MUSIC

"Today's dancefloors are wakes in remembrance of a mythological era of openness that never was. Remember where you were. See where you are.... I'm in Kami-Sakunobe." (K-S.H.E) "Routes Not Roots" is the debut album by K-S.H.E (Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion), the newest project from internationally celebrated producer, label owner and DJ Terre Thaemlitz. K-S.H.E "Routes Not Roots" combines Comatonse Recordings' notorious "Fagjazz" sound with the classic NY Deep House and Cross-over dancefloor sensibility of "DJ Sprinkles' Deeperama," Thaemlitz' bi-monthly event held at Club Module, Tokyo. The results are spacious, bass-heavy, epic dance mixes filled with dark humor and harsh realities. As people have come to expect of Thaemlitz releases, "Routes Not Roots" mixes a wide range of social themes such as identity vs. immigrant status; community vs. tranny-on-tranny violence; authenticity vs. cultural decontextualization; openly gay African-American club imagery vs. gay sex on the Down-Low; innocence vs. childhood fantasies of violence; and more. From HIV drug trials to tranny and women's unemployment rates to sexually amorphous Japanese cross-dressers posing as high school girls, K-S.H.E doesn't miss a beat.

Dj Sprinkles’ debut full length album,continues with themes from 1998’s “Sloppy 42nds: A tribute to the 42nd Street transsexual clubs destroyed by Walt Disney’s buyout of Times Square” (a track recently featured on Ame’s “Coast2Coast” DJ mix compilation for NRK Records).

While the world celebrates the revial of New York House Music, constructing utopian fictions about the genre as it goes along, DJ Sprinkles retreats deep into the bowels of house. This is the rhythm of empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug & alcohol addiction, racism, gender & sexual crises, unemployment, and censorship.

The title song of track1&2 is a real “strictly rhythm” house music. It’s a simple 4/4 beat with piano loop.maybe this is a real minimal house! Third track “Ball’r (madonna-free zone)” is a euphoric mid tempo house.this track reminds jan jelinek or larry heard.

Fourth track “Brenda’s $20 Dilemma” is a sequel of his fag jazz style.check the beautiful kuniyuki remix of this song(mule musiq 34). Fifth track “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” is a classic new york house style.if you like the record of jus-ed or that kind of artist,you like this song.

Sixth track “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To” is a one of the highlight song on the album. Actually this track is not 4/4 beat house but very emotional powerfull music. Seventh track “Reverse Rotation” is a deep and madness beautiful song.When you listen this song,you associate the music of theo parrish or pepe bradock.

Eighth&nineth track are main songs of this album. “Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep Into the Bowel of House)” is associated the sound of jungle wonz or virgo. but this song is filled with somthing sadness.check the story about this album from terre,you will see…. http://www.comatonse.com/releases/midtown120blues.html This album is for a real house music lovers.

視聴-Midtown 120 Intro・ミッドタウン１２０イントロ
視聴-Midtown 120 Blues・ミッドタウン１２０ブルース
視聴-Reverse Rotation・後戻り
視聴-Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)・グランドセントラル駅　パート２（列車でミズーリ州から72時間）

Comatonse.000 was the project name, EP title, and catalog number of Terre Thaemlitz' 1993 debut 12-inch featuring the NY Loft classic A-side "Raw Through a Straw," and the bass-heavy ambient B-side that captured the attention of producers like Bill Laswell and Mixmaster Morris, "Tranquilizer." This CD compiles all Comatonse.000 related releases to date, including that other Comatonse EP working the "Scorpio" break so important to the early Loft house scene, Social Material's, Class/Consciousness. This is the first time "Consciousness" has been made available in digital format. The disc also includes a previously unreleased demo version of "Tranquilizer" as a hidden bonus track. Self- released on Comatonse Recordings with custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself, the package includes one CD in an archival vinyl pouch with one double-sided insert card (100mm x 100mm), phonograph style anti-static inner sleeve, and 4x4 panel poster insert printed on newsprint (472mm x 472mm).
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 1)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 2)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 3)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 4)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 5)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 6)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 7)
視聴-comatonse.000 comatonse.000.r3(Excerpt 8)

