Greek-born, Berlin-based musician Subheim composes deep electronic music with acoustic elements. His work is a collage of field recordings, slow evolving drum beats, hypnotic melodies and echoing voices. Drawing from a wide spectrum of genres and influences, from ambient, drone and post-rock to downtempo, lofi, trip hop and even techno, his sonic journeys are there for cold nights, for long train rides, for one to sink into during or after the storm, for the sleepless and the loners.
Subheim’s third album, Foray, is not for the faint-hearted. An attentively crafted LP with emphasis upon clarity and enveloping warmth, Foray is driven by a progressive subtlety, yet supported by an underbelly of sometimes forlorn, and at other times, disturbing emotion. Moving away from…

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…the orchestral ensembles and soundtrack explorations of his second album, Subheim pursues a more minimal approach, taking a much darker turn to deep ambient textures blended with the added realism of field recordings.

Foray opens with Bitter, a concoction of wounded cello and illusory vocal recordings: and here we begin an introspective journey. From the sparse beauty of Alone’s isolated piano to the aggressive ambience of techno-driven Arktos, we witness Subheim exploring new and diverse musical territories. Red Ridge, with its trip-hop feel, steers the listener through unsuspecting harmonic twists and saturated synth pads reminiscent of twentieth century dystopian film. Much of the material, sourced from heavy experimentation with instrumental, percussive and vocal sampling, remains recognisably Subheim in its core elements including his signature sustains, Middle-Eastern sounds and heavy reverberation.

At first listen and initial glance of sibling duo Chenot and David Keith, the immediate assumption is that they would be based out of Berlin, maybe Stockholm, or even Copenhagen, where electronic, new wave, and synth- and electro-pop have surged in popularity and many artists are experimenting with a range of sounds to expand these genres. However, the Keiths – otherwise known as Mission Zero – are from New Haven, Connecticut, and they’ve just released their third album overall (second EP).
People in Glass Yachts showcases the multiple talents of the siblings. Specifically, the album sounds like the duo are supported by a full band, but on the contrary the two perform all the instruments. Chenot takes on the duties…

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…of lead vocals while also playing the piano, synths, and guitar. David plays the drums, djembe, and bass and is responsible for the electronic beats.

The EP also demonstrates the dynamic and diversity of the brother-sister project. They don’t create just mind-blowing, electronic-driven synth-pop, but instead they’ve written tracks that span different fields of pop music. “What Do I Say” is a breezy, summer-time, surf-pop track. “Lotus” recalls the calm, laid-back pop of the early ’80s. “Be Right Here” is a surprising piano ballad that could be written three, four, and even five decades ago, and it brings back memories of Diahann Carroll. “Miles from Shore” is laced with a number of genres, including acid jazz and Afrobeat. It’s an interesting track that has a tribal, electronic feel.

There are only two tracks on the album that could be considered anything close to the typical synth-pop. The opening song, “Scattered on the Beach”, is a slow burning, stuttering number that is at times ethereal. “Past Immaterial” mixes Phantogram-style synths and beats underneath the pop melodies of Chenot. It ebbs and flows from pop arrangements to darker, garage-style beats.

People in Glass Yachts is not your typical, run-of-the-mill synth-pop album. It’s actually a challenging listen given the variety of music and sounds heard on the album. In some ways, the album feels like an experiment by the siblings, attempting to find the right combinations. More often than not, they succeed. However, if there is one complaint, a consequence of the experimentation is that the album doesn’t feel cohesive from start to end. Instead, the album is more of a compilation of songs that displays the wild and creative imagination of the Keiths, which should be applauded.

Operating under the From the Mouth of the Sun name, Dag Rosenqvist and Aaron Martin follow their 2012 collaboration Woven Tide with the equally satisfying Into the Well. The two are familiar names in this neck o’ the woods, with work by the Gothenburg, Sweden-based Rosenqvist having appeared on labels such as Miasmah, Under the Spire, Lowpoint, and Rural Colors and recordings by the Topeka, Kansas resident Martin showing up on Preservation, Experimedia, Type, and Sonic Meditations, among others. Though the latter’s main instrument is cello and Rosenqvist’s guitar, the two are credited on the new recording with a plenitude of additional instruments, including bass, piano, synthesizers, pump organ, voice, singing bowls, banjo, lap steel, glockenspiel, and field…

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…recordings, and on the title track vocalists Dawn Smithson and Jerker Lund, trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, and French horn player Jenny Olsson also appear.

