Immersively sensual, diaristic entries by cult US ambient avatar Ulla (aka Ulla Straus), the first release on Experiences Ltd. For solitary reflection or post-party couch slump with friends, Ulla’s first mononymous release is a gorgeous record that mellows and balances any physical or mental space it comes into contact with.
Four years after their almighty collaboration on “Project STS-31 (Hubble Telescope Series Vol.3)”, Solar One Music’s cofounder Robert Witschakowski and half of Dopplereffekt duo Gerald Donald return with another cosmic album of their instantly recognizable trademark. Featuring ten detailed and luminous cuts of beautifully crafted emotional music, with deep narrative over tough machine groove, the opus takes you on a moody trip across craggy soundscapes made of abrasive tones, crossing the red line between tight-strapped melodic waves, subaquatic underground electro, and intricate structures. Expect nothing but stripped down layers mixed with chunky synthetic bass lines and stellar melodies over pounding 808 drums on this future classic tinted with nostalgia. Built as a journey through unknown territories, much anticipating “Dimensional Shifting” oscillates between moments of bravery on the dancefloor and moody sequences, keeping intact the aesthetic signature of the Jena-based electro emissary and the legend from Detroit.
2020 marks the tenth of collaboration for Red Axes, the Tel Aviv-based duo of Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi. Informed by post-punk, new wave, and a plethora of club sounds old and new, they have cleaved a singular path with their hefty discography. To celebrate their anniversary, they reunite with Dark Entries for an eponymous 11 track LP brimming with jagged guitars, spacy arpeggios, and hypnotic vocals. ‘Red Axes’ is their first effort written and conceived of as an album-length listening experience. This work flows effortlessly through a variety of stylistic detours, highlighting their ears as both keen listeners and skilled DJs. Opener ‘They Game’ is a grooving number that unifies the psychedelia of cosmic disco with the early 90s ‘baggy’ sound. The energy mounts further with “Shelera”, a guitar-driven acidic banger, and “Sticks and Stones”, a certifiable club hit fueled by sassy vocals courtesy of Adi Bronicki. Launching Side B is “Break the Limit”, an EBM-laced number that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Razormaid compilation. The following tracks wax moodier, with “Brotherhood (Of the Misunderstanding)” touching on darkwave territory. “Udibaby” and “Arpman” close out the album with their respectively dense and sparse takes on kosmische lysergia.
Ben Bondy blesses Special Guest DJ’s Experiences Ltd with a near-fathomless solo debut of sensual, low key electronics and intimate nocturnes. ’Sibling’ sees Bondy return to a seductively gauzy midground sound that over the course of 15 tracks lulls and lists with a minimalist patience, allowing forms to emerge and evaporate in constantly shifty transitions and weathered plays of light according to an immersive eco-logic. Those liminal traces of sound and influence are almost imperceptible, pulling you into a protective amniotic sound-world thats evocative and comforting.
Debut by Ireen Amnes. “In The Land of Silence” is the first full length album by experimental artist Ireen Amnes. The founder of the London based collective Under My Feet debuts on Sonic Groove with an immaterial journey contemplating suffering, liberation, the importance of affection and unity. This ambient album reveals a hidden connection between these human emotions. From anger and rejection, to love and unity, the sounds explored by the artist represent a recent journey within. Recollections of distant memories are expressed with nostalgic sounds; by contrast, darker tracks are symbolic of those moments when it is more dif ficult to accept reality for what it is. Ireen expresses in this album that there wouldn’t be any joy without suffering.
Sprouting from a rich humus of Latin and African polyrhythms, Ghost Horse creates a fusion of free jazz, hip hop, blues & loop music. The result is fascinating but quietly menacing, pulsing & breathing with the visceral force of nature reclaiming abandoned structures.
Manos Brujas is a project by Julian Vasquez, a Colombian artist who draws his inspiration from the lost tribes and shamanism. With his first album Sangre de Oro on our Pinkman Digi Lab series, Manos tells about a legend of a magic totem hidden far in the jungle and a tribe man’s quest to find it, driven by his desire to gain shamanic power. Replete with ritual-like drum beats, rumbling melodies and echoes of animal chatter, the sonic narrative of the album follows the tribe man’s journey, dragging the listener from the remote depths of the jungle to the psychedelic realms of dreams and rituals, until the man realises that the real power was within him. The album is a cinematic and intricate trip made to alters minds.