A CD compiling all of K-S.H.E's 12-inch and one-off releases to date beyond the 2006 debut album Routes not Roots (one of the few albums to ever receive a full 5-star rating from Resident Advisor, and precursor to DJ Sprinkles' Midtown 120 Blues). This is the first time for many of these tracks to be available in digital format. Includes K-S.H.E's previously unreleased original version of "Reverse Rotation," which was later dramatically re-tempo'ed and re-worked for release on DJ Sprinkles' album. Self-released on Comatonse Recordings with custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself, the package includes one CD in an archival vinyl pouch with one double-sided insert card (100mm x 100mm), phonograph style anti-static inner sleeve, and 4x4 panel poster insert printed on newsprint (472mm x 472mm).
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 1)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 2)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 3)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 4)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 5)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 6)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 7)

Yes, your eyes tell you the truth – this is the first new record by Zero Kama released since 2008 live vinyl! During these 16 years Zoe Dewitt was active with book publishing, Zero Kama and Korpses Katatonic reissues, lectures, scientific research, exhibitions, and rare but bright live shows. However, most of us have forgotten our dreams of seeing new releases of Zero Kama.

Originally, "What is a Body" is the 50-minute background soundtrack for Zoe Dewitt's lecture performance in the anatomical theatre of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2015. Exclusively based on samples from "The Secret Eye of LAYLAH" it takes you to the same Zero Kama you always known - dark ritual music with transcendent drones and tribal parts. The music is not to talk about but to listen and disappear in.

Black vinyl, colored vinyl, and the DigiCD. The vinyl comes with a big booklet about the record conception and the lecture by Zoe Dewitt.

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!

currently the rediscovery of long forgotten japanese electronic, jazz and new age music is at a peak like never before. but although many re-issues already flood the record stores around the world: the large, diverse musical culture of japan still got some gems in store that are really missing.

for example, it is still quiet around the the work of japanese bass player, new-age and ambient musi-cian motohiko hamase. when the today 66-years old artist started to be a professional musician in the 1970’s, he quickly gained success as a versed studio instrumentalist and started to be part of the great modern jazz isao suzuki sextett, where he played with legends like pianist tsuyoshi yamamoto or fu-sion guitar one-off-a-kind kazumi watanabe.

he also was around in the studio when legendary japanese jazz records like “straight ahead” of takao uematsu, “moritato for osada” of jazz singer minami yasuda or “moon stone” of synthesizer, piano and organ wizard mikio masuda been recorded.

in the 1980’s hamase began to slowly drift away from jazz and drowned himself and his musical vision into new-age, ambient and experimental electronic spheres, in which he incorporated his funky medi-tative way of playing the bass above airy sounds and arrangements.

his first solo album “intaglio” was not only a milestone of japanese new-age ambient, it was also fresh sonic journey in jazz that does not sound like jazz at all. now studio mule is happy to announce the re-recording of his gem from 1986, that opens new doors of perception while being not quite at all.

first issued by the japanese label shi zen, the record had a decent success in japan and by some overseas fans of music from the far east. with seven haunting, stylistically hard to pigeonhole compo-sitions hamase drifts around new-age worlds with howling wind sounds, gently bass picking and dis-creet drums, that sometimes remind the listener on the power of japanese taiko percussions. also, propulsive fourth-world-grooves call the tune and all composition avoid a foreseeable structure. at large his albums seem to be improvised and yet all is deeply composed.

music that works like shuffling through an imaginary sound library full of spiritual deepness, that even spreads in its shaky moments some profound relaxing moods. a true discovery of old music that oper-ates deeply contemporary due to his exploratory spirit and gently played tones. the release marks another highlight in studio mule’s fresh mission to excavate neglected japanese music, that somehow has more to offer in present age, than at the time of his original birth. 

Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project. There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up. But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions. GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm. In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions.  Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery.  Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape

The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album.  ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’  is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.

September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski’s new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: “The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”

Release 20/1/2023. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone’s experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s critically acclaimed records The Sacrificial Code [Ideal Recordings, 2019] & Living Torch [Portraits GRM, 2022]. Her collaborative approach expands from her previous work to closely include the musicians Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton in the creation and development of the piece. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the unique styles and techniques of O’Malley & Railton, presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a durational experience of variable length that follows slowly evolving harmony and timbre between cello, sine waves, and electric guitar. As a listener, the transition between these junctures can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s obscurity and unity in the instrumentation and identities of the players; the electric guitar's saturation timbre blends with the cello's rich periodicity, while shifting overtone feedback develops interference patterns against the precise sine waves. The gradual yet ever-occurring changes in harmony challenge the listener’s perception of stasis and movement. The moment you grasp the music, a slight shift in perspective guides your attention forward into a new and unfolding harmonic experience. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created between March and May of 2020. During this unsettling period of the pandemic, Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods. With a few interns left on-site, Malone was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus & MONOM to develop and record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends and collaborators Lucy Railton & Stephen O’Malley to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces. Hence, the foundation was laid for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. 

