★Umor Rex
Mercurio
Mercurio is the debut album by Opuntia, the solo project of Mexico City producer Camila de Laborde. After three albums with her duo/band, Camila Fuchs (ATP/Felte, etc.), Camila decides to embark on a new path of musical and interpersonal exploration with Opuntia as her new alias, and with the album Mercurio as a statement of metamorphosis and creative process.
Broadly speaking, Mercurio is a direct impact of beautiful melodies, rhythms, and voices that traverse a leftfield electronic pop axis, s…
Music for Unknown Rituals
After two years, Carl and Andreas present their second album, and once again, it opens up a wide associative space for us. What strikes us initially is the uncommon instrumentation: a church organ, harpsichord, glass tubes, and more. Like their first album (The Aporias of Futurism), it is mysterious and dark. But it also carries a strong touch of rebellion and adrenaline, sometimes quite pointedly. The pieces are now shorter and feature intricate yet irresistible rhythms. The impact is immediate…
Sirens
Eight years after its original release in 2015, and sold out upon release, Umor Rex finally presents a vinyl repress of Sirens, by Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV. This new edition is limited to 500 copies and comes with revised artwork.
Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform in…
Pruebas de Existencia
Marcos Díaz has been part of Buenos Aires underground for many years, being in projects like Bosques and making solo music under the pseudonym Entidad Animada (animated entity). Under this project, Marcos has explored sounds that involve a mix of feedback/distortion through synthesizers, guitars and drum machines that hint at the influence of Stereolab, Spacemen 3, and mid-nineties shoegaze. However, there are also ambient soundscapes with a slight rubbed of the ritualistic psychedelia of the Po…
BFHC
Limited edition of 100 copies. On her second album (first one on Umor Rex), the Minsk born / Paris based artist Lina Filipovich continues her experiments on deconstruction and re-appropriation of classical pieces. BFHC includes seven electronic interpretations of the works of Baroque composers such as Bach, Handel, Frescobaldi, Carleton and Couperin. Inspired by memories of her experience of interpreting Bach's pieces in early childhood, Filipovich explores the desire to push the limits of perfo…
Visions
Yamila reveals her most intimate catharsis in Visions, an album that brings together and provokes the hallucinatory powers of music. Like an ancient herald, she announces the profound feminine mystique while crossing epic melodies full of pleasure and pain. This album is a journey that prodigiously unites baroque accents, Spanish folklore –such as flamenco– and contemporary electronic music. Her voice and music –sometimes torn and others buoyant– could resemble the score for a biblical passage (…
G. Steenkiste & U. Schütte
*100 copies limited edition* These two pieces, recorded in sessions in Ghent, Belgium and Hamburg, Germany, represent the first musical collaboration between long-time friends U. Schütte (half of the German duo Phantom Horse, with several releases on Umor Rex) and G. Steenkiste (aka Hellvete). In this work, two specific traditions of the avant garde of modern electronic music of the meet elegantly: the systematic, evolutionary and minimal construction of harmonic and solemn forms, with the patie…
Stonewalling
“Stonewalling” offers a collection of electroacoustic pieces taking as input the Mexican vernacular music from the golden age of Mexican cinema of the first part of the 20th century. In those films, music was used as communication due their poor verbal communication-skills. This is an album about communication, about the impossibility to do so to resolve conflicts. In the technical side, some of the sources used as layering in the tracks come from radio frequencies taken from explorations into t…
Tropical Syndroms
**100 copies** Tropical Syndroms is the second album by Thé Déluge, a.k.a. Vincent Caylet, also known as Cankun (Not Not Fun / Hands in the Dark). Like his debut album Forest Structures (Umor Rex, 2017), this new installment is an amalgam of sounds generated through multiple devices and analog synthesizers, loops and layers creating an incredible mix of textures, sounds that can almost be touched.In Caylet’s work, there is always a certain familiarity in the tones, there is an implicit nature pr…
The Beginning of Nothing
**100 copies** In just a few years and with a handful of releases, the Canadian producer better known as Yves Malone has earned himself a reputation. In The Beginning of Nothing he continues working with many layers of analog synths and a keen sense of drum machines to create atmospheres and textures extracted from late twentieth-century collective fears of a dystopian future. Created as a sort of score to an internal elegy, Yves Malone creates soundtracks of the daily fear, regret, and resignat…
Exit Future Heart
"Exit Future Heart" is an LP of improvised sessions by the conjoined ensemble of Tokyo—based abstract pop duo Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa and Chicago’s free music trio Good Willsmith. "Exit Future Heart" follows three Good Willsmith albums released on Umor Rex and three albums by Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa on Thrill Jockey. Recorded live at home in Chicago over the course of one night when Wong and Minekawa passed through on tour, Exit Future Heart showcases a program of spontaneous com…
Voices Bloom
A distillation of cultural memory through electronic process, James Place - the creative guise of New York native Phil Tortoroli, returns with his third release for Umor Rex. The sonic realization of love and loss, re-sculpted for the Post-Modern age, pursuing his glacial take on techno into newly intimate depths. Departing from a line in TS Elliot’s Four Quartets “the moment in and out of time”, its works take form through the haze of a dream. Over the course of several months Tortoroli t…
Forest Structures
Thé Déluge is the new moniker of French musician Vincent Caylet. While Caylet’s previous outings as Cankun (released on Not Not Fun and Hands in the Dark) were blissful psychedelic sundrenched jam sessions, Forest Structures sees Caylet largely jettison cosmic tropical islands and guitar twang. Thé Déluge deals in moonlit electronics and nocturnal transmission that consistently bleep into each other and overlap. Recorded mostly on analog gear and inspired by both nature and urbanism, Thé Déluge …
Old Speakers
Missing Organs is Tristan Bath, a British musician and writer based in Vienna, Austria. Old Speakers deploys a bottomless variety of instruments, beats, and techniques, all refined and rewritten —somewhat accidentally— into a document of the period of personal and international upheaval during which they came to life. Old Speakers is his Brexit album; a document of the dread, quiet chaos, and bitterness in European society which came to the surface in 2016. Field recordings and improvisations fo…
Lie Together, Die Together
**100 hand-numbered copies** Lie Together, Die Together is a collection of images that work better as mental notes, sometimes just a reminder of a possible project to come, sometimes just falling for a strange aesthetic beauty. The memory images are at odds with photographic representation. From the latter’s perspective, memory images appear to be fragments —but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments—. Simil…
Perfect Fatigue
**100 hand-numbered copies** Perfect Fatigue is a collection of film photography taken throughout North America between 2009 and 2014. Directly engaging with the legacy of landscape photography, the images in this collection document a series of encounters between the elemental and the human. The natural world, captured with an almost mystical, luminous sense of place, becomes a sequence of sites that are both filmic and autobiographical.
Michael Vallera is a visual artist and musician currently…