MUSIC

A limited edition first ever pressing of Arca’s iconic @@@@@ mixtape, the scorching of earth that preceded the launch of her KICK series. Delivering 62 minutes of quantum states, this is some of her most delicate and astonishing work to date - hard, soft, emotional, brutal, sincere and playful. Presented on double vinyl with an etched D-side.

For the inaugural release on Quadrant Park, SDEM delivers a live recording with a twist: this set was recorded in early 2024 in a single take to an audience of one, at a now abandoned empty club space beneath a railway arch in Leeds.

Following a series of physical and digital releases culminating with Vortices in 2023, SDEM has focused on continuous upgrades to a mutating live set, sporadically performed, for example, alongside the Autechre and Gescom axes. In the phase documented here, the set draws deeply from turntable-era early hip hop and 80s drum machine architecture, resulting in a landscape of tactile slippage: rhythms gripping and releasing, gestural scrubs and stabs, scratching meets musique concrète. Interlocking parts snap in and out of alignment, before recombining on the fly – kinetic, raw, and precise.

The SDEM approach is marked by Tom Knapp’s sculptural take on sound design, rhythm and texture – ranging from dystopic ambient passages to pixelated, sub-heavy beats. A member of the Skam circle of atavistic beat freaks since the late 90s, Knapp’s sound is that of hyperattentive electronica buried under soil and left to decay (or ferment). What emerges is somehow both ruthlessly futuristic and redolent of decrepit antique engineering.

At Quadrant Park is presented in an edition of 500 compact discs with artwork by Robert Beatty unique to every individual copy. In a warped reflection of the recording circumstances, each copy forms one distinct frame of a short film never to be viewed in its totality.

Liner notes are provided by the sole witness to the recording, long-standing SDEM co-conspirator Ed Martin, aka edv3ctor, while audio was mastered by the ears that matter, frozen reeds mainstay Jim O’Rourke.

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.

Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.

While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

AS Over and FT Over (Active noise canceling script) is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.

On AS Amygdala anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”

The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.

On AS U, Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.

AS Back staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence” FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say.
FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin. 

hexed!, aya’s second album, confronts the desperation and dysfunction of addiction. Internalised phobias and suppressed traumas, haunt the corridors and golden hours once romanticised on 2021’s im hole; daymares concealed by nocturnal afters-hopping and key bag circles. Opener ‘I am the pipe I hit myself with’ exposes the gray portrait secreted somewhere between the 8th and 9th floors of her previous record. ‘I used to say some shit for sure’, ‘I used to say it when I was me-less’. hexed! is about what happens when aya turns the lights on.

"Robin Stewart regrows dub techno from the seeds on 'Crinkle', following 2023's 'When A Worm Wears A Wig' with a set of twisted warehouse melters that apply advanced dub logic to pointillistic technoid rhythms. RIYL Rhyw, Peder Mannerfelt or Rrose.

Think about dub techno for a moment and it's not hard to imagine a very specific aesthetic - something that began with Basic Channel in the '90s and plateaued only a few years later. This was just one application, though; not only has techno mutated in the last few decades, but there's more to dub than bussed tape echo and snatched stabs. Bristol-based Stewart goes back to the source here, considering the way his favorite vintage dub records hit physically, not just how they sound on the surface. It's not an easy mental leap to make, considering the trade up you need to make when you prioritize soft, warm bass throbs over the kind of ear-bleed kicks you'd expect find knocking the mortar from the Berghain brickwork every weekend. When does techno stop being techno altogether, exactly?

So 'Stomach' is a genuine surprise, leaving Giant Swan's punky, maximalist swagger as a distant memory. The off-grid, lolloping kicks are interesting enough on their own, but it's how Stewart treats them that makes the track pop, sinking them in swirling, lysergic goop rather than drowning them out with rinsed tape FX. The oscillating, demonic subs that heave just beneath the surface don't muddy things completely, they crack the sunroof on the top end, letting the industrialized foley clanks and hoarse vocaloid stutters boot us towards an unexpected destination. And although 'Compact' is more trad on the surface - a gated peak-time roller, natch - Stewart's canny processing makes the kicks tickle more than they thump. Everything builds up to the title track, where Stewart freezes mind-rinsing dissociated echo spirals into their own rhythmic forms that push against the relentless double-time thuds, weaving phantom polyrhythms out of thin air while spectral voices whisper overhead.

Don't sleep on this one - just make sure you've got Adrian Sherwood's shrooms plug on speed dial first." - Boomkat

Electronic music producer, vocalist, and performer AYA, known for his incisive experimental sound and challenging lyricism, releases his 2021 book and digital album “im hole” on one-press limited edition color vinyl! The album brings together the experimental sounds of her early years, the humor she displayed in her DJ sets and edits, and the identity-shaking lyricism of her live performances, and has been named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork since its release, as well as one of DJ Mary Anne Hobbs' best albums of the year! It was also selected as one of DJ Mary Anne Hobbs' best albums of the year, and has received high acclaim. Using fragments of rhythm, noise, and sound, the artist freely transforms themes of language, dialect, gender, and sexuality to weave an autobiographical narrative, while at the same time breaking the self-absorbed loop that queer art tends to fall into, and questioning preconceived notions and stereotypes. The title “im hole” represents the ambiguous balance between self-realization and sexuality, and includes a provocative perspective on the trans experience as it is culturally described. In terms of sound, the album deconstructs existing sounds and words and reconstructs them in unexpected ways. The storytelling is characterized by a sharp sense of humor that shines through the despair, and the multi-layered and challenging sound draws the listener in as dubstep merges with detailed melodies and delicate sound textures. This is a piece that will once again offer a taste of the charms of the new album, which is scheduled for 2025.