MUSIC

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.

Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth exists first as a curator's fancy – in this case from Oslo's Ultima Festival for contemporary music in 2014. The idea was to give revered Norwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, access to seminal avant-garde composer Harry Partch's self-designed, custom-made, specialized, invented instruments – an orchestra tuned to just intonation, using up to 43 intervals instead of the standard 12 for the most commonly used Western equal temperament. An artist with a 30+ year career and an uncompromising reputation that reflects the emotional specificity of his uneasy, yet compelling sound, maintained throughout his expansive discography, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he attended art school, training in electronic music and sound art, he had little experience with acoustic instruments and can neither read nor write music notation. Yet he's been engaged with Partch's music, and outsider art more generally, since he was a teenager. His resulting piece/composition for the project was originally intended only for performance by Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik, for a series of concerts in five European cities between 2015 and 2018. It's Musikfabrik that undertook the painstaking, expensive process of building an entire set of the composer’s creations – the second only to the originals built by Partch himself. They are the professional musicians and virtuosic instrumentalists that had to re-train and re-educate on these unknown and experimental sound sculptures in non-standard tunings. And they house this large, gorgeous physical instrumentarium and deal with the enormous logistics of working with it, sometimes shipping the fragile pieces to other locales via semi-trucks or ships. Because of such monumental efforts, Musikfabrik are notoriously guarded with recordings of the instruments. And rightly so. They're the only ones allowed to perform on them, too. But Sow Your Gold isn't Musikfabrik playing. Instead, Sten spent days and nights alone with the instrumentarium in Cologne. He played the instruments himself while recording, layering the recordings and editing without effects to compose an 'audio score' for Musikfabrik to work from in order for the ensemble to perform the piece. (Partch also regularly worked this way, although he would transcribe afterwards. Likewise, Sten worked with a professional arranger to create a detailed score, too.) So, that makes Sow Your Gold an even less likely rarity – partly why its release comes seven years after its creation. If you ask Sten about the album's title, he’ll point you to the text he borrowed it from – Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens by H.M.E. De Jong, a 1969 study of a 1617 book of alchemical emblems – and notable passages dealing with alchemy, chemistry, and agriculture, all transformative processes. And while that may sound complicated, his takeaway is simple: "You have to break something down to create something new," – a lesson he felt related strongly to his own musical process, especially in this project. So, while Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth is a piece written for specific, oddly tuned, extremely rare and unusual instruments, and for a certain ensemble – namely, some of the finest contemporary musicians in Europe – Sten grew fond of the audio score, recognizing it as coming directly from the creative process in its purest, most natural form. And so from a foliated earth, where obscure tradition, treasured scarcity, immense effort, and patient certainty layer and criss-cross, comes rugged gold, polished to shining by one outsider for another.

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.

NAFF013 ∞ the Pearl ∞ Sensational x Planteaterz The Pearl is a collaboration between Planteaterz and the mercurial NYC rap-mystic, Sensational. The EP features four songs recorded in the winter of 2021 with Sensational on the mic and eaterz on production, and is accompanied by instrumentals and killer remixes by Maara, J. Albert, and Lowjack. The Pearl is a sound, a world, and definitely a vibe. We’re pleased to share the fruits of this collaboration with you here.

Oddball Fantasies is more than pleased to welcome Cheb Runner for its second release. His Moroccan roots remain omnipresent in this perfectly balanced blend between traditional Raï elements & the irresistible sound of the 80s underground. When old meets new, those who resist to dance, shall be few!

“Art is awe, art is mystery expressed,” writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. “Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt.” The central mysteries of Smith’s ninth studio album, Let’s Turn It Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we’re feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described “feeler,” the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let’s Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. “The album is a puzzle,” Smith says. “[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them.” The energized “Is it Me or is it You?” comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets “There is Something” refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing—a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. “I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn’t have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play.” By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full. Smith has never fit neatly into the ambient genre conversation she’s most often associated with, and here she forges even further outside of it, traversing avant-garde pop, neoclassical, and the otherwise unclassifiable. The result is a playful, inquisitive, excitable work which appeals to us as social, sensitive animals, and invites listeners into a wholly idiosyncratic world that is both experimental, and, feels like the most human thing in the world. Proceeding through Let’s Turn it Into Sound is like peeking into a secret realm: one that delights both in the discovery of the magic hidden in the everyday, and the shimmer that lingers long after the portal itself shuts.

