First release of the french young producer Adrien Van de Velde aka A Strange Wedding, Meta Romance is a three track EP offering a reflexion on slow trance through different modern style of music. Powerful beats are melted with hypnotic melodies, epic pads and tribal vocals to give a mystical yet contemporary vision of dance music.
Introducing a new vinyl only Compilation Series from Monotone featuring some top notch producers. Kicking things off the Techno/Electro master The Advent starts things off with a collaboration with his son and this track is a beauty. This has Monotone style written all over it with hard percussion, epic synths and smooth rythyms. Next we have label boss Exzakt coming back to his form with Kreep. Classic Exzakt beats and just a driving composition added with some vocal flavor to make a solid club tune. 214 comes correct on Side B with a riding, groovy jam that will get the asses shaking. To finish things off we have the mysterious EggFooYoung with a rare appearance since taking on the Michna alias he is well known for today. This is a record that is a must have for all Electro Heads out there.
Repitch Recordings presents another small collection of club-ready electronic creations. This time around, the label welcomes french veteran and New Flesh / Rave Or Die founder Umwelt, sharing the platter with Canada-born Berlin-based young master Ryan James Ford. Led by their mutual love for saturated analog percussions, massive kick drums, and relentless beats, the two producers find common ground while retaining their respective distinctive approaches. Umwelt’s much more electro-oriented excursions style relentlessly acidic basslines alongside epic synth pads and distorted polyrhythms, while Ford’s side connects flows more down the stream of contemporary techno, deep and drone-laden as it is.
The Ghost That Walks aka Paul Bishop graces us today with one of the most epic and tense EPs to date on New Flesh Records. Expect nothing but raw, dark, experimental, kickin’ and industrial music from the depths of Space packed in four dancefloor friendly tunes of pure analogue sounds with early 90’s flavors. A reflect of New Flesh Records essence.
Julian Perez on fire, Camina O Revienta EP features 2 pounding dance floor bombs and a nice laidback track for early mornings.
Serbia’s Soul Print Recordings returns after a year away, with four pieces of beautiful and emotive deep house from the Englishman Mark Hand. The record kicks off with Midnight, a beautiful track with it’s floaty pads and gently rippling bass tones, coupled with the great soulful voice of Greg Blackman. False Leads is a percussive number, drenched in machine soul, with on the flip, Sio’s voice sits effortlessly above a downtempo beat, while Mark adds his late father’s saxophone to the mix on the final jazz enfused Mountains.
Elliot Litrowski is the newest member of the Moustache Records family. His debut called Schmock Machine EP will be released as Moustache Records 037. The EP title track song Schmockmachine is an uptempo TR707 beat, a really strong arpeggio, deep smooth strings with top break… A2 Arpeggiophobia moog synths, deep basslines and deeper strings topped with hipster plastic drums. B1 He somtimes goes out at night is a powerfull track with pumping tr-707 beat, obvious italo strings, some acid, a mega party break and an Alden Tyrell kinda bassline. B2 Patrique;s world a more slower beaytifull track with cowbells, sharp snaredrums and a very niche bassline, some flanger hi-hats and there you go.
What a wonderful outlier on Holland’s 030303 label, this one. Lush breaks, with hints of UK hardcore and classic bleep house inhabit this wonderful EP. The EP kicks of with the track ‘Animal Samba’ is more housey with memories of 808 State, UR and Reese springing to mind. A2 is called ‘Junglitter’ and with a tempo so low, the track is perfect for slow raving; this is Goldie abusing the hand break…Breaks are at its heaviest on the first track of the flipside: ‘Musiphon’ keeps rolling on a brilliant formula of a dominant bass line rolling at mid tempo while an LFO-esque melodie fights for a second position. The last one ‘Vedelius’ -like the artist- a four/four track accompanied with breaks with the quirky melody in the bass and nightmarish screams taking over. This is possibly the track most suitable for the dance floor, not a cozy one though.
New from Nite Vision who are Nigel Rogers (Perseus Traxx, Northern Powerhouse) and Craig Stainton (Acid Phreex, Mantra, Monofonix, Myriadd) with a slamming techno track plus a wicked remix from Canadian mainman Rennie Foster, pressed on limited edition, hand stamped & numbered one-sided black vinyl housed in a white paper sleeve with a printed insert info sheet.
