★Keplar
Balance
Recorded across the Atlantic in 2001 and originally issued by Mille Plateaux the following year as part of that label's defining run of millennial glitch and click & cuts releases, Balance remains the lone collaborative outing between two of the era's most influential label-running architects: Frank Bretschneider, co-founder of Raster (later raster-noton), and Taylor Deupree, founder of 12k and LINE.
The record was made the long way around. Bretschneider and Deupree, working from Berlin and Broo…
Heroin
Recorded by Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers over the single week between Christmas 2000 and New Year 2001, and originally issued that same year on the Dutch imprint Brombron, Heroin remains one of the great curiosities of early-laptop electronic music: a record that arrived bearing an ambivalent, faintly transgressive title and contained almost the opposite of what that title implied.
The album sits at a precise moment in both composers' arcs. Mathieu, originally a drummer and a co-founder o…
Aix
Aix is an outstanding piece of work by Italian electro-acoustic savant Giuseppe Ielasi, originally released in 2009 on Taylor Deupree's 12k label, the follow-up to 2007’s August (12k) and Ielasi's first collaboration with Nicola Ratti as "Bellows", also out in 2007 (Kning Disk). Originally only released on CD (12k), the album got a very limited vinyl issue on Czech label Minority Records in 2010. Keplar presents this extraordinary and timeless collection of 9 evocative minimalist soundscapes on …