"My Disco finally unveil their debut album for Downwards, a brilliant rendering of concrète/industrial styles recorded in the same Berlin studio often frequented by Einstürzende Neubauten, Pan Sonic and Keiji Haino, somehow channeling the spirit of all three. It's an intensely rich and wildly unexpected trip that takes in the ragged intensity of Suicide alongside gong recordings and a kind of isolationist ambient spirit that resides somewhere between Selected Ambient Works Vol II and Raime.

Environment finds My Disco in the midst of deep synth despair, leaving behind the gnashing guitars in favour of cold metallic percussion and gloomy pads reverberating in derelict, factory-like space. Gutting out the driving, mathy repetition of their prized early work (2010's Steve Albini-produced "Young/You" is a favorite of Karl O’Connor/Regis), the Melbourne-based trio now recall the ungodly offspring of Raime and Swans, operating with an increased appreciation of space, rhythm and tone that will shock even the hardest to please explorers of avant-rock and industrial fault lines.

In no uncertain terms, its 8 tracks plumb the depths of a foul mood, strafing thru a series of antechamber-like stations like some inelegant beast encumbered with clanking manacles and ankle restraints. Thanks to the visceral, vivid nature of the recording and production, the devil lies in the synaesthetic sonic/visual detail, riddling a mostly wordless narrative that perfectly says it without saying it.

Biting down first with the jagged metallic klang and gnawing drones of "An Intimate Conflict," the album continues to fetishize both bleeding-raw and cinematic themes thru the torture chamber ambience of "Exercise In Sacrifice," and the red-lining tone poem "Act," leading into belly of the beast bass growls on "Rival Colour," before the dissonant, keening might of "No Permanence" calves off into a closer to end all closers, with the band's Cornell Wilczek feeding Buchla Easel tones into the empty tank strikes and fetid atmosphere of "Forever" with a febrile effect worthy of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement.

By any measure, Environment is one of Downwards’ most singular albums, and a must-check for disciples of proper, unheimlich sonics. Trust it’'l wipe that art school smirk right off your mug."

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here and here.

Brace, Brace is Julia Reidy’s soaring Slip return: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics.

Reidy's signature 12-string playing - precise, burrowing, rhapsodic - dominates the LP's outer cuts, framing a plaintive electric centre. Blooms of arpeggiations and desolate strums re-inflect slow-moving pitch sequences; the music feels at once on fire and graceful, inevitable.

Perhaps most surprising is how organic Brace, Brace's expanded palette feels. Reidy's electronics are subtly eerie extensions, alien resonances of her playing, both embedding her instrument and making it somehow unreal. This strange smear of body and apparition is neatly nailed in Reidy's sung-to-herself vocals, coaxed out and encroached upon by autotune.

Succeeding issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40's A Guide To Saints, Brace, Brace is a definitive statement from a blazing, restless talent.

More information can be found here.

From Here to Eternity is the first full length album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn since his 2014 long play, Infinite Sadness.

The use of processed guitar and his passion for cinematic swells reaches new realms that are markedly more ominous and dense than his previous long play. Kyle Bobby Dunn also recruited prominent ambient composers and a handful of his favorite musicians to arrange their own instrumentation for several works on this release that add multiple layers of mystery and intrigue of the human mind and heart. Artists that contributed to this effort are: Benoît Pioulard, Simon Scott, Loscil, Pan-American, Wayne Robert Thomas, Isaac Helsen, Mark Nelson, Robert Donne, Maryam Sirvan, and Michael Vincent Waller.

Kyle Bobby Dunn wanted this album to be very much about the eternal conflict with all human emotions and life circumstances and to somehow go even further than the concepts left behind on Infinite Sadness. The moods and sounds range from angelic choral elements to motion picture soundtrack epics; permeating the skeletal system of the listener with a sense of boundaries and mortality. There are also moments that capture the dynamics of the artist performing in the live setting perfectly and were engineered meticulously by Matt Rogalsky and Kyle Bobby Dunn himself. Truly a difficult album of unending loss, confusion, pain, identity, disease and even death, but also some of the most reflective and warm moments of his career to date.