The album’s interestingly structured, seeing as how six of the pieces, ranging from two to six minutes, are relatively brief whereas one, the aforesaid title track, pushes past eleven. That makes for an effective mix, with the shorter settings acting as mini-symphonies that make their case with dispatch and the longer one affording the duo an opportunity to craft a long-form composition. Don’t think, however, that the others are any less artful for being shorter, as they thoroughly impress when Rosenqvist and Martin shape the tracks’ elements into entrancing, oft-plaintive wholes of striking beauty. In no more than five minutes, “Bodies in Fog” augments a simple glockenspiel motif with layers of strings and guitars in such a way that’s nothing less than soul-stirring, and with banjo, cello, and other sounds woven into a multi-hued shawl, “Braid & Tomb” radiates like some awe-inspiring natural phenomenon.

Into the Well offers an abundantly rich listening experience, but if there’s a single instrument that stands out, it’s Martin’s cello, which repeatedly elevates the material by amplifying its emotional dimension. While synthesizers form part of the duo’s sonic arsenal, the recording presents a largely acoustic sound, never more so than when the arrangements for “Path for Blood” and “Walking Behind Glass” largely consist of piano, strings, and pump organ only.

As compelling as the shorter settings are, it’s the title track that makes the strongest argument for the group project. Opening quietly, “Into the Well,” abetted by the presence of Smithson and Lund, slowly blossoms from its supplicating beginnings into a somewhat phantasmagoric force-field of lachrymose strings, hushed vocal expressions, and horns. The title might imply downward movement, but the trajectory of the track—literally and figuratively—is characterized by ascension. There’s an at times shamanistic quality to this superb album’s material that makes the duo seem like alchemists operating out of some remote cabin and who through their toils bring wondrous music into being.

Montreal musician Eric Quach has been making music as thisquietarmy since 2005, amassing a musical output of more than 20 releases since starting the project. His next one is titled Anthems for Catharsis, marking the follow-up to last year’s Rebirths, and the first LP of original material since 2013’s Hex Mountains.
The new set of songs originated in Quach’s Montreal studio, where he made a conscious effort to stretch the boundaries of the oft-repetitive genres of ambient and drone. This time around, he stripped the music down to its bones, focusing on purification and detoxification. In the process, he “struck a black metal vein, resulting in a dark and brooding ice cold oozing of his signature drones.”
From the eerie opening notes and slow-building…

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…suspense of “Ruminations” to the onslaught of percussion throughout “Purgation/Purification” to the industrial airiness of “From Darkness Redux,” Thisquietarmy presents an array of intricate, icy and always intriguing pieces on Anthems of Catharsis.

Conrad Lambert had the world at his feet.
The songwriter’s Merz project was snapped up by a major label at the turn of the Millennium, leading to sessions for his debut album. Yet he walked away from it all. Embarking on a curiously left field, utterly English career, Merz is return with new album Thinking Like a Mountain. Perhaps the most individual step on a profoundly individual journey, the material ranges from the 12 minute opening statement to the final dream-like coda, from orchestral sweep to impressionistic pop music.
Produced by Matthew Herbert, guests include Shahzad Ismaily and founder member of Icelandic band müm Gyða Valtýsdóttir, with additional mix work accomplished by Dimlite and Ewan Pearson.
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…multi-instrumental talent to the full, he swings between the minimal electronica of opener ‘Shrug’ to the distorted calypso of ‘Serene’ with real verve, via barely-there, guitar-driven pieces like ‘Dear Ghost’.

In 1974, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to direct his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s monumental sci-fi novel Dune.
The film was set to star David Carradine, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Amanda Lear. Meanwhile, after the producers considered none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd was slated to compose along with contributions from the French prog-rock outfit Magma. Jodorowsky was given a lavish budget but the film didn’t make it past its intensive pre-production stage.
As Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune illustrates, Jodorowsky and his production team put a great deal of effort into storyboarding and design, with an eye for detail that would’ve…

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…made Stanley Kubrick blush. As it turns out, the great irony of Jodorowsky’s career is that he made his most widely-felt impact with a film he never even began shooting. To this day, his work on Dune continues to reflect in popular cinema and culture. In a sense, his version of Dune died giving birth to the genre-defining films that emerged in its wake. Alien, for example, was written by Dan O’Bannon and of course bore the unmistakable design aesthetic of Swiss painter H.R. Giger—both of whom had been brought in for Jodorowsky’s production. This backstory, of course, frames Kurt Stenzel’s score to Pavich’s documentary and vice-versa.

