Kukangendai, "Palm"

"Kukangendai is a kick ass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrythmic and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a forest than it is a geode. They started in 2006. They left Tokyo to Kyoto and started the cult venue Soto ("Outside") "to listen to music they hadn’t heard yet" a few years later. They collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto last year. They reminded me of James Brown on a heavy binge of Bastro–there's a deep current of both archaic musical tastes and the human desire for articulating that archaism in there, but you shake your ass and get the shouting in… in a punk basement … 13th century version of Breadwinner, the bare soul version.  I'm honored and proud to work with this tribe, and to count them amongst friends."

-Stephen O’Malley, February 2019, Paris

More information can be found here.

3854 Hits

M. Sage, "Catch a Blessing"

Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.

Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.

Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty. And the perks were plenty. As Sage explains: "Learning to know less and to just feel more about what I am making has become important to me. I like, or am learning to like, the possibility of that openness, that uncertainty. Not knowing. It is uncomfortable, but it is nourishing."

Recorded over a summer in a tiny room on the second floor of a 120-year-old apartment in Chicago, Catch a Blessing is the result of and the meditation on the exquisite exhaust and lavish lushness of his crumbling (and rebuilt) locales.

Presented as a collection of ornately expressionistic portraits of Chicago, Sage approached the album more as paintings or sculptures than musical compositions. Album opener "Avondale Primer Gray" unfurls a calm but vibrant quasi-melody that dissolves into a blur of found sonic objects both familiar unknown. "Lions to Baffle" is a semi-synthetic symphony of muted, sax-laden alien jazz, while "Elevator Straffing" maintains a whirling, glittering hum of echoed dissonance. "Claiming Air Rights" could be the literal sound of a piano floating through space, levitating despite an impossible weight. "Michigan Turquoise" brings an exquisitely eerie hymn with the same ghastly grace of Sparklehorse. Album centerpiece "Window Unit +Three Flat" is an open-ended epic of texture and ambiguity, immediately followed by the warped and trickling elegance of "Polish Triangle." "Wolfe Point Fog" closes Catch a Blessing with peculiar focus, departing with an open-ended and wholly optimistic focus.

The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.

Out now on Geographic North.

3822 Hits

Jan St. Werner, "Glottal Wolpertinger (Fiepblatter Catalogue #6)"

Glottal Wolpertinger was initially conceived as a radio installation for documenta 14, the world's most renowned event for contemporary arts, with each of the tracks broadcasting individually over the course of ten weeks and culminating in a convergence of all eight tracks at a performance in Athens. The pieces consist of microtonally tuned feedback, multispectral drones which Werner modulated and filtered with a purposeful, and indeed vocalized, emphasis given to the different frequencies and textures used. By naming the individual frequency bands, Werner defies traditional tuning systems and instead centers the piece on collaging variable elements. Sonic elements churn and sprawl across the tracks in constant motion. Their drones, combatting for space, entangle one another and oscillate into overtones that shift, build, and wither with fluid motion that blurs the line between consonance and dissonance.

Glottal Wolpertinger's incarnation as a recording is no less potent than its preceding forms, but serves as a continuation of the project's evolution as a distinct listening experience. Werner's apt title for the project embellishes the ambiguity and cognitive dissonance inherent with the work, as the wolpertinger is a creature of European myth which is said to be the mutated result of different species breeding under special circumstances in the Alps. Glottal intonations are those produced by the guttural and throat region of the body, the center of organic sound. According to Werner, the wolpertingers are "bastards, collaged freaks who exist in the grey zone of nature’s perfect plan," the same grey zone in which his pieces live.

Jan St. Werner is a critically acclaimed and internationally recognized sound innovator. In myriad ways – as a solo artist, a collaborator, through his group Mouse On Mars, as a producer, as a lecturer at MIT, or as a professor of Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremburg - Werner has challenged traditional approaches to creating and experiencing music. The sixth installment of his "Fiepblatter Catalogue series," Glottal Wolpertinger endeavors to transcribe the phenomenon of sound as anarchic and highly sensitive material. His multilayered presentation of the project highlights the ways in which sound and music can fluctuate and re-constitute depending on context all within one consistent work. In keeping with the series' collaborative nature, the pieces include contributions from guitarists Aaron & Bryce Dessner of The National.

