Diagenesis
*CD Version* Russell Burden (Being) is a sound and visual artist living on the south coast of the UK. His practice develops work that explores qualities of ambient perception, most often through the lens of hydrological, geological or biological processes. He has delivered gallery exhibits in various mediums including live cymatic feed, and dark space installation. Russell was also a member of The Humble Bee & Players and last year as artist in residence for a site specific project produced a se…
Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear
Dark Entries calls on Philadelphia experimental duo The Ghostwriters to resurrect their 1981 LP of minimalist mayhem, Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and th…
Finomehanika
Tip! An essential repress of the monumental 2020 album. Finomehanika was Rijeka-based Robert Merlak's first solo release in two decades since "Albumski" on pioneering avant-garde techno label Phthalo which put him on the map next to fellow artists as diverse as Dntel, Daedelus and James 'V/Vm' Kirby.
Merging piano and field recordings, Merlak moves between musique concrete, ambient, and neo classical, crafting great layers of depth and ambience combining the frayed melancholia of Vladislav Delay…
Ōki-sa
*100 copies limited edition* Jason Kolàr (Stroom) returns to Dauw on this collaboration with Japanese musician Fumitake Tamura (Leaving Records). 'Ōki-sa' documents the duo's encounters during Kolàr's Japan tour in September 2023. Fumitake Tamura and Jason Kolàr met in Tokyo during Kolàr’s Japanese tour in September 2023. Sharing a mutual admiration for their previous works, they decided to meet at Soundbar Patrol in Sangenjaya for a series of improvisational sessions.
The album contains a chro…
Àlááfíà
Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The…
No Sound In Space
Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in '2001: A Space Odyssey', is Blake's far-reaching canvas on 'No Sound In Space', a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rathe…
Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer
12k is very happy to help usher in the return of Ezekiel Honig, a New York City-based artist and founder of both the Anticipate Recordings and Microcosm labels, which have released music from Sawako, Nicola Ratti and Mark Templeton, among others, throughout the 2000s.
Honig returns with Unmapping the Distance Keeps Getting Closer, an album of very stark, and often dark and vulnerable music. Honig describes the work in the context of the feeling of listening while walking through the city, and th…
Deep Valley
Deep Valley is a new work by Australian artists Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Matt Rösner, composed and recorded during a week long residency at Bundanon Art Museum on the south coast of New South Wales. The Bundanon property was gifted to the Australian people by renowned artist, Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne in the 1990’s. In making this gift, the Boyd’s opened a creative place for artists to immerse themselves in a truly distinctive Australian landscape. The property sits on the banks on the…
I Am The Dirt Under Your Fingernails
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* Since 1983, Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, Council Estate Electronics, The Sidewinder, etc.) has been producing largely solo, but sometimes collaborative, work under the Final moniker. Beginning as a more obviously power electronics-inspired project it has during the past two decades or so evolved into one which still retains that sonic intensity but has a more expansive sound. 'I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails' is the latest album, closely following 'I…
Multiple Musics
**500 copies** Previously unreleased live recording from the Ranta archives. The creative duo of Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi performed many times in the 1970’s and 1980’s. On this outstanding performance, recorded at the Japanese Culture Institute in Cologne in 1987, the application of an advanced multi delay system, independently utilized by both players, plays a central role. The smartly treated cyclic tapestry of the delay system (modulated, transformed, harmonized) injects additional d…
Ephimeral
SOFA is proud to have discovered a great jewel in Spanish music. The Madrid based soundartist and composer Miguel Angel Tolosa has during the last five years become a special member of the SOFA family, having contributed on several SOFA albums both as an artist and as a recording and mastering engineer. Now, on "Ephimeral" we hear him all alone. Tolosa says about his music that it's not meant to convey extramusical contents, such as philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda or adver…
Angel Tears in Sunlight
Angel Tears in Sunlight is Pauline Anna Strom’s first album in over thirty years; an assemblage of music that refracts the expansiveness, and minutiae, of imagined realms while embracing the kaleidoscopic echoes of our distant epochs.
The capacity to collapse time might elucidate the enigma of Pauline Anna Strom. A mystic force in music, emerging during the dawn of new age as the Trans-Millenia Consort, the pioneering synthesist channelled primordial energies into future-facing sound through a s…
A Colour For Autumn
"Somehow, 15 years has passed since I worked on A Colour For Autumn. This recording was, in many ways, a critical one for me. In some respects, it rounded out a period of work that was focused on a particular marriage of thematics and harmony. Like For Varying Degrees Of Winter, it dwelled on old world impressions of the seasons, something that, in the southern hemisphere, isn’t intrinsically part of our way of approaching place. I think it was this incongruity with my own lived experience that …
Enmixed
*50 copies limited edition* Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s enmixed, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.”
In Bat…
UBEK III
Ubek returns. The mysterious Polish duo digs out a new collection of degraded echoes, salvaged from authority. Galvanised as if lost to the shock of formal experiments. Ubek III revises the present and takes us back to other versions of actuality.
Omega
*200 copies limited edition* Die Sonne Satans (also known as Die Sonne Satan) is the musical creation of Paolo Beltrame. The name Die Sonne Satans is borrowed from the title of Georges Bernanos' novel "Sous le soleil de Satan", which Maurice Pialat adapted into the eponymous film in 1987. Die Sonne Satans is driven by the desire for self-determination in opposition to dogmas or conventions supported only by tradition, authority, or revelation. It remains one of the most creative and simultaneous…
The Gentle Whale
The acquatic and marine imagery drawn by the titles and the artwork for “The Gentle Whale”, Francesco Lurgo’s second LP, the first one for Silentes, are a metaphor for a sound that is liquid and like the sea is constantly shifting from the quietness of intimate ambient moments to waves of maximalist sonic pressure, always looking with admiration to the creative world of contemporary soundtracks. From this sonic fluid, arpeggios and themes played by melancholic post-rock guitars and plucky synths…
Herzog Sessions
In 2007 an Italian film festival invites Mouse on Mars to score a film of their choice. The organizers claim to be able to clear the rights for any movie the band chooses. Werner Herzog’s fictional documentary Fata Morgana, which merges footage of several desert explorations by Herzog and his team into one continuous association, has long been a band’s favorite. The film comes with a soundtrack by Mozart, Leonard Cohen, Third Ear Band and field recordings. Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner are sent a…
Shyness
Labels Theory Therapy and co:clear come together to release the debut album by Italy-based artist CHANTSSSS.
‘Shyness’ suggests something subtle, intricate and ethereal – but it also demands your attention. Over 10 tracks of spacious, sub-aquatic ambience, CHANTSSSS pulls you deep into his vaporous sound world. The songs themselves, a blend of ambient pop, chamber music and pulsing low end rhythms, feel cloaked in mystery. Layers of reverb and zonked vocals float in the atmosphere, moving betwee…
Electronygen
*300 copies limited edition*
recorded and mixed by seiji morimoto, berlin 2022mastered by kris limbach (emitter19 studio)cover work: takuya kurihara