No-Go
Eric Random is a British pioneer of post punk electronica. Born in 1961 Eric soon joined the Buzzcocks’ road crew. At the age of 17 he became a third of a group called The Tiller Boys, the other two being Pete Shelley and Francis Cookson. They played their live debut in 1978, supporting Joy Division at Manchester’s Factory club. For Pete Shelley The Buzzcocks were his main concern, so The Tiller Boys soon fell apart. Eric founded Free Agents with Cookson and soon met Richard Kirk and Stephen Mal…
Preparing For Power
Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England who where active from 1979 until 2003. The group were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work – they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organisation and music venue (the legendary ‘Ambulance Station’) – they refused to integrate into the commercial music racket turning down publishing deals from major labels – stubbornly opting for total independence. Bourbonese Qualk were also known …
Menial Disorders
The Industrial / experimental project Alien Brains was founded by Nigel Jacklin in 1979 while he was still at school in Oundle, near Peterborough, in the UK. Menial Disorders was their first release on Deleted Records. The cassette album includes recordings made in the school physics department using sound generators and a ‘loopotron’ which had been lent to Nigel by one of Billy Bragg’s bandmates (Billy Bragg’s Punk band, Riff Raff, were based in Oundle at the time) as well as their first live a…
Synopsis Seriation
'Synopsis Seriation,' Hecker's latest release with Editions Mego, draws upon current research in machine listening and music information retrieval, where the 'ghosts in the machine' are unsupervised, engineered operators designed to extract auditory features from a signal. The album advances a general research programme Hecker initiated through various projects. In 'A Script for Machine Synthesis' (EMEGO 226, 2017), the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces in collaboration with Reza…
L'Étoile Au Front
Klanggalerie presents L'Étoile Au Front by Étant Donnés. Etant Donnes is a French duo named after Marcel Duchamp's last major work. The group consists of brothers Marc and Eric Hurtado, born in Morocco and working mainly as performance artists and musicians. L'Etoile du Front was the band's third album, dating back to 1982 and originally issued on French Bain Total label.
Spume & Recollection
Punctual like a Swiss watch, Driftmachine presents a new album that once again astounds and delights. We know their trademark: solid mechanical percussions, forceful bass and melodies systematically built around circular patterns. "Spume & Recollection" is the sixth Umor Rex album by the Berlin duo, and what better way to celebrate the label's 15th anniversary than with a new record from the masters of labyrinthine cables and patches. Regarding "Nocturnes" (UR 2014), their debut album, we descri…
Lux
Wavey, dystopian industrial-electronic tripscapes from NON and Hyperdub affiliate and multi-disciplinary artist Venus Ex Machina. F*ck Cyberpunk 2077, this is cyberpunk 2021. She's made an AI opera, been involved in various art projects and composed for film, now Venus Ex Machina has deployed her debut full-length - a sprawling dystopia of decaying industrial beatscapes, squealing noise, drones and disorienting sound design. "Lux" isn't just a collection of odds and ends, it's a narrative univer…
Tropical
You could think of the collection of tracks here as a library record of sorts, and each track inhabits its own universe. Tropical fits various moods and situations, and it could soundtrack any number of activities at home or on a dancefloor - whether real, imaginary, or hallucinated. Strangely enough, it sounds like it could have been constructed from obscure Italian library breaks, when instead every instrument has been played and panned, several times over, across magnetic tape. The genesis of…
Yellow River Blue
The newly established label bié Records follows Yu Su's winter 2019 tour of mainland China where she travelled from Qingdao, the western shore of Yellow Sea Coast to Xining, the largest urban hub on the Tibetan Plateau. As she encounters musical artists and enthusiasts at the foreground of the explosive leftfield electronic scene across China, she is inspired to participate and contribute; Yu Su is delighted to offer her debut album Yellow River Blue for release through bié Records in China, wit…
Palav Aed
Wake Dream is proud to present Palav Aed, the first full length album by Amsterdam/Tallinn based Estonian musician Ruutu Poiss. Recorded over the course of seven years from 2012 to 2019 in various home studios in Ruutu Poiss’ home town Tallinn, the tracks on Palav Aed were all made revolving around the same equipment constellation, the album sounding as coherent as it sounds timeless. Having released several 7”s, 12”s and EPs on Levels, International Major Label, Rets Records and being featured …
Seven Diamond Lines
As played by Lena Willikens, ’Seven Diamond Lines’ has been a long time in the making, and finally lands with the slow, technoid version backed by the original chant recording of Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. The version slots ideally into Offen’s style of aerobic mysticism, and the chant will surely find its place in meditation rituals. DJ taxi Yan explains: “This is a well know Guru Rinpoche Prayer, and has been chanted at least 1800 years. It has seven lines. Almost all the Tibetan peop…
Numero 95: Virtual Experience Software
Numero serve up this glorious ode to software generated soundscapes that emerged in the 90s after decades of brown corporate banality. In part helped along by access to the internet, the PC revolution also allowed for these vibrant sounds to emerge. Described as "the soundtrack to the screen saver fever dream we're all trying to climb back into" Numero 95 is a wistful and whimsical ambient collection with pastoral shades, smooth jazz and new age overtones and proto-vapourwave gems.
