MUSIC

With 'Respire', Stockholm's Sonja Tofik presents a collection of works that cluster around themes of disunion and contemplation. In two halves, tiers of synthetic materials are layered into sullen reveries with organic components and concrète treatments, and as the obscurity of their genesis reaches a crescendo, these delicate and foreboding compositions find further means of communication the more they blister and bloom.

Rod Modell returns as Deepchord for his first solo release on Astral Industries since inaugurating the label with his sought-after ‘Lanterns’ EP. Consisting of two stunning long-form pieces split on one side each, 'Immersions' captures the emotive, halcyon sound that Rod has long become synonymous with. Opening with glistening ambient textures, ‘Immersion I’ grows into an 18-minute piece of deep rolling dub techno. On the other side ‘Immersion II’ paints pristine soundscapes of soft, lapping waves, underpinned by submerged pulsations that rise to the surface to continue its deep space explorations. Two highly refined and inspiring tracks that sit on the apogee of this sound.

“I had the honour of remixing all of the Bamboo tapes that J.Derwort ever recorded. Most of my mixes were approved by the master himself during the last days of his life in Oliva, Spain. For ‘Eleven’, I sampled from his last live performance at Jazzcafe Dizzy in Rotterdam on February 11th, 2018. He died on the day of the release of our latest Chi Factory album, ‘The Mantra Recordings’, on February 11th, 2019. We will miss him, life will not be the same. Farewell soul brother!” Words by Hanyo van Oosterom.

Dots written by Atom™. Recorded 1994 at "Sel I/S/C", Frankfurt/M. Under exclusive license from the AtomTM_Audio_Archive.

Mark Van Hoen's long-running Locust project arrives on the New York label Mysteries of The Deep with The First Cause. Across the album, Van Hoen deftly balances tough, fuzzy, crunching and distorted sounds with spectral vocal loops and ethereal atmospheres - channelling the ghosts of jungle, techno and trip-hop. The crushing bass weight and gloom never become oppressive as slivers of light illuminate the darkness.

Matti Bye is a Swedish composer and pianist with an illustrious catalogue spanning two decades, with numerous soundtracks and releases on Kning Disk, Rotor Records, Tona Serenad and Time Released Sound. He has previously appeared on Northen Electronics via compilations, but Between Darkness and White Snow is his first album for the label. The creation involved playing a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano through his EMS Synthi A. It was recorded onto tape with a vintage Swiss Nagra IV S tape machine giving it a wonderful warm analogue fidelity. We get four shadowy, soul-stirring, brittle ambient pieces traversing light and dark which are a pleasure to get lost inside during the small hours.

Il Quadro di Troisi presents La Commedia Everything changes, all things evolve: four years after their eponymous debut, Il Quadro di Troisi return with a new album and a new line-up. The perfect circle traced by Eva Geist (aka Andrea Noce) and Donato Dozzy (aka Donato Scaramuzzi) becomes a triangle with the permanent addition of Pietro Micioni, who collaborated in the previous recordings and had been part of ll Quadro’s live set. Nothing stays the same, and the world is a lot different from what it was in 2020. The global crisis generated by the constant escalation of conflict and by the pandemic was mirrored by a time of individual crisis and personal, often irreversible transformation that underscored the entire period of the album’s composition. The influence of these turbulent times is felt in the writing: La Commedia is about turning a crisis into an opportunity and using change as a catalyst for rebirth. Much like the characters in classic Italian comedies, who are masters in using irony to face life’s hardships, Il Quadro di Troisi explores the vast and unpredictable terrain between the lighter and darker sides of the human experience, matching the magical with the mundane. La Commedia is about the many facets of life: each song is named after an archetype (e.g. the truth, the night, the Earth, the prophet), as though our existence were a tarot deck and its reading an exercise in collective consciousness. La Commedia marks the band’s embrace of a more traditional song form, shaped by a very personal and distinctive musical style. The distinguishing elements of Il Quadro di Troisi’s music – classic Italian songwriting with an electronic spin – meld into a unique mix that is both seductive and eerie, elegant and earthy, contemporary and timeless. La Commedia celebrates the band’s cultural roots while constantly moving into new territory, balancing nostalgia with a forward-thinking approach. La Commedia is a rare gem that confirms Il Quadro di Troisi’s relevance in the international music scene, as demonstrated by the number of top-level artists featured on the album: from Suzanne Ciani, a legend and a pioneer of independent music with a career spanning five decades, to Aimee Portioli, aka Grand River, a Dutch-Italian musician, composer and sound designer based in Berlin, along with Francesca Colombo’s eclectic violin (the de facto “fourth angle” of Il Quadro di Troisi’s frame), Fiona Brice’s strings, cultural agitator and icon of the Roman underground scene Stefano Di Trapani (aka Demented Burrocacao and a member of Trapcoustic and System Hardware Abnormal, among other projects), Maestro Daniele Di Gregorio, an excellent musician and a longtime collaboration of songwriting legend Paolo Conte, and Tommaso Cappellato, whose professional description goes well beyond “drummer” and who has been working with artists like Rabih Beaini and Maurice Louca. The cover of the album, as well as those of the singles, was designed by Francesco Messina, another icon of Italian music. Messina is a longtime Franco Battiato collaborator and co-author, a cult musician (his Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo, made in collaboration with Roul Lovisoni, is considered a seminal record by the alternative Italian music scene), as well as a photographer, visual artist and the author of legendary record covers.