UNDERMEDVETENHETEN is a simple, science fantasy game for 1-12 players, with a focus on atmosphere, storytelling and player cooperation – perfect for newcomers to live action role playing. It takes 2 minutes to set up, lasts around 30 minutes, and no two games are ever the same. Players take on the roles of humans aboard a vessel on an endless journey into the depths of space. They are not lost, but all hope is, as they hurtle stricken into the void. Your only access to the universe outside is through the ship’s altruistic artificial intelligence, Mima. As immersive chapter cards are revealed one by one, players must interact with Mima in order to shed light on the universe around them, indulge in fantasies of worlds past, or attempt to right the ship’s blighted trajectory. Can you make sense of the abyss? UNDERMEDVETENHETEN comes complete with a soundtrack composed by John B McKenna.
DYL+ DB1 successfully fuses experimental D&B, half-step and techno tropes. Here they re-establish their occasional studio partnership with a first collaborative full-length. It’s a pleasingly atmospheric and imaginative affair, with the pair offering up tracks that variously mix and match elements of unearthly ambient, off-kilter drum and bass, broken techno, murky post-dubstep rhythms, experimental electronica, the metallic clonk of industrial and the hazy hypnotism of dub techno. Musically it’s hard to pin down due to the wide variety of interestingly programmed rhythms, though the album’s uniformly paranoid sense of impending darkness, coupled with occasional glimpses of musical positivity, ensures a coherent aural vision.
Anna Funk Damage, an Italian artist, releases his first LP on Lux Rec. Seven tracks which define the musical attitude behind the moniker. Cruel, unforgiving, harsh. Ranging from extremely slow to fast pacing. Through and through a drugged-out weave of misery and hostility. And his lamenting voice that reminds us that only failure is certain.
3 years after the original vinyl press, Pinkman and Tear Apart Tapes (Das Ding’s own imprint) join forces for a fresh take on ‘Industrial Universal’. The cassette features the re-release of the 4 tracks from the sold out EP on the A-side, and 4 new productions on the B-side. Industrial Universal 1.1 adds an extra turmoil and energy into the already time tested cocktail, delivered in Das Dings style.
Indigo is Icelandic artist’s Exos fourth studio album, arriving almost two full decades after his last LP. In the meantime, the seasoned producer has never stopped to refine his production style, mastering an aesthetic that feels at once minimalist and yet richly detailed. Spanning the organic and the electronic, drawing from early dub techno blueprints and comprising the beauty of his austere homeland. From this Exos expands an absorbing atmosphere, sustaining the primal power of nature within compositions that hold an exalted presence yet never go over-board, instead, they gently push along even in their most intense moments thus vastly transcending the pure club context. The albums thirteen tracks are a sonic bliss to indulge in, each element is crafted so meticulously and balanced with care against its counterparts. Whether the luminous, spaciously glowing opening tracks “Reincarnation” or “í Skjoli Naetur ”the then-ensuing hypnotic techno-trips of “Sælureitur” and “Quad arcanum Leticia” and finally the deeply satisfying, dubbed-out backbone of the album’s main body – a series of Exos’ signature-style dub-techno cuts that he has been perfecting now for over 20 years. Seeing it all mesh together in this concentrated form, it’s the picture of an exceptionally experienced producer pushing himself beyond any limits to achieve his greatest feat yet. When the fog clears and the last tracks slowly roll out, the record leaves as smoothly as it had entered, allowing for reflection and contemplation of one of techno’s most exhaustive LP-efforts yet to date.
Rekids label boss Radio Slave ventures further into unknown territory in a three-part sophomore album entitled ‘Radio Silence’. The UK artist delivers his latest body of work in the form of his ‘Radio Silence’ album, which will be dropping in three parts. The first chapter features perhaps the most leftfield tracks we’ve ever heard Radio Slave product. There’s a rawness to the album, which is in part due to the fact each track was recorded live and without edits, using hardware and Ableton as the main sequencer. Across the seven tracks, Radio Slave hone’s in on a sound that’s haunting and hypnotic.
Voluminous Arts happily announces its third official release, a 12 track album entitled “Disco” by Gavilán Rayna Russom’s elusive alias Black Meteoric Star. This is not a Disco record. The title deliberately troubles the music biz’s incessant tendency to hierarchize genre classification over the experience of listening. If you must categorize these mutant sounds think of them as a proposed alternate score for those long, caffeinated sessions in Abby Sciuto’s forensics lab, the soundtrack to a heavy workout in the Westchester Danger Room or perhaps the musical accompaniment to deep body investigations of your own ancestral memories. What this record really is, and why it’s called “Disco” has to do with the layering of time and life energy present in the spaces where we have traditionally danced to music which are sometimes called Discos. From the pounding urgency of “Muscle Machine” through the unbridled night vision romp that is “Fluid Feline Forms” and the shimmering investigations of “Whispers Between Worlds” to the extended lazer pointer focus of “I’m Unmelting” this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary. What you have here is another fantastic Black Meteoric Star record, as always made without multitracking or overdubbing, recorded directly from single live takes. It is is utterly consistent with all that name has come to mean, but on “Disco” Black Meteoric Star’s vision has been allowed to expand into an almost mythologically epic space. Ancestral time works differently. Settle in and absorb the frequencies. As the closing track suggests, the virtual Disco these sounds evoke is for “Freaks Only”.
