Electronic / Experimental
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Experiments In Psychoacoustics, Timbre & Minimalism: 2011-2021
Late Music and Disciples are pleased to present the first and second volumes in an archival series of selected electronic and acoustic works by Sarah Davachi, all previously unreleased in the vinyl format. Featuring (way) back catalogue material from various CDs, cassettes, and EPs; singles and original film scores; as well as miscellaneous live and studio recordings.
“Something for everyone”
We've all experienced earworms - those phrases or riffs that spiral through your head for an eternity, materializing when you least expect it. On 'Models', Brummie producer Lee Gamble lets these sonic spectres inform a suite of illusory anthems, subliming vulnerable, half-remembered fragments of dream pop, Soundcloud rap and trance in the process. Sung by cybernetic voices in an almost wordless language, his widescreen memories reverberate across the last few decades of pop history, smudging Elizabeth Frazer's surreal poetry into disembodied diva cries and Lil Uzi Vert's abstract, AutoTuned mumbles.
It's a technique that advances the theories behind Gamble's 2012 album 'Diversions 1994-1996', when the producer vaporized interludes and breakdowns from his collection of jungle tapes into ghosted echoes. He surveys and blurs musical history in much the same way here, but swerves sampling completely and isn't in search of passive, ambient euphoria. On 'Models' Gamble instead trains his focus on the synthetic voice, an element that's far more conspicuous. Loose phrases were fed into a series of neural networks which would attempt to mimic them and sing them back, often corrupting them into indecipherable clouds. Gamble's role was to make sense of the chatter and twist these non-words into tight emotional coils. Extracting the most haunted fragments and using them to sculpt dreamy pop simulacrums, Gamble takes the concept of the pop producer to its logical extreme - examining how intonation and language is engineered to monopolize our attention, his uncomfortably addicting, magical realist inversion of pop plays like a bewitching symphony of earworms.
The record's front cover is a dimly lit photograph of a West Midlands motorway, rooting Gamble's effervescent fantasies in lived albeit flimic reality. It's a direct link to the producer's home turf and a conscious attempt to sidestep the visual aesthetics of contemporary digital art.
On 'Purple, Orange' Gamble's process is heralded by a crooning, artificial wail. As unsettling and out-of-body as an episode of déjà vu, it's marked with eldritch wrinkles that pitch it closer to Carnatic scales, stressing that the transhuman voice doesn't come from a single place, but all places at once: no-one and everyone.
Like a premonition of a hyperpop-trip-hop fusion that hasn't happened yet, Models is saccharine and melancholy at once. And just as Tricky perfectly represented the mid-'90s by costuming vintage soul and rap with his visionary outfits, Gamble fits out his sonic mannequins in the drapery of the algorithmic age: DAW-fried vocal artifacts, mannered, hyperreal instrumentation and cavernous digital reverb. The meaning we attach to pop is often our own. Sometimes the words are right there - "so close to me," we can make out through the dust - before they're split into fractal shapes and devolved into gibberish. It's pop music, but it ain't background music.
Revanchist (2023) is the long-awaited debut album by Evian Christ, scheduled for release by WARP on 20th October 2023. The eight-track record explores the latent potential in Trance to evoke, beyond Euphoria, the fullest feeling of the Sublime. Revanchist draws from an unlikely and expansive pool of influences; compositing, at once, the suffocating throttle of Demiurge-era Emptyset (2011); the worldliness of Madonna and William Orbit’s Ray Of Light LP (1998); the acute uncanniness of Laibach’s Across The Universe (1988); and a highly stylized approach to mixing and sound design primarily inspired by Sasha’s seminal Xpander EP (1999)
On Embers, Revanchist’s opening track and lead single, perhaps best encapsulates Christ’s inclination towards the total annihilation of Trance’s default affects; rapturous supersaws meet a tempest of indecipherable noise, mangled 808s and broken shards of Defected Records gospel house acapellas. Nobody Else shows reverence to classic Balearic Trance and its associated imagery — a widescreen view of a supermassive Iberian sunset; Apocalypse Now meets Café Del Mar. Its spacious breakdown, featuring an impressionistic treatment of vocals lifted from Clairo’s North, provides one of Revanchist's most strikingly fragile moments. Yxguden, the record's final single, is accompanied by a music video directed by early computer graphics pioneer and Tiesto-collaborator Micha Klein, who choreographs a meeting between Drain Gang’s Bladee and a Nordic Bronze Age cave drawing of an axe-wielding Moundperson. Utilising a vocal hook most widely recognised for its use in DJ Hixxy’s “More and More” (2007), Yxguden’s chaotic arrangement jump-cuts between moments of gauzy ambiance and frenzied exhilaration. Run Boys Run, Revanchist’s concluding track, sees Christ summon an enraptured chorus of bending strings and soaring choral threnoi, eventually resting on a single sub-bass note, held to exhaustion
Revanchist’s album artwork, designed by David Rudnick, features a hand-drawn depiction of a crystal-forged newborn, emerging against a backdrop compositing Lars Hertervig’s Gamle Furutrær (1865) and a still from Chris Bucklow’s Jerusalem (1994). The album was mixed and mastered by Chris Pawlusek and Christ in Goa, India
...The three albums “Tentai”, “After” and “Tracks” are a sort of hop, skip and jump in the band's trajectory. “Tracks” can also be seen as their third great leap forward, after “Kukangendai 2” and “Palm”. The vocal part is completely gone, and each self-contained track is even more diverse, more abundantly imaginative. Some of them could even be described as "pop" or "danceable". They have clearly entered a new phase.
