Ecstatic Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 4 Items

Edition of 300 copies. A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic ‘inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin’s estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using Amqr - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

mari maurice aka more eaze returns to Ecstatic with a tenderly gorgeous solo side after her standout claire rousay collaboration last year for the same label - a big recommendation if yr into Elysia Crampton, Mica Levi, MBV, Vegyn, Organ Tapes, Grouper, Dntel, Nozomu Matsumoto, Rainy Miller.

Nestling in the space between ambient, indie-/synth-, and what’s now termed hyper-pop, more eaze specialises in lower case songcraft that effortlessly gets under the skin. Featuring notable guest input by Spivak, Dialect, and Pam3, ‘The Joker’ is perhaps more eaze’s most significant long player, forming a filigree distillation of soft-touch, emo-core pop styles wreathed in fractal electronics and blessed by a gentle sensitivity that feels like micro-dosing with mates on a sunny day.

’The Joker’ was inspired by more eaze’s experiences travelling extensively during 2021-22, absorbing and transmuting time spent meeting new people, seeing new places, and watching established relationships change. Like regular spar claire rousay, ‘The Joker’ finds micro-insights crystallised to odd-pop imperfection, merging ohrwurm hooks with field recordings and traces of electronica, R&B, reggaeton, and classic indie-rock chops to divine a personal truth that should resonate with lovers of low key ambient as much as hi-key poptimism.

Through nine subtly effected snapshots of daily life, mari somehow encapsulates the feeling of trying to endear yourself to someone new, the tactility of another’s touch, chuckling at misfired jokes. Beginning with fractured toytronics and autotune vox in ‘yours’, melodies spill over from the Dntel-like licks of ‘fall apart’, to the mutant shoegaze bliss of ‘vindictive’ (it properly sounds like an autotuned version of MBV’s ‘to here knows when’), plus E+E-via-Palmistry reggaeton of ‘hablar contagion', with Spivak lending featherlight vox to ‘a chat’, while ‘comedy’ dials up a sense of outsider irony with a wry shrug.

Liverpool-via-Brooklyn’s Dialect helps seal the deal with the burbling touch of ‘eyeliner’, a fittingly hypnagogic ending to a dreamlike album whose effect lingers like latent fractals of a therapeutic psilocybin session.

Master synthesists Colin Potter (nww), Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving), and Guido Zen reprise their supergroup for Ecstatic with a seductively serpentine follow-up to their superb debut from a couple of years ago. PNZ’s pulsing, twanging, expansive ‘Magari’ was recorded between 2018-2020 in the slipstream of ’Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out’, which is surely one of the strongest new kosmiche-related albums of recent years. Where that album refreshed classic styles of European synth music for modern ears, ‘Magari’ - meaning “I Wish” in Italian - adapts their style to the unique Afro-Latin lilt of Brazilian music with central use of the Berimbau; a single-stringed percussion instrument commonly associated with the elegant martial art/dance of Capoeira, which the band’s Guido Zen brought home from his travels in South America. Combined with their juicy, almost fleshly arps and Guitar pedal-generated computer voice, the results are wonderfully wide-eyed, embracing bouts of motorik rhythm beside vertiginous noise wormholes and mystic tone poems that speak to a cumulative experience spanning decades spent hunting for life between the wires.

Novo Line reprises the meter-messing genius of his Movements album with the Dyad mini LP - a brilliantly uncompromising follow-up for Ecstatic. Exclusively using the tools of ’88/’89 professional recording set-ups - namely the Atari ST, but with a slight algorithmic alteration. While it’s increasingly hard to find new tricks in old gear, especially with the resurgence of hardware fetishism and the ubiquity of DAWs, that’s exactly what Nat Fowler has been doing for the best part of a decade as Novo Line. By, in his own words, “misusing one algorithmic composition program (not, by a longshot, a professional music production tool of any epoch) contained in 208kb of data on a 3.5” floppy disk”, He generates and explores new permutations of old music which, ironically enough, sound fresher or at least more innovative than a lot of new music in circulation right now.Inputting ever-changing parameters of melody, and 29 year old algorithms, the machine’s voice is live-mixed and presented un-rendered as maxed-out waveforms via 1MB RAM, resulting in a severely compressed and combusting effect that leave mastering and sound engineers the world over scratching their heads in puzzlement. However, the effect is equally enthralling to anyone whose ears have become overly accustomed to contemporary emulations of ‘space’ in electronic music, and genuinely sound unique in relief of the contemporary field.The release poses a playful question: can a record be ambivalent as to which speed it should be played? Celebrating vinyl and futhermore physical media, the listener is encouraged to find their exact speed of preference with the RPM toggle and pitch slider, that nearly forgotten joy in modifying speed in real time without a CPU mediating between the listener and sound; some tracks stumble heavily at 33rpm like boulders in the tumble dry, while others flash by at 45. In the taut, recoiling thud of Monad, thru the frenetic pop edit of Ennead to the ‘floor-curdling prong of Dyad Marcia on the front, to the forceful New Beat mutation Tetrad, and the mind bending Melpomenean Dyad which closes the LP, its some heavily challenging but deeply satisfying gear that seriously yet playfully messes with convention.Essentially Novo Line is revelling in the pure spirit of computer music and the sonification of dance music as we know it - born in the ’88/’89 phenomenon of techno-house music, including its Industrial/EBM precedents, and its New Beat/Euro House offshoots. And like John McCusker’s delectable artwork of a beige room and monitors interwoven with tubular, computer generated follies, Novo Line provides a captivating perspective that shortcircuits nostalgia’s illness to result in a killer vaccine against/for convention.