La Ola Interior - Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990
Following “La Contra Ola” (BJR015), Bongo Joe is pleased to present La Ola Interior, a compilation exploring the ambient side of the Spanish electronic music produced in the 80’s. It gathers musicians from various horizons and of many generations, who shared the desire to create an immersive soundscape and to combine electronic music with non-Western musical traditions. As a general rule, the Anglo-Saxon tropism did relate the spanish peninsula’s ambient music to the Balearic Sound, that is to s…
Underwater Kites
* 2021 Stock* Arriving in the wake of inspirational releases from Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and Throbbing Gristle, Modern Art’s Underwater Kites pinched those templates into a range of nervy, minimalist styles porous to influence and defined by the moody character of Gary Ramon’s vocals and his feel for expressive, evocative melody. As the founder of Color Discs/Color Tapes, there’s reams of evidence that Ramon was a proper locus for the post-punk scene at that time, and his outp…
Oriental Towers
* 2021 Stock. Edition of 300 * Another entry from the darkly enchanting minimal synth-pop and psych-tinged world of The Modern Art. As an introduction to the world of Coil and Current 93 collaborator (and Sun Dial main man) Gary Ramon and his orbiting bandmates, you can't do better. "From a time when drummers were as rare as a tune with a melody. It could have been made yesterday, by one of those modern bands of foppish young men, whose parents' record collection contained stuff like The Wake an…
Enchanted Isle Of Entanglement
Therapeutische Hörgruppe Köln was founded in 2008 by Tobias Beck, Volker Hennes, Svann Langguth and Dirk Specht. At the end of 2009, the group expanded to include Tobias Grewenig. The focus of their joint work is the development and implementation of conceptual methods in the fields of sound art and electroacoustic music. In installations, performances and concerts, site-specific characteristics are preferably investigated, integrated and thematically developed in the works. Of particular intere…
First Man In The Moon
An unlikely meeting of two like-minded spirits, "First Man in the Moon" sees the former Swans guitarist and Hallow Ground regular Norman Westberg and the prolific double bass player Jacek Mazurkiewicz collaborate for five evocative tracks. The pair finds common ground beyond the boundaries of atmospheric drone, abstract jazz and experimental music and blurs the lines between the acoustic and the electronic.
The two first met when the composer Mazurkiewicz supported Swans with his solo project 3F…
Porphyr
** Edition of 200 ** A-Musik is delighted to present Titanoboa's debut album as the first a-Musik release of 2021. "Porphyr" contains eight tracks of delicate Electroacoustic Noire and contemporary Post-Industrial chamber music that were produced in her Cologne based studio. Being equally into rumbling noise, experimental turntablism, angelic singing, organ improvisation and a lot of studio wizardry, these recordings somehow remind of a combination of Pharmakon's raw power, Maximim Bérangère's l…
Recalcitrance
Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has studied the operations of states and their mobilization of technical practices to serve a presupposed general interest, which involves the production of rules and norms. Such rules and norms are blind to forms of knowledge that are denigrated as ‘local’ and ‘traditional’, and feature the correlative elimination of what does not conform and cannot be standardized – in other words, what is recalcitrant to objective evaluation. Anything that resists subs…
Vauville
** Edition of 200 ** The compositions on this album started out after travelling to Normandy (France) where a week long I took inspiration on the quiet beaches listening to the sounds of the waves, the wind and the natural sounds. Starting out with field-recordings from church bells and improvised sessions on organ the idea arose to recreate the ever ongoing soundscapes of self-preservation as heard on those beaches. After moving from Antwerp to Brussels new inspiration came. New impressions fr…