Inner Space Memorial [for J.G.Ballard] 20:57

"Over the years, I have produced a number of works in praise of the ideas of J.G Ballard. He lived just over the river from my home. While reading his autobiography in 2009, I was wandering how to go and say hello, but found out I was too late. I produced a monument in honour of him called the 'Inner Space Memorial,' part of my Retrospective at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. A pair of speaker cones were turned around to play back into the void of their cabinets. An epitaph for a great mind."

Wonderland 20:00

"'Wonderland' is the finale of my exhibition soundtrack to "Asleep at the wheel...". A work that questions where our culture is heading further down the highway ahead. A single majestic daydream that drives you forwards as reality undertakes you. Location recordings were made in the middle of the night on a footbridge over the M3, at the end of Ballard's street. I was fascinated to work out that while he was writing Crash and Concrete Island, the six lane motorway was being built right past the front of his home. Ideal music for when you need to stay awake on the road!"

More information can be found here.

Hamburg's Marc Richter has been busy since his last Type appearance (2009's genre-bending and critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968).  Aside from helming the prolific Dekorder imprint, he's put out a number of musical curios, including 2012's excellent film soundtrack EARTH.  Now Richter is back with Alphabet 1968's proper followup, a sprawling double album pieced together with crumbling samples, vocal snippets and an arsenal of noise generators and filters.

Richter's material has always been characterized by an air of surrealism, but it's never been more obvious than on the pulsing, chattering opener "Human Gidrah" or in the delirious fractured pop of "Hands."  There are real songs in hidden somewhere, but disintegrated by Richter's sound manipulation techniques and dissolved into soupy extended drone marathons. The centerpiece is undoubtedly "Is Nowhere," which builds slowly over 20 minutes with rumbling organ sounds and buzzing filters, never budging your attention for a second.

Black To Comm is a deeper, more challenging record than its predecessor, but one which repays the patient listener. Richter's dusty, unique sound has never sounded more well-honed and pointed, and it's a patchwork of ideas and fragments that only improves over time.

More information can be found here.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

A modern-day revenge tragedy in six parts. Symmetrical, finespun, almost courtly; but quick-tempered with it, and far from blood-shy.

A picture emerges: domestic disturbances, pissing on the compost heap, noise complaints from hateful neighbours. Sulking, pouting, goading – a hierarchy of needs. Cold leaves and Christmas. Body-clocks betrayed. Staying up late to collect bottles to smash in the carpark across the road. Marijuana and make-believe. Cracking this thin ice with deft stomping aplomb.

Due out December 15, 2014, in an edition of 300. Recommended if you carry a torch for AC Marias, Brenda Ray, General Strike, The Poems, Robert Storey or other such angels of shut-in dub dysfunction.

More information can be found here.

Faith In Strangers was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year.  Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.

The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away’"featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe, and last track "Missing," a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore, who also appeared on 2012's Luxury Problems.  Between these two points, Faith In Strangers heads off from the sparse and infected "Violence" to the broken, downcast pop of "On Oath" and the motorik, driving melancholy of "Science & Industry" – three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity.  Things take a sharp turn with "No Surrender"- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while "How It Was" refracts sweaty Warehouse signatures and "Damage" finds the sweet spot between RZA's classic Ghost Dog and Terror Danjah at his most brutal.  Faith in Strangers is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here: its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott's mixing desk.  It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott's career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

More information can be found here.

Sea Island is a collection of new material composed and recorded over the past two years. While many of these compositions were performed live extensively prior to recording, others were constructed in the studio and are being heard for the first time here.  Musically, the album represents a range of compositional approaches.  Murky, densely textured depths of sound are explored with subtle pulses and pings woven within, contrasted with composed or improvised moments of acoustic instrumentation making a move into the foreground.  Certain tracks on Sea Island such as album opener "Ahull" make rhythm their focus by exploring subtle polyrhythms and investigating colliding moments of repetition and variation.

Though staunchly electronic at its core, instruments such as vibraphone and piano make appearances, and layers of live musicality, improvisation and detail appear in the looped and layered beds of manipulated sound recordings.  A varied cast of players appear in the loscil ensemble, some familiar collaborators from the past such as Jason Zumpano on rhodes and Josh Lindstrom on vibraphone, and others new to the mix such as Fieldhead's Elaine Reynolds who provides layered violin on "Catalina 1943," and Ashley Pitre contributing vocals on Bleeding Ink.  Seattle pianist Kelly Wyse, who collaborated with loscil on his 2013 edition of piano-centric reworks Intervalo, performs on the tracks "Sea Island Murders" and "En Masse."

More information can be found here.

Vinyl reissue of Carter's 2008 "standards" album.

