Tennota & Rosa Anschütz -Tornamented Walls [MEA054]

‘Tornamented Walls’ is the first result of a collaboration that began in 2022. The album is a freeze-frame of emergence: personal preparations prior and minor aside, the album was live and improvised. Rosa Anschütz sings, speaks, plays harmonium, and utilizes a looper as an instrument in itself. Her symbolic prose is at the heart of the music, emotionally direct yet haunted by a translucent potential of meaning. In lockstep with the voice, Tennota dissolve the dense rhythmic complexity of their recent work into a creeping mantra, the material interrogated until the patina of the sound is the music itself. ‘Tornamented Walls’ floats on top of a wave of slow-motion techno influences, a deepened ambient and experimental perspective, and a feel of subtle and subdued lyricism not strictly limited to its vocal parts. It is a record of darkly ambient and abstracted techno pop, listening music to be played loud. More disenchanted than dark, it is confrontational through its fearless incorporation of a widely varying set of different states of mind.

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Tennota & Rosa Anschütz -Tornamented Walls [MEA054]

Don’t DJ & NWAQ – Fashion [MEA033]

DON'T DJ/NWAQ - Fashion

Ahead of the Meakusma Festival 2019, Don’t DJ and NWAQ did an artist residency developing new music together from scratch. Their resulting performance at the festival was a mesmerizing descent into the artistic perspectives of two singular artists active in off-kilter club music. Some of the eight tracks on this record were recorded live at the festival while others were recorded during the residency. All dwell in distorted and eccentric bliss and play around with rhythmic arrhythmic and post-rhythmic tension. There is happiness in dystopia although the subtle yet intense layering in the music hints at undercurrents that are far from bright. The joyousness of this record lies in the notable excitement Don’t DJ and NWAQ experience fusing their modi operandi coming up with a music that shines and distorts. As massive blocks of sound alternate with subtler disorienting parts repetitive vocals create an air of disparate acceptance. It uses club music’s template and pushes on.

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Don’t DJ & NWAQ – Fashion [MEA033]

Giraffe – Shine and Dark [MEA026]

“Dreams, as we all know, are very curious things: certain incidents in them are presented with quite uncanny vividness, each detail executed with the finishing touch of a jeweller, while others you leap across as though entirely unaware of, for instance, space and time. Dreams seem to be induced not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what clever tricks my reason has sometimes played on me in dreams!” says Fyodor Dostoevsky in his anti-hero novella “Notes from Underground” from 1864. Also, the three Hamburg based art lovers of the band Giraffe like to play on their dreams. Since 2017 the trio released their deeply collective reveries on one album called “June” and one EP called “Climate”. Both are featuring brief and epic sensitive shifting conversations between Charly Schppner on percussion, Sascha Demand on electric guitar and Jrgen Hall on synthesizers. “We compose and produce everything together. The ideas of each single member become better through the influences of the others.” they reveal about their meandering creative activity. The result is a sublime tension of itself: a psychoacoustic distillation of improvisation, composition and experiment in which clattering percussion, synthesized transcendence and dreamily electric guitar serialism transform into radical poetic journey music. For their new album “Shine & Dark” Giraffe built their music around acoustic drums, frame drums and electric percussions, that evoke spiritual jazz emotions and percussive ethnic vibes while dark synth layers and mesmerizing guitar microtonality dances around the rhythmic tension. Suspenseful wondrous story-telling, that opens a gate to an elaborated executed, multi-layered musical paradise, that is entirely induced by desire.

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Giraffe – Shine and Dark [MEA026]

Tomaga – Music For Visual Disorders [MEA023]

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.

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Tomaga – Music For Visual Disorders [MEA023]

Monochord – Spatial Stereo [MEA018]

Monochord are Vienna-based musicians Bernhard Hammer and Jakob Schneidewind, two thirds of Elektro Guzzi, though Monochord paints a different picture. Electroacoustic experiments and filmic elements define the music that develops instinctively yet irrevocably, a sense of forward motion setting them apart. Compositionally minimal, these tracks maximize their inherent potential all the way through to their logical and even illogical end. Referencing electronica, ambient, shoegaze and at times modern classical harmonics, Monochord builds and unbuilds in a slow heartbeat. Introspective and filmic, its quiet and non-confrontational nature makes Monochord move in the interzone between various spheres. Their music escapes definition and that is its truest definition. Its subtle pulse and evocative and drony feel invite and inspire.

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Monochord – Spatial Stereo [MEA018]

Bryce Hackford – Behind [MEA017]

Artist, producer and DJ Bryce Hackford presents the nine-track album Behind, his second full length since 2013’s Fair, and his first for Meakusma. Behind is an expansive collection for Hackford, who draws from experimental, process-oriented composition techniques to create sensorially engaging dance music. An ethos of presence, enrichment and dissociation pervades Behind – by stripping away the constructed-ness of so much dance music, Hackford allows himself to produce music that is as much a joy to create as it is to share. An ambassador of “ecstatic states” as he calls them, Hackford’s music suggests heightened temporal zones may be ubiquitous if you allow them to be. Behind is a proposition of such ecstatic states, its music pulsing vitally at opposite ends of the BPM spectrum. Distinctly unmotivated by polemic dialogues around dance music, Behind seeks a more soluble musical space for unmitigated engagement. It is music inspired by transitions, no less vital before sunset as it is after the curtain call.

