William Thomas Burnett aka Willie Burns / DJ Speculator / Black Deer is one of the creative minds of the underground music scene in NYC. After releases for L.I.E.S., The Trilogy Tapes, Crme and Rush Hour, The WT Records boss unveils his new monicker Phobian, presenting 4 TR-808/SH-101/Pro One driven electro jams for the mysterious Haunted Air Records.
Sumerian Fleet aka Alden Tyrell and Mr Pauli with vocalist Zarkoff. Their debut eponymous EP was released on Clones West Coast series in 2010 and the Sturm Bricht Los EP came out in 2012 on the Creme Eclipse branch of Creme Organization. Sumerian Fleet is ready to release their first full length album Just Pressure all new material recorded between 2013 and 2014 as well as a remixed version of the title track from the Sturm Bricht Los EP. Just Pressure contains 80s Dark Wave/EBM inspired tracks with an industrial tinge. Citing inspiration from Fad Gadget, Front 242, Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, Sumerian Fleet deliver 9 songs of vintage dark electro. Their sound brings to mind rough 80s/90s Industrial dance with a Gothic tinge and a touch of bass guitar as the lead instrument. The band utilizes vintage analog gear like the Linn Drum, Roland TR-808, MiniMoog, Korg MS-20, and Roland Jupiter 8 . All songs were recorded at Mr Paulis studio in Den Haag and Alden Tyrells studio in Rotterdam. The album has been mastered for vinyl at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley by George Horn. Each LP is packaged in a custom-made jacket by our in-house designer Eloise Leigh, incorporating Mesopotamian pyramids and occult symbols, offset printed with gold ink at Stumptown Printers in Portland.
The mysterious project by Jodey Kendrick who has released his first pure electro double album with Drexciya influences. Without compromise. Brut, Faster, Sexy like Varla.
For its first album project, Shipwrec is to release a new full-length album from pioneering electronic producer DMX Krew entitled “Shape Shifting Shaman” with colourful artwork by Doppeldenk. Ed DMX is best known for releasing six albums on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records and for spanning styles from breakbeat to techno to electro. He has already released two EPs on the four-year-old Dutch label Shipwrec and now returns with a full-length opus that proves, more than twenty years after first emerging, that few people are as sonically inventive as him. Of the album, DMX Krew says “I feel like these tracks are more original and have a stronger feeling of my personality in them. When I finished each of these tracks I had a happy feeling that I had done something true to myself and something that represents my best”. Reporting that he is always making and releasing music but tends to save back his best tracks for a full length project, Shape Shifting Shaman is just that – a collection of all killer material with great cover design and excellent mastering.
Cultivated Electronics round off the World Electronix series with a remixes EP featuring tracks from each of the 4 volumes. Morphology’s Darkstar is remixed by The Hacker, The Exatics Ten Days is given a dark twist by Sync 24, J.T.C’s In Transit is refunked by DMX Krew and the EP is finished off with Marco Benardi’s Morbider mix of Sync 24 & Deixis Ah Ah Ah.
Glaswegian producer Marco Bernardi offers up 4 tracks of unsettling, quirky, off the wall techno and electro. Along with his heavy release schedule, Marco has also launched his own label Take the Elevator that focuses on non-conventional house and techno.
Dark Entries introduce the debut album by RedRedRed, a contemporary artist from San Francisco, Michael Wood. “Pattern Completion” was originally planned as a 4 song cassette EP that was only released digitally. The A side features remixed and remastered versions of the tracks from the EP. The B side consists of four unreleased tracks, two of which are instrumental. The material on “Pattern Completion” is strongly influenced by Michael’s former live/work studio space in the Bayview District of San Francisco, an area surrounded by recycling facilities and water treatment plants. The songs reflect this industrial atmosphere, stacking treated rhythm box patterns, quivering synthesizers, and mechanical vocals. “Pattern Completion” develops the strain of futuristic, mutant industrial pioneered by San Francisco groups like Tuxedomoon and Factrix, with RedRedRedadding his own brand of damaged angular rhythms.
Neo Romantico dance music by Shangri & La. Inspired by a club and a scene that never was, we hear rroto acid, bongo boogie, future reggae and candid club cuts that equals the Fantastic Four. Great sounding music for good looking people.
Lux Rec continue their endless research at the margins of music, what is underground, at every latitude, to find rough gems and bring them to light. After a series of releases which explore Techno in various ways, they turned their attention to another field. That of the Cold Electronics and New Wave movement, and French musical existentialism. Cold Colors comes from Bordeaux, France. To Lux Rec he is the best expression of and a new take on that type of music. A sense of solitude is the first reaction to his music. Melodic longings for something that is not there, unreachable. Four songs to depict a hopeless stare into emptiness. Shadows of a love long gone.
Man/machine magician Boris Divider unleashes his fourth album. Continuing his explorations and escapades into the darkest, iciest realms of electronic music, Deflector/Atractor is perhaps his most extensive collection to date as we’re treated to shimmering ambient bliss (“Particle”) to dreamy, skippy, robot-charming fracturism (“Mikrowelt”) via his more classic, straight up funky electro (“Deflector”). Yet another bold march into the coded unknown for both Boris and Fundamentals, this can’t be slept on.
