modern love

What is time? Documented here are phone voice memo recordings that range from 2015-2020, re-aligned, chopped up and spliced together. All of us reside in our individually projected reality, but when these individual inner rhythms come into contact with one another, a bigger "time clock" appears. If we can learn to see the world without the constant self surveillance, a new pattern and perception comes into view. And what splendid beauty it is. Dedicated to all the young gods out there.

'Faith In Strangers’ was recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in July 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.

 

 

Opener ‘Time Away’ features Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and closing track ‘Missing’ features vocals from Stott’s vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around a destroyed production style that's pioneering in spirit, buried in sentiment. 

 

 

‘No Surrender’ is a primitive spell making way for pitch-screwed woodblock drums, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ comes like RZA’s ‘Ghost Dog’ re-factored by Terror Danjah. The title track is the album's most beautiful, gliding on a chiming melody and the hum of Andy’s mixing desk. 

Stone cold.

The second album of 2012's masterpiece has been repressed! From the opening vocals to the bass-heavy beat of the preceding track Numb, which leads into a dark world, all of these songs have a solemn worldview where ashes fall. This album features a female vocalist who sounds like a liquefied version of Sade, and the leaden industrial beat and jet-black ambience that accompanies the aesthetic sound is breathtaking. The artwork that perfectly matches the music is also excellent. Masterpiece!

Modern Love with a new 7” series reserved for asymmetric bangers and pop diversions, opening with a double A-side from Andy Stott, his first single in 11 years. Inna bare, dancehall style ‘Out (Version)’ on the A side feels out skeletal drums and stabs for a pure adrenaline rush in the dance. On the AA, ’Love (Version)’ cranks martial drums for propulsion; a euphoric rhythm searching for a vocal. Aye it’s a special one. Some heat coming in this series, keep it locked.

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

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

Modern Love debut from Delia Beatriz aka Debit; a study of Mayan wind instruments from the late post classical period, rebuilt as synth instruments and deployed with ultimate heft and wooooze. Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released 'System' harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On 'The Long Count', the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane. 'The Long Count' is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments - whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets - using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance. Featuring soundscapes that are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, the material here is as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner; Debit's microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that’s all too rare. Although 'The Long Count' was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA - an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations. File under: magick concrète.

Delphine Dora is a prolific composer, improviser and musician who has released on a plethora of labels including Recital, Morc, Sloow Tapes, Feeding Tube, Okraïna and more, and ‘Le Grand Passage’ is her Modern Love debut, a stunning set of songs for piano and voice, recorded in one take without overdubs or edits. We don’t think theres much, if anything, quite like it, but if you’ve been snagged by transcendent, advanced and amateur music by Andrew Chalk, Virginia Astley, Dominique Lawalrée, or Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, we think this one might just be for you. In an act of pure expression, Delphine Dora recorded the 8 songs of ‘The Great Passage’ in a single take, succumbing to a whirlwind of inspiration that transported her beyond the material world. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It’s music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Delphine was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when an technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, "something greater than myself". The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Glistening imperfections lash 'The Great Passage' to the physical world, but Dora - seemingly possessed as she quivers in a fictional dialect - lets her fantasies intensify her spirit, lifting the music towards the heavens. It's not sacred music, per se, but it is unashamedly mystical. On the luxurious, languid opening, Dora dissolves eerily familiar romantic piano motifs into an attentive ceremony, singing with charged emotion. Her words aren't really decipherable, but their resonance vibrates beyond language; it's striking to hear how confident she is in vulnerability. She lets the piano wrap into her voice, connecting us directly to a unique mode of emotional expression by urging us - the listener - to project our own meaning onto her abstracted words. Dora refers to the act of improvisation itself as a way to indicate "the fragility of being”, and as her words blur in and out of focus, dipping from a hoarse croak to a choking wail, she places herself at the very edge of musical formality, questioning strictures put in place to suffocate self-expression. Her music has often been labeled "outsider", but here she sounds intimate and interconnected, more self-consciously candid than anything traditional might have allowed. She conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channelling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora's hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she's able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multi-dimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable.

