Rotterdam’s Ian Martin has brought his own brand of dark ambient and unsettling electronics to a stellar clutch of labels. Of these, it is the Bunker/Panzerkreuz crew that Martin has become most readily associated with, perhaps due to the fact label and artist reside in the Netherlands. Wright Seer finds Martin back on Panzerkreuz for his first release of 2016 and features five more untitled tracks of subtle drone-electro hybrids that sound all the more mind-bending with each successive listen.
Danish Damien Dubrovnik duo have been releasing psyched-out noise and power electronics since 2009, and the majority of their work has been released through their own sublime Posh Isolation stable. This time, however, they jump start their machines and distortion pedals, and land on the Jealous God imprint; the label is run by a rather startling trio, the combined talents of Karl O’Connor aka Regis, Juan Mendez aka Silent Servant, and James Ruskin. It sounds like Damien Dubrovnik have all the respect they need, then! All four sound sculptures seem tailor made for the label, where glacial drones hint at something otherworldly or religious, and faint pulses can be heard in the background of the mix. It’s techno without techno, dance music without the dance.
Six synth/field recording/techno noise tracks by Ryan Huber. Recorded, mixed, mastered 2015 on a Tascam DP-03SD.
Blackest Ever Black have performed an interesting exercise in issuing this new 12″ from Tropic Of Cancer along with the Archive: The Downwards Singles collection; as it allows you to hear first-hand how Camella Lobo’s band has progressed musically in a few short years. This three track 12″ is her first new music since that excellent debut Tropic of Cancer LP, and finds Lobo working with Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv.
Blackest Ever Black serve up a double dose of Tropic Of Cancer goodness, with the fresh material from Camella Lobo complemented by this Archive: The Downwards Singles 12″. The smarter cookies out there will glean the content from the title, with Blackest Ever Black gathering together the earliest Tropic of Cancer material issued through the DO sublabel of Karl O’Connor’s Downwards label. These three tracks were recorded in Tropic Of Cancer’s original iteration of Lobo and Juan ‘Silent Servant’ Mendez, a time when the band was exploring a more explicitly bleaker, hazier sound. The motorik stomp and yelping Mendez vocals of closing track “Be Brave” remains a thrilling experience to sink into.
Jonas Ronnberg aka Varg with a mini album themed around dominance and glamour. This is the statement of Penthouse Electronics.
“The Right Place Where Not to Be” is the title of Giorgio Gigli’s first full-length “sonic movie”, a work emerging from the depth of his soul and which properly filters every musical input he’s developed over the years. The album takes its outset in a scenario where all human and animal life-forms have perished and only plants and minerals have survived. Giorgio performs that concept writing an ultra-detailed soundtrack to an imaginary movie, using rich textures that reveal new acoustics, enhanced by alienating atmospheres that captivate the listener. The album is focused on obsessive rhythmics cut on low frequencies, a persistent motion, and a stable tremor. The world is justifying its life-forms in detail. The sky is darkened by laden clouds and stratified sonics that electrify the sound of space. Blooming sensations that cover a wide spectrum, alternate from a feverish tension to the lightness of faith. Confines are rejected, techno meets ambient, purging our body of consciousness. A sonic bubble from a faraway era, a timeless atmosphere that describes a vision that seems to answer to the most important question: why? The task of creating an album is brilliantly managed in a manner that cinematically depicts a surreal concept without the loss tension. The experience of the music is enhanced by the intricate artwork with an evocative artwork that expresses Giorgio’s concept: The sequence of mountains dominated by clouds on a clear sky and the depths of flowers are tinged with the memory of a wonderful past.
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A Gathering Together is Ron Morelli’s second full-length for Hospital Productions: a ‘techno’ cacophony brought to its granular detail and reduced to its most elemental tonal depths. A cohesive fusion of surreal and feverish deja vu loops, brittle noise, fucked rhythms, scrap metal percussions, pro-one metal synths, and an injection of near-buried, Drano vocal samples, it’s a fearsome celebration of brokenness, of amplified surroundings. Stereo-shifting drones and driving rhythms that tell the stories of those now gone, more a soundtrack for a wake than 4/4 crafted for the dancefloor. There’s a naked anxiety at work that doesn’t turn away from loss, but runs with an excited melancholy that looks to a future that won’t exist. The boldness of the gestures are not to be confused with exuberance. With this effort Morelli has shown remarkable restraint and patience most notably highlighted on title track ‘A Gathering Together.’ An intense cut born from rapid-paced dead-end urban environments that force people together. It’s a calling to do more, include more, and celebrate the many forms within those inconspicuous places. Upon numerous listens, it’s clear the sound design is a reflection of heavy compositional themes that suggest a greater whole. This is hard, dirty techno–humid, reduced, bare bones, yet dense and dissolved to its electronic soil. Heavy without being oppressive, it is the culmination of many elements pulled from all spheres of modern electronics, eaten, digested, and spit back out.
Elegies-in-waiting to the monotonous dread of exploitative labour, dosed with elliptical distortion, industrial noise and ear-crushing bass. Vexd veteran Roly Porter drops by with a sci-fi reinvention of Council Flat, trading in IFs mogadon footwork and megaton polyrhythms for a less apocalyptic, more introspective blend of modern classical, dark ambient and dirty stinking breakbeat.
