MUSIC

Shout Out! To Freedom… encapsulates the endless potential that can come about from stasis. It's a record that as is celebratory of N.O.W.’s past as it is determined to break from it.

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

Sweet Company is the second album by Jabu. Where their first LP, Sleep Heavy, was an unflinching exploration of grief, dark and disembodied, Sweet Company’s deep, sedative soul feels like more of a lovers’ outing: optimistic, becalmed, looking outwards as well as inwards, and longing for the kind of human connections where ego and self-consciousness might dissolve. It is perhaps also an exhortation to love and accept yourself, to recover a lost innocence and peace – that paradise which has always been lost. Released via their own do you have peace? label, Sweet Company is on the one hand a very intimate and private-sounding work - the sound of life played out in a room, a bubble, a home, a head. The rhythms of everyday domesticity: listening to the plants, cars in the street, voices through the wall…. going to work, not going to work, sleeping heavy or not sleeping at all. Wavering on the brink of a revelation, of something just beyond the material world, while you wait for the kettle to boil. The core Jabu trio of producer Amos Childs and vocalists Jasmine Butt and Alex Rendall is present and correct. Sweet Company has the exhilarating sweep and confidence of a collaboration between people who trust and understand each other implicitly, and, secure in that knowledge, are able to give the absolute best of themselves to us. As before, Jasmine’s voice is a textural, painterly instrument, layered and blurred into abstraction, resisting the limits of language; the songs she sings on are portals into vast internal landscapes where the normal rules of gravity are suspended, every sound is smothered in a cathedral-like resonance, and you're both fearful and hopeful that you might never find your way back out again. Alex takes a more narrative, confessional and no less engaging pop tack: as on the gauzy, decelerated 2-step of ‘Lately’, with his masochistic, self-mocking entreaties to “be cruel to me […] I like it when you make a fool of me”. Childs has a true hip-hop fiend's ear for a striking sample, and how to loop it to most hypnotic and rapturous effect, but here takes things to ever more powerfully uncanny and auteurish places, drawing inspiration from the voidal bliss-outs of shoegaze (AR Kane’s amniotic dream-pop epic 69 is one influence cited) and the space-time disturbances of dub, commanding both a raindrops-on-cobwebs delicacy and an immense, oceanic pressure. His productions seem to resist linear progression - instead they move by a kind of unstoppable diffusion, like weeds reclaiming an unkempt garden, or alien flora patterning the sea-floor and coral-caves of the subaquatic level of a computer game which may exist only in your, or his, imagination. Perhaps it's Daniela Dyson, the British-Afro-Colombian artist who contributes her vivid, energising poetic mysticism to two tracks, who best sums up Sweet Company's ambition and effect: “Me quiero perder en los momentos tan puros en su esencia que Las Horas mismas se detienen para ser testigo de nuestro amor” (I want to lose myself in the moments so pure in their essence / that The Hours themselves stop to bear witness to our love…). For a precious half an hour, we're invited to celebrate the smallness of our lives - and the limitless grandeur which that smallness contains. When it ends, we step back from the brink but things aren’t quite the same anymore: we’re haunted by what we briefly almost knew.

On the A side Akie mixes everything from ambient interludes to raw drum machine workouts in an almost diaristic way with sections of field recordings and voice notes fading in and out. B side sees Lil Mofo repurposing everything from dad rock to Chain Reaction 12”s, using the echo chamber as a instrument and means of connecting seemingly disparate sounds & genres. Definitely one for a late night drive with no destination / or an intimate vision quest in the living room in front of the space heater.

"Axacan" is the fourth album from Daniel Bachman for Three Lobed and his first album in three years. It was recorded in 2020 at various locations in Virginia. It will be pressed on two 140 gram 12" records in Virginia by Furnace and housed within a full color gatefold jacket bearing new photography by Bachman. As a part of the Three Lobed Recordings 20th Anniversary series it features an OBI strip bearing an essay about the LP by Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox.

