MUSIC

10 Year anniversary edition of cv313's Beyond Starlit Sky on Echospace. Out of print for a decade, now newly remastered, ‘beyond starlit sky’ is archetypal dub house crafted in the image of Berlin’s MvO & Ernestus as much as Detroit’s Infiniti. The nine minute studio original weaves iridescent melody thru deftly convected clouds of static noise fidelity on tumescent bassline with starry-eyed effect. The live mix alters the atmospheric physics to let the bass billow outwards under storm-brew clouds of gaseous swill, subtly teasing in the harmonised dub chords until they properly pay-off deep into the 2nd half. ！

Nearly 15 years have passed since the original was release in 2010 with all tracks lovingly remastered for this new remastered edition; which also includes STL's first ever remix and sounds just as beautiful as the day we first heard it! Deep, reduced dub-techno with ethereal production nuances from Stephen Hitchell and Rod Modell. Both original tracks here reveal the duo's obsession with the likes of Maurizio, Basic Channel and Chain Reaction.

It's been nearly 15 years since this originally hit the shelves, which literally took the immersive atmospheric sound of Echospace and brought it right to the floor. With cv313's ''Sailingstars'' the spirit continues as they go on to preach the gospel of deep with a rippling exercise in space and bass. A sort of slow motion movement in tone and 38 hz sub frequency which nearly verges on the disturbing, a sonic threshold quite hard to achieve in a vinyl cut. The power of repetition and subtle atmosphere are clearly demonstrated here by bringing the listener to an almost hypnotic state within its melodic spatial grooves. The B side offers two immense reductions, equally effective providing a low end throb, analog spirit and organic textures captured in zero gravity, it's like truly sailing among the stars. Lovingly remastered and mixed down from the original analog 1/4'' reel to reel tape, strictly limited to 300 copies for the world.

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.

originally released on Main Street Records in 1999, and repressed in 2025.

originally released on Main Street Records in 1996, and repressed in 2025.

originally released on Main Street Records in 1995, and repressed in 2025.

"A growing, single-minded confidence in his thing practically makes time stand still and places us right in the moment and momentum of the music. Crucially, whilst clearly referencing foundational styles, it’s a masterclass in innovation not imitation" - boomkat

Carrier presents Tender Spirits, the third turn on his eponymous series that explores his abstractions at its most sparse and cerebral.

Space maintains great purpose for Guy Brewer, having experimented with this previously for multiple drum-focused missives as Carrier. On his latest release, he treads deeper into the furthest regions of dub deconstruction, with Tender Spirits offering a serene path to the inbetween.

Across 8+ minutes, Light Candles, To Mark The Way moves towards the muted sublime; a gentle half time’d bliss that ebbs and floats across the enveloping mist. Slow Punctures gradually returns to dusk, eerily surveying the hollowed-out remains of its dub architecture with an off-kilter lurch. Carpathian echoes further in stark reduction, a weightless atonal zone anchored by the abstracted pressure suspended within.

Tender Spirits tracks Carrier at exciting new parallels, unfurling his most ascendant and capacious music to date.

Twenty-four years on from its original release, Monolake's seminal Gravity receives its first vinyl pressing courtesy of Field Records. Occupying its own space at the intersection of dub techno, minimal and electronica, it's an ageless album of staggering vision and technological prowess which has matured into an all-time pillar of electronic music. This edition, remastered by the album's key architect Robert Henke, follows on from the recent reissue of Monolake's first album, Hongkong.

Arriving just after the turn of the millennium, Gravity marked a turning point for Monolake. With co-founder Gerhard Behles moving on to other ventures, Henke produced most of the album solo and journeyed deeper into spatial exploration and the dub-informed principles that underpinned their project from the start. Minimalism and negative space run through the whole record, from the keen slithers of percussion pinging through lattices of delay to the hypnotising pulse of subliminal basslines anchoring the tracks. Gravity is a record which hangs on techno's linearity as a form of meditation, but the crystalline clarity of the mix allows every micro-fluctuation in rhythm and sound to cut through.

Compared to a lot of overly sterile digital music released in the early 2000s, Gravity endures thanks to the warmth and texture Henke elicited from his processes — even when leaning into none-more-digital effects like bit reduction. He described the ninth-floor view over Berlin from his studio at night as a key influence on the sound of the record, but the space Gravity shapes out feels thrillingly implacable. Unbound by the standard conventions of time and space, Gravity stands proud as a true original and finally gets the ceremonious vinyl pressing it so richly deserves.