Since the first time Childhood Intelligence connected to Darren, they could hear a very unique energy in his music, an almost healing Spirit. They are very happy to Welcome him with his Debut 2×12 Album “A Clear Vision Of A Distant Future” – to the Childhood family and celebrate Childhood Intelligence’s 10th Official Release.
Regis lets his rhythmic noise opus out into the world, a bruising and hauntingly absorbing album – his first since 2001 – dispatched on his pivotal label; Downwards. On a masterful twenty-year followup to ‘Penetration’, Karl O’Connor yields a definitive solo LP that distills his passions for sonic brutalism and bastardised Chicago tracks with syncopated UK swagger and reverberating warehouse ballistics. Its lip-bitingly gripping effect is testament to a resounding reputation as one of Industrial music’s most influential producers, and sees the artist bring his own influences – from Test Department to Jeff Mills – into line with his potent palette of narcotised tones. Recorded in Berlin with Einstürzende Neubauten’s producer/engineer Boris Wilsdorf, the album’s supple, spartan, and rhythmic gymnastics notably benefit from acres of icy room to roll around and lash out. Snagged around muscular bassline revs, and caressed with keys and vocals by postpunk catalyst Annie Hogan (whose recent turn for Downwards was a total revelation), the 9 tracks portray Regis at his leanest and most mesmerising, which is all the more impressive coming from an artist who’s deliberately held his line through club music’s mutations for more than 30 years.
PHXS07 comes from the Athenian experimentalist Bill Anagnos. It is the final outcome of several projects and performances held in 2019. Throughout long periods of almost complete isolation and loneliness and with a basic amount of audio equipment those 11 tracks are mainly fragments of manually managed and arranged in house performances using two analog synthesisers, a turntable, a loop station and a cheap sampler. Obvious is the influence of Kraut rock and retro wave due to the severe use of synthesisers and locked grooves.
Andy Jaggers (aka ADJ) is a name that has been synonymous with the underground electro scene since the mid-nineties. Andy released his early works as 3 Elements on his own label Analogique, delivering 4 now very hard to find records in between ’95 and ’96. Later he would set up Pyramid Transmissions with Pathic to release their own productions and those of likeminded individuals pushing the envelope of the electro sound outside the normally accepted boundaries. For Those That Knoe has worked extensively with Andy to put together a deliciously cohesive eight-track compilation of his works spanning the more recent period of his production career. The LP includes Pyramid Transmission vinyl favorites, cuts only previously available on his digital albums and some pieces released for the very first time.
RØDHÅD has continuously pushed the boundaries of modern techno to new hypnotic and theatrical heights on his Dystopian party-turned-label imprint, where he released his debut Anxious back in 2017. This time, RØDHÅD tunes into a place of reflection and reformation on his most avant-garde project to date: WSNWG – BACK TO ZERO. Intended to provide a space for solo releases, the imprint comes at a crucial turning point, as society circles in on itself during the pandemic. RØDHÅD christens the label with MOOD, his first ambient experimentalist release, comprised of his own solo archival material mostly from 2017/2018, working on a plane of spontaneity, devoid of set structures. The result is a life-giving, intimate and solipsistic work. Awash with field recordings, droning loops and subtle granulations, the sparse soundscapes on the 18- track album are deeply profound and satisfying. Crafting emotive textures through detailed layering of ethereal pads and simple synth melodies on ‘When They Returned After Midnight’ reflects the producer’s meditative sensibilities, whilst more beat-driven tracks such as ‘He Didn’t Seem The Kind of Guy Who Would Just Talk To A Stranger’ and ‘Pigeons Dancing On The Roof’ employ trip-hop beats atop washed synths and textural loops for a more downtempo affair. The album often has the dynamics of a sci-fi film score; the slow-building distortion on ‘A Huge Plume of Ash Rose From a Volcano’ carries a profound weight and substance, whilst the eerie ‘Like Sleepwalkers Ghosting Through A Dream’ breathes as if it had a life of its own.
Weird shapes emerge from the darkness, illuminated only by muted street lamps and neon signs. The CPR album sifts through the shadows of night life decadence, influenced dimly lit romantic and mysteries that lurk on the streets in the early hours of the morning. CPR is a collaboration of a mysterious Berlin duo of lovers, Alexandra Ismalone and Tobias Lisius. Together they conjure a sound that paradoxically traverses darkness and brightness – diving into the depht of the unconsciousness leading to a hypnotic, transportive and psychedelic state done within a dark, intriguing and mysterious way.
The Hipodrome Of Music 