In Kali’s own words: “Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight. Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing. Memories blurred non-sequentially, the fabric of reality deteriorated, unforeseen kinships formed and disappeared, and all the while, the seasons changed and moved on without the ones we lost. Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy has since been performed live on many European stages, in durations of sixty and ninety minutes. Including at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, the Bozar in Brussels, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. Concerts are forthcoming at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Mira Festival in Barcelona, the Venice Biennale, and the Purcell Room at the Southbank Center in London. 

In addition to live concerts, the Funkhaus recordings of Does Spring Hide Its Joy have evolved in parallel as a site-specific sound installation. Malone has also invited the video artist Nika Milano to create a custom analog video work that interprets and accompanies the musical score as a fourth player, creating a visual atmosphere inspired by the sonic principles of the composition. Eight sequential video stills from Milano’s work are featured in the album artwork. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is packaged in a heavyweight laminated jacket with full-color printed inner sleeves with artwork by Nika Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering, the record is pressed in perfect sound quality by Optimal in Germany. 

Half asleep you hear a guitar echo through the early morning haze, you're so zonked you cant tell if its a dream or if the droney reverb is coming from real life, you sit up, now starting to understand what is afoot. Thats right, its the errant kings of slowcore Duster returning with yet another surprise release - In Dreams. Disintegrated, half remembered melodies permeate this record like a slow tide of static soaking into a discarded slice of sponge cake, proving somehow inventive and nostalgic at the same time, in other words Duster on top form.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

Thoughts of You, as a phrase, might immediately associate one with feelings of love, endearment, fantasy or even obsession. These are the very sentiments that lay as cornerstones in Salvator Dragatto’s debut LP for Colemine Records. The allure and drama of black & white photography have always played a vital role in how Salvator (aka Joseph Reina) not only views the world but how he hears music. Parallels in film processing to his own recording methods started becoming more and more apparent as the record was being formed; Limitations in exposures rivaling limitations in tracks. Film grain and dust sediments rivaling tape hiss and dirty EQ pots. What most would consider to be imperfections, Dragatto leaned into and found inspiration. This record is an homage to the likes of André Kertész, Robert Frank, Jean-Luc Godard and René Groebli, who’s works have impacted Dragatto’s world so greatly both visually and sonically. Thoughts of You is an unabashed reflection of the noir. From the powerful thematic horn lines to the gentlest string passages, this record is a collection of themes and vignettes that explore the emotions set upon by black and white imagery.

