★Mana
August in the Water: Music for Film 1995-2005
Sublime, ethereal minimalism: the first drawing together of Hiroyuki Onogawa’s soundtrack compositions, plotting a decade of music for films by cult filmmaker Gakuryū Ishii. ‘Sequenced into an album by Onogawa himself, this retrospective spans a fertile period of collaboration with Ishii, through soundtracks for three remarkable films — August in the Water (1995), Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), and Mirrored Mind (2005) — where the cinema is texturally and sensually imbued with the spiritual, ambien…
Fever Dreams
“Composed during one of London's endless dark and locked down winters, Fever Dreams is a fantastical, speculative take on high density living. From dark, mouldy rooms, subterranean depths, symbiosis and multi-species entanglements, it cloaks itself in the claustrophobia, excitement and despair of living in a metropolis. It is a work which both celebrates and fears the weeds, spores, vermin and grime of London. The dark fantasies, frustrations, and utopian aspirations of its urban survivors. Froz…
De Leon
De Leon returns to Mana, following their 2018 LP, offering a suite of new material that adds further waypoints to the map of their cryptic sound world, deepening and expanding the direction of travel they began within the Aught collective. The dual legacies of Javanese gamelan and minimalist composition remain clear touchstones on this second, untitled album, which employs architectures of repetition and microtonality and evokes the musical heritage of the Bay Area whilst folding in the arid lan…
Profondo Rosa
Big or profound sensations from small gestures which are carefully arranged. Using a mixture of sacred and profane, or classical and prosaic sound sources, knitted into intricate, fleet-footed compositions that virtually spring into the ear. Profondo Rosa is composer Ailin Grad’s first vinyl album following years embedded and loved in the Argentinian experimental music scene, with past treats on labels Krut, Sun Ark, Orange Milk Records and her own label Abyss, devoted to ‘connecting Latin Juke …
Stairway 13
Swooping, sub-heavy sci-fi from Riz Maslen. Leda Maar is a new moniker for the established artist who’s released a crop of downtempo and electronic music as Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine, as well as collaborated with the likes of Future Sound of London, filmmaker Andrew Kötting, and featured in PSP-era Grand Theft Auto soundtracks. Mana’s long lasting love of Riz’s 1996 Laundrophonic EP, released under her Neotropic name, spurred this new release. That 12” was a deep and dark web of rhythm…
Telas
Nicolas Jaar's Telas was made between December 2016 and January 2020. Special thanks to Somnath Bhatt (art) , Susanna Gonzo (voice) , Milena Punzi (cello) , Heba Kadry (mastering) , Abeera Kamran (website), Mario Zorio & Anna Ippolito (custom instruments), Andrea Zarza & Matthew Kent (Mana) and Mark Byrne (Other People)
Puzzle Music
**in process of stocking** “Puzzle Music is the desire to create images out of diverse pieces of sound. To collect timbral colours in a gradient procession and connect them until they create reason. Principally not knowing how the image will turn out, or what the picture even is. It is the act of placing sound shapes next to one another in the hope that clarity will gradually be revealed. When grouping the songs together I was thinking of them as mechanisms in a timepiece. I have something of an…
The Devil Museum
Somewhere between ambient, soundtrack, and an audio play. The tragicomedy and melancholy of a halted art project and a restless mind turning in on itself; as daydreams, farce, and the surreal transform into a blue and beautiful narrative. “In January, 2018, I travelled to Lithuania. I was staying in a small wooden cabin in the middle of a forest and was there to photograph all 3000 sculptures in the nearby Devil Museum. The project was funded by the Mondriaan Fund but two months earlier I’d lent…
Malar
Big Tip! Uwalmassa shape their relationship with various forms of musical heritage into technical and stylish forms on Malar, marrying acoustic sonics with a contemporary outlook that reflects their Indonesian identity; evolving, mutating, and scavenging traditions to draw parallels to dance music, and to test the adaptability and flexibility of those sounds. Here the collective go dark and deep in their first album-length collaboration with Mana, casting long shadows and moving snake style at s…
The Clouds Know
Cryptic, twilight emissions from Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer; their synthetic compound of electronics and ouroboros jazz has walked from ECM and Perlon over to Mana.Developing a sound that tends to drift along as otherworldly atmospheres and strange fusion, Vilod evade easy categorisation, even compared to Villalobos’ already experimental and genre-twisting solo minimal offerings. He and Loderbauer pull away the backbone inherent to the structure of that dance music, and The Clouds Kno…
In a Landscape
Rain, spit, ice, neon, mercury, arcing electricity, plants, steam, soil, and dust; this is dream music from Sa Pa. Following up on his 2015 debut 風物詩 [Fuubutsushi], In a Landscape provides rich content for fantasy and the fertile imagination, establishing a rich terrain of visual, poetic, and abstract sound that draws on techno and dub ambient.Somewhere between pastoral impressionism and cyber-noir, its surface evokes the tensions of a fluctuating, fizzing atmosphere, pictures emerging and disso…
L'Escalier Des Aveugles
**Includes a 12 page accordion-style booklet with documents from Luc Ferrari's archive** L’Escalier des Aveugles, or The Stairway of the Blind, was commissioned in November 1990 by Spanish National Radio (Radio Nacional de España). Asked for a piece to premiere as part of the European Day of Music, Luc Ferrari returned with a radiophonic concept that organised his anecdotal music into montage form, sequencing short, elusive narratives in a successive way.The completed composition is formed of th…
O Yama O
O YAMA O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima and Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, the group has performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.Nakajima’s performance often fo…
Pomegranates
Mana is pleased to finally present Pomegranates by Nicolas Jaar as a double LP, with new mastering by D&M. The sleeve is designed by David Rudnick, with labels by Stéphane Jourdan and a new insert created by Jaar collaborator and friend Maziyar Pahlevan. Longer and slower-releasing than his other albums, Pomegranates often parallels the cinematic epic on which it's based (Նռան գույնը), with ideas pursued over long timelines and across dark landscapes, assembling elements and moods from the aest…
De Leon
**small repress available** Gamelan and Capoeira in dub. The collective behind this doesn't like to talk much but their music is beautifully conversational. De Leon is the most organic and percussive of their shifting identities, developed on their Aught project in small-run, clear-shell cassette tape releases over the last few years. They've appreciated a cult interest for their takes on outernational rhythm, field recording, and the tension and relief on the knife-edge of dance music; all deli…
Crawling Through Tory Slime
The debut LP of this collaborator with Rhodri Davies and Chris Watson, evoking the knockabout, visionary, English humour of Jeff Keen and Bruce Lacy, spiked here with massive, steaming dollops of contemporary political outrage and disgust. "'Sounds are slurpy, runny, fizzy, spongy, hard as rock,' says the label, 'recalling long improvisational sets, floor-sucking dubwise psychedelia, plunderphonics and tight GRM-era electronic sound design.' Released to coincide with BD's summer-long exhibition…
Rose Des Vents
Epic, impressionistic electro-acoustic sound travelogue of early ‘80s France by Swiss composer who studied under Stockhausen, Boulez and Gottfried Michael Koenig, among others, the first release on the newly minted Mana label run by Andrea Zarza, curator at the British Library Sound Archive, and Blowing Up The Workshop founder Matthew Kent.
“First commissioned by the French Government in 1981, the LP Rose Des Vents evolved out of a six year project by Swiss composer Pierre Mariétan to docu…