The multi-media project Kraftwerk was started in Düsseldorf, Germany 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. They set up their electronic Kling Klang Studio where they conceived and produced all Kraftwerk albums. Kraftwerk created the soundtrack for the digital age of the 21st century. Their compositions, using innovative techniques, electronic sounds and synthetic voices combined with computerised rhythms, had a major musical influence on Electro, Hip Hop, Techno and Synth-Pop.
Legowelt has been a key figure in the Dutch electronic music scene since the early nineties, steadily releasing timeless music that merges the pioneering sounds of Detroit and Chicago with idiosyncratic sci-fi fascinations. “Unconditional Contours” captures Legowelt’s stint at the Swiss Museum for Electronic Music Instruments (SMEM), after he was invited to be the first artist in residence at the institution’s “Playroom” project. Legowelt visited SMEM in Fribourg, Switzerland, in early 2019 to explore the collection and record music. Possessing an extensive collection of synthesizers himself, he used hand-picked synthesizers from the museum’s archive: the rare Farfisa Synthorchestra, the EVS-1 Evolution, the “shittiest rompler ever made”, amongst many others. The 10-track album “Unconditional Contours” is both a probe into the vast collection of SMEM, and a display of Legowelt’s well established compositional qualities. Leaving ample space for new sounds to unfold, Legowelt invokes gentle trips, brooding excursions, bleep heavy soundscapes, and reimagined elements of dance music classicism. SMEM and -OUS are launching the “smem+ous” series to document the “Playroom” residencies. A limited edition of this album was already sent out to early supporters of the “Playroom”. Founded in 2016 and based on a collection of more than 5000 synthesizers, organs, drum machines and effects that had been collected over a 35 year period by Klemens Niklaus Trenkle, SMEM offers residencies, studio sessions, talks and workshops.
“When I first saw this collection, I was truly flabbergasted. Endless rows of synthesisers – some so obscure I had not ever seen nor heard of them. This place will probably turn into the world’s most magical place for synths.” – Legowelt
KMRU is the moniker of Joseph Kamaru, a sound artist, and producer based in Nairobi. One of the leading exponents of the burgeoning experimental music scene in Nairobi and beyond he was listed by Resident Advisor as one of ’15 East African Artists You Need To Hear’ in 2018 and is a regular performer at the fabled Nyegenyege Festival having also presented live performances at CTM festival and Gamma Festival. Peel is KMRU’s first release for Editions Mego. exquisite mix of field recordings and electronics unravelling at a repetitive and leisurely pace to expose a rich tapestry of sound that has been revered for it’s ability to cross borders with the sheer undertow of emotional content. The subtle calming atmosphere within Peel belies the compositional prowess as layers of delicate sounds wrap around each other creating a hybrid new form ambient musics both captivating through it’s textural depth and kaleidoscopic patterns. The track titles lend themselves to the themes and mood set within: Why are you here, Well, Solace, Klang, Insubstantial and the title track. This is a deep heartfelt journey with a new strong voice being expressed through the means of organically presented electronic ambient sounds, one which reveals further layers on repeat listens.
Long-time Muslimgauze fans with keen eyes and/or photographic memories may immediately notice something about the newly unearthed Sadaams Children album; with some slight orthographic differences, it just about shares a name with a short track from the classic Narcotic (Staalplaat, 1997; the similarity and the difference is pretty much expected from someone who both liked to reuse names and didn’t care for consistency in spelling as Bryn Jones did). While none of the four lengthy tracks found on Sadaams Children actually sound like sparse, clean string sounds of Narcotic’s ”Saddams Children”, three of them never previously heard extended versions of tracks previously found on that release – well, one is both an extended and truncated version, but such are the idiosyncrasies and joys of the ever-complex Muslimgauze oeuvre.