So many things could have gone wrong here had Stenzel attempted to encompass the pretense and grandeur of the subject at hand. “We need to try,” he writes in the liner notes—the implication being that we as the audience should put forth our best effort both to imagine the film Jodorowsky envisioned and to honor the scale of what he was aiming to accomplish. But Stenzel’s score—which consists mainly of a bunch of analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time (with no additional digital sequencing)—actually requires little effort from listeners.

Given the psychedelic quality of Jodorowsky’s most well-known films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it’s no surprise that in the documentary the maverick Chilean director talks about wanting to mimic the effects of LSD with Dune. But his goals didn’t stop there. Jodorowsky breathlessly describes how his film was to serve as a “prophet”—not as a prophecy, but as a living, breathing entity with a consciousness of its own. “For me,” he declares on camera, “Dune will be the coming of a God. An artistic and cinematographic God.”

To Stenzel’s credit, although he does fall prey to a bit of reverence—most notably in passages that feature audio samples of Jodorowsky waxing poetic on what moviemaking means to him—the music doesn’t strive to be anywhere near as lofty as that. Stenzel is wise to go for a more discreet, at times even whimsical, tone that supports the documentary’s easygoing, storytelling structure. It’s too bad that Stenzel, when he does opt to use Jodorowsky monologues, doesn’t get more creative with them by chopping them up or subjecting them to effects, but the samples occur rarely and end up being incidental to the score’s overall flavor anyway.

Charmingly, the liner notes include a list of all the synth gear Stenzel used, just in case you’re interested in geeking-out. But that would be missing the point. Stenzel’s score doesn’t stand out so much for the tools he used to create it as much as for the choices he made while using those tools. Pavich instructed Stenzel to go for a “Tangerine Dream-type feel,” and as such the predictable path would have been to mimic the wheezing, primitive synthesizer sounds that define sci-fi cinema of the ’60s and ’70s—sounds that now feel quaint at best and moldy at worst. Had Stenzel emulated the audacious bleeting style of, say, early Moog pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or any number of artists from the period, he would have artificially encased this music in a temporal ambience it doesn’t actually require in order to engage your attention. Ultimately, not unlike the French electronic duo Air, Stenzel has too much creative inspiration to settle for being a stylist, and though he openly references the past, he lands with both feet firmly anchored in the present.

Pavich’s documentary more or less consists of a string of interviews undercut with shots of old photos and storyboard drawings. Clearly then, Stenzel’s job was to keep the music moving along to match whatever pace Pavich set as appropriate for the audience’s patience threshold. Stenzel shifts quickly but gracefully from one motif to the next, weaving sounds in and out like a choreographer who prefers to stay offstage while guiding each “dancer”—each new instrument, melody, textural element, or structural change—into the fray on cue. By turns dramatic, spaced-out, otherworldly, entrancing, stately, ominous, hopeful, playful, and chatty, most of the tracks on Jodorowsky’s Dune run about a minute long and manage to cover more than one mood before they run that course. Taken as a whole, they stream by yet never feel rushed, and Stenzel establishes his dual knack for patience and economy very early on.

In what is perhaps this album’s defining moment, a high-pitched synth line wails and echoes in a vast empty space. Stenzel gives it a character and shape not unlike those celestial bodies that appear to us via deep-space photography as giant, colorful plumes. The lone synth line segues into a live drumset, the first appearance of organic instruments and room ambience on the whole album. The drums don’t last long, and soon they too meld into vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding chants before the voices grow more distressed. Then, a snarling, heavily filtered electric guitar riff that recalls Tool’s “Forty-Six & 2” makes its entrance before flaring out as quickly as it came. One might expect these elements to step on each other’s toes. But, as with just about every other sound that leads up to this passage, Stenzel creates a sensation of smooth sailing, even as he radically alters the scenery every few minutes. On Jodorowsky’s Dune, Stenzel takes you across topographic oceans that never rock the boat. — Pitchfork

Long-range acoustic hallucinations for violin and piano. Exploring spectral techniques throughout extended temporal structures, Pateras & Veltheim physically generate unrelenting harmonic waves to create a singular psycho-harmonic texture, blurring perceptions between two otherwise distinct instruments to create something otherworldly and hypnotic.
Never having worked exclusively as a duo, this is the first joint statement from these two composer/performers who have played together in numerous contexts since 2001, including in experimental film soundtracks for Eron Sheean and Pia Borg, the avant-music-theatre sextet Twitch, Pateras’ Tzadik releases and in his recent collaboration with Mike Patton, t?t?ma.

