Review:
Off! This Kill The DJ label just keeps on hitting new grounds, and this new collab between Car and Red Axes is further proof of just how exciting this collective really is. Car has already featured prominently for the label, but Red Axes has been churning out beast after beast for labels like ESP Institute, Hivern Discs and many others of the same calibre. Although we have labelled this as cold wave, because is does indeed transpire feelings of chilly melancholia, the EP is basically a collection of mindful techno tunes for the more explorative of DJ's. From "Incognito" through to "2040", there is a feeling of pensiveness and true romanticism, the sort you don't often hear anymore and one that we're always on the hunt for. A heavy artillery of remixes come demo Il Est Vilaine, and Tom Furse with two mighty versions. TIP!!!
Review:
Donato Dozzy has long been one of techno's most inventive and singularly minded talents. Even so, this latest full-length - his first since 2013 - is pretty conceptual. There's something more than a little Matthew Herbert-esque about Dozzy's desire to create an entire album out of the near operatic vocals of Rome-based singer Anna Caragnano. Using nothing but her voice - harmonies, solos, grunts, whispers, speech and dreamy freestyle passages - and a swathe of sound effects, Dozzy creates a rich, evocative, often spine-tingling range of largely ambient, otherworldly tracks. There are occasional rhythmic passages, of course - see "Festa (A Mattola)" in particular - but for the most part the Italian producer concentrates on textures and atmospheres. The results are rarely less than beguiling.
Review:
The fourth and final edition of SchleiBen is an extra special one, bringing forth acollaborative project between Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound fame, Not Waving artist Alessio Natalizia and Brain Machine's Guido Zen. Furthermore the series ties with Dusseldorf remain, as Osnabruck based producer Niklas Rehme-Schluter lines the flip with the beautiful ambient touches of his Cass project. The two part efforts from Potter, Natalizia and Zen offer a perfect marriage of methods, with percussion hinting at and Techno, while the constant Drone influx and disintegration grab your attention, overlapping with rhythmic repetition deeper and deeper. The Cass contributions see tracks from the German artist's cassette only Hiding Place album presented on vinyl for the first time and fit snugly into the sonic ethos explored over the previous SchleiBen releases.
Review:
After a recent string of EPs and mini LPs, it's a pleasure to hear Biosphere's tantalizing drones and ambient loops across two full tracks. The Hilvarenbeek Recordings are the perfect encapsulation of the man's sound and vision, forever iterating his subtle sounds to paint rich and vivid portrays of the world and of his surroundings. The new LP, much like his best material to date, comes to life thanks to the amalgamation of field recordings, raw talent, and a pensive outlook on the world. A constant thirst for applying sound to vision, and vision to sound. Wonderful, as always, and utterly recommended.
Review:
Until now, Neel has always been referenced as the other force behind the revered Voices From The Lake project with Donato Dozzy. The Italian artist now debuts solo with the album Phobos, a completely ambient work of earthly sound design and alien atmospheres in a 45-minute journey laced with otherworldly Martian motifs. Neel's defining opus comes through John Elliot's Spectrum Spools, closely following the lauded reissue of The Aquaplano Sessions, and it's a wholly rewarding body of work best enjoyed in full in the one sitting.
Review:
Brian Williams Lustmord project is up there with the very best of British ambient and drone. The man has been constantly pioneering the genre since the late 90s, and its no wonder that John Wonzencroft comes calling for him on his Touch stable. Dark Matter is, indeed, a dark piece of work; chimerical in every way possible, and wide-eyed enough to leave the listener with enough room to interpret the tunes as they wish. From "Subspace" through to "Black Static", Williams paints a bleak and ominous picture, a hollow wail of fibrous sound textures that enter the world of the totally surreal. We won't pollute your mind with too many words; it's up to you to understand how to interpret these sounds.
Review:
Last year, David Moore's Bing & Ruth project - an ever-changing chamber music ensemble dedicated to blurring the boundaries between classic American minimalism, neo-classical and 1970s ambient - pitched up on RVNG INTL with the brilliant Tomorrow Is The Golden Age full-length. It was such a success, in fact, that the esteemed New York label has decided to reissue the group's hard-to-find 2010 album City Lake. They've thrown in a trio of tasty bonus tracks, but it's the original album - an emotion-rich mixture of Reich, Riley, Cage and Eno influences, cyclical themes, stretched-out builds and hauntingly distant vocals - that really sets the pulse racing. It truly is a thing of rare beauty, capable of stirring the sense through little more than subtle shifts in musical emphasis.
Review:
The excellent Forma outfit return to the Kranky imprint with this magnificent little seven-tracker, crossing the boundaries between dance and the utterly abstract, tapping into all osrts of colourful soundscapes and sonic visuals. "Crossings" opens on a gentle flutter of polyrhythms which morph effortlessly into the beat-led sway of "Ostinato" and the Balearic charm of "Three-Two". "Rebreather" is a marvelous shot of ambience, while "Cut-Up" explores the off-kilter beat science that Forma is known for, "New City" drops us into a world of euphoria, and "Acent" takes those polyrhythms to new heights - and speeds! A recommended affair
Review:
Like everything Rrose does, there is a strong concept and deep thought process behind Note. An original composition by 70s minimalist James Tenney, the Eaux boss delivers two new interpretations here. One of them was recorded at Dupont Underground, apparently a place for disused trolleys and you can hear random metallic sounds bashing and crashing away in the background as layers of droning noise hum gently to a finale. There is also a studio version, which involves more defined instruments and elements; cymbals crash and death pace drums underscore Rrose's washes of grey, blurry sound scapes. Further deserves kudos for putting out such a thought-provoking release.