More information can be found here.

4050 Hits

MIS+RESS, "Dispellers"

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of MIS+RESS to its roster of artists, presenting his new album entitled Dispellers.

MIS+RESS is the ambient solo project of Brian Wenckebach, based in New Jersey, USA. He is also known as one half of electronica/shoegaze duo Elika, experimental/electronica duo Thee Koukouvaya and lately as member of Measured, a new collaboration project along with Evagelia Maravelias, the other half of Elika, and electronic producer and latter-day Tangerine Dream member, Ulrich Schnauss. To date MIS+RESS has released an album on Somewherecold Records in 2017 and a self-released EP in 2018.

Dispellers is Wenckebach’s second release on Sound In Silence after the, already sold out, mini album Witches’ Jelly by Thee Koukouvaya, his other project along with John O’Hara, back in 2015.

Dispellers is a gorgeous collection of eight calming compositions, centered on ambient atmospheres and dreamy soundscapes. Utilizing mesmerizing melodies and blissful layers of delayed guitars, loops of ethereal textures, heavily processed with reverb and a variety of other effect pedals, Wenckebach creates one of his finest works to date. Dispellers is a wonderful album of nostalgic and emotional content, highly recommended for devotees of Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, The Durutti Column and July Skies.

More information can be found here.

3737 Hits

Western Edges, "Prowess"

Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Western Edges to its family, presenting his debut album Prowess.

Western Edges is the new ambient/electronic solo project of Richard Adams, founder member, alongside his brother Chris, of the legendary Leeds band Hood. Since Hood went on hiatus in 2005, Richard Adams has recorded his music under the moniker of The Declining Winter, either solo or with help of friends such as Martin Cummings (Northerner), Paul Elam (Fieldhead), Mick Harrison (Prolapse, National Screen Service), James Yates (Seamajestea), Barrie Cummings, Joanne Ellis and many others, having released several sublime albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Home Assembly Music, Rusted Rail, Monopsone, Mobeer and Rural Colours, amongst others. He is also member of several other projects such as Memory Drawings, Great Panoptique Winter and Northern Exchange, along with friends such as Joel Hanson (Judgement Of Paris), Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers, Last Harbour), Gareth S Brown (Hood), Chris Cole (Manyfingers, Movietone), Jason Sweeney (Panoptique Electrical) and others.

Prowess is Adams’ third release on Sound In Silence after two highly acclaimed albums in 2015, Wildness by Great Panoptique Winter and Endless Scenery by The Declining Winter.

Prowess is made up of eight electronic tracks, of blissful ambience and shimmering electronics. These tracks were made to soundtrack the feelings Richard Adams had about the area where he lives in Saltaire, West Yorkshire and the Aire valley, while each one was inspired by a different photograph of the area. Adams skillfully blends together elements of soothing ambient, lo-fi electronica and minimal techno, creating an impressive album full of warm soundscapes, ethereal textures, washes of lush pads, drifting synth layers, hypnotic drones, deep bass lines and minimal beats.
Expertly mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Prowess is a delicate album which appeals to all fans of beatless Boards Of Canada, Aphex Twin, bvdub and late-period Hood.

More information can be found here.

3979 Hits

Coil, "Live Five"

COIL LIVE FIVE (Pre-order at thighpaulsandra.co.uk)

Recorded live at St. John's Church, Gdansk on Oct 25th 2002.

 

  1. I Am Angie Bowie (Sine Waves)
  2. The Last Rites Of Spring
  3. 'Hammersmith' Deceivers
  4. A Warning From The Sun
  5. The Universe Is A Haunted House
  6. Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)
  7. I Don't Want To Be The One
  8. Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
  9. Are You Shivering?

 

Mixed in 2019 from the original multitrack recordings, this exclusive release is available only from Thighpaulsandra.co.uk.

 

IMPORTANT: The original limited edition has sold out, but due to high demand we are offering a regular edition of this release, which does not contain either the stickers or the signed certificate. This is a pre-order; these are expected to ship from the end of April 2019. Strictly one copy per customer (although it is indeed possible to add multiples of this item to your cart, any additional purchases will be refunded).

4715 Hits

Rosalind Hall, "Drift"

Drift is a free fall album consisting of three compositions invoking a sense of hovering expansion. Deeply spacious yet tightly compacted sound movements create holding patterns that slowly shift and evolve. Cycles fall in and out of sync while atmospheres envelop time, appearing on the periphery before being subsumed back into space.

The compositions utilize modified alto saxophone with spring reverb attachment, synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and electronic processing. The saxophone is played with an acoustic spring reverberation preparation to produce multiple feedback tones, pitch beating and metallic distortion. Using sampling and pitch shifting techniques, the instrument and its presence of breath act as the glue that binds the pieces.

Bio:

Rosalind Hall is an Australian musician and composer who creates performances, compositions, installations and soundtracks. Rosalind’s spatial and expansive work explores the physicality of sound through the use of amplification, microtonal movement, beating frequencies and reverberations. Using acoustic and electronic sound technologies such as modified saxophone, synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and processing software, Rosalind extends her sound sources by sampling and processing to create pieces that invoke a sense of claustrophobic infinity.

More information can be found here.

3801 Hits

Helm, "Chemical Flowers"

Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called "Capital Crisis (New City Loop)" seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme.

Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like "Leave Them All Behind" tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent.

Confused narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. "I Knew You Would Respond" evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It's one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it's one of the most recognizably human.

The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like "Lizard in Fear" whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds - five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced world-building. Movement is key.

Releases May 17, 2019.  More information can be found here.

3797 Hits

M. Geddes Gengras, "I Am The Last of That Green and Warm​-​Hued World"

Over the last decade, M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in both solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Along with Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones and Alex Gray, and a host of Jamaican singers and artists, Gengras continues to blur the boundaries of dub and electronic music under the name Duppy Gun – a project which crystallized with an acclaimed collaboration called Icon Give Thank (RVNG, 2012) with roots reggae legends The Congos.

I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World, Gengras’s first release with Hausu Mountain, follows in the more ambient- and drone-focused vein of his work, as explored on recent releases with labels like Leaving Records, Umor Rex, and Room40. The album stretches through an 80-minute program of layered synth mosaics and expanses of serene drift that continually shift and reconfigure themselves into networks of interlaced harmonies and electronic textures. At any given moment, huge foundations of low-end drift swirl beneath angelic pads and soaring, quasi-melodic leads, as layers of environmental foley drip into view around the margins. Synth tones evoke the timbres of human vocal formants, stuttering digital glitch, or unidentifiable hand drum percussion. Mixing disparate sounds and moods in his palette, Gengras paints a mental journey through diverse emotional zones: quiet meditation under the desert sun at noon, ego-destroying tidal wave swells slamming onto the beach, confused wandering through hostile territory under the cover of night.

I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World came into existence after M. Geddes Gengras's father appeared to him in a dream and suggested that he read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. The vivid, post-apocalyptic locales visited in the book, which range from mountain ranges to atomic water pumping stations to interdimensional portals, directly inform the auditory spaces that Gengras draws into life with this album. While ambient music often reaches the listener with a host of external signifiers meant to ground the music in some semblance of the physical world (see: oceanic album art, song titles that evoke specific images), Gengras’s music achieves a rare degree of topographical intricacy by virtue of his wide, dense mixes and the contrasting textures presented by his interlocking tiers of synthesis. Over the course of five extended sessions that range from 11 to 22 minutes each, the album sinks into passages of near-complete stasis and crests into segments animated by intermittent bursts of melody and muted, techno-adjacent drum tones, settling into discrete atmospheres that percolate at different degrees of rhythmic complexity. All the while, M. Geddes Gengras allows individual elements to generatively interact and twist around each other to the point that no two moments present the same exact sounds. A far cry from willfully repetitive, loop-based ambient music, I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World extends before the listener as a fluctuating, self-contained biome, with the components of each composition carefully stacked together and charged with their own trajectory through time and imagined physical space.

More information can be round here.

8617 Hits

Thisquietarmy/Dirk Serries/Tom Malmendier, "Hell"

Live trio collaboration:


Dirk Serries - guitar
Eric Quach - guitar
Tom Malmendier - drums


This is an improvisational set by three musicians who came together at Christuskirche Bochum. The result is a 41-minute-long track with an epic structure of drone, noise, ambient, experimental sounds and freejazz elements.

More information can be found here.

