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Significant Other unveils a new project: Pain Management. A new imprint presenting music and visual media across a variety of formats. The outlet launches with an original 4 track EP: When It Rains.

Christening the label with his first full length release since 2021, the subversive producer steps out from behind the curtain with a batch of tracks guaranteed to soothe psychic woes and challenge sound systems alike.

True to the name of the label, this debut release delivers a healthy dose of leftfield club weight. Tough and tender in equal measure, it’s a record that explores in-between zones. A fever dream of narrative experiments at the outer edges of club music, packing enough punch to shake a dancefloor, but enough delicacy to soundtrack the ride home. The final product is a meeting of outsider sonics and sleazy dance tropes, body music for restless minds.

The record begins with the lead single ‘rpg’ (a1). A smoked out, drug chug power ballad featuring fellow NYC underground alum James K. Anchored around a growling 4/4 battle beat, swells of dub and inchoate vocal cries rise intermittently from the haze. Within the fever dream fugue of thuggish sub weight and engine-room crud, a tender, sustained warmth shimmers.

A2’s ‘I Get Such Bad Headaches’ is a twisted club thumper built around a questioning vocal refrain. It’s a tongue in cheek nod to the label’s origins that takes shape in a sleazy beat track with some serious club weight. Slowed n’ chopped to the maximum, it’s a low slung sleeper-hit with attitude. DJ Screw meets Tylenol PM, a bass-boosted anthem for the neural punishment enjoyer.

The B-side opens with the title track, ‘When It Rains (It Pours)’, a droned out mess of distant voices and textural grit. Anchored around the titular looping axiom, the track has a deathly, abyssal weight to it. A claustrophobic hymn of surrender, faithful to its stark refrain.

‘Bad Blood’ wraps the record on a tender note. A sluggish heartbeat pumps beneath the fog of dub delays and distortion, propelling forward a lethargic rhythm. Out of nowhere a blissed out synth line pierces the tension. A sharp, emotive melody disrupting the paramnesia with something new. If the record’s title track suggests a downward spiral through some psychic storm, then ‘Bad Blood’ shows the outline of dry land coming slowly into focus.

Art Direction by Ciaran Birch

Absis returns to Hivern Discs with his Fenix EP. Six cuts that dive deep into Salva's more abstract and slow side keeping his signature reverberating drums and droning landscapes. Comes with poster that will be printed, together with the sleeve, at L'Anacronica in Barcelona, with letterpress on a shiny silver cardboard.

An exciting new addition to the Spazio Disponibile family. For their 29th release Neel and Donato Dozzy welcome close friend and highly respected French electronic musician David Letellier as Kangding Ray. On his Polar EP he pushes his excellent sound design once again and delivers a pack of beautiful sparkling experimental techno.

Audiophile pressing (45 Rpm). Packaged in a deluxe, gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket. Hi-res download included.

Junko Tange’s second and final album - a minimalistic, phantasmagoric masterpiece of distant, dreamlike voices woven through pulsating, dubbed-out drum machines, synths and static, originally issued by Osaka’s Vanity Records in 1981. Did this unassuming dental student (who vanished from the music world following this release) inadvertently invent dub techno? You be the judge. Label head Yuzuru Agi said this was his favorite Vanity release, and it’s not hard to see why. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from new transfers of the original analog tapes, this fully authorized 2LP is the definitive edition of this landmark electronic work.

Two years after his acclaimed ‘Darkos LP’, Jonquera is back to Charlieu’s surrounding vales for his second album on Bamboo Shows.

Through ‘La Croix des Cros’, the French Musician delivers a loner-folk eclogue about the fantasized inner demons of a country dweller. Just like clay, audio recordings here are a malleable substance, slowly reworked over a year, following a sinuous production process where all mishaps are welcomed as breaches to step into.

Far from the spaghetti western myth of the reckless bounty hunter, riding his faithful horse in the great outdoors to spill blood; this 14-track album is the grieving lament of a wistful cowboy, longing for a simple patch of peace where one’s free to cultivate the earth and noodle on the guitar.

Heldon’s cosmic space-rock, Badalamenti’s Twin-Peaksesque foggy jazz or Morricone’s glorious soundtracks, so many references to portray another fertile imprint by Jonquera, available from February 13, 2023 on a 12” vinyl.

Originally released in France in 1998, Vibractance is one of the most unique and haunting titles in Merzbow’s vast catalog. It’s unique drone, noise, almost ambient like qualities makes this a great starting point for adventurer ears but also an essential album for the initiated. A true journey into the unknown where pulsating sonar waves swim between a sea of eerie beauty and tangible dreams. Celebrating it’s 25th anniversary, Aurora Central Records proudly presents its first ever vinyl and cassette release.

