Off the back of an incredible year of releases by Coil, Stephen Mallinder, Tim Story, and numerous others, Dais Records returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of Soisong’s “qXn948s”, one of the great masterstrokes of electronic experimentalism from the first decade of the new millennium. Among the earliest products of the short-lived, Bangkok based creative partnership of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Ivan Pavlov, its complex arrangements of digital frequencies, fragmented melodies, pulse, tones, and drones entirely rethink the terms of ambient music within a darkened and deeply subversive guise.

Initially emerging from the ashes of the first wave of punk during the late 1970s, the sounds falling roughly under the musical categories of industrial and noise stand among the most remarkable and unexpected of any to spring from the underground during the 20th century. Often wildly antagonistic and emotively cathartic, both were widely prone to display a deep sensitivity to sonority and a wildly experimental temperament. For the last decade and a half, the American imprint, Dais, has offered a special dedication to highlighting those remarkable worlds, continuously contextualizing them within more appropriate terms. Their latest, the first ever vinyl reissue of Soisong’s “qXn948s”, originally privately issued on CD by the project in 2008, continues this initiative by resurrecting one of the most striking gestures created by the duo of founding member of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and long-time Coil member, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and veteran Russian electronic experimentalist Ivan Pavlov. A brooding meditation of complex sonority and bristling texture, it’s an absolute stunner that’s nearly impossible to get off the turntable after the first needle drop.

Founded in 2008 - roughly a decade into their friendship - SoiSong was the short-lived creative partnership of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Ivan Pavlov. Birthed in Bangkok, where Christopherson relocated following the death of his Coil collaborator John Balance, it ran until Christopherson’s untimely passing in 2010, producing only a handful of releases and a wealth of archival material that has slowly been issued over the years since.

Subversive, disruptive, and oblique, the project’s name being a combination of the Thai word for ‘two’ with the name of a notorious red-light district street in Bangkok, and its output always presenting a challenge to the normative terms of listening, the above output often appeared in the form of self-released CDs packaged in elaborate origami that had to be destroyed to be accessed; a website with password protected sections, where different passwords were provided for different events, objects, or releases; performance merchandise of headphones and a Walkman melted shut so the music can only be heard as long as the set of batteries last.

Looking back over their period of activity, Pavlov describes SoiSong as having been less of a band, and more of a “utopian, semi-alien platform for collaboration, devoid of pronounced personality or centralized authority… more like a message from elsewhere that anyone is welcome to participate in and spread” that incorporated elements of synthesis, Eastern minimalism, and glitch. “qXn948s” - balanced at the razor’s edge between elegance and mayhem - collects some of the duo’s earliest recordings, and retains every ounce of the radical prescience and transgressiveness, lingering among even its most gentle passages, that caught the hearts and minds of audiences upon its original release more than a decade and a half ago.

Constructed from samples and software composed intuitively by Christopherson and Ivan Pavlov in tandem, the final form of “qXn948s” encounters the album’s source material processed and reworked into complex arrangements of digital frequencies, fragmented melodies, pulse, tones, and drones. Subtle, minimal, and deeply atmospheric, the sense of artistic balance and vision - moving from darkness to light and back again - is engrossing, as though ambient and New Age music had been rebirthed in a darkened and brooding form for the years ahead.