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.

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force lick another deadly shot of tumbling, tucked-up senegalese mbalax, making their 1st outing of ’16 and a 3rd 12” together in this line-up since 2015.

We’re all over the sloshing Walo Walo Version something rotten. It’s an utter joy to reprogramme yourself to its tangled syncopation, picking out and anticipating particular patterns with uncertain limbs, revelling in its wickedly stumbling, uniquely resolved meter. If, like us you’re nuts for drums, that lone, hingeing clap will leave you equally rapt, and then there’s a locked groove…

Flip side is also amazing: Ndiguel Groove resets the rhythm to a loping, shoe-laces-tied sort of house bustle sprinkled with lissom guitar and suspended in Mark’s mixing trickery, before turning up a denser original mix of Walo Walo Rhythm riding that Prophet 5 bassline and talking drums ‘aaaard.

Moritz von Oswald, who has laid the groundwork for a deep interaction between genuine Jamaican dub and Detroit-style classic techno through his collaborations with Mark Ernestus, dub techno legend =Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, is creating ambient techno. Moritz Von Oswald Trio, a legendary trio teamed up with Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric, the pioneer of , and Vladislav Delay, a master of avant-garde electronic music from Northern Europe and Finland. Stock up on the 4th album "Fetch" released in 2012 from London's prestigious !

Rod Modell & Stephen Hitchell’s landmark 2006 vessel docks its first 3 x 12” edition, replete with the first ever Convextion remix and graced by some of the finest dub techno beyond the M-Series/BC canon.

At just-shy of 20 years old, and giving us acute nostalgia for hazier days, ‘Vantage Isle’ is renowned and enhanced with the benefit of hindsight for swirling countless sessions to a depth-charged payload of skanking, trotting, clagged-up dub house emblematic of the Berlin sound’s Detroit echo(space). It was the fateful first release on DeepChord’s own label, ushering tidal waves of moon-pulled grooves that have shored up on shelves everywhere, ready to be cracked out at those times when only the fuzziest stuff will suffice. To our (admittedly patchy) recollection its release coincided a period when mushies were, weirdly enough, legal in the UK and the madge was, well, majestic, and this record was a go-to soundtrack for properly smudged times. 

The first disc ideally oscillates signature strokes of durational, pounding dub house in ‘dc mix I’ and its multiple variations, reshapes, and dubs, notably the likes of their poignant dub noise miniatures such as ‘echo space glacial’ which pushed the BC aesthetic deeper into the brink of oblique, and came up for air in hypnogroggic style on the likes of the ‘spacecho dub II [extended mix]’. Even better, and practically worth price of admission alone, is the Convextion remix - Gerard Hanson’s first - masterfully distilling the elements to a ghostly choral swell swept up in pendulous triplets that eternally transport to the sublime.

100% classique.

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 

*Fully Remastered* Special stuff from Stephen Hitchell and Rod Modell's cv313 alias, dropping two sturdy but spectral House grooves backed with an epic 22 minute live recording made in "the heart of Detroit". The A-side mixes of 'Seconds To Forever' are made for that non-exclusive club in the clouds, the one where every track is a gaseous anthem which only requires a slow smile of approval. Their original mix is all about strafing bassline movements whose gentle kinetic motions expel intoxicating clouds of dreamy sleep-techno tones for that deliciously anaesthetised suspension. The 'Remodel' organises the effervescence into curling dub chords while a layer of tilted congas from The Howard Street Rhythm Section trickles through the mist. If you need the bliss to last longer flip over for the ultimate catharsis of a 22 minute+ 'Reprise' which was mastered for a forthcoming CD release by legendary NSC mastering engineer, Ron Murphy before he sadly passed away. Hitchell has since retouched the track with some help from Mark Richardson and his analogue desk at Prarie Cat Mastering, sloping the momentum for a near-infinite psychedelic exploration. Sublime.

Heat is a surprise new double album from Shinichi Atobe for Demdike Stare. It follows on from 2017's From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art (DDS 023LP) and continues a run of highly enigmatic, acclaimed and completely unparalleled productions that follow their own timeless logic. There's no sonic fiction involved; this material really does just turn up on a CD sent by air mail from Japan to Manchester, sparse info, no messing, pure gold. What's that cover art about? It's probaby something to do with the balmy, slightly fucked, sun-stroked material within. "So Good, So Right", the ten-minute opener, will force you to forget about all the shit around you for a while. There are also several tracks called "Heat"; they're all killer. This music takes you elsewhere almost immediately; that fan on your desk is basically a summer breeze. In fact, this whole album is absurd, completely effortless, and a total classic. Find a more life-affirming electronic album in 2018, and there's an ice cream in the offing. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton, cover by Mat Thornton.

Shinichi Atobe’s fifth album for DDS, his first in two years. Deep and sublime, the classic Chain Reaction < > Chicago House vibe, but this time with a swarming Drexciyan undercurrent, somewhere between DJ Sprinkles, Dopplereffekt and The Other People Place, and yet still 100% Shinichi.

It’s odd working with an artist without ongoing dialogue; no context or an exchange of ideas. It’s all conjecture. Here's another CD of material in the post from Shinichi, two years more or less since the last one. No words except for the track titles. Oh, a photo this time.

‘Yes’, positivity, hope. But the album starts with a dystopian vision; something like Dopplereffekt’s sound-chemistry experiments, a tense builder. Big optimistic chasms open up, the Piano House euphoria of the title track, beautiful sunset closer 'Ocean 1’. But there’s a noticeable change too. 'Lake 2’ is more fraught sci-fi, 'Lake 3’ a sort of percussive Chain Reaction monster, 'Loop 1’, on a Drexciyan tip. 

It’s all coated in that weird - some people say infuriating - toppy production, witnessed this time in a more tempered and different formation courtesy of an amazing Rashad Becker master, all precise but loosely swung arrangements. Everything slow to unfurl but, also, everything in exactly the right place. (Boomkat)

Shinichi Atobe has managed to stay off the grid since he made an appearance on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction imprint back in 2001. He delivered the second-to-last 12" on the label and then disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a solitary record that's been selling for crazy money and a trail of speculation that has led some people to wonder whether the project was in fact the work of someone on the Basic Channel payroll. That killer Chain Reaction 12" has also been a longtime favorite of Demdike Stare, who have been trying to follow the trail and make contact with Atobe for some time, whoever he turned out to be. A lead from the Basic Channel office turned up an address in Japan and -- unbelievably -- an album full of archival and new material. Demdike painstakingly assembled and compiled the material for this debut album. And what a weird and brilliant album it is -- deploying a slow-churn opener that sounds like a syrupy Actress track, before working through a brilliantly sharp and tactile nine-minute piano house roller that sounds like DJ Sprinkles, then diving headlong into a heady, Vainqueur-inspired drone-world. It's a confounding album, full of odd little signatures that give the whole thing a timeless feeling completely detached from the zeitgeist, like a sound bubble from another era. This is only the second album release on Demdike Stare's DDS imprint, following the release of Nate Young's Regression Vol. 3 (Other Days) (DDS 007LP) in 2013. Who knows what they might turn up next? Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art has its origins in early 2000, before Chain Reaction released the legendary Ship-Scope 12" (later released by Demdike Stare in 2015, DDS 014EP). Three of the tracks here are taken from an acetate cut at Dubplates & Mastering at that time, but which wouldn't see the light of day until now, including another batch of tracks taken from original masters. Only five copies of that acetate were ever made, so this is the first time any of these tracks are available for public consumption, and they rank among the finest and most distinctive in either the Chain Reaction or Shinichi Atobe's vaults. The material is effectively some of the Japanese producer's earliest work, showcasing the sort of tender, feminine pressure that would bubble up on the Ship-Scope EP and later be revealed in his new productions, Butterfly Effect (DDS 010CD) and World yet, for many reasons, they would lay sunk in his archive for the next 17 years. The tracks taken from that acetate are labeled "First Plate 1-3" and really are quite remarkable, having taken on so much character and added weight over the years that the incidental crackle of surface noise imbues proceedings with an added dimension that's hard to fathom. It basically sounds like a lost transmission making its way from Paul-Lincke-Ufer at the turn of the millennium to a new, completely changed world all these years later. The patina of crackle lends a mist-on-bare skin feeling akin to summer garden parties at Berghain in the stepping "First Plate 1", and gives a foggier sort of depth perception to the hydraulic, Maurizian heft of "First Plate 2", but it's the submerged euphoria of "First Plate 3" that hits the hardest; a heady, bittersweet reminder of days gone by. The other four tracks are crisply transferred from master tapes, relinquishing a sublime, impossible to categorize house variant that recalls everything from DJ Sprinkles to Ron Trent, yet with that weird, timeless production tick that by now has become something of a signature for this most distinctive and hard to categorize producer. Buoyant dub house and techno with lush, gaseous synths and keys. Remastered by Matt Colton from original tapes and worn actetates -- grit included; Limited copies.

Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be /
Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames /
Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear /
The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves /
Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end /
Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts /
Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing /
Once upon a time there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago /
Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere /
Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut /
The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head /
Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas /
A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats /
World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite

2nd wave dub techno staple Stephen Hitchell meets new wave producer Federson in a back ’n forth of timeless originals and versions. San Francisco’s Chris Kelly, aka Federsen’s Alt Dub label hosts this passing of the baton/torch with CV313 and Echospace figure Hitchell a sits 2nd release after the ‘Positive Charge’ EP christened the vessel in earlier ’24. Federsen fronts the session with a smoky, night-driving dub of CV313’s ‘Skycrossing’ in properly classic Maurizio style, especially that scooping bassline, whilst shutting it down with the more air-stepping levity of his dusted congas and distant dub chords to ‘Skyway’. CV313’s original ‘Skycrossing’ places his mastery of constantly shifting, ever the same, dynamic within its unfurling envelopes, alongside a remix of ‘Skyway’ that plunges upward, outward into billowing electro-acoustic dub techno dimensions.

Carmen's new 3 track EP gives a sense of where she might be heading next on her musical journey. On Nutrition, the submerged influence of dub seen in a lot of her earlier work has risen more prominently to the surface. Carmen describes the tracks as "some dub studies born out of my continued fascination with the form. I’m in a period where I just keep going back to experimenting with beats and rhythms". Nutrition is set for release on 25 October 2024 through Smalltown Supersound.

In the body of work of Cologne artist Wolfgang Voigt – who, like few others, has informed, shaped and influenced the world of electronic music with countless different projects since the early 1990s -, GAS stands out in particular as a saturnine sound cosmos based on heavily condensed classic sequences. Even after nearly 20 years, the sound of GAS doesn’t seem to have lost any of its luster, as shown by the commanding success of Kompakt’s fall 2016 re-release of the essential back catalogue as a 10xLP/4xCD box set.

The overwhelming feedback from a loyal international fan community and worldwide media outlets attests once again to the sheer timelessness of GAS. Which is why it will feel like hardly a day has passed since the release of the last official album “Pop” nearly two decades ago, when Wolfgang Voigt resumes this specific creative path with the upcoming new full-length NARKOPOP.

Even in the here and now, the unmistakable vibe of GAS immediately hits home, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey with the very first sounds, drawing him or her into an impervious sonic thicket, down to the depths of rapture and reverie. From wafts of dense symphonic mist emerges a floating and whirling feeling of weightlessness, before the listener steps into an eerily beautiful forest of fantasy, pulled in by the allure of a narcotic bass drum.

While earlier GAS tracks were often based on the hypnotic effects of looping techniques, the 10 new pieces on NARKOPOP unfold their magic in a more entwined manner, sometimes with the sonic might of an entire philharmonic orchestra, sometimes as subtle and fragile as the most delicate branch of a tree with many. A main characteristic of Voigt’s oeuvre, the coalescence of seemingly contradictory stylistic aspects such as harmonious and atonal, concrete and abstract, light and heavy, near and far is also a decisive feature of NARKOPOP.

In accordance with the transgressive spirit of his collective work, Voigt carries the aesthetic conceptions of his music over to the realm of the visual. Based on his abstract forest pictures, the GAS artwork addresses Voigt’s artistic affinity to romanticism and the forest as a place of yearning. For the first time, a closer look at the cover of NARKOPOP reveals signs of architectural fragments which hint at another, maybe parallel world behind Voigt’s forest. Truth is the prettiest illusion.