Multi-media mystic Andro Gogibedashvili aka Saphileaum’s latest slate expands his “spherical ambient” lexicon into increasingly celestial terrain, inspired by visions of galactical oases, sparkling starscapes, and elemental serenity. Ganbana takes its title from a Georgian word for ‘cleansed by water,’ which aptly characterizes the album’s six liquid-tribal compositions. Rolling oceans of hand percussion flow below soothing swells of electronics, streaked with ocarina, insects, and sitar. Snippets of mantric voice occasionally cut through the devotional trance but otherwise Saphileaum’s world is one of solitude and ascent, attuned to a time and space outside our own, where “a second is a century, and a century a second, as the waterfall of cosmic nectar is poured over your being.”

Human Pitch is proud to welcome Seoul-based duo Salamanda to the label for the release of their third LP ashbalkum - a portal into unseen worlds, enchanting stasis, & laughter in the face of our evolving realities. Across an effervescent 39 minute runtime, ashbalkum provides a spellbinding view into how we interact with the world around us - one where one’s own being, language, & nature itself are all rendered infinitely mutable.

Written during the surrealist landscape of summer 2021 somewhere between a sweet dream & a beautiful nightmare, ashbalkum accesses a playful tranquility that mirrors our tumultuous present - distantly intimate, static & constantly changing, moving while standing still, all the while narrowly evading the pressures of our pre-apocalyptic world looming just overhead. Through their collaborative energy steeped in joy, friendship, & experimentation, Salamanda transports us towards even further surreality - taking their sound to wholly new frontiers  while aiming to just have fun creating together & living presently.

ashbalkum’s namesake stems from symbolic & phonetic reinterpretation - specifically, a Korean phrase for the realization that what you’ve been experiencing as “reality” is actually a dream. The transmutation of this humorous existentialism into new meaning forms the core of ashbalkum - blissfully maneuvering through life, basking in irreverent states of lucidity, & attuning all frequencies to fellow dreamers within the dream.

Do dreams always reflect what we think? Is what we feel within dreams real?

Ultimately, Salamanda don’t seek to answer these questions, so much as revel in the delightful liminality of it all.

“Weaves impressions of ancient stories with modern sounds… Every detail and twist passed down through the generations [with] a deep spiritual resonance” Pitchfork “Like experiencing the glacial lassitude of a one-hour raga compressed into four-minute movements....A self-assured and challenging collection” The Guardian Hailing from Baltimore, Punjabi-American sitar player, songwriter and ambient musician Ami Dang unites the disparate worlds of Indian classical music and dreamy synth-infused song composition on beguiling new album The Living World’s Demands. Envisioned as a lament to the challenges to which humanity has subjected the world and itself, Ami Dang’s newest album builds on the floating, blissful ambience of 2019’s Parted Plains and the vocal-led, pop structures of 2020 collaborative release Galdre Visions (a bona fide ambient supergroup also featuring Green-House and Nailah Hunter). The Living World’s Demands is an immensely evocative and expressive collection, just as complex, nuanced and precious as the living world in its title. Within are themes of trauma, survival, resistance, desperation and righteous vitriol, responding to greed, fear and injustice, yet the music is often euphoric, disarming and breathtakingly beautiful. Lilting sitar lines sparkle about an unpredictably broad spectrum of synthesis; Indian classical percussion rattles and snakes through its drum programming. And atop, Ami’s astonishing singing voice - with lyrics of English and Punjabi - deftly weaves her two worlds together with silken threads of both contemporary and traditional textures. Amrita “Ami” Kaur Dang has studied North Indian classical music (voice and sitar) in both New Delhi and Maryland, and she also holds a degree in music technology & composition from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Following in the footsteps of artists like Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, she seeks to advance the sound of contemporary experimental, pop, and electronic music with the sounds of South Asia—through vocals and sitar, ragas, and sampling. She has collaborated with Animal Collective, William Cashion (of Future Islands), James Acaster, Thor Harris—to name a few. She has performed onstage with Beach House, black midi, Grimes, Lower Dens, Florist and more. The Living World’s Demands is a co-release between Phantom Limb and LA’s Leaving Records.