In mulling over their career, it’s staggering to realize that Sonic Youth not only delivered a healthy slab of releases as a unit but also have a myriad of shelved material still waiting for broader ears. While the group’s current Bandcamp abode lays out a generous amount of it, a bunch more has yet to surface. And it’s a massive mountain to chip away at in the sense of the group output alone; individual members’ projects are a whole other game, needless to say. "In/Out/In" ably delivers a new slab of mostly-unheard Sonic righteousness, with a scope on the post 2000-era band in especially zoned/exploratory regions. The 80’s and 90’s continually saw Sonic Youth reminding everyone that their jams ran free alongside song craft and visible development album to album; there were Peel excursions, dipping toes into soundtrack work starting with 1986’s "Made In USA", and of course great impromptu expansive takes of tried and true previous material onstage. The millennial establishment of home turf studio spaces in NYC then NJ greatly egged on forays into improvisation and composition on their own clock as evidenced in "Goodbye 20th Century" and the plethora of SYR releases that trickled out side by side between major release albums. At this juncture they had already created a cultural template for a whole new breed of rock heads who, in turn, entered a feedback loop to SY itself, which cultivated more of its own new moves informed by the very fandom they had for their acolytes all the while pushing the band outward to uncharted fields. Jim O’Rourke’s residency had already influenced the band’s material in part into denser, longer, meditative paths. Mark Ibold’s entry for their swan song "The Eternal" also allowed for more of this exploration with Kim Gordon having more room to commit to third guitar. However "The Eternal" also took more cues from Ibold’s bottom-end swing and perhaps dialed back the expansiveness of the "NYC Ghosts and Flowers" and "Sonic Nurse" era a notch in a cool way, making it one of the best group efforts for me, anyway. Perhaps this fueled some of these tracks here, in an already comfortable zone with a new lineup and new drive to take sideroads to even more outer realms. "In/Out/In" reveals their last decade to be still heavy on the roll-tape and bug-out Sonic Youth. Not all recorded in one session but rather spread out over 2000-2010, the sequencing here is especially well thought out. Opening with the 2008 “Basement Contender” we get a super-unfiltered glimpse of the band at Kim and Thurston’s Northampton house creating a gentle springboard of Venusian choogle, with phased Lee lappings at cascading Thurston figures forming a simmering soundtrack. “Machine” offers another instrumental track from "The Eternal" sessions and is a steamy exercise in stop-start rhythmic grunt amidst a jungle of chiming and upward spiraling chord progressions. We’ve also got the extended score offering “Social Static” from the Chris Habib/Spencer Tunick film of the same name, draping white sheets of noise over your head then descending into a gauzy maw of car-alarm guitars and ambient-yet-disruptive turbulence that eventually subsides into a smoky coda. Two more tracks round out the set both culled from a Three Lobed box set of various artists from 2011 called "Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them": “In & Out” quietly resembles Can in a cave with dripping stalactites of Kim’s wordless tone rumble and was recorded at a soundcheck in Pomona California and their home Hoboken turf in 2010. “Out & In” from 2000 was done in their late downtown NYC studio and serves to close out this LP’s last 12 minutes as a reminder of what they got up to with O’Rourke there. More gentle time shift chord framework erupts into molten fury three minutes in, before mutating into the sonic equivalent of a slowly collapsing star. Casting an audio net over the entire instrumental/outtake oeuvre of Sonic Youth’s long history isn’t something easily committed to a single release without a doubt. Hearing these tracks in comparison to, say, 1986’s "Made In USA" material shows the massive leaps they took over the years. Whereas ’86 showed them freshly discovering their go-with-the-flow instrumental abilities for a soundtrack, their last decade showed them complementing the ambience with assured twists and turns that only came to be through their inimitable and rooted telepathy. That, plus the freedom to compose in more comfortable environs other than dank Ludlow Street rental spaces (hard to believe "Daydream Nation" was created in a claustrophobic practice basement) most assuredly was a component in their continued paths of discovery. Shifting on the drop of a dime from quiet/deep forays into full on noised-out Autobahn stomps with Steve Shelley at the wheel, they painted detailed and varied brush strokes and continually created organic sounds that undoubtedly carried the signature sound of the band, while ringing loud with their continual drive to free themselves from just that. Enjoy this capsule. -Brian Turner, 2021-

This is the first analog reissue of a masterpiece that was originally released only on CD by 12k in 2004. The publisher is Germany's Keplar, which has recently reissued masterpieces by Vladislav Delay, Giuseppe Ielasi, Arovane and many others. This is the ultimate in ambient music, where minimalism and nostalgia melt together in the universal and timeless longing of electronica. It is truly one eternity. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut by Loop-o, the quality of the vinyl is perfect. Limited edition of 500 copies.

