MUSIC

First Babe Roots album perfectly executed. This is the perfect balance between dub structures and reggae rhythms. Album composed and produced by Babe Roots in Berlin (DE) and Turin (IT) between 2013 and 2016. Mastered by Mathieu Berthet at Berthet Mastering Paris. Artwork by Miranda. 12" 180gr black vinyl.

Pole is the project of ground-breaking electronic musician Stefan Betke. The new album Fading is the first since 2015’s Wald. As with every new Pole record, it’s part of a continued forward trajectory but it also connects to a pre-existing sonic framework. “Every Pole record connects to recordings that I've made before,” Betke says, “in order to stay in this kind of vertical development. The ideas from 1, 2, 3 [his groundbreaking first three albums] up to now are connected. I keep the interesting elements, languages and vocabulary that I designed and add new elements.” Fading follows the physical released on Mute of remastered versions of his iconic albums 1, 2, 3 to much acclaim.

Andy Stott’s radical 2011 bonecrusher returns on its first new pressing for almost a decade, still screwing the dance and heads like nothing else with its lo-sprung suspended takes on boogie dub and claggiest rhythmic thumpers.
The sludgy, slow-motion slug of ‘Passed Me By’ marked a pivotal point when Stott swam against the grain of prevailing currents of the post-dubstep era’s turn toward garage-techno and UKF- inspired percussive house. Working loosely adjacent to a then emergent witch-house sound, Andy screwed templates associated to Salem and Holy Other into a more muscular, thrumming style
of drug chug more in key with early Actress, arriving at his own distinctive sound that sent us reeling.
Between the intoxicating, syrupy gnarrr of ‘New Ground’ with its Proustian vocal motifs, and the head-wobbling Pennine weather system compressions of its titular curtain closer, it’s a stone cold classique; eliciting heads-down, wall-banging reactions in the side-chained thrum of ‘North To South’ and a lip-biting MDMA-buzz come up with the Thriller funk of ‘Intermittent’, while sore thumb ‘Dark Details’ gives shivering flashbacks to warehouse brukouts and ‘Execution’ curbs the high with a K-holing drag.
Delivering a narcotic, keeling dose of nostalgia that slings us back to late hours in the office
and blunted afters with the goodest kru, ‘Passed Me By’ was one of those records that made us reassess pretty much everything else around at the time, practically forcing us to play other stuff on the wrong speed if we wanted to DJ with it, or more simply letting it run and and slowly shift temporal perceptions and paradigms in the process. Ye ye we’re biased and all, but it’s the fucking GOAT.

Andy Stott’s ultra-classic bout of screwed, knackered House is a shapeshifting, hardy perennial whose crushing traction and atmospheric grip has only deepened in the decade (+1) since it was first issued, as part of a now notorious one-two in 2011 beside ‘Passed Me By’. Out of print for almost a decade, it’s now finally available again in a new edition that’s still sounding unlike pretty much anything else we’ve heard in the intervening years. ’We Stay Together’ was a proper watershed moment for Andy Stott in the nascent phase of an inspirational stylistic arc. While he’d spent the previous six years constructing everything from warehouse-shuddering deep house and dub techno to bare-boned dubstep, the arrival of a new decade paid witness to Stott turning inward, collapsing what he’d learnt from late night sessions with the Modern Love crew into a radical new sound that was arguably without precedent in its field. The simple move of screwing the tempo to circa 100BPM would, in turn, open out his sound, prising room between the rhythms which he coloured with a palette of particularly bruised, processed outside-the-box textures gleaned from an array of guitar pedals and endlessly churned samples. There were, of course, parallels in DJ Screw’s codeine-infused treatments of classic rap and soul, and their influence on the contemporaneous “witch house” style, but few, if any, were doing it within a techno and club music context that hewed so close to the darker, gristlier underbelly and animus of Manchester’s warehouse heritage. This style of viscous, cranky chug proved fertile ground that would be explored in-depth over the next decade - you can hear traces of it on everything from Overmono’s sludge to Low’s acclaimed 'Double Negative’ - and trust when we say it’s the source of it all. But, still, nothing twats quite as smart or heavy as ‘We Stay Together’. From an opening that uncannily echoes the rinsed-out empty warehouse scenes in the closing stages of ‘Fioriucci Made Me Hardcore’, the serotonin-depleted ’Submission’ triggers a side-chained momentum that helplessly drags users thru the gnarly mire of ‘Posers’ to the zombied lurch of ‘Bad Wires’ and its title tune’s ket-legged strut. He pushes the aesthetics to asphyxiating degrees on ‘Cherry Eye’, but not without a glimmer of hope in its underwater choral motifs that always buoys his best bits from utter doom, before ‘Cracked’ stresses the metallic tang of his textures with a bloodlust and vital, systolic throb whose effect has only been galvanised with age. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘We Stay Together’ surely ranks among the best of its strange, pivotal decade. There’s really nothing else quite like it.

