Lux Rec brings on the 11th release. Four finely crafted musical pieces to dance to and for your own private cinematic experience. Join Murphy Jax on a trip of post apocalyptic nightmares with unknown enemies and dangers lurking behind the ruins of a doomed society.
Suzanne Ciani is a composer, recording artist, and pioneer in the field of electronic music. She is best loved for her fifteen albums of original music that feature her performances in a broad array of expressions: solo piano, piano with orchestra, piano with jazz ensemble and pure electronic. No matter the medium, Ciani’s music communicates the special intimacy, passion, and sensitivity that have become her trademark and prompted fans to buy over a million of her albums. The Seven Waves is Suzanne’s first album. She started recording it in 1979, finished it in 1981, and released it in Japan in 1982 on Atlantic Recordings.
The debut release on Emotional Response comes from Alan Hurst – aka Brooklyn based producer Jason Letkiewicz – with a deeper exploration in to the experimental, ambient electronics first seen on his debut work ‘Processed World’. The results are a darker mixture of hypnotic rhythms and uncertain soundscapes, hinting at soundtrack and library forms. Known for his productions under a series of alias’, including Steve Summers and Innergaze, this is Jason’s sophomore album under his Alan Hurst moniker and is the perfect way to launch the label.
A new 12” EP by the lovely French synthwave duo known as Deux on Minimal Wave. Gérard Pelletier and Cati Tete formed Deux shortly after meeting in Lyon in 1981. Their music can be described as minimal synth with stripped down rhythm compositions and suitably cold duets. A perfect blend of archetypal Kraftwerkian pop and French synth, these set of songs comprise their later years (1985) and stylistically sound like classic house combined with the romance of New Wave. This EP features previously unreleased newly remastered studio and demo tracks.
The new release from Don’t imprint features two sublime 1988 Belgian New Beat classics from Zsa Zsa Laboum and HN03. Laboum’s “Something Scary” is perhaps the archetypal New Beat track, commencing with a sample lifted from the dodgy 80s B Movie “The Entity” and displaying some excellent percussion and a powerful and obscure acid line – it still sounds excellent some twenty four years later. On the flip is the R&S classic “Doughnut Dollies” from New Beat icon Eric Beysens under his HN03 moniker features. It’s grubby industrial arpeggio sounding equally vibrant today – especially pitched way down to -8 like the New Beat guys used to do!
The three songs included were at the origins recorded to be part of the previous material, “The Whip”. As the mood of these songs was rougher and more abrasive, they found themselves gathered in this new EP by the means of letting them to breathe and to reveal their own expressive states.
Tanz Ohne Muzik aka Dan Serbanescu is back with “The Whip”, four psychedelic shoegaze tracks.
Downwards’ collect the best of their DO series, together with a handful of exclusive aces on ‘So Click Heels’. Since 2009 the label’s affections for the miasmatic drizzle, sonic innovation and repressed violence of post-punk and shoegaze has manifested itself in some twelve releases veering between the scuzzy basement noise of Collin Gorman Weiland, the blissful feedback blooms of The KVB, and swaggering rock’n’roll from DVA Damas. A good proportion of them feature here – including Richard H Kirk’s droning remix of Tropic Of Cancer’s ‘Be Brave’, the desiccated drum machines of Sandra Electronics (Regis), and Pink Playground’s powdered-glass shoegaze bloomer ‘Ten”. Unreleased bits: the phet-clenched twitch of Deathday’s ‘Dropped Into Obscurity’ or V West’s ‘Catching Me Cold’; the excoriating sludge of The KVB’s ‘Dayzed’; a mighty slab of monochrome, motorik punk from Silent Servants (Juan Mendez); the psychoactivated rock ‘n roll of Green Screen Door; and not least an insidious Electro cut from Antonym, or the graphite surfaces and choking dust of Six Six Seconds’ ‘Tearing Down Heaven’.
Degada Saf was a transgressive-dada-ist musical combo coming from Veneto, Italy. Degada Saf played a synth-electronic music, a kind of involved no-disco with no-sense lyrics in esperanto. Their music suggests a peculiar mixture of post-modernism synthesized electro assaults, new wave’s imaginative minimalism and pop art aesthetic vision. “No Inzro” makes constant interferences between rigorous avant-gardism, alternative music styles and colorfully plastic electro pop. The spectrum of musical imagination reveals a lot of good surprises, notably with the opening theme “La Rhumba de Shang Hai” which directly gives the tonality of the entire album: kitschy retro-popish ambiences based on dancing minimal hypno pulses and efficiently cold melodies. A groovy and captivating electro experience and a pretty decent introduction to the band’s very own musical universe.