"Masque Femine should be regarded as a total work - much like a film, a ballet, a building, or, an altarpiece - rather than as an album of individual songs. And, its fundamental subject should not be understood to be romantic love."

Cut and mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M.

More information is available here.

Since his first live performances in 2002, Sean McBride, aka Martial Canterel (who also performs as half of the duo Xeno & Oaklander), has crafted his electronic sound in a peculiar intersection between avant-garde and pop. Merging the influences of the first wave of relatively unknown minimal electronic bands in northern Europe, and seminal industrial noise bands such as Throbbing Gristle and SPK, with the smoothly stylish songcraft of early British New Wave, Martial Canterel records and performs using analogue synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines exclusively, molding electricity to fix the action of music creation in substance. The mastery of his composition technique, a second nature of harmonic complexity, along with a unique talent for melodies, enables him to manufacture gems of extreme noise pop, making use of all its unexpected ingredients.

Gyors, Lassù marks an important milestone in the evolution of Martial Canterel's music, progressing far beyond the cages of "minimal synth" and embracing the noisier qualities of its sound with a renewed urgency, a kind of thickness embodied in multiple layers using only eurorack, Serge and Roland 100 modular systems at his disposal and flushing out the entire session in one take. Sine waves are rendered into walls of guitar-like noise on songs like "And I Thought," while the stretching out and liquifaction of what were once very precise pointillistic staccato synth arpeggios are marshaled into layers of violent bliss on "Gyors/Lassù." The analogue labor and the density of sound highlight the character of continuous performance of the music, where the intertwining of the artist and his work is profoundly material in its quality. As in a modern embodiment of the potter’s wheel…the hands, the texture of clay, with ceramic material. Translated lyrically and conceptually, music performance is for time what travel represents in space, and Gyors, Lassù is the sonic rendering of McBride's wanderings between Hungary ("Bulvàr," "Budapest II") and the South of Italy ("Teano"), between vibrant rhythmic structures and melancholic instrumentals, balancing its bodily intensity with abstract experimentation against the regression of the modern listener.

More information can be found here.

Starting as an imprint solely for Perc's own productions, Perc Trax has grown in recognition and confidence each year since its first release in 2004. This year Perc Trax celebrates its tenth year of existence, during which time it has released over seventy vinyl singles and six albums, hosted showcases as far away as New York and Tokyo and recently spawned the Submit and Perc Trax Ltd. sublabels.

To celebrate a decade of releasing music, Perc Trax looks to the future, releasing eleven brand new tracks from a mix of Perc Trax regulars including Truss, Forward Strategy Group, Sawf and Perc himself and names new to the label such as Clouds, Happa, Kareem, Drvg Cvltvre and Martyn Hare. These new tracks will be released as three separate vinyl EPs and will also form part of a 2xCD album. The first disc containing the new tracks, whilst the second disc is home to Perc's first commercially available DJ mix.

More information can be found here.

Mysterious techno operative makes shock return with debut album Butterfly Effect.

Demdike Stare have released the debut album from Shinichi Atobe on their DDS label.

Atobe only has one previous record to his name: Ship-Scope, a dubby and emotive techno 12-inch that came out on the Basic Channel sublabel Chain Reaction in 2001 (that one remains highly sought-after online and was one of FACT's "25 Best Dub Techno Tracks of All Time").  He hasn't been heard from since, but some sleuthing by UK duo Demdike Stare has unearthed a full album's worth of new and archival material from the Japan-based producer.

The album is limited to 600 vinyl copies. The vinyl, CD editions, and digital version are out now.

(via Resident Advisor and FACT)

Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello are creators of mythology.  Their mythology renders a series of acoustic spaces, haunted by narrative and hinting at happenings unseen, but certainly heard.

With Fable, we are presented with their second duet. It chronicles three years of intermittent audio communications in search of new collaborative approaches. The results focus on the pair's joint interests in modular synthesis, field recordings and the blurry boundaries between acoustic instrumentation and electronics. The album's multiplicity of sources creates a weaving and at times overwhelming collage of materials that coalesce with considered intent. Its palette, whilst diverse remains focused and as the album progresses themes of arrhythmic percussion, electronic-like field recording, prepared piano and vintage synthesis begin to take form.

Like the photography of the cover, these musical pieces bare witness to time, they exist in the moment, but are formed outside of a sense of singularity. Their textured qualities and intricate variations are evidence of an iterative production methodology that invites a depth of listening. A pondering and the intended goal that one may hear or even see their own internal spaces, haunted by a cast of sonic characters.

More information can be found here.

Synapse-scorching occult-industrial-prog-noise-folk from the strings of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies.

