Electronic / Experimental
3596 products

Burnt Friedman frames his latest album in the vein of the nonsuch explorer series, with a musical look at Central Europe, specifically Berlin, and its intersection of artists, dancers, musicians still moving to 30 year old techno and house while constantly investigating and discarding novel new forms...
“Burnt Friedman with Explorer Series Vol. 4, original ethnic music of the peoples of the world/full spectrum stereo dominance. With such a complicated amalgam of races, religions, and language as there is in central Europe, it is not surprising, that the musical life is endless in variety. Before the upheavals engendered by immigration policies, the introduction of 5 G technology, and the gaining of maximum self-expression, the separation of cultures must have been even more noticeable, yet now in the sphere of music one can see them drawing more closely together.
This is especially true of an under-populated melting pot such as Berlin, where the sense of beauty is innate and one hardly meets a white male or a woman not being a painter or a dancer, or a musician. The system of scales, and also the fact that the western central Europeans rely on recorded or written script in order to conserve the themes of their music, could lead us to look upon it as a form of art music. Remarkably enough, traditional house or techno which existed 30 years ago, still flourishes today. Moreover, all the time new forms and musical styles are being discovered, tried out and eventually overlooked. The present record can offer but a modest sampling of extinct splendors, political or individual sufferings, gloomy sadness, love, resentment, exquisite delicacy, laughter and delectable wisdom of rural and urban central European music. Burnt Friedman's essential function is to perform music that ensures the repose of the dead and render their ghosts harmless; in the case of whole communities, to dispel evil spirits and restore to Berlin its pristine purity; and in the case of individuals, to expel the demands of possession.
Despite the limited scope of sound carriers, these ten highlights of central European culture contain an emotional force and documentary value of inestimable importance. Although it would be incorrect to consider the various selections contained herein as authentic ethnological documents insofar as the performances were for the most part "mystified", on the other hand one can certainly consider them significant examples of the attempts of white males to develop their own modes of expression and communication.”

Folder is a collaboration between Ultrafog, mdo and ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ
Artwork by Angelina Nonaj & Ryan Loecker
Centre labels by Jesse Sappell
Mastered by Miles of Demdike Stare, cut at D&M Berlin
Returning with his first album in 13 years, Errorsmith’s ‘Superlative Fatigue’ long-awaited release on PAN arrives as his perhaps most optimistic record yet.
Placing a strong emphasis on spectral exploration, the tracks tell an inherent story and span a musical arc with his recognisable synthesised tones, computerised vocal effects and timbral changes in motion.
In comparison to his previous productions, Errorsmith (Erik Wiegand) sees the release as less abstract, harsh or aggressive: “I would say it is rather accessible and cheerful; at times ridiculously cheerful but still very sincere and emotional.” He suggests. “I find it touching when this little android raises its pitch at the end of ‘Lightspeed’ or the android catching its breath in ‘My Party’ for instance.”
The album title, ‘Superlative Fatigue’ reflects this tension between an over-the-top, hysterical emotion, against more deeply felt expressions or realness.
Besides collaborating with the likes of Mark Fell, to Berghain resident Fiedel as MMM, and Soundstream as Smith N Hack, Wiegand has released a string of seminal dancefloor tracks. Building his own instruments using modular software synthesizers is a large part of his work. Where almost all the sounds in the LP were created with his synth, ‘Razor’, (a synthesizer plug-in he developed for Native instruments, released in 2011) or slightly modified versions of it.
Premiered at Unsound Festival last year, this new material he has developed since has finally taken form in this epic full-length.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by James Hoff and layout by Bill Kouligas.





A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s, collected in his two CDs: 1989's Vandalia (NMN 076-4CD/NMN 083-5LP) and 1984's Per La Sete Dell'orecchio (NMN 083-3LP). This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this operative and only in appearance "neutral" premise introduces an implicit mimetic transposition. This link between the "iconic" threshold of the acoustical material and its transposition literally deconstructs the prerogatives and the ideological categories of music composition. In Antibarbarus, the temporal continuum restores the mimesis of the phenomenal regression of musical time, crystallized in a framed-length which gets estranged from subjective domain. But the transfiguration of sound sources now deliberately intends to de-signify the analytical prerogatives of hearing. The sensorial perception is in such a way inhibited from an immediate comprehension of the acoustic reality so reproduced: canis reversus ad vomitum suum. In the late 1950s, Marchetti was able both to formalize a more critical aim towards the established lingua franca and absolutist ideology of musical avant-gardism and to expand the sense of artistic praxis, in line with an ethical and subtly political evaluation of aesthetic experience. Marchetti was inspired by Cage's poetics of indeterminacy and subsequently created, through a close and indissoluble association with Juan Hidalgo and José Luis Castillejo, an original and de-ritualized form of action-music which led in 1964 to the birth of ZAJ group. Marchetti's work relays, in its procedural level, upon a resolute de-functioning of the musical codes and impose this act as a reversed mimesis of the methodological statute of music composing. Namely, not a "degré zero de l'écriture", but its "reversal"; not a "denial of style", but "style of denial". In this perspective, Walter Marchetti's oeuvre condenses one of the rare examples of aesthetic radicalism consciously extended to music poetics. Comes in full color gatefold sleeve; Includes printed inner sleeves (with photos of "Musica da camera n. 182", London, Raven Row, 1989/2011 and "Music in secca", Milano, Fondazione Mudima, 2003); Liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo in English and Italian.


