MUSIC

Music From Memory's fourth release sees the Amsterdam based label taking an exciting sidestep with the release of “Clouds”, an album of contemporary music recorded in spring 2014. “Clouds” is the debut album of Gaussian Curve, a collaboration between Italian ambient pioneer Gigi Masin, Land Of Light’s Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk (also know as Young Marco).

Each of them established in their own rights, the three musicians from Italy, UK and the Netherlands, came together during a weekend long recording session in April of this year.Without preconceived ideas and developed around often purely intuitive improvised jams, the eight tracks on the album are all 'one take' live recordings. With Gigi Masin on Rhodes and piano, Jonny Nash on guitar, melodica, synths and trumpet and Marco Sterk on synths, rhythmic structures and production duties, the three of them succeed in developing a musical language all of their own.

Recorded in the heart of Amsterdam's Red Light district, the album reflects the unusually warm Spring and the buzz from the open windows that filled the derelict downtown studio space during that particular weekend. Whilst on the more introvert late night compositions the music quietly soars, reflecting the brooding melancholy of an evening in that particular part of the city. With a heartfelt simplicity “Clouds” is a record of an inspired meeting of unique souls and unique surroundings.

Music From Memory are excited to present the first compilation of works by British electronic pioneers MLO aka Peter Smith and Jon Tye. Titled ‘Oumuamua’ and second up in the Virtual Dreams series, the compilation is an in-depth artist focused release containing twelve thoughtfully selected tracks that touch on highlights from the duo’s discography as well as newly (re)discovered music drawn from a vast archive of unreleased pieces, sketches and extended jams recorded between 1993-1995. MLO’s ambient explorations began when Pete and Jon, having first met in rival punk bands during the late ‘70s, found themselves with unlimited access to an incredibly well-equipped studio, having been hired to produce an Icelandic pop star’s record in the early ‘90s. Particularly charmed by the Korg PS 3300 and an Emulator 2, Smith and Tye were also deeply fascinated by outer space and set about developing a musical landscape informed by both this new state of the art musical equipment and what lay beyond the Earth’s limits. Painting with a palette informed by classical minimalism, new age and the works of Cluster & Eno; the duos primary colours were drones, sustained tones, washes, calming tides, gentle temple bells and soft angelic voices with flickering glimpses of percussion and drums that hinted at the possibilities of a dance floor. ‘Oumuamua’ is a collection of music to get lost-in, a wander down the mazed, mirrored corridors of the subconscious. Peaceful, flowing, fresh-water patterns, drawing the listener toward a mediative, inner space. Not strictly ambient, rather the music rests temporarily within the boundaries between drum ‘n’ bass, library music, soundtracks and Techno. Or how Jon Tye himself puts it: “It really feels like music from a different place, a different time, made by different people.”

Music From Memory are excited to present the first compilation of works by British electronic pioneers MLO aka Peter Smith and Jon Tye. Titled ‘Oumuamua’ and second up in the Virtual Dreams series, the compilation is an in-depth artist focused release containing twelve thoughtfully selected tracks that touch on highlights from the duo’s discography as well as newly (re)discovered music drawn from a vast archive of unreleased pieces, sketches and extended jams recorded between 1993-1995. MLO’s ambient explorations began when Pete and Jon, having first met in rival punk bands during the late ‘70s, found themselves with unlimited access to an incredibly well-equipped studio, having been hired to produce an Icelandic pop star’s record in the early ‘90s. Particularly charmed by the Korg PS 3300 and an Emulator 2, Smith and Tye were also deeply fascinated by outer space and set about developing a musical landscape informed by both this new state of the art musical equipment and what lay beyond the Earth’s limits. Painting with a palette informed by classical minimalism, new age and the works of Cluster & Eno; the duos primary colours were drones, sustained tones, washes, calming tides, gentle temple bells and soft angelic voices with flickering glimpses of percussion and drums that hinted at the possibilities of a dance floor. ‘Oumuamua’ is a collection of music to get lost-in, a wander down the mazed, mirrored corridors of the subconscious. Peaceful, flowing, fresh-water patterns, drawing the listener toward a mediative, inner space. Not strictly ambient, rather the music rests temporarily within the boundaries between drum ‘n’ bass, library music, soundtracks and Techno. Or how Jon Tye himself puts it: “It really feels like music from a different place, a different time, made by different people.”

