Dais Records is proud to unveil the new dark pop masterpiece from artist and composer Tor Lundvall. His first vocal album since 2009’s Sleeping and Hiding, and following the release of two instrumental albums and three CD box sets since that time, Tor returns with an album of beautifully intricate sadness and reflection: A Dark Place.

Born in 1968 in Wyckoff, NJ, Tor Lundvall is a painter and ambient composer.  The son of Blue Note Records legend Bruce Lundvall, Tor was exposed to artwork, music, and creativity from a young age, and  began his professional painting and music output in the late '80s.

Widely known for his dark imagery and thoughtful, provocative soundscapes, Tor Lundvall’s artwork is all-encompassing. His music, when paired with his paintings, creates a world within which one could easily disappear.

An intensely private individual, Tor Lundvall eschews the gallery circuit and live performances for his private studio in Eastern Long Island, NY, preferring to show his artwork privately and focus on studio production and writing without the pressures of the audience and all it encompasses.

Dais Records is honored to provide another glimpse into his world through his recordings.  We hope you find it as special and as unforgettable as we do.

More information can be found here.

Air Lows is the debut solo album by Silvia Kastel.

The Italian artist has been a fixture of the underground since her precocious teens, clocking up many miles in Control Unit with Ninni Morgia ("It’s like Catherine Deneuve dumped two cases of post-Repulsion psychiatric notes over Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing, lit the fuse and, ahem, stood well back" – Julian Cope), including collaborations with the likes of Smegma, Factrix, Gary Smith, Aki Onda and Gate (Michael Morley of The Dead C). Through her own label, Ultramarine, she has released music by the likes of Raymond Dijkstra, Blood Stereo and Bene Gesserit.

Both solo and in her work with others, Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock and improvisation. Air Lows – which follows the cassette releases Love Tape (2011), Voice Studies 20 (2015) and The Gap (2016) – is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but assuredly breaks new ground.

Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono’s Philharmony being a particular favourite). The formal artifice of muzak / elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very "human" synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant and Sun Ra: all these things were touchstones for Air Lows' conception and composition. All strains of music addressing – and complicating – the relationship between the human and the technological. By extension, visual inspirations also proved important: anime, and the avant-garde fashion of Rei Kawakubo. What does that shirt or dress sound like?

Though used sparingly, Kastel’s voice remains her key instrument, whether subject to dissociative digital manipulations as on "Bruell," delivering matter-of-fact spoken monologues, or providing splashes of pure tonal colour. Recorded between her expansive Italian studio and a more compact, ersatz set-up in Berlin, Air Lows gradually takes on some of the character of the German capital: you can hear the wide streets and empty spaces, the seepage of never-ending nightlife, the loneliness. Air Lows is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: the glorious technicolour J-pop deconstructons of its first half leading inexorably to the icy noir of "Spiderwebs" and "Concrete Void." These later tracks are reminiscent of 2015’s magnificent 39 12", Kastel in the role of numbed, nihilistic chanteuse stalking dank, murky tunnels of reverb and sub-bass. But there is contradiction and emotional ambiguity to Air Lows from the outset, and throughout: a sense of both infinite space and acute claustrophobia; energy and inertia; fluency and restraint.

Out now on Blackest Ever Black.

Written during what Dimitris Papadatos, aka Jay Glass Dubs, describes as "an adventurous and bold period," and holding material issued on tape by various labels between 2015-2016, the Dubs compilation frames a singular, stripped-down take on classic dub forms, wherein Jay Glass Dubs perceptibly retains the sound’s heavy function and mystic qualities, but subtly updates its palette with a range of nods to a myriad of unexpected, angular styles.

The results form a sort of ghostly, filleted subtraction of classic dub architecture, all plasmic tones and diaphanous, boneless structures buoyed by an often overwhelming, yet somehow intangible bass presence. Beyond the obvious, thematic ligature that connects the material, which was all recorded within a very short period of time, the artist also suggests there is an underlying, encrypted similarity to the material which is "merely apparent to me," and awaits much closer investigation from keen ears.

