17 January 2021

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Albums and Singles

A 4-disc, 60-track anthology compiling early work by Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive, prior to signing to 4AD. This set compiles 3 volumes previously released on vinyl, alongside a bonus disc and 36-page booklet.

For the past couple of years the Disciples label has been exploring the His Name Is Alive tape archives, charting the development of their sound over 3 roughly chronological volumes - All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never and Hope Is A Candle (the latter LP being released alongside this boxed set). The full vinyl trilogy is anthologized here, alongside a bonus disc which collects together the best tracks from a series of cassette companion volumes that Defever compiled to go alongside each LP - 6Teen OK, Return Versions and Ghost Tape EXP.

While 'official' His Name Is Alive albums are much-loved by fans of the 4AD label in its crepuscular Cocteau Twins/This Mortal Coil period, these tentative tracks reveal a different kind of sound, notably losing the layer of prominent female lead vocals to reveal the shadowy instrumental moves going on underneath, with some tracks recorded when Defever was as young as 10.
With help transferring ageing cassettes and annotating the results from Shelley Salant of Tyvek, the unearthed results are revelatory - a gorgeous sequence of gently decaying tone float made with an incredibly primitive DIY set-up.

More information can be found here.

17 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Orchestral Studies Collectanea consists of seven previously unreleased orchestral movements (Tracks 1-7) in addition to remastered variations of arrangements that originally appeared on Orchestral Tape Studies and Orchestral Tape Studies [Tyresta Reworks].

Orchestral Studies Collectanea is a compilation arranged and produced by zakè with additional production by close friend Tyresta. OSC is a group of richly layered movements of fragmented orchestral loops, paying homage to minimalist symphonic composers and orchestras. zakè and Tyresta incorporate field recordings and faint drone billows to accompany these selected samples of orchestral loops. With an emphasis on tone and recurrent murmurs, these arrangements offer approximately 48 minutes of delicate repetition, reticent sound treatments, and subtle manipulations. OSC is intended for low-volume listening.

More information can be found here.

17 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

40 Años Nos Iluminan ("40 years enlighten us") is a special edition release celebrating the 40th anniversary of legendary Spanish electronic pioneers  Esplendor Geométrico.  This is NOT a "best of" or "collection" but an all NEW album!

40 Años Nos Iluminan is not just another EG album, as they have reinvented themselves by taking inspiration from their own long career since 1980. The new tracks included in 40 Años… offer better sound and compositions full of details, sometimes subtle, opening a new path of exploration that goes beyond the typical current industrial music loaded with clichés.  Here E.G. experiment with noise, recorded voices, striking collages, and their trademark hypnotic rhythms of industrial trance. 40 Años… marks a turning point and an evolution for E.G. (which, however, still sounds like E.G.).

The album includes 16 NEW tracks in the double vinyl version and 24 in the double CD.  Four cuts are versions-reconstructions of old EG tracks by other artists.

More information can be found here.

17 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Debuting in 1988 as a self-released 8xCassette boxed set, Chapter Eleven collects the solo recordings (1976 - 1987) from one of the earliest members of the US Industrial Noise scene, coalescing a wide swath of influences and culling experimental techniques into inventive new terrain. Carefully remastered from the original tapes, this deluxe reissue is a long-awaited rescue from obscurity.

"Turman seemed to have taken over where the last of the great synth based kraut artists left off in the '70s, infusing the spiritual meditation music with his own brand of loop hypnosis, slowly moving drones, industrial patterns, guitar fuzz, and even some in-your-face 80's style synth work" - IMPOSE Magazine

More information can be found here.

17 January 2021

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

The main reason that I follow Marc Richter's career is simply that he keeps releasing great albums, but he deserves a lot of credit for being one of the most restlessly creative and consistently adventurous artists in the electronic music underground. In keeping with that theme, this latest Black to Comm side project is arguably another experimental playground akin to Jemh Circs, yet Mouchoir Étanche's first full-length unveils a surprisingly focused vision best described as "somewhere between a chopped & screwed opera and a fever dream about an imaginary Dario Argento film set in a cathedral."

