instead, humans are affected by music, b…
Roto Vildblomma, a re-worked, re-mixed and re-mastered edition of MMMΔ’s first ever recording is now available on vinyl by Improved Sequence. Roto Vildblomma marked the beginning of MMMΔ’s (still ongoing) quest to tame the beast of melody grafted intermodulations. It was first released in May 2010 under the Mohammad moniker.
**Blue tape Limited Edition to 90 numbered copies ** Carlos Casas has spent years documenting the edges of human experience - from the oil fields of Azerbaijan to the remote reaches of Patagonia - and his work as a filmmaker and sound artist reflects a deep engagement with landscape, isolation, and the uncanny. The Mont Aigu Tapes 2 continues his exploration of the French countryside estate that has become a recurring site of inspiration, a place where Casas has set up temporary studios and reco…
Continuous Hole, a collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos) and John Wiese. The fruit of over ten years of home recordings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Baltimore, “Continuous Hole” melds improvisation and musique concrète composition into a uniquely sweaty document of labor-intensive rhythm. A finger puzzle of reconciled opposites: lockstep structure and constant flux. Many of the tracks reflect the unique blending of the disparate backgrounds of its creators: on “Abhorred Shears”, “Slee…
8 years almost to the day after releasing his unique re-interpretation album of his field recordings made in the late 90's in Tanzania, Kink Gong is back with another volume of bushmen madness. Here’s what Kink Gong aka Laurent Jeanneau has to say about his end of millennium trip:
"My experience in Tanzania is now over 20 years and most of the so called remix was started in Tanzania and left unfinished, then eventually retouched in Vienna, Paris, Shanghai, Kunming, Dali or Vientiane. 20 years la…
Space is the place - at least, it's the place uppermost in the mind of midwest US label Past Inside The Present owner Zakè and his sonic partner Ossa - location given as the north pole according to his Twitter - as they embark on collaborative 10 tracks. The fact that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA to you and me - has supplied them with celestial sound emissions for the tracks is a bonus. But ultimately, the real headline factor once it's actually on your turntable is t…
Emotional Response and Ocean Moon come together for a special collaborative release, where Seahawks take the music of Woo on a journey to the inner sanctum. Immersive, psychoactive and phased to perfection. For those who know not the music of WOO, prepare to behold a rare and magical incarnation of transcendent beauty.
Perhaps Seahawks most spaced out voyage since Vision Quest One: Spaceships Over Topanga Canyon, ‘Celestial Railroads’ is a psychedelic odyssey that goes way beyond the norm. Like …
New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people. These two artists have worked together from the peak days of the late 90s / early 00s Chicago music scene up through the present day, which has seen…
On Synthetic: Season 2, Halifax pop artist and composer Rich Aucoin continues his journey through the history of synthesizers. The second entry in his quadruple LP series once again features an armada of the world’s most rare, historic, and highly sought after electronic instruments. Gaining access to the collections of Calgary’s National Music Centre and LA’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum, Aucoin ran amok on machines to create four albums of thrilling, transporting instrumental music. Each song on…
Michael Scott Dawson is a Canadian producer and sound artist. Anchored by frayed melodies, tape loops, and pastoral field recordings he has crafted a body of tender and nostalgic ambient work.