From Jay's eponymous 2015 debut for Hylé tapes, listeners will encounter the heaving smudge of Definition Dub, the serpentine, Coil-like digital delays of "Grumpy Dub," and a grime drone drill "Depression Dub." Off the II tape for THRHNDRDSVNTNN comes the darkwave synths and militant step of "Magazine Dub" recalling a gauzier Equiknoxx production, next to the bass-less scudder, "Detrimental Dub" and the shoegazing bloom of "Daria Dub," while his III tape tees up some abyssal highlights in the vertiginous "Hilton Dub," the melancholy, Basic Channel-scoped scale of "Sieben Dub," and the HTRK-esque starkness of "Everlasting Dub."

Exclusive to the set is "Perfumed Dub," recorded in 2017 and pointing to vast, layered, atmospheric directions for a timeless project which is only just hitting its stride.

Out now on Ecstatic.

12k is very happy to announce a new LP from long-time label favorite and ever-elusive Shuttle358. With Field, Shuttle358’s Dan Abrams returns to the beautiful roots he layed down with his now-classic Frame (12k1011, 2000) which Alternative Press heralded as "Ranking alongside Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II and Eno's Music for Airports in its evocation of imaginary space.", and which Boomkat (UK) called "Shuttle358's undisputed masterpiece." His distinct human imprint on the highly digital sounds of the microsound and clicks and cuts movement of the time played out across his other releases as well including Optimal LP (12k1005, 1999), Chessa (12k1030, 2004) and Understanding Wildlife (Mille Plateaux, 2002).

It is in this specific space and through splintered memories from the dawn of the 2000s that brings Shuttle358 back to his early explorations with Field. Specifically, those sounds nestled in computers from the late '90s running period software and "graced"by the lo-fi color of early DSP algorithms. Abrams deliberately takes advantage of slow CPU cycles and crashes on old computers to piece together a framework of disjointed rhythms and melodic loops that sound like they're crawling and skittering from a new digital dystopia. This landscape unveils elements that made his early work so powerful by the way he combines the broken with the beautiful. Deep rhythms made from truncated transients provide the foundation for ghostly vocal snippets and the signature musical ambience that defines the Shuttle358 atmosphere.

In a way, Field can be seen as a rebirth of the glitch, a modern take on the captivating microsound movement of the early 2000s and a powerful statement from Abrams who connects the dots and further deepens and expands his sonic story.

Out now on 12k.

We're excited to welcome New York City-based composer and performer Lea Bertucci back to NNA for a brand new full-length LP, Metal Aether.  Lea’s early 2017 cassette release All That Is Solid Melts Into Air focused on her role as a composer, with a hand-picked selection of talented musicians performing her minimal compositions.  Metal Aether instead showcases her role as a performer, revealing four pieces that represent approximately 3 years of ideas and gestures for alto saxophone and magnetic tape.

Much like the recordings of her previous NNA release, Metal Aether continues to explore Lea’s acute interest in the nature of acoustics and the harmonic accumulation of sound, with its four pieces having been recorded in Le Havre, France in a former military base, and in New York City at ISSUE Project Room. With her horn, Lea produces pulsing minimalist patterns, transcendent drones, and upper register squalls that envelop these spaces in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects. Tracks like "Accumulations" explore evocative, ancient-sounding melodic figures, while tracks like "Sustain and Dissolve" relish in the microtonal relationships between overlapping sustained notes. Aside from the saxophone, Bertucci further interacts with physical space by fortifying these pieces with manipulated field recordings from diverse locations, ranging from Mayan pyramids to NYC subways. Other instruments such as prepared piano and vibraphone can be heard on this album, processed through tape to unite melody and texture together as one. Lea displays a firm grasp of the inherent possibilities of sound manipulation to maximize her music’s power through the recording process itself, mixing conflicting fidelities to achieve a deeper, more organic form of expression.

More information can be found here.

Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier.

Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece "I Am Sitting In a Room." He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electronic tones produced by oscillators in combination with single instruments. Demonstrating the restless creative drive of an artist now in his 80s, the two recent works presented here both feature the electric guitar, an instrument Lucier has just recently begun to explore.

In "Criss-Cross," Lucier's first composition for electric guitars, two guitarists using e-bows sweep slowly up and down a single semitone, beginning at opposite ends of the pitch range. The piece exemplifies Lucier's desire not to "compose" in the conventional sense, but rather to eliminate everything that "distracts from the acoustical unfolding of the idea."