Churning mantras and drukpa elegies for two erased darkside tree limbs: that of the Draconian in Khem, and of Drax Priory in West Yorkshire, which together with Bhutan are the Dragon Lands. The twilight language of flowers is spoken and wolves are raised, finally, Kali dances. For fans of Bathory and Popul Vuh.

Comes in a deluxe 6-panel outsized double-digipak with a 16-page booklet.

More information is available here.

"Ruins was made in Aljezur, Portugal in 2011 on a residency set up by Galeria Zé dos Bois. I recorded everything there except the last song, which I did at mother's house in 2004. I'm still surprised by what I wound up with. It was the first time I'd sat still for a few years; processed a lot of political anger and emotional garbage. Recorded pretty simply, with a portable 4-track, a Sony stereo mic and an upright piano. When I wasn't recording songs I was hiking several miles to the beach. The path wound through the ruins of several old estates and a small village.

The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love. I left the songs the way they came (microwave beep from when power went out after a storm); I hope that the album bears some resemblance to the place that I was in."

More information is available here.

A double-CD release that collates material from the period 2008 – 2011.  Including for the first time digitally The Bacteria Magnet and Rushkoff Coercion E.P.s, previously unreleased remixes and exclusive tracks.  Comes in deluxe 6 panel digipac with art from Babs Santini.

Copies ordered from Dirter arrive as a three-disc edition, with a bonus CD in a full-color printed sleeve.  The bonus disc is (for the first time in digital form) the vinyl mix of Huffin' Rag Blues.

More information can be found here.

M. Geddes Gengras returns with the anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years (Umor Rex 2013). The music on New Process Music constitutes his first recordings of purely modular composition; while the album was recorded between 2011 and 2012 it has never been released before and we are pleased to present it for the first time as the Vol. 2 of his Collected Works series.

New Process Music represents a major aesthetic shift for M. Geddes Gengras, fusing the long-form modular compositions he had been exploring on a bevy of small-run cassette releases with a new obsession with post-production editing to create a deeply tuned aural environment, lush in analog electronics that are gritty along the edges, with rich textures and melodies materializing and wafting away like smoke. For New Process Music, Gengras used only a small eurorack synth and magnavox tape echo for the tracking process; the pieces that emerge act as documents of an artist exploring the limits of his chosen instruments. Most of the patches here were originally written for performance and recorded live. Sequences are twisted and bent, turned in on themselves or combined with random information. Longer tracks like "Slider" and "The Last Time We Were Here" zigzag across scales, the latter emulating the endless keyboard technique that was highlighted on Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, while the former takes the form of a bubbling kosmiche workout that collapses under its own momentum. Shorter pieces like "Glass Dance" and "Relation" offer fractured sequences that refuse to resolve over wavering beds of drone and shade. The overall effect is that of a richly detailed sound world that envelops the listener in a deeply personal space.

Out November 18th.

More information here.

After the Rain is the latest offering from Mark Van Hoen and Louis Sherman's Locust project. Following up the 2013 release You'll Be Safe Forever, this new album sees Locust stepping away from the abstracted forms of previous works presenting a more melodic/harmonic proposition. Bathed in a warm nostalgic memory, After the Rain draws on Mark's formative influences, primarily '70s electronic music.

Unlike previous Locust and Mark Van Hoen releases, which relied on programming and sequencing much of this new record was played live, creating a space where innovation is secondary to the suggestive power of time, space, mood and melody. Rich in melancholia and a yearning for a world once suggested After the Rain explores a crack in the historical framework, one embracing female identity and astute observations of melodic atmosphere. After the Rain is a melodic electronic mood record which presents itself as a triumph of historical revisionism.

More information can be found here.

After releasing a first glimpse in the form of the Atomos VII EP earlier this year, A Winged Victory For The Sullen reveal their second full-length album entitled Atomos which sees the duo introduce flurries of electronics, harp and modular synthesizers to their sound in the follow-up to the 2011 self- titled album.

In 2013 AWVFTS caught the ear of Wayne McGregor, founder of Random Dance Company and resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, who is perhaps best known for his choreography work on the Radiohead video "Lotus Flower" as well as "Ingenue" by Atoms For Peace.  McGregor used the debut album as the warm-up music during practice sessions for Random, and after noticing the group's reaction with the music, he contacted Adam and Dustin to see if they would write the score for his new work.

Given complete artistic freedom, the duo treated the score with the same care and attention as their debut full-length by recording more than sixty minutes of music over a four-month period across studios in Brussels, Berlin and Reykjavik with the help of their long time collaborative sound engineer Francesco Donadello. During the process they came to the realization that this would become their official second studio album. McGregor provided them with the inspiration to expand their sound palette into more electronic territory, whilst keeping their signature chamber sound, resulting in a very unique release.