Quiet Voices is a collaborative musical and sound art project, mixing ambient & electronic music, cinematic atmospheres & spoken word, founded by Jean-Yves Leloup, featuring musical pieces he composed with Hélène Vogelsinger, Villeneuve & Morando, Wild Anima, François-Eudes Chanfrault and Maxence Cyrin. Most of the composers involved in this project are all working in the field of cinema, composing music using electronic and acoustic instruments. All these musicians are also working in the field of modern classical, ambient and electronic music. Through the use of spoken voices (some of them coming from films), the Quiet Voices project can be heard as a tribute to the power and emotion of cinema. Each track can be heard as a short film, or a scene, fostering the listener's imagination. All the pieces from the record are dealing with the themes of time, memory, death or loss, and often dealing with the idea of an imaginary intermediate dimension between life and death. Jean-Yves Leloup is a Paris-based french sound artist/DJ, curator and music writer. He is the curator of various music exhibitions (Electro at Paris Philharmonie, London Design Museum and Düsseldorf Kunst Palast) and the author of various books such as " Digital Magma ", " Global Techno ", " Techno 100 ", " Music Non-Stop " and t " Ambient Music : avant-garde, new age, chill-out & cinema " (2021). He teaches sound in cinema at Paris Esra cinema School, and has released four albums with the RadioMentale duo.

A bearhug of chill-out room gouching gear from MFM spanning the golden era of ‘90s ambient dance music with gems from David Moufang, LFO, Global Communication, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Sun Electric and many more notables of that era. Since the world turned into a big chill out room in early 2020, albeit with a heavy sense of anxiety, this set could hardly be better placed for downtime in the comfort of your own home, rolling out mystic highlights such as LFO’s MDMA-tingle arps and pads in ‘Helen’ and the sublime suspension systems of Global Communication’s remix of ‘Arcadian’, along with Move D’s early nugget ‘Sergio Leone’s Wet Dream’, and the lush pads of his close spar Jonah Sharp’s Spacetime Continuum, plus a strip of killer slow acid in Sideral’s ‘Mare Nostrum’, and the blissed romance of ‘Love 2 Love’ by Sun Electric. One for the lovers and the ravers.

From the viscerally punishing and nerve wrecking, to the wistfully sublime, Kevin Drumm‘s work often yield a ferocious intensity through the timbres of minute details. On ‘Battering Rams’, sinister forces interlope with sanguine glimmers of respite and contemplation, while recurring drones ceaselessly crescendo to near paralysing effect, only for the album's final moments to offer a lofty reprise of boundless oscillation, dispelling all the pent-up tension into a sanguine state of bliss. Once again, underpinning Kevin Drumms’ genius of transforming seemingly trivial sounds into elongated microtonal worlds that stay etched deeply in your conscious, often long after the work's final reverberations have subsided. Now, throughout this series of archival works dating from 2000 to 2022, his mastery is once again on full display and available via two new remastered formats.

The Gerogerigegege, the Japanese avant-blues music that has been attracting noise music lovers all over the world, is now available on long-awaited vinyl from The Trilogy Tapes, a limited edition cassette released last year by the popular fashion brand CAV EMPT.

This summer, I read Kenji Miyazawa's children's story (illustrated by Takeshi Motai), "Gauche the Cellist" (1934, illustrated by Takeshi Motai, 1956). Just a few days before I made this recording, I was on stage. As a result, I had to be in the same state of mind as Gauche at the beginning of the story. It was not a good feeling, but I knew it was not a coincidence that this book was in my possession, so I read it again and again, looked at Mr. Motai's picture of the raccoon boy again and again, and headed for the park before dawn. The only instrument I used was a Hapidrum, and the sticks were mallets that looked just like the ones the raccoon boy was holding...Juntaro Yamanouchi

"Oblivion Hymns rewrites [Hammock's] script, bringing strings to the fore in a manner that would make composer Max Richter or Hammock’s peers in A Winged Victory For The Sullen proud." —MAGNET "...some of the most blissful music Clash has ever had the luxury of bathing in. [Hammock] has gone on to become one of the foremost purveyors of affecting ambient post-rock on the scene." —Clash Music "Hammock’s music draws out such powerful emotions that one can be blinded with joy even while tears blur your vision."

We’re thrilled to announce NAFF017, “To / Deep”, by Chicago trio Purelink “To / Deep” comprises four tracks, two of which –Maintain the Bliss and Head On A Swivel– were previously released as a digital-only EP in 2021. Here, Purelink return to form with an updated sound, adding crystalline angularity and dialed precision to their warm, enveloping style. Blissed break abstractions flutter and gasp like shifting light through variegated glass. Rhythms arise within rhythms, the breath resounds throughout. “To / Deep” carries the uncanny feeling that home has changed, or that home is change.