In this immaculately controlled performance of "Criss-Cross" by Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom the piece was written in 2013, a seemingly simple idea creates a rich array of sonic effects — not simply beating patterns, which gradually slow down as the two tones reach unison and accelerate as they move further apart, but also the remarkable phenomenon of sound waves spinning in elliptical patterns through space between the two guitar amps.

In the comparatively lush "Hanover," Lucier draws inspiration from the photograph on the cover, an image of the Dartmouth Jazz Band taken in 1918 featuring Lucier's father on violin. Using the instrumentation present in the photograph, Lucier creates an unearthly sound world of sliding tones from violin, alto and tenor saxophones, piano, vibraphone (bowed), and three electric guitars (which take the place of the banjos present in the photograph). Waves of slow glissandi create thick, complex beating patterns, gently punctuated by repeated single notes from the piano. The result is a piece that is simultaneously both unperturbably calm and constantly in motion.

Out now on Black Truffle.

Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears – maybe paracusia?  Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie’s second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist’' grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor… An unsettling and strangely beautiful album – akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting.

Out 3/23/18 on Students of Decay.

"The artist sometimes known as Huerco S. ushers a phase shift of sound to the shoegazing harmonic gauze of Make Me Know You Sweet, his immersive debut proper as Pendant. In this horizontal mode, Brian Leeds relays abstract stories from a headspace beyond the dance, placing his interests in the Romantic landscapes of JMW Turner, Robert Ashley’s avant-garde enigmas, and Indigenous North American philosophy at the service of a more expressive, oneiric sound that sub/consciously avoids the trapfalls of 'chillout' ambient cliché.

Across seven amorphous, texturally detailed tracks he establishes far reaching coordinates for both Pendant and the West Mineral label, which aims to release everything except the commonly accepted, traditional forms of late 20th/early 21st century dance music, while also representing the work of his inner circle of friends, producers, artists. In that that sense there’s a definite feeling of "no place like home" to his new work, but that home appears altered, much in the same way The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby deals with themes of memory and nostalgia.

It’s best described as mid-ground music, as opposed to the putative background purpose of ambient styles, or the upfront physicality of dance music. Rather, the sound billows and unfurls with a paradoxically static chaos, occupying and lurking a space between the eyes and ears in a way that’s not necessarily comforting, and feels to question the nature and relevance of ubiquitous pastoral, new age tropes in the modern era of uncertainty and disingenuity.

The results ponder an impressionistic, romantically ambiguous simulacra of reel life worries and anxiety, feeling at once dense and impending yet without centre. From the keening, 11 minute swell of "VVQ-SSJ" at the album’s prow, to the similar scope of its closer, Pendant presents an absorbing vessel for introspection, modulating the listener’s depth perception and moderating our intimacy with an elemental push and pull between the curdling, bittersweet froth of "BBN-UWZ," the dusky obfuscation of "IBX-BZC" and, in the supremely evocative play of phosphorescing light and seductive darkness in the mottled depths of "KVL-LWQ," which also benefits from additional production by Pontiac Streator.

Make Me Know You Sweet taps into a latent, esoteric vein of American spirituality that’s always been there, yet is only divined by those who remain open-minded to its effect."

–via Boomkat

More cryptic information can be found here.

"Why am I afraid of my own thoughts?"

After a severe mental breakdown, Kyle Bates of Portland OR's Drowse was prescribed a plethora of antipsychotic drugs to subdue his paranoia and suicidal ideation. Several unmedicated years later, Bates’ anxiety began to resurface, and he turned to Klonopin and alcohol to blanket the intrusive thoughts. It was during this time that Bates wrote and recorded Drowse's second full-length album, Cold Air. Marked by fanatical self-exploration and expansive detuned instrumentation, Cold Air is the project's first release for The Flenser.

Drowse is a peek inside the mind of Kyle Bates, the band's only full time member. Cold Air was painstakingly recorded over nine months in Bates’ home. The house itself appears several times on the album in the form of field recordings and background occurrences. Although Bates himself is a secular person, his lyrics were influenced by the religious writings of Anne Carson and Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose ruminations on death correlated with his own. Cold Air is an album that frames big picture ideas within intimate, often shame-ridden experiences: a nose broken while blackout drunk, a seizure followed by feverish hallucinations, a father’s stroke, the death of a close friend. Cold Air is the sound of the uncertainty beneath our lives surfacing.

