MUSIC

Total Annihilation Beach is the latest collection from Caveman LSD, one of the handful of monikers of Special Guest DJ / uon / sometimes just shy. Their releases under this name have always had the character of sonic transmissions – crushed sine-waves hurtling out of a wormhole, remote pirate radio bandwidths, whale-song picked up on radar, and so on. Here, the signal seems to come from a place whose remoteness is not defined by distance, but adjacency: these are alternate reality bops. What does it sound like? Kind of solarpunk, but dirty; not at all an artifact from a hopeless culture. Percussion at the forefront; warm timbres and tones – never have I heard this producer play with tabla and tambourine loops as they do in “Lost Hours,” the opening track of the EP. The buildup holds tension and dynamics tight, with a vocoder-smoothed moan – sampled from the caveman’s own voice, on the low – alternating between two notes; when the beat decompresses for the first time two and a half minutes in, one hears the amorphous and cavernous pads we know so well from shy. “Bottle Service Angels” picks up with another acoustic drum loop, and a clap entering 18 seconds in swings the rest of the track into your hips – there’s even an alternate percussion interlude sandwiched in the middle. The drums are turned over by a distorted and delayed wave, almost like a cop siren, which finds an answer in the track’s final seconds: we hear them blaring, but distantly (the demo version of this track, from spring 2020, was called “ACAB Beat”). The B side begins with a textured, heaving slab of ambience: “The Sun Will Sink Into the Ocean.” It is perhaps the sun one sees setting over “Total Annihilation Beach” – a phrase that came to shy while tripping on LSD in San Francisco, which felt to them like a post-apocalyptic haven for the rich. Seems on point. There is a machinic repetition to the track, but also sweeping curtains of sound that move like mist. But what comes at nightfall? Not cops, not raiders nor bottle service angels – nothing, actually. Just a void into which one lobs praise. “H6 Remix” adapts a Mesopotamian hymn to the divine wife of a moon deity, dated to 1400 BCE; the strings of the sampled oud playing it out are rich and trail beautifully with reverb. Caveman LSD’s gesture of remixing such a song reads sincere – the reality we inhabit is likely just as brutal as the one to which these transmissions belong; however, in both, honor exists. Love follows.

Good Morning Tapes back at the deep end on this new album from Josiah Wolfson’s X Or Size project, all washed out and reverberating dub in a mode you’ll want to sink into if you’re into Actress, NWAQ, Huerco S, Ulla. X Or Size throw just the right amount of darkened ambiguity into proceedings to render the sound at its most compelling, borrowing from the classic dub techno playbook with wave after wave of luxurious, eroded dub chords and fractured percussion somewhere between vintage Chain Reaction and the more contemporary wave of late night zoners as best exemplified by Actress’ ghost-in-the-machine productions, Huerco S’s comedown vapors and Ulla’s dreamtime logic. On DÆZI the ominous spirit of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas enters the fray, albeit with more optimistic shading, while Whirled Why is pure rhythm & sound, like some alternate version of ‘Roll Off’ with a creeping bass drum added for the pure, slow skank. The title track closes the set with the album’s most club sharpened moment, taking the trace echos of Chicago House and wrapping it in so much delay and reverb that you no longer know where the hook begins and where it ends - like some malfunctioning looper finding its own fuzzy logic. The strongest release on GMT in a while - tipped to the deepest heads.