Cellule 75

The delirious intensity of the opening "Enter Mirror Hotel" is probably the perfect distillation of this latest direction, but it has some tough competition from a few other pieces deeper in the album, such as "Sécheresse," which brings together an achingly gorgeous descending organ theme with an evocative host of found sounds (children playing, ringing metal chimes) that overtake the original motif and transform into a smeared nightmare. "Le rêveur illimité" is yet another favorite, as overlapping layers of a woman speaking in French tumble over each other while eerie drones mass and slowly undulate beneath. It sounds a hell of lot like what would happen if Félicia Atkinson decided to create her own alternate soundtrack to Suspiria (which I sincerely hope she someday does). Admittedly, some of Une fille pétrifiée's other pieces are occasionally too indulgent for my taste, but Richter is generally in fine form, as he sustains a unbroken mood of haunted and bleary hypnagogic ambiance while still playfully stretching and twisting samples far beyond recognizability. In theory, Richter's finest work will always wind up on his more formal and "composed" Black to Comm albums, but he clearly has too many excellent ideas for just one outlet and some of those ideas work quite beautifully in this more spontaneous and collage-inspired incarnation.

Samples can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Impedance, an entirely instrumental album spanning 4 sides, contains powerful rhythmic sequences, heart-beating frequencies and hypnotic loops that are paradoxically encapsulated in carefully crafted compositions which are full of secret passages and hidden doors. Kalancea's work creates ungraspable sonic experiences, which take us over, immersing us in powerful and mind altering soundscapes.

There's no quick payoff on Impedance. This is the sound of new, patient electronic music full of depth and substance.

Alina Kalancea is a Romanian sound artist and composer based in Modena, Italy. She has studied sound design and synthesis with Enrico Cosimi and collaborated with producer Alex Gamez, and artists Julia Kent and Raven Bush.

More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As darkness falls, once familiar territory is rendered alien and foreboding; full of weird and terrifying possibilities. These are Night Lands.

Cardinal Fuzz are proud to present Night Lands, the new album from Dead Sea Apes.

Recorded live in the rehearsal room last December, the newly expanded 4 piece Dead Sea Apes lock into spooky nocturnal grooves, augmented by Nik Rayne (The Myrrors) who was over in the UK for the month.

Night Lands is comprised of 3 off-the-cuff improvised jams, where Dead Sea Apes effortlessly mind meld with Rayne to head off into parts unknown.

Night Lands by Dead Sea Apes is released on vinyl and ltd CD by Cardinal Fuzz.

Out February 7, 2020.  More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Sunburned Hand of the Man might be the last of the great American free rock collectives. There was a time, not too long ago, when every region of this great republic could boast of its own visionary troupe of seekers and improvisers, thrumming at the frequency of the illuminated world. There was Pelt in the south and Jackie-O Motherfucker in the Pacific northwest, No-Neck Blues Band in New York and the iridescent Jewelled Antler out in the Bay Area. And up in the New England wilds, there was The Sunburned Hand of the Man.  David Keenan of The Wire memorably called it the New Weird America. It felt to me like the mystical democracy of Walt Whitman. It was never arch or jittery or wiry; it sprawled like the continent and massed like the seas. It produced some of the most singularly thrilling performances that I ever had the privilege of witnessing. Most of those groups have since gone dormant—disbanded entirely or decomposed into smaller units and solo projects. But the Sunburned Hand of the Man remains.

Or rather, we might say that the Sunburned Hand has returned. The sudden appearance of the phenomenal Headless in late 2019 felt like something of a resurfacing. There had, of course, been a steady trickle of obscuro cassettes and CD-Rs over the years, filling out an already bewilderingly immense and impossible to master discography. But Headless felt like their first proper album since the release of the Kieran Hebden-produced A on Ecstatic Peace! all the way back in 2010. It appears that it was no one-off.

The thing that one has to remember about Sunburned Hand of the Man is that while they were no less committed to vast, ritualistic summonings than their siblings in the American free rock underground, they were perhaps uniquely capable of channeling that cosmic funk. There’s a throb and a groove to Sunburned's music that made it as much body music as head music. This is a different kind of American weirdness than that which conjures ghosts and threatens to tear down the veil between worlds. This is “free your ass” weirdness that chugs and bounces. It makes us want to get out of our heads where we’ve all been trapped these past months and drive on the freeway or bop down the street or loaf like Walt Whitman in the stoned sun. Like the man said, it makes us want to taste the campfire. Pick A Day to Die. Sure, but definitely not today."

