Night School Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 4 Items

Slovak-Hungarian musician Adela Mede explores the interplay between voice and technology with field recordings. She sings in three languages (Slovak, Hungarian and English). Intimate ambient utterances with themes of spiritual growth accompanied by experimental electronics with a wide scope of influences; from minimalism to folklore. Initially released in early 2022 to universal acclaim on digital and cassette, Night School is extremely excited to share Szabadság on vinyl. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux for vinyl, the clearer format teases out new nuances in the music, revealing a physicality and permanence to Mede’s first masterwork. "Szabadság is a navigation. This debut by Adela Mede, recorded in her family home on the Slovakian border with Hungary, searches through the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past and present. Examining both the vulnerability and determination of her voice - as it leaves the lips, raw, and in the ways it can be transformed with digital processing - the embodied memories of language, of utterance, are explored. Airy, open sound worlds and tentative strings of improvised naked vocal transform themselves into insistent repetition. Fizzing, sparkling electronics are set against the beautiful grainy depth of field recordings. The locations, these places, are found and lost - home is found and lost - in a dance of fragmented vocal harmonies. Three languages (English, Hungarian, Slovak) weave a song of spring, nature, forgiveness, togetherness and rebirth.” – words by Lisa Busby “Ostensibly speaking, Szabadság, the debut album from Adela Mede, is an avant-garde/experimental composition record with a deep interest in voice. Peel back the layers, and it’s also an art-pop record that reaches for the stars.” - Dazed “The vocals on Szabadság navigate between three languages: Hungarian, Slovak, and English. But the melancholy inflexion in her voice transcends meanings, words, and linguistic systems across any borders.” - The Quietus “It’s an exploration of what it means to find home across different countries, cities and languages, revelling in the dis/comfort of a life stretched across borders” - The Wire

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, »If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best« is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date.

Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release »If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst,« 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If »I Can’t Handle« was lo fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit revelling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern.

Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Since her 2016 debut, Logan has released music as Time Binding Ensemble, Otherworld, in groups Anxiety and Herbert Powell and myriad variations on the Helena Celle moniker. This album is a riposte to her debut and updates its principles. Joyful, degraded Jungle breaks, Cyberpunk synth meltdown, noise solos, true head music, like the furthest Aphex Twin being deep friend in a Glasgow backwater.

Transcendentally beautiful, The Space Lady's music is returning to Earth. Transmitting messages of peace and harmony, The Space Lady began her odyssey on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, then San Francisco ten years later, playing versions of contemporary pop music with an accordion and dressed flamboyantly. Following the theft and destruction of her accordion , The Space Lady invested in a then-new Casio keyboard, complete with a phase shifter and headset mic, birthing an otherworldly new dimension to popular song that has captured the imaginations of the underground and its leading exponents ever since. The legend of The Space Lady has continued to grow in the 21st century. Following inclusions on compilations by John Maus, Erol Alkan and Irwin Chusid's "Songs In The Key of Z," the benevolent spectre of The Space Lady inspired humanity from afar in the mists of time and obscurity. 2013 sees the first official release of The Space Lady's music following a hand-dubbed cassette and CD in the early 90s. These recordings were recorded in 1990 for that hand-made release and have now been remastered by Brian Pyle (Ensemble Economique).

Circular patterns morphing through time, loop and ritual form the fabric of Proserpine, the latest work by Leeds-based musician, Teresa Winter. Recorded from a summer to a winter through 2021 and 2022, Proserpine is Winter's most cohesive, focused music to date: confidently revelling in space, fixating on isolated sounds and giving way to satisfying, swirling waves of vocal and electronic buzz. Proserpine is Teresa Winter's debut recording for Glasgow-based label, Night School.

On Proserpine, musical patterns revolve and intersect with each other, transmogrifying the music's narrative. Over-arching themes emerge: continual change, elusiveness. Insubstantiality emerges into concrete reality in the form of recognisable field recordings: the purring of a pet cat, the hum of a live cable. The loops and patterns are sometimes just out of sight, the click and whirl on Child Of Nature is the backdrop to hymnal vocalisations by Winter, who intones spell-like text in conversation with herself. On opener Circles, Winter's vocal is pre-linguistic, detached syllables falling into flowing streams, before Plume's field recordings seem to juxtapose nocturnal and diurnal wildlife. "You said I was a Flower Of The Mountain" sings Winter, as James Joyce's Molly Bloom does but the carpe diem desire in Ulysses is dissipated here, spread out by gauzy, droning organs. Here desire is blown up and out, changed into something undefinable but no less powerful.

Change is at the heart of the album. The Roman goddess Proserpine, herself a reimagined version of the earlier Greek goddess Persephone, is always between: between summer and winter, the land of the living and the underworld, constantly emerging into new states of being. It's a fitting metaphor for Winter's work. Like an Apple feels like it soundtracks this in-between state, long, trailing reverb smudging synth keys and Winter's achingly beautiful vocal performance. The effect is stirring but flitting in and out of perception, sometimes Winter's presence feels of this world, of musical instruments and practises and at others it feels like the music is about to phase into a different plane, a different universe.

While Proserpine references the myths and cults of the classical, pre-Christian era, Winter's restless preoccupation with the mechanics of religion informs the album in other ways. Ritual is present through out, either in the mantra-like vocalisations or even the private rituals we are invited to witness: on Fireworks the listener eave drops into the protagonist's private bonfire. On the stunning Lamento, layers of Choral vocal interlock in celestial patterns that recall catholic mass: it's an overt effect that simulates the ecstasy of religious fervour and also reminds the listener of the use of vocal that runs through Proserpine. Winter's vocals often echo with the euphoria of obliteration, of disintegrating in an awful bliss. It's an effect achieved with finality by the closer New Water as the piece begins with voice before burning up in the atmosphere of elegiac violins and enveloping undertows of whirring synth patterns and ghostly pads. Proserpine is forever turning, changing, always elusive and quietly revelatory.