LYO steps forward with the first volume of their compilation series « Driving Blind » supporting underground new talents and confirmed artists from all over the globe as well as including in-house producers of the label. Selected with care and love, it will bring you on an electronic journey pushing boundaries of style featuring only fresh new original music.
Chicago deknician Traxx delivers an epic 17:00 minute excursion into the world of “proto rhythm” Here we have a blueprint 80s style mastermix which touches upon tracks that may be considered “proto-house” material from a forgotten time when studio experimentation and creativity with the machines were the norm. When producers made music for the djs and the two were all intertwined in the process working hand in hand (we can think about Larry Levan’s “Night Dubbing” album with Imagination as reference”. This 17 minute trip is Traxx’s take on the early sound of New York, some of the records played then and some of the techniques used to “spice up” the records shall we say.
After closing the first part of Fundamental Records’ experiment called Music for The Other People Place, the second part begins. Music for The Other People Place. Experiment 2. A special and highly limited electro / electronics project (tributed to James Stinson), produced by different artists that will remain anonymous, if they choose to…
Old friends Katie Rose and Shawn O’Sullivan, aka Further Reductions, collaborate again with the label. This time the Brooklyn NY two-piece brings a more lo-fi, moody, and outstretched collection of tracks to the table. Each track an instance of their ongoing exploration of new sounds, the defining characteristic of their work. This material evokes the spirit of mellow 90s, acid-era, Psychic TV-ish, lucid dreaminess. Soothing, monotonous, yet disrupted by a feast of kicks reminiscent of Gary Numan drum parties. Summer darkness.
‘Auf Dem Schwarzen Kanal’ is one of the most outstanding, most sought-after releases in Conrad Schnitzler’s extensive catalog. It was the only Schnitzler record to appear on a major label and saw him flirting with the experimental new wave sound that was emerging in 1980, particularly on the title track. Nevertheless, it still managed to sound idiosyncratically unlike any other music around at the time. Recorded with Wolfgang Seidel at Peter Baumann’s Paragon Studio in Berlin, the four tracks take us on a caustic, dissonant mutant disco trip which has lost none of its fascination in the years since. Now Bureau B great reissues this long lost work.
German label Workshop offers up a four track VA packed with gold. It kicks off with the lush and ambient-laced deep house of “Strip Down to E” before taking off with the wonky chord hits, off balance drums and withering sci-fi effects of “Grand Street Piano”, which is rave re-imagined. Things get as deep as you’d expect of a track called “Cerebral Repertoire” with its crystal clear and reflective pads, then “Zero” catches you off guard with its skittish rhythms and unusual arrangement. As always here, Workshop have cooked up some truly beguiling brilliance. Excellent leftfield House compilation.
The Deep, was the alias Matt Frost and Pete Diggens recorded under from 1993-1996. Frost and Diggens released a stream of vinyl on their own imprint Violent Drum. ‘Silver Surfer’, ‘X O Surf’ and the ‘X O Surf remixes’ were created over a series of weekends in ’93. When you listen to the record you can hear Frost and Diggens try to create the sound of waves amongst the beats, they were also influenced by tracks like Pink Floyd’s 20-minute epic ‘Echoes’.
Shawn’s statement regarding this album: “‘Conduit’ contains moments from the last two or so years of my life. There have been a lot of trying times and ups and downs in there. These moments are the exhaust of that life. Some more subjective than others. We are simply conduits for whatever flows through our cores. We tap into it. We allow it to flow through us. As it takes shape, we select its forms and hone its output. We are simply conduit for our work. Maintain the Flow State.”
The album is the second full length album by Shawn Rudiman for Pittsburgh Tracks.
Wata Igarashi’s debut release on Omnidisc is exactly what is needed at this moment. Escape from reality with mind altering LFO’d modulated everything. The EP is made up of 3 tough techno cuts balanced out by ‘Homecoming’, the closing track looking to a more positive future.
The latest installment in Delsin’s deep-diving Mantis series comes from Varuna. As a core fixture in the Basel, Switzerland-based amenthia crew, this secretive production collective have quietly issued compelling excursions into dense, immersion-chamber techno. Varuna gift Mantis three subtly sublime, long-form pulsations that evolve slowly but purposefully, drawing the ear and mind further into a place of intense meditation.
The third installment in the Delsin Mantis series comes from Dutch producer Konduku. The three tracks on this 12” are a masterclass in subtle soundsystem music, matching his intricate drum programming and enlightening ambient textures with the primal energy of early bleep and bass.