“There is a German satellite falling to earth!” a woman’s voice urgently announces. “She says, what if it hits me? Welcome to anxiety group.” A dense cloud on the horizon heralds a fresh onslaught from that infamous swarm of free jazz killer bees, a new project from self-described “conceptual kleptomaniac post digital free jazz outfit” Drone Operatør. Riding hard along the line between experimental electronics, blockbuster sound design and the loosest jazz improvisation, this rogue’s gallery of players, headed up by art world provocateurs Paul Barsch and Tilman Horning, take the fevered pulse of the relentlessly flattened now and note down four key observations which presented together make up Welcøme TO Anxiety Group. Coaxing lively theatricality from a continually provoked altercation between acoustic instrumentation and synthetic sound, each of the project’s four tracks provides a new perspective on what it means to improvise through technological mediation. “Here we are now,” write Drone Operatør. “22 after 2k. mp4 flex to 32bit float. The sax - the heart. The quadcopter - the brain. Duo d'Allemagne not wasting a life time learning jazz standards.” To open proceedings, our faithful operatør whips up exquisite dissonance with ‘Bot Møther’, smashing together squalls of saxophone and ripples of percussion with the sounds of sci-fi artillery, like an amphetamine-fuelled, midnight jam hammered out oblivious to an ongoing alien invasion. Slowing to a furtive creep for ‘German Satellite’, picking out keenly felt anxiety in suggestive plucks, stuttering clacks and strained wails, their cosmic warning signalling a neurotic climax before settling back into a post-coital skitter, flourishes of keys, both digital and analogue, harmonising with Drone Operatør’s weary welcome to the group. Eschewing the electronic completely for the cacophonous gallop of ‘Røhrstøck’, we’re invited to hold on for dear life during a mad scramble towards the ‘The Vessel,’ a staggering sequence of tumbling synthetic chimes, embellished with peals of ornate sax that flare up and out to illuminate the track’s irregularity, alternately submerged and retrieved through a subtle manipulation of filters. It’s a session that has to be heard to be believed, crammed with as much difficulty and as much revelation as any good therapy should. As Drone Operatør describe: “From iconic spamming to intellectual nonsense. Always never predictable, never not cheesy. Battery life cycles full of joy. You say you like free jazz. We don’t believe you.” Welcøme to Anxiety Group will be released on July 29th, 2021 by Participant, on limited edition clear red vinyl, and digital download via the Participant Bandcamp. The release will be accompanied by a series of films by Drone Operatør, featuring editing, FX, and CGI by digital artist Darío Alva. Text by: Henry Bruce Jones Participant is a record label and creative studio run by filmmaker William Markarian-Martin and conceptual artist Richie Culver

The idea for a remix LP came about following the incredibly positive reception that greeted “The Flow Across Borders” upon its release in May last year. After the services of The Orb and Richard Norris were secured by the label, Frazer and Ali asked some of their favourite artists on Castles in Space to contribute remixes for the project, which subsequently grew into a wonderful overview of both the scope and diversity of the band’s output and the skill and sensitivity of the remixers. Frazer Brown: “As the tracks started to come in, we realised that this collection was going to be something very special. The Orb remix is classic Orb, Richard Norris’ contribution is pure bliss, and the fact that this is the first official remix that Concretism has ever done is especially thrilling. Every track is astounding…”

Ali O’May and Frazer Brown met in early 2018 while performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic (emom) gig in Edinburgh. With obvious common interests, further discussions lead a few months later to Ali passing Frazer a USB drive filled with stems recorded directly from Ali’s vast modular system. Across August and September 2019, Frazer used about a dozen of those stems as the foundation for a set of tracks, building them into fully realised pieces across a range of styles from techno, lo-fi, breaks, acid house and ambient. And thus was born the Dohnavúr method - Ali coaxing the raw materials from his modular set up and Frazer working them up instinctively with his encyclopaedic knowledge of electronic music into tracks for which the feel, genre and direction is inspired by Ali’s foundational building blocks. Sleeve artwork is once again handled by Mark Hall.

Hajj's Dawn label returns with a limited CD drop from Modern Collaspe Recommended if you're into Youth & Bfdm.

Tensor Norm is back. In this ocassion, we visit differents locations of the world geography to bring you an EP full of electro, breaks, acid and IDM.

Side A goes into the coordinates of dark electro in different ways. “Cell Reprogramming” by Clone Theory (one of its members is Heuristic Audio) is a spatial track with smooth percussion, a heavy, oscillating bassline and minimal melodic design. On “Automorphism”, Sigma_ALgebra resorts to smooth percussion and a drone-like oscillating bassline to generate a floating feel, over which choppy, lightning-like melodic profiles occur. Finally, north american LectrO cOd-E, speeds up the tempo to expose the military round bass, synth twitches and vocoder transmissions of “Morphology”.

Side B is incided in borderline spaces with the incorporation of acid sounds as main elements. After an opening that programs the rhythmic structure and adds pad atmosphere, “Amenacid” by Liðvarð aka DJ VLR ratchets up the tension through a brief acid line modified steadily but subtly. The EP closes with “Phanaire Luses”, a track with typical IDM resources with which, through the accumulation of bleep-like emissions, acid figures, sparks and amorphous sounds, Jaquarius builds a psychedelic track.