Carla dal Forno announces her second full-length album, ​Look Up Sharp​, on her own Kallista Records.

The London-based artist enters a new era in her peerless output pushing her dub-damaged DIY dispatches to the limits of flawless dream-pop.  In a transformative move towards crystal clear vocals and sharpened production, Look Up Sharp is an evolutionary leap from the thick fog and pastoral stillness of her Blackest Ever Black missives, You Know What It’s Like (2016) and The Garden EP (2017).

Three years since her plain-speaking debut album, the Melbourne-via-Berlin artist finds herself absorbed in London’s sprawling mess. The small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied dal Forno's first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces.  Look Up Sharp is the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar. Dal Forno connects with kindred spirits and finds refuge in darkened alleys, secret gardens and wherever else she dares to look.

In her own territory between plaintive pop, folk and post-punk, dal Forno conjures the ghosts of AC Marias, Virginia Astley and Broadcast through her brushwork of art-damaged fx and spectral atmospheres.  The first half of the record is filled with dubbed-out humid bass lines, which tether stoned hazes of psychedelic synth work as on "Took A Long Time" and "No Trace." These are contrasted with songs like "I'm Conscious" and "So Much Better" that channel the lilting power of Young Marble Giants and are clear sequels-in-waiting to dead-eyed classics like "Fast Moving Cars."

The B-side begins with the feverish bass and meandering melody of "Don't Follow Me," which takes The Cure's "A Forest" as its conceptual springboard. It's the clearest lyrical example since "The Garden" of dal Forno's unmatched ability to unpick the masculine void of post-punk and new wave nostalgia to reflect contemporary nuance.  Look Up Sharp reaches its satisfying conclusion with "Push On" - dal Forno’s most explicit foray into an undiscovered trip hop universe between Massive Attack and Tracey Thorn.  The album's last gasp finds personal validation in fragility: "I push on / I'm the Place I'm Going," a self discovery lifted by reverberant broken beats and glass-blown vocals.

Adding further depth to Look Up Sharp are the instrumentals, which flow seamlessly between the vocal-led pieces.  "Hype Sleep" and "Heart of Hearts" drink from the same stream as The Flying Lizard's dubbed-out madness and the vivid purple sunsets of Eno's Another Green World.  While "Creep Out of Bed" and "Leaving for Japan" funnel the fourth-world psychedelia of Cyclobe's industrial-folk into the vortex of Nico's The Marble Index.

Conceived as a whole, Look Up Sharp is a singular prism in which light, sound and concept bend at all angles.  A deeply personal but infinitely relatable album its many surfaces are complex but authentic, enduring but imperfect, hard-edged but delicate.  A diamond. Look up sharp or you’ll miss it.

More information can be found here.

Composed during Vietnam's monsoon season and propelled by the composers' fear of drowning, Degradation is inspired by flooding, torrential rain and the ocean.

Over three tracks Rắn Cạp Đuôi, an international music and visual arts collective based in Saigon, take us on a journey from breaking waves to inundated landscapes, and underwater horrors.

Rắn Cạp Đuôi, whose name translates to 'snake bites tail', are comprised of members Phạm Thế Vũ, Đỗ Tấn Sĩ, and Zach Sch. Additional collaborators include: Lý Hà Trang, Đỗ Hoàng Tuấn Anh, Bjorn Bols, Colton Cox, Josie Turnbull, and Trần Duy Hưng.

More information can be found here.