Demdike Stare return to Modern Love with their first release on the label since 2018, a sick addition to the label’s 7” series. One side of charred bruk-pop rufige featuring Alice Merida Richards on vocals, with a murderous pipe-bomb riddim on the flip. Both cuts find Demdike in wickedly rambunctious mood, the a-side ‘Junk’ weaving gated filters and squashed subs into the gynoid vocal delivery of Alice Merida Richards, formerly of baroque pop band Virginia Wing, and here giving it a full Nico via Trish Keenan thing. Imagine the Chain Reaction label doing monochrome, mutant pop, and you’re just about there. ’Tuff Crew’ on the flip sees the duo panel-beating sheet noise, gnashing drums and hyperpop hiccups into a seething industrial dancehall swivel made to swarm warehouses with its dizzying stereo diffusions. Hands down some of their best gear, play extra loud for the full madness.

Flora Yin Wong returns with a stunning, highly evocative second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes. Where her debut album ‘Holy Palm’ catalogued exotic personal and spiritual travels captured over a 6 year period, ‘Cold Reading’ details the aftermath; the erosion of fantasy, a breakdown of belief systems, and an overwhelming sense of rootlessness. A surreal, tripped-out listen, it comes highly recommended if you're into Valerio Tricoli, Enya, Bryn Jones, soundtracks to Last Year at Marienbad and Inland Empire - all hyperrealist, concrète sound design and fritzed dream sequences. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief following an uncanny, dispiriting trip to East and Southeast Asia, Flora Yin Wong read about Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘Violin Sonata in G Minor’, aka the Devil’s Trill Sonata, a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream. It’s this soporific motif that binds and underpins ’Cold Reading’, in which Flora chases the dragon of fleeting fantasy through sequences of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. Through 10 parts, Flora crystallises a feeling of ennui that followed those travels, where she was taken to a Bazi reader (a form of Chinese astrology or metaphysics based on time and date of birth), whose augur left her feeling perplexed and alienated. She made a long overdue, ultimately unfulfilling, return with her father to his adoptive family in his hometown Kuala Lumpur, spent nights alone snowed in at a haunted house in Kyoto, and lodged with monks in a South Korean Temple. Images of these episodes flash through the album like a slow strobe, ghosted memories recalled with ever-decreasing fidelity. From her use of the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata in ‘All My Dreams are Nightmares’ through evocations of subtropical humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of ‘Konna’ and ‘Banjar’, to a breathtaking dreampop denouement ‘Nectar Dripping’ and the Enya-like lush of ‘Beautiful Crisis’, Flora blooms her ideas with an open-ended ambiguity so often missing from so called Ambient music, ushering the listener into a soundworld that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms.

Modern Love’s 7” series returns with a 45 special from Chicago’s Sun God, delivering a pair of chrome-burn acid jak and cosmic house tear-outs fired to spangle the dance. Screwed, exceptional music for the club. A follow-up to Jamal’s album ‘Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ (Modern Love, 2022), this rare 7” outing hails the Chi house don at his mind-bending best, plotting coordinates for the outer limits of club music whilst firmly tethered to its fundamentals. Never one to follow the grid, Jamal makes the template his own with a hands-on approach that translates decades of experience - from dancing to Ron Hardy in the ‘80s, being an apprentice of sorts to Adonis in the ‘90s, and then thru countless performances and almost innumerable releases ever since - into uniquely transcendent shapes. Coming on like Sun Ra strapped with a 303, ’It Is My Fault, My Fault Alone’ yields the chewiest acid and spitting, hot oil rhythms articulated with the sort of fervour and psychosexual thrust that underlines all of Jamal’s best work, and here emphatically brought to to the boil via a maze of knotted drums and frayed synths that join dots between Prince and Armando in an effortlessly asymmetric style. The B-side ‘Be Fearless In The Pursuit Of What Sets Ur Soul On Fire’ only ramps the pressure with a frenetic arrangement anchored to a modulated kick and synced to psychedelic synths that roll with seemingly endless momentum. At the risk of sounding like yoghurt-weaving rave casualties; Jamal is once again utterly attuned to the type of cosmic frequencies and aerobic mystic needs that have been lost in translation by successive waves of dry-ass posers and dancers who don’t like to get their kicks dirty. And for that, we eternally salute him.

