Bergen is the next, and natural step in the expanding career of Dutch producer Tom Trago. The acclaimed producer behind Voyage Direct will release his fourth LP, with the label and crew he’s built a close relationship with over the past ten years – Dekmantel. With a new studio and approach to music, Bergen is Trago sounding at his very finest, returning to his roots with a focussed, and dedicated production ethos.
The Colorful World of Arp Frique is the exotic and super funky debut album of Niels Nieuborg. After his surprising, very well received debut release on Rush Hour, Arp Frique continues collaborating with Orlando Julius, Ed Motta, Americo Brito, Ronald Snijders and more. On this surprise debut album, he continues the same approach, delivering a scintillating set of tracks that gleefully join the dots between Afro-disco, jazz-funk, boogie, Caribbean reggae-disco, bossa-soul and the kind of up-tempo, synth-laden madness that defies easy categorization. Throughout, the presence of live drums, vocals and instrumentation gives the album a loose and fluid feel, as if what we’re listening to is not a fresh album, but rather a long lost African rarity from the turn of the ’80s.
After touring the world looking for sounds suitable for their vibrations, Nu Guinea decided to go back to square one, Napoli, where Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina were born and raised. They watched their city from a distance reconstructing its energy from their studio in Berlin, calibrating the synths on the meridian of Vesuvius, the volcano that has always protected and threatened Napoli. ‘Nuova Napoli’ is the result of a long musical research that has become a historical investigation on the sound that shaped Napoli during the ‘70s and ‘80s, starting from the contamination of genres (disco, jazz-funk, African rhythms) which ended up in Nu Guinea’s DNA. In this album the synthesizers fill the spaces between the past and the future, tightening in a single body acoustic instruments, electronics and voices in Neapolitan dialect. It is the first time that the duo has worked with such a large group of musicians, some of whom are exponents of the contemporary Neapolitan scene.
Reissue of the sought after birth act of the Afro- / Jazz-Parisian scene that fascinated so many musicians and music fans throughout the 70s and 80s. Comes in a heavyweight tip-on sleeve.
Mannequin Records present a trilogy of reissues from the avantgarde Italian-born producer Doris Norton, ”Norton Computer For Peace” (1983), ”Personal Computer” (1984), ”Artificial Intellingence” (1985). Apple’s first music ”endorsement” and Roland affiliate, Doris Norton is one of the most important women pioneer in the use of synths and in the early electro / computer music.
Mannequin Records present a trilogy of reissues from the avantgarde Italian-born producer Doris Norton, ”Norton Computer For Peace” (1983), ”Personal Computer” (1984), ”Artificial Intellingence” (1985). Apple’s first music ”endorsement” and Roland affiliate, Doris Norton is one of the most important women pioneer in the use of synths and in the early electro / computer music.
‘Jamal Moss has cultivated an unmistakable sonic vocabulary. Genre signifiers are contorted into perplexing polyrhythms of perpetual dynamism and velocity. The chirps and squelches of acid heritage are subverted and lunged into new zones without sacrificing spirit. This is another essential statement from an impossibly unique and uncompromising talent.’ Tadd Mullinix … Jamal Moss’s Acid Attacks tape on a 2xLP with an exclusive vinyl only tracks.
‘Hello, I am Qnete and these are my Play-Doh Stories. Some of them are already three years old and it feels like I’ve become somewhat of a different person since then. Still, I like to listen to them from time to time, thinking of how I was back then, reminding me of what helped shape me, what helped me become who I am now. Sometimes, I also get the feeling that it is not me who wrote the stories. They seem to seem unknown to me, just like they seem to you, because you are not me. Then I listen, and I know again.’
As we step into 2018, DJ Bone brings another fresh fusion of funk and ferocity, Composed for deployment on his own Subject Detroit imprint, A Piece Of Beyond is a detailed and varied cross section of Bone’s multidimensional musical mind, journeying along a strong spine of Detroit Techno in all its many shapes, colours and textures…
Loch Ness was originally composed as a soundtrack for a – never finished – 2012 Commodore 64 Loch Ness ‘Spotter Simulator’ videogame. An adventure / simulator / RPG in which the player takes the role of a cryptozoologist trying to proof the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. The sounds on this soundtrack come from the mighty Commodore 64 itself. This computer, released in 1982, came with a state of the art soundchip – the MOS technologies SID. Far ahead of its competition it sported advanced functions like waveforms with Pulse Width Modulation, envelope generators and a filter. With this chip the commodore 64 had a real 3 voice synthesizer build in – lightyears removed from the spartan primitive unmusical blips and beeps of the Ataris or Apple II’s. The cassette version of the Loch Ness videogame remastered soundtrack comes with new artwork and extra unreleased tracks.
Digital re-issue coinciding with the tape release of this 2007 Strange Life CDR DX7 drenched cult spywave album. Very much influenced by real locations in the vicinity of the The Hague dune studio where this was recorded – this imaginary soundtrack scores a hypothetical story of a Cold War animal parapsychologist living in an abandoned zoo.
XOR Gate is the brainchild of Heinrich Mueller, one half of Drexciya and Dopplereffekt. In linguistic or electronic logic, the XOR Gate designates a device, digital or grammatical, which outputs a value only when two di ering inputs are fed into it. This can be summed up with the formula ‘one or the other but not neither, nor both.’ A conic section is a shape created as a plane intersects a cone. This can result in di erent figures such as a circle, an ellipse, a parabola or a hyperbola. Conic Sections is here composed of eight themes, or shapes, over which waveform and synthesis entirely merge with human emotions. The line is blurred. These eight themes are intertwined, forming one long musical string. The line is forever blurred.