Repress! Vinyl LP presented in a deluxe edition with printed innersleeve and a special transparent obi strip; the cover is also printed internally. Hand numbered. Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electronic bridges in semi-darkness to allow us to cross too. No words would be needed to explain this work... It is the meeting of two people, an exchange of different points of view. A way to meet and then break up. Rod has reworked a piece of Gigi making it his own... and so did Gigi with a piece of Rod. A magnificent intersection of sounds and thoughts... remaining suspended to watch the passing of time, to listen to the noises and silences of life that passes inexorably around us.

Acclaimed guitar duo Loren Connors and Alan Licht celebrate their 30-year collaboration with release of their eighth album — At The Top Of The Stairs.Across the decades, their improvisations turned increasingly abstract and atonal, while still maintaining complex, ethereal arrangements. The harmonious blend of Licht's meticulously crafted feedback and harmonic patterns with Connors' ghostly blue tones remains the core sound of this partnership. At The Top Of The Stairs was recorded live in 2018. Across two side-long pieces, the duo ascends slowly, through layers of atmospheric tension punctuated by thunderous waves of Connors' effects.For fifty years, Connors's adaptation of acoustic Delta blues has transmuted into miniature gray scale compositions and howling riffs. His collaborators include Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon. Rock/experimental musician Alan Licht was a member of the bands Love Child, Run On, and Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, and has released a range of acclaimed rock and experimental albums. He is an author with books published by Rizzoli, W.W. Norton, Faber & Faber and Blank Forms.

Written and recorded with the goal of creating a one-movement suite in the least amount of time possible, "Succo di formiche" reflects the archetypal joy of music making, the spontaneous impulses underlying its formation, and a love of the record album form.

Echoes, Spaces, Lines collects Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, the first three albums by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. Exploring all corners of the multiverse through transpersonal form and freedom, Strom’s first three albums share a singular sensibility, different streams flowing from the same oracular font. Echoes, Spaces, Lines establishes Strom’s rightful place in the canon of great synthesists. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, newly remastered, and adding Oceans of Tears, a fully realized but previously unreleased album exclusive to this box set, these are the first official reissues and the definitive encapsulation of Pauline Anna Strom’s prolific and visionary early work. This four LP box set includes a 12-page booklet containing liner notes, an unearthed interview with Strom, and unseen ephemera.