3878 Hits

Reynols, "Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018"

Reynols started in 1993 in Buenos Aires and is famous amongst many things for its unique Down's syndrome drummer/vocalist Miguel Tomasín, who is the band's spiritual architect. Reynols is also known for its musical diversity, which spans everything from cosmic free-rock and lo-fi drone electronic music, to conceptual sound art and social/political/esoteric observations. The world of Reynols is a universe completely of its own, and inhabits so much that even an extensive box like this only scratches the surface.

Although Reynols have worked with an open-process DIY philosophy and been the subject of multiple documentaries, the band has still managed to sustain an element of mystery, so the release of Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018 marks the first time the band has allowed an extensive overview of their work to be made. Fans of the band will also be happy to learn that most of the material is previously unreleased, including two albums from the early 2000s that were completed but never issued; the earliest recordings from 1993; collaborations with artists Acid Mother's Temple and Pauline Oliveros; conceptual pieces; and more. There's also a DVD with 90 minutes of videos.

This boxed set shows the full range of Reynols.  It has been six years in the making and is the most extensive boxed set project ever to be released by Pica Disk.

3855 Hits

Maryanne Amacher, "Petra"

Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher’s 1991 piece "Petra" marks her first commercially available instrumental work.

"Petra" was originally commissioned for the ISCM World Music Days in Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. "Petra" is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher's impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear's short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.

This solemn interpretation of "Petra" was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre.

Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.

Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher's and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.

More information can be found here.

3565 Hits

Michael Morley, "Heavens Idleness Awaits"

Michael Morley has long been acclaimed for his electric guitar and electronic forays in New Zealand’s legendary The Dead C and Gate. On Heavens Idleness Awaits, he strips his music to its most elemental state. Recorded at home and using only a single tracked 12-string acoustic guitar, Morley creates an intimate and intensely meditative work. Over four side-long tracks, he weaves hypnotic melodic figures that slowly unfurl to reveal a minimalist masterwork and one of his most powerful statements to date.

More information can be found here.

4013 Hits

Motion Sickness of Time Travel, "Subterranean"

A 105-minute smoky tinted imprinted professionally duplicated cassette tape, housed in a clear case with full-color artwork printed on shimmer paper. Art by Grant Evans and inspired by Sarah Colombo's debut novel Subterranean.  Also available in digital format.

"... struck by the despair of objects."

More information can be found here.

3607 Hits

øjeRum, "Nattesne"

Today, we're glad to present our last winter's release by øjeRum who comes back for the second time on eilean rec. with Nattesne (eilean 85).

øjeRum is Copenhagen-based musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski. Since 2014 he has put out releases on various labels such as A Giant Fern, Cabin Floor Esoterica, eilean rec., Phinery, Scissor Tail Editions, and Vaald.

øjeRum is all about the attempt to capture and convey emotions, moods and memories.

More information can be found here and here.

3798 Hits

Sarah Davachi, "Pale Bloom"

Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilizing everything from pipe and reed organs to analog synthesizers, this prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for a radiant work of quiet minimalism and poetic rumination.

Recorded at Berkeley, California's famed Fantasy Studios, Pale Bloom is comprised of two delicately-arranged sides. The first – a three-part suite where Davachi's piano acts as conjurer, beckoning Hammond organ and stirring countertenor into a patiently unfolding congress – recalls Eduard Artemiev's majestic soundtrack for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. "Perfumes I-III" employs the harmonically rich music of Bach as a springboard for abstract, solemn pieces that sound as haunted as they are dreamlike.

While the first half of Pale Bloom showcases Davachi's latent Romanticism, the sidelong "If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery" reveals the Mills College graduate's affinity for the work of avant-garde composers La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue. Softly vibrating strings rise and fall like complementary exhalations of breath. As the fluctuating pitches create overtones that pitter and pulse, the piece slowly and subtly evolves – suggesting a well-tempered stillness, yet without stasis.

More information can be found here.

3885 Hits

Yannick Franck Presents Mt. Gemini, "Just Like A River" (Orphan Swords)

A deconstruction of Ska, Rocksteady and Skinhead Reggae from the '50s, '60s and '70s. Rather a passionate deconstruction of a genre than compositions or remixes per se, this incantatory tribute favors abstraction using loops, distortion, compression, variations of speed and height, and effects (delay, reverb, chorus). Recorded in different states of altered consciousness, Mt. Gemini is built of spontaneous and unexpected combinations. It is an attempt to generate inner spaces where the borders between reverie and reality blur. An hallucinatory shock, a journey made of distant echoes, an atmosphere imbued with joy and nostalgia.