Introducing C.P.I. an almost forgotten project from Capablanca & Marc Piñol granted a full album release via John Talabot’s Hivern Discs. Emerging in 2014 with a rare 7″ release, Alianza follows a brace of EPs spread across a four year peroid, with this album diving deep into the submersive ambient realms of analogue, machine made music. Full of tension, lo-fi industrialisms and atmospheres that play with themes of giallo italo (“Osera”), and winds of the new age in “Islaalsl”, find spiritual spoken word in both “Rasa” and “Epileg”, with the latter drifting unnoticed into a haunted cathedral of choirs. For lovers of ambient 4th world music, dub techno noise-floor, crackle and pop (“I/O”) and epic space western drone (“Sol”), C.P.I. have arrived.
What beats an arpeggiated bass line over a teutonic 90 bpm kick and snare with eerie distorted vocals? I’ve been looking for years and I still don’t know if anything hits that sweet spot quite as well. John Carpenter esque Horror soundtrack synths creep along reverb drenched industrial drums, splattered with existential dread and spectral chants. Ryan is known for various monikers such as PC World / To Live & Die in Rayleigh (some of which are lined up for future Beat Concern drops) and his Club Mutante night which brings together the world of live techno, Industrial, EBM and noise. Punk ethics standing alongside dance floor machine funk. A Civil Terror.
Mannequin and Platform 23 Records reissue what is considered to many the most complete album by perennial anarcho-outsiders Bourbonese Qualk. The last recorded album at their South London squat, The Ambulance Station on the Old Kent Road, and again released on their own Recloose Organisation, saw the band develop further beyond the limits of the post-punk / industrial scene where genres increasingly became redundant. Ethno, jazz, funk and EBM are all buried deep in the album as it seeks independence. The title, a critique of the Labour movements ineffective and limited call to arms against the prevailing Thatcherism of the mid-80s, encapsulates this wider oeuvre. From opening Return To Order, the acoustic gloom is offset by tight musicianship and countering melody. The switch of Outcry precedes psychedelic anthem, Boggy Creek, with its VU remembrance. Blighted pulses Confrontation, Xenophobia, Backlash and closer, Insurrection, sense the darkness, but the ground has shifted forwards with the legendary 1.51 minutes of man’n’ machine that is Lies, the enwrapping symphonic dub vocal of Born Left Hearted and incongruously pretty, Is It As It Was?
Trends come and go as we have seen, unlike many, Brooklyn-born Adam X isn’t one to follow trends, but rather set them. Now entering his 30th year of DJing and 25th year running his Sonic Groove label much of the world of dance music has come full circle since Adam started back in 1990. With that said there was no better time to explore his vast back catalog then the present as it’s all the more relevant right now. As many younger contemporary techno djs have taken to the faster, harder, stronger route as of late, this was par for the course back in 1992, where this compilation begins. What we have here is a collection of formative psychedelic acid tracks specifically made for the raves that were happening all over the world at the time. Many of the tracks here had previously appeared on cutting edge labels such as Direct Drive, Drop Bass Network and Magnetic North, who were all spearheading the sound at the time, we also get two unreleased cuts from the vaults, plus a rare collab with Thomas Heckmann. Back then the goal was simple- to push the limits of this fresh sound, and see how far they could actually go with their 303s; this music now filling warehouses and clubs worldwide. The eleven tracks on this record undoubtedly take rave-extremity to new heights whilst keeping the integrity (and brutality) of the music intact and the crowd in a frenzy.
Linea Aspera return with their second full-length LP, combining analogue production techniques with evocative emotional authenticity that ties themes of inherently human experience to cosmological concepts of physics and astronomy.
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.
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.
The necromantic antibeats is the first longplayer by DJ WEB (Walid El Barbir). Repetitive and funky drum-compositions contradict vocal samples resembling horror, suffering, pain and malady, combining both into very playful compositions which contain seductive joy and the ill depths of mankind (hell) at the same time. Dead poems for the eager & the lost evoking forgotten potentials through ritualistic repetitions.