Spectre is the third album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1984, the album finds Strom exploring the darker corridors of human mythology under the influence of vampiric lore, evoking a hushed gothic solitude and showcasing her breathtaking dexterity of sound design. Despite its shadowy hues, Spectre offers generous glimpses of a vivid light that could only have come from a heart wide open to the cosmos. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Plot Zero is the second album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1983, Strom envisioned the album as a “mind trip without chemicals,” utilizing boundless imagination to cover a canvas with brilliant synthesized shapes and tones. The pieces on Plot Zero flow freely and infinitely, evoking a transportative momentum with Strom’s distinctive synthesizers soaring across infinite horizons into vast, colorful nebulas. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Trans-Millenia Consort is the near mythical debut album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1982, the album is a bold and beautiful evocation of a life that exists between and beyond time. Evoking ancient rituals and primordial futures, the music of Trans-Millenia Consort glows with a strange iridescence; its pulsing embryonic waveforms flutter and drift, tones fall like raindrops of the long-ago, and melodies shimmer and dance across the ages like fireflies of a lost world. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

As escapism from corporate banality turned the corner in the ‘90s, a new generation of vibrant, software generated soundscapes emerged. Communal access to the internet propagated the new hive mind of ideas online, giving way to smoother, stress-free textures. The PC revolution opened the gateway to ray-traced playgrounds of color and light, allowing for visions of utopic proportions to manifest themselves on screensavers far and wide. Boot up your machine, load the software on this floppy diskette, and drop out of a reality bounded by the physical laws of the universe.

Numero 95 is the soundtrack to the screen saver fever dream we’re all trying to climb back into. Eight droplets of proto-vaporwave, synthesized in vinyl (or digital) form, fresh from Numero’s archive of forgotten sounds. Are you looking for that half way point between smooth jazz and new age? Mac and PC? Quantum Leap and the X-Files? This software is for you. 

Housed in a replica floppy diskette, Numero 95 explores an early computer music unbound by scene or region. Eight solo pioneers vibing out at home in their headphones, traveling as far as the sound card would allow. This is music that barely escaped the hard drive and yet percolates at the edges of the algorithm 30 years later. 

Welcome to Numero 95.

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography and creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within Walker’s music has never been so articulately explored, or graced with as much intention, as on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed and engineered entirely by Walker, with the exception of some subtle upright bass from C.J. Boyd on the song “Window I.” Producing the album on her own wasn’t Walker’s original intention, though; after flying to New York in November 2019 to develop some home-recorded tracks with The Blow’s Melissa Dyne, a sudden illness forced Walker to cancel the sessions and return home to Tucson to recover, and soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic ruled out the possibility of a return trip to New York. Instead, Walker decided to finish the album herself in her makeshift home studio. She spent the following months recording, processing and arranging her self-described “messy Ableton sessions” into densely harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and her own dulcet singing voice, allowing trial, error and intuition to guide her way. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient compositions (as in the instrumentals “Horizon, Harbor Resonance” and “For Heddi”) and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting (as in the lyrics-focused tracks “Reconstellated” and “Waking the Dreaming Body”), their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

A timeless minimal ambient masterpiece that was released only in CDR in 2003.

Recorded in 2007 and 2008, Cursory Asperses was created with cassette tape recordings of water sounds from various rivers, streams, lakes, beaches, and pools, combined with direct to tape instrument recordings from synthesizers, an organ, cello, piano, and bowed instruments. Instead of traditionally mixing these, at the time we were interested in software, using free Mac OS Classic programs such as Audiosculpt and Soundhack. Before we had a DAW, before VSTs, we used non-realtime convolution processing through software, using the water recordings as an impulse for the instrument sounds. The instrument sounds were "arranged" (by adding silence before, during, or after) in layered, visual swathes, to create an audio interpretation of the movement of water and waves, slowly evolving and shifting, for a meditation on deep and focused listening. Opposed to passivity, where sounds become lost in distant tones and layers upon layers are misinterpreted as single, meaningless tones. Or, it's just as meaningless as the passing of water, the flow of rivers - the crashes of sparkling ocean waves, all those sounds that we recognize. The tones are unpolished, left in their fuzzy form, with the high noise crushed into the deep. Behind the swells, and under the depths is a longing, or a lack thereof. It's passing by, no different than it was years before.

A subjective mixtape by Dj Salinger. Mixed, recorded and assembled by Dj Salinger in a state of deep melancholy. Mastering by Franz Kirmann.

Franz Kirmann is a French music producer living in London. He has made albums for various labels including Denovali, Bytes, Mercury KX. He also writes music for film and TV and is a lecturer in music production at Point Blank Music school.
 

