Mannequin, Emotional Rescue and Blowpipe come together to release the music of Dutch post-punk, industrial outsiders Nexda, by releasing a collection of music drawn from all their single and EP vinyl releases, to offer a compelling album. Taken from two 12′ EPs, a split 7′ and a flexi 7′, all released in 1982, the music within Word & Numbers captures striking compositions, part of, but some way removed from their contemporary post-punk bands coming out of the Dutch Ultra’ scene of the time.
Editions Gravats kick off the club-ready “Les Disques De La Bretagne” series with 8 tracks by Low Jack, a re-working of tracks from “Glacial Dancehalll 2” (split tape with Time Cow from Equiknoxx).
Jeremy Campbell and R. Zanzibar return as Out 2 with their debut full length, Showcase. Following their recent Moving EP, the duo expand their mix of New York off-kilter pop lyrical poetics riding over percussive desk-dub funk grooves.
Msic From Memory took a deep dive into the archives of obscure British multi-instrumentalist Mike Turtle, resurfacing with a fine double-album of largely previously unheard cuts. Two years on they’ve taken another stroll through Turtle’s well-stocked vault, resulting in another essential collection of quirky cuts. Check, for example, the psychedelic patchwork “Reincarnation”, where backwards drums do battle with exotic Indian samples, or the delay-laden, lo-fi synth-pop pulse of “Uiko’s Return to Jeka”, which boasts strange spoken word vocals from Turtle and South African style juju guitar solos. You’ll find these kinds of imaginative experiments throughout; tracks that really shouldn’t work, but instead entertain, excite and inspire in equal measure.
Back in the day, French pianist, composer and all-round jazz superstar Jean-François Quiévreux, a.k.a. Jef Gilson, was up there alongside the likes of peers John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, and Sun Ra. In a fitting homage to the decades worth of sublime music, and his sad passing away in 2012, French quarter Palm Unit have released a lively, honest tribute, upbeat and contemporary re-interpretative vision of his legacy.
The debut album by Siberia-born, Moscow-based artist Margenrot aka Lusia Kazaryan-Topchyan – a dark and mesmerising journey into the subterranean, inspired by her Armenian roots and murky sounds of 80-90s industrial music. The album shares its name with a conflict-ridden historical region in southeast Armenia. Margenrot’s inspiration, however, goes beyond geopolitics, and is rooted in the myth of the region’s name. According to Armenian folklore, the name Zangezur came into use after Timur’s conquest, who conquered the Syunik province after a renegade Armenian prince sabotaged the area’s alarm bells. As the province fell, its inhabitants wondered why the bells never rang, giving birth to the phrase “the ring is in vain,” or “zange zur” in Armenian.
Released on TRAX in the golden year of 1989 Chicago’s Virgo aka friends Eric Lewis and Merwyn Sanders, gently pushed House music towards a more musically sophisticated realm that hadn’t been explored previously. Across 8 tracks Virgo took us on a deep exploration of sound that was both masterfully arranged and produced and in direct contrast to a lot of the rudimental and jacking drum tracks that were the flavour of the day. There are few debut albums in the electronic sphere that can claim the title of ‘classic’, but this is surely one of them. A defining turning point in dance music, the dawn of what would later be referred to as the ‘deep house’ movement and sound is all evident with the grooves of this legendary record. Often listed as one of the ‘greatest LP’s of all time’, this self-titled odyssey remains an essential, must have record that never loses it’s magic, flawless in every way and still trailblazing today.
Tomaga’s Music For visual Disorders comprises nine tracks of intuitive automation, compiling compositions that have been used by different artists and curators within the context of works of visual art, dance and exhibitions. Tomaga members Valentina Magaletti and Tom Relleen use a multi-instrumental palette, conjuring up a musical sphere that touches on industrial music, minimalism, ambient and a gentle, at times inward, at times outward, take on krautrock’s motorik. Tomaga’s music is deceptively moderate as its core revolves around intuitive and gentle pulses. Its experimentation lies in its development as it is often driven by abstract images and intentions and even allows moments of soft-spoken absurdity. Music For Visual Disorders is a highly contemporary take on avantgarde and classic contemporary music.
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.
The Hipodrome Of Music 