“Tracks” brings to the fore the undercurrent of Latin flavor (?) in their post-“After” work, and demonstrates the most varied rhythmic patterns ever. The change is undoubtedly led by the drums, but the band's mode change, from making "differences" to making "waves", also comes from the bass and guitar. I'm honestly surprised at their evolution, by how they've come to handle their groove, be it horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
I wouldn't say that it's a new sound for them, however. Tortoise, for instance, also went through similar style changes. But the progress of Kukangendai is based on different motives and mechanisms. One must be the change of musical tastes and preferences of its members. Another, more importantly, is their use of difference and repetition. The gap-making repetition has the potential to generate countless variations of sound effects, so that new music naturally arises from what they've done, not necessarily or primarily under the direct influence of other artists.
Some tracks in the new album may sound, say, somewhat Latin, and seem too foreign to Kukangendai's music thus far. But they don't mean to introduce such a sound in the album or to approach any preexisting genre. They're creating something on their own and it just happens to resemble another. And that's the same as what happened to their style in relation to minimal music, math rock, footwork and so on.
Kukangendai is a band of difference and repetition. They make (or listen to) a difference in repetition and make a new repetition in the difference; they repeat a repetition (with difference) and a difference (with repetition) to yield an unexpected sound and euphony. Difference and repetition is music. “Tracks” mirrors the vibrance, the robustness of the band at this moment in time, and it's the highest achievement possible for these peerless musicians.
― Atsushi Sasaki
Ambient and environmental Japanese scene has flourished stronger than ever in the last years. The pioneers of this sound and the creators of an innovative way of making and understanding ambient music, such as Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima, Toshifumi Hinata or Takashi Kokubo have been championed and their works have been successfully unearthed by reissue labels.
Continuing in this endless path, Glossy Mistakes adds Takashi Kokubo’s brilliant “Volk Von Bauhaus” to its catalogue, with the Japanese masterpiece as the third official release of the Spanish label.
As most of 80’s Japanese ambient and environmental music, “Volk Von Bauhaus” is an audio impression designed to give a multi-sensory experience to the listener. An effort to make things audible, an exercise of understanding and soundtracking objects or situations. The main objective of this sound is to create an iconic musical landscape to accompany a specific place.
Though his name might be unfamiliar to many, Kokubo has crafted music that has impacted virtually all of Japan, from national mobile phone earthquake alerts to contactless card payment jingles. He was one of the first artists to create ambient music strictly through loops. As he mentioned when release this album, "this recording used no keyboard players, no multitrack tape recording techniques, no analog sounds”. A shift on the process of imagining sound.
“Volk Von Haus” is and ode to this ambient, new age and environmental music created in Japan throughout the 80’s. Throughout 9 cuts, Kokubo handcrafts his own sound and immerses the listener in a peaceful yet challenging adventure. The record is the first piece of his Digital Soundology series, and arguably his most interesting work due to the groundbreaking techniques he used.
"A revolutionary musical expression that shatters the old values”, explains Kokubo about this piece. And its just what we can hear when we play “Volk Von Haus”.
The album includes an unheard exclusive track by Takashi Kokubo an insert with an interview made by Takashi Kokubo. A true gem that must land in every ambient head’s musical library.
Remastered from master tapes by Frederic Stader.