Review:
The Serbian representative of retirement synthesiser success Abul Mogard has a new release to impart which comes forth on Walls' own label Ecstatic. As with previous Mogard releases on VCO Records, there is a quiet, slow-burning intensity to this work, gently unfurling monstrous tones in a harmonious swell that manages to be both comforting and unsettling in the same stroke. With subtle processing at the heart of his sound, Mogard once again demonstrates just how powerful the right combination of signal paths can be at evoking strong emotions, using the most glacial sonic gestures possible as a throwdown to an impatient age.
Review:
Off the back that recent appearance for the illustrious Hinge Finger label run by Joy Orbison and Will Bankhead, techno deviant Barnt returns with a magnetic, and inimitably loose, EP for the imperceptible Holger imprint. We love the material that these guys put out, and this EP from Barnt feels like exactly the right territory for the label to explore. "A-Seite 1-5" opts for the beatless approach, immersing us into an open-world of minimalistic pads shifting and moulding into one another in a subtle sort of trance - excellent. The more representative Barnt flex comes through via "If She Says She Is a Healer, She Is A Healer", a cold, mesmerising techno bullet with a strange, twisted armoury of explorative synths recalling the Middle East. That's what it sounds like to us, anyway, but that's exactly what Barnt's music does; its vibe is ever-shifting, always in a state of flux and, of course, highly recommended.
Review:
Back in 2011, Gerd Janson's Running Back introduced many people to the music LA producer Diego Herrera makes as Suzanne Kraft with the Green Flash EP that was as vivid in presentation as it was in tone. You'll be hearing a lot from Diego Herrera this year, with some high profile collaborative releases with Secret Circuit on the way; an album as Blase on ESP Institute and an Odd Numbers hookup with Willie Burns for Rush Hour's No 'Label'. Before all that, Gerd Janson welcomes Herrera, er, back into the fold with this vinyl issue of the Missum CDr that introduced the Suzanne Kraft project back in 2010. In contrast to the disco-tinged house music of the aforementioned Green Flash EP, the seven tracks on Missum take on a more experimental tone, with beats largely absent in favour of some heavily textured ambient soundscapes produced with a Tascam 464 Portastudio four-track recorder.
Review:
London's corpulent Ninja Tune returns with a follow-up from Lee Bannon, another LP in a similarly washed out and ambient-heavy guise. Pattern Of Excel is positively abstract the whole way through, where watery shades of drone meet sparse bleeps and glitchy sonics. Many of the tracks within contain an almost free jazz feel to them - check "Good/Swimmer" and "Artificial Stasis" - making the whole album a long a complex journey into electro-acoustic treatment and experimentation. This is one you want on during a session of heavy meditation. Vast, wild and recommended.
Review:
This new album from Kevin Martin's band of enchanting doom-mongers forms part of a new series that pits King Midas Sound against various collaborators. In this instance, Martin and vocalist Roger Robinson were moved to link up with Austrian ambient champ Fennesz, whose laconic guitar tones lend an ethereal, orchestral quality to the haunted dub that KMS have always been known for. The ballads linger in an uneasy tension, both gentle in application but unsettling in tone, while Robinson and Kiki Hitomi once again share mic duties to round out the affecting situation in an unexpected but utterly magnificent meeting of minds.
Review:
In the period since the release of his late 2012 album Hardcourage, Drew Lustman has founded his own label as well as dropping singles on Swamp81 and Ninja Tune, slipped out the odd remix and kept up a busy touring schedule. Where he managed to fit in the studio time for a fourth album In The Wild is not clear but a new FaltyDL long player will always be welcome. At 17 tracks long, In The Wild is Lustman's most comprehensive display of his production palette by some distance with the Brooklyn based artist using the afforded space to really go deep into his various creative impulses. It's a lot to take in immediately, but tracks such as "Frontin'" and "Ahead The Ship Sleeps" feel like FaltyDL on top form.
Review:
Wolverhampton based duo Richard Roberts and Andrew Harber aka Letherette return on Ninja Tune with their new full length: a 40-minute mix of previously unreleased productions have been unearthed in conjunction with their recently released second album for "Last Night On The Planet". This collection which explores ambient and deeper beats territory was originally released on a limited run cassette, but will see a digital release in 2017. Harber has stated that the tracks were "saturated onto cassette (Marantz CP430) a number of times to give it a crusty, aged and brittle edge, the playlist was conceived on a typically bleak night-bus ride through Birmingham."
