Premium solo material from Jordan CGZ (Magic Mountain High, Juju & Jordash). An unbounded trip around the producers musical universe. Sounds ranging from icy futuristic soundscapes to crunchy melodica techno workouts, Other-wordly Jazz explorations to hazy Rhodes washed Deep house memories.
Legendary Swedish outfit Frak for the 20th installment of Libertine Records Traditions series. Extraordinary, classy, and timeless music from recovered 80s tapes. From freaky Acid to New Wave, Electro and Industrial, high-quality standards for a future underground classic release.
This double LP showcases the talent of Sour once again. The Florence based underground BuioClub owner has squeezed more acid juices out of of his analog gear collection. Eight excellent acid tracks carefully crafted to serve the dancefloor. Hypnotizing 303 basslines and solid kickdrums, driving hats, spicy percussion and captivating atmospheres.
Coral Morphologic is the brainchild of Jared McKay and Colin Foord. A mending of minds, the arts, science, and the sea. Their lab in Miami lies close to the Florida Reef just offshore; the third largest coral barrier reef system in the world. This album composed by Jared echoes the voice of the reef. A reflection of its cosmic connection to our moon. A departure from the earth into deep space. We often wonder what intelligent life exists outside of our own aquatic world. Look and listen to the synchronous celestial satellites and the endless love song they sing.
This release is coming exactly 3 years after Gëinst ARTS, Accents Records and Inerit discussed about a new place where they could converge musically and artistically. A place to propose spontaneous and borderless music by avoiding any kind of standardization. This place is now called ITAE and this is the first release. ITAE001 is a first great demonstration of the esthetic that ITAE wants to share and develop over time.
Acclaimed saxophonist, producer and composer Yasuaki Shimizu will release Kiren, his unreleased album from 1984, on the Palto Flats record label. Kiren is Yasuaki Shimizu’s work for experimental dance music. Employing cutting edge production to create lush new wave soundscapes, it bridges the gap between his early 80s recordings and his later work with the Saxophonettes, filling a key lost chapter in his discography. By the early 1980s Yasuaki Shimizu had established himself on the Japanese new wave scene, producing many important experimental pop records and releasing several albums as the bandleader of Mariah. Following the release of his widely regarded solo classic Kakashi, from 1982, and the otherworldly Utakata No Hibi, by Mariah in 1983, he went into the studio the following year with frequent collaborators, producer Aki Ikuta and Morio Watanabe (bassist of Mariah), to record a mystifying collection of experimental dance music. Utilizing cutting-edge technology and studio trickery, Kiren showcases Shimizu’s trademark playfulness, marrying richly layered production techniques to off-kilter, sometimes traditional sounding rhythms and melodies. Portending his work with the Saxophonettes as well as forecasting trends in techno, new wave, and futuristic rhythmic music, this formerly lost album represents an important period of Shimizu’s artistic expression, an artist at his peak, while successfully exploring the intersections of fusion, synthpop, new wave, and jazz.
Strut presents the first compilation of legendary Afghan Ghazal singer Dr. Mohammad Sadiq Fitrat a.k.a. Nashenas, recorded at the Radio Afghanistan Studios and later released on singles by the Royal label in Iran. Nashenas first made his move towards music aged 16 in 1951 when he approached Afghanistan’s national radio station, Radio Kabul, with an idea for a broadcast and, impressed with his language skills, they offered him a permanent job. “I was in close contact with some of the big names in Afghan music like Jalil Zaland,” Nashenas explains. “My father had a gramophone and we listened to other singers like Ustad Qasim Khan and Kundan Lal Saigal.” After unsuccessful initial forays into singing sessions for the station, he honed his skills as a writer, singer and musician, playing the harmonium. Inspired by a movie he had seen at the cinema, Nashenas wrote a new poem and sang on air again after the evening news, using the name ‘Nashenas’ (meaning ‘unknown’) for the first time. Following a wave of positive feedback from the public, he was given a new weekend slot and built his reputation through film song interpretations, famous poems set to music and his own compositions sung in Dari and Pashto. Nashenas would witness turbulent times as Afghanistan found itself caught up in the Cold War and the early ‘90s civil war until it became too dangerous to stay in the country. Through a friend in the U.N., he was able to seek asylum for himself and his family and take up residence in London, continuing to work as a musician and giving concerts globally. Most of Nashenas’ recordings during this period were only made for broadcast, later surfacing on singles through the Royal label in Iran. Life Is A Heavy Burden is compiled from these singles by Chris Menist and Mads Jensen. All tracks are remastered by The Carvery and both formats feature new liner notes including an interview with Nashenas. The album is part of the new United Sounds of Asia series curated by Chris Menist and Maft Sai of Paradise Bangkok.
Mighty fine Electro album from Zobol on Wave Function Records, a great follow up to the Sound Synthesis debut last year.
Kalita unveil the first ever album reissue of one of – if not the – strongest South African kwaito/bubblegum albums in existence, Jivaro’s 1989 masterpiece ‘Saturday Fever’. A super strong South African bubblegum album with that characteristic infectious bassline sound all over. Also includes two synth-heavy reggae numbers. Produced, arranged and composed by Victor Ndlovu, with backing vocals by Beleoi Khamsule and Magengenene sisters Lizy and Ntsaleni.
‘Motion Pictures Regime’ is based on the influence of media consumption in relationships culture, where the image’s dictatorship and plastic personalities prevail over real feelings and worthy values. A soundtrack for the lovers and the broken hearted of nowadays.