More information is available here.

John Fahey is to the solo acoustic guitar what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric: the man whom all subsequent musicians had to listen to. Fahey made more than 40 albums between 1959 and his death in 2001, most of them featuring only his solo steel-string guitar. He fused elements of folk, blues, and experimental composition, taking familiar American sounds and recontextualizing them as something entirely new. Yet despite his stature as a groundbreaking visionary, Fahey’s intentions—as a man and as an artist—remain largely unexamined. Journalist Steve Lowenthal has spent years researching Fahe'’s life and music, talking with his producers, his friends, his peers, his wives, his business partners, and many others. He describes Fahey’s battles with stage fright, alcohol, and prescription pills; how he ended up homeless and mentally unbalanced; and how, despite his troubles, he managed to found a record label that won Grammys and remains critically revered. This portrait of a troubled and troubling man in a constant state of creative flux is not only a biography but also the compelling story of a great American outcast.

More information can be found here.

Recorded in Madrid and Rome during 2013, this is the new album by the influential electronic duo ranked as industrial music pioneers. Ultraphoon is a leap ahead as for production and sound quality, with a stunning and brutal outcome, richly detailed nonetheless. Rhythms, noises and processed voices from different sources come together in hypnotic –bordering on trance– soundscapes along the lines of previous releases such as Pulsión (2009) and Desarrollos Geométricos (2011). Most of the meticulous mastering process has been carried out by Francisco López, internationally renowned as one of the top sound art and experimental music personalities, giving a new twist to the usual Esplendor Geométrico sound.

More information can be found here and here.

Trouble is the brand new dispatch from the assorted output of Kevin Drumm and sits as one of the quietest in his entire catalogue. A single continuous 54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum, Trouble is neither ambient nor drone but a more complex investigation into the deep recesses of sound.  One which discreetly works itself into the mind of a listener willing to invest in the path laid out in this extremely subtle, beautiful and exceptional release.

More information can be found here.

Recorded with a multitude of collaborators in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, Quixotism presents the fruit of two years of work in the form of a single, LP-length piece in five parts. Ambarchi's work in recent years has evinced an increasing fascination with the possibilities of combining abstract sonic textures with rhythm and pulse, whether in his drumming with Keiji Haino, the subtly driving ride cymbals provided by drummer Joe Talia in their work together, or the motorik grooves of Sagittarian Domain (Editions Mego, 2012). Quixotism takes this aspect of Ambarchi's recent work to the next level: the entirety of this long-form work is built on a foundation of pulsing double-time electronic percussion provided by Thomas Brinkmann. Beginning as almost subliminal propulsion behind cavernous orchestral textures and John Tilbury’s delicate piano interjections, the percussive elements (elaborated on by Ambarchi and Matt Chamberlain) slowly inch into the foreground of the piece before suddenly breaking out into a polyrhythmic shuffle around the halfway mark, being joined by master Japanese tabla player U-zhaan for the piece’s final, beautiful, passages.

The pulse acts as thread leading the listener though a heterogeneous variety of acoustic spaces, from the concert hall in which the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra were recorded to the intimacy of Crys Cole's contact-mic textures. Ambarchi’s guitar itself ranges over this wide variety of acoustic spaces, from airless, clipped tones to swirling, reverberated fog. Within the complex web Ambarchi spins over the piece’s steadily pulsing foundation, elements approach and recede, appear and reappear, in a non-linear fashion, even as the piece plots an overall course from the grey, almost Nono-esque reverberated space of its opening section to the crisp foreground presence of Jim O’Rourke's synth and Evyind Kang’s strings in its final moments. Formally indebted to the side-long workouts of classic Cologne techno, the long-form works of composers such as Eliane Radigue, and the organic push and pull of improvised performance, Quixotism is constantly in motion, yet its transitions happen slowly and steadily, so that they are often nearly imperceptible, the diverse elements which make up the piece succeeding one another with the logic of a dream.

Anyone who follows Ambarchi's work knows that it has many facets: explorations of the outer limits of rock with Keiji Haino, psychoacoustic interference and sizzling harmonics in his solo performances, delicate improvisations with Keith Rowe or John Tilbury. To all these projects, Ambarchi brings his particular sensibility, patiently allowing sounds to develop on their own terms without forsaking their intrinsic physical and emotional power. Similarly, although Quixotism is shaped by its many contributors, the resulting sound world is unmistakably Ambarchi’s own. His most substantial solo release since Audience of One (Touch, 2012), Quixotism represents the summation of Ambarchi’s work over the last few years while also pointing to the future.

More information can be found here.