Hungarian composer and musicologist László Hortobágyi, took his first expedition to North India in the late 1960’s to record music, study philosophy and learn traditional instruments such as the rudra-vina, sitar, surbahar and tabla. These ongoing trips heavily influenced his musical style and much of his recorded work. LFI is happy to announce the reincarnation of one of his most illustrious works, Transreplica Meccano originally released by Hungaropop in 1988.
Veranda Culture is the new project from Melbourne artist and DJ, Francis Inferno Orchestra. The new album, his second full length LP, follows on from his most recent release, the club-ready ‘Oasis and Time’, The next step in James’ musical journey sees the producer shift-direction with the tranquil and beautiful Veranda Culture, balancing New Age ambience, percussive pulse rides and echoing synths for an album that unfurls with a calming patience and soothing confidence throughout. Recorded over a period of three years between Melbourne and London, FIO began making Veranda Culture after discovering the debut album of Greek-born, Sausalito-based composer Iasos – the New Age masterpiece ‘Inter-Dimensional Music’ LP — in Melbourne’s Liquorice Pie record store. The album is filled with quietly twitching rattles and bells, gurgling talking drums, and snippets of trickling water and bird songs collected through field recordings, creating a bed of sound that is hard to pin down but effortless to absorb as a whole.
There is a sense of urgency increasingly infecting the human condition, fragmenting our attention span, accelerating our needs and often influencing our motives when making creative decisions. The result is a lack of dynamics, there is no ebb or flow, its “go” time, all the time. Electronic music is one of the clearest examples of a widening division between great art created in a deeply imaginative vaccum and the soulessly formulaic and branded product that serves the impatient masses. What draws the ESP Institute to Benedikt Frey is his ability to operate on the fringe, outside the constructs artists constantly channel themselves into—his art speaks a pure language that is realized by any means necessary, a process devised solely to articulate his own message, one delivered with patience, never rushed nor dictated by the outside world. Artificial was written and produced over two years, tirelessly sculpted into a sequence abstract pieces that are fiercely independent but accumulate layers of meaning when collaged. It is electronic and rhythm-based, but never reliant on any prescribed instrumentation, arrangement or expecatation. This is our idea of well conceived and executed album; not simply a collection of tracks but a complex narrative that unfolds over peaks and valleys, pulling the listener into emotional corners before leaving a residual impression. Some may describe music very well in words, but there is always something lost in translation—a story only the music itself can tell.
A dervish bewt from Stefan Schwander’s Harmonious Thelonious for TTT, Apakapa catches the Düsseldorf-based explorer meeting the moroccan flute of Ghazi Barakat for one of the project’s jazziest, moodily hypnotic episodes.
Prolific and always inventive live pair and studio wizards Juju & Jordash are back with another fantastic album on their home label, Dekmantel. Called “Sis-boom-bah!” it features nine tracks that once again showcase their musical maturity and free thinking. The pair say it is an album “steeped in traditionalism” and to us it sounds spiritual, musical and beautifully thought provoking.
“Q/R” it’s about weird electro, new wave, industrial, synth pop and dark psychedelic musik. It includes a remastered version of Chen Yi’s 1982 work “Rug” , but also unreleased track from Beta Evers & Dora Gerl as “Severe Sisters”, Denis Frajerman & William Bope project, The Blizzard Sow. An industrial/rock track recorded by a new band from Berlin, called Automatenfall. A new track from USA based artist Neud Photo, a cosmic electro track from mysterious BB & SS and an exclusive latvian piece from 1988 (19 Gadi Pirms Sakuma).
Prolific and understated musician Shane English delivers a follow up 12 inch for L.I.E.S. after his powerful ”General Dimensions” LP from 2016. Once again the Austin based artist taps into the outer edges of the electronic world falling in a grey area somewhere between Muslimgauze, creeped tribal electronics or the tense beat experiments on Seico Corp Recordings. his is downed tree split open wire music, live to the touch.. free form open ended recorded music from one of the most interesting and best kept secrets in American electronics these days. Unending tension with every turn, this is not a record to miss.
Jasss makes her head and body-turning album debut with Weightless, an absorbingly stark and spiky set of industro-dub concerns riddled with heavy inspiration from African rhythms, jazz and concrète electronics. iDEAL give Jasss room to consolidate and expand her grizzled dancefloor structures to a full length episode that brutally dovetails with Joachim Nordwall and co’s unforgiving but compelling take on contemporary noise and industrial musics.
Former masked techno crusader Adam Rivet started the Kess Kill imprint a couple of years ago, to showcase some lesser known talents from the ’80s scene in Europe. French producer Guy Clerbois began his musical career by transforming sounds: creating rhythms with scratched vinyl records and altering their playing speeds plus detuning his guitar. In the mid eighties, he began what would become the very concept of Vitor Hublot, making shifted reworks of existing ones. All compositions originally issued on the ‘185 Millions De Francophones Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi…’ LP via his own Psoria Discs in 1986.
