★Dekorder
Conical Space
Here’s the first part in Dekorder’s brand new series of highly limited Hybrid-Vinyl 12“ releases to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the label. Future contributions will feature new & exclusive recordings by Leyland Kirby, Excepter, Sonic Boom, Bill Kouligas, Vindicatrix, Kemiallysät Ystävät, Ensemble Economique, Alien Radio, Black To Comm and a few lovely surprises to be revealed in the 2nd half of the year. Hybrid-Vinyl is a newly devised combination of a Picture-Disc and a regular …
The Falling Rocket
This is true cosmic music!!! Stephan Mathieu is at the top of his game with The Falling Rocket, this is some seriously pensive & brooding minimalism that runs the gamut of the emotion rainbow without tossing you around rollercoaster style, with mostly just a Farfisa organ, Hohner Electronium, and radio at his disposal, Mathieu concentrates on a dense & lightweight essence, the sound of civilized silence carved out in the blankness of your mind, surrounded by inaudible hiss & hum, a delicate stat…
Phantom Horse
Phantom Horse is the duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Dommaschk from Hamburg and Kiel (home of seminal Digitalis Recordings artist Jürgen Müller). Schütte is a (part-time) member of Datashock, Black To Comm, Aosuke et al and has recently released his modular synth explorations under the Alien Radio moniker on a (sold-out) Dekorder split-LP with Keith Fullerton Whitman and a 4-way split 7" with Köhn, Ducktails and Peaking Lights on Kraak. Dommaschk plays guitar, synth and electric piano.
With…
Dawn Undefeated
Failing Lights self-titled album on Intransitive Recordings marked a turning point in Noise Music's one-way street of loudness, aggression and primal chaos; a tendency that can also be detected in the recent solo and duo output by his bandmates Nate Young and John Olson (Regression, Stare Case, et al) and the latest albums by contemporaries like John Wiese and Spencer Yeh.
As Marc Masters observed in Pitchfork: "If this is a trend, pinpointing when it began is probably impossible. But for …
Hylyt
Tomutonttu is the solo disguise of Tampere's Jan Anderzen, head of Kemialliset Ystävät and (part-time) member of Avarus, Tuusanuuskat and the Islaja band. Anderzen is one of the focal points of Finnish underground music for the past 15 years with a zillion releases on some of the leading underground labels worldwide (Fonal, Ultra Eczema, Ducktails/Real Estate member Matthew Mondanile's New Images, Beta-lactam Ring, FatCat, Beniffer, etc.). Tomutonttu is one of his longest running …
Ship Chop
Ship Chop is a celebratory cut-up of far-flung musics. Edited, collaged and re-arranged by Daniel Padden from original vinyl sources to create impossible collaborations between musical ghosts. It is both reverential and sacrilegious, giving the music its full praise whilst also subjecting it to playful subversion. Some of the editing is obvious and transparent, but some of it much less so, where sounds from different recordings and continents overlap into an unlikely whole.
Daniel Padden …
Sentimental Favourites
Vinyl Lp, edition of 300 copies. The work of the Berlin-based composer Andrew Pekler has been been documented in various releases for labels such as ~scape, Staubgold and Kranky. When asked by Giuseppe Ielasi for some material to be released on Schoolmap Records, Pekler immediately considered the possibility of taking the many unused music fragments that had been collecting cyber-dust on various hard drives and bringing them into some kind of order. Raw sketches, orphaned sounds, finished pieces…
Crossing The Pass By Torchlight
"it's an exquisite feeling, to taste the truth, to let it wrap you completely, to feel it's ecstatic warmth, to let it ripple through you, to let you feel life with every breath, as if day and night are colliding, and sparks exploding, and the sky turning deep red, and night falls like a blanket, and the wind is a soft whisper, and the dune grass are like blades, piercing blackness. ensemble economique is brian pyle of starving weirdos and rv painting. his solo project has previously rele…
Generator breaker
A new Astral Social Club album is always a highlight of the year and Generator Breaker is no exception. Neil Campbell is one of the veterans of the British DIY/Drone/Noise scene and with ASC he has slowly formulated his very own and unique musical universe, akin to the psychedelic visions of his contemporaries and sometimes collaborators Sunroof! and Vibracathedral Orchestra but with a more electronic, less rock-influenced approach, instead aiming towards a heavily layered techno-infused …
Toad Blinker
Like its predecessor 'Rotary Signal Emitter', this is a proper headful of intuitive sample mulching and cheap, busted electronics, bubbling and fried with a knowing sense of psychedelia. In the course of eleven tracks on 'Toad Blinker' Dan Hayhurst clearly rejects the normative values imposed on Techno which so many producers get bogged down in and ends up with something genuinely marvellous and thoroughly endearing. OK it might not rock a dancefloor, per se, but its rocking our tiny minds…
Ghost Lanes
Ghost Lanes (the A side) was recorded during the first ever duo session that Gareth and Rutger had, at STEIM, Amsterdam, June 2009. The two hadn't met before, but immediately there was a strange chemistry between them, and without much discussion, it was plug-in and play, and two albums and an EP were recorded. Ghost Lanes was then released as a very limited 3-inch CDr. A year and a half later, they settled at STEIM again, for another fruitful session. That's when Mackerel Sky was recorded. A pe…
Split
Fantastic split album from Dekorder presenting two contrasting works showcasing the vast possibilities of Don Buchla's famous Modular Electronic Music System (originally invented for use by the likes of Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley et al at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre). Keith Fullerton Whitman is a noted master of this system: his staggering 'Disingenuity b/w Disingenuousness' put it to mind-bending use last year on Pan Records - topping many end-of-year charts in t…
Shadow of events
'Shadow Of Events is the third album by Oslo, Norway sound artist, producer and musician Alexander Rishaug, following his Asphodel CD Possible Landscape (2004) and 2001's Panorama on the Smalltown Supersound label. The album was recorded over a five year period and mixed in Berlin last year. Not unlike his previous albums but apparently more refined Shadow Of Events combines a warm and organic haunting quality blended with both abstract and concrete tones and subtle digital noises. 'Most …
To describe George Washington Bridge
To Describe George Washington Bridge is Stephan Mathieu’s 2nd Dekorder release in the 10inch format (reflecting his interest in old 78rpm records) after 2009’s sold out The Key to the Kingdom, and, we’re happy to say, again it features two of the composer’s most outstanding short pieces. Both are recorded utilizing similar methods as used on his most recent album “A Static Place” on 12k yet they are presented in an even more condensed and melodic way. As source material he used transcript…
Pyramiden Von Gießen
This latest from German weirdos Datashock must be what it feels like to double drop the blue pill. From the first couple of notes of ‘Intro/Lasagne Phalanx’ it’s pretty clear that the extended collective of prog folkies are vying to drag our unconsciousness through the rabbit hole before exacting all manner of mental tortures. It’s probably worth it though; with the gritty, bass heavy backdrop of classic Amon Duul II (I’m talking Yeti here, none of those later-period bootlegs) and the rag…
Echohaus
If you’ve heard of Felix Kubin before, you’ll likely think you have some idea of how ‘Echohaus’ is going to sound. Well forget what you know, you’re wrong – Kubin’s well-worn Sci-Fi pop stylings are entirely erased on ‘Echohaus’ as he rebuilds people’s preconceptions from the ground up. He may have just scored a long-deserved Wire cover, but Kubin is not content to simply rest on his laurels, and although ‘Echohaus’, a collaboration with contemporary chamber group Ensemble Integrales, migh…
The african twintowers suite
LP version, The African Twintowers Suite" represents a lost soundtrack; compiling the most interesting recordings, newly edited, layered, collaged, shortened and mixed between 2009 and 2010. Seminal German director Christoph Schlingensief (R.I.P. 2010) shoots his latest feature film "The African Twintowers" in Lüderitz-Namibia with Irm Hermann, Klaus Beyer, Robert Stadlober, Patti Smith... Autumn 2006: Schlingensief approaches Berlin musician-composer Hanno Leichtmann (Groupshow, Static, …
The Divine
""the divine" marks the second phase in the trilogy proposed by john twells aka xela. crawling out of a castle dungeon in pursuit of its predecessor, "the illuminated", this lp finds itself trapped in an abandoned church somewhere in a damp southern wilderness. church bells chime and rattle through the record's first piece, echoing and distorting through a fog of chattering voices and prayers. tape loops stumble over tape loops and the solemn, ecclesiastical drone slowly decomposes into thick, c…
I Hate Even Numbers
Parallel universes mangle and mash into a superheated cloud of galactic debris and non-recyclable plastic. After a slew of genre-confounding 7" releases, Our Love Will Destroy The World unravels his own history of nearly everything in this, the mere third full length offering under his world destroying moniker. Smearing the already dotty line between twinkle-toed rave music and excoriating drone cacophony, I Hate Even Numbers weighs in like a three-legged gargantuan in a one-man morris dance. Bl…
(third) Stunt
This new Ielasi album is the final part of a trilogy started in 2008 with the “Stunt“ EP on Schoolmap. The series only source material is one turntable and a large selection of vinyl records; pulses and rhythms being the main organisational/compositional principles. Ielasi focuses on the (audible) physical gesture of actually playing these records, a technique borrowing heavily from turntablism in hip-hop music, in contrast to the more anthropologic sampling techniques of plunderphonia. T…