Pretty Sneaky, the anonymous project that has been quietly hiding behind a banana peel logo and self released white label 12” EPs, present their dilated and slomo sub laden atmospheres, this time for Marionette - following elusive outings for label favorites Mana and Meakusma. After being introduced to PS through a common connection back in 2016, a year before their very first self published white label release, it was only in 2021 that we reconnected to discuss an album for the label. Maintaining anonymity all these years is something to admire and respect, and PS is a reminder that the music itself and the imagination of it is compelling enough without the need to attach the name, face, or any context to the listening experience - going against the grain of trends. Koldd (aka Norman Levy), is a longtime friend and collaborator of Pretty Sneaky, and while Norman has played instruments on two previous cuts (Meakusma ‘track 1’ and PRSN4 ‘track 3’) - this is their very first collaborative release, where five of the recordings were produced at Levy’s studio in Marseille. The seven themes presented here lysergically weave field recordings of bird call and wind/water with pastoral synth lines and resonating modular patches that are on occasion sideswiped with a bass-heavy thump and stripped back percussion. This album is a mysterious offering for the heads out there looking to get transported to the macro space around us while reminiscing the dancefloor - the sort of thing you’d play for your friends after a night out that blows them to smithereens.

WRWTFWW Records is so happy to announce Shower, the brand-new album by New York born, Los Angeles based ambient / jazz / downtempo musician Danny Scott Lane, following the recently released and very well-received cozy soundscape, Home Decor. The limited edition LP (500 copies worldwide) is available on biovinyl housed in a heavy 350gsm sleeve featuring an illustration by Gabrielle Rul and design by Jazlyn Fung. The album is also available digitally. Continuing to gently push (caress?) the boundaries of chill out music, smooth jazz, and comfy electronica, Shower draws inspiration from “the feeling of a steamy shower shared with a stranger after a night on the dance floor”, a warm immersive affair for the mind and the body. This latest funky auditory experience once again invites Matt Elliot Gooden’s soothing saxophone, and this time also welcomes the vibrant beats of drummer David Ruiz. Organic, discreet in the most relaxing and elegant ways, and just the right amount of sexy – Lane’s new creation offers the finest in audio cocooning. As you tilt your head back and close your eyes, let the hot and dripping sounds of Shower transport you to a world of sonic serenity. Feel the rich textures and appeasing harmonies wash over you, enveloping your senses in pure musical bliss. Shower is the first new release by WRWTFWW Records made with biovinyl, a sustainable alternative to traditional vinyl. Biovinyl replaces petroleum in S-PVC by recycling used cooking oil or industrial waste gases, resulting in 100% CO₂ savings in bio-based S-PVC production. Furthermore, it is 100% recyclable and reusable, embracing the circular economy ideology.

London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Akusmi announces »Lines«, an exhilarating new collection of works born from the desire to take where the acclaimed debut album »Fleeting Future« left off - in search of new forms. Formed with a sense of urgency and a reductive approach »Lines« is almost entirely comprised of alto saxophone, clarinet and piano with embellishments of ambience and minimal percussive elements. Recorded in full at his home studio in London, Pascal Bideau speaks about the process: »I wanted to go a bit more a bit more horizontal and ambient, work with layers of lines, might they be dotted or straight, and leave them to unfold and see where they would take me.« Akusmi uniquely finds the spaces in between experimental jazz, crossover classical and ambient music.

Silencio" is the ninth album in total, and the last album released on Haruomi Hosono's private label, Daisy World Discs, in 2010. At the time of its release, Haruomi Hosono praised this quiet masterpiece with the comment, "The path Soichiro Suzuki found on 'Silencio' among the miscellaneous sounds buzzing in the labyrinth will be a valuable guide for those who come after him.

Quantum Web is the new album from Discovery Zone, the experimental pop project of musician and multimedia artist JJ Weihl. Dipping into a pool of musically stylistic depth and flipping themes of omnipresence in advertising and corporate culture sterility into aesthetic guideposts for her omnivorous compositions, Quantum Web represents the next evolutionary phase of Discovery Zone while arranging the past, present, and future across the infinite, invisible web that interconnects us all. First edition vinyl includes a printed inner sleeve with album lyrics.