Homer Steinweiss has an incredibly storied career in music that started when he was just a teenager. He's drummed for nearly every "retro soul" group that mattered and his distinctive stickwork helped blend the raw-but-receptive soul sound back into the mainstream via the likes of Amy Winehouse & Sharon Jones. He’s now one of the most in demand drummers in the world, playing with Jonas Brothers, Clairo, Solange, Adele, and Bruno Mars to name a few. With his debut solo release Ensatina, Homer is stepping to the forefront as both musician and producer. His new record is a reflection of who he is now and a testament to how struggle often brings about a needed change. In 2020 Homer had to reckon with considerable emotional turbulence; at the same time that his band Holy Hive broke up, a personal relationship of 20+ years fell apart putting Homer in an uncertain place mentally. The fallout was significant enough for him to seek professional help. "I was going through these super manic highs and then very depressive lows," Homer describes. "And being in all that, it's just so tough to imagine that the other side is there, that it'll be ok." But, with time, professional help, and support from friends and family, Homer made it through and has been forever changed. This album is a product of that period of his life. The first song from these sessions, “Now That It’s Over” perfectly sums up Homer’s triumph through those tough times. It's a song of changing perspective and contemplation with haunting vocals from Hether and Flikka. "Paul (Castelluzzo—aka, Hether), as a friend, saw me through these highs and lows," Homer points out. "I only had the one line, 'Now that it's over, I'm alright,' but he felt that lyric so much that he wrote all these sections and lyrics and basically completed the song. It was like he was writing to me." Hether also features on album standouts “Deep Sea”, a modern love song, “Start Select”, a juxtaposition of inspiration and melancholy, and “Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever” which is an incredible contemporary take on the B side soul ballad. Homer uses his innate gift for bringing seemingly opposing energies together on “Racecar Driver”, pairing the vocals of Hether & long time friend and collaborator KIRBY to make a genre challenging banger. KIRBY also graces the album opener “Rollin’”, an airy, warm-weather invoking song that her raspy voice perfectly compliments. He puts his drumming front and center on “So Get Up!”, a bottom heavy infectious track that MINOVA’s vocals turn into an instant hit that is sure to smash speakers. On “Wishing Well” & “Hide It Behind the Light I’m Shining Through” Homer is joined by girl named GOLDEN, who’s unique voice effortlessly finds the pocket in each tune. The man on trumpet, and fellow Big Crown label mate Dave Guy, puts his incomparable playing on the album closer “Goldie” which Homer says is the part of the movie where the credits roll. Making this album was a refuge for Homer and it put him back on track. Ensatina is a glimpse into the different energies and influences that make Homer tick. To say he was always much more than a drummer would be an understatement, and this first solo offering is just the beginning of his next chapter.

14 short melancholy tape-loops from the early eighties. Remastered and now available on conventional pressed CD in Trim-Pak (previously available as a very limited CDR. "Melancholia is probably the best Basinski's record until now, even if this is hard for me to say given my love for each one of his releases. Contrarily to his 'continuing' projects such as Disintegration Loops and Water Music, this is a sort of a sketch album, made of short pieces all created with tape loops and some synthetic wave here and there. This music is so beautifully delicate and sad in its auto-reflective moods, it stands right there with everything ranging from the usual suspects in the 'ambient' field, to a distorted damp ghost of Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel put into a time machine. Just ravishing as you can imagine, William's almost suffocated loops celebrate the burial of any enthusiastic thought, to make room to the most difficult introspection -- the one growing you in a hurry and leaving you alone, observing from a safe distance. This beauty is for any human being who's not afraid to understand life's happenings -- maybe the hard way, but who cares?" --Massimo Ricci, touchingextremes.org.

Deepchord have emerged from the shadows of their Motor City lair in a big way this year, unleashing their dubby techno constructs upon the public at a feverish pace. Previously appearing earlier this year on a hyper-limited triple-pack, their landmark ‘Vantage Isle’ album has been re-released on CD in an expanded fashion.

Awash in effervescent sheets of reverb and echo that evoke images of Detroit’s decaying urban landscapes as they dissolve into the ether, there’s a certain physicality to the album’s sonic vistas that is lacking from the output of other producers mining similar territory. Where contemporaries such as Deadbeat and Mikkel Metal gloss over the dub with a digital sheen, DeepChord wring their sounds from tangles of live wires and sputtering banks of effects, molding and shaping them by hand until they coalesce into living organisms. It’s a sonic space with one foot in the past and the other firmly planted in the not-so-distant future.

Often resembling a cross between Berlin’s Basic Channel collective and Detroit’s techno lineage, ‘Vantage Isle’ is less an album of individual tracks than a compilation of remixes. Working from a limited sonic palette rooted in the signature warmth of the analog technologies of yore, the collection plays out in true dub fashion as each of the artists involved offers their own versions of the same rudimentary riddim. The effect is similar in fashion to Rhythm & Sound’s classic ‘See Mi Yah’ series, with the basic template examined and reexamined from different angles.

Despite being cut from the same aural cloth, each of the tracks occupies its own niche, with the artist’s stamp firmly imprinted on the final product. The three DeepChord mixes feature lumbering rhythms underpinned by devastatingly deep bass pulses set adrift amid a sea of tumbling chords and skittering delay. Echospace – the collaborative project between Soultek and DeepChord’s own Rod Modell – is well represented with five reshapes showcasing their signature style, which is simultaneously both more ambient and more techno-oriented than anything DeepChord has committed to tape. Labelmate CV313 also impresses, turning in a complimentary pair of tracks that demonstrate the mysterious producer’s aptitude for producing storming waves of driving beats over a milky smooth ambience.