Bog Bodies - the band consisting of Robert Stillman, Anders Holst and Seán Carpio delve into deep time to carve sonic abstractions across their self-titled new album on MIC. Navigating the “liminal territory between noise and signal, chaos and control, form and abstraction,” the trio recorded and mixed the album on an 8-track cassette machine. Bog Bodies is a searching inquiry into the mythologies and magical undercurrents that knit together our existence in the information age. Bog Bodies opens with a leftfield homage to Superman III, exploring the mythical qualities of technology through a series of angular horn lines that dissolve into the mire of feedback noise on the album’s raking, anthemic title track. Reverberating in tectonic sheets of sound on ‘One That Is Reflected In The Image Becomes All’ and Bog Bodies reaches its climax on the 11-minute ‘Cave Painting 2019’ - a subterranean epic of mystic force, drawn up from the earth in sweeping drones. Bringing together their combined experiences playing with the likes of Manuel Göttsching, Luke Temple, The Smile and more recently Coby Sey.

Arovane's acclaimed 2004 album »Lilies« has been out of print on vinyl for nearly 2 decades now. It finally gets a well-deserved reissue through the Berlin based Keplar label. The new version has been remastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering and comes with a brand new cover artwork. *2023 remaster* "Lilies" was a follow-up to "Tides" in every sense, exploring a trip to Japan and drawing on shimmering textures and the sort of melodies that you might need some time to recover from. There's a hugely evocative sense to these tracks, emotionally driven, free of complexity or conceit, piano melodies providing the central focus for a twilight cascade of light that seems perfect for the Tokyo skyline - just as the sun sets. It's an album that radiates warmth and vulnerability, fusing the technological might at the heart of each track (and at the heart of the city) with an age-old understanding that certain echoes of sound, small melodic changes and cushioned lullabies can imprint sounds on your mind like childhood memories - remembered forever. Like a dreamlike score, or maybe even an alternate soundtrack to "Lost in Translation" - the sort of music that intertwines with images and stays in your mind indefinately. After coming back from Tokyo and completing the production of "Lilies", Uwe Zahn disassembled his studio in the big flat in an old building in Berlin's Prenzlauerberg district and stored it away in boxes. He needed a break from making music. "Lilies" was the last album prior to a nine-year hiatus for Arovane, ending in 2013 with the release of "Ve Palor".

With Narration, Toki Fuko returns to Affin after a long break. The EP contains 4 stylistically diverse tracks (some of them overlong), which are captivating in their perfection and document the musical versatility of the musician, who skilfully moves between dubby, hypnotic, in-depth techno here.An extremely worthy successor and a grandiose further development of the Astatine EP from 2020. Keplar continue their Arovane reissue program with this long overdue edition of Uwe Zahn's iconic EP collection 'Icol Diston' that features some of his finest productions, all releases by cult legendary label Din (the Hardwax one, not Ian Boddy's label). From the shockingly contemporary rework of Torsten T++ Pröfrock's 'Außen vor' to the itchy industrial grind of 'icol vern', it holds up. After Zahn changed track completely with 'Tides' in 2000, Pröfrock's DIN label assembled the then Berlin-based producer's early 12"s - "i.o.", "icol diston" and "AMX" - into "Icol Diston", closing the book on the first iteration of his sound. Zahn had written the music during a time of unprecedented musical freedom in Berlin, and felt the city's energy seep into ideas he was exploring in his rapidly growing studio. "There was an overwhelming dynamic of liberation reverberating through the city—through the clubs, the arts, the people," he says. During long tram rides, he would dream out the rhythmic sequences he'd reassemble later using a handful of synths, sequences and samplers, recording live in stereo straight to DAT. So invariably, this is some of the most intricate beat oriented material Zahn has ever produced, drawing on the blueprint of Autechre's seminal "Tri Repetae" and fashioned in the shadow of Hardwax and the mighty Dubplates & Mastering, welding dub bass and tekno stabs to skittering IDM repeaters and cycling hats. With the benefit of hindsight, it all makes complete sense. His first release, "i.o." was an attempt for Zahn to map out a process he'd explore further on the following year's "Atol Scrap". These are still some of the producer's most iconic recordings, and show how well developed his sound was even at the very beginning. Gravelly beats immediately push to the front of the title track, steadily overwhelmed by winding, melancholy synth patterns that would become an Arovane staple in the coming years. 'parf' and 'torn' follow largely the same path (the latter being a particular highlight), but it's when Zahn switches things up on 'andar' that the depth of his sound begins to show. Using a rumbling kick and barely-present glitches to provide an almost hip-hop jolt, he concentrates his focus on undulating, dubby atmospherics that allow his signature melodies to poke only half-way through the fog. The EP's follow-up "icol diston" meanwhile is some of the most upfront music Zahn has produced to date, immediately showing his rhythmic advances on the glassy 'yua:e', a self-assured collision of pulsing, stepped kicks, polyrhythmic crunches and euphoric analog washes. Zahn even responds to the rave echoes that surrounded him in Berlin with 'nacrath', contorting 'ardkore stabs into chirpy, hopeful lead sequences that dance through sine pulses, harp-like synth plucks and halfstep bumps. But hands-down our favorite moments come from Zahn's final DIN 12", where he remixed two tracks from Pröfrock himself: Dynamo's 'außen vor' and Various Artists' 'no.8'. The former is legendary around these parts, showing Zahn's skill working in plushest technoid mode as he skips around a squashed deep house template, letting pads slowly affect the flow with distant longing, and the latter is a remodel of Pröfrock's most crushing recording. Zahn takes his friend's smoked-out synth squelches and adds a low, slow beat that comes across like a weightless answer to Timbaland's Missy/Tweet run, dominating the soundsystem with subdued, syncopated force. Both tracks still sound like little else out there, and they haven't aged a day. Massive recommendation, obviously.