Releases May 3, 2019 on Past Inside the Present.

"Grouper's Liz Harris has today (February 8) released an album under a new moniker, Nivhek. After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house is out now on Yellow Electric.

Recorded using Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals, the album was developed during two residencies Harris spent in Azores, Portugal and Murmansk, Russia, as well as at her home in Astoria, Oregon."

-via Fact

Chasms was formed in 2011 by Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden. Following 2016's On the Legs of Love Purified and the recent "Divine Illusion" single, The Mirage pushes the band's ethereal sound into the murky depths of dub. Marking a sonic shift for the project, The Mirage finds the duo trading in chaotic bursts of noise for understated minimalism that's still characteristically melancholic and potent with emotion. Labrador's drum production is as deft as ever with an expanded range of electronic samples and tape-delay-induced polyrhythms. Layered with Madden's persistently dubby bass, Labrador's sparse guitar and gliding soprano float above a labyrinth of hypnotic sequences. These dub-laced dirges signify growth within the band, heard in their command of repetition, space, and effects to build a pervasive mood that's often utterly heartbreaking.

The duo’s second LP for the Felte label, The Mirage was conceived following major upheaval in the pair’s lives, including the loss of Madden's brother and a number of the band's friends in Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire in 2016. Compounded with the dissolution of a marriage, and leaving San Francisco after more than a decade to relocate to Los Angeles, the album is an exploration of grief and the multi-faceted heartbreak that follows such events. What we think we see, what we think we know to be true, how we think life will turn out, the plans we make – all reduced to an illusion when someone you expected to be alive tomorrow is gone, when plans fail, when the mask is removed, and you are left simply to be.

Mixed by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv) and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, The Mirage tells candid narratives of a heavy heart but does not wallow in despair. At times, the album even offers danceable moments as in the entrancing, textural "Every Heaven in Between" with its restless techno and house-inspired four-on-the-floor beat. Sliding guitar chords and a smoky bass line wade between rhythmic pulsing and a booming kick in the narcotic "Shadow." A transformative assemblage of songs, The Mirage is a powerful reflection on the events that shatter and shape our lives.

More information can be found here.

Akira Rabelais’ years-in-the-making new album CXVI features collaborations with Harold Budd, Ben Frost, Biosphere, Kassel Jaeger and Stephan Mathieu, among others. It unfurls a quietly breathtaking, dreamlike sequence of events where early music meets a prism of shoegaze, ASMR, classical and textural sound design - huge recommemdation if yr into Felicia Atkinson, the GRM, Morton Feldman, Stephan Mathieu, Deathprod, Harold Budd...

Set to be received as Rabelais' magnum opus, CXVI finds the Hollywood-based composer challenging his usual working methods, pushing himself to refresh binds with longterm collaborators such as Harold Budd and Stephan Mathieu and forge new relationships with like-minded craftsmen such as Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), while also finding a new vocal muse in Karen Vogt of Heligoland, and also coaxing the recorded debuts of his friend Mélanie Skribiane, and filmmaker/photographer Bogdan D. Smith. The result of their time-lapsed endeavours is a record of divine subtlety and poignant patience, rendered with a mirage-like appeal.

Opener "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds," beautifully segues from a prickly bouquet of keys and lovebite-distortion penned with Ben Frost to a reverberant, spine-freezing piano coda from Harold Budd, before "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds" smokily gives way to the sylvan shadowplay of the album's masterful centerpiece, "Star to Every Wandring Worth's Unknown," where Mélanie Skribiane reads from Max Ernst's "la femme 100 têtes" against an exquisite veil of strings and keys realized by Akira with the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger a.k.a. François Bonnet.

The 3rd part of the album only becomes more sparse and isolationist, as Karen Vogt's plainsong gives way to the tremulous, icy timbres of Akira's processed guitar strokes, originally written for Cedrick Corliolis' Tokyo Platform soundtrack, before the final side of "If Error and Upon Me Proved" finds Akira pushing Geir Jenssen’s (Biosphere) synths into the red, emphasizing a romantic soreness that turns into crushing noise, before Bogdan Smith's whispered vocal melts into an ancient, arcane air inscribed to 78rpm vinyl by Stephan Mathieu and then sweetened, re-incorporated by Akira as the album's stunning closing passage.

