Keplar special
Together Is The New Alone
Recorded during nightly sessions in Dublin between April and July 2001, and originally issued that autumn on Mille Plateaux, Together Is The New Alone stood out within the German label's celebrated catalogue from its first listen, an album whose title named a feeling we now have an entire vocabulary for, two decades before the rest of us had a word for it.
It was the second LP under Donnacha Costello's own name, and the record where the Irish producer fully emerged from his earlier work as Jayro…
Multila
Originally issued in 2000 by Berlin's Chain Reaction, Sasu Ripatti's Multila arrived as a strange object within the orbit of Basic Channel. The third album under the Vladislav Delay moniker, it remains, more than two decades on, one of the most quietly radical statements to emerge from that lineage. The album compiles the Huone and Ranta 12-inches Ripatti had released on Chain Reaction across 1999 and 2000, refracting the Berlin label's dub-techno orthodoxy through a colder, more diffuse Finnish…
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 …