Multi-instrumentalist, musician, photographer and co-founder of groups such as Oiseaux-Tempête, Le Réveil des Tropiques, FOUDRE!, The Rustle Of The Stars and FareWell Poetry, Frédéric D. Oberland takes, as the starting point for his sophomore solo album, a vertiginous dive into George Bataille’s ‘Inner Experience’ and the cave of Dante’s ‘Inferno’. A condensed version of a sound and visual installation created in the basement of the contemporary art space Labanque in Béthune1, ‘Labyrinth’ invites us to bare witness to the loss of landmarks and to feel an immersive sense of trance. The point of departure, the opening note, is the A, the lowest of the piano, from which we slide, almost imperceptibly, snapped up by a wave of sounds, rich in their instrumentation, sometimes rough (electric guitars, console feedbacks, bursts of transformed drums and saxophone screams crackling in their dissonance) and at other moments delicate (hushed and scattered chords of piano, mellotron and distant synths in whispering voices). Accompanied by the drumming and spatial mixing by Jules Wysocki, the six connected stages/chapters of this immersive journey embrace expanse. In a continuous game of call and response between the intimate and the vast, ‘Labyrinth’ plays with the dynamics, the silence and the musical genres (ambient, free- jazz, electronics, acousmatic), kneading and pulling the form and structure of the tracks in ever changing attempts towards transfiguring the chaos. More radical in continuity and more outlandish than his first album ‘Peregrinus Ubique’ – ‘stranger / traveller everywhere’ – (VoxxoV, 2015), the ‘Labyrinth’ of Frédéric D. Oberland recalls in these almost orgiastic collages, the work of ”editing” provided for his nomadic Oiseaux-Tempête albums (Sub Rosa, 2012-2017), yet here in a more introverted territory, weaving a cocoon whose ascending and cyclical pulsations intoxicate us, as if under hypnosis.
Minimal Wave presents a reissue of Sympathy Nervous’ pioneering debut album originally released in 1980 on Vanity Records out of Japan. Sympathy Nervous was Yosihumi Niinuma’s lifelong project which he started in his Tokyo living room in 1979. Through Sympathy Nervous, Niinuma was able to channel his energy into what he loved – building his own synthesizers and speakers from scratch. Niinuma was inspired by German Krautrock and through his music created intense proto-techno soundscapes. Now finally available for the first time ever, remastered from the original tapes used for the 1980 release, is the timeless masterpiece in its entirety.
Waveform Transmission Vol.3 initially came out in 1994 on Tresor Records. The eight titles on the album marked a turning point for Jeff Mills. It indicates a transition from the straightforward sound he had created through the early 1990’s, into the different facets and sound pallet he will develop through the remainder of the decade. It is a significant piece within Jeff Mills’ masterwork.
Freerotation Records returns with another 12” featuring Freerotation residents and regulars. The theme for this release is live hardware techno and the A side features two cuts from Juju and Jordash’s live improvised set from Freerotation 2017, while the flip showcases two of Freerotation 2017’s live hardware acts, the evergreen Shawn Rudiman from Pittsburgh USA, and the recently revived North-Easterners Cubic Space Collective. Collectively these artists are some of the best live techno performers in the world today, with decades of experience behind them, and true dedication to their craft.
Ron Morelli has put together a 13 track album for his returning release on the American based label, Hospital Productions. The album digs deep into the punk roots of the L.I.E.S. boss as he touches upon everything from raw industrial techno to mind-bending electronics and sinisterly cold ambience. This is one not for the faint-hearted, get a little taste below. “Composed over the last two years in various foul states, the album is a fusion of base level hardware programming, open room mic recordings and extensive computer processing, all finalized in the Paris studio of Krikor Kouchian.”
Pivotal, peerless DJ/selector and Minimal Wave overse’er Veronica Vasicka serves her solo debut on Downwards. ‘From Here’, a dank industrial-pop workout recorded in 2004 and now issued for the first time, backed with sick remixes by Regis, Paul Kendall (Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb) and Robert Hampson (Loop, Main) in his lesser-spotted Chasm alias.
Ectomorph occupy a unique and strange place within Detroit Techno history. Founded in 1994, they released their first 12″ singles in 1995 as an attempt to make Detroit music for Detroit itself, rather than exclusively for export. The mystique of their early singles led to mythic status and a strong underground cult following, which they have continued to develop through releases on their own Interdimensional Transmissions label. Their live shows are legendary for their ability to fluidly incorporate improvisational techniques into synthesized music (and for the sheer amount of hardware that they bring to the stage). The Ectomorph show is all analog, no computers or samplers or even drum machines: all sounds come from the modulars and the mountains of Moogs. Ectomorph (now officially comprised of BMG & Erika) reconvened in 2016 to write new music, which led to a series of live shows where the new material was tested via performance and allowed to evolve in form. To capture the energy of these performances, the new material was recorded in the studio totally live, multitracked for further engineering, but with no editing whatsoever. The entire album was recorded live in one or two takes in the Interdimensional Laboratories in Detroit. This is the sound of the idea that is Ectomorph, presented in its natural and organic format, live and improvisational.
Showcasing Brazil with a split EP by new members Radioworkers (Benjamin Sallum, Pedro Zopelar & Henrique Martinelli) and 777 regular Seixlack (aka Innsyter).
Returning to Giallo Disco after a 2 year absence is the mighty Ketsueki Sakuru. Trademark arps and low-motion rhythms collide this time with the sleaze of a different era. Taking cues from the book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk the Snuff EP imagines itself as the video game remake directed by Hidetaka Suehiro. Carrying itself with the confidence of a gigalo, not even wearing a smile, the Snuff EP lurks in dark drones, distorted snares, new beat grime and retrosynth moods.
The Hipodrome Of Music 