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Veltheim is also a respected pop arranger in Australia, working for Gurrumul, Tom Lewis and Steve Pigram, and has composed abstract masterworks for the likes of The London Sinfonietta.
As with all Immediata releases, the audio is accompanied by extensive text, in this case an extended conversation between Pateras and Veltheim covering Melbourne underground events in the early 2000s, the persistent question of composition vs. improvisation, originality, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Hunt, Indigenous music and the relation of sound to film. This is the third release on the ongoing Immediata series, beautifully presented in dark green thick recycled cardboard, silver hot stamped text on both sides, 24 page booklet, and mastered by Lachlan Carrick at Moose Mastering, Melbourne.

Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s — expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade. They’re not made for fist-pumping, and they don’t follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord.
Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu,…

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…a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson’s snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking.

“18 Arms” goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus’ tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat’s pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all.

But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson’s music is all about feel. It’s hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you’re moved all the same. (“‘Deep’ to me is like the human condition that you don’t talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person” Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music’s emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious “Organ to Dust” is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. “Nabta Playa”, named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it’s reminiscent of Drexciya’s Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons’ fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform “Amarna”, whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It’s the album’s most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson’s album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.

Jlin‘s debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer’s mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her.
On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Free Fall feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on…

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…a single EP; it’s not that they don’t have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.

Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. “Eu4ria”, like the aptly named “Guantanamo” from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer “Abnormal Restriction,” as definitive a statement about Patton’s musical identity as you’ll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway’s turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, “Abnormal Restriction” added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. “Eu4ria” is lighter, Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King’s Carrie. “They’re all gonna laugh at you,” Carrie’s mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here,the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.

“I Am The Queen” and “BuZilla” are two biting pieces of footwork that don’t let up and shouldn’t. It’s not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. “BuZilla” reuses the phrase “live and let die.” The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It’s an aggressive and focused answer to her “genre.” Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton’s present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement.

Full stop: Timeline doesn’t present the next innovative chapter in drum’n’bass; listeners hungry for advances to the form will have to look elsewhere for that. What Artificial Intelligence’s Zula Warner and Glenn Herweijer do offer, however, is high- quality material that, even if locked solidly into the tradition, is undeniably hard-hitting. With A.I. releases dating back to 2003, the London duo has received its share of awards and acclaim — in 2006, for example, Radio 1 deemed “Desperado” the ‘No.1 Drum & Bass Tune of the Year’ — and, based on the evidence of this latest assured collection, clearly knows its way around a dynamic belter.
At sixteen cuts and eighty minutes, it’s a generously stuffed release, though the two closing tracks, being alternate versions of earlier album cuts, are…

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…largely superfluous. Even so, there’s more than enough to dig into, and the material draws on multiple styles, jungle, soul, and house among them. There are tight neurofunk and drum’n’bass grooves aplenty, and A.I. brings guests aboard for some of it, with DRS, Terri Walker, Steo, and MC Sense contributing vocals to respective cuts. An occasional speaking voice or instrument sample works its way into the material to enhance A.I.’s cred as sound designers, but Warner and Herweijer never stray so far into experimental territory they lose their grip on the music’s drum’n’bass essence.

Steo’s and Terri Walker’s soulful vocal performances catapult “Take Me There” and “Justify” to euphoric heights, the atmospheric “Aroma” and anthemic “Fallen” (featuring Dawn Wall) document A.I.’s soulful side, and “Privilege” (with Sense) and the raw jungle workout “The Source” thunder with dynamic intent. With DRS’s biting flow added to the mix, “Pass the Buck” hits with a lethal force similar to “Firestarter,” especially when bass stabs careen with so much intensity they feel capable of taking your head off. At such moments, innovation takes a back seat to the visceral pleasure provided by the listening experience.

The Oregon-based sound artist Randal Collier-Ford has been operating in the Dark Ambient field since 2012, and on this second Cryo Chamber outing he arms ten grandiose visions with image-generating titles such as “Suspension of Icarus” and “Decaying Sun,” evoking apocalyptic impressions, spiritual entities, and mythological archetypes as he does so.
“Monument” immediately announces that Remnants will be less focused on ambient-drone soundscaping and more on atmospheric sound design. A richly cinematic soundworld is created, one painstakingly assembled by Collier-Ford and arranged with respect to evocative power to maximum effect. The closing “Revelations” aside, the pieces aren’t musical in the conventional sense, though musical elements are present in more or less fragmented form;…

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…Collier-Ford clearly has a different goal in mind, the idea presumably being to place the listener within a landscape generated via the arrangement of disparate sound elements. The precise location of the outdoors setting conjured in “Horns of Eden” isn’t clear, for instance, but wherever it is it’s one infused with gloom and desolation. “Remnants,” on the other hand, appears to be situated near a building, given the presence of creaking doors, yet shoveling noises and the sounds of someone trudging through a rumbling, haunted site clearly locates us outside, too.