Continue reading “Filmmaker – Motion Pictures Regime [TAR205]”
Minimal Wave presents West View, a double LP of rare demos and newly remastered classics by UK duo Vicious Pink. Vicious Pink was an electrifying synth-pop duo formed by Josephine Warden and Brian Moss, who met in a smokey Leeds nightclub in 1981. The pair formed their band Vicious Pink Phenomena and soon after went on to provide gloriously off-kilter backing vocals for their friends, Soft Cell, completely unrehearsed. Later, they dropped Phenomena to simplify their name. Between 1982 and 1986, they released seven singles that all reached the UK dance charts, despite the fact that their ambitions never lay in commercial success. To this day, their music remains artful, catchy, and provocative. West View compiles material from their early days together, featuring previously unreleased demos as well as newly remastered classics like Cccan’t You See and My Private Tokyo. The double LP is housed in a glossy heavyweight sleeve, accompanied by a 12-page LP-sized booklet featuring the duo’s entire ‘how it happened’ story, unpublished lyrics, and unpublished photos from those early years.
Carl Finlow remains a prolific producer more than a quarter of a century on from his emergence. Still averaging several records a year across a variety of aliases, recent times have seen Finlow forge particularly strong links with the Central Processing Unit label. Now, after a run of EPs for the Sheffield imprint which began with 2018’s ‘Projections’, Finlow’s Silicon Scally project offers up CPU’s first drop of 2022 in the form of the ‘Field Lines’ LP. Silicon Scally productions have long been marked out by how they combine piston-precise beat programming with more textured synth play. ‘Field Lines’ runs with this formula to deliver some of Finlow’s most atmospheric material to date. At once shadowy and expansive, listening to ‘Field Lines’ is the aural equivalent of taking a night-time drive around some futuristic metropolis.
Fraktion Schwarz-Weiss is a synthimental Wave Duo from Berlin, founded in 2019. This is their debut released on the Kernkrach sublabel Hertz-Schrittmacher.
New Danny Wolfers AKA Legowelt album under the Smackos alias on his Nightwind Records. Most of this album was recorded around 2017 at the North Sea Institute for the Overmind. As usual heavy tripped out raw melodic Smackos synth compositions for all your deep listening hobbies. Instruments used: Novation Supernova, Akai S900, Waldorf Blofeld, Waldorf Pulse 2, Roland JP08 & JV2080 and probably lots more.
Robert Hood presents the return of his Monobox alias with an album featuring seven tracks. For the return of Monobox, Hood has envisaged that the vessel has been lying dormant for 40 or 50 years and is now beginning to rise up again, or regenerate. The new Monobox album, ‘Regenerate’ creates an all-enveloping story from its opening chapter and the atmospheric ‘Rise’. Stripped-back tribalism ensues with ‘Blackwater Canal’ before the ominous ‘Wargames’, while ‘Angel City’ brings a lighter, sparkling touch. Disc two delivers the gritty ‘Exoplanet’ running at over nine minutes as it gradually draws you in, then flip over for the sweeping grooves of ‘Drydock’. The album closes on the album’s title track where vintage melodies sit alongside techno futurism.
Record Kicks presents “Origin of Forms” the vibrant debut album by Moscow funk band The Diasonics, a mix of cinematic funk, instrumental hip-hop and soviet psychedelia or “hussar funk”, how The Diasonics call their music.
‘Space 1.8’ is Nala Sinephro’s debut album; each contributing piece is part of a connected, collaborative and deeply personal body of music. Performed and recorded at Pink Bird Recordings in Wanstead and in the comfort of Sinephro’s bedroom, tracks one through eight allow experimentation to breathe and borrow from jazz, electronic and folk influences. On the LP, Sinephro invites a host of talented musicians to enjoy its confines, providing a quiet place to dissolve the edges of London from the senses.
89s† is the obscure electronic music project of Berlin-based Carlos Grabstein whom has collaborated with the multi-faceted Petra Flurr to create the German industrial-album of the year. Clearly influenced majorly by the rudimentary early industrial of DAF and Suicide it includes as well more modern approaches to the genre that evokes to Nitzer Ebb because of the exploding energy of their chants and the tribalist power of their drums sections.
In 2021 the album “Footsteps” introduced listeners to the individual style of Human Figures. Daniel Lewis aka Daniel Holt, The Recluse or Death Posture merged raw strings with primal percussion to forge a sound of his very own. He now returns to Frigio with “Tabula Rasa¨. Here we have instrumental machine freak outs and bitter dark-wave, guitar and bass riffs that try to sound more like they arise from listening to mystical 60’s eastern inspirations. Tabula Rasa is a deep and often wistful journey into the world of Daniel Holt’s project Human Figures. Transitive and ethereal, these eight tracks effortlessly fuse elements of cold wave, post-punk, and minimal electronics culminating in a pensive opus awash in faded dreams. Another classic from the visionary artist at his finest.
Mannequin Records presents a 2xLP compilation of System 01, the legendary techno project of Johnny Klimek & Paul Browse. Moving from acid basslines, 808/909 minimalistic reminiscences and hidden movie samples, the core of the compilation is covering Johnny and Paul whole activity as System 01, spanning from their 1990 debut EP “From Psychodelics To Cybernetics” on Interfisch with Timothy Leary, father of the LSD generation, to 1994, with the release of their most acclaimed album “Drugs Work” on Tresor, naturally placing them in the “Der Klang Der Familie”.