--Brent S. Sirota--

More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The debut full-length from ambient-electronic composer Rachika Nayar, Our Hands Against the Dusk, is both kaleidoscopic and inventive, but far from cerebral. In mid-2019, the Brooklyn-based artist chose the cover image (a video still of her hands entwined with a friends') from an old collaborative project. Along with its title lifted from a Richard Jackson poem, the image of "touch" references deeply (inter)personal experiences that animated the album over the four years it was written: not just caress, but encounters and collisions.

Her compositional process similarly begins with a moment of touch: her fingers on the fretboard. Songs are built from guitar loops that are then digitally processed into endless new shapes as they are combined and threaded through multiple genres and emotions.

Nayar grew up exploring musical worlds ranging between modern composers, Midwestern emo, uplifting trance and beyond. The diverse influences are visible on longer tracks such as "Losing Too Is Still Ours," which extends from rippling guitar figures and keening vocals to methodic, marching strings. The song title stems from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem of great personal import. Other songs wind through their own images and cultural iconography, forming a poetic web. The ghostly hazed "Aurobindo," for one, references an Indian yogi at whose Pondicherry ashram a family member had a moment of Hindu "darshan."

For Nayar, the album's fluid but always deeply felt form is thus a way of translating that which could never be summed up with static names, words, or feelings. It is her way of navigating the many communities, musical and human, through which she’s passed as a trans feminine Indian-American. Rejecting the easy reduction of her project to an "identity politics narrative," though, she takes that understanding as one of many in a stream of perspectives that shapes her life, and her music suggests the same.

To that end, Our Hands Against the Dusk mines the flux and discontinuity of experience as fertile ground. Nayar's debut invites us to join alongside it in thinking beyond metanarratives, as musical and emotional histories touch in its twilight space and refract into a multifaceted whole. In that endeavor, Our Hands Against the Dusk is an embrace and a hope.

More information can be found here.

27 December 2020

Administrator

Albums and Singles

With three albums in as break_fold, Tim Hann’s approach to complex, yet catchy electronic music has become even more diversified. Sure, the dense production and processing alongside heavy programmed rhythms can be found throughout these eight compositions, but there seems to be an expansion to the ambient elements of his work, balancing the more aggressive and commanding moments adeptly with space and mood.

Cathedral Transmissions

Rich, ambient synthesizer passages drift over the mix on opener "22_12_18_Pt1" but the buzzing, distorted electronics are not far away in the mix.The beats are slow and spacious, but there is just enough grime to the sound to keep it from being mundane.The understated melodies take the forefront on the following "22_12_18_Pt2," where they share the focus with prominent rhythms, sounding like a cleaner reiteration of the previous part of the song.

There is a similar sense to "Gaps_in_The_Mesh_(Remix)" (a remix of ambient artist Ten’s work) with its focus on slower tempos and rich synths as opposed to the intense production and distortion found in much of Hann’s other work.There is a more noticeable balance in the sound of "13_11_19," in which a restrained rhythm is coupled with shimmering synthesizers and otherwise less discernible rhythmic pulsations.He shifts the noisier elements into more melodic passages, with the result being a comfortable sounding work, but not a forgettable one.

I have always favored the noisier side of break_fold’s work, and that is certainly here as well.There may be some light synth pads throughout "15_11_19," but the punchy drums and dirty basslines balance out the equation exceptionally.While "29_04_18" may be a bit muted in comparison, the low volume distorted hum and idiosyncratic drum sounds give extra depth that is magnified even more with the constant changing and shifting structure.

The two concluding pieces are the one that especially stood out for me, however.The up front synth and drums of "01_07_19" are instantly engaging, and the use of synth arpeggios and other bleeping rhythmic arrangements make for a distinct and active dynamic throughout.Album closer "JP" is another complex work propelled by snappy drum machines, multiple layers, and heavily varied production.As the song goes on, Hann adds more melodic elements to flesh things out, but the final product is as singular sounding as anything break_fold has done thus far.

For his third album as break_fold, Tim Hann seemingly leans into lusher, ambient sounds more than the previous two.That is not to say that there are no heavy electronic rhythms or dense, complicated production, but there is a generally calmer sound throughout this self-titled disc.As is a general rule for me with electronic music, I favor the more dissonant, challenging works on here, but Hann demonstrates his ability to cover wide swaths of the genre’s spectrum while still leaving his unique mark on whatever he does.

Samples Available Here