Love Surrender original and Three other takes + two synthetic messages from Studio Styrka. That is what this vinyl contains. Love surrender has a more synthier style than the tracks recently released on Bio Rhythm.
In between the release of album length projects for Mystic & Quantum and Shipwrec, Ed Upton returns for Central Processing Unit duty with this collection for the label’s Binary Series under his universally recognised DMK Krew banner. Upton’s taking no prisoners here with six cuts aimed squarely at the electro purists out there, effortlessly combining neck snapping rhythms with those unique melodies that characterise the DMK Krew electro sound. Tracks like the fluctuating analogue drama of “Not Very”, the Martian boogie of “Spook Show” and EP highlight “Crawlspace” rank this release up there with the best thus far in CPU’s must check discography.
A legendary name in techno, Lory D is back and as strong as when his vinyls were cherished all over the world as his SNS (Sound Never Seen) was printed by Rephlex of Aphex Twin. MT100 is a timeless and genre-free track: it’s just music. The melody is sound-track material for a high profile film with a rhythm which however recall the first drum machines of the eighties.
Returning to Viewlexx sub-label Murder Capital, Gesloten Cirkel is ready to serve up a full-length album, Submit X. Russian mystery man Gesloten Cirkel has caused quite a stir with his releases on this label as well as Moustache Techno Series and Berceuse Heroique – it is often weird, twisted music that fuses acid and techno and electro into brave new forms. This new album continues in that tradition across ten new cuts. Right from the off Gesloten Circkel spits out the jams – opener ‘Zombiemachine Acid’ is built on a corrugated bed of beats, has slapping percussion and a sharp acid line. After the same track without the acid line comes ‘Submit X’ with its into fractured, loopy sounds and layered up vocal snippets. For unsettling, dark and droning ambient check ‘Stakapella’, or the same sketch with a distant electro beat on ‘Stakan’. ‘Chatters’ is then a grimy post punk electronic track with whirring melodies, malfunctioning synths and plenty of dirt in its make-up and the latter part of the album touches on more paranoid electro, nagging and unsettling techno and whip-snapping acid tracks. Truly unique, esoteric and idiosyncratic, this album is as unpredictable as you would expect from someone like the enigmatic Gesloten Cirkel.
The Zukunft (future) is over. The machine-dreams has been dreamed, the future shock has lost its terror. Compared to the complexity and contrariness of our technologically advanced presence, the utopias and dystopias of the last century has become a vague description of the here and now. Total monitoring? Check. Cyberspace? Check. A man on the moon? Check! We tried to achieve the future so fast, that our thinking could hardly keep up with it. Newer than now? Difficult to imagine. Also and especially not when it comes to electronic music. The new arises from the old, a well-established method since the brainchild of sampling, gets a whole new quality in an interconnected world. The linearity of time crumbles away in our unlimited digital archives, in which styles and cultures, movement and countermovement are collocated, ever-present in unison. It is sufficient to regroup the set pieces from the past and the present over and over again to connote the new, the forward direction.
Tesla286 just does not do that. The well-known stranger, whom self-mystification just fits the mould every bit as his synonym, stops the clocks and takes a look back. He simulates a past where the future still had a future. The 11 exact electro-replicas of the current album move within the realms of a tight historical framework, somewhere between Asimov, Dopplereffekt and mid-nineties Detroit.
With ‘Umlaufbahn’ we will be absorbed in the magnetic atmosphere of a planet. ‘Tesla’s Oscillator’ clearly cites Herbie Hancock’s ‘ Rockit’ from 1984 and is reminiscent of the futurism of Detroit-electro-wave from a beat of another decade. The title track ‘Zukunft’ presses every button in the science fiction narratives between Star Wars and the subaquatic warriors of the Drexciya universe. The cold machine rhythm of the hypnotic tracks lead us back again and again to the fears of a generation, which mistrusts and simultaneously promotes technical progress. Not before ‘Meteorite over Pankow’ strikes a more optimistic tone, which originates from overlooking the imminent extinction of the human race (or at least of Berlin).
Tesla286 has created a fan-fiction version of a long-gone era with ‘Zukunft’, which reflects our own nostalgic look on the once-upon-a-time-future. We pinpoint that our discomfort over the consequences of the technical progress didn’t really change over the last few decades. There is almost a comforting hint to the power of fear over the new, a stabilising human coefficient, which makes this album so newsworthy.
Last Known Trajectory proudly presents reinterpretations of In Sync’s undisputed UK techno classic, namely ‘Storm’, alongside new versions of accompanying tracks, ‘Warm’ and ‘Subway Route’. Split over two separately available twelve inch EPs. Here, lovingly reinvented by E.R.P. (aka Gerard Hanson), Maarten van der Vleuten (Evo-Lute Muzik) and Ramjac (of Irdial vintage).
On a rainy late September day in the mid eighties, 7 year old Phillip Lauer didn’t know what to expect from that little new born G, who was referred to as his brother Jacob. On the other hand, Baby Jacob wasn’t very sure of what to make of this – back then still sporty – youngster either, who behaved like his boss. To make a short story long… it took them almost 30 years to finally find out – behind the helm of the infamous Pyramide 2 Studio when conducting this fine piece of home made dance music: the Brudis EP.
