Frustrated Funk’s Limited Vinyl Series drops another crazy slice of experimental electro wax. Gary Kempston aka Goliath is dropping an amazing collection of tracks. Goliath has his own fresh and unique sound palette and his music is miles away from anything else.
Mike Norris aka Fort Romeau is a UK artist based in South London. Mike began making music at 14, inspired by the slow jams of Air’s Premiers Symptômes and the warm analogue sounds of Autechre’s Amber LP he began creating, “just loops of noise and atmosphere, just playing with the sound directly.” Later, while at university in Brighton, he began DJing at clubs and the experience of being enveloped in the sound had a profound effect on his attitude to music-making. In Mike’s words, “I started really thinking about the visceral quality of the sound all my favorite music had – this deep, thick quality that just absorbed you.” Shortly after leaving university, Mike began working with the band La Roux, playing keyboards and programming the band’s live show – all the while developing his own musical practice between sound checks and airport stopovers. It wasn’t until the band stopped touring that he was able to concentrate on his music full time and, having become used to working within the limitations of a slow laptop and a pair of headphones, changed his ethos to music making “you have to learn to be very efficient, its is pretty frustrating but you live within the limitations of your equipment. That’s what really defines you as a musician I think. I only have one synthesizer, a Yamaha DX7, and this LP is really the product of me interfacing with that one synth and a 7 year old laptop.”
The first full length on Chiwax is coming from Steve Murphy & die Roth from Venice, Italy. The album includes 8 lovely vintage Chicago house and ’80ies Chicago house tracks.
Big release by one of the best electronic Cold Wave bands from Italy. Janitor Of Lunacy were an Italian New Wave electronic band, active in Brescia from 1981 to 1986, composed by Kovre, Claudio Asserini and Gabriele Farina. With this line up, JOL produced a demo tape in 1983 entitled ‘Crimes On The Dancefloor”, which was very well reviewed by the italian music press. Thanks to such great feedbacks, the band was choosed for various compilation of the era, playing many live shows in historic clubs like Xenon in Florence or Odissea 2001 in Milano, sharing the stage with Weimar Gesang and some others Supporti Fonografici related bands. In 1986 JOL entered in studio for recording their first full-lenght for this label, album publicized by various magazine but that never saw the light of the day, due to artistic divergences.
Hippos In Tanks’ carefully assembled roster, White Car are the label’s darkest, sexiest operators. Hailing from the Pilsen neighbourhood in Chicago, their debut album ‘Everyday Grace’ channels that Eurotic undercurrent of Techno/Wave/drug music which has fuelled the city’s subterranean scene since the earliest days. Like an hallucinatory audio version of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly, their chimeric, cyberdelic fantasia assimilates elements of 30 years + of debonaire, thrusting automatik funk, from DAF to NIN to CTI, to ’80s Bowie, Prince and way beyond, refracting each glint until it becomes an amorphous nebula of digital info masking an ice-cool, thermo-controlled interior. The stuttered vocal of central figure Elon Katz expounds ideas of bodiless cybernetic sex and binary sensuality, melding his urging physicality into a virtual matrix of jagged, shoulder-jerking rhythms and writhing synthlines saturated in bacchanalian dissonance.
Berlin based Brit Ed Davenport presents his debut LP on NRK Music. Counterchange has plenty of concessions to filmic home listening rather than straight up dancefloor fodder. Notably, breakbeats feature heavily up the spine of the album, as does subtle vocal sampling and plenty of atmospheric tension. Starting with the brooding drums and moody voices of “Of Light & Shade” the album unfurls through the barely restrained rave euphoria of the title track, the beautifully re-worked melodies of “New Yorkshire” and “More Red Lights” as well as touching on some sombre downbeat bleakness, bold concrete funk and under-lapping deep techno. The penultimate track, “Somewhere,” is to be the album’s forceful first single: an obvious choice for its deeply hypnotic rhythms and train-track grooves.
Italian producer Nicholas serves you his debut album for 4lux called Still Playing House, showcasing his love for the earlier USA house sounds in 14 original deep house tracks. The album includes also 2 remixes by Hunee and label head Gerd.