Andrea’s second album “Due In Color“ was primarily created in 2020 and 2021. During these crazy and decelerated times he explored more hazy and experimental Jazz, which inspired him to use more acoustic sounds in his productions. Dark loud clubs are in a far away distance, while Andrea takes us to wonderful blooming fields.

Invisible Inc is over the moon to finally be announcing this long-awaited double album of new music by Secret Circuit. Presented here are 21 new pieces (or 22 if you count the bandcamp-exclusive digital bonus) recorded between 2020 and 2022 which capture that spacey, otherworldly quality Secret Circuit is known for but they also very much veer into the warmer, earthier and generally more ambient textural territories of his E Ruscha V and Only Thingz work...an altogether softer sensibility. The fact that the second disc of the double album is primarily ambient further confuses the issue! But Secret Circuit this most definitely is! From a plethora of demos (40+) Invisible Inc label boss GK Machine wanted to distill these down and explore a side of Ruscha's that he felt hadn't been heard before, focussing on Ruscha's more emotive yet at the same time experimental side. Is that a paradox? Well, let's say only very rarely do we hear modular synths doing something so human-sounding, and when these are juxtaposed alongside slide guitars, live bass and vocodered vocals, we have something very special indeed. Then there's the artwork...all lovingly drawn by E Ruscha V himself and landing on our desk long after the record had gone into production and test pressings delivered and approved. The package is made complete with a double-sided colour insert with liner notes and another of Ruscha's mind-warping doodles. Oh and the liner notes are written in reverse so you'll need a mirror to read them. Of course they are! To cut a long story short, everything about this release is archetypal classic Secret Circuit and couldn't be anyone else. A highpoint for the label in 2023, no doubt.

New family members Loris S. Sarid & Innis Chonnel summon a long-overdue return to the 12th Isle with an album built around percussive sounds taken from various mic-ed up objects found in a wood workshop on the East Coast of Scotland. With the pair occasionally leaving said workshop to enjoy some respite in Innis Chonnel’s horse box / studio, the artists hatched a plan to process and program their field recordings, later combining them with improvised synthesiser rhythms and overdubs. The tracks began to materialise over the course of a few follow-up sessions by which time saws sang and flutes flowed through watering cans. Shortly afterwards they found their way to us via carrier pigeon on a CD-ROM that smelt vaguely of soiled hay and we knew we had to act. With the help of an old reel to reel and the tape bounce & mastering work of Murray Collier, we present them here in their final format.

The first Huerco S. album in 6 years, glyding into new territory with a pool of glassy synths, padded subs and cascading arpeggios, pretty much unlike anything Brian Leeds has made under any alias. "His sound palette has broadened to absorb and refine trap’s un-smeared geometrics and drill’s taught rhythms amongst the gaseous bodies and soul-piercing ambience that has garnered such acclaim; Where those previous veins were rooted in the pre-Columbian civilizations of his native Kansas, Plonk reflects the mournful sodium glow of cities at night, street corners that light up with painful moments of clarity you wish would disappear."