An apartment by the suburban seaside. A pact with the ocean, popping candy, night trains, the lethargic limbo of summertime from Boxing Day to New Year's Eve.

Lucy Duncombe embroiders her signature vocal synthesis on a remarkable cover of Bonnie Beecher’s one-off, cult ballad ‘Come Wander With Me’, a pearlescent gem exemplary of Modern Love’s guess-again, gotta-get-‘em-all 7” shellings - RIYL Maria Chavez, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Laurie Anderson, Nozomu Matsumoto, Niecy Blues. Highly regarded for a pair of innovative releases with 12th Isle, Lucy Duncombe is an experimental singer and artist who uses technology to deftly abstract songcraft in ways that uniquely pique the imagination. With ’Sunset, She Exclaims’ Lucy diversifies Modern Love’s 7” series via a trio of works that embody influences ranging from doo wop to avant garde and pure pop forms, in a style of melismatic sound poetry weft with Jacquardian intricacy. It’s a truly precious, beguiling and evocative record that will reward repeat plays for eons to come, much in the manner of contemporary classics such as Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Grafts’, or Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. The star of this short story is no doubt ‘Sunset, She Exclaims’, where Lucy reframes Jeff Alexander and Anthony Wilson's haunting ballad, ‘Come Wander With Me’, used as a titular device in The Twilight Zone’s swansong episode, 1964, and which has since notably featured on Vincent Gallo’s ‘Brown Bunny’(2003). In Duncombe’s larynx and motherboard, the song is dissected and reworked as a glossolalic froth of hiccuped melody blooming into crepuscular harmony. Its effect is practically hormonal; affective as indole in, as she puts it, "reducing the stench of the real”, whilst distilling the saccharine sadness of the original to a synaesthetic, dream-nudging whiff of nostalgia. Once you prize yourself away from that A-side, Lucy’s B-side only lures deeper into blurred hyper-pop fantasy. The precedents of Maria Chavez’s experimental sound poetry and Niecy Blues’ raw soul hover around ‘Ghosting’ and ‘Ghosted’, teasing the parameters of avant-pop into plasmic refrains, foregrounding the usually unwanted parts of vocal performance - glitching digital artefacts and errant detritus - in a way that makes the mind’s eye saccade, tracing the half-heard glowworms nestled in its bush of ghosts. Fine-tuned ears will surely recognise the sort of brilliance on show here, and will no doubt revel in its gauzy glaze, which prizes oneiric ambiguity, ephemerality, the supernatural, over anything more corporeal.

Lucy Railton trusts in the nuance of her own creative instincts on an intensely modern, quietly radical new album, her second for Modern Love. Following her 2018 solo debut Paradise 94 (LOVE 108LP), and countless collaborations in the time since, Railton's diverse musical circles here bleed into each other, creating an insoluble testament to a lifelong pursuit of sound. The multi-instrumentalist further articulates her own tonal register, embracing her solo strengths and trusting the process to reveal vulnerable and compelling emotional facets through a fluid mix of composition, and pure expression. On the simplest level, Corner Dancer is a record that revels in the momentum of creation. Through a range of approaches, Railton gradually loosens her grip and allows her identities to expose themselves; cut to the bone, sinew and spirit of music making. Reaching outside tried and tested zones, she lands at a charged space characterized by unmetered pacing and an embrace of imperfection, using cello, viella (a medieval cello), Buchla, 808, a fan, synths, horse hair whips, a handheld harp and her own voice, across eight tracks that arc from an opening sequence of ruptured asymmetries, to something bordering the sublime on "Blush Study," the album's masterful closing flourish. In between, Railton invokes psychoacoustic, heady spins and repetitions, while also allowing space for live performance, a mode to which she feels most attuned, and here captured best on "Held in Paradise" (her violin debut) and "Rib Cage." Collapsing boundaries, Railton harnesses a lifetime of formal training in order to patiently trace more ambiguous, intimate and sometimes deviant shapes, operating to a fuzzed logic that loops back to themes with an ingenious underlying dramaturgy of energies, dismantling the form from the inside out, in a way that bends through feeling, rather than design.。