AE-30 is both a film and audio album of the 2021 Sam Gendel x Roland AE-30 / Aerophone / Pro Digital Wind Instrument documentary. In August, musician Sam Gendel and filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz traveled to Iceland and filmed Gendel performing the instrument in unique locations outdoors around the country - most locations remote and accessed only via their friend Viktor, a search-and-rescue volunteer for Iceland who expertly navigates the country's challenging terrain in his modified Toyota Land Cruiser. The full documentary film and audio companion album will be released December 8th 2021 via Leaving Records.

All Genre artist & beatmaker in anonymity Droopy Eye debuts the full-length album Embruja. After nearly a decade of exchanging genre-fluid demos and audio email attachments with Leaving Records founderperson Matthewdavid, Embruja surfaces as the perfect anomaly with playfully aligned experimental sonic & philosophical influences that include Terence McKenna x Underground UK Dance Music Culture, and The LA Beat Scene.

Eagerly awaited yet patiently bubbling under the surface, UwU dust bath emerges with its primal offering, a deeply generous and authentic sonic array from low-key prolifics Purelink. Despite the Chicago trio’s humbly mysterious presence, the transcendental music speaks resoundingly. UwU 001 is rooted in the group’s most sincere and early jams; exuding an innocent magic almost impossible to recreate, tranquil effervescence of the highest nature; three otherworldly originals harmoniously colluding with an intercontinental all-star cast of remixers. xphresh (special guest DJ & Ben Bondy), Low Flung & Nice Girl each respectfully contributing to the synonymous mutual (& virtual) affiliation, kindredship and vision entrenched in the UwU ethos. An immersive sense of bliss exudes from even the initial vibrations of the A side. Soaked in textural pleasure, Butterfly Jam feels suspended; gloriously hovering with organic ebb and flow. Preparing to bloom, the harmonic design starts to flourish, thriving together with rhythmic and dynamic nuances to form a mesmerizing spherical habitat. Fantasize the interior of a bubble with Fine Pink Mist, effortlessly floating and entirely balanced; rich, assured subs anchor the glistening percussive texture and pads, providing a soft bed for experiments in melody and tone; hypnotic movement propelling throughout. The concluding original Dozen Sunbeams evokes a dance of flickering light, dynamically subtle motion maturing in each voice. Everything has a perfect place; an evolving trademark of Purelink’s delicate, yet deliberate, chillout ecstasy. Each track is thoughtfully paired with a complimenting remix on the B side, preserving and echoing the ethereal essence while adding a personally inspired touch, nurturing fresh existence and perspective. Arguably the most unforeseen plot twist comes via xphresh (Special Guest DJ & Ben Bondy), causing Rih✫nna’s notoriously iconic vocals to drip like honey, seeping into the fuzzed post-dancehall daydream; a sunkissed celebration. Low Flung carries the brightly burning torch, contributing a deep-haze rendition which exhibits elevated harmonics and pulsing drum delays, tripped out extraterrestrial heaven. Lastly, Nice Girl’s semi locked groove percussion heavy mix plants our feet firmly back on earth; infectiously spirited and euphoric like the original, the luminous stabs glow alongside a bulked out beat and vocal whispers - witness the transformation to full dancefloor status. In case you aren’t fully satisfied, the Good Girl No Infringement Dub comes as a digital treat, stripped back sublime and mesmerized. UwU dust bath is inaugurating its anticipated catalog with pure, unadulterated aural alchemy. The synergy throughout this entire release reveals an unspoken affinity and divine love language between the label and artists that can translate to how we feel and absorb music, its sound and a subconscious sense of intimacy and connection.

Once again Studio Mule dives deep into the music history of Japan, unearthing the multi-colored album “A-Key” by Eiki Nonaka, released as CD only on the short living japanese label Sun & Moon Records in 1995. An album, that uniquely unifies global ethnic music styles, the playfulness of Jazz, innovative electronic soundscapes, and the winding per-sonality of spiritual music. It’s the only solo album of a musician, that is triggering the advanced electrified japanese music culture since the early 1980ees. Eiki Nonaka was part of electronic New Age quartet interiors, releasing the two minimalistic, synth-pop leaning albums “Interior” and “design” in 1982 and 1987. likewise, he was a member of Haruomi Hosono’s band friends of earth, playing, voicing, and tuning the drum machine, guitar, synthesizers, and mi-crophone on their second landmark experimental Pop Electronic album “Sex, Energy and Star”, released Hosono’s outstanding non-standard label in 1986. His one and only solo album “A-Key” features the essence of all his musical journeys until 1995, bringing, as he puts it on his blog http://www.viewz.jp, “all my musical career up to that point designed in sounds that were ringing in my head at that time. It's extremely introspective, but the various mental landscapes of that time are still vibrating fresh and acoustically new.”

Brunhild Ferrari's Stürmische Ruhe, her first duo with Christoph Heemann. "A legendary figure in underground music, Heemann has quietly produced a unique body of work since his beginnings with the absurdist cutups of H.N.A.S. in the mid-1980, including collaborations with Merzbow, Organum and Nurse With Wound, the eerie psychedelia of Mirror (with Andrew Chalk), In Camera (with Timo van Lujik) and Plastic Palace People (with Jim O’Rourke), and the precise cinema pour l’oreille constructions of his solo works. Created together in Ferrari’s Parisian studio (once shared with Luc) between 2011 and 2014, Stürmische Ruhe is a single half-hour piece that folds rain and storm recordings into a intricately woven fabric of haunted electronics, unexpected edits and disorienting processing."

This is the long-awaited debut album from the mysterious producer Pretty Sneaky, who has been releasing singles on her own label under the same name as "Mana," which has been distributing high-profile releases from Luc Ferrari and Nicolas Jaar under the distribution by Honest Jons. This is a double-pack from an up-and-coming producer who is rumored to be an alias of SHED, who has been releasing only stamped label albums with no information at all, and is also known for his work on Ostgut Ton and Delsin. This is a good release that showcases his lustrous dub techno/ambient sound amidst the tropical scent of birdsong and nature sounds collected from the jungle. Mastered and cut by Duplates & Mastering. Mastered and cut by Duplates & Mastering. Artwork by Matthew Kent, the label's owner.

Shadowy London duo Two Shell continue mischievously subverting and twisting the norms of UK bass on their third EP ‘Icons’. Although the overall feel of these five tracks is one of stability - accelerated vocal samples, synths pinging around all over the place, post-Joy Orbison bass heavy techno - the results are uniformly pulse-raising and intense. For fans of Bicep or Jamie xx.

Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature. A skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, a actor, an engaging TV personality, and one of Japan’s most uniquely powerful performers. For most of Mikami’s career as a singer, he has performed solo. Just him and his electric guitar against the world, creating jagged A-minor vamps to drive along the surreal wisdom of his lyrics. But he’s equally at home in more demanding improvisational contexts such as those provided here by John Edwards on bass and Alex Nielson on drums. Their dense propulsive textures seem to spur on Mikami, his voice arcing powerfully into fragmented spaces, his guitar darting, colliding, shedding jagged and angular splinters of sound. A pulsing, raging maelstrom of serrated-edged energy. Gruff, rough, honest and very, very real.

"On an east London side street, Café Oto hosts a programme of international experimental sounds to shame subsidised arts temples, drawing demographic-defying crowds of all ages through its doors. The first release on Oto's own label, available as an authentic vinyl slab or a slippery download, is a 40-minute splurge of sax, drums and bass skronk, live at the venue in 2010, from the German free-jazz giant Brötzmann and two stars of the London improv scene. Unrepeatable moments of collective inspiration and sudden sunlit shafts of modal near melody punctuate the continuing energy blur. Business as usual down Dalston Junction." Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times "Since it opened in Dalston in April 2008, Café OTO has become London's new music venue of choice for the likes of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson – and Peter Brötzmann, whose first residency at the club in January 2010 yielded this inaugural release on OtoRoku, Café OTO’s new in-house label. The night in question was the first time Brötzmann had played with bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, and the decision to team them up was inspired. With Alan Wilkinson, or in Decoy with Alex Hawkins and NEW with Alex Ward, Edwards and Noble have a deserved reputation as a thrilling high-energy rhythm section. And as Brötzmann is no slouch when it comes to high-energy playing, the combination is explosive. Right from the start of the set – the first that evening – it's obvious why this was selected to christen the label. All three players jump straight into top gear, with Brötzmann setting a cracking pace, his torrent of sound characterised by that hard-edged tone which makes him such compelling listening. ...the worse the better sets a high standard for subsequent releases to match. But, as every night at Café OTO is recorded and there's a wealth of fine music waiting in the wings, including quality recordings from Otomo Yoshihide and Wadada Leo Smith, OtoRoku looks like a label to watch." John Eyles, Paris Transatlantic "These two extended improvisations, recorded in January 2010 during Brötzmann’s first residency at OTO, finds the group attaining near-telepathic modes of interconnectedness, despite this being the trio’s first outing together. From the off, Brötzmann’s gills are gurning, throwing up torrents of molten roar, while Noble’s mule-kicking at the traps reels out ride hits like a baby sporting a bonnet of bees." - Spencer Grady, BBC Music "Does the world need another Brötzmann album? Probably not, but as the inaugural release on Cafe OTO's in-house high quality vinyl-only label, this one is cause for celebration. Recorded there - superbly well, too - during Brötzmann's residency in January 2012, this is no frills straight-up free jazz, solos and all, pitting the Firebreather of Wuppertal against the might local rhythm team (yes, they can and do swing hard) of John Edwards and Steve Noble. All three are on outstanding form, from the opening yelp - when it comes to Big Bang beginning, nobody does it better than Brötzmann - to Edwards's snarling drone 38 minutes later. Shame engineer Shane Browne slammed thos faders down so brutally: for once, you feel like joining in with the whoops and hollers of the punters." - Dan Warburton, The WIREiframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/37772304&color=%239a8d5e&auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_artwork=false&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=false" allow="autoplay" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="166" frameborder="no">