Experimental musician John Also Bennett’s latest full-length emerged from a bicoastal pandemic road trip through the badlands of South Dakota. Moved by the scale and complexity of the landscape – “remnants of an ancient seafloor mixed with the ash of a volcanic eruption, eroded over millennia and now resembling the tangled folds of earth’s brain” – he sculpted a series of stark, microtonal arrangements using a 1940’s Oahu lap steel guitar, a Yamaha SY77 multi-timbral synthesizer, and field recordings. The following year, upon relocating with his wife (Kranky composer Christina Vantzou) to the cliffside village of Livaniana on the island of Crete, Bennett discovered a method of translating his minimalist lap steel phrases into live MIDI information, which he then used to trigger different waveforms to extend the resonance of the instrument. This multi-layered generative process resulted in a collection as vast and bewildering as the terrain that inspired it: Out there in the middle of nowhere. Opening with the desolate 15-minute “Nowhere,” Bennett’s playing is both glacial and geological, attuned to “the wonder and absolute emptiness” of the Badlands as “an infinite living sculpture.” Notes stretch, shift, and drift into vistas of twilit silence. Footsteps crunch across dry soil and rocky ravines, beneath skies stretching to the horizon. The use of extreme glissandos conjures a sense of windswept plains and winding canyons, primordial and unpopulated. Even outlier “Spectral Valley” – one of the few nods towards Bennett’s work in progressive kosmische trio Forma – unfolds with patient grandeur, rich swells of electronics gleaming in long golden arcs. Closing track “Embrosnerόs” (named for the verdant interior Cretan village where it was recorded) best embodies the album’s cinematic liminality, at the axis of barren and beatific. Gestural breaths of lap steel shimmer in sparkling air, with echoes of both the dusty West and some forgotten paradise. Bennett describes its creation as taking place “mostly during sunset hours, blanketed by waves of cicadas as sheep bells twinkled in the distance.” A micro-tuned DX7 radiates in the periphery while the guitar’s strings hang and reverberate like deepening shadows at dusk.

“Conflict was an album I made during a years long dispute with a loved one. My desired outcome of the argument was that the other person would admit they’re wrong, but upon seeing that wasn’t going to happen, I tried to find a way to exist peacefully in the disagreement. The songs on Conflict try to find the space between right and wrong, winning and losing, etc.

Each song title presents a duality: The pain of a pilgrim’s journey vs. the reward of salvation, the star power of a charming boxer vs. his penchant for violence, the beauty of a battered painting vs. the fight that warped it. The music tries to stay balanced between the two opposites. Each composition starts as a 2 or 4 bar looping piano figure and usually only develops slightly, never changing key or tempo or dynamics. The flute accompaniment improvises on only 3 or 4 possible note choices per song.

This quote by MMA fighter Platinum Mike Perry was often in my head during the recording: ‘Absorb the pain and react smoothly… don’t become distracted by the white noise of possibilities…experience a flow-like state, even an Ultra Instinct.’ Funny enough, there is a bunch of white noise on this record from the DX7 synthesizer and cheap piano mics, but it doesn’t distract from the music.”

A missing link from Iasos meets Visible Cloaks! A prodigy who is also known for releasing from , he has a vision of "Modern New Age", and by actually listening to New Age music, he healed his own depression. New Agers, Matthewdavid. "On Mushrooms EP", which was produced as an introductory work for the album "Mycelium Music" to be released from , which is led by himself, is now available on cassette. An organic and ethereal ambient/drone work in which Sam Gendel's ally Sam Wilkes and labelmate Brin also participated.

A cult work that has been talked about for years by some music lovers in Japan is now officially available for the first time! ethereal, mysterious sound.

A performance of the single-note percussion instrument "quire chime" by 12 users of "Yamato Kogen Taiyo no Ie", a support facility for people with disabilities in Yamazoe-mura, Nara Prefecture. The fresh and transparent tones, played one by one and at random, eventually formed a series of beautiful music. I wonder if there has ever been such pure and unadulterated music. This work is the ultimate improvised ambient that penetrates deep into the listener's subconscious.
Chee Shimizu

A cult work that has been talked about for years by some music lovers in Japan is now officially available for the first time! ethereal, mysterious sound.

