★Denovali Records
Heide
Nanook of the North is back with their second album, following the enthusiastically received 2018 debut "Nanook of the North," (Denovali). The duo of a composer and violinist Stefan Wesołowski and electronic producer Piotr Kaliński were acclaimed by Boiler Room, The Wire or NPR. Bob Boilen of Tiny Desk Concerts called Nanook of the North's performance at the famous SXSW Festival in Austin, US "one of the wow moments of SXSW". Their new material is a raw and minimalist sonic landscape, practicall…
Symmetry
The First Three Ricardo Donoso Albums Now Available As A Very Limited Boxset. Ricardo Donoso has composed a new paradigm of ambient music, in which concrete textures and digital synthesis expand on an abstract world in constant movement & mutation. Under a chain of progressive rhythm’s, cinematic textures and elegant melodicism, Donoso’s work pushes through with piercing strength, manipulating a sonic wave through space with nothing but pulse and mind blowing intensity.Although Donoso’s work has…
Window In
**CD version** "Window In is Michael Vallera’s third full length offering on Denovali, following All Perfect Days (2018) and Vivid Flu (2017). The four tracks that compose Window In are an exercise in density, movement, and space. Raw studio recordings of electric guitar were taken as the foundation, then heavily altered and manipulated through sampling, erasing the trace back to origin of the sound. The result is a series of vignettes that are unattached to a particular source but instead exist…
µ: of Anxiety x Discernment
"Based on the idea of transferring the sound language of Ambient, Minimal Music and Avant-Pop into an orchestral format, Leipzig-based pianist, composer and sound designer Philipp Rumsch founded his own ensemble in 2015. This ensemble consists of twelve artists from Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden and Weimar. Besides the ensemble, they all work in various musical contexts and environments.Between 2013 and 2020 Philipp Rumsch has studied jazz piano under the aegis of Michael Wollny and Richie Beirach at…
In Silhouette
The master of atmospheric magick and nuance, Brian Pyle a.k.a. Ensemble Economique returns to Denovali with the latest findings of his endless search in the shadows. With In Silhouette the revered artist and engineer commits some of his sharpest, most absorbing synthesis at the service of a cryptic, underlying narrative which never fully gives up its secrets but keeps you guessing by way of adroit inference and suggestion. Quite crucially it all feels somehow fresh yet deeply timeless, distillin…
The Silent Season
The Berlin/London duo attain an ever-more amorphous and befuddling sound on their fifth album. Antony Harrison and Leyli have conjured something quite special on their latest Paco Sala album, finetuning their experimental urges for a session that sounds like Hype Williams in high definition. Seemingly orchestrated in the drug-addled downtime after extensive knee surgery, The Silent Season shifts away from Paco Sala’s outsider pop leanings of previous releases in favour of an 11-track collection …
Tiento de las Luz
The completely singular drone and ambient pioneer Thomas Köner is back on Denovali. Köner’s Tiento de la Luz is a unique release for the artist as it subtly blends classical instrumentation and live electronics in homage to a 15th century musical form. This deep and graceful drone album comes on heavyweight vinyl in a variety of colours and includes a download code and extra thick sleeve.