Shifted’s ‘Crossed Paths’ is a record which pushes the formal possibilities of techno and is the first full length work to be released on Mote-Evolver. On ‘Crossed Paths’ the breadth of Shifted’s ideas is both subtle and devastating. As a producer Shifted’s methodology is like that of a sculptor, he works principally with textures knowing precisely when to leave edges raw and fault lines exposed. ‘Crossed Paths’ is constructed of 11 ominous cuts carved with precision and poise.
Reissue for this super-rare space funk album from 1983, one of the holy grails of the Cosmic scene. Extremely expensive and hard-to-find in the original, this LP was created by legendary French producers Jean-Pierre Massiera and Bernard Torelli (listed here as Areisam and Bernie) and released on French label Savoir Faire. It is a superb example of the duos innovative electronic disco madness, always pushing boundaries while remaining supremely funky. Stand-outtracks are the Italo classic “Challenger” – heady synths, tough bass and astronaut vocals combine in a strange space odyssey, “Cruisin”, a superb electro-boogie style cut with a hypnotic driving bassline, and the fantastic “On The Border”, a tight funky percussive workout whipped by wild space-rock guitars.
The Montreal-based producer Tazz presents his debut LP, ʻAdventures of Tazzʼ for Londonʼs Tsuba imprint. The album includes 10 tracks and sees the producer deliver synth heavy, emotive and raw vibes in a distinctly Detroit influenced style.
New electro project on Zusammen. After the last 3 outings have been a sidestep towards a more experimental and spoken affair, it’s back to dark electro again on what could be one of the best Zusammen releases so far.
Dekmantel presents the return of Vedomir to their imprint, with nothing less than a full length album this time. The Ukraine-based producer shows he’s getting more mature with every release, delivering a comprehensive artist album that crosses over genres easily. Ranging from downtempo, almost jazz-like slowburners to haunting Chicago house with a true analog feel, and from dark electro stuff, to the beautiful ambient soundscape: this record is a piece of stunning musical versatility.
The Messenger is the fourth chapter of a musical science fiction series. This chapter explores the recycling of Planet Earth and the end of all Earth’s life forms. Doomsday appears to be nothing more than a agricultural reconditioning phase controlled by an alien life forms, they reveal the explosive reality of creating the Human animal for the production and harvesting of Dreams. Caught between secretive human+alien relationship, The Messenger pleads the case for more time so that humans can evacuate Earth and save innocent lives – but time has run out.
Two years after Monolake’s ‘Silence’ release, Robert Henke is back with a new Monolake album entitled ‘Ghosts’. Dark and colorful, with haunting and deep excursions into magic worlds of sound and grooves, held together by a fragmentary story as part of the artwork that indicates a continuation of themes present on ‘Silence’: Precisely crafted earthshaking beats, rough dirty noises, wide lush soundscapes and little sonic creatures inhabiting a fascinating planet in which a lot of things go badly wrong and nothing is taken for granted. Music that augments reality when listening to whilst commuting, music to get lost in when experienced loud in a club. There is nothing minimal in that music, it is bass heavy and full of detail. The 2x vinyl version (gatefold sleeve) includes 11 tracks plus a bonus CD with all tracks in digital format.
This album features 7 long form dance tracks, and is as Tevo Howard’s second album to date. The tracks included are to be looked at as sound compositions both as a whole and as their individual parts. In sound design, these tracks are sculpted for the dancer while focusing on metaphoric juxtapositions between the actual text titles of the tracks and their individual sound designs.
Nokoman dropped out of the sky into the dunes off Lookhill. All he said was: ‘I want to use your SP1200 and your cell phone’.
Manchester’s Claro Intelecto is back to release his third full-length album, Reform Club, on Delsin Records. Throughout his career, the man known as Mark Stewart has always created lush deep house and techno soundscapes awash with dubby undercurrents. This new album deals in all the usual moods and textures you’d expect from Claro Intelecto… it’s warm and cuddly, comforting and inviting right from the first track, despite the rough edges and well defined analogue details which pervade throughout.
The debut album from Italian producer Nick Anthony Simoncino. Produced exclusively on analog hardware and recorded to an old cassette tape. This L.P is Simoncino’s ode to early Chicago dance traxxxs. Closing out the L.P is a very special 13min remix from one of house music’s legends, Mr Larry Heard. Timeless house music presented in its most organic form.
“Always Then” is the second album from UK post punk band The KVB aka Klaus von Barrel. The album will be released on Clan Destine Records and is featuring 10 dark wave, new wave tracks.
The Hipodrome Of Music 