Master synthesists Colin Potter (NWW), Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) and Guido Zen reprise their supergroup for Ecstatic with a seductively serpentine follow-up to their superb debut from a couple of years ago. PNZ’s pulsing, twanging, expansive ‘Magari’ was recorded between 2018-2020 in the slipstream of ’Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out’, which is surely one of the strongest new kosmiche-related albums of recent years. Where that album refreshed classic styles of European synth music for modern ears, ‘Magari’ – meaning “I Wish” in Italian – adapts their style to the unique Afro-Latin lilt of Brazilian music with central use of the Berimbau; a single-stringed percussion instrument commonly associated with the elegant martial art/dance of Capoeira, which the band’s Guido Zen brought home from his travels in South America. Combined with their juicy, almost fleshly arps and Guitar pedal-generated computer voice, the results are wonderfully wide-eyed, embracing bouts of motorik rhythm beside vertiginous noise wormholes and mystic tone poems that speak to a cumulative experience spanning decades spent hunting for life between the wires.
Like their first LP, much of the recording took place remotely or in pairs, and rarely with all three present, before the parts were mixed down at Colin’s studio in Leytonstone. In its journey between the intricate meters and perpendicular vectors of ‘Too Much Traffic’, and their mesh of curdled tones with their phone recordings of a manic preacher in Camberwell on ‘Saved’, they variously recall Craig Leon’s alien invocations of Dogon folk tales as much as the heady dissonance of Alessandro Cortini; producing outstanding pieces of tangibly haptic substance in ‘Sergio’ and infectiously tip-of-tongue Berimbau twang on ‘Gennaio’, and for good measure, something like Phil Collins gently losing the plot after healthy dose of Ayahuasca in ‘Fill’, while ‘Ancora’ sounds like Basic Channel scoring Herzog’s Aguirre.
Nous’klaer & RE:VIVE present two scores by Thessa Torsing (upsammy) and Tammo Hesselink. Torsing’s is a 27-minute piece, composed for a collage of archival footage of the Dutch ship MS Oranje. The short film explores the lifecycle of the ship, from production to usage and to the fire that ultimately destroyed it. Hesselink’s is a 17-minute piece for the pioneering short film, Ballet Mecanique (1924), a rigid composition of sharp notes and twisted drum patterns that hypnotically evolve accompanying the film’s staccato rhythm.
When Joakim aka Cray76 moved back from NYC to Paris in 2019, he knew he wouldn’t have access to a studio for a little while. And although he welcomed that forced pause in making music, he felt the need to take at least one piece of gear with him in his suitcase. It was the legendary Roland TB303, one of the simplest and quirkest synth ever made and maybe the one that had the most important influence on electronic music since the mid 80s. Having recorded a few beats on his Roland TR808 before he packed his studio in Brooklyn to be shipped back to France, Joakim decided to make a record only using those 2 machines, an « exercice de style » that is a tribute to 30 years+ of acid house and techno and a way to make tools that he could use in his DJ sets. It goes deep, it goes hypnotic, it goes rough, many flavors of acid are packed in this 808+303=1111 12inch.
Brokntoys return with the second volume of Casting Shadows this time featuring three secret gems selected by Intergalactic Gary. A true music archaeologist and one of the leading lights of the Netherlands’ West Coast scene for over 30 years, his knowledge spans across genres and decades. Opening proceedings on the A side, we go back to one of Andrea Benedetti’s acid classics – this time revisited at 33RPM, morphing it into a slow-burning dancefloor grinder. On the B-side, Italo disco duo GAG get a re-airing of their lost classic Flyin’ Bolero. QUAD, the UK duo formed by Mark Carroll and Pete Diggens, closes the EP with a deep breakbeat excursion originally released on Kinetix.
Szymek Lawik and Maritn Lefteri’s regular party and NTS show, Feel the Drive, turns record label with a debut release that takes you through the gears. Spending their lives digging up the very best Italo, New Beat and EBM delights, a record label was the next logical move for Szymek Lawik and Martin Lefteri. The perfect distillation of their combined tastes and determination to search the globe for new music, the four-track debut EP features big hitters from Franz Scala (Bahnsteig 23, Tusk Wax, Cocktail d’Amore), Anatolian Weapons (Beats in Space, Dark Entries), Furor Exotica (Bordello a Parigi, Sprechen) and the label bosses themselves under their Ondata guise (Red Laser, Night Noise Music).
Moustache Records welcomes to the family the oldskool electro legend Martin Matiske with his Electronic disco-ish 12 inch EP release “Robotic Theatre”. This is a future vision of a theatre run by robots and is the era in which machines entertain mankind. Operas are written and played in a mechanical way. The pieces of “Robotic Theatre” deal with different terms of stage work. Track A1 is called “Acting Faces” and Refers to the rehearsing of the role, as well as the interaction of the actors on stage. The well-being of the actor does not often match what is played. He has to play even If it’s painful. B2 is the track called “Machinery” Human beings are machines that build machines today. The advantage is perfection and time saving. Robots as actors are reliable and precise. B1 listen to the name “Transistor Dances”its Like The Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms you just need a dance to express happiness and remind your culture. Dances bring people together. A robotic dance should not be missing in a play. The last track of the EP is the tune “Practise” a story about a robot the has to practise to achieve perfection and it is fun.” Don’tplay this underwater order now gone is gone.
The Hipodrome Of Music 