★Alicja
Supernauczanie
* Edition of 50* “I can say about myself that I was programmed in my childhood, and then in my early youth. Like some artificial intelligence from a science-fiction novel.Through the programming process, Lech Emfazy Stefański described a breakthrough moment in his youth. This led him to his most significant achievements, establishing in 1955 the famous Theater on Tarczyńska Street in Warsaw. It also contributed to the involvement in psychotronics - camouflage for occult and psychic activities, w…
Skamielina
** Edition of 50. Cassette With Skeleton Doggo Insert ** Skamielina means fossil and there is an excavated feel about this pretty piece of pastoral horror. Like something has been dug up and now stalks the cloying, humid summer, alive again in the warm rain with the incessant mosquito-buzz of tape, the ever-present tape-buzz of mosquitos. Samutek’s has over 30 releases, none of which have any details apart from titles that are in varied German, Polish and English. The cover photography is murky-…
Tomiris
** Edition of 50 ** It begins violently and gets worse. Rattled barely-percussive scrapings, peppered with audio documents at the edge of perception lead to an unignorably painful and persistent crying baby. Eventually she is sped up, synths slide in and it’s over. Tomiris is being born. Club-concrete producer Ratkiller’s Tomiris is a conceptual reworking of the soundtrack to the 2019 Kazakstani film of the same name and it occupies a similar weird mythic space. Tomiris the film is a piece of na…
Throat Mask
The self-titled debut from Throat Mask collects four improvisations from the duo that are built around random processes and hover constantly between collapse and coalescence. The recording sees Nathan Gray attempt to guide his unruly stack of sputtering and chiming digital automations while T. Kowalski responds with fm, digital and analog synthesis and sparsely gestural midi drums.Side A keeps returning to Gray’s voice, occasionally it’s recognisable but more often it’s faltering or shredded by …
Eliksir
* Pro-dubbed clear tape in smokey brown case, cover image printed on transparency film, insert card with a stamp * Alicja founder, painter DJ and problem child Tomasz Kowalski presents his first collection of confounding audio objects: Eliksir. The title track, centrepiece and key to the work as a whole, Eliksir is an augmented radio play that is loosely based around Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room. But instead of an intense focus on auditory phenomena, distraction and interruption divert t…