The bold Eduardo de La Calle of Analog Solutions infamy drops his second 12″ for Hivern, following up from his take on U’R’s “Transition” for the 2014 HVN release. Here Eduardo gives us some us his finest examples of the lush Techno soundscapes he’s become known for.
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.
Having first joined forces last year to lend a hand of Massimo Pagliara’s collaborative With One Another full-length, Benedikt Frey and Nadia D’Alo present their debut full-length under the Init alias. It’s a thoroughly atmospheric, clandestine affair, with the duo delivering a dark-wave opus that tips a hat to early Depeche Mode, minimal wave, Detroit techno and the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno. D’Alo provides the vocals, though for much of the time they’re utilized as textures, rather than the central focus of the duo’s shuffling, slowly evolving synth-scapes. As an album, Two Pole Resonance is initially attractive – albeit in a stylized, late night kind of way – but really comes into its’ own after repeat listens. It is, though, definitely worth the effort.
5X0D has always been Mark Phillips and Rob Lawrence since it began in 1981 in Bristol UK. Early influences were many going back to pop, prog and krautrock bands of the early 70s, through punk and new wave to industrial, then later Japanese technopop like YMO.
First in a series of compilations from Monofonus Press is this lovely 4 song 12″ EP. Opening track “Molecular Psychology” by Interbrain, duo of Willie Burns and Alessandro Adriani is a 14- minute Electro-Kraut caliche stomper to keep the mosquitoes riled up around the sweat-drenched masses. The Stockholm duo Empfänger swarm in with throbbing kick drums, buzzing bass sequences and some meth-crazed psychopath vocals on their Acid Techno track “Charles.” Side B opens up with the Cosmic Disco track “Tsch” by Welsh producer Samoln. Closing the record is the epic “The Terrible Comet Salt” by Idea Fire Company & BRRR, which has a peculiar narrative over a haunting low key composition.
FOQL belongs to the same Polish electronic music collective as Marburg, but the sound of this project is truly different. Hypatia EP is delicate and even fragile maybe… It has the ritual feeling like some of the music by Coil has, and fuses ambient, electronix and techno in the same way Kobosil can do. In short, this is a record for well informed and well educated music lovers.
There’s something decidedly mysterious and otherworldly about this fourth release on Giegling’s Forum sub-label. As usual, they’re not giving much away, and to make matters worse the artist at the controls – the previously unheard of Sa Pa – is a debutant. Happily, the music – a mix of crackly, fizzing, minimal-influenced experimental techno, ambient and weirder, dub-flecked explorations – speaks for itself. Fuubutsushi is an impressively atmospheric and off-kilter affair, with Sa Pa paying much attention to the tiniest of details (see the intricate sound collage that forms the rhythm track on the bleak “Tagularius”). If this is indeed Sa Pa’s first outing (and there’s a suspicon it’s an alter-ego, given the quality of the production), it’s rather impressive. A poet’s reminder of a specific season.
Light Sounds Dark’s steady plummet into the 5th dimension continues in earnest as the label reach their 14th release. A rather special unit, certain to dissipate as cleanly and as smoothly as a 150mics dose of Sandoz’ finest; best to pay the admission and take the trip now if you want in. Fortune favours the brave and fearless exploration is surely required. Gone are the boogie, cosmic and Balearic coloured fractals, replaced now by dark industrial menace, no-wave bleakness and post-punk tribal space music. Painstakingly sequenced and arranged over three discs to give you a truly immersive journey; fasten those seatbelts and take a trip on the rainbow super highway.
The origins of these enigmatic VHS-scrambled prog-techno explorations are so true and tripped they’re worth quoting in full from co-chairman Christopher Hontos: “Night Court was recorded in July two summers ago (’13) in a remote cabin on Lake Namekagan (located on national forest grounds in northern Wisconsin). We usually do these ball-busting weeklong recording sessions up there with a good group of folks and a grip of mushrooms. For this one we had this idea of setting up our synths on the deck and doing a trippy somnabulistic overnight open-air recording sesh that would be called “Night Court.” However when the time came and the crew got together we interpreted the name literally and ended up jamming out an album of legal system-themed tracks. We recorded the entire album in one day every song in one take and with very little post-production. Track after track flowed and we never drifted from the theme nor spent time diverting our focus (with the exception of Farstad being vetoed after trying to start up a footwork-style track). After the session we were all so burnt-out and fried we thought little of the recordings. But as time passed we went back to them and realized we had struck gold. Italics ours – this is rare ore. A freaked fusion vision, flowing cold city collectivist synths interlaid with executioner guitar, ambulance/TV samples, alley haze, and flashing sirens sax. Insane music for insane times. Its meanings are manifold: political (a sweeping overview of the nothing-specific nature of humanity via the American legal system), metaphoric (tongue-in-cheek turns to fist-in-air, and we realize that life imitates fiction less than fiction imitates life), realistic (at the time of recording none of us had ever seen an entire episode Law & Order).”
Never a label to be afraid of bucking expectations, the 20th Acido releases sees founder Dynamo Dreesen collaborating with regular colluder SVN and, surprisingly, Dave ‘A Made Up Sound’ Huismans. Of the three untitled tracks, it’s the A side where the production touch of A Made Up Sound is most discernible, thanks to the skipping, stripped back rhythmic kicks that propel the cut forwards. You can totally see Ben UFO getting plenty of mileage out of this one. It is the B side where the abstract inclinations of SVN and Dreesen come to the fore, with “Track 2” sinking meandering drums in a thick, foggy soup of sonics and delayed modular bleeps whilst the final track is jittering, minimal electronics at its most paranoid.
Emotional Rescue returns to the post war music of West Germany and the work of Dominik Von Senger and his cohorts based around the Dunkelziffer project. This special “Sampler” EP of recordings was produced as their part in Cologne’s Stollwerck art complex, that acted as a home and inspiration to their musical experiments. Based within the disused industrial warehouses spaces of Stollwerck, a mix of post-hippies, punks and anarchists created a community within that fed off each other’s artistic endeavours.
Midwich Productions presents James Marlon Magas’ Heads Plus. For the past several years, Magas has been concentrating on instrumental production, eschewing vocal histrionics of previous work, in favor of moodier, more open-ended composition. This focus has resulted in the bombastic and hallucinatory Heads Plus, an all-instrumental wallop that fuses howling ARP Odyssey, capricious Juno funk and fuzzed Rhodes anchored to the ever-present throb of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Freed from vocal constraints, Heads Plus conjures a cinematic ambience where light and dark wrangle for dominance in a dystopian post-techno near-future.
The Hipodrome Of Music 