In his debut LP on the imprint, Fleisch collective co-founder and resident Halv Drøm crafts esoteric body music inspired by loss, nostalgia and ego-dissolution. With groove, finesse and nothing to prove, he processes his past and future through an arcane haze of post-punk guitars and industrial field recordings.
Minimal Wave Records and Bitter Lake Recordings are happy to present their first collaborative release, a double LP by mythical Japanese underground electronic trio Portray Heads. Their self-titled double LP spans all their recordings to date including the songs from their rare “Elaborate Dummy” flexi (1985) and follow-up “Oratorio” (1986) Influenced by early 1980s European New Wave and Japanese synth-pop, their songs range from circular poppy synth gems to moody dark new wave anthems – all led by strong female vocals.
Minimal Wave presents a reissue of Jyl‘s self-titled full-length album from 1984, originally released on Klaus Schulze’s Inteam label. Born and raised in California, Jyl travelled to Europe in her twenties to dance and met several talented and like-minded collaborators along the way. She ended up in Germany, and worked with Ingo Werner, Angela Werner, and Klaus Schulze, on what would become one of the most important and forward thinking electronic albums of the time. Shortly after its release, the song “Computer Love” became a mini-hit along with the album’s opening track “Mechanic Ballerina”. The lyrics of “Silicon Valley” and “Computer Generation” are reflective of the times and have become even more relevant now, 36 years later. The production and song arrangement on the album is immaculate. The synthesizers, drum programming and vocal contributions complement Jyl’s voice perfectly. The album contains an incredible depth beyond a regular dance album likely due to the spirit of the people behind it – the list of contributors add to its significance and near-mythological mystery.
Suction Records presents the first new album since 2014 by the legendary, and somewhat underrated electronic project of Mark Van Hoen, Locust. The album is called “The Plaintive”. Earlier this year, Locust released “The Plaintive” as a 15-track CD/digital album, part of Touched Music’s “Touched By Silence” boxset, and the CD was sold out in a matter of hours. Having heard Locust’s contribution to the set, the Suction crew was immediately smitten with the material, which sounded very much unlike the Locust of old, yet absolutely complimentary to Van Hoen’s murky, analog-synth past. Produced intermittently over a 5-year period, the tracks were created with a largely-digital eurorack modular system, alongside a selection of analog synthesizers, notably a newly-acquired Prophet 12 polysynth. While tracks like “If You Knew” and “Out Here” are reminiscent of classic Locust, much of “The Plaintive” shows us a new side to Locust – melodic, playful, and melancholic, with clear nods to the melodic electronic sounds of early pioneers like Cluster, early-Kraftwerk, or even OMD’s late-70s output.
Exhausted Modern’s debut full-length titled The Year of the Rat is a proof of the thought-provocation that author’s name generates. Released on his own Endless Illusion imprint, the album doesn’t have all the answers, it simply offers Exhausted Modern’s perception of the modern times and also the energy to do something with them. The title, borrowed from the Chinese zodiac calendar, doesn’t slip to mere esoteric prognosis, it fittingly and provocatively comments on broken mechanics of society, capitalistic hierarchisation and emotional frustration of its victims. Despite the dystopian character of Exhausted Modern’s sound, which ranges from fast melancholia through suspicious calmness to slowly bubbling rage, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. It’s critical artistic statement of a person who despite seeing all the darkness, also sees the way out of it.
Marcos Cabral returns to L.I.E.S. with a new six track mini LP after a run of cult releases for The Trilogy Tapes as Chemotex. Here we get Cabral in top form falling somewhere in-between his last works for L.I.E.S. and Chemotex tracks. Through the record we get a rough yet refined style moving from metallic gnarled electro to melodic IDM and/or destructive the electronics as heard on “Secret Air”. Our favorite being the introspective closer “Wearing Petrichor”.
The Hipodrome Of Music 