Thijs says: "The idea for this music started with textural, electronic meditations, where time becomes a blur and there is no need for pushing things to happen. You can zoom in or zoom out of the music at any time. This also relates to my fascination or need for longer (or shorter) periods of concentration. In reality one loses focus because of life happening and I feel this record can be enjoyed in the background as well as in a concentrated listening session. The first synthesizer recordings w…
The new solo album from João Branco Kyron, aka Kyron from Portuguese group Beautify Junkyards. Dreaming Eden is an electronic reverie comprised of drifting melodies, dusty archive sounds and synthesised rhythms.It feels like the soundtrack to a dream, in that nothing stays fixed, melodies develop then collapse, strident rhythms strike up and then unravel into fragments. And like a dream it’s hard to pin down in time- the overall sound is not quite contemporary, and neither is it a vintage re-ena…
You might've caught CV Vision in Berlin, either on stage or behind the mixer at some of his favourite clubs like Arkaoda, Heiners or O Tannenbaum. He could be accompanied by synths, or drum kit, or even full band – channelling his love of Bo Hansson and Claude Larson, or Soft Machine and Picchio dal Pozzo. Always heavy on the backbeat, the songs awash with heady synths and expansive psych inversions. Taking inspiration from deep in the mediaeval mists of times long past, CV Vision comes riding o…
As part of our series "Experimental Electronic Underground GDR", we are very pleased to be able to make a very special recording available again. On the evening of 3.9.1986, the privately announced and illegal concert took place in the Erlöserkirche in East Berlin/GDR. Montgomery mixed Schnitzler's music live from the tapes. Jörg Thomasius recorded the performance and released the recording in 1987 on his own underground cassette label Krötenkassetten. The elaborately restored original recording…
Renowned acid cosmologist Johannes Auvinen, best known by his alias Tin Man, leaves the club floor behind for a full-length kosmische excursion on Bureau B. Since his first Tin Man records nearly 20 years ago, Auvinen has impelled acid—in the grand tradition of Phuture and co.—into shapes and forms heretofore uncharted. He does it again on his latest, "Arles," exploring a new realm of impressionistic beauty where pristine, heartfelt melodies dance delicately atop austere motorik rhythms. It's a …
Originally part of 2021’s Faust Box Set release commemorating the bands 50th anniversary Momentaufnahme I and II are now set for their own stand alone release by popular demand. This is for all those that missed out on the limited edition box set release. They collect together music recorded at the band's studio - a converted schoolhouse in rural Wümme between 1971 and 1974 in a similar vein to the way in which 'The Faust Tapes’ (released in 1973) was assembled. These two albums range from minim…
Krishna Goineau was born in Sri Lanka in 1963. He spent his youth in the 1970s in Barcelona, where he met Javier Hernando in 1978 to found the post-punk group Xeerox. In 1981 Goinau moved to Düsseldorf, where he met Christo Haas and Beate Bartel. He became the singer of the joint project Liaisons Dangereuses and lent his unmistakable voice to the band's big hit ("Los Niños Del Parque"). At the end of the 1980s Krishna Goineau lived in Brussels and became the singer and keyboardist of the groups…
For eight years now, songwriter and producer Sebastian Lee Philipp has been steering his project Die Wilde Jagd through the field of tension between contemporary electronic music and avant-pop. Between 2015 and 2020, three studio albums were produced as documents of Philipp's rigorous musical creativity. Most recently, «Atem», a composition for Roadburn Festival, was released in 2022, documenting yet another, more experimental side of the project. On the new, eagerly awaited fourth album, all th…
*300 copies limited edition* Without a doubt, To Rococo Rot are an exception within the German music landscape. From 1995 until they broke up in 2014, the group around Robert Lippok, Ronald Lippok and Stefan Schneider researched a unique sound between electronic music, ambient, post-melancholy and the further development of a new, free music like krautrock. Pitchfork described their sound as "unmistakably digital, yet 100% human". With releases on labels such as Kitty-Yo, City Slang and Mute Re…
Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Colin Andrew Sheffield's "Images" was entirely constructed from heavily edited and manipulated samples from jazz records. These eight electroacoustic mosaics range in style from lush ambient loops to jarring tones like the wails of the damned. Chopped drum solos appear and retreat along with spiraling piano fragments; saxophone and trumpet scraps clash or fall in time with disfigured bass rumblings, etcetera. These song-length explorations are detailed, atmosphe…
*200 copies limited edition* With the present "TO/OT", the duo comprising Orsi and TeZ (Clock Dva) continue in a straight line along the 'furrow' already traced with the previous "OT/TO", inverting the 'position' of the roles in the control room compared to it. Electronic patterns and programmed rhythmic parts make up these load-bearing plots that describe a synthetic universe adjacent to the one traversed by the first cosmic couriers, where filters emphasise the progressions, and soft and evoca…