The shimmering dissonance with hints of slowcore, post-punk, ambient and shoegaze that characterizes Cold Air will appeal to fans of Mount Eerie, Planning for Burial, and Have a Nice Life. Many of these songs feature vocals from the band's creative partner Maya Stoner. Drowse is a complex and layered project set apart by its raw ambition.

More information can be found here.

NPVR is moniker taken on board by Pita (Peter Rehberg) and Factory Floor's Nik Void.

Peter and Nik both share formidable reputations in the post-industrial shape-shifting world of sound and form with a vast range of releases and collaborative endeavors over a number of years. Together, they tie together their collective experience into a vast array of sonic devices unleashing an album of pragmatic imbalance and psychedelic orientation. Blurring the lines of techno, ambient, avant garde, noise, etc.

33 33 positions itself in the nebulous realm of contemporary (dis)comfort presenting itself on the border of music and sound, the social and the private.

More information can be found here.

Deep Frosty bandleader Steve Ruecker is a legend to some, a much loved participant in the California rock scene who often hosts barnburning jams at his house in Encinitas. Enlisting Ben Flashman from Los Angeles and Utrillo Kushner from Oakland (Noel Von Harmonson and Ben Chasny guest) of Comets on Fire, Blues Band could be 2017's great rock record. Guitar progressions undergo a classic Quicksilver treatment, as Ruecker's sincere, Roky-esque vocals make testament to the plight of the indigenous, the horror of modern times, and the hopeless beauty of heartbreak. The band's pure enthusiasm coupled with a distaste for complacency seeps through like blood on fabric, making Blues Band a raw and rocking joy to hear.

More information can be found here.

High Rise exploded onto Tokyo’s underground music scene with the roar and reckless abandon of a motorcycle accelerating headlong into a dead man’s curve. Born from the explosive chemistry of bassist/vocalist Asahito Nanjo and frenetic guitarist Munehiro Narita, the band blazed a wild new stream of psychedelic guitar music. Their second album, High Rise II, is a defining document of the band and unquestionably one of the greatest albums to emerge from 20th century underground Japan and beyond. With Nanjo’s distorted thunder bass and Narita’s wildly narrative lead guitar playing, High Rise II is a non-stop tour de force of improvised rock music. Combining elements of garage rock, punk and no wave, the band pushed all levels fully in-the-red and transcended the limits of rock and psychedelia to create a raw, unique expansion of the music.

Black Editions is proud to present High Rise II, newly mixed and mastered by Asahito Nanjo in what the band states is the definitive version of their most quintessential recording. Housed in heavy Stoughton tip-on jackets this new edition restores the original vinyl version’s textured black and silver artwork. Insert with unreleased band photographs included. Pressed onto high quality vinyl by RTI.

Out January 26, 2018 on Black Editions.

In the field of music or any contemporary cultural terrain, concepts like development dynamics and progression are used as aesthetic judgement. To any musician or composer, the idea of musical build up comes with a crisis, any attempt towards formal pleasure calls for suspicion that this desire is never one’s own.

In the case of Orchestra of Constant Distress this deadlock manifests itself in an impulse of refusal directed against any evolution and the result is the extreme generic and the absolute distress of normative noise and improvisation. Members with such experiences from The Skull Defekts, Union Carbide Productions, Brainbombs and No Balls are joined in assemblage of catatonic sounds, obstinate riffs and rigid rhythms.

"Just when you think something is about to happen, it doesn't." Review of debut album.

ORCHESTRA OF CONSTANT DISTRESS are :

Joachim Nordwall (The Skull Defekts, iDEAL Recordings)

Anders Bryngelsson (Brainbombs, No Balls)

Henrik Rylander (The Skull Defekts, Union Carbide Productions)

Henrik Andersson

Out February 23, 2018 on Riot Season.

Chris Carter's Chemistry Lessons Volume One is populated with insistent melodic patterns and a distinct sense of wonderment at the limitless possibilities of science. "If there’s an influence on the album, it's definitely '60s radiophonic,” Carter says. "Over the last few years I’ve also been listening to old English folk music, almost like a guilty pleasure, and so some of tracks on the album hark back to an almost ingrained DNA we have for those kinds of melodies. They’re not dissimilar to nursery rhymes in some ways."

That combination of traditional music and the backing track for exciting, potential futures gives tracks like "Moon Two" and "Tangerines" a sheen of inquisitiveness and quiet euphoria, while "Modularity" and "Roane" have an anxious, sci-fi noir charm. Elsewhere skewed voices add a calming, human note to the album. Carter explains, "Sleazy and I had worked together on ways of developing a sort of artificial singing using software and hardware. This was me trying to take it a step further. I've taken lyrics, my own voice or people’s voices from a collection that I’d put together with Sleazy, and I've chopped them up and done all sorts of weird things with them." These moments sit alongside tracks where melodies have a dissonant, noisy, awkwardness that ties the music on CCCL Volume 1 back to the Throbbing Gristle legacy.

As a founding member of Throbbing Gristle alongside Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Chris Carter has had a significant role in the development of electronic music – a journey which has continued through his releases as one half of Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti and a third of Carter Tutti Void – as well as with his own solo and collaborative releases.

He is also credited with the invention and production of groundbreaking electronics – from the legendary Gristleizer home-soldered effects unit through to the Dirty Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument and the sold-out TG One Eurorack module designed with Tiptop Audio (issued to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report) – Carter has created the means to make sounds as well as making the sounds themselves.

The 25-track album was recorded in Carter’s own Norfolk studio and the artwork and accompanying videos were self-created, taking cues in part from battered old experimental BBC broadcast LPs.

Despite having been worked on over an extended period between various artistic projects in a variety of different moods, situations and circumstances, CCCL Volume 1’s experiments never feel like Carter noodling around aimlessly in his studio-laboratory. Instead there is an inner coherence and a distinctively Chris Carter approach to sound and execution that showcases the sonic scientist’s restless, questing creative spirit forever scouting for new ideas.

Out March 30th, 2018.  More information can be found here.

Vang Circular is the first outing from Timo van Luijk (La Scie Dorée / Af Ursin, Elodie) and Mark Harwood (Penultimate Press / Astor). Employing vibes, mellotron, natural reader, an iron ant, synth, metal pipes, slide guitar and a double bass these audacious souls conjure a wonky musical vision that gently peels away the familiar. The results are a surprising synthesis of the two individuals somewhat oppositional agendas. From the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the highest celestial plane the core of this haunted and bewitching release exists as a spectre at the edge of time.

More information can be found here.

release date: 2/23/2018

Towards A Frontier is a significant new collection of music, short films, photography and visual art by Richard Skelton. Collectively these diverse yet convergent works document his participation in Frontiers in Retreat, "a five-year collaboration project that fosters multidisciplinary dialogue on ecological questions within a European network formed around artist residencies. The project sets out to examine processes of change in particular, sensitive ecological contexts within Europe, to reflect them in relation to each other and to develop new approaches to the urgencies posed by them."

Along with the artists Kati Gausmann and Ráðhildur Ingadóttir, Richard was invited "to live and work in a unique small community where creativity is applied to everyday life in a remote rural setting of East Iceland." The artists first visited Seyðisfjörður in the autumn of 2014, returning in the spring of 2016, and finally in the summer of 2017. During their last visit, they staged an exhibition at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art.

The Standard Edition of Towards A Frontier comprises a CD of music written and recorded in the mountains of East Iceland between 2014 and 2016. Slowly unfolding over 66 minutes, it is Richard's most ambitious composition to date, evoking the seasonal shifts of a remote and singularly compelling landscape.

In addition to the music CD, there is also an Art Edition which includes a book, two short films, and additional music.

More information can be found here.

"A gorgeous set of new tracks by the brilliant composer and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang. It took him a decade and a half to revisit the vibe concocted on his masterpiece from 2001, Live Low To The Earth In The Iron Age, but the wait was worth it. It features an array of spiritually intoxicating instrumentation: tamboura, electric guitar, organ, trumpet, oboe, trombone, and Korean traditional instruments. Eyvind Kang on Plainlight: "In 2002 I wanted to make a kind of sequel to my first solo record on Abduction, Live Low To The Earth In The Iron Age. I found that the 'weight' of sounds seemed to evaporate the compositions. The last thing I wanted to make was a traditional shoegaze recording. 15 years later, I had a strange dream: a voice said 'Because a plainlight has fallen in Heaven, heartbreak would cease.' This statement then became a kind of guiding image and method. Thus, with Korean traditional instruments playing the ostinato and drone, things fell into place."

-via Forced Exposure

Out 12/15/17 on Abduction.

Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom's unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.

Pauline Anna Strom introduced her music to the world in 1982 with Trans-Millenia Consort, a collection of transportive synthesizer music providing listeners a vessel to break beyond temporal limits into a world of pulsing, mercurial tonalities and charged, embryonic waveforms. Strom's solicitation into the unknown continued through a half dozen more stellar releases during the decade, which, despite their singularity and mastery, slipped into the more obscure annals of want lists and bootleg editions.

Though Strom's work developed during the dawn of San Francisco’s influential new age and ambient scenes, her music remains non-programmatic, an adventurous tangent diverting from the era’s ideological tropes. The artist’s own path to creative maturation was atypical. Raised by her Catholic family in Louisiana and Kentucky, she was tragically deprived of sight due to complications from a premature birth. This impairment would sensitize her to listenable worlds with great acuity and creative engagement, the loss becoming a formative aspect of Strom’s spiritualist take on the power of music.

Recalling her youth, Strom says she was "a loner and heretic." Seeking solace and solidarity, she moved to the mecca of California’s counter culture with her husband, a G.I., who was assigned duty in the Bay Area during the decline of the Vietnam War. Having dabbled with piano as a teen, Pauline’s passion for music reignited when synthesizers became central to the serene scene of San Fran FM radio in the mid-70s. Inspired by the electronic music of the instrument’s early ambassadors (Klaus Schulze, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream), Strom purchased a Tascam 4-track recorder and a small array of synths (Yamaha DX7, TX816, CS-10) to navigate her own universe of space music.

As she gained confidence to share her creations beyond the walls of the apartment where she meticulously crafted under headphones day and night, Strom took on the artistic identity of the ‘consort,’ spiriting listeners through epochs described by her evocative musical passages. From this moment and represented within Trans-Millenia Music, Strom proves to be a delicate melodist and meticulous colorist, as well as a sound designer of great drama and inspired energy. The celestial sounds evoke the uncertainty of pre-physical and primordial elements, creating an impression of a world beyond access that Strom has always felt was hers. In the collection’s liner notes Strom recounts, “I have always been in touch with the past more than the present.”

Apart from its mysteries, Strom’s curiosity for the non-present was also suffused with a social bent. She believed that humanity was confined by its inability to access the people of the future, therefore suffering in a kind of group solipsism. Designing a world of music that rooted itself in all times but the present, Strom’s alter ego, the Trans-Millenia Consort, became a musical activist for triggering this state of heightened consciousness.

Exemplary passages highlighted in Trans-Millenia Music were selected from the three full-lengths originally issued on vinyl in addition to a group of four full-lengths self-released on cassette. This substantive body of work challenges the canonization of new age and ambient music as one-size-fits-all categories. Strom's music induces a dynamic range of listening that captivates and intrigues, a cinematic experience rather than a meditation for passive listening.

Out now on RVNG Intl.

A breath ("adem" in Dutch) is life, air being spread in a body of flesh, blood, organs, sinews and tissue to ensure its continuous functioning. Like a pendulum, like time itself, like the sea and winds, it is endless motion. Take a breath and consider the inevitable advancement of days, weeks, months, and years, while your body is swept along.

Adem is yadayn's third album of composed material and fourth release overall since 2014. The music on this record was mostly composed and developed throughout the course of one quite eventful year, or was improvised during the recording sessions that wrapped up that year at a time of homecoming, when the dust of the year's turmoil was finally settling down. The album is conceptualized as two related suites (an A-side and a B-side if you will), a continuous journey rather than a set of individual songs as postcards. In that sense it is compositionally closer to yadayn's debut album Vloed (2014), though it is sonically very much related to the lo-fi explorations on Pendel (2015), while even a few of the drony, improvised sensibilities of Naam(2015) appear. As such, Adem is a logical continuation of yadayn’s musical trajectory, while at the same time being a moment of contemplation.

The main guitar and ukulele parts as well as a few overdubs for four of the six tracks ("Hoor," "Ruimte," "Tijd," and “Voel”) were self-recorded in a decommissioned telephone exchange building, in a large hall blessed with very spacious reverb, in yadayn's native town of Halle. The building was legally squatted for a short while by artists. The other two songs were recorded respectively in the house of yadayn's grandmother ("Zee") and at his home ("Adem").

More information can be found here.