Sadly Betty Botox is no longer with us. She departed planet earth in 2010 and leaves a gaping hole amongst all those who knew her. She left behind a DAT tape in her studio with ‘”The Final EP” written on the cover in lipstick, which her closest confidants feel she wanted to be her last statement to the world. So, after a slight delay, two years later, 4 tracks that were regular features in her musically wayward dj sets are now available for her to fans to hear and play. Combining her love for Psyche Funk, Cosmic Synth, Space Rock and late 70s Stadium Rock these reworkings, remixes, refixes and reproductions of known and unknown tracks are sure to be hits on non-conservative dance floors everywhere.
Dark Entries presents a 4-song compilation from one of the finest groups of the Spanish New Wave/Techno-Pop scene of the 1980s. Vocoder were a quartet from Zaragoza, Spain formed in 1981 by Keyboardists Antonio Laval, Alfonso Olarte, Antonio Tenas and vocalist Pilar Pellicer. “Cuadro Sinóptico” compiles both 2-song 12″ maxi singles as one 4-song EP. All four songs were recorded during 1984-85. A futuristic sound for the modern age topped with Pilar’s charismatic vocals. Lyrically they address robotic love, disco dancing, and the tropical island of Mindanao.
Minimal Wave sublabel Cititrax, presents new music from Brooklyn based synth duo Innergaze, the musical project of Aurora Halal and Jason Letkiewicz. Their music, crushed and static, obscured by sound. EBM, coldwave, early techno fight it out for dominance of the drum machine. Casually brutal vocals force their way through from the Death Factory. Celestial synths coexisting with the industrial landscape bellow.
NYC’s Neud Photo returns to Pylon for a new EP ranging from synth wave / italo / and electro. Neud Photo uses his signature style utilizing 808 electro/disco beats and an array of analog synths. Classic sounding tracks that with a timeless feel.
Hippos In Tanks’ carefully assembled roster, White Car are the label’s darkest, sexiest operators. Hailing from the Pilsen neighbourhood in Chicago, their debut album ‘Everyday Grace’ channels that Eurotic undercurrent of Techno/Wave/drug music which has fuelled the city’s subterranean scene since the earliest days. Like an hallucinatory audio version of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly, their chimeric, cyberdelic fantasia assimilates elements of 30 years + of debonaire, thrusting automatik funk, from DAF to NIN to CTI, to ’80s Bowie, Prince and way beyond, refracting each glint until it becomes an amorphous nebula of digital info masking an ice-cool, thermo-controlled interior. The stuttered vocal of central figure Elon Katz expounds ideas of bodiless cybernetic sex and binary sensuality, melding his urging physicality into a virtual matrix of jagged, shoulder-jerking rhythms and writhing synthlines saturated in bacchanalian dissonance.
100% Silk are out in force to remix Peaking Lights’ adored ‘936’ LP. Ital refits ‘Marshmellow Yellow’ with a struttin’ Mr. Soft groove, all spongy bass bumps and refracted melody, while Xander Harris views ‘Birds Of Paradise’ as a sludgy piece of Balearic baroque with spy-eyed arpeggios. Best of all is Innergaze’s baggy acid re-tweak of ‘Shines For U’, full of lip-smacking MDMA charm, and Cuticle make a welcome return to the label with the seeping, sideways Chicago revision of ‘Tiger Eyes’.
Brand new, mysterious label and production outfit The Army Of God are on the march. This debut release, “Salvation” is an yet unknown recording dating from somewhere in the 80’s. The recording comprises glorious, slow-mo and dark wave vibes with vocals chanting about apocalyptic religious visions like a sci-fi dark gospel theme. Salvation comes with a dub version as well as a sophisticated Spaventi D’Azzuro re-make on the flip.
This is the second volume of The Minimal Wave Tapes series, a collection of rare electronic music compiled from bands around the world. Most of the songs were recorded in the 1980s and originally released on limited edition cassettes or vinyl by the artists themselves, and only a handful of people knew about them. Now they’ve been remastered from their analog source tapes, brought to you by Veronica Vasicka and Peanut Butter Wolf.
The Hipodrome Of Music 