The particularly disturbing “Eye of the West” hints at a nightmarish graveyard setting where the long-dead drag their skeletal remains from their decaying crypts; the throbbing bass tones and whooshes in “Black Garden” promise, if anything, an even deeper plunge into madness and the macabre. As evocative as they are, such pieces aren’t for the faint of heart. That said, what’s especially satisfying about these constructions is the way they patiently develop; abrupt transitions and ill-fitting juxtapositions are eschewed, Collier-Ford instead choosing to let each setting unfold as it naturally should. It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe what he’s doing on these carefully composed collages as painting in sound.

In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder — a little glimmer of light from the depths of a well.
A co-president of the beloved, minimalist-focused Root Strata label, Croy devotes much of his time to building a sophisticated, wonderfully weird roster of artists (Grouper, the Alps, and Driphouse have all issued LPs on the label): but he’s also earned a reputation as a gifted electroacoustic auteur.
Devane, meanwhile, comes from a guitar background, tempered by a love for the digital greats (as his acoustic cover of Aphex Twin’s “Rhubarb” attests). The duo’s latest, City of Brides, is their most cohesive — and perhaps paradoxically, sonically varied — statement to date.

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Establishing a sense of momentum when nothing moves is one of the biggest challenges in drone music. On City of Brides, Croy and Devane supply propulsion through juxtaposition: not just between the organic and the artificial, but also between the serious and the playful. For every period of restraint—the two-part, vaguely erotic shadow play of “Songs for Diminished Lovemaking”, for instance—there’s a burst of playfulness to balance it. On the buoyant “Mendocino Nature Rave”, the duo ventriloquize their motherboards to reproduce the sounds of dolphins, bats, and other wildlife, while “Hall of Mirrors” sounds like a thrilling, grim game of Peek-A-Boo, constantly threatened by melodramatic synth swoops.

There are no samples to speak of on City of Brides; every sound we hear is built from scratch. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. “Blonde Is Back” is the most magnificent, its warm swathes of synths simultaneously soothing and suffocating. The experience of listening to it isn’t that far off from being smothered by a fleece blanket.

The diversity of the instruments here helps distinguish City of Brides from peers like Pete Swanson and Oren Ambarchi, or influencers like La Monte Young. On “Mark of the Slav”, En use a koto to create a foggy soundscape before drifting out into the horizon. In addition to honoring its reputation for graceful precision, En challenge the koto’s inherent solemnity by way of energetic arrangements that render it assertive, even abrasive; its shattered-glass-strums break the reverent murmur of “Secret Samba”. Indeed, one could make a strong case for Croy’s playing as City of Brides’ secret weapon: a valuable source of energy on an extensive, occasionally exhausting album.

If you’re not a fan of drone, City of Brides probably won’t turn you into an acolyte. The LP gets off to a sluggish, vaguely narcotic start with “Blades” and “Dead Ringer”, two relatively straightforward ambient pieces that lack the standout quirks of later tracks. Those looking for a more leaden approach may walk away disappointed as well; Devane’s guitars never reach the intensity of, say, Sunn O))). Nevertheless, there are plenty of secrets refracted through City of Brides‘ glassine spaces—and peering through such a globally-inspired prism is arguably as compelling as any seismic axe riff.

If Markus Guentner‘s Theia is a rather more tonally dramatic collection than one might have come to expect from the ambient veteran of Kompakt, Sending Orbs, and Moodgadget, it’s easily explained by the subject matter involved. Theia, you see, is the name of the ancient planetary mass that is said to have collided with the hypothesized proto-Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago, the idea being that had the collision not been glancing, Earth, in that earlier form, might have been destroyed. For whatever reason, Guentner’s selected this topic as the source of inspiration for his full-length return to wax after a nine-year interval.
For reasons that should be obvious, Theia isn’t a collection of soothing, Pop Ambient-styled reveries. The violence and chaos of the collision and…

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…subsequent maelstrom are conveyed by Guentner in seven settings, one of which, “Baryon,” features The Sight Below, aka Rafael Anton Irisarri, who also mastered the album. Guentner generously cedes the controls to Irisarri on the track, allowing the guest to reshape the soundscape using electric guitar. Yet as cataclysmic as the planets’ collision would have been, the music in this case is pitched at a more modest level, with “Baryon” eventually growing into a deep ambient exercise that while still epic more calms the nerves than frays them.