We are putting 3 past albums by Detroit dub techno artist Deepchord onto Bandcamp. Here we have 'Auratones' - a foray into deep, organic, cinematic dance music. Shimmering, watery, brain hemisphere synchronization tones caress and melt stress away. Dance floor friendly tracks that work equally well in one’s private listening space. Synesthetic sounds trigger sensory experiences in cognitive pathways other than hearing…smells of perfumes, thoughts of colours, and altered perception of time and space. Psychoacoustic, cerebral, electronic listening music for those wanting a different experience than the current harsher, darker dance trends are offering. Recorded during April - June 2016 in Barcelona Spain, then further mixed / processed / assembled in Port Huron Michigan early 2017.

An extended repress of an album that sold out in a flash and is now a rarity! Daisart is home to renowned artists such as Nico Niquo (Orange Milk), Midori Hirano, and ju ca (phinery, angoisse). This is the best ambient album of 2021 by Picnic, a collaborative unit of labelmates ju ca and mdo, who are also members of angoisse. This is new masterpiece of around the scene of West Mineral and Motion Ward,etc. Deep and melancholic soundscapes, with remixes by Huerco S., Dj Paradise (uon), The Humble Bee & Dntel.

This album, released in 2012, continues the themes and sonic textures found in Music for Films, Music for Airports, and Apollo : Atmospheres and Soundtracks, where Eno began his exploration of ambient music. It is clear that he is pursuing further possibilities. Eno himself regards this album as the latest project in his "Music for Thinking" series, which also includes "Discreet Music" (1975) and "Neroli" (1993).

LUX is one of Eno's most ambitious works to date. 75 minutes in length, it consists of 12 parts and was originally developed from music created for the sound installation exhibition "Music for the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria" currently being held in Turin, Italy. It evolved from music originally created for a sound installation exhibition [Music for the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria] currently being held in Turin, Italy. This is Brian Eno's third work for the label, following "Small Craft on a Milk Sea" with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams and "Drums Between The Bells" with poet Rick Holland. It is Brian Eno's first ambient album of the 21st century, and the one that the world has been waiting for.

Nico Niquo (Orange Milk), Midori Hirano, ju ca (phinery, angoisse) and more are also on the label. A limited edition of 50 copies of the CD "bonus," a self-titled companion piece released by "Picnic," a collaborative unit of "angoisse" labelmates ju ca and mdo, has been reissued on 2LP! This is also recommended as one of the most important ambient works of this year. From Nadia Khan of Where To Now, to Pepper (Ulla), Monkey Twenty (Pontiac Streator), Ben Bondy, Nap, Mister Water Wet and other heroes from around West Mineral, to Australian talents includes Low Flung, Other Joe, and many more. Allstars creates a new milestone in dub ambient. Mastered by shy, aka uon, a genius in the dub ambient world around West Mineral. Don't miss it.

French photographer, musician, and lifeguard Romeo Poirier is also known for his cult favorite "Plage Arrière," a meditative deep sea ambient cassette released on Kit Records. A long-awaited repress of this popular work, originally released in 2020! Is this truly a miraculous fusion of Andrew Pekler and Biosphere? Mastered at Schwebung by Stephan Mathieu. If you like Jelinek or Boards Of Canada, you will love this. Limited edition clear vinyl.