Thomas Köner's first encounter with this musical genre goes back to a commission from Frankfurter Gesel…
Reorchestrations
This new collection of Joe Acheson's 'Reorchestrations' (including two previously unreleased tracks) takes works by exceptional experimental/classical/folk musicians as source material, and passes them through Joe's studio where they are intricately reworked with the signature Hidden Orchestra composition and production techniques. The result is a cohesive new Hidden Orchestra album, consisting of tracks produced since 2012, and representing the best of the music to come out of Joe's stud…
Blossoms In Red
Based in Californian Humboldt County, Brian Pyle wanders the world on his countless travels. Far from being restless, he has his very own Pylesque way of travelling. Much like a Lynchian version of Hemingway, he has an eye for the thin layer between restlessness and relaxation, gloom and serenity. Wherever he goes, he ardently absorbes these nuances, rarefies them and moulds them into a seamless array of glimmering styles, from drone and ambient to shoegaze and post-wave, giving birth to …
Machine to Machine
Following on from early 2015’s exercise in dissonant formalism “Sarava Exu”, “Machine to Machine”, Donoso’s newest full length work sees a return to a more melodic sound. “Machine to Machine”, continues to bridge the gap between Ricardo Donoso’s more rhythmic and melodic work alongside his more experimental, loose and dissonant side yet still maintaining his unique signature feel; “WTF”-polymertric rhythms, elegant cinematics and spine chilling tension. Recorded over the last two years …
Fogh Depot
2015 release ** Fogh Depot is not just a collaboration between three musicians weaving a cozy melancholic cocoon in the midst of a looming, cold, unwelcoming metropolis of Moscow. It’s a creativity lab where complex cryptoanarchic ideas rigidify in the viscously flowing Phrygian mode, while the simple and naive piano melodies sweep the listener right back to childhood. Fogh Depot’s debut album contains eight stories told by different people in different places. "Anticyclone" feels like a massive…
Split
This split constitutes an exciting collaboration of these two French experimental/avant-garde/dark jazz acts. In mutual respect and appreciation, both Dale Cooper Quartet and Witxes selected a track of their split companion and created a fundamental and independent rework of around 20 minutes length.Based upon parts of Witxes' "The Apparel" -- from the last album "A Fabric of Beliefs" -- and afternoon summer recording sessions, the Dale Cooper Quartet's "Le Strategie Saint-Frusquin" contains the…
Quatorze Pieces De Menace
Dale Cooper Quartet and The Dictaphones are back with their third album called "Quatorze Pièces de Menace". This new full-length of the cult French Dark Jazz collective is the follow up of the highly acclaimed 2011 output "Métamanoir" - the second release for the German experimental music label Denovali. Halfway from their debut "Parole de Navarre"'s ambient and drone driven soundscapes and the more orchestrated "Métamanoir", this new collection of tracks is following their quest for dreamy but …
Sarava Exu
In contrast with the continual pursuit of achievement, that today's culture teaches us, the theme of Descent, found in many myths in the shape of the hero going underground to pass a period of solitude, is no longer represented. A cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a person's life and it was seen as necessary in order for the initiate to re-connect with their past and concomitantly with his collective unconscious, or humanity’s primordial existence. …
Deterrence
A year before exploding onto the electronic music scene in 2011with the critically acclaimed Progress Chance, Ricardo Donoso's debut release "Deterrence" was issued as an extremely limited cassette edition - a through-composed ambient piece, "Deterrence" is stripped of all the rhythmic flux which he has become known for. Considered by many in underground circles to be a true masterwork of the Dark Ambient genre, "Deterrence" is often times compared to works by artists such as Lustmord, Bi…
Loss
The 2nd EP by Moon Zero (London-based Tim Garratt) 'LOSS' is the result of a year spent working out how to play Moon Zero live and then going on to play concerts. Using a wide range of instrumentation such ad drawbar organ, bass synth, vocals, fx processors and guitar pedals, Loss was written & recorded over 2 days at St George in The East Church in London, October 2013. Whereas 'Tombs' was more concerned with exploring melody in an ambient space, 'Loss' is looking at pulse and movement i…
Tombs
The 1st EP by Moon Zero (London-based Tim Garratt) 'Tombs' is, especially for a debut, a bold and confident musical statement, which reimagines the possibilities of processed organ and vocal sounds in a live context. The opener 'Dalyan' builds from slowly wavering layers of sound into a crumbling, decaying wall of fuzzed-out, peaking noise, which in turn builds again into ever-moving blocks of chopped loops and feedback, absorbing the listener completely into Moon Zero's musical space. A …
Splintered Instruments
While looking back to an extensive period of creating music with his ambient project “Sketches for Albinos” Matthew Collings felt the urgent necessity of starting with a completely different approach to music, as the ambient aesthetic didn’t match any longer with new ideas burgeoning in his head. He wanted to create a more direct sound to involve a much grander and more dangerous range of emotions. The composition process of “Splintered Instruments” came out of personally reckoning with tw…
Silence Is A Rhythm Too
Matthew Collings is a Scotland-based composer. Not only being a solo recording and live artist, he collaborates regularly with artists from all kinds of fields including musicians, dancers and filmmakers. He’s responsible for several installations using custom-made software, which have been exhibited at Burning Man Festival in San Francisco or Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts. His work for films includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic, ‘The…
Tiento de las Nieves
Shipping on Monday "Love is life’s snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight—whiter and purer than snow itself. What is life without love? It is like this ice—a cold, bare, rugged mass, the wind driving it and rending it and then forcing it together again, nothing to cover over the open rifts, nothing to break the violence of the collisions, nothing to round away the sharp corners of the broken floes—nothing, nothing but ba…