Guentner’s been producing ambient music for many years and has developed a keen sense of pacing and dynamics, and as Theia advances, it becomes clear that he designed the album to be heard as an evolving soundscape that would document the cosmological event as it unfolded. In keeping with that idea, the pulsating ambient-drone “Redshift” builds in volume and density across nine minutes in a way that anticipates the eventual moment of contact, while the shimmering mass generated within “Ejecta” does much the same during its eleven-minute run, if in slightly less intense manner. While “Limb” hews to a comparatively more consistent dynamic level, it rumbles at an unnervingly powerful pitch with layers of shimmering detail so plentiful, it becomes an opaque colossus of immense depth. An omnipresent sense of dread and anticipation shadows the release until the primal event arrives in all its monumental glory during the closing “Cavus.” You’d be wise to strap yourself in before undertaking this rather harrowing final journey.

Daniel ‘Oskar’ Offermann has done a grand job of building up his White label empire with Adam Zawadzki, largely orbiting around releases from artists such as Edward, Nu and of course his own music. Back in 2012 he released the Do Pilots Still Dream of Flying? album through the imprint, whilst in the mean time continuing to branch out to labels such as Thema (where he appeared with Edward in a collaborative capacity) and Riverette. It’s been a quiet 2015 so far for Offermann, and even White has taken it relatively easy with just a couple of twelves out so far, but it would seem that the label boss has been gearing up to bigger things. Mule Musiq have certainly been no slouches this year however, with albums from Koss and Fred P’s FP-Oner alias complementing singles from Frank & Tony, Jemmy,..

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…Kuniyuki and more besides.

Following on from the 2012 single U Can You to Me Say Offermann makes a return to Mule with a ten-track follow up to his first LP entitled Le Grand to Do. 

Le Grand to Do was produced during a period when Offermann delved into mediation, part-time veganism and New Age music. The ten tracks were produced in 2014, the rhythms constructed using cheap drum machines such as the Alesis HR-16, the Boss DR-660 and the Yamaha RX-70. The record also looks back to Offermann’s past as a drummer, its ornate, piano-heavy sound built on powerful fills that veer away from the dance floor.

This four-track EP emerges from a friendship that unexpectedly blossomed between Marcus Marr and Chet Faker online, after they exchanged compliments on Twitter. Conversations about production and gear ultimately evolved into an attempt at artistic collaboration in London.
Those familiar with Chet Faker’s work have come to expect a certain understated aesthetic from the soulful musicians; on this release Faker sings like a man set free. Never before has he sounded so confident as a singer, as evidenced on “The Trouble With Us,” where he sounds like a perfect blend of Sting, Justin Timberlake and Bon Iver. Marr’s production is also top-notch, successfully creating dance tracks that are fun and engaging without ever feeling frivolous or vapid. Work is an ironic…

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…title for an EP that is this fun and entertaining from start to finish; hopefully, Marr and Faker choose to release a full-length sometime soon.

1. Birthday Card (7:46)
2. The Trouble with Us (3:42)
3. Learning for Your Love (6:30)
4. Killing Jar (7:16)

Zora Jones has described 2010 as her year zero. She saw DJ Rashad spin for the first time at a party in Montreal, which was pretty much everyone’s first encounter with footwork in a club setting. She and her friends ended up spending a week with the Chicago DJ, and he gave them a batch of tracks he’d produced with his Ghettoteknitianz crew. It opened up a whole new world for her. “That folder is still one of the main folders I go to for inspiration,” she told The Fader. “Those tracks are so crisp to me and so influential. 2010 was the year for me.”
You can hear the late Rashad’s influence on Jones’ debut EP, 100 Ladies — or at least, you can deduce it. Many of her tracks move at 160 BPM, smack in the middle of footwork’s sweet spot. But in the past five years, Jones has also established her own…

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…sound, one that’s indebted to footwork (and also to grime), but irreducible to either of those genres. It’s several steps removed—and that’s a direct result of the work that she’s put in.

The title of the Austrian-born, Barcelona-based producer’s EP is a reference to a pact that she made with herself: to make 100 tracks before she released anything. This isn’t the first thing she has unveiled; there have been collaborations with Sinjin Hawke and DJ Taye on FractalFantasy (the imprint she runs with Hawke, which began life as an online outlet for audiovisual productions), and she’s posted the odd solo track to her SoundCloud account. But this is her first extended statement, and the singularity of her vision is immediately apparent.

Aside from the occasional anchoring 808 kick, she favors thin, silvery sounds: brittle rimshots, tinny hi-hats, and 808 toms tuned toward their upper limits. Her main instrument is the voice—resampled, stacked in dizzying fifths, pitched up near dog-whistle frequency, and painted on in bright, loopy brushstrokes. Put together, these elements combine to suggest club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead.

Of the album’s seven tracks, only two come anywhere close to resembling established forms. “Zui”, with its shuddering 808 patterns and stuttering monosyllables, wears its footwork influences proudly on its sleeve, and the lurching cadence of “Too Many Tears” sounds like an outgrowth of the “weightless” style of grime favored by Mumdance, Rabit, and Murlo. Again, though, her wordless vocal melodies stand proudly apart; they’re eerie, shapeshifting things, part violin and part warbling bird, and their effect is spellbinding.

The EP is bookended by its best tracks. The footwork-tempo closer “First Light” pumps away like Philip Glass rearranged for tin whistle, Gameboy, and chipmunk, while the opening “Oh Boy” forsakes drums entirely; it’s just wordless vocal trills pitched up into icy configurations accompanied by the hollow hum of whirly tubes. Despite their novelty, both songs remain unusually moving; for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. They offer the equivalent of a solid musical form being melted down and channeled into tiny, sidewinding rivulets; it will be fascinating to see where these streams carry her next.

Multi-talented Montrealer d’Eon is at it again — or should we say was at it, and is just telling us now.
Foxconn / Trios was recorded back in 2012, around the same time as the Music for Keyboards series, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.
Where Music for Keyboards offered warm ambience, Foxconn / Trios ripples with blistering sonic chicanery. It’s a record that has all the break-neck speed of footwork, but in lieu of tightly cut vocals, d’Eon coats these tracks in a kind of celestial sheen, which serves as a very necessary parachute in slowing down these speedy juggernauts.
At times it’s almost too much, with tracks like “Sobha Renaissance Information I” and “Datamatics Global Services II” coming off as completely jarring. Yet, you can acclimatize to these tracks…

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…surprisingly quickly if you’ve done your homework; Foxconn / Trios is the type of release that really demands knowledge of the styles that precede it. Any dawdling electronic music fans that stumble into these waters may very well get pummelled back to shore in no time at all. In short, this is esoteric stuff.

The fact that this was recorded in 2012 is telling; that was a time when footwork and juke had properly emerged from Chicago and were firmly on the musical world map, thanks to labels like Planet Mu and Hyperdub. Considering the fact that Foxconn / Trios is so similar to those genres, just on a different plane, perhaps d’Eon didn’t want to seem as if they were trying to infiltrate those in-the-now styles, or maybe they just didn’t think anyone was ready for this.

Whatever the reason, listening to Foxconn / Trios in full, one can’t help but ask: Have we arrived at post-juke already?

Blurry radio transmissions emanate from some industrial bunker; pulsating sequencer patterns and mutant techno, stripped bare of beats, ripple through granular, sheet-metal haze — these are but a few of the ethereal sounds flickering forth from Prequel Tapes‘ debut full-length. In accompanying text, the album’s creator, Marco Freivogel, waxes nostalgic about youthful days listening to The Cure, KLF, and Future Sound of London and his stumbling first attempts at music production using a Casio FZ-1 sampler, Korg MS-10, and drum machine. With time and maturity comes a growing sophistication yet also a concomitant distancing from innocent origins, and it’s the latter that drives Prequel Tapes to reclaim that past — or at least try to — by returning to analog gear, vintage synthesizers,…

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…and long-retired formats. Drawing upon decades of exposure to rave culture, industrial music, and other electronic mutations, Inner Systems can be heard as one person’s life story distilled into audio form.

The project name, by the way, wasn’t arbitrarily chosen: the material includes sounds lifted from DAT tapes of recordings made between 1989 and 1991, and the project in general plays like a glossolalic to-and-fro between the past and present. While there’s not a strong stylistic similarity between Prequel Tapes and Kraftwerk, the former does share with the latter a nostalgic affection for earlier times now only accessible through memory, and Inner Systems also sometimes suggests what the modern-day spawn of Radioactivity‘s experimental vignettes would sound like transported to the present age and expanded upon.

Though the album’s designed to be regarded as a total statement, there are differences between the eight tracks: “Under Your Skin” grinds with industrial purpose, its nightmarish sound design intermittently punctuated by war zone blasts and strangulated churning, whereas the ghost of ‘80s techno shadows “When We Fall Into the Light,” even if the synthesizer-heavy material does often feel on the verge of splintering into rubble. It’s hardly the only one that does so, but in its relentless compulsion to shape-shift and mutate it’s perhaps the album track that best captures the project’s tone. In expressing a wistful affection for the past, projects of Freivogel’s kind often, if only implicitly, cast a negative, even hopeless eye on the present and future. Inner Systems refreshingly does otherwise in the way it occasionally infuses its material with uplift. That’s nowhere more audible than in the title track, which pulsates with a dynamic, clangorous energy that encourages rave-like abandon and begins to feel like a kind of controlled ecstasy.

Far from the shy retiring geeks of electro stereotype, Italian trio Aucan have toured incessantly over the last few years, playing over 300 shows supporting the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Matmos and Fuck Buttons. If the sprawling and cosmic Stelle Fisse is anything to go by, Aucan could soon be stepping up to headline status themselves, with their combination of minimalist post-rock and modular techno sure to win over crowds of earnest beard strokers and rave kids alike.
Key to Aucan’s brilliance is the emotion they bring to their hypnotic soundscapes. If this initially comes across as a bit moody on opener Disgelo’s ominous drum intro and haunting vocals, it’s soon replaced by the calming ambient rave of Loop/Layers.
The best example of the Italians’ melding of live…

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..instruments and electronics comes with Disto, while towards the album’s end they successfully set the controls for the heart of the sun on Outer Space and the far-better-than-it-sounds Cosmic Dub.

Nino Pedone – aka Shapednoise – has accumulated an enviable discography during his relatively short career. Previous releases on Hospital Productions, Opal Tapes, Stroboscopic Artefacts, Russian Torrent Versions, his own Repitch and Cosmo Rhythmatic imprints, and now Type Recordings have cemented his reputation as a stalwart of the noise techno genre. His second album, like many second albums, seeks to extend his self-erected boundaries, and Different Selves is certainly his most abstract and punishing work to date. Whether this abstraction is successful in the context of the album is a question that will be left open.
There is a high incidence of musical quotation at work here, but this is not mere pastiche, rather a sign that the genre has reached maturity.

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Hearing Vladislav Delay’s 2014 album Visa in ‘The Man From Another Place’, the shredding of Emptyset’s ‘Recur’ in the aptly-titled ‘What Is It Like’, the microscopic finesse of the Haxan Cloak’s ‘Consumed’ in ‘Dream Within A Dream’, and Kerridge’s ‘MPH’ in ‘Intruder’, provides a useful network of references, something familiar to cling on to in a release so determinedly devoid of hooks. The sound design of Different Selves is undeniably flawless, and in a recent interview with XLR8R, Shapednoise suggested that he has been trying to conceive music in visual terms. The album as a whole seems to be crying out for live A/V treatment in Berlin’s Kraftwerk, where the combination of the space and the soundsystem would make for a truly magnificent performance. On the other hand, individual tracks like the acrid, grime-smeared masterclass in beat-making that is ‘Heart-Energy-Shape’ would sound equally at home in a DJ set in a dank Stoke Newington basement.

Domestic listening is probably the one setting in which Different Selves shows weakness. The album is long, clocking in at over 50 minutes, there is a drastic shortage of pads, and instead of light, an almighty black hole to look forward to at the end of the tunnel. There is also a slight top-heaviness in the mix which makes even the most abusive passages sound shallow, thereby lessening their physical impact – something which, in its power to transport the listener, is arguably more important at home than it is in a club, where physicality underwrites the whole experience and the sound can be tweaked to tailored perfection. The beguiling opening track, which features Justin K. Broadrick of Godflesh fame, is an exception to the previous statement. It displays an adept sense of proportion, its massive soundscape breathes, its tectonics rumble, and it labours over one idea throughout, whereas some of the other tracks rupture and lurch without closure.

It is the beats that really make this album. Pedone’s work was already highly accomplished in this regard, but in Different Selves they have evolved into a more complex and savage form. In a track like ‘Well-Being’, the icy, satanic gusts of static can only be understood as such through the brutality of the bassline, which situates the listener somewhere in the vicinity of the seventh circle of Inferno. Whereas in some albums of the genre, the smattering of 4/4 can seem disposable, Shapednoise lets it be known that it is the beats that unleash the emotional potential of the other elements, and in so doing brings Different Selves out of the underworld and onto a more resonant plane.