Chino is Krakow, Poland’s Artur Oles. Artur is into Polish Brutalist architecture, poster art, 80’s drum machines, FM synthesis, tape hiss, obscure eastern electronics, Tatra mountains. Following a series of impeccable records, this is Chino’s debut on cassette. Eight tracks of perfectly studied techno with edges of the abstract.
Amongst those that keep track of these things, German trio Hyonobeat are considered proto-techno pioneers. While it’s not known whether Detroit’s Belleville Three were fans, you could argue that Hynobeat’s rhythm-focused approach pre-dated both techno and Chicago house. Thanks to this fine retrospective from Dark Entries, you can judge for yourself. The material included was all recorded between 1983 and 1986, with the wild, off-kilter polyrhythms and ragged TB-303 lines of “The Arumbeya Fetish”, mutant electro of “Kilian” and high-octane thrust of the decidedly out-there “Mission in Congo” standing out. Remarkably, Hypnobeat would chain together drum machines and bass synthesizers to create their tracks – a practice that would later become common during the acid house era.
SIMULTAN is an annual festival dedicated to media art and artistic experiment, creating a bond between different media.
After a fashionably long hiatus between drinks, Melbourne’s Animals Dancing returns with its third release, this time from Boroondara’s Tornado Wallace. Strap yourself in and feel the G’s.
Music From Memory return, this time with four tracks drawn from Virgil ‘Vincent’ Work Jnr’s little-known cassette only debut from 1987. This album reflects a more stripped back and raw musical approach from the St. Louis musician. The ‘Fast Forward’ sessions grew out of a series of late night jams with Vincent’s brother Scott who was then living in Kansas. With nothing planned in advance and no written music involved in the final recording sessions, the songs that would form ‘Fast Forward’ very much evolved out of improvisation. As Virgil himself explains, the title of the album in fact came about because it felt “as if I had fast forwarded to a different sound”. Although the album received a good response from local radio DJs and music magazines, the album sadly never gained enough momentum or demand for a further run of copies. Fast forward to 2017, exactly thirty years are their production, and Music From Memory are delighted to be able to finally make Vincent’s music commercially available again.
23 years have passed since Edward Upton first donned the DMX Krew alias, but the prolific British producer shows no signs of slowing down. Astonishingly, Strange Directions is the electro stalwart’s 21st full-length excursion. Predictably, it’s rather good, with Upton delivering a set that effortlessly body-pops between vocoder-laced electro workouts, melodious IDM, bass-heavy intelligent techno, gnarled Drexciyan throbbers, Artificial Intelligence style home listening fare and even a dash of muscular, tongue-in-cheek Italo-disco (the deliciously sleazy “Soft Networks”). As usual, the distinctive, off-kilter swing of original analogue hardware is present throughout, as Upton showcases his full range of talents.
“Feeling numb from all the electronic dancemusic coming out?, moaning about how its become a bit samey, or are you just tired of your shitster friends saying its not like in the 90’s anymore. This record will shut everyone in the room up. A1 is a deeply psychotic acid death march into confusion, so minimal and primitive (kick, snare, acidsquelch) it will challenge every beard and armpit and might even hypnotize the dj to the point he cannot mix in the next one. A2 is a straight up Commodore 64 SID track with mongoloid data elephants tooting over a wobbly and tarded electroish beat. B1 is a dystopic dreamy rave stomper, starting out kinda datacuddly but gets more and more serious, with choirs of fable mooers taking you into that virtual bad trip you need. b2 continues as expected with more c64 SID madness, so snary I cant even determine if its in 115 or 230bpm. But it leaves you with the feeling your ears and mind just been wrestled, smacked and poked at, and thats the point. This is no record for the safing chickenshit DJ.”
Senora are Dani & Diego from Barcelona. Their debut release features two ayahuasca journeys into sound plus a remix from island god Black Merlin.
Warp Factor 9 is a one-off project by John and Russell Kilby of esoteric post-rock bands The Crystal Set and Bhagavad Guitars respectively. The Atmospherian originally appeared on their self-released 1993 album Five Days In A Photon Belt. Carpentaria made an edit of the track linearly and replayed certain elements from scratch along with some re-recorded vocals from John. During this process, Tamas and Paul generated elements that would subsequently be used for a remix by fellow Aussie producer and prodigy Tornado Wallace.
Stefan Schwander aka Harmonious Thelonious is definitely not a newcomer. He has been around for a long time and has already released lots of amazingly varied music on labels such as Emotional Response, Italic, Meakusma and Diskant. He’s also an integral part of the infamous Duesseldorf / Salon Des Amateurs axis that is an obvious hotbed of talent. He describes his style as “American minimalism vs. African drumming vs. European sequencing”, a heady mixture which is clearly evident on this EP though with a definite Middle Eastern twist. Here at Versatile HQ we were introduced to this clutch of tracks by one of the members of Acid Arab and we were totally blown away. Stefan has a very unique production style, fusing all of the above elements with a hint of Gamelan, a dash of tweaked FM synthesis type sounds with a dose of warm ambience and finally his own singular touch on the mix. We are very happy to present you these 4 tracks to you, an essential EP from one of European music’s true originals.
The Hipodrome Of Music 