Ecstatic Electronic & Dance 11 Artikel

Above All Dreams is Abul Mogard’s beautifully absorbing new album for Ecstatic - his first since the Circular Forms and his popular Works compilation. Counting six original pieces in its 66 minute wingspan, there’s no mistaking that Above All Dreams is the most expansive solo release by Mogard to date. Taking into account its intangible divinity and cinematic quality - the result of no less than three years diligent work - it is arguably elevated to the level of his master opus; presenting a modular distillation of Mogard’s most intoxicating strain of hauntology.

Limited Edition White Vinyl (300 copies), includes a fold-out insert with images and detailed text by Lucy Howarth, curator of Moss’s recent exhibitions, plus a Moss original on the other side. Following a major retrospective at The Tate St Ives, forgotten art maverick Marlow Moss (1889-1958) - a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art - is the inspiration and the focus of this new LP from Primitive World for the Ecstatic label. Crafted from various synth improvisations, including the rare and tricky PPG Wave synth/sampler, it comes highly recommended if you’re into Peder Mannerfelt’s brut ambient, Raster Noton’s grid-based rhythmic fascinations, or Pan Sonic at their most glacial.

Juan Mendez a.k.a Silent Servant finds his ideal EBM vocal foil in Ori Ofir under their Sterile Hand moniker. The duo’s first vinyl round for Not Waving’s Ecstatic label is a dark and sleazy run of deviant industrial techno and pugilistic EBM cuts made over the last year.

Not Waving takes 2017 by the scruff with his Populist EP, consolidating the myriad stripes of his acclaimed Animals album in four extended peaktime hammers forged for darkrooms, basements and warehouses alike.

If last year’s LP saw you thru from day-into-night, or vice-versa, this one is aimed squarely at the gurny hours of abandon in between, with ferocious acid lines and jabbing drums stripped down and strapped up to prompt reckless behaviour on the ‘floor.

Containing his first material written in the wake of Animals, the Populist EP is Alessio Natalizia a.k.a. Not Waving’s strongest dancefloor statement since the one-sided Get Serious (2015) bullet.
It finds him taking the opportunity to make straight-up bangers, rather than ‘songs’, which were thoroughly tried and tested over successive tours of the USA and countless shows in Europe too in
the last 9 months.

Too Many Freaks is an anthem in waiting, harnessing a barely-hinged sense of chaos between its
careening synth lead, acid squabble and velvet-clad kicks, before the dry-rutting jag and plaintive vox of Vibe Killer takes a dog-grip like This Heat meeting Tuning Circuits. Top marks go to the check-your-stylus intro for Control Myself on the B-side, which holds its fizzy line into a fetid crevice of what sounds Russell Haswell ramping with Powell, whereas the crooked clampjaw groove of Ur Lucky Ur Still Alive pivots around a sample a lone raver at Atonal, Berlin “who had no idea how she got there and what she did the night before”. A ruddy good night all-round, then?

Not Waving co-owns the Ecstatic label alongside Sam Willis. Not Waving is widely regarded a connoisseur of Italian new wave and post-punk music - he compiled the Mutazione (Italian Electronic & New Wave Underground 1980-1988) set for Strut - and has issued a series of acclaimed, sought-after, playfully anachronistic twists on that sound since 2013.

A download code is included. Futuro’ is Not Waving’s sublime synth/ambient soundtrack to one of the world’s most intense art/theatre experiences: Sean Rogg’s radical immersive artwork ‘The Waldorf Project’ - fusing choreography, spatial design, music and performance into a cohesive experience.

Pop subversives Beth Roberts and Andrew Hargreaves (The Boats, Tape Loop Orchestra) pose their 2nd album as The Mistys with ‘Pregnant Mannequin’, following some five years on from their debut album ‘Redemption Forest’. It basically sounds like an incredible, saccharine shoegaze/dreampop album recorded to a salvaged D90 tape that’s about to disintegrate, warbling in and out of time. Referencing a wealth of pop archetypes via their uniquely claggy, recombinant filter to render a new vision for subversive pop music, Beth Roberts’ sugary vocals are smudged and buried deeper in the mix, processed with fizzing textures that only add an extra poignancy and a sense of struggle to the classic pathos of her voice. In key, Andrew Hargreaves lends some of his most sharpened, devastating hooks, bringing their project closer to a polysemous conception of ambient-EBM-pop.

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.

Richard Smith a.k.a L/F/D/M reports four barrelling hardware shots from London’s EBM and techno underworld with the tense, nervous energy of his Crocodiles in the Ceiling EP for Not Waving’s Ecstatic label following a slew of ‘floor-wreckers with Optimo Trax and Diagonal (Bronze Teeth, Green Gums with former Factory Floor member Dom Butler).