NEW one from 1/2 of acclaimed duo BLACKWATER... more sooon.. (Mint / New - limited version with screen print) Debut solo album from The Dengie Hundred, one half of London’s Blackwater whose slo-motion synth-pop LP ‘Navigation’ was acclaimed by cult record shops Monorail, All Night Flight and World of Echo, which included it in its review of the best releases of 2021. Named after a clifftop cabin overlooking Whitsand Bay in Cornwall’s ‘forgotten corner’, ‘Brackenbank’ charts the first weeks of a new relationship between long-distance lovers in London and the South West. Desiring vocals move like the tide toward and away from drones and dub-soaked drum machines that recall heart beats, train tracks, the clinks of boat rigs and clunks of ferry chains. Composed of sounds recorded in an unfamiliar landscape of sea and rock and sky, ‘Brackenbank’s’ electronic sonic atmosphere was processed on the lines of the Great Western Railway as The Dengie Hundred travelled back and forth: looking forward; longing after. Kingsand, Cawsand, Eddystone, Firestone – the album’s grid references are both geographical and emotional, offering love songs and instrumentals as pulsing trances from places that can be traced with a finger across the map of The Rame, Cornwall’s ‘most unsung’ peninsula. Brackenbank was mastered by Carim Clasmann, mastered and cut for vinyl by Stefan Betke (aka Pole).

*Berlin-based ambient artist N Kramer is releasing his new album Altered Scenes and Slight Variations on May 17 via Leaving Records. *Created over 2020-2022 as a variation on themes Niklas revisited over time with playful adjustment, Altered Scenes is the result of curiosity for complex harmony and composition techniques pursued via searching Youtube for tutorials on music theory. *Inspirations were drawn from a variety of sources such as the mixing of Studio Ghibli chord progressions with Jon Hassell soundscapes. We can also hear the retain of acousmatic percussive/harmonic processes & performance established on 2021's Habitat w/Berlin percussionist J Foerster. *Compiling a series of scenes (or tracks) soundtracking an imaginary film in episodic fashion, these scenes feature various musical motives used in alternating contexts. *Presented with a scene sequence, the listener is invited to experience the album as an “Opening” scene, continuing through a “Soft Lit Room”, “Wading Through The Grass” in the next moment, and so on. *Altered Scenes reconciles opposites amidst ASMR backgrounds: serendipitous or random vs. designed or composed, static vs. the free-flowing, sparse & quiet vs. dense & pulsating.

MONOBIRDS From Ahmedabad to Xenon, 1969 / 1979 In December 1969, David Tudor made a series of recordings at the Electronic Music Studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, using Moog Synthesizers that he himself had brought from the United States and installed there. Ten years later, on March 1, 1979, Tudor used one of these recordings, which he now called Monobird, as the primary source track for a recording session at the New York discotheque Xenon. This album includes two 33rpm vinyl records of these works and an essay by You Nakai, When David Tudor Went Disco, that provides an in-depth study of Tudor’s performance at Xenon and its relation to Monobird. VINYL 1 A: Monobird (NX) 26”28’ / B: Monobird (SX) 29”31’ Recorded at the Electronic Music Studio at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, December 1969 VINYL 2 A: Laser Performance (Take 1) 29”23’ B: Laser Performance (Take 2) 27”43’ Recorded at Xenon, New York City, March 1, 1979 David Tudor: Monobirds - Edition of 200

In late 1965, Billy Klüver, a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, arranged for ten New York artists -- John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman -- to meet with a group of his fellow engineers and scientists from Bell Laboratories to work together to develop technical equipment to be used as an integral part of the artists’ performances. 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering took place at the 69th Regiment Armory at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City, October 13 to 23, 1966. More than 10,000 people attended the performances over the nine evenings, where each artist presented his or her work twice. 9 Evenings is recognized as a major event of the 1960s. It was the culmination of extraordinary activity in art, dance and music in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as the beginning of a new era in which artists in these fields explored the use of technology in their work. Variations VII was the next to last of Cage’s Variations, a series of indeterminate compositions begun in 1958, for a variety of instruments and performers which in the mid-1960s made increasing use of electronic equipment and systems. Cage described the work in the 9 Evenings program: "It is a piece of music, Variations VII, indeterminate in form and detail, making use of the sound system which has been devised collectively for this festival, further making use of modulation means organized by David Tudor, using as sound sources only those sounds which are in the air at the moment of performance, picked up via the communication bands, telephone lines, microphones together with, instead of musical instruments, a variety of household appliances, and frequency generators." For the performance, these sources were from radio stations, Geiger counters, and contact microphones placed on household appliances like a food blender, juicer, fan, and toaster, as well as sensors attached to one of the performers to pick up body sounds. In addition, Cage had ten open telephone lines to bring sound from places in New York City, like the restaurant Luchow’s, The New York Times press room, the ASPCA stray dog holding pound, the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station, choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance studio, and the turtle tank in composer Terry Riley’s apartment. The mechanical and electronic components were placed on two long tables facing each other. The four performers, David Behrman, John Cage, Anthony Gnazzo and David Tudor, worked in a free and unscripted manner connecting, activating, and modulating the various sound sources. Photocells were mounted on the performance tables aimed at lights placed at ankle level under the facing tables. As the four performers moved along the aisle between the tables, the light beams were broken and different sound sources were triggered and sent to speakers around the Armory. The shadows cast by these lights created what Cage later described as “enlargement of activities” as “inside composers picked up outside sources... Fishing.” For the second performance of Variations VII, Cage invited the audience to leave their seats, and they approached the performance tables, wandered around the Armory space, or sat on the floor listening to the performance. A sound recording of Variations VII was made on 7" reel-to-reel audio tape. TOPOS proposed making vinyl records of the full recording of the performance; and they worked to prepare this master recording to fit the requirements of the vinyl medium: dividing it into four roughly equal parts, but preserving the integrity of the composition by making breaks where there was a transition happening in the sound, for example when one sustained sound would die out and another begin. - Julie Martin, New Jersey, 2019

Vladimir Ivkovic主催の〈Offen Music〉からも編集盤が組まれていたウクライナの女性建築家で詩人、音楽家のIhor Tsymbrovskyが、ポーランドの〈Koka Records〉から96年に人知れず発表し、今や入手困難を極める希少カセット作品『Come, Angel』が〈Kontakt Audio〉と〈Infinite Fog Productions〉の共同により、2022年度、史上初の単独再発。ネオ・クラシカルから前衛音楽、ドローン、ジャズまでもが、東欧的なあちら側のフォークロアと共に溶け合う、未知なる絶景の如し大傑作盤！

This is the second album released from HIFUMI Records in 2000.

Kinichi Motegi (Fishmans, dr) participated in this ambitious album, which was recorded simultaneously with live instruments under the theme of "brown, light blue, and green = sky, earth, and natural trees" to contain the body heat and even the atmosphere of the place with humans and instruments. The album is a unique work with a fairy-tale, nostalgic worldview and experimental musicality full of humor, and the covers of "Give me a good word" by the Fishmans and "Minna yume no naka" by Kounosuke Hamaguchi are also wonderfully expressive!
The analog mastering by ZAK, who recorded and mixed the album at the time of its production, is used for The jacket photo by Masafumi Sanai is also a mysterious one.