Tresor Records announces a new commission, bringing together two of its most time-honored contributors. Berlin’s Thomas Fehlmann and Detroit’s Terrence Dixon came together in Detroit to produce this expressive album. An avant-premiere live performance of this album was presented at Tresor’s annual Detroit showcase in May 2017. Composed of six titles and exploring a wide range of rhythms and emotions, “We Take It From Here” is a celebration of resilience, patience, creativity and devotion.
‘Caibu’ is Paul Rose’s first album as SCB. The album builds on material from the ‘Below The Line’, ‘Old Media New Society’, and ‘Engineered Morality’ EPs which explored a fictional narrative in which a hypothetical timeline is corrupted by a climate-related disaster. The title of the album itself refers to an imagined surgical procedure where cognitive ability is augmented through transplant from one brain to another. As such, ‘Caibu’ invites the listener to forge their own ideas on the development of society in the context of crisis.
Spacetravel and ninth super strike from Melliflow. an electronic music label based in Berlin. founded and curated by Vera & Alexandra. Spacetravel is the new soundscape project of Luca Cara.
Instant is the trio of Bernd Schöll (Bass, Vocals, Rhythm), Mike Hauer (Guitar, Synth, Percussion), and Marion Siekmann (Vocals) from Munich, Germany. They formed in 1980 after meeting through mutual friends attending the local art and graphic design school. The trio were dissatisfied with their surrounding musical environment. They set out to create their own brand of Neue Deutsche Welle fusing Dada, disco, and Krautrock. Over the course of 2 weeks in Summer 1980 the band teamed up with local producer Mario Strack to record 6 songs. These would make up their debut eponymous album that was originally self-released on 10” vinyl in 1981. They utilized a simple set up of guitar, bass, and keyboards, plus the BOSS DR-55 Dr. Rhythm drum machine. Metal scraps clanging appear on the tracks “Do Not” and “Optimate Minimum”, and a washing machine was sampled on the track “Joyboy”, which features Marion reading from the appliance’s instruction manual. The A-side features 4 tracks in 11 minute, while the B-side hosts 2 songs in the same stretch of time. “Charade” features no wave saxophone accompaniment from Kai Taschner of Munich New Wave band Luna Set. Marion’s vocals are between Nico’s Teutonic chill and Alison Statton’s (Young Marble Giants) playfulness, while Bernd takes a monotone approach. Lyrics for “My Boy” and “Everybody’s Gotta Mutate” were adapted from ‘Rotwang’, a fragmented novel written by Tim Hildebrandt, one of the brothers famous for illustrating the works of Tolkien.
Since first joining forces in 2014, hardware freak Parrish Smith and former punk activist Mark van de Maat (founder of Amsterdam’s admirable Knekelhuis label) have earned a reputation for delivering the kind of incendiary live shows that were once the preserve of British multi-media mavericks such as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Mutilating and manipulating their songs on the fly, Volition Immanent takes no prisoners in pursuit of artistic expression.
To celebrate New Flesh Records 20th release to date, French veteran DJ Umwelt returns to his own label with a new LP. Built like the soundtrack of a dystopian movie where main characters evolve in a hopeless future, Sci-Fi ‘Abandon In Place’ delivers no less than height cinematic masterpieces half-way between electro and ambient registers. From the menacing sirens of opener ‘Void Of Nothingness’ to the melancholic synths of closing ‘Galactic Wreck’, passing through the Blade Runnerish vision of ‘Celestial Matter’, this soulful album depicts nothing but the extinction of mankind in a ending world. Besides its terrific message, ‘Abandon In Place’ showcases the unlimited talent and incredible versatility of Umwelt, a mighty producer able to split from the most cutting edge music on New Flesh Records to a more radical, straight to the dancefloor approach on Rave Or Die. A gloomy journey through apocalyptic tones, slow yet deep basslines, industrial touches, cold and un- compromising emotions. Umwelt’s most forward thinking opus to date sum up in once sentence: “By the end of the day, all is dust”.
Over the last decade the work of Cosmin Nicolae has been a cresting force of forward thinking electronic music. His TRG alias formed the inaugurate release on the peerless Hessle Audio. In essence he forms an important part of the story of the cross pollination of UK bass’ music with techno and his hard work and craft has seen him maintain his fixture as a sought after talent, both producing and as a DJ. One element which always amplified his work beyond that of many other peers is Cosmin’s dedication to crafting interesting sound from scratch, a process which precedes his production and has it roots in home-brewed experimentation with instruments, electro-acoustic process and improvisation. With this debut release under his actual name, Opal Tapes has provided a space for Cosmin to have free reign to display another, looser and more experimental side of his repertoire. In many ways, an impossible album to classify, it feels as if it’s creating itself a points. The ideas therein are the genesis of so many fully functional’ songs but hearing them like this brings us so much closer to someone else’s mind and fingertips.
Camelot Arcade is the new triple LP from Ceephax Acid Crew on WeMe Records. 13 tracks of Camelot goodness with all the feeling and melodies we’ve come to expect from Ceephax and his collection of classic electronic hardware. The tracks range from the easy listening sound of Phraxby to the baroque dancefloor pump of Camelot Escalator, to the trap-esque cyber feel of Yodecahedron and the Detroit moodiness of The Green Night. Creon Happy and Trusthouse Forte have an upbeat classical feel (backed up of course by Ceephax’s favourite Roland drum machines.) While Path to the None and Shadowphax Part I&II are more dark in spirit. A lot of the tracks such as Life Started Tomorrow and The Great Greatsby were born randomly of quick jams with live keyboard playing and the album has an organic feel to it which a lot of the more formulaic electronic music lacks. All in all Camelot Arcade is a wonderful breath of fresh air and is sure to go down in history as one of Ceephax’s best.
The Hipodrome Of Music 