Riddled with bedevilling detail and utterly timeless in its scope, CXVI is a disorientating opus you’ll want to undergo over and again, for our money one of the great quiet albums of recent years.

More information can be found here.

Nihiloxica's highly anticipated new EP featuring 4 new tracks of Bugandan percussive experimentation. Comprised of four percussionists, one kit drummer combined with an analog synth player. Recorded live in single takes at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, Uganda between October- December 2018.

More information can be found here.

This recording is released in 3 formats -

1.) 23-track download

2.) CDr + 23-track download

The CDr contains a 46 minute track ("The π Key") which will not be available for download. This item is released in an edition of 25.

3.) The π Key - Deluxe Edition

WOODEN KEY + ANTIQUE 6" RECORD HOUSED IN SIGNED AND NUMBERED BESPOKE COVER + CDR + 23 TRACK DOWNLOAD

Each individual CDR is unique to each order as it contains the 46 minute track ("The π Key") plus the two tracks from the 6" record included in your package. This item is released in an edition of 23.

The Geometry of Social Deprivation is constructed from samples and manipulated sounds garnered from twenty-three 6" shellac records from the 1920's.

Each track contains a blend of loops and sampled fragments constructed from one record using the sound found on both the A and B sides. Each track is created from a different record. No additional instrumentation has been added.

This sometimes soft and ambient but challenging and abstract 8-hour suite of crackling, dusty and forgotten sounds of yesteryear has been designed to be played as a functional piece of music, to while away the hours as you go about your daily routine... a faint drone in the background or a suffocating, all encompassing sonic assault. Equally it can be utilized as an aid to spend your evenings "researching" a field of your choosing.

More information can be found here.

"Another brilliant posthumous album by Letha Rodman Melchior. Letha's music, as her visual art, was a great collaged pile of extreme strangeness, with seemingly irreconcilable objects butting heads in ways that end up making great sense.

I met Letha a long time ago, when she was in Cell, but I had not much idea of her work beyond that until she had moved to North Carolina and I started hearing her health was bad. Siltbreeze put out an amazing album called Handbook for Mortals, and it was essential listening. Letha managed to create very very warped music without making it off-putting. Although her sonics were whacked as hell, they were created with such a warm and gooey center that even people who'd usually shy away from such things, would ask what was playing when we floated the album through the store's stereo system.

Siltbreeze followed up with the ungodly brilliant, Shimmering Ghost, after cancer claimed another genius, and we were stunned when Dan Melchior offered us the chance to do this LP.

Letha Rodman Melchior was a truly singular artist. And it is with great pride that Feeding Tube presents another chapter of her largely undocumented saga."

-Byron Coley, 2019

More information can be found here.

"Spaces is a series of compositions based on recordings in museums. Each work builds on a binaural recording of the environmental sounds a museum and each has been processed based on different concepts. The approach for processing and adding of electronic sounds was inspired by an artwork that was hanging in the museum space. So space and artwork form a unity.

As a composer and mastering engineer I am extremely sensitive to the sounds around me. But I’m also a keen visitor of museums and while there I always listen to what the museum sounds like. Museums are spaces where people encounter works of art and are given the opportunity to contemplate on this experience. Some do this silently while others keep chatting their route and only vaguely take in what is presented. There’s a lot going on and each museum has its own sonic character.

I have started collecting sounds in 2008. Snippets from these recordings have been part of many works in the years that followed. In 2015 however I decided to construct a complete sound work revolving around the sounds that I recorded. That has become A=F=L=O=A=T. This track was part of my annual musical gift to friends and colleagues and received positive feedback. Then, begin 2017, I decided to make a next move and see if other recordings could be evolved into real compositions. Gradually the concept formed, by composing, experimenting, returning to museums and study the artworks and actually the whole sonic environment of the museum.

