Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 415 Items

The Love Buzz of Scary de Jong.

'Zo overkwam het Krist Novoselic dat hij “Love Buzz" van het Haagse Shocking Blue tegenkwam en - onder de indruk van Klaasje van der Wal zijn basspel - deze meenam naar een repetitie. "Love Buzz" werd de eerste single van Nirvana. "Het Love Buzz van Scary de Jong" is wederom Haags en een weerklank op deze gebeurtenis.'

Monastics was active in New York City in the late 2000s / early 2010s. While the trio of EJ Fry, Don Chase, and Jeremy Hurewitz have scattered to different parts of the country, they have remained close and during the pandemic connected through the isolation of quarantine and began swapping tracks. With tape loops, beats, electronics, and guitar (which listeners might recognize from Jeremy’s Rootless project), “World Island” reflects a changing world that is being eclipsed by darkness but where fragments of light emerge, beguiling and beautiful. The voices of south Asian children on “I come from nowhere,” the soft rain loops recorded on a hutong on Beijing on “For K, Parts 1&2,” and the stark ache of “contactless delivery” strangely offer a feeling of global solidarity for a moment in time when everyone was experiencing some version of the same thing, a “World Island” that we were all temporarily placed on.

Having lived and worked in numerous musical directions for many years, Semay Wu’s begrudgingly faithful cello still remains at her side: from Merseyside, to Manchester, to The Netherlands, and now to Central Scotland. Always trying to push age-old boundaries of how the instrument is viewed and heard, her focus has led her to explore further collaborative and everyday improvisations, blending electronics with mixed media and a variety of gestural art disciplines.

Raspberry Hotel is Semay’s first foray into recorded solo work. Finding it hard to stick to any one brief, she filled out a room of a local studio space, with toys, everyday objects, instruments, and her cello. Sitting on the floor, she recorded whatever came to mind. A week-long session of improvisations were then taken home, spliced up and pieces were composed and mixed. Raspberry Hotel is made up of fleeting, off-the-cuff performances, that can be listened to as separate tracks or as one long piece.

Instruments: cello, voice, toys & electronics.

Originally born in days of a global lockdown, Johannes Albert gets ready for a second round of Ambient music. "Spessart II" follows the footprints of its predecessor and keeps things mostly quiet yet very thrilling at the same time. Starting off with "Frischling" the beat maker takes us on a calm synth trip through his home forest Spessart, using wild boar - Wildschwein - vocabulary all the way. Sparks of early Downbeat ("Gewaff"), even Trip Hop ("Überläufer") and instrumental Sade ("Leitbache") occur in the well balanced 8 track album. Johannes' dad Rudi adds to the vibe playing the Jagdhorn on "Keiler". If you like the band "The Art Of Noise" you will most likely love this too.

"The New World" is the second album by Bologna Violenta. Released for the first time in 2010 by Bar La Muerte, it is a record that in just over 20 minutes tells in a grotesque way the atrocities of the world in which we live. The extreme sound is underlined by samplings that bring to mind the narratives that accompanied the much reviled world movies of the 60s in which the oddities of the human being followed one another on the screen between the serious and the humorous, between the horror and the eroticism, between news and fiction, seamlessly.

Edition of 70.

Art by Thilo Jenssen Layout by Kin40k & Semj

Guitar and electronics: Alf Brooks Saxophone: Pete Cunningham Bass, objects and strings: Emanuele Porcinai

Originally released in 2013, this full length collaboration from Duane Pitre and Eleh is now available on cassette. Pitreleh use high resolution analog and digital tools to create music utilizing natural vibrations and harmonics as rhythm and melody. Inspiration is drawn directly from vibrational waves (sound, gravity, water). The electronics, of which both pieces are constructed, are tuned using pure intonation which utilizes the prime numbers: 1-3-5-7. The debut live performance of Pitreleh was recently presented at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn as well as the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

“A Magnetic Road to Hell” is Robert Millis and Bardo Todol’s first release as a duo. Recorded transcontinentally throughout 2021 and 2022 they traded sounds and ideas between Cordoba, Argentina and Seattle, USA with a stop in Mexico along the way: screamings, rivers, kids, radios, mellotron, records, 78rpm shellac, wax cylinders, field recordings, birds, electronics, guitars, percussion, haze, static, a destroyed Indian piano, talkative violins, talkative people from the 1920s, talkative black and white dreams, tin cans from the streets, Argentinian children's tales about cows being teachers, and more. You’re riding on an unspooling reel of tape, through sounds real and imagined, the tape flapping dangerously, shredding; we are all of us magnetized, attracting together, pushing apart, unwinding onto the floor, stumbling along the road to hell. Robert Millis and Bardo Todol have each released music on many different labels: Sublime Frequencies, Dinzu Artefacts, The Helen Scardale Agency, Discrepant, Abduction Records, Dust-to-Digital, Fire Breathing Turtle, Sub Pop, and Ikuisuus.

Odd and fluid tape manipulations by Gonçalo F. Cardoso’s most bizarre moniker, Hannibal Chew III. Grabbing the deteriorated recordings left over from his 2017 trip to the title island and letting his imagination and machines run free, the journey here is hectic: mud, rain, radio jingles, crickets, confusing conversations and random mall music resulting in an eternal looping impression from whatever was ingrained. A dream/nightmare logic that manages to never make total sense, we should be thankful for that as nothing, ever is really like we remember so why should this be? ‘’In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost’’ Mark Fisher in Ghost of my Life Based on half remembered memories from the island of Borneo, 2017. All tracks were later re-composed under semi-lockdown in Lisbon, 2020. Pressed on a limited edition of 100 copies Artwork by Pablo Picco

Andean inspired home recordings from Tomás Tello - solo and with friends. ACA (roughly translated as right here) is a new project by Tomás Tello enabling him to collaborate with whoever crosses his paths creating a truly mystifying journey of highland mysticism crossed with late night bonfire jams, whichever way you look at it Tello keeps the South American experimentalism torch flying high above in the starry sky. Tomás had this to say about the album: ‘’Where I live the crickets never stop chirping… and during quarantine they kept going and going and going … Grillito (small cricket in Spanish) was recorded in Tavira, Portugal between 2019 and 2020 in various impromptu sessions. Side A begins, appropriately, with the theme Grillito ... the opening is inspired by the music of the Sikuris. Next comes Yarabits, recorded with Raul Jardín and Aya. I recorded the rest of the side by myself including some field recordings of the Quelccaya glaciar in Cuzco, Peru. Side B extends the concept to its illogical conclusion with an infinity mix between the Quelccaya recordings and various songs that I recorded with Daniel Llermaly on bass and a Nintendo making simple beats...I also decided to include an homemade cover of Olas de Verano by Los Pakines and a cumbia samba by Juaneco y su combo. Eventually the album peaks with a long section I recorded with Laura Robles using the Cajón... I mixed those recordings with others of the Pacific Ocean spray in Lima. It’s really nice to have this music committed to tape because when I started playing music it was with Laura Robles, so it's really special to have recorded this! Grillito, for me, is a displacement between different memories and fantasies that appear when I remember traveling on Peruvian roads... each theme is like looking through a window on a bus...you sleep and wake up and you are in another type of territory...in the desert...in the highlands....in the city... in a small town ... next to the sea … inside your memory... these are long, long trips ... The little crickets are there to remind us that we are not alone... a nature musical gift. ‘’