Following their recent solo releases Soniscope (Dauw) and Cells #5 (SAUNA 064CS), Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Midori Hirano and Tokyo based string experimentalist Atsuko Hatano have teamed up for their first collaborative full-length: Water Ladder. An intense, multilayered continuation of earlier collaborations (Atsuko was featured on Midori's debut LP back in 2006), the foundation for this new collaborative album was laid when they shared stages in Berlin (Ausland) and Japan in 2019. Working remotely at first, they later recorded parts of the album in Nara's snoihouse (using omnidirectional polyhedral speakers). "As we rallied back and forth with our recordings in the process of creating this album, unanticipated fluctuations and irregularities emerged, coming together into a kind of music with a unique resilience and buoyancy that cannot be confined to existing molds. It was as though we had built a Water Ladder to bridge the gap between us," explains prolific composer and viola player Atsuko Hatano, who's been busy recording solo and with colleagues such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Mocky, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Takeo Toyama, and Anzu Suhara (Asa-chang and Junrei). Kyoto-born, Berlin-based Midori Hirano, who's also been releasing music under her MimiCof moniker, adds multiple instruments to the ever-changing sonic landscapes of Water Ladder -- an album defined by suspenseful and seemingly suspended compositions that often feel like floating in midair, a sensation the musicians compare to "that distinctive feeling you get from riding a high-speed elevator, where you can no longer tell whether you're going up or down." Devoid of birdsong, the late summer air is nevertheless full of buzzing, whirring, hissing sounds on foreboding album opener "Summer Noise," a cinematic intro with slow-moving piano chords and an ominous build-up over the course of its sprawling eight minutes. Elsewhere, sudden bursts of viola cut through nighttime peace ("Nocturnal Awakening"), followed by "Cotton Sphere" -- which makes the sensation of floating in midair complete: harmonies and melodies rise and form to fall apart again. Whereas the title track truly explodes half-way in, the final "Cascade" brings closure to the electro-acoustic six-track collection: the floating continues. "Water cannot retain its form on its own, and can take any shape as effected by external forces. Its movements cannot be captured by eyesight alone: A body of water that appears to be crashing down into a deep, bottomless waterfall could actually be rising up very slowly into midair," says Atsuko. "This is an invitation for you to cross the ever-transforming Water Ladder built between Midori and myself."

Emily A Sprague’s Hill, Flower, Fog is an illumination of consciousness across six modular meditations. A place, a poem, and a homespun ode to existing in “this cone of time in our universe,” Hill, Flower, Fog channels the here and now and fosters a far-reaching connectedness, or lifeline, from the everyday to the cosmos.

2022 Miasmah edition of the now classic debut album by Deaf Center, originally released on Type records in 2005. Full-lenght album version, includes the tracks that were previously only on the CD edition + a 20 minute side of unreleased material from the same timeframe. Released as a gatefold 2xLP with original extended artwork. ‘Pale Ravine’ is the debut full-length realization of Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland under the Deaf Center moniker. More recently known for solo recordings under their own names on the Sonic Pieces label. The album, back then made in their mid 20ies, is an other-wordly sound collagé to Norwegian nature, theatricality and old silent films. The two musicians have looked deep into their own family histories to piece together a dusty and nostalgic epic, blending elements of classical and electronic music with an array of field recordings and a lot of fog.

Melt is the debut full-length album by Blank Gloss, the Sacramento duo of Patrick Hills and Morgan Fox. Attentive listeners will recall their lovely contribution to Kompakt’s Pop Ambient 2021, “Of A Vessel”, which reappears here; others might know their 2020 mini-album, January, released on the stylish Miami label Night Young. With Melt, Blank Gloss make a heavy contribution to Kompakt’s ongoing explorations of the hundreds of hues of Pop Ambience. A lush dream of an album, it’s a remarkable index of the gilded eternities that you can magic from a reduced tonal palette: glistening guitars, ruminative piano, warps and weaves of subtle drone and hum. The two members of Blank Gloss met through their shared involvement in punk and experimental music. Fox’s band had recorded at Hills’ Earthtone studio a number of times; they hit it off and made the decision to explore making music together. Their initial explorations resulted in their mini-album, January; for Melt, they aimed for something more minimal and improvised. “We tried to go into it without many preconceived notions,” Fox recalls. “We tried not to overthink what was happening or spend too much time hyper-focused on any one thing. We found it more enjoyable to make and to listen to when we just let whatever was happening happen.” This process freed Fox and Hills to make music that’s guided by intuition, inhabiting the moment and reaching for the next surprising possibility. The long reels of e-bow guitar that wind through opener “Those Who Plant” ease the listener into an album that says plenty by doing less: witness the dream scripts that play out through pieces like “Hollowed Out” and “Of A Vessel”, the gentle weightlessness of “Almost Home”, or the clusters of guitar, expressive yet restrained, that sculpt “Rags” into being. It’s an album that feels sui generis, somehow, much as it clearly sits within a number of fields – pop ambient, touches of new age and drone music. Some provisional clues, though, for music that echoes Melt’s loveliness: the humble ambience of the artists on Cold Blue Music; the eventless horizon of Bark Psychosis’ “Pendulum Man”; the emotive pointillism of Labradford; some of the snippets of song that drift through Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook’s Sleeps With The Fishes. Like all of this music, Melt embraces a radical ambiguity, one that allows the listener to enter the frame and inhabit the corners of the duo’s music. There’s pleasure and joy here too, of course – you can hear it in the ease of the playing and the beauty of the melodies that Blank Gloss carefully dapple across the tonal field. Reflecting on the sessions for Melt, Fox sums it up perfectly: “Being able to sit together in the little room and document the process of experimentation and bouncing ideas back and forth was really fun and rewarding. I hope that comes through on the album.”