Listening to a museum makes you aware of the spatiality of a museum. The, sometimes, huge halls where art is presented also seem to make space in my mind. And so I thought that space would be a good metaphor for the first dimension that I want to express. The second dimension is the work of art itself, which is a silent object. It just hangs there. But it represents a whole universe of thoughts and ideas that the observer can take in and tumble around and around in his mind. My own observations I have translated into the electronic layers on top of the binaural recordings.

The music on the CDs has been laid out as spacious as possible, leading to long almost silent intermissions between the tracks. In the hope of a listener with a wide-open mind-set."

-Jos Smolders

More information can be found here.

FEAN started as a musical artist-in-residence project in a little church in the Frysian village Katlyk. The group consists of Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra, Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), who also form the quartet Piiptsjilling. For FEAN they are accompanied by Belgian guests Annelies Monseré, Sylvain Chauveau and Joachim Badenhorst.

The FEAN project gets its inspiration from the ecological decay of peatland in the Dutch province Friesland and in other parts of Europe. Agriculture and peat extraction are threatening the landscape severely and with long term consequences. This forms the underlying thought for the improvised recording sessions, which were overseen by Jan Switters.

Although the Piiptsjilling members are obviously used to performing and recording together, adding the three Belgian guests (who hadn't played together before) added an extra dimension to the group's dynamic, resulting in a concentrated yet playful series of improvisations, that were later mixed and edited for the FEAN album.

More information can be found here.

Pacific City Sound Visions greets wonder again, this fall, to bring you a third vinyl release from the late '80s/early '90s European experimental/industrial scene.  After Vox Populi!'s "Half Dead Ganja Music" and Frank Dommert's "Kiefermusic," we have a hand-picked compilation by the Hamburg artist MAAT.

MAAT is a solo project by Dörte Marth, who created two secretly powerful and underappreciated records in 1993. They were released on two labels (Dragnet, Dom Elchklang) run by Achim P. Li Khan, the co-founder of H.N.A.S.

MAAT'S musical palette is at once, strikingly, a more dark and brooding occult version of Anima and Limpe Fuchs. One can hear classical music references much like Coil's Unnatural History, but played further, blurring the shadowy lines between sampling and virtuoso playing.  MAAT'S dark and glisteningly illustrated use of electronic drums, Pan-Asian arrangements, and classical styles, invent a private world where she uncovers and projects forth, a new and ancient female energy.  It's almost as if she is orchestrating her palette and shooting it through star-clusters beneath the world.  Probably Typhonian Highlife and 4th World Magazine's greatest influence.

More information can be found here.

"I first met Lionel Marchetti in Australia during the Liquid Architecture Festival in 2010. Decibel were touring our Alvin Lucier program, and Lionel was on the same bill performing a live performance set manipulating electro-acoustic materials with dancer Yoko Higashi. I was so taken with Lionel's performances and the resulting music, that I asked him if he would write a piece for Decibel.

I didn’t realize that he hadn’t done something like this before. The first work was "Première étude (les ombres)," communicated as a text score, and premiered in 2012. I was asked by Lionel to make some recordings of ocarinas, harmonicas, and folk instruments – and I sent these to him for the creation of a 'partition concrète d'accompagnement'– a fixed media part that is featured in the live performance. For this piece, the part comes from speakers beside each performer, and a bass amplifier beneath the piano. Like his own performances I had seen the year before, the work was naturally performative – with unique speaker and performer configurations, interesting and odd additional instruments. It was such a rich work, a remarkable combination of electronic, spatial, acoustic and textural music. The performers use the partition concrete as a score.

I visited Lionel in Lyon, France in 2014, recording flute improvisations in his studio. He used these as a basis for "Une série de reflets," again communicating via text instructions and each performer having their own dedicated speaker to interact with. "Pour un enfant qui dort," which again requested flute sounds that were this time part of the live performance as well as the partition concrète, was also written around that time. The next work saw a more 'compositional' collaboration - "The Earth defeats me" began as a graphically scored work written by me and recorded by Decibel in the studio. That recording was used to make the partition concrète which is now an embedded as part of the animated score file, thanks to the software we had developed to do so.

These works exist as live performances, but also as singular concrète works, when heard without the instruments. Working with Lionel has been remarkable: he has a singular way of thinking about sound and its relationship to works and images. Music concrete is a lifestyle for him, it is a way of thinking, communicating and being. These pieces enable the acoustic instruments to be part of that – extending the ideas in the partition concrete, using them structurally and texturally, as well as being part of them.

When I first met Lionel, I didn’t realize he was in Australia because it was originally planned he would be travelling with French composer Éliane Radigue, performing some of her electroacoustic works, as her preferred diffuser. I would commission a work for Decibel from Élaine ("Occam Hexa II") in 2014 and it was during that process I realized the link between them. Decibel performed Lionel and Eliane's music together – it is music that concerns itself with the incredible power of sound, but from the most delicate and dream like perspective."

-Cat Hope

More information can be found here.

"As I’ve tried to understand what is happening now without judgement––a collapse of systems, boundaries, and symbols that crumble faster with each forcible attempt to reinstate them––I am finding equal failure in streamlined, singular methodologies for both comprehension and composition. Outside, reason and rationale wane in heft and clarity. Representation in a world that refuses fact is uncertain and deceptive. Time is complicated by the failure of the linear. Inside, what we see is not what we hear, what we hear is not what we think, what we think is not what we feel, and so on.

The dread incited by this precarity is difficult to interpret without announcing failure: the anxiety of watching our own hourglass is palpable and demanding. I feel existence in this moment has required a move away from my own humanity in order to simply live in it, live through it, live with it while refusing to release the idea of environmental recovery. It is to request your humanity to unwillingly shift, to mutate toward something sharply resilient and relentless. The sounds on this record embody this sense of mutant consciousness. It is, for me, a representation of a vigorous sprint towards complexity, towards the interdependencies that serve as stop-gaps, towards freaky, slippery, compounded stacks of reality.

The title, A Parallel Array of Horses, is derived from a geologic phenomenon in which a block of a specific type of rock has been completely separated by mineral veins from its counterpart within another body of rock, and then stacked upon multiples of others like it. Sounds on this record are both recorded and produced: the album opens with recordings of a Mojave wind storm and closes with the world’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats departing their cave to roam the summer night air of Southeast Texas. Both scenes are landscapes of precarity, politically or meteorologically or otherwise. Interspersed are a variety of electronic instruments and processes, and compositional techniques that are variously clear-cut or intentionally buried by digital processing. Tracks three and four are composed entirely with my own voice––my own body as the original playback mechanism for experiencing the world, but manipulated, elaborated upon, and layered to express a more complex interpretation of that subjective reality.

Through listening, I find myself able to retrace my steps back to a sense of decentered, porous presence––the present is still here, with all of its shifts and confusion and valuable interdependencies. No matter is created or destroyed, only new forms arise."

>-Geneva Skeen

More information can be found here.

As audacious as the sleeve it comes housed in, the UK’s most eccentric audio malefactor returns with his eighth studio album, Practical Electronics.  Unique in the Thighpaulsandra oeuvre, this one eschews the usual group-based recordings, consisting of electronics and vocals only.

Hovering between haunted narratives and extended instrumental sequences, Practical Electronics is an eccentric excursion into playful pop and fearless electronic experimentation.  Simultaneously intimidating and accessible, the energy of this untamed mind unleashes an artefact where high art unfolds as an oblique electronic cabaret.

Having cut is teeth amongst such legendary outfits such as Coil and Spiritualized, Thighpaulsandra has constantly catapulted himself further and further into a musical landscape utterly of his own devising.  Practical Electronics is the latest exemplary installment of a voice that is uncompromising as it is outlandish.

More information can be found here.

"Imagine Richard Youngs as the junior member of a cabal of prolific and puritanical English musician-mystics, including The Fall's Mark E Smith, Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill, Martin Carthy and The Clangers composer Vernon Elliot, and still his nature will elude you."

-Stewart Lee, Sunday Times.

Dissident is a hallucination of a legendary lost Samizdat-style recording of the legendary lost Richard Youngs Band. It's not clear to me that it is against anything in particular, and as such it is not literally dissident. In fact, I'm a little lost how or why it is dissident, save for being informed by the imagined provisional recordings of pre-Glasnost protest. Perhaps the wordless scratch vocals are voicing dissent, but I remember having fun. So much so, I couldn’t stop myself from fleshing out the rough nylon guitar songs to a full band arrangement, recorded in multiple spaces.  Which is as far from the Samizdat spirit as you could care to go.

More information can be found here.

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio, Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July 1980), Dome 2 (October 1980) and Dome 3 (October 1981).  A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.

These albums represent some of the most beautifuly stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.

Previously issued in the out-of-print Dome 1-4+5 boxed set in 2011.  Now available as standalone LP with download card.

More information can be found here.

Martina Lussi's second album fuses together disparate sound sources with a disorienting quality that reflects the modern climate of dispersion and distraction. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based sound artist released her debut album Selected Ambient on Hallow Ground in 2017, and now comes to Latency with a bold new set of themes and processes.

The range of tools at her disposal spans field recordings, processed instrumentation, synthesized elements and snatches of human expression.  The guitar is a recurring figure, subjected to a variety of treatments from heavy, sustained distortion to clean, pealing notes. Elsewhere the sound of sports crowds and choral singing merge, and patient beds of drones and noise melt into the sounds of industry and mechanics.  The track titles manifest as a compositional game of deception complete with innuendos, empty phrases and claims – flirtations with perfume names and ironic assertions.

From the volatile geopolitical climate to the changing nature of music consumption in the face of streaming and digital access, Diffusion is a Force is a reflection on fractured times where familiar modes and models change their meaning with the ever-quickening pace of communication.

More information can be found here.

On Epitaph things are different - Jay's voice croons crystalline over goth futurism for the first time on record (if you haven't heard of Ku….) - he sings one of the oldest Greek songs ever written and has spent the last year doing impromptu vocal covers of Tricky tracks in Cambridge pubs. And did you notice the tracks don't have dub in the title any more?

This his first proper proper solo LP from Jay Glass Dubs - a widescreen vision of 4AD nightmares, ballads for River Styx crossings and echoes that never end. It's This Mortal Coil if they knew about dungeon synth and Metalheadz and still thought dub techno was boring as fuck.

Epitaph follows his 2LP retrospective of Dubs on Not Waving's Ecstatic Recordings; and his 12” mini-LP with Leslie Winer on Bokeh early in 2018.  It's his 5th and no way final release for Bokeh (do you remember BKV 002, the slowest dancehall mixtape ever made?).  Realized with help of Greek vocalist and performing artist Yorgia Karidi and a special saxophone guest spot from Ben Vince (Curl, Where To Now, Hessle Audio).  Bokeh graphic visionary Patrick Savile's sensually airbrushed and peeled lemon closes this funeral casket of all the things you thought you knew about Jay Glass Dubs.

More information can be found here.

"Heart-rending shoegaze entries from the master of rose-tinted but thorny ambient pop hymns, landing smart on the heels of his nostalgic pangs collected in the recent Songs of Remembrance / Songs of Forgiveness LP reissues. The struggle is beautiful.

Accompanied by the languorous basslines of Drew Piraino on the record's broadest and most affective pieces, Jefre's chiming guitars and muffled drums form hymns to rare feels, with the distancing effect of distortion connoting the effect of age, as serene moments appear move ever farther out of reach.

That effect is felt most strongly in the transition of "Love’s Refrain" from something like a crumpled tape recording of shimmering yacht rock thru to its coruscating, noisy finale, and the dense weight of humid air and featherlight chirrups in "Little Dear Isle," while the other side pushes off from the sore synth chorale of "In Summer" and into the slackened drums of "Blue Nudes (I-IV)," again underlined by Drew Piraino’s murmuring bassline, with Jefre pushing the upper registers into the red, before collapsing into the tape noise and lone piano refrain of his "Prelude.""

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here.