But it’s the contribution from Convextion that really stands out. Paring the beat down to a pulsing mass of kick drums and ruptured bursts of static, the Texas-based producer weaves writhing clusters of chords into the mix as yawning pads bathe everything in a warm, static-fried glow. It’s creepy stuff, but it’s also the visionary highlight of an album that stands tall not just among the glut of contemporary dub techno releases, but among the classics of the genre as well. All in all, ‘Vantage Isle’ is a tremendous achievement that will most likely be held up as a high water mark of the genre for years to come.
-Resident Advisor

Michigan’s Rod Modell makes immersive techno. It doesn’t quite fit into any specific genre mold, so his subtle, nearly anonymous tracks can slip by unnoticed. It’s easy to get lost in the microbial hiss, goopy dub timbres and rumbling muffle to miss the bass writhing in the fuzz or percussive tics cracking the drone.

On Vantage Isle Sessions, he again partners with Soultek’s Steven Hitchell as DeepChord. This new disc comprises 12 remixes by the duo of the elusive "Vantage Isle,” a track so impermanent it appears there was never a proper, original version. The 13th remix, smack in the middle of the disc’s sequencing, comes from the sole outsider: Gerard Hanson (Convextion). It may also be the best thing here. His version is by far the most submerged; strands of shuffling dust pile up on a cyborg samba, immersed in a hail of cut-ups, stray clicks and extended chords. Modell and Hitchell’s "Echospace Spatial Dub" is far more immediate. The closest thing to a straight dance cut, its bass is crisp and dry, looped in a slinky cycle that rattles along a taut trot, leaving the dub FX to plop and squish on the periphery.

The "Echospace Reshape" could pass as early-’90s ambient rockers Seefeel remixed by a Warp glitch-termite of comparable vintage. It’s a radian eight-minute sprawl that, thankfully, can’t decide whether it struts or churns, jets spurting and bass paddling in mutual confusion. The "Echospace Glacial" mix is practically a symphony of aquatic audio, complete with cascading water. The "cv313" reductions are the most surprising. The first applies a more variegated rhythm, its spatter and chipped blips a relief from the disc’s constant numbing throb. The second, the album’s closer, is all crackling froth and organ spume, blissfully coursing through the stereo field.

Modell is in solo mode on the weirder Incense and Black Light. From its title on down, this album has an after-hours feel. There’s more water, but now it sounds like it’s pebbling apartment windows instead of draining along sewer canals. A recurring bongo-like smatter, muted and almost incongruous, adds to the bedroom vibe. It’s as if some vintage space-age bachelor pad LP is spinning absent-mindedly with the volume turned way down. Only the tinniest percussion pops through the silence. Chimes shimmer, hi-hats lisp, steam crackles. Modell’s music always seems to be in this suspended animation, adrift and afloat in a majestic emptiness.
-Dusted Magazine

You might say that the sound of Deepchord results from one of techno's rock-hardest truths: Jack into the primordial 4/4 throb, the universal language of kick-drum, and the rest of your track's sonic spectrum is fair game for experiments of the maddest science.
Deepchord's lab book in this case is a dark-art manual for contacting the Jamaican-dub spirit world, a volume its Detroit-based progenitor Rod Modell was most likely handed by someone from Berlin's Basic Channel label. In its heyday, Basic Channel's style was often tagged "heroin house," a term coined ostensibly to account for the fleeting subgenre's pulsing silvery narcosis. If an opiate reference leaves you cold, however, you can think of it as "scuba house": dance jams for the diving bell. Let's face it, though. All along calling the sport scuba "diving" has been a way of covering up what it really is, and the properties it shares with Deepchord: the sensation of sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a long time and savoring the healing properties of otherworldly ambience. Along those lines, "Deepchord" and "Echospace" would be great brand names for long-range Navy Seal audio espionage gear, the kind you could use to make spine-tingling underwater field recordings of the sort of drifty, murmuring echoes and chthonic subbass tremors, that permeate Vantage Isle. And while the Deepchord/Echospace universe promotes a carefully vintage style, purist should note that it's not wholly analog. Mitchell professes his love for early digital synths, like the landmark Yamaha DX7. As he says in an interview with Resident Advisor, it's a hardware sound, one that distinctly separates it from the kind of computer-software plug-in steez that's the current benchmark for convenient techno production. Released on triple-pack last year as the latest and most epic of Echospace's near-cultishly coveted vinyl productions, it takes material played live at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2001, and in the great spirit of electronic musical anonymity, allows it to be devoured by a wolf-pack of various pseudonyms and collaborations. If you simply heard the album and didn't read about it, you wouldn't know it was the same dubby minimal techno track thirteen times.