More information can be found here.

4193 Hits

Cruel Diagonals, "Pulse of Indignation"

Written alongside and as a follow-up to Disambiguation, Cruel Diagonals' Pulse of Indignation is a mighty next leap in Megan Mitchell's musical trajectory. Whereas, for Mitchell, Disambiguation was about sense-making and uncovering some of the traumas surrounding Mitchell’s early musical career as an adolescent and young adult, Pulse of Indignation is about recognizing the exploitation, grooming, and pain that she was subjected to as a young woman under the watchful eye of men with power in the music industry. It's about harnessing the righteous anger, repulsion, and indeed, indignation, at the proliferation of these experiences for young women and non-men. If Disambiguation was about mourning the loss of Mitchell’s self-volition through uncovering layers of previously obscured suffering, Pulse of Indignation is about moving through to the next stage and owning the narrative she projects into the world.

More information can be found here.

3697 Hits

Muslimgauze, "Azzazin" reissue

26819

"Azzazin is a double standout Muslimgauze album, first LP originally issued in 1996, as a CD and the second LP as a 10", tightly focused on a singular palette of monotone drones and swarming electronic buzzes, which arguably sound like a parallel to early Editions Mego.

They're probably the most minimalist Muslimgauze tracks you've heard, and even still he manages to express a fine range of abstracted emotions, from aggressive buzz to tender ambient pieces and spectral concrete prisms. Starting with an extremely minimal opening number -- it's no surprise Finnish experimental duo Pan Sonic are Muslimgauze fans, based on this track -- Azzazin has a much more electronic feeling than most of Bryn Jones' other albums, eschewing the traditional elements used elsewhere for a rough, quietly aggressive and disturbing feel. The fourth track, with its unpredictable keyboard snarls over a low, quiet pulse, and the sixth and seventh songs, with distorted, high-pitched noise tones mixed with a soft series of bass notes and a slight spoken-word interjection from time to time, are some of the strong points from this intriguing release.

Surprisingly this album contains no trace of percussion whatsoever and instead presents a dry and claustrophobic minimal electronics that sounds more like a Warp band or a project by some S.E.T.I.-inspired laptop artist than a Middle Eastern-inspired band. Outerspace sci-fi sounds meet with found sounds and human-made noises, isolationist experimental knob tweaking and mostly hi frequency material loops playing at random. Beats are used in an extremely limited way throughout Azzazzin, with rhythm, always a key component of Jones' work, more suggested at points by the nature of the keyboard lines than anything else. This record draws a picture of the artist that is different than the one we got to know. Closing with an equally minimal track, Azzazin won't be everyone's cup of tea, but adventuresome listeners will find themselves rewarded."

More information can be found here.

3718 Hits

Gramm, "Personal Rock" reissue (Jan Jelinek)

Twenty years ago, Jan Jelinek's debut album Personal Rock was released by Source Records. Under the pseudonym Gramm, it brings together eight tracks that have not been available on vinyl since their original release. Faitiche is very glad to announce the re-release of the album: Personal Rock will appear as a double LP featuring the original cover artwork.
What people wrote about Personal Rock two decades ago:

"Situated somewhere between Jelinek's much-loved Loop-Finding Jazz Records, Farben, Move D's Conjoint project and Atom Heart's most immersive work for Rather Interesting, it is a late-night album full of subtle production tricks and melodic House structures that belong to the pre-millennial IDM heyday, but which transcend its overly-masculine templates.” (Boomkat)

"Though many producers have pushed forward the clicks-and-cuts style of experimental ambience developed by German experimentalists Oval (among others), few have been able to match their knack for making abstract cuts into pieces of undeniable beauty. Jan Jelinek's first LP as Gramm is one of the precious few, and it is obvious from the opener." (AllMusic)

"Organized in organic structures and minimal movements, the tracks get into utopian states and super-desirable moods, offering superior contentedness and dependable taste of the kind seldom sustained for a whole album. (...) Subway-Escalator-Soul." (Spex)

Releases April 6, 2019 on Faitiche.

4127 Hits