Ulla Straus is a Philadelphia-based ambient artist who has released a number of masterpieces of acoustic dub/ambient music under the direction of Huerco S. collaboration with Pontiac Streator on West Mineral, a label that is now recognized as a sacred place, caused quite a stir. This album was released in 2020 under a different name from a new label [Experiences Ltd] started by uon, a special guest DJ who is an important acoustic dub act at [West Mineral]. It's so beautiful and so deep, you can sink into it forever. This album is built around chant sampling and piano, and is a further exploration of the world of "Big Room", a masterpiece ambient cassette released last year on [Quiet Time]. Mastered by D&M and amp; cut to perfection. Limited to 400 copies. Don't miss it if you like "Mono No Aware" or "bblisss", not to mention [West Mineral] works!

reversals and slippage toward glass, reconfigured
smasht past it
smeared the oil cross currents
and me
plant rotting its container, or, grains lovingly
no warm water to spit back
no cloth to tie

i glance back
refractions stack right.

a kiss that will stew until it evaporates
scuffed across my feet, feet crossed

bubbled trash that spilt intermittently,
who cleaned the air with a smudgey for you.

Huerco S’ West Mineral label follow Pendant’s sublime 'Make Me Know You Sweet' album with uon’s wholly absorbing study in brownian motion and isolation tank ambience; a hypnotically lush exploration of underwater romance. If you're into the impeccable run of Vainqueur releases on Chain Reaction, this one's for you.

It’s the 2nd release from the enigmatic project, whose debut 12”s in 2017 was among the year’s standout ambient and dub-related releases. On this new one uon poetically describes three different behaviours of water and its amorphous states through a gently elemental push and pull of forces best considered in the vein of Basic Channel, Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas or the shimmering convections of Ross 154.

Beautifully elusive but crucially watermarked with a sense of originality in personalized style, Solaris opens the set with a 17 minute cut - a seemingly infinite journey through swells of diffracted chords and silty filters, simultaneously connoting sensations of opiated amniotic safety and oceanic infinity.

Where the A-side feels like floating in a lush mass, the bass-heavy articulation of his B-side’s J may well urge listeners onto the ‘floor with the same, inexorable traction of classic Vainqueur records, and in a way smartly reflects uon’s mutable DJ style, before the aqueous qualities of his final track Bus soothes to a deeper blue state of loved-up introspection which, like Solaris, could have have easily taken up a side to itself.

Bliss.

Pontiac Streator mints a solo debut for Brian Leeds’ (Huerco S.) West Mineral Ltd. label with a bouquet of plasmic ambient lobe strokers, dusted with the guest charms of Ben Bondy, Perila, Nikolay Kozlov, and Protozoa Project. Arriving as a more personalised pursuit of the genteel themes that bound his pair of albums with Ulla in 2018-19, ’Sone Glo’ portrays the Philly-based ambient avatar at his most slanted and enchanting with a sandman suite of late night ambient blissouts. It’s an effortless listen, lathering aqueous textures and wistful melodies into a therapeutic hush, blessed with a prized sensuality that has placed him at the bosom of the neo-ambient love-in over the past five years. A good handful of those ambient lovers chime into his sound here too, drizzling whispered vox and smudged hooks into his vaporous matrix with results that ooze across variegated strains of balmy to gruff ambient dembow with a deeply seductive appeal and mind-drift pathos. Streator steers clear of any tricks or stunts in favour of slow-burn textural depth and subliminal rhythmic hypnosis. He cuts straight to the heart on opener 'Atlas Obscura' with Protozoa Project’s soothing glossolalia suffused to a sloshing dembow groove that underlines the whole album’s subtle pressure changes. He patently cares for your downtime, gently EQ’ing the chakras with the tongue-tip lather of ‘Picture of the Woods’, and later placing Perila’s narration over liquid electro pulses on album standout ‘I Want Something’, while Ben Bondy lends a reverberant touch to ‘Purp Thread’ and Folder’s Nikolay Kozlov brings a thawed ambient thizz to ‘Heliacal’. Still, Streator is the inventive star of his own show, effectively doing for dembow what Kassem Mosse did with deep minimal house on the irresistible sway and heavy-lidded pads of ‘Ixora’, before liquifying limbs with the slinky roll of his instrumentals on ‘Surge XL’ and the eyes-down delicacy ‘Red Kings’.

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Dublin-based dub techno producer Odd Ned released great Dub Techno album from the very mysterious Irish label , which started its activities in 2018 and is gradually gaining underground popularity with good releases by very cult act such as Nashpaints and Frog Of Earth. An experimental dub techno album where a strong rhythm / bass skeleton, aquatic dub ambience, and derailed and freaky electronics intersect! 4-panel digipak CD.