Fad Gadget

The Best Of released on Silver Vinyl

MUTE 4.0 SILVER VINYL EDITION

RELEASED 6 SEP

CELEBRATING 40 YEARS SINCE

THE DEBUT FAD GADGET 7” RELEASE

AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON VINYL

“Under the moniker Fad Gadget, Frank Tovey pioneered a genre of electronic music which is now part of the mainstream.” – The Independent

“Never before or since has an artist captured the awkwardness, the strange humour, the revulsion and prurient joy of (especially British) sexuality and human physicality quite as effectively as Tovey” – The Quietus

“Proto-techno “pop” perversions” – Pitchfork

“Enchanting synth-pop brilliance” – Dangerous Minds

Mute have announced a double silver-vinyl release of The Best of Fad Gadget, out on 6 September 2019. Available here for the first time on vinyl, part of the ongoing MUTE 4.0 (1978 > TOMORROW) campaign, the release marks the 40th anniversary of Fad Gadget’s debut 7”, the double A-side single, ‘Back to Nature’ / ‘The Box’.The original 2001 CD was the last release before the untimely early death of Frank Tovey aka Fad Gadget in 2002. The track listing, his personal selection, was designed to be both a concise retrospective of the Fad Gadget years and an introduction to his work for a new generation as he embarked on Depeche Mode’s Exciter tour as their special guest.

Fad Gadget was Mute’s first signing and the groundbreaking debut 7”, ‘Back To Nature’ / ‘The Box’ (Oct 1979), recorded using a drum machine and a synthesiser, was the second release on the label. Alongside Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell and The Normal, Frank Tovey was at the forefront of the British electronic movement of the late 70s/early 80s and his live performances, drawing on his art school background and interest in performance art, were intense, spectacular and innovative.The Best of Fad Gadget features the classic singles ‘Ricky’s Hand’, ‘Fireside Favourite’, ‘Collapsing New People’ and ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’ (featuring Alison Moyet), b- sides and tracks from his celebrated albums, Fireside Favourites (1980), Incontinent (1981), Under The Flag (1982), and Gag (1984) as well as ‘Luxury’, taken from 1986’s Frank Tovey release, Snakes & Ladders.

This release is the first stage of Mute’s celebration of Frank Tovey’s work, to be followed by a career-spanning box set in early 2020 marking the 40th anniversary of his first album Fireside Favourites.

The Best of Fad Gadget tracklisting

Side A
1. Back To Nature
2. The Box
3. Ricky’s Hand
4. Handshake

Side B
5. Fireside Favourite
6. Insecticide
7. Make Room
8. Lady Shave

Side C

9. Saturday Night Special
10. King Of The Flies
11. Life On The Line
12. 4M
13. For Whom The Bells Toll

Side D
14. Love Parasite
15. I Discover Love
16. Collapsing New People
17. One Man’s Meat
18. Luxury

Pre-order: smarturl.it/FGBO

https://www.instagram.com/fadgadgetofficial/

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Sweeney, presenting his second album Human, Insignificant.

For about twenty years Jason Sweeney, now based in Eden Hills, South Australia, has been composing and recording either solo, under the alias of Panoptique Electrical, Other People’s Children and Simpático, or with friends in various musical projects like Pretty Boy Crossover, Sweet William, School of Two, Luxury Gap, Par Avion, Great Panoptique Winter, Mist & Sea, Winter Witches, GIRL and many others. He has also been directing and creating interactive works for the internet, experimental films, projects for galleries and theatre spaces and has collaborated with some of Australia’s leading performing arts companies and organizations.

Human, Insignificant is a wonderful collection of eight new emotional songs about brokenness and fragility. With a total duration of something more than 26 minutes, it’s a brief, quiet and melancholy album, written, recorded and produced by Sweeney with the help of his collaborators Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer who played and recorded cellos respectively. Centered on Sweeney’s fragile vocals and elegant piano melodies with the addition of string arrangements of cinematic cellos and layers of other odd sound artefacts and noises, Human, Insignificant perfectly merges songwriting, modern classical, evocative atmospheres and ambient soundscapes.
Human, Insignificant is a breathtaking album with a feeling of meditation, highly recommended for devotees of Scott Walker, David Sylvian and Anohni.

More information can be found here.

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Wil Bolton, presenting his new album Surface Reflections.

This is his second release on the label after the highly acclaimed, and already sold out, album Whorl back in 2014.

For more than fifteen years Wil Bolton has been making predominantly sound-based artworks for both music releases and installations, often enhanced with video or photography. His work has been shown in many exhibitions and festivals and has also worked on projects with video artists, choreographers and dancers.
He is co-owner of the electronic label Boltfish Recordings and has also released several albums and EPs under the moniker of Cheju. From time to time he has also collaborated with other soundlike musicians on projects like Ashlar, Le Moors, Anzio Green, The Ashes Of Piemonte, Wil & Tarl, Biotron Shelf and others.
Under his own name he has offered many releases, which gained high worldwide praises, on labels such as Home Normal, Hibernate Recordings, Eilean Rec., Dronarivm, Dauw, Fluid Audio, Time Released Sound and many others.

Surface Reflections consists of five long-form tracks of warm ambient, with a total duration of about 44 minutes. Blending layers of field recordings, recorded in Hong Kong and focused on everyday sounds, with delicate loops of guitars and synths, manipulated and edited with effect pedals and laptop processing, Bolton creates one of his best albums to date.
Surface Reflections is a sublime album of emotive melodies, hypnotic soundscapes and mesmerizing textures, carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) and highly recommended for devotees of ambient pioneers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd and Steve Roach.

More information can be found here.

Emptyset, the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, are tireless innovators at the vanguard of electronic music.  Over the course of the last decade the duo have consistently applied new and inventive compositional tools to create art that is both unique and poignant.  Blossoms focuses on ideas of evolution and adaptation, bringing together Emptyset's body of exploratory sound production with emerging methods of machine learning and raw audio synthesis.

The machine learning system for Blossoms was developed through extensive audio training, a process of seeding a software model with a sonic knowledge base of material to learn and predict from.  This was supplied from a collection of their existing material as well as 10 hours of improvised recordings using wood, metal and drum skins.  This collection of electronic and acoustic sounds formed unexpected outcomes as the system sought out coherence from within this vastly diverse source material, attempting to form a logic from within the contradictions of the sonic data set.  The system demonstrates obscure mechanisms of relational reasoning and pattern recognition, finding correlations and connections between seemingly unrelated sounds and manifesting an emergent non-human musicality.

While intensely researching and developing the parameters for Blossoms, Emptyset's members have remained pillars in the communities of art and audio. James Ginzburg released two acclaimed solo releases in the last year, and runs the Subtext label (which recently released Ellen Arkbro's Chords), and additionally runs the Arc Light Editions imprint with Jen Allan.  Paul Purgas recently presented a lecture on the history of India’s first electronic music studio at Guildford International Music Festival’s Moog Symposium, curated Wysing Arts Centre’s annual music festival with Moor Mother and wrote for the Unsound:Undead book for Audint (distributed by MIT Press).  Since the release of their 2017 album Borders, the duo has been collaborating with highly specialized programmers and engaging with emerging theoretical research to devise a system architecture that would be evolved enough to establish the foundations for their album.  Emptyset have continued to evolve the project into more performative frameworks as well, which will culminate in a series of live performances including the initial realization’s debut at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland.

Blossoms is a work built on hybrids and mutations, combining complexly synthesized audio with reverbs derived from impulses taken in architectural sites Emptyset have worked in previously.  The assembled compositions are emblematic of Emptyset's dedication to forward-looking sound and examine patterns of emergence and augmentation, fragmentation and resilience, and the convolution of biotic and abiotic agency.

More information can be found here.

After years of mythology, misinterpretation and procrastination, Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers Records as the ideal collaborators to release "the right tracks" from his uber-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French-specific Volume One of this authentically titled "Strain Crack Break" series. Featuring some Finders Keepers' regulars amongst galactic Gallic rarities (previously presumed to be imaginary red herrings) this deluxe double vinyl dossier demystifies some of the essential French free jazz and Parisian prog inclusions from the alphabetical "dedication" inventory as printed in the anti-band's 1979 industrial milestone debut.

When Steven Stapleton, Heman Pathak and John Fothergill's anti-band Nurse With Wound decided to include an alphabetical dedication to all their favorite bands on the back of their inaugural LP, the notion of creating a future record dealers' trophy list couldn't have been further from their minds. By adding a list of untraveled European mythical musicians and noise makers to their own debut release of unchartered industrial art rock, they were merely providing a suggestive support system of existing potential like-minded bands, establishing safety in numbers should anyone require sonic subtitles for Nurse With Wound's own mutant musical language. Luckily for them, the record landed in record shops in the midst of 1979's memorable summer of abject apathy and its sound became a hit amongst disillusioned agit-pop pickers and artsy post-punks, thus playing a key role in the burgeoning "Industrial" genre that ensued.  For the most part, however, the list–like most instruction manuals–remained unreadable, syntactic and suspiciously sarcastic… As potential "real musicians," Nurse With Wound became an Industrial music fan's household name, but in contrast many of the names on The Nurse With Wound List were considered to be imaginary musicians, made-up bands or booby traps for hacks and smart-arses. It took a while for the rest of the record collecting community to catch on or finally catch up.

Since then, many of the rare, obscure and unpronounceable genre-free records on The Nurse With Wound List have slowly found their own feet and stumbled in to the homes of open-minded outernational vinyl junkies, DJs and sample-hungry producers, self-propelled and judged on their own merit, mostly without consultation of the enigmatic NWW map. But, to the inspective competitive collector’s chagrin, one resounding fact recurs: NWW got there first! via vinyl vacations, on cheap flights and Interrail tickets, buying bargain bin LPs on a shoestring while oblivious to the pending pension-worthy price tags after their 40 year vintage.  Stapleton and Fothergill, even if you've never heard of them, were at the bottom of the pit before "digging" became paydirt. And NOW at huge international record fairs that occur in massive exhibition halls (or within the confines of your one-touch palm pilot) amongst jive talk acronyms such as SS, PP, BIN, DNAP and BCWHES the coded letters NWW have begun to appear on stickers in the corner of original copies of the same premium progressive records accompanied by a customary 18% price hike to titillate/coerce the initiated as dealers extort the taught. Like "psych" "PINA" or "Krautrock" did before, "NWW" has become a buzzword and in the passed decades since its first publication The List has been mythologized, misunderstood and misconstrued. Its also been overlooked, overestimated and under-appreciated in equal measures, but with a growing interest it has also come to represent a maligned genre in itself, something that all members of the original line-up would have deemed sacrilegious. Bolstered by the subtitle "Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden," all bands on the inventory (many chosen on the strength of just one track alone) were chosen for their genre-defying qualities… A check-list for the uncharted.

Forty years after Nurse With Wound’s first record, Finders Keepers Records, in close collaboration with Steven Stapleton remind fans of THIS kind of "lost" music–that there once existed a feint path which was worn away decades before major label pop property developers built over this psychedelic underground. As long-running fans and liberators of some of the same records, arriving at the same axis from different-but-the-same planets, Finders Keepers and Nurse With Wound finally sing from the same hymn sheet, resulting in a collaborative attempt to officially, authentically, and legally compile the best tracks from the list, succeeding where many overzealous nerds have deferred (or simply, got the wrong end of the stick). Naturally our lavish metallic gatefold double vinyl compendium would only scratch the surface of this DIY dossier of elongated punk-prog peculiarities, hence our decision to release volume one in a series which, in accordance with Steve's wishes, focuses exclusively on individual tracks of French origin, the country that unsurprisingly hosted the highest content of bands on the list. Comprising of musique concrète, free jazz, Rock In Opposition, Zeuhl School space rock, macabre ballet music, lo-fi sci-fi, and classic horror literature-inspired prog, this first volume of the series entitled "Strain Crack And Break" throws us in at the deep end, where the Seine meets the in-sane, introducing the space cadets that found Mars in Marseilles.

Like the Swedish flat-pack record shelves that attempt to house the vast amounts of vintage vinyl that goes into a multi-volume compilation like this, it is time to prepare your own musical penchants and preconceived ideas about DIY music and hear them slowly strain, crack and break.

More information can be found here.

шон means "Poles" in Mongolia dialect.

It is the first and it will be certainly the only one album from Otto Solange.

"I’ve decided in 2019 to release some of the pieces of works recorded from 2013 to 2015 to leave an imprint from this period and give a life to an other side of my sound works, more unknown by people who follow my other sound projects (Monolyth & Cobalt, D-Rhöne).

I've traveled a lot at this time and also, this period was precisely at the middle of a great change in my life. My son was born at the end of 2015 and a big part of these works have been recorded for him, with probably some memories from my previous journeys around the world."

"All have been composed and recorded at home with a set of many electronic hardwares and no laptop (samplers, effects and loops). Using some various samples from my music collection library as a collage process and some other sounds have been recorded from a part of my solo instruments and electronics machines."

More information can be found here.

"Who are we when we're alone?"

The simplest questions are often the most difficult to answer. In April of 2018, Drowse's Kyle Bates left his home in Portland, OR for an artist residency in barren northern Iceland. Much of Bates' time there was spent in self-imposed isolation, giving him ample space to ponder the nature of solitude, and what it means to be "closed" or "open" to the world. Upon returning home, Bates worked obsessively. Maya Stoner, a longtime creative partner, sometimes came to sing, but recordings where mostly done alone. The dichotomy of his Icelandic musings materialized in a very real way as he neglected his personal relationships in favor of his art. While he was confronting his life-long fear of intimacy, and reconciling himself to a diagnosis of Bipolar 1, Bates found that the means he employed to conquer these obstacles–self reflection through art–carried with them an equal measure of misery. Light Mirror, Drowse's second album for The Flenser, is a subtle exploration of these contradictory attitudes and their consequences that can be heard as an artifact of sonic self-sabotage.

Light Mirror falls within a lineage of overcast Pacific Northwest albums (think Grouper's Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill), but finds Drowse pushing past its slowcore roots. The album's prismatic sound reflects experimental electronic, noise pop, black metal, krautrock, and more through Kyle's distinct song-worlds. The lyrics are ruminations on the idea of multiple selves, identity, paranoia, fear of the body, alcohol abuse, social media, the power of memory, the truths that are revealed when we are alone, and the significance of human contact. They were influenced by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and poet Louise Glück, who both address self-contradiction. Mastered by Nicholas Wilbur (Mount Eerie, Planning for Burial) at the Unknown, the album showcases a striking maturation in sound.  Light Mirror is Drowse's most intimate and desolate work to date.

More information can be found here.

In his solo work and as a member of Nine Inch Nails, Alessandro Cortini's music casts the listener into an intricately rendered vortex of emotive dynamics, where he expertly maximizes the boundaries of contemporary electronic music. His new album, Volume Massimo, combines his fondness for melody with the rigour of experimental practice. Follows on from 2017's universally acclaimed album Avanti.  8 tracks of deftly arranged synthesizers saturated with sonic artefacts and luscious pop sensibilities.

More information can be found here.

On Sutarti, Joshua Sabin draws influence from the compositional structures and psychoacoustic properties that exist within early Lithuanian folk music, exploring the emotional potency of the human voice through the manipulation of elements of archival recordings.

Obtaining access to the folk music archives of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Ethnomusicology Archive from the outset of this project, Sabin felt a particular resonance with the extensive library of vocal recordings and specifically the song forms of the Sutartinė. Derived from the Lithuanian verb "Sutarti" - to be "in agreement," "to attune" – Sutartinės are a Lithuanian form of Schwebungsdiaphonie - a distinct canonic song style consisting of two or more voices that purposefully clash creating extremely precise dissonances and the phenomena of aural ‘beating’.

Inspired by the psychoacoustic research of Rytis Ambrazevičius, whose computer analyses reveal the unique acoustic and harmonic complexities in these archival songs, and transfixed by what Sabin describes as their "arresting and often almost plaintive and minimalistic beauty," he sought to compose directly with the recordings themselves as a raw material.

Sutarti exists fundamentally as an emotional "response," presenting archival voices through radical recontextualizations that Sabin hopes simultaneously express both his personal perspective and experience, and also speak universally to the power and versatility of the voice as a communicator of meaning and emotion.

Produced with archival recordings, instrumentation including, Skudučiai and Fiddle, and field recordings of Lithuanian forest ambiences.

Joshua Sabin is an Edinburgh based composer and sound designer, who’s first LP Terminus Drift was released on Subtext in 2017.

Done as part of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's RE:VIVE initiative in collaboration with the Lithuanian Archivist's Association and the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council

More information can be found here.

After a trilogy of spectacular explorations of relentlessly driving rhythms – Sagittarian Domain (2012), Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016) – Simian Angel finds Oren Ambarchi renewing his focus on his singular approach to the electric guitar, returning in part to the spacious canvases of classic releases like Grapes from the Estate while also following his muse down previously unexplored byways.

Reflecting Ambarchi's profound love of Brazilian music – an aspect of his omnivorous musical appetite not immediately apparent in his own work until now – Simian Angel features the remarkable percussive talents of the legendary Cyro Baptista, a key part of the Downtown scene who has collaborated with everyone from John Zorn and Derek Bailey to Robert Palmer and Herbie Hancock. Like the music of Nana Vasconcelos and Airto Moreira, Simian Angel places Baptista's dexterous and rhythmically nuanced handling of traditional Brazilian percussion instruments into an unexpected musical context. On the first side, "Palm Sugar Candy," Baptista's spare and halting rhythms wind their way through a landscape of gliding electronic tones, gently rising up and momentarily subsiding until the piece's final minutes leave Ambarchi's guitar unaccompanied. While the rich, swirling harmonics of Ambarchi's guitar performance are familiar to listeners from his previous recordings, the subtly wavering, synthetic guitar tone we hear is quite new, coming across at times like an abstracted, splayed-out take on the 80s guitar-synth work of Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell. Equally new is the harmonic complexity of Ambarchi's playing, which leaves behind the minimalist simplicity of much of his previous work for a constantly-shifting play between lush consonance and uneasy dissonance.

Beginning with a beautiful passage of unaccompanied percussion dominated by the berimbau, the side-long title piece carries on the first side's exploration of subtle, non-linear dynamic arcs, taking the form of a gently episodic suite, in which distinctive moments, like a lyrical passage of guitar-triggered piano, unexpectedly arise from intervals of drifting tones like dream images suddenly cohering. In the piece’s second half, the piano tones becomes increasingly more clipped and synthetic, scattering themselves into aleatoric melodies that call to mind an imaginary collaboration between Albert Marcoeur and David Behrman, grounded all the while by the pulse of Baptista's percussion. Subtle yet complex, fleeting yet emotionally affecting, Simian Angel is an essential chapter in Ambarchi's restlessly exploratory oeuvre.

More information can be found here.

Piezo sensor and contact speaker attached on rear side of each plate
Amplifying and mirroring their subtle and naturally occurring vibrations
Evoking the characteristic resonant frequencies of each type of metal

The sound art of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on immediate complex, unnoticed or unapproachable aspects of the human condition or civilisation. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in Palestine, and tones - otoacoustic emissions - generated from the actual human ear.

Currently Jacob Kirkegaard works on two projects, one on the sound of global waste and waste management. The other on sound environments related to the immediate human post mortem.

With his peculiar alchemist approach and extensive research, complex phenomena and current conditions are portrayed through composition, installation, video and photography. Rather than providing answers, his portrayals create spaces for reflection.

Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, biennales and concert spaces throughout the world, including MoMA in New York, LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art and ARoS in Denmark, The Menil Collection and at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, The Sydney Biennale in Australia, Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

More information can be found here.

"When I was a child I lived in a small house on the outskirts of a small village in Sardinia.

The house was located 100 meters from the countryside (close to San Gavino Monreale castle).

I spent my whole childhood playing and exploring all these uninhabited places, sometimes there were dangers but the love for nature was much stronger.

This song and its artwork reflect those beautiful moments spent with my dearest and old friends in those magnificent places where human beings have not yet built anything."

-Andrea Porcu

More information can be found here.

A monograph made in the Winter of 2018, with a microscopic camera, paints, pens, and ultra-marine powder.  Texts are hung throughout the book; revering dreams of night, sea life, and the fluid of romance.  Includes an audio cassette to coat the reading experience. A perfume I concocted (seaweed, tobacco, and moss points) scents each book.

166 color pages,  8.5″ x 10″ perfect bound
Scented with “Stupid Fish” perfume
Comes with 30-minute cassette of music made for the book
Limited edition of 18 copies,  signed and numbered

More information can be found here.

"The first time I called myself a 'Witch' was the most magical moment of my life... dare to look within yourself and you are a Witch." - M. Adler

"Underneath it all is an appreciation of nature." - Kenneth Anger

This 2-disc set of recordings includes 10 new compositions, one never physically released track ("Totality") plus 5 favorites together in a single collection. With the right intentions one or more of these works can serve as aids down your own path of study, discovery, practice, and enlightenment.

More information can be found here.

Slow, methodical organ recordings on this major new work from Kali Malone; a quietly subversive double album featuring almost two hours of concentrated, creeping organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code with ultimately profound emotional resonance.

The Sacrificial Code takes a more surgical approach to the methods first explored on last year's Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017. Over the course of three parts performed on three different organs, Malone's minimalist process captures a jarring precision of closeness, both on the level of the materiality of the sounds and on the level of composition.  The recordings here involved careful close miking of the pipe organ in such a way as to eliminate environmental identifiers as far as possible - essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces were then further compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse - an approach that flows against the grain of the prevailing musical hegemony, where sound is so often manipulated, and composition often steeped in self indulgence.  It echoes Steve Reich's sentiment "..by voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind."

With its slow, purified and seemingly austere qualities, The Sacrificial Code guides us through an almost trance-inducing process where we become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness.  As such, it's a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self restraint - a stunning realisation of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigour which gradually reveals startling personal dimensions.  It has a perception-altering quality that encourages self exploration free of signposts and without a preordained endpoint - the antithesis to the language of colourless musical platitudes we've become so accustomed to.

More information can be found here and here.

Lena Andersson is a fictional character created by Berlin-based Japanese artist Kyoka and Irish producer Eomac. Both met in 2016 during a residency at the Stockholm EMS studios. The initial spark of their collaboration was a joint session on the studio's Buchla system, later expanding to multiple other sound sources and instruments at sessions in the Etopia studio in Zaragoza supported by Fuga.

During the improvisations, a call-and-response working principle emerged immediately which joins the special talents of both musicians. Kyoka's free and experimental approach forms part of the source material that is contrasted with Eomac's skillful editing; unconventional reflections face a driving force. From Kyoka's extensive field recording collection, an arabesque of disturbing vocal fragments arises that is set against Eomac's hard rhythmic framework, as in "Das Tier," for instance. "37 Years Later" or "Mystic" live on a vivid texture that has been condensed directly at the mixing console into a kind of dramaturgical capturing of the moment. The immediacy of the collaboration forms the basis for a synergy of the individual production techniques. A strategy that lacks neither absolute creative freedom nor an awareness of musical function.

Söder Mälarstrand thus captures an intuitive cooperation between the two producers, which also refers back to the place of origin through its dialogical, moment-related production principle. The album title is a tribute to the Stockholm studios where the project began.

More information can be found here.

After several acclaimed EPs, including Risk in a New Age (Desire Records 2014), License To Desire (Desire Records 2015, reissued by Aurora Borealis recordings in 2017) and Weehawken (Clan Destine Records 2016) - Orphan Swords' debut LP, Ascent, finally arrives. In recording the album, the duo took the radical decision to interchange their usual respective input in the creative process, which resulted in a revelatory piece of music, one that functions as an initiatory narrative summarized as follows:

"Ascent is the story of an unsolved vanishing in a mountain, somewhere undefined.

You have been assigned to solve this mystery and you have departed from home long ago. Today, you have finally reached the highest town in the mountains, the ultimate refuge before the highest peak. You are now setting for the ascent where the final search will take place.

You are now climbing up, the path gets increasingly steep and the oxygen begins to rarefy. Exhausted and out of breath, you try and keep on going. Surrounded by clouds and ice-cold stone, in the midst of your confusion, you're struck by the idea that the very object of your search, the missing entity you've been assigned to find and grown obsessed with, is a part of you. Something that you have lost long ago, you have no idea what it looks like or what it is supposed to be, but you know for sure it is what you’re looking for.

Ascent is the story of that search, it is mostly about transience and vacuity, acceptance and the search for inner unity. An ascent that becomes profound introspection."

Ascent is the first part of a diptych. Breach - also recorded during the same period - will follow and conclude the two-part conceptual series at a later date.

More information can be found here.

Release lost 1979 soundtrack Chance Versus Causality

CABARET VOLTAIRE have announced the release of their 1979 soundtrack, Chance Versus Causality, available officially for the first time since the film’s release. Chance Versus Causality will be out on limited edition transparent green vinyl, CD and digitally on 30 August 2019 via Mute. Listen to a taste of what to expect here: https://youtu.be/nQHVJu9lYr4

PRE-ORDER: https://smarturl.it/CV2019

On the same day 1974-76 will get its first vinyl release. The album, originally released on cassette via Industrial Records in 1980, was reissued on CD by The Grey Area of Mute in 1992 and will be now available on limited edition transparent orange double vinyl and digitally. 1974-76 is a selection of material recorded by Cabaret Voltaire in their formative years. Recorded in Chris Watson’s attic on a domestic reel-to-reel tape recorder, a number of the recordings were included in the now legendary limited edition cassette released by the band in 1976.

Chance Versus Causality was recorded in 1979 as the soundtrack for director Babeth Mondini’s film of the same name. The band originally met Mondini at the infamous Brussels Plan K show which saw Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and William Burroughs share a bill, and soon after, she asked them to create the soundtrack for her film. Chance Versus Causality was improvised, in a similar vein to what the band refer to as their live “ambient sets”, described as having “less rhythm, more tape” and the soundtrack was recorded live by the original line up – Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson – at the band’s Western Works studio with no prior knowledge of the film, or instruction from the director.

Only one copy of the soundtrack existed, two reels of tape that were sent to Holland for inclusion in the film, a split-screen 16mm film that was given a limited release and never seen by the band. Only a section of the soundtrack had been previously available, the b-side to the ‘Silent Command’ 7” (RoughTrade004). Around 15 years ago the tapes were returned to Cabaret Voltaire, and this lost classic from the archive was placed to one side and only came up again recently during discussions with Mute. The artwork, was created with archive and found montage imagery from that period, including images projected at performances from that time, was mixed digitally by Richard H. Kirk and Phil Wolstenholme.

Live, improvised but coherent with a touch of mischief and warmth, this single piece of music is an evocative snapshot of this era of Cabaret Voltaire, just after the release of Nag, Nag, Nag and ahead of the Voice of America album release, which has strong ties with this release through the vocal samples and overall sound.

Cabaret Voltaire have been performing select festivals in recent years, and Richard H. Kirk is currently working on a new Cabaret Voltaire album.