A performance of the single-note percussion instrument "quire chime" by 12 users of "Yamato Kogen Taiyo no Ie", a support facility for people with disabilities in Yamazoe-mura, Nara Prefecture. The fresh and transparent tones, played one by one and at random, eventually formed a series of beautiful music. I wonder if there has ever been such pure and unadulterated music. This work is the ultimate improvised ambient that penetrates deep into the listener's subconscious.
Chee Shimizu

A late ‘90s neo-noir ambient jungle masterpiece, Christoph De Babalon’s 'If You’re Into It, I’m Out Of It' sounds something like Thomas Köner re-assembling fierce, unrelenting D&B with his frozen gear. Now a quarter of a century old, it still occupies its own distinct notch on the continuum; copied endlessly, never bettered. Christoph De Babalon was a key member of Digital Hardcore, the mutant Berlin-based splinter cell who fused UK rave music with more experimental, Teutonic techno, Ambient and hardedge politics to brutal effect during the mid-late ‘90s. CDB was always somehow on another level to most of his peers and labelmates at DHR, less interested in purely aggy breakbeat energy, his was a sound that also embraced windswept, ice-cold ambient atmospherics and a bleak sort of romance that was at odds with the almost cartoonish “sound terror” aesthetic of the label. For us, ‘If You’re Into It, I’m Out Of It’ really distills a feeling of that era, as the utopian outlook of rave’s early years had given way to something much darker, more maudlin, perhaps symptomatic of an ennui with dance music’s hyper-commercial land grab, a kind of pre-millennial tension. Either way, it provided the perfect soundtrack to ravers who were spending more time developing virtual lives online, or (speaking from experience) who weren’t yet old enough to go raving, but were shelled with media images and 2nd hand impressions of the culture, which had by then morphed into the prevailing trends of garage, trance, and prog house, and was but a ghost of its original, loony self. It’s an album torn between extreme states; on the one hand going harder than the rest in killer rave moves such as the hardcore rattler ‘Dead (Too)’, the epic amen + drone blow-out ‘My Confession’, or the cut-throat beast ‘Water’. But on the other, it gets properly haunting on the remarkable 15 minute opener ‘Opium’, or with the sublime, Gas-like suspension system of ‘Brilliance’, and the funereal, bombed-out bliss of ‘High Life (Theme)’. Christoph De Babalon effectively plotted out terrain that bridged DJ Scud’s rugged jungle breakcore with soundscaping more commonly associated with Thomas Köner or Deathprod, and in the process set the ground for myriad contemporary producers and sounds ranging from Raime and Blackest Ever Black to Demdike, Pessimisst and beyond. ‘If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It’ was, and still is, a deadly statement of intent, with an aesthetic that still strongly resonates and influences today. Classic.

'Faith In Strangers’ was recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in July 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener ‘Time Away’ featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track ‘Missing’ a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore who also appeared on 2012’s ‘Luxury Problems’. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a deep sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with ‘No Surrender’- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ finds the sweet spot between RZA’s classic ‘Ghost Dog’ and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. ‘Faith in Strangers’ is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott’s mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that turn this album into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott’s career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

The music on this recording is performed by a kind of fictitious chamber ensemble situated in an imaginary room outlined by textures that alternate between gestural foreground and passive landscape. The three pieces contained within this release are tied together by sharing similar harmonic material and instrumentation and could ideally be perceived as parts of one long performance stretching through the two sides of the record. The textural room in which this musical performance operates is unreliable, unstable, constantly shifting in size and activity from sparse and open to dense and claustrophobic. Inside this non-euclidean performance space a chamber ensemble made up of zithers expanded through analog tape transposition, harmonium and organ, double bass, digital FM, feedback-convolution and Serge modular synthesizer perform a music made from justly tuned intervals arranged in a way that blurs the distinction between traditional minor and major tonal harmony in favor of harmonic progression within an essentially modal framework. In terms of the material used to make these pieces, essentially all non-harmonic sounds are contaminated field-recordings. They have gone through a sort of feedback process between digital and analog, or acoustic, processing where field-recorded material has been edited, processed and re-amplified and recorded again in acoustic spaces that shape the character of the material and imprint acoustic identities on the recordings. The tonal instruments were treated in a process analogous to this - harmonic material built from recordings and digitally generated synthesis was recorded, transcribed, rearranged and overdubbed again with additional electronic or acoustic instruments to form a composite electroacoustic instrumental sound.