Folder is a collaboration between Ultrafog, mdo and ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

Artwork by Angelina Nonaj & Ryan Loecker
Centre labels by Jesse Sappell
Mastered by Miles of Demdike Stare, cut at D&M Berlin

Since he started producing music, Berlin-based American sound artist Jake Muir has been obsessed with sampling. His 2018 album "Lady's Mantle" was based on manipulated chunks of vintage Californian surf rock, and its follow-up, 2020's midnight symphony "The Hum Of Your Veiled Voice" was sourced from a wide variety of old records, and inspired by the work of experimental turntablists like Marina Rosenfeld, Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck. On "Mana", Muir looks back to a misunderstood musical movement. Around 1995, a group of New York producers and DJs - including DJ Olive, DJ Spooky and Spectre - pioneered a genre-dissolving sound by unifying hip-hop techniques with ideas pulled from dub, jungle, ambient music and industrial noise. Badged "illbient", it was a short-lived genre that felt like a high-minded psychedelic cousin of the UK's trip-hop. Muir uses illbient as the springboard for "Mana", utilizing a selection of samples to inform his frothy drones and foreboding atmospheres. He ushers the material into 2021 by diverting it through his own contemporary worldview, attempting to recreate the hyperreal fantasy histories of Japanese RPGs (think "Dark Souls" and "Final Fantasy") and nod to sensual, tactile soundscapes of European industrial labels Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The result is a magickal, sensory journey that's as physical as it is representational. If the illbient producers were encouraging a burgeoning experimental music landscape to emphasize the tactile feeling of turntablism and sample manipulation, Muir is doing the same with "Mana". Each track heaves and breathes not just with his cultural reference points, but with layered, complicated emotions. We can hear joy, sadness, desire and anguish, obscured by disintegrating noise, hallucinogenic harmonies and sub-aquatic bass. It's electronic music that's rooted not in technology, but in touch. credits

A balmy set of hypnagogic electronics meshed to meditative rhythms is the order of the day on the third release from Huerco S’ West Mineral Ltd, huge recommendation if you’re into Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Spencer Clark or that classic Hallucinator gear on Chain Reaction. Everything on this label is gold...

Pontiac Streator previously appeared as a guest on the first West Mineral Ltd release, Pendant’s by-now classic Make Me Know You Sweet, while Ulla Straus is perhaps best known for her part on the cultishly adored bblisss compilation tape which introduced Huerco S.’s Pendant alias to the world at large. Their first album together is a bedroom-crafted confection where drowsy meditations smudge with lounging exotica themes in a blunted style to properly heavy-lidded effect.

Chat was recorded on July 5th in Pilsen, Chicago on Ulla’s bed after a long week spent dancing with friends, staying up all night typing in chatrooms, and hate-watching Fox news. The results channel that experience into four lop-sided creations that feel satisfyingly burned out and immersive, like the murmur of zonked chat between close friends.

In four parts; Chat One thru Chat Four, the record unfurls with a muggy mid-fi tension between its illusive fidelities, kindling a smoky atmosphere that colours listening spaces with seductive smells and a muggy, keening tension that recalls the minutes before sundown. This balmy feel of the surreal comes out in a sylvan patina of sweetened cicadas and curling pads urged along by a stream of wooden drums, variously recalling Spencer Clark on some kind of Aguirre soundtrack mission in the tropics, a heatsick Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement piece, or, in the dream-pop drift of the last part, like Leven Signs smudged by Muslimgauze.

Coolly serving to expand West Mineral Ltd's remit after that spellbinding Pendant album and a 12” of ectoplasmic dubs from uon, the flux of arid/fluid textures and para-dimensional fidelities in Chat feels somehow calming yet fraught with a somnambulant appeal that’s dangerously easy to fall for.

Nine of the densest ambient and meditative music pieces since the dawn of music!! Sounds both extremely of this time, and of no time whatsoever. Monolithic and stark but extremely warm, intensely personal, and for every one in every which way. We are very happy to present to you "For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), an album by Huerco S.

the masterpiece is repressed. Dope minimal experimental dub techno with dots and lines intersecting in a cold, dark monochrome space. It's a chilling space created by thoroughly inorganic acoustics, dynamic heavy bass, dubwise from a deep epicenter, and unsettling melodies. he sampled from Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and covered Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun". The cover photo, taken by Mika Vainio herself, is also very beautiful.