*Limited edition of 111 copies.* The long-awaited reissue of ABSURDUM is finally released. Originally published by 13/Silentes in an incredible art edition of only 17 copies as a 3LP box and a handmade book, it is now being made available for everybody. ABSURDUM began as a series of writings by MB entitled DISSECTIONS. These 16 texts are now featured inside the poster cover that includes the CD of the entire work. No other words are necessary. It's only absurd. It's only MB
Standard edition. Lim…
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* A new work for the 'Like the Snow' project by Luca Mazzariol, a remarkable Italian artist who in three years has put out as many CDs of excellent music of difficult stylistic cataloguing, among whose textures - always strongly evocative and of great emotional impact - alternate dreamy and romantic atmospheres, passages with an epic and almost 'orchestral' pace, eclectic rhythmic digressions sometimes coloured by more distinctly electronic sounds, delicate ambient…
Tip! True to form, Andrea Borghi works directly with VHS tapes and the apparatus that plays them, manipulating the exposed mechanisms with the care and curiosity of a dedicated scientist. Drawing from these manual manipulations, Borghi's experiments combine mechanical sounds with mangled tape samples to inspire a mechanised nostalgia inseparably hybridised with human trace. Unlike others who work with old film, he resists the eerie to focus on the intricate crunch and buzz, an electro-acoustic s…
Violet Vinyl Edition. 40th-anniversary edition. Korpses Katatonik was a musical solo project of Zoe DeWitt during the years 1982 and 1983. Unlike DeWitt's later project Zero Kama, the work of Korpses Katatonik remains entirely within the realm of electronic music and shows an uncompromising experimental style comparable to that of other industrial bands like Coil, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, or Cabaret Voltaire. Like many other exponents of industrial culture Korpses Katatonik was inspired by dark p…
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* After years contributing to Italy’s heterogeneous and increasingly transnational music echosystem by curating his own dream & microsounds label Pampsychia, Reptilian Expo lands on Artetetra like an elegant jelly trainwreck hitting with a mix low-frequencies body-muzak filled with a cocktail of squeaks, wacky samples, manipulated vocal lines and a much-needed pinch of irony. Cunti is a collection of sonic short stories, fantastic journeys into an unconscious wor…
**Tiny repress. LP limited edition of 100 copies with special insert and inner sleeve with artist’s description. Cover handprinted by silkscreen on high quality paper.** Die Welttraumforscher is an enigmatic Swiss musical and artistic project. Active since 1981, when the first cassette came out on Das Moniflabel, they have an archive with more than 30 albums, but also stories, films and fanciful illustrations. Die Welttraumforscher is a sonority exploration that translates energy and sounds from…
We have British Electric Foundation on the front of this month's Electronic Sound and an exclusive blue vinyl seven-inch boasting two previously unreleased Martyn Ware tracks to accompany the issue.
Keisuke s_d_ latests works on the Japanese label otonezumi-kohboh, "Multiple Mysteries", a truly finesse experimental spooky footwork Ep, and "Machapuchare", a drone masterpiece inspired by the supposed thrills of climbing Machapuchare, prepare us on his next release: “Movement of Multiple points”. In this new Pampsychia Keisuke is bringing from Japan a mind-blending rhythm synthetic excursion. All tracks are made and used in max/msp to create a broken system that allows control and uncontrol. T…
Tip! Originally conceived as a mock live bootleg for Turn Us Alias 2020 (Macao’s Saturnalia festival online edition), Stock Fantasy Zone is the new album by Babau dedicated to the unearthly delights of unconscious reticular motion, wacky 2D shredding and daily side quests. Directly from inside the Stack, finally imagine a zone where all activities are possible but purposeless, all primary objectives are achieved without even moving and the game-logic has finally disappeared leaving back a virtua…
As part of the first batch of tapes of 2022/23, Artetetra is presenting a split featuring two éminences grises of minimal but highly imaginative audio storytelling. Kinked and Señor Service, who fully deserve the title of bedroom superstars, use their screens and musical tools as gateways and magic wands to dissolve the listener into uncertain and nebulous musical worlds, creating the clever illusion of a narrative. But remember, it's just an illusion! Pure audio préstidigitation for children an…
Artetetra is honored to present a journey through music with Trans Zimmer & The DJs' debut album. A dense, musical-like jewel of midi composition and arrangement. For this self-titled album, the film composer "Trans Zimmer" teamed up with production crew "The DJs" and together disassembled a number of orchestral compositions through their sharp sound design craft and absurd, whimsical lyrics. The DJs selected 11 of their favorite arrangements and got down to the midi grind, pouring over every si…
Rainbow Island is a quartet born in Rome in 2013. Since its foundation the band confirmed themselves as skilled explorers of virtual dub, deranged non-narrative storytelling and manipulations of digital riddim music in between fourth and fifth worlds. Audacious and dynamic polydimensional dwellers, Rainbow Island are the most up-to-date sonic guide to our complex contemporaneity and, after the LCD Jiāng swims in “Crystal Smerluvio Riddims” culminating in the Bobblers direct encounters of “Dances…