That's a testament to the unexpected broadness of palette that is left after it's been decided that you're amputating music down to its barest filtered flicker. The original dubby excursion gets eaten up, obliterated, leaving behind a beatless void on the fourth track, gets resurrected via hardcore throb on the standout seventh track, morphs into a refined and alluring nightclub pulse on the eleventh. Despite all the diversity, Vantage Isle does not, however, span the full geographical expanse of Deepchord's The Coldest Season, which went from tundra to valley to desert plain. Instead its sequence of inspired variations creates a pulsing, silvery rainforest of microcosmic depth. The listener ends up in a position kind of like the protagonist in Kafka's "A Country Doctor," who on first inspecting his young patient finds no physical incursion, only upon a second closer glance to discover a grotesque wound in the same place where there was just bare skin. Such is the effect of this strand of minimal electronics: With its enshrouded maternal heartbeats and diaphonous synths burbles it can lurk in the background of your aural space interminably, only to reach out and smack you without warning. Great for drug addicts, OCD-sufferers, and anyone else with over-acute hearing and/or insomnia.
-Prefix Magazine 

Exclusive unheard live extracts from cv313's live performance at Glass City Record Store release party in Detroit, USA. Recorded from 16 channel Mackie mixer, performed entirely on analog/digital hardware, samplers and sequencers. NO COMPUTER INVOLVED. Recorded in May, 2001 @ a warehouse somewhere in Detroit.

Thoughts:

Live Excursions is the third in the cv313 Live series, this time a recording of a gig performed by Hitchell at the 2001 DEMF Festival for the Glass City Records release party. As the earliest recording in the series to date it is in many ways Live @ Primary‘s opposite number, a fact reflected in the vastly different material featured, as well as the negative-print artwork that adorns the gatefold Eco friendly wallet.

It is perhaps the most easily recognizable as a cv313 gig in particular, featuring many staples of early cv313 material with very few of the diversions into Soultek, Intrusion or other housier archive material that characterizes other live cv313 sets. Live Excursions focuses heavily on on tightly looped, mesmerizing, repeated grooves soaked in delay and reverb, with warm, fuzzy textures and soft, through-the-walls beat-work that one can imagine anesthetizing many a wearied festival-goer seeking a final, hazy chill out session.

The tracks on Live Excursions are all simply named “Glass City Session” with a numeric suffix, but a bit of digging into the cv313 back catalog does at least reveal the origins of some of these tracks. It opens, for example, on a live version of the twenty-two minute long “Subtraktive [Intrusion’s Enchantment] Extended Version,” and yes, that makes it a live variant of an extended version of a remix of “Subtraktive,” proof of how deeply meta the whole echospace [detroit] catalog can be.

The original mix can actually be found on the second “Subtraktive” disc of the 2xCD edition of Dimensional Space, and this live version doesn’t deviate drastically from it. It’s a stunning opening to the set, the hovering drones, rolling congas, and earth-shaking sub-bass making for a truly hypnotic, head in the clouds twenty-two minute opus.

“Glasscity Session III” is a particular surprise, as it turns out to be none other than a live version of “Durveda,” a hitherto unreleased track fully of atyipically dark and disturbing drones and textures that makes it proper debut on Dimensional Space. This alone makes Live Excursions enough of a historical curio for fans to warrant investing.

Pre-orders of the Live Excursions disc on the echospace [detroit] Bandcamp site also came with an immediate download of four tracks that were stated to be on the CD itself. In actual fact it appears that the second and fourth tracks appear on the main disc, but the first and third do not, making them digital exclusives. Sadly, these tracks are not mastered to anywhere near the same quality as the main disc, the sound quality muddy and muted.

