News & Events
Buzz Bin
"One of electronic music's most interesting new voices." FACT
Born Again In The Voltage is an astonishing collection of electro-acoustic pieces for Buchla 200 system, cello and voice composed and produced by Caterina Barbieri at Elektronmusikstudion (SE) between 2014 and 2015.
Cello by Antonello Manzo. Images by Giovanni Brunetto. Photography by Angelo Jaroszuk Bogasz. Layout by IMPREC. Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Music produced by Caterina Barbieri between August 2014 and August 2015.
Recorded and mixed at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm (SE).
Buchla 200 modular synthesizer + vocals + cello.
Cello by Antonello Mostacci.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4951
SURE, EVERYTHING IS ENDING, but not yet. Ever since David Tibet's Current 93 sung its birth canal blues back in the early 1980s, there's been a smell of apocalypse in the air. As the American author of horror novels Thomas Ligotti put it, Tibet has over the years presented us with words and images that are "portentous in a literal and most poetic sense."* No matter how great or small, Tibet's visions has sustained a sense of urgency throughout his many, many projects and towering work. 35 years on, as dark clouds once again are gathering on the horizon, his syncretic tale of the fallen empire inside us all seem to be as pertinent as ever. Arise for bad times.
Enter Zu93, the effectively named collaboration between Tibet and the ever-changing Italian group Zu, centered around Massimo Pupillo and Luca Mai. Seven years after the collaborators first met in Rome, the most beautifully apocalyptic city of all, they can finally present Mirror Emperor, mixed and produced by Stefano Pilia. If last year's Create Christ, Sailor Boy, the startling Hypnopazūzu album Tibet made alongside Youth, the legendary producer and Killing Joke bassist, was "a transformative union," the imperial ghost music presented on Mirror Emperor marks a return to their earth, a tour amidst the ruins: Gentle guitars, weeping cellos, the occasional rumbling bass and soft percussion, are melted and gently poured into the sepulchral engine. Despite a few electric swirls or the odd metallic screech Mirror Emperor moves seamlessly and comes across as surprisingly grounded and subtle, yet anticipatory, foreboding and at times even pastoral and Arcadian. The sound of a magical chamber orchestra or Cæsar Legions? Well, Mirror Emperor does echo pivotal moments from the respective catalogues of its creators, most urgently akin to Zu's acoustic explorations on their 2014 collaboration with Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow fame, The Left Hand Path, leading up to last year’s brilliantly metamorphic Jhator. For others the album will come as a gift from the blazing starres, more than hinting at a stripped down Current 93 of the 90s, perhaps in the same way as 2010's Baalstorm, Sing Omega or Myrninerest's 2012 album, 'Jhonn,' Uttered Babylon at times did.
"The album is the closing of a long circle for me," comments Massimo Pupillo. "I've been following David's work since the early days and count Current 93 as one of the main inspirations behind my work with Zu. For me his poetry and music is like a light in the depths of human experience, a soundtrack for one's personal descent into the unconscious fields." "Zu made something very beautiful and very powerful for me to skip into. I love this album," Tibet says. Mirror Emperor adds another chapter in his ever-expanding oblique vision: personal, dense and hallucinatory. A voice through a cloud, indeed. On Mirror Emperor, the demiurge of our demise hides in the cracks of a broken world, beneath stones and moss, among the comets, in tears and things and on "BloodBoats," as if a "cosmic melancholy" (Ligotti) is being articulated. More mourning than light. Tibet explains:
We all carry different faces, different masks, and all of them will be taken from us. We were born free, and fell through the Mirror into a UnWorld, a Mirror Empire. In this Mirror Empire we are under the Mirror Emperor, and there are MANY Bad Moons Rising. At the final curtain there is scant applause.
As the music fades out, we hear a whispered "awake." “Every time I heard this final call to awakening while working on the album, I found myself deeply moved," Pupillo says. "Awake. If this was the last word to come out of Zu, I would be a happy man."
What we're left with is a dreamlike suite, created under a murderous moon. Perhaps that is all we ever hoped for. Hey, was that the Apocalypse?
Zu93 is: David Tibet, Massimo Pupillo, Stefano Pilia, Luca Mai, Luca Tilli, Andrea Serrapiglio, Sara D’Uva.
– Tore Engelsen Espedal, March 2018
*Quoted from Thomas Ligotti's "Will You Wait For Me By the Dead Clock?," the afterword in David Tibet's collection of lyrics Sing Omega (Spheres, 2015)
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4917
The latest project of Madeline Johnston of Sister Grotto. Together with collaborator Tucker Theodore, Midwife creates dreamy songs that confront raw emotions, haunted soundscapes that get stuck in your head. Following their acclaimed 2017 debut Like Author, Like Daughter, their new Prayer Hands EP delves further, bringing more reverb-drenched anthems of loss.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4938
Above All Dreams is Abul Mogard's beautifully absorbing new solo record for Ecstatic - his first since the Circular Forms and his popular Works [2016] compilation.
Counting six original pieces in its 66-minute wingspan, there's no mistaking that Above All Dreams is the most expansive solo release by Mogard to date. And taking into account the sets' intangible divinity and cinematic quality - the result of no less than three years diligent work - it is arguably elevated to the level of his master opus; presenting an essentially single malt modular distillation of Mogard's most intoxicating strain of hauntology.
Consistent with Mogard’s music since the sought-after VCO tapes c. 2012-2013, the allure of Above All Dreams lies in his ability to evoke and render feelings which are perhaps purposefully avoided in more academic echelons of drone music. Rather than a purist expression of physics thru maths and geometry, Mogard more complexly voices his soul, improvising on modular synth for hours, days, months and years in the same way a more conventional "band" develops group intuition.
While hands-on, the intuitive evolution of process locates a newfound freedom in his music that implies a recognition of the metaphysical or post-physical, while Mogard explicitly points to influence from the Brazilian music of Tom Zé, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Chico Buarque, whose approach to shape and density, or perceptions of light and delicacy, also go some way to explaining the ephemeral intangibility of Above All Dreams.
The results are thus best considered as the ephemera of non-verbal communications. From the gaseous bloom of "Quiet Dreams" to the opiated depth of "Where Not Even" to the starlit "Upon The Smallish Circulation," and thru the B-side’s keeling, 16 mins+ panoramas of "Above All Dreams" and "The Roof Falls," the power of Abul Mogard's dreams above all transcends sound, feeling and physics in a truly remarkable and intangible way that evades words or concrete notation. It's just incredibly special and poignant in a way that has resonated with a lot of listeners, and will continue to do so as long as people have ears and feelings.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 5184
Norman Westberg is perhaps best recognised for his truly individual approach to guitar with the band SWANS. His playing with SWANS has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. His particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately informed a great many players.
His new solo record, After Vacation, is his first full length to come in the wake of the final SWANS outing in its current configuration. More importantly it is also the first record to see Westberg move beyond a more performative mode of single take composition.
After Vacation sees Westberg significantly expand his sonic palette. He opens up the tonal and harmonic possibilities of his instrument in unexpected and profoundly beautiful ways. His guitar, as singular source, becomes transformed through a web of outboard processes. He transforms vibrating strings completely, taking singular gesture and reshapes it through webs of delay, reverb and other treatments.
Moreover he finds a new sense of space and dimension with these recordings. After Vacation has a decidedly more topographic sense. It charts out the dark contours of places unseen but imagined. It traverses a divergent range of places in search of a ever opening compositional approach.
The results are in excess of anything Westberg has created previously. His melodic capacities come to the fore; matching his distinctly personal approach to the textural qualities of his instrument.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 17046