Try and up that feel-good jam and ride worlds with spinning city’s. Now delete scene. Where’s the fucking high?!

A Certain Frank is the Düsseldorf based duo of Frank Fenstermacher and Kurt “Pyrolater” Dalhke. Through the 80s and early 90s, they made speedy, wild coldwave as Der Plan, releasing music on their own label Ata Tak (which also released Oval’s wonderful debut ‘Wohnton’!). In the mid-90s, influenced by a lifelong love for the exotica and tiki bar jazz of Martin Deny and Les Baxter, the two formed A Certain Frank. Hence, the sounds of A Certain Frank are far warmer, sensual and sultry than that of Der Plan. “Without You,” from their 2001 album ‘Nothing,’ approaches something like Sade across its pulsating, truly gorgeous six minutes. And the New Age composition “Naïve,” from A Certain Frank’s 1996 debut ‘No End No…’ (and appearing on DSPs for the first time courtesy of your friends here at ULYSSA), drifts back-and-forth between enchanting flute lines and brooding, synth stabs. And then, there’s “Nothing,” a shadowy triphop earworm that stands confidently alongside the work of Skalpel or Portishead. Yes, A Certain Frank is that good and, sadly, that overlooked. In fact, taken altogether on ‘Ulyssa presents: A Certain Frank,’ it becomes quite clear that their austere dada experiments in electronic lounge and jazz are as curious and captivating as more celebrated albums like Nuno Canavarro’s ‘Plux Quba’ and Björk’s ‘Debut.’ The time has come to give A Certain Frank its due. ‘ULYSSA presents: A Certain Frank’ is the first time any of these songs have been released on cassette and the first time songs from ‘No End No…’ have come to streaming services. ULYSSA Season 2 begins here. Sploosh.

2021 restock; LP version. 180 gram vinyl; 350gsm gatefold sleeve; includes download with "The Doctrine Of Eternal Ice". Originally released by Side Effects in 1986, Zamia Lehmanni was the third (and final) core SPK album and was Graeme Revell's first truly solo project. He was in a period of transition, somewhere between the industrial noise of the early years and his later award-winning soundtrack work. On the day before this was first released, this style of music, now ubiquitous (especially in soundtracks), did not exist. After Information Overload Unit (1981) cleared a space for subsequent explorations, and the environmental percussion and anchored mutilated sound collages of Leichenschrei (1982), the "body without organs" was fully eviscerated. Graeme felt "industrial music" was becoming ossified and needed to be taken into radically new territories: "post-industrial". The track "In Flagrante Delicto" (mastered as originally intended here) was later used by Revell for his work on the soundtrack for the 1989 film Dead Calm, which won him Best Original Score from the Australian Film Institute. Unavailable in any format since Mute's 1992 CD edition, Cold Spring Records now present this landmark album on newly remastered CD, and on vinyl for the first time since 1986. Approved by Graham Revell, this release comes with new artwork by Abby Helasdottir and is remastered by Martin Bowes (The Cage). New liner notes from Graeme Revell, 2019.

Architecture, music, mathematics. From the series Recollection GRM, which reissues the INA-GRM works, the history of Greek-French people who controlled a large amount of uncontrollable sounds by architecture and mathematical methodologies and transformed them into music with unparalleled strength. Introducing contemporary music composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001).

Constructed the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (1958). Also included is'Concret PH', which was performed using 400 speakers, along with Edgard Varese's blockbuster electronic music "Poem Electronique" at the Philips Hall. You can't taste this tingling sensation that is ejected from a very esoteric and incomprehensible range that incorporates mathematics into music. Others, such as the chaotic concrète'Bohor'dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, are a number of sound images that make you feel as if you are looking at a complete building in front of you.

Habitat, an environmental music collaboration by Berlin based composer Niklas Kramer and percussionist Joda Foerster, is inspired by the drawings of Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Each of the eight tracks represents a room in an imaginary building.

In Habitat the duo layers, loops and merges sonic textures and patterns into fluid blocks without the restraint of statics. African log drum, Bolivian chajchas, vibraphone, kalimba and various other percussion instruments are processed, pitched, harmonised and filtered through modular synth and script based sample cutting to form a collage of asynchronous layers.

By using acoustic instruments and expanding their sound into abstract shapes, Habitat evokes a vague intimacy, a curious state of comfort in the unknown.