Live Excursions is hopefully not the last in the Live series of cv313 sets we’ll see, as they frequently offer unique takes on the material, and each has it own distinctive character. This is definitely one for armchair listening, an intoxicating opiate best experienced on headphones with a spacious sound stage. -Igloo Magazine

If you missed out on the pair of cv313/ Echospace [detroit] Record Store Day CD’s then why not attempt to heal your pain by picking up this disc of ‘Live ‘Excursions’ from Detroit’s Stephen Hitchell and Rod Modell (DeepChord). Arguably the finest dub techno practitioners outside of early productions from Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, you know; Basic Channel etc.

These tracks are extracted from a live session at a warehouse somewhere in Detroit and serve as evidence these guys can cut it live - all hardware/ no computers. Outside of that there’s nothing revelatory here just straight up chilled cv313 shimmering dubbed out magic. Metallic clouds that seemingly float into infinity, steady beats and a vibe that’s hypnotic throughout. Repetitious? On the surface for sure, but once inside - the nuances reveal themselves and all is not as it seems. These guys go deeeeeeep and I want some of what they’re smokin’. Originally this was issued in an edition of 100 copies but we have a limited amount of the reissue available in different packaging/ artwork.

Oh and while you’re at it there’s also limited copies of their deeply immersive ‘Seconds To Forever’ disc available and totally worth grabbing. -Norman (UK)

Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell's glacial dub techno project cv313 release never before heard live extracts from a session they performed at a Glass City Record Store release party in Detroit. Performed in a warehouse entirely on hardware, its a characteristically deep and otherworldly release from the pair, pillowy kicks swimming in infinite layers of spidery static and hallucinatory pads. It's music that is involving and immersive to the point of disorienting, and shows cv313 as a powerful live act - even when experienced on headphones long after the event has taken place. -Bleep

Having recently released the impressively in-your-face Live at Primary CD, it's something of a surprise to see CV313 dropping another live recording so soon. To be fair, Live Excursions first surfaced digitally last year via their own Bandcamp site, and now makes its way onto CD for the first time. The recordings themselves are vintage too, having been captured at a warehouse party in Detroit back in 2001. According to the Echospace website, the tracks were performed live using only outboard kit and a 16-channel mixer, with no computer trickery. Whatever the method, the resultant tracks are long, trippy, and immersive forays into dub techno and ambient in CV313's trademark style. -Juno

"[Live Excursions]" shows American masters of dub-techno at the beginning of their joint experiments.

A separate chapter in the work of Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchella are performances. Their music becomes then a slightly different dimension - it is less clarified, it has a more raw sound and marked by a strong element of improvisation. We can convince listening to the album, "[Live Excurcusions]", containing songs recorded during spontaneous sessions organized in a record store Glass City in the Motor City as part held there in 2001, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.

The show starts slowly pending roll, combining tarry sound straight from Jamaican dub with reduced rhythm of techno style. All of this is immersed in a corroded shafts of grainy sound, behind which regularly emerges rudimentary melodic motif ("Glassity Session 1"). After twenty minutes of psychedelic music, Rodell and Hitchell hit more dance party - combining, for minimalowym backing billowing sheets and deep bass ("Glasscity Session 2").

When the club energy falls, US producers are turning to ambient. "Glasscity Session 3" is quite unusual composition in their repertoire. Its center are the mechanical rhythms borrowed from Kraftwerk, which overlap with towering waves of synthesizers monochrome pierced corrosive loop. In contrast - the next composition is actually techno pure form. This time the silent any noise and echoes, and remains the only motor pulse, braided rozwibrowanymi chords ("Glassicty Session 4").

The next two parts of the show in detroitowym shop again wprzęgają dub sound processing techniques to create a psychedelic dance music. In the "Glassity Session 5" measuring impacts bit bulky accompanied by distant explosions zbasowanych effects, and "Glassity Session 6" withdrawn rhythm resonates thicket of sewage reverb. Record ends with another nod to the ambient aesthetics - rozwibrowanymi cascades of chords intertwined with the majestic tone ("Glassicty Session 7").