Special Guest DJ & Pontiac Streator are crimeboys, here delivering a debut album volley of ambient jungle and trip hop dub paying homage to influences including Vangelis, Burial, Silent Hill and the putative effects of N ₂O. ‘Very Dark Past’ is the pair’s immersive debut, with eight cuts that firm up a flux of etheric inspirations into a translucent body of aerosolised ambient and writhing rhythms primed for the back rooms. Working within etheric parameters established over recent years by their respective solo efforts and a plethora of collaborative projects by peers such as Huerco S., Perila, Exael, and Ulla,‘Very Dark Past’ digs into a now familiar vein of lathered cultural ephemera and rave nostalgia full of gauzy signposts and warm sentimentality that works a treat on stressed minds and bodies. Titled tongue-in-cheek in key with their mode of prophylactic rave safety, the crimeboys step off from the gentlest ends of LTJ Bukem or PS1-style jungle into pulpiest/soft focus ambient dance. Bladerunner vibes prompt the opening lushness of ‘holodeck blue’, and ‘trippin’’ trades in filigree ambient jungle delicacy, beside the caress of ‘deja entendu (dub)’ and frayed echoes of Timeblind in ‘red shift’, while a sublime highlight of spongiform subbass and fractalised breaks in ‘sex and drugs’ gives way to Burial-esque 2-step of ‘haunted tattoo’ and a weightless lushness approximating DJ Crystal or Photek underwater in ‘days go by’. Some hidden cuts on the vinyl edition too.

'Single' isn't just a reissue of Pub's similarly-titled 2002 set, it properly rounds up the Glaswegian dub techno reductionist's first three 12"s and adds a couple of vinyl exclusives. Long-form blunted dancefloor haziness never sounded so lovely: imagine Various Artists/T++, The Black Dog, BoC and Manuel Göttsching locked in a room wth some synths, drum machines and echo boxes. Hot on the heels of last year's much needed 'Do You Ever Regret Pantomime?' reissue comes this equally levitational set of Caledonian miasma, remastered at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering. It's the best way to widen yer appreciation of the Ampoule boss's early work, especially if you've only come across his debut album and the 'Summer' EP. 'Single' is basically a photo album of Pub's earliest experiments, and kicks off fittingly with 'Lunch', from his 1999-released 12" "Lick/Lunch". When that record originally dropped, Pub was only 18 years old and was penning his extended dub-phoric jams on a single synthesizer/workstation. The rudimentary DIY methodology adds to the raw emotionality of the material. It sounds as if Pub is very slowly conducting the loose, trance-influenced arpeggios and dusty rhythms and shifting them carefully in-and-out of frame on the fly almost like Manuel Göttsching on the Biblical "E2-E4". There's a physicality to the music that sounds alien in an era where DAWs are practically unavoidable, and it's sobering to recall. 'Springing Daisy's' is a truncated version of the "Springing Daisy's Mix" of 'Film' (from 2002's "Derail" 12"), turning up on "Single" again to close the collection, shortened from almost 15 minutes to 10 and aptly renamed 'Short Film'. Both versions center around Pub's innate ability to take basic ingredients - in this case a single melodic loop and a distorted T++ style rhythm - and sublime them into gaseous traces of their constituent parts. 'Springing Daisy's' is the "pop" version - short, sharp, beat heavy - and 'Short Film' (a vinyl exclusive) is the abstracted, Basic Channel-influenced inversion, detuning the melody and torching the rhythm into an acidic fizz. 'Derail' is included too, and has never sounded better, showcasing Pub at his most dissociated and melancholy with a distant BoC hum couched in a thick fog of reverberating resonance. 2003's 'Surgery' rounds up the early run, and displays Pub's artistic progression, moving a few steps out of the murk and allowing the drums to push into near-dancefloor territory on the title track. And the new edition is finished off with the trancey 'Kamikazi', a track from the original "> Single" that's never made it to vinyl before.

A self-released record with three previously unreleased versions & reworks of tracks from the last 7 years, originally released via Blackest Ever Black, Berceuse Heroique and Noods Radio. TEXT FROM RWDFWD.COM: "Red X, Information & Drum Tangle. Originally relesead via Blackest Ever Black, Berceuse Heroique and Noods Radio, respectively (go seek them out if you haven't yet!) - this self-released 12" features three previously unheard cuts & versions of recent time - dubbed, live & direct - straight from Ossia's mixing desk. Red X, which was the title track to Ossia's debut solo record on Blackest in 2015, is served up on the A side of this record (now cut at 45rpm, so you can test it at slow motion dread speed too). This new cut is titled 'Red X (Vertigo Version)' and keen ears and eyes might recognise the additional inclusion of the String & electone organ part which appeared on the final track 'Vertigo' at the end of Ossia's recent album 'Devil's Dance'. The strings - played by the great Rakhi Singh - come searing in over the spring reverberated breakdown section, and burn over the final crescendo of the track - something Ossia had been testing out in live shows from time to time, but only recently commited to a proper recording - now also including extra splashes of echo & reverb over Peter Tosh's Red X vocal excerpts, for extra menace. On the B Side, we get two dubwise versions, raw dub style - First up, 'Information' which came out on a 2 x 12" va Berceuse Heroique in 2016, gets the rework / dub mix treatment. Some of you might remember that the original 'Information' already had a version to it on the B side of it's original release, which explored an even more minimalist angle. Upping the energy levels for this counterpart, some years later, the 'Raw 2020 Version' on this new record features a reworked bassline which revolves into more stepping kind of techno territory - with the remnants of pads, and percussion getting squeezed through broken mixing desk faders, their echo'd signals left to feedback into the void as the bass tumbles down on you. Play it loud, or don't. The final cut on this disc is also the most 'recent' - The original cut of Drum Tangle came out in 2021 on a various artists 12" via our friends at Noods Radio. We have the last copies of this 12" available here by the way - And if you don't already own it, then we'd recommend grabbing a copy of that one, so you can play this new version right after the original cut. Because, as in best Jamaican style dub tradition, the idea is that the dub should follow the original cut - allowing you to explore the foundations of the rhythm in a newly focused way. Plus, this part two, the 'Raw Dub' of Drum Tangle lets loose on those snares which were only teased in during the final part of the original Drum Tangle cut - listen closely and they might just whisper at you, whilst the bassline shudders below."

Nachthorn, for midi-controlled organ Nachthorn takes its name from one of the 78 stops that make up the main organ in St. Antonius Church in Düsseldorf. This instrument, equipped with a system developed by the German company Sinua, offers the possibility of controlling all of its keyboards and timbres via a computer. The organ thus becomes a powerful synthesiser. This set-up allowed me to fulfil an old dream of mine : to create an entirely acoustic dance music piece with the organ as sole actor. Oscillating between dub techno, harmonic locked grooves or after-hours pop, Nachhorn proposes a hypnotic music piece whose lines sketch the outline of an imaginary warehouse.

Big-bottomed techno and ambient steppers from the Rasmus Hedlund, chasing his Dialog turn on Astral Industries with a set of full sunken productions for the deep ends of the club. Working a vein of Scandinavian and Finnish atmospheric steppers pressure shared by Vladislav Delay, Andreas Tilliander and Liima, the 5th Hedlund LP in a decade stretches out on an hour of proper bass weight and reverberating echo chamber dubbing. His seven tracks balance the sort of atmospheric content found in Dialog’s recently issued ambient 2LP with the kind of effortless, durational, grooving structures caught in Sasu Ripatti’s work with MvO Trio on the brilliantly supple ‘Rytmisk’ and the buoyant, toes-off-the-floor styles of ‘Kalla Vindar’ and the lushly convective ‘Verners Funk’ with its plumply rounded subs. He sinks into pure Rhythm & Sound-via-Tilliander ambient dub weight in a radiant ‘Chords Galore’, developing in Kompakt-like Pop Ambient scaping, and ‘Bappa’ pulls it farther out in Vladislav Delay or DeepChord zones with overlapping echo chamber FX o mess with your balance, locking it off with ‘Vila Du Lilla’ on the lushest beatless tip.

The third and final part of a trilogy of EPs from Al Wootton of deep, textural, off kilter techno, influenced by the forest. Sparse, rolling, minimal percussive tracks, dubbed out and primed for soundsystems.