Review:
Traditionally, the UK's Nathan Fake has been closely associated to James Holden's eternal Border Community imprint, a label that has unapologetically stuck to its particular strain of house and techno over the last decade, and a quality that has certainly contributed to its constant success. We've always been great admirers of Fake's dreamy, progressive style of house music, and we see his recent collaborations with London's Ninja Tune as the perfect move for both himself and the mighty record label. Providence, his debut LP for the imprint, stretches the realms of his style to the limit, providing us with 12 highly diverse and explorative slices of IDM-filtered pseudi-house. In reality, there is little to none pure house music in here, but Fake manages to retain a certain momentum that renders these experimental tunes both danceable and enjoyable outside of the bedroom. Deep synths collide with glowing shards of percussion and deep, hyper-space sonics; even Prurient features one of the darker, looser tunes. Recommended!
Review:
if there is one collaboration that we have bowed down to over the last few years, it's most certainly this new found friendship between London's Kevin Martin aka The Bug, and American doom metal guitarists, Earth. One wouldn't immediately make the connection between inner-city future-grime music and suburban stoner rock, but the two styles were in perfect unison, and this is because they're both fascinated with dark, looming clouds of bass. Whether that's through virtual synths or badass bass guitars, it doesn't matter, because the mood is mightily present. Concrete Desert is the alliance's debut LP, and it's all guns blazing from start to finish; tunes like "Snakes vs Rats" or "Metal Drone" represent exactly the sort of freshen-up that each respective act needed - on the one hand, The Bug could have done with some more external influences to the melodic constructions, while Earth needed a new framework to enter the minds of a new, European audience. We've dubbed this style 'metal drone', and we're pretty sure that it's gonna stick after you've hit the ol' play button. Top quality stuff - highly recommended!
Review:
Fake's Providence narrative continues with unique and innovative thrust as renowned experimental composer Olga Wojciechowska repurposes and re-orchestrates his most startling and original work to date. Rich, perplexing and full of drama, Nathan's signature abrasion is felt with even more emphasis and timeless scope as the eminent Polish composer works her magic. Also included is a breath-taking ambient twist from Konx-Om-Pax and live versions from Nathan himself. Providential.
Review:
Fans of A/V pioneer Amon Tobin were thrilled when he broke a three-year silence with an exclusive Record Store Day release of Dark Jovian last month. However not everyone was able to get their hands on the luxuriantly packed double vinyl set, so now a digital version has surfaced to keep everybody happy. It's a stunning five-track cosmic soundtrack inspired by Tobin's obsession with space exploration movies and an attempt 'to interpret a sense of scale, like moving towards impossibly giant objects and planets turning'. Also included are haunting reworks by Lee Gamble, Logos and Eprom!
Review:
Andreas Grosser was considered an underrated hero of German synth music in the early '80s and based off only a couple of albums - a collaboration with Tangerine Dream/Ash Ra Tempel's Klaus Schulz in 1987 and of course 1981s Vinite Visum, that's reissued here on Running Back. All tracks were composed and performed between 1976 and 1980, when the East Berlin synthesist was inspired by the West German cosmic scene. He was rumoured to have made many hours of music, which he duplicated to cassette recordings for anyone that wanted them. Presented here is a collection of psychedelic ambient oddities, conjured from celestial synth sounds and other assorted classic machines.
Review:
Following on from appearances on Kaleidoscope and No Pain In Pop, patten makes his way onto Warp with his stubborn brand of fractured collage music, revelling in drunken rhythm and delirious sample placement to create a hypnagogic long player rich with homespun charm. There is a consistent distance to the way patten places his sounds, whether it be a heavily treated horn or a scuffed drum hit, with everything dangling just out of reach, not least on borderline-beatless moment "Here Always". There are more tangible incidents as well, such as the gentle whir of "Drift" with its nudging bass tones, but by and large this is an album to get cast asunder by, and it does that casting very well indeed.
Review:
Given that Warp Records has described this set from ambient legend Brian Eno as "almost as much musical novel, as a traditional album", it's perhaps fitting that this limited edition comes housed in a hardback book. The album's narrative unfurls slowly across the album's four tracks, picking up pace during the 26-minute "Fickle Sun" suite of tracks. Predictably, it's all hugely atmospheric and attractive, featuring a mix of dreamy electronics, twinkling pianos, poetic spoken word extracts and, according to Eno's own notes, "three-dimensional recording techniques". Perhaps most intriguing of all, though, is closer "Fickle Sun I'm Set Free", which sees Eno paying tribute to the hazy, psychedelic pop of Harry Nilsson.
Review:
We all know and love Mark Pritchard. The Cornish producer has been one of Warp's finest artists since the '90s, and he has produced nothing but excellence from day one. We don't need to go into his history, as you should bloody well know it given the fact that you've landed here, but we will give you a little taster of what is at the heart of Under The Sun. The sound is definitely one that is shifting in shape, and while he has been known to make everything from techno to futuristic jungle, this LP is much more about mood and vibe, something that is clear from the appearance of Radiohead's Thom Yorke on "Beautiful People". That is not to say that the album is in any way too delicate or soft and, in fact, there are plenty of dark and foreboding moments that have rendered this dude's musical career so illustrious.