"[Live Excursions]" shows Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchella at the beginning of their joint experiments. But I can be heard on the album germs of ideas that will be later developed into brilliant Echospace plate. Rough and raw sound recordings show an obvious kinship with the canonical achievements of Basic Channel - but slowing rhythm, sound radical corrosion, extending the length of recordings, music saturating the psychedelic mood, it indicates that this is just born into our ears completely new vision of dub-techno. Thus, this album is a very interesting document for all lovers of this timeless music. -Nowamuzyka Magazine 

There's been a world of hurt in regard to this album, the original masters recorded from 1996-2010 were submerged underwater due to the flood in our home studio where boxes of old reel's were never to be recovered again. Finally, years of restructure on live recordings and pain staking undulation in the restoration process have lead us to finally accomplish what so many expected wouldn't happen: an awakening of sagacious spirit: With that being said It's our distinct honor to present the sonic world of "dimensional space" the highly anticipated debut album from cv313. This album has taken a cosmic eclipse where two events collide for Unison. The culmination of this project lead to synergy, creative experience re-invented and re-imagined, flow of an astral vortex.

Ocora masterpiece recurrence! A live recording of music for rituals handed down in Bon, an ancient Tibetan religion that is said to have existed before the introduction of Buddhism. Re-release of the first album in 1983.

01 Chant dedicated to the protective divinity Midü
02 --13 Nag-zhig ’s propitiatory ceremony (nag-zhig bskang-ba)
14 Tea Offerings (ja-mchod)
Tea offering
15 Drum-beating in Praise of Shenrab (gshen-rab mchod-rgna) A drum praising Shenrab

Recording: March 1981, April 1983 Live recording of rituals in Tibet

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell

Superior Viaduct and our new artist label, W.25TH, are proud to continue to be the home for Cindy Lee with the physical release of the celebrated album Diamond Jubilee. Universally praised, shortlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, and already hailed by Pitchfork as the 3rd best album of the 2020s, anticipation and conversation around the record has been high. Cindy Lee is the performance and songwriting vehicle of Patrick Flegel (who previously fronted influential indie group Women). Over several albums, Flegel has combined delicate melodies and sheer beauty with moments of experimentation. With Diamond Jubilee, Flegel's undeniable songcraft comes to the foreground, embracing a more instant connection and accessibility. Timeless tales of love and longing, surrounded by sticky hooks, take the listener on an unforgettable journey.

In October 1987, four months after the release of their critically acclaimed Sister LP, Sonic Youth showcased their latest work in a blistering set at Cabaret Metro, Chicago. The concert was introduced by Big Black's Steve Albini (who at the time was banned from the venue) and subsequently released as a semi-official bootleg under the title Hold That Tiger on writer/provocateur Byron Coley's impishly Geffen-baiting label Goofin' (years later the band would use this nom de guerre for their own imprint). Hold That Tiger's sterling reputation among the Sonic Youth faithful is well deserved. In fact, it isn't a stretch to suggest that the album is to the first handful of SY releases what It's Alive is to the first three Ramones LPs – a feral and liberatory public snapshot of a band's blossoming imperial phase. Indeed, HTT is the sound of a group at the peak of their powers, presenting new songs alongside a handful of older ones with the kind of wild, cathartic enthusiasm common to rock 'n' roll's most revered live albums. Taking nothing away from Sister – inarguably one of indie rock's first true masterpieces – it is reasonable that many fans prefer the live versions heard on Hold That Tiger to their studio counterparts. On HTT, Sonic Youth is a spiky, pummeling and confident force, alternately mammoth and meditative. Sister and its predecessor EVOL notably added an airy, dreamlike reverie to the band's turbulent doom-lurch, a stylistic evolution that seems to crystallize on HTT. Throughout, Kim Gordon's sinewy, sumptuous bass and Steve Shelley's propulsive, tom-heavy percussion provide the bedrock groove for Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's ferocious barrages of noise-guitar crunch. By 1987, the band was confidently articulating their dual lexicon of punk-noir dissonance and supernal, psychedelic sonic calligraphy – bending their jagged, streetwise gnarl into balloon animals of dazzling and beautiful songs. This collision of splendor and chaos would become a hallmark of the group's singular alchemy as well as provide a blueprint for the post-SST American underground they would help invent and ultimately nurture. Hold That Tiger's encore – four songs by the band's beloved Ramones, which Thurston would later astutely compare to "the perfect pudding after a hearty meal" – serves as a reminder that, like any true punks, Sonic Youth never could resist a good, rousing anthem to send the kids home with their ears ringing, their hearts hot-wired. This first-time reissue comes with gatefold jacket. Mastered by Bob Weston from the orginal tapes. Recorded by Aadam Jacobs. Audio repair/editing by Aaron Mullan.

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.

Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.

Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Track Listing:

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta