Bureau B Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 68 Items

Limited to 100 copies.

Dumbo Tracks returns with a second album Move With Intention – the anticipated follow up to 2022's eponymous debut. Philipp Janzen and collaborators deliver a varied collection of nine zoned-out grooves direct from Dumbo Studio in Cologne, with vocal contributions from Portable, Ada, Marker Starling, Rubee Fegan and nothhingspecial.

Looking back to his musical upbringing, Philipp Janzen switched up the recording process from the first record to incorporate more of a live band element. The result is a more eclectic sound which allowed more freedom to experiment, while keeping the collaborative spirit that is a vital Dumbo Tracks trademark.

The genesis of the record began in Italy, where Philipp and co-producer Julian Stetter traveled to jam out ideas on modular synths over the course of a few days. These ideas served as the basis for more instrumental tracks back at Dumbo Studio, where Philipp invited friends to develop the tracks further within a live dynamic. For the final phase of the record, Philipp enlisted the artistry of five vocalists: spoken word frontwoman Rubee Fegan, Canadian singer songwriter Marker Starling, house romantic Portable, Bonn-based haunted pop artist nothhingspecial and Hamburg's techno visionary Ada.

Rubee Fegan contributes her anecdotal observations to four songs, not least on the opening track "Daughter Of Flood" with her poetic remark "sip on the wave of her." It's a vocal style that Philipp had been looking for for ages, and finally found after hearing Rubee's band Smile. Long-time collaborator Christopher Cummings aka Marker Starling lends his lilting tenor to "Slow Despair", an uplifting drum machine and organ workout. Track three "What If" shifts the goal posts, as an acid bassline rises over a swung groove that wouldn't sound out of place in a Manchester warehouse, before we emerge into a clearing of heartbreak and expectation, courtesy of singer producer nothhingspecial.

The title track sees Philipp and crew slow the tempo down to a molasses dreamscape, a beatdown groove that's joined by Paris-residing artist Portable. Portable's emotive voice is the perfect foil for the tracks' invocation to mindfulness, aided by filtered hi-hats and widescreen sequencers. "Mica" takes the synths and drum machines out to the countryside, and finds producer and singer Ada supplying the most sensitive of vocals and flutes to a song that carries the kosmisch torch. Organs spill over rolling drums and dub reverb, underneath Rubee's cosmic voiceover on "A Naked Star", and the album concludes with "My Eyes Won't Close" a chromatic modular descent into despair, vividly described by nothhingspecial.

It all makes for a gloriously eclectic album, an anarchic pop record that follows its own rules. Move With Intention is both electronic yet alive, motorik and pastoral, filled with dancefloor grooves and a krautrock swagger. In this sense the intention is clear: to respectfully rip up the rule book and keep moving forward.

Dumbo Tracks returns with a second album Move With Intention – the anticipated follow up to 2022's eponymous debut. Philipp Janzen and collaborators deliver a varied collection of nine zoned-out grooves direct from Dumbo Studio in Cologne, with vocal contributions from Portable, Ada, Marker Starling, Rubee Fegan and nothhingspecial.

Looking back to his musical upbringing, Philipp Janzen switched up the recording process from the first record to incorporate more of a live band element. The result is a more eclectic sound which allowed more freedom to experiment, while keeping the collaborative spirit that is a vital Dumbo Tracks trademark.

The genesis of the record began in Italy, where Philipp and co-producer Julian Stetter traveled to jam out ideas on modular synths over the course of a few days. These ideas served as the basis for more instrumental tracks back at Dumbo Studio, where Philipp invited friends to develop the tracks further within a live dynamic. For the final phase of the record, Philipp enlisted the artistry of five vocalists: spoken word frontwoman Rubee Fegan, Canadian singer songwriter Marker Starling, house romantic Portable, Bonn-based haunted pop artist nothhingspecial and Hamburg's techno visionary Ada.

Rubee Fegan contributes her anecdotal observations to four songs, not least on the opening track "Daughter Of Flood" with her poetic remark "sip on the wave of her." It's a vocal style that Philipp had been looking for for ages, and finally found after hearing Rubee's band Smile. Long-time collaborator Christopher Cummings aka Marker Starling lends his lilting tenor to "Slow Despair", an uplifting drum machine and organ workout. Track three "What If" shifts the goal posts, as an acid bassline rises over a swung groove that wouldn't sound out of place in a Manchester warehouse, before we emerge into a clearing of heartbreak and expectation, courtesy of singer producer nothhingspecial.

The title track sees Philipp and crew slow the tempo down to a molasses dreamscape, a beatdown groove that's joined by Paris-residing artist Portable. Portable's emotive voice is the perfect foil for the tracks' invocation to mindfulness, aided by filtered hi-hats and widescreen sequencers. "Mica" takes the synths and drum machines out to the countryside, and finds producer and singer Ada supplying the most sensitive of vocals and flutes to a song that carries the kosmisch torch. Organs spill over rolling drums and dub reverb, underneath Rubee's cosmic voiceover on "A Naked Star", and the album concludes with "My Eyes Won't Close" a chromatic modular descent into despair, vividly described by nothhingspecial.

It all makes for a gloriously eclectic album, an anarchic pop record that follows its own rules. Move With Intention is both electronic yet alive, motorik and pastoral, filled with dancefloor grooves and a krautrock swagger. In this sense the intention is clear: to respectfully rip up the rule book and keep moving forward.

The Psychedelic Side of Kosmische Musik Fellow humans, Bureau B invite you on an expedition to Silberland, a singular span of spacetime created by Germany's sonic futurists of the seventies and eighties. Embracing the early electronics and tape experiments of the sixties' avant-garde, these artists aimed to boldly go, eschewing small steps for giant leaps into a nebulous and novel sound.

Limited to 150 copies. Yellow double LP edition.

‘Destiny Waiving’ completes a collaborative trilogy that began with 2011’s ‘Underrated Silence’ and followed by 2013’s ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day’ (Schnauss also became a full time member of Engineers at this time). Initial sessions began at Ulrich’s East London home studio in early 2017 and final mixes were completed there in late 2020. Despite its extended conception, most tracks were completed during 2017, in part informed by improvisational sets in London, Dublin and St James’ Church in Birmingham (as part of the Seventh Wave electronica festival).

Available on LP/CD/digital plus a limited edition with a bonus disc of alternate versions with added live drums by the Von Spar drummer Jan-Phillip Janzen.

We also offer the limited yellow colored edition.

Started as the so called “Krautrock Guerrilla” in 2012, six years later the Berlin combo Camera are releasing their fourth full-length album. Customarily associated with the likes of NEU! and La Düsseldorf it is
time to allow Camera to break free of the krautrock tradition and accept that they are very much doing their own thing now. Motto: “It's not repetition, it’s discipline”
For fans of nominative determinism, there can be few more apposite appelations than Michael Drummer. He is the catalyst, the chain mail vapour trail linking everything together as he crosses the soundscape of everything captured on Camera. The band’s moniker Camera, meanwhile, is an altogether more capricious
calling card. Camera obscura. Camera lucida. From daguerrotype to digital, self-induction to selfies. The song title Super 8 offers a potential clue to the
camera in their mind’s eye. When Super 8 was introduced in 1965, it was one of the few film formats to accommodate a sound track, occupying the
space between the edge of the film and the image area. Perhaps this will serve as a nice analogy when pondering where Camera’s music comes
from. Emotional Detox is the fourth full-length album by Camera, now a quintet, following two albums as a trio and one as a duo. The line-up on ED comprises Steffen Kahles, Michael Drummer, Michel Collet, Andreas Miranda and Timm Brockmann, all more or less based in Berlin. Drummer is the only constant through all four phases. Keyboarder Timm
Brockmann, who left the group in 2014, returns to the fold. He and Franz Bargmann, who left Camera the year before him, released a Brockmann //
Bargmann LP entitled Licht on Bureau B in 2017, a celebration of keys, guitars and effects which, at times, emulated the ferocious potential of Camera. By the time Steffen Kahles joined the band, Brockmann had
already departed, so the new ensemble adds another twist in bringing together two keyboard players from different Camera phases for the first time. The Brockmann Drummer reunion, meanwhile, completes a circle tracing back to early Camera experiences shared in 2010/11, playing on the streets of Berlin (literally).
Paradoxically, the new, expanded Camera line-up sharpens the focus of the tracks running through Emotional Detox. With Drummer not so much joining
the dots as hammering them home with a nail gun, the stronger framework allows even greater freedom for the musicians to express and ultimately align their disparate creative interests. Throw a single stone into a pond and concentric circles will ripple outwards into infinity. A swoosh of parallel lines. Boundless symmetry. The soundscape assumes the quality of a cinematic loop, like watching the same film over and over, yet discovering new things each time it plays. As a mythological Mancunian once said before the fall: it’s
not repetition, it’s discipline. Customarily associated with the likes of NEU! and La Düsseldorf perhaps it is time to allow Camera to break free of the krautrock tradition and accept that they are very much doing their own thing now. The “Krautrock Guerrilla” tag was cute and catchy for a while, but the flanged depths of
Himmelhilf sound more Bloody Valentinesque, less like echoes of Cluster or Harmonia. The motorik origins of the band documented on their debut album Radiate! (2012) and the nods to history and William Burroughs on the sophomore Remember I Was Carbon Dioxide (2014) gave way to Commodore 64 playfulness on Phantom of Liberty (2016). A spirit of experimentation still abounds on the new LP, but there’s also evidence that the group have taken a confident step towards something more “pop” – without tearing up the tangled roots beneath the surface of Camera’s studio floor. The reference points are there, but Emotional Detox is not dependent on them. We live in an age when everything happens at the same time – all of your music in one place, instantaneous streams on mobile devices, encyclopaedic references checked in seconds. The
temptation to see connections everywhere can be overwhelming, the speed at which information
travels slows us down. Emotional Detox encourages us to disregard these multiple distractions.
That’s when detoxification kicks in.

The German pioneer of electronic music Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) amassed a vast archive of sounds for use in combination with each other in live performances. In 2011 the idea came up of con-structing new compositions, not remixes, from this material. The Con-Struct series was born. This release features con-structions by Baal & Mortimer who writes about it in the linernotes: It was exciting to break open existing material, peeling something out of the past and thus transgressing it and opening portals. Or like Wolfgang Seidel, a fellow musician of Schnitzler, quoted to me from Schnitzler"s archive: "Music is not the sound waves that reach our ears, but what we make of them." Wer ist Conrad Schnitzler Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011), Komponist und Konzeptkünstler, ist einer der wichtigsten Vertreter deutscher Elektronikmusik-Avantgarde. Er studierte bei Joseph Beuys, gründete 1967/68 den legendären Berliner Subkultur-Club Zodiak Free Arts Lab, war Mitglied bei Tangerine Dream (mit Klaus Schulze und Edgar Froese) und Kluster (mit Hans-Joachim Roedelius und Dieter Moebius) und veröffentlichte unzählige Soloalben. Über Baal & Mortimer Seit 2014 ist Baal & Mortimer das Projekt von Alexandra Grübler, welches musikalisch und sprachlich an Fragen von Widerstand, Autonomie, Materie und Spekulation forscht. Das Debütalbum "Deixis" wurde 2020 auf Bureau B veröffentlicht und die EP "The Torso Tapes" 2021 auf Italic. Im selben Jahr veröffentlichte sie die 7"" Single "And the Sky gave up the Dead" für die Ausstellung "Journey through a Body" in der Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Nach einem Master in Kunstwissenschaften und Philosophie lebt Baal & Mortimer derzeit in Berlin, in den Räumen zwischen Klang, Sprache und Körper. Baal & Mortimer hat mit Black Merlin, Musiccargo und Rupert Clervaux zusammengearbeitet und war 2018 Mentee von Laurel Halo im Berliner Amplify Programm.

‘Destiny Waiving’ completes a collaborative trilogy that began with 2011’s ‘Underrated Silence’ and followed by 2013’s ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day’ (Schnauss also became a full time member of Engineers at this time). Initial sessions began at Ulrich’s East London home studio in early 2017 and final mixes where completed there in late 2020. Despite it’s extended conception, most tracks where completed during 2017, in part informed by improvisational sets in London, Dublin and St James’ Church in Birmingham (as part of the Seventh Wave electronica festival).

"NY, Hel, Barca" is a compilation of Jimi Tenor's early works from the legendary Warp and Sähkö days (1994-2001).

Bureau B present a reissue of Serge Blenner's Magazin Frivole, originally released in 1981. Cold, concise analog synthesizer instrumentals -- on his second album Serge Blenner remained true to his style, albeit shifting course slightly towards pop territory. The juxtaposition of dark harmonies and pop structures is what makes this album so appealing. In places, it feels like a blueprint for early Depeche Mode. Having seen his first album La Vogue (BB 324CD/LP) snapped up by the Sky Records and fast-tracked for release in 1980, Blenner delivered his second LP, Magazin Frivole, the following year. Mindful of the success of its predecessor, Blenner added the name of his debut in big letters to the front cover of the new sleeve. Blenner remained faithful to his musical style, albeit adding more of a pop flavor. Magazin Frivole would not look out of place filed alongside Depeche Mode on the record shelf, as a certain resemblance is undeniable. Moreover, Blenner was one of the few proponents of electronic music who preferred to keep his songs concise, in contrast to the meandering odysseys of many of his electronic contemporaries. The far better-known French artist Jean-Michel Jarre adhered to similar principles, yet although Blenner was often compared to his compatriot, he claims only to have heard his music long after La Vogue had appeared. Minor chords dominate his harmonies, the bass performs octave leaps which mirror the zeitgeist. Unexpected key changes abound, adding a restless, almost disquieting quality. Overall, Magazin Frivole is less dark than the preceding album, but a picture of cheerfulness it is not. Nevertheless, a poppy drum computer introduces a lighter note. From the very first track, chord changes pop up at unexpected junctures -- they seem to come in prematurely, before harmonic sequences have run their course. Blenner doesn't have any explanation for this curiosity, other than to note that "most of the music was played by hand, so of course it wasn't all perfect." "I did all I could to avoid being successful -- on a subconscious level, at least. Unpredictable metrics and irregular beats were definitely part of the process," Blenner admits with an enigmatic smile. Juxtaposed with Blenner's more recent works, one can see what he means. His latest album Musique de Chambre (2008) comprises modern classical chamber music, built on digitally sampled real instruments. Besides, Blenner points out, handling all of those analog devices was a convoluted and complex undertaking.

Limited edition for Record Store Day 2018!

Limited edition for Record Store Day 2018!

Limited edition for Record Store Day 2018!