Imre Kiss finally lands back on the Lobster Theremin mothership, this time with a reissue of his seminal tape album Midnight Wave. A seminal, bold and instantly nostalgic LP, Midnight Wave showcases Imre’s immense ability to craft vivid landscapes of ethereal sound, infused with layers and years of emotional content. Culled from live-to-tape synth sessions in his once London abode, these tracks are the result of melancholic and restricted surroundings and trappings. What has emerged is a body of crackling, warm ambient and techno with a vast, cinematic scope. A sonic portrait of an alienated moment in London, told using industrial visceral tools and visualised through the cutting figure of a lonely individual boarding the 5am night bus home.
‘Italian techno masterminds Donato Dozzy and Neel are returning as the duo Voices From The Lake with a release on the mother label Editions Mego: Live @ MAXXI is a marvellous organic live-set of hypnotic ambient techno, proofing the outstanding and elegant craftsmanship of their sonic sculpturing, that they both are famous for. As was to be expected they stay true to their polyphonic topography of liquid scapes: aquatic sceneries are embedded in soaking dense atmospheres, gently gyrating us into trance. Sometimes soft echoes of sirenic voices are heard – the only remnants of human traces in these spaces that have suspended time, where smooth silky textures are being channeled into fractal structures that induce a state of transcendence. The haptic quality of their sound is adding up to a sonic matrix of metaphysic imaginary that is provoked by gentle glides and dynamic beat patterns of almost tribalistic quality. Dunked in a bath of dark fluid, sometimes washed away at the shores of Kosmische – VFTL’s tunes are not scared to seduce us into a condition of haziness, culminating in a cover of Paolo Conte’s ,Max’ which is turned into a dazzling sample of sweet, dreamy melancholia.
Chicago based musician Connor Camburn under the alias Lituus, with an entirely beatless collection that well establishes Avian as the home for the kind of searching electronic experimentation that would have been found on the ten-inch focused imprint that Shifted recently announced would merge with its parent label. Shorn of percussive elements yet not without their own rhythmic structures, Camburn’s six compositions are free of immediate electronic genre influences and instead draw primarily on non-musical inspiration in addition to various other contextual reference points, as he sought to express ideas of the unraveling or ”de-composition” of musical or architectural spaces through musical forms imagined as inverted contours and negative spaces.
50Weapons begins its finale with the first of 11 12″s, catalog numbers 40 through 50, featuring a 50Weapons artist on one side and another artist, chosen by the first, on the B-side. “Narr Day” is the first tune ever made by one of Berlin’s key electronic acts; all the flavors of the early days are combined in this minimal ambient techno tune made of the three main ingredients: a bass, a drone, and a kick drum. Cosmin TRG uses the dark drone of “Narr Day” as the base for his modular-synthesizer-enhanced rework of the track. Dark and trippy techno for the head.
Established producer D’Marc Cantu has been crafting his own style of jakbeat since the late ’90s, but comes to New York Haunted with some dark and experimental techno and drones.
Vagon Brei, aka Victor Ramos is back with a full length CD album on Photic Fields. A project inspired by and dedicated to Richard Feynman: the scientist, the teacher, the explorer, the visionary and the raconteur. His scientific curiosity, zest for life and eccentric personality were tried to be captured in music, produced by a true admirer of the man. A varied set of tracks, among the album you’ll find mystic waves, ambient moods, synth soundtracks and electro cuts. ‘It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong’.
You wake from sleep, the door closes by itself and the walls run with slime and rain. A shadow moves, almost familiar, welcoming and simultaniously intimidating. The candle flickers and snuffs out. A noise. Your torch is dying. Something takes your hand. Long fingernails and old skin. You mark the floor, chant the incantation. Together. In the first of our split series we present two modern artists who’s imaginations know no limit. Abstract drones, anchient machinery, neon cities within the shadow of the overfiend.
Already featuring on two earlier Planet Rhythm samplers and on the digital imprint, it was just a matter of time for his 12″ solo-debut to come; Von Grall presents his “No Contact EP” on the Planet Rhythm Black imprint.
Alessio Natalizia’s Not Waving moniker goes from strength to strength, even since ending his collaboration with Sam Willis in the highly regarded Walls project. Now focusing on the textured, modular workouts and cinematic synth journeys seen on the brilliant two previous albums Umwelt and Human Capabilities, he returns with his most ambitious outing yet. This double LP gathers together all the material Natalizia issued on the cassette series of the same name and is a must for those who like their electronics immersive to the max. From the retro futurism of “Witzelsucht” and “It Needs No Medication” to the brazen industrial attitude of “The Behaviourist Approach” and “Creating Capabilities” there are many moods of his musical identity that he explores here. But for most part its the beauty in the soulful mechanical soundscapes that he creates on this imaginary soundtrack, particularly on “Part of Thought”, “Dangerously Well” and “Negative Reinforcement”.
For his last outing on Hospital Productions, Nine Inch Nails collaborator Alessandro Cortini utilized just two pieces of equipment: a Roland MC-202 and a delay pedal. For this follow-up, he’s expanded his toolbox a little, supplementing those hardware pieces with two further machines: a Roland TR-606 and TB-303. Musically, Risveglio inhabits a similar space to its predecessor, with Cortini creating blurry, fluid dreamscapes built around semi-rhythmic loops, distorted chords and fuzzy ambient textures. Listeners may struggle to spot the TB-303 – most often used to create ragged waves of intense electronics – such is the unique way in which Cortini manipulates it. Regardless, the Italian’s post-industrial, half-awake soundscapes are thoroughly mesmerizing.
The Hipodrome Of Music 