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Bryce Hackford – Behind [MEA017]

Ryo Murakami – Spectrum EP [MEA015]

Osaka-based Ryo Murakamiis coming with two new tracks on Meakusma, combining the forward momentum of his previous work with his new-found experimental approach. Both tracks play with atmosphere and impact, are essentially slow burners that through Murakami’s subtle play with dynamics and change become incredibly moving and abstracted studies into groove and ambient sound. Cherry on the cake is the Porter Ricks remix, a hazy glow that is as revealing as it is mystifying covers the track, whilst the basis of it is, in the best Porter Ricks tradition, a surprisingly funky twist on the rhythm and bass of the original track.

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Ryo Murakami – Spectrum EP [MEA015]

Anno Stamm – My Peoples Head [MEA011]

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Lars Stowe is mostly known for his work as Anstam, releasing his very own brand of avantgarde bassmusic and IDM-flavored intense electronic music on his own Anstam label and on Modeselektor’s 50Weapons imprint. His new Anno Stamm moniker sees him take on house and techno with the same eclectic and open-minded stance. On this new release for Meakusma, Stowe once again injects his tracks with fervour and eclecticism, breaking open their mould and giving them a sense of direction shaped into a relentless groove that slowly but surely opens up time and again. Here are four tracks that pay homage to Berlin’s techno roots. Just as much well-timed as ‘out of time’, these four tracks are underground slabs of raw but sophisticated, daftly funky techno power!

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Anno Stamm – My Peoples Head [MEA011]

Harmonious Thelonious – The Malag EP [MEA010]

Stefan Schwander has been releasing his heavily processed and sequenced take on African music and American minimalism under his Harmonious Thelonious moniker since 2008. His new EP on meakusma is only the second one on a non-German label. On two tracks, Schwander takes his trademark rhythmically and melodically repetitive sound into straightforward Techno territory, although some heavy phasing gives the raw power and stoic repetition of these tracks an ambientish, post-club feel. Two other tracks further develop his typically eclectic and informed sound, playing live organ on one of them, displaying a jittery and jumpy rhythmic style that looks for a groove that until now did not exist. Jesse Hackett, a.k.a. Elmore Judd, delivers a remix that takes the original firmly into ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ territory, giving melody and rhythm a more open sense of space, and layering it with vocal samples to further add to a sense of Funk alienation.

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Harmonious Thelonious – The Malag EP [MEA010]

Madteo – ReCast [MEA007]

Meakusma presents “ReCast”, an essential collection of previously released and unreleased tracks by Madteo, re-interpreted and remixed by Anthony Shake Shakir, Marcellus Pittman and Kassem Mosse.

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Madteo – ReCast [MEA007]

DJ Yoav B. – Wisdom Traxx EP [MEA005]

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DJ Yoav B. releases three new tracks on the Belgian Meakusma label. Gently rubbing shoulders with Detroit Techno and HipHop, built on crazy loops and raw rhythms, the tracks are enhanced with psychedelic and playful sounds, that give them the feeling of being in continuous flux and movement. The mood here is absorbing yet ambivalent. On top of this, Protect-U, from the fantastic Future Times camp, delivers a remix, pulling the music away from reality, firmly aiming it for the universe. With a mid-tempo House feeling, a crispy bassline and abstract synthesizer pattern, they take the listener beyond the infinite.

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DJ Yoav B. – Wisdom Traxx EP [MEA005]

Sic! – Sic! [MEA004.1]

SIC! - Orange Sky (Front Cover)

Meakusma broadens its label profile with another brave and free-spirited release. [sic!] is a modern disco band with members Jules Etienne, Alessandro Tartari and producer and DJ Massimiliano Pagliara. They all share a passion for warm synth sounds, poignant melodies and groovy structures. Far beyond typical or retro-kitsch, [sic!] have composed 4 wonderful disco songs full of summer, with timelessness firmly stamped on them.

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Sic! – Sic! [MEA004.1]

Terrence Dixon – Room 310 [MEA003]

Room 310

One of the rare new Terrence Dixon releases… this time on the nice Meakusma. The two original tracks are two deep space jams with and from a Detroit mindset, the remixes on the flipside by Upperground Orchestra take the ‘Room 310’ track into deep jazz territory. The original ‘Room 310′ has one filtered and repetitive synth melody at its core, Dixon’s own voice marking a conflict between the reality of everyday life and the expanded reality of what he sees in the sky. ‘Who is That’ explores the same territory.

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Terrence Dixon – Room 310 [MEA003]