Mary Jane Leach is a composer focused on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC's pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman's work since his death in 1990, compiling Unjust Malaise (2005) and editing the book Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015). Woodwind Multiples features four pieces for multiples of the same instrument: four bass flutes, nine oboes, nine clarinets, and seven bassoons. Each piece works closely with the unique sound of each instrument, combining pitches that create other, sometimes unexpected, tones, primarily combination and interference tones, as well as rhythmic patterns. What you hear is what happens naturally -- there is no processing or manipulation. 8B4 (1985/2022), played by Manuel Zurria, is for four bass flutes. It is a revision of 8x4, which was written in 1985 for the DownTown Ensemble and was only performed once, due to its unusual instrumentation: alto flute, English horn (originally bass oboe), clarinet, and voice. Xantippe's Rebuke (1993) was written for Libby Van Cleve, for eight taped oboes and one live, solo oboe. The eight taped parts are equal and dependent, while the solo part is meant to be a solo with the tape as accompaniment. The piece works with the unique sound of the oboe, starting with unison pitches that create the richest sound, building the piece from there. Pitches and rhythmic patterns that occur naturally are notated and then played later, which in turn create other pitches and rhythmic patterns. Charybdis (2020), played by Sam Dunscombe, is for solo clarinet and eight taped clarinets. It combines a somewhat obscured reference to Weep You No More, a John Dowland piece, which combines with the sound phenomena created from the melody and supporting chords of the Dowland. Feu de Joie (1992) was written for bassoonist Shannon Peet and is an homage to the bassoon and its wonderful sound. It is for seven parts -- six taped and one "live." The taped bassoons combine to create a bed of sound that exploits the unique qualities of the bassoon, creating combination and interference tones, starting off with unison pitches, creating a rich sound that builds from there. Most of the subsequent pitches and phrases occur naturally, and are then notated later on in the piece, which in turn creates other notes and phrases. Engineered by Manuel Zurria, Bryce Goggin, and Sam Dunscombe, mastered by Rashad Becker.

An air of ancient ritualism cloaks Modern Love’s midnight meeting between UK producer MOBBS and French-Egyptian spellcaster Susu Laroche, carving out a channel between hexed trip hop and shoegaze that’s one part DJ Screw, one part MBV, operating within a long shadow of influence cast by Curve, Leila, Cocteau Twins, Nearly God.

Clasping chiral energies on their debut collab, MOBBS brings a history spanning shadowy production work for big name artists to the grimly stylised vein of performance art and musick explored by Susu Laroche, an Egyptian-French with strong binds to chthonic contemporary London. 

Their maiden sacrifice heightens the senses to blends of monotonic, sandalwood scented incantations and carpet-burned downbeats swept in slurred dub. Songs are subtly variegated in tone to spell out shifting plays of light evoking bedsit antechambers and warehouse innards lit by iPhone candle or extractor hood and emergency light bulbs on their last lumens. 

It's music that's as elaborately serrated and blemished as early MBV, but positioned in a vastly different cultural landscape, drawing from hip-hop, drone, psych and basement noise. The pair’s range of cultural obsessions maintains a precarious balance between shadowy histories and an asphyxiating present; all too often, when the past is projected it's thru a mollifying, nostalgic lens, so their critical, prudent hybrid sound is a vital, chilling corrective.

From the bell-ringing, chain-rattle jag of ‘Throne’ thru the sleepwalker drift of ‘Roam’, and concrete plangency of ‘Forest’, the marriage of MOBBS’ illusive textures with Laroche’s feel for analog image and film (as evinced in her art for the likes of Blackhaine and Mica Levi) imprints their sound in gauzy layers that leave fleeting impressions on the mind’s eye. At their heaviest, Laroche’s arcane declarations descend in impressive enactments, undressing the excesses of over-glossed trip hop to reveal and revel in the sound at its starkest, sexiest, for new waves of washed up souls.
 

Dub, Folk … Rat Heart lands on Modern Love’s 7” series with two asymmetric ohrwurms, featuring Ben Vince on the stunning saxophone-led A side, with a wildly morose Spanish guitar ballad on the flip.