Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 412 Items

Gatos Negros, aka Madrid DJs/ producers Christian C. & Iván Smoka, second album 'Hi Score' is a texture and abstraction gambling project now on sale via Vasco Ispirian's Made in Green Records label. 'Hi Score' sees the duo sailing ethereal ambient soundscapes, shady alt rock waves, experimental grooves almost horizontally danceable, acid electro-pop & avant-garde electronica- all in an utterly smart, consistent, and effective vocal fashion.

»Sucesiones« is a compilation of studies written for 53 equal divisions of the octave (53 Edo). This tuning temperament was selected after analyzing the work of Mexican researcher and visionary Augusto Novaro, one of the microtonal and just intonation pioneer theorists. Novaro claims that 53 EDO is one of rich musical qualities, which has good approximations to the harmonic series. The use of simple textures such as sine waves was a conscious decision, this in order to maintain the focus on the relationship between the frequencies and the possibilities this tuning allows, that fluctuate from aggressive beat frequencies to pure intervals

The album "Interstitial" is a document of a musical experiment, created in collaboration of the musicians Oh No Noh, Jenny Berger Myhre and F.S.Blumm.
The title refers to the process of the album's creation, to the letting go and filling of interstices, the temporally and spatially staggered collaborative composing, the accompanying addition and omission with the foresight to leave room for the ideas of others - without knowing how they would ultimately sound.
The three musicians layered individual elements from field recordings and improvisations into new units. The music developed in this way is a trance-like snapshot and spans wide arcs of ambient, sound art and soundscapes. Oh No Noh, Jenny Berger Myhre and F.S.Blumm each composed a piece, which served as the basis for the overlays of the other two musicians. Each of the three resulting pieces was processed, directed and shaped in its timbre and structure in different ways. The titles of the tracks describe the order of the overdubs (JBM Jenny Berger Myhre, FS Frank Schültge, MR Markus Rom).

Long serving veterans of the electronic scene Somatic Responses are back on Acroplane Recordings with Doomsday Conduit - their 4th LP on the Irish imprint. Always looking forward, the Healy brothers have crafted an album with two distinct identities, presented on either side of a limited edition cassette.

On Side A of this run of 100 tapes, the somewhat introspective opener Other Destinations breaks the ice to make way for the heavyweight material that the Welsh duo are known so well for. The aptly named Photon Barrage features frantic acid lines and punishing breaks, followed by the title track where pulsating bass lines dominate the neo-jungle landscape. Synth layers unfurl in the fast paced The Fault Inside Us, leading to a change of velocity in the form of Slewed Diffusion where the marching percussion is pierced by hyperspace drills.

The B side sees the Somatics exploring the acid drenched, electro occupied realm of their collective output. 2Hlec kicks off with morphing mechanical breaks. Imagined Darkness (Elektro Mix) follows with the sounds of machines engaged in mutual destruction. Process Layer is stripped back in comparison, almost hypnotic, eventually decomposing into a chorus of digital lamentations. SLec has one foot in a post-apocalyptic Detroit, with the other located somewhere off-world. Closing the LP out is the dark ambient ode to the void, Tec Cymru.

The mech-scape imagery for this release has been designed by Timothée Mathelin (www.futurorg.com) and features full colour on shell printing on both sides of the LP's blue cassette.

Mastering for this release is by Alex Lennon at Ashmus Mastering.

In line with his recent body of work, Uwe Zahn bundled minimal compositions telling narratives situating in the melodic realm of ambient music. On first sight, it seems common that one can enter or construct such stories through the melodies these compositions offer. However, melodies never stand on their own – maybe only theoretically – but in fact truly reveal their magic through the sonical context they’re embedded in. To Zahn, a crucial part of his practice is all about this latter notion. Finding the sweet – and sometimes hidden – spots in sound-design that allow him to express the narratives he wants to share. »Seismograf« could be seen as an ode to this exploration and devoted to the practice of listening - to hear sounds that are otherwise inaudible.

Written and mixed by Mona Steinwidder. Mastered by Gavin Weiss.

Music performed, recorded and mixed by Till Hormann. Mastered by René Huthwelker. Cover photograph by Raphael Dillhof.

Pro-dubbed C-42 Tape with a Letter-press J-Card / Pro-dubbed C-42 Tape with a Letter-press J-Card

Far Rainbow is the London-based duo of Emily Mary Barnett and Bobby Barry. The Blue Hugeness begins with bubbling sounds which Barnett’s cymbals splash through, taking on a gait somewhere between Jack DeJohnette and a leaky pipe. Later, flickering drones emerge that seem more electrical than instrumental – which might be true as previous releases have seen Barry credited with playing electric toothbrush and various small motors. Submerged in it all are eerie field recordings, the most beguiling sounding like a baby cooing in the distance. It’s seldom clear where any sound comes from on this tape. Even where the drums begin and end gets a little hazy, while the lush reverb that glistens off everything is a source of intrigue in itself. It’s a spooky and hypnotic zone, one where machines seem to live in ghostly spaces. Every sound on ‘The Blue Hugeness’ is a riddle, slipping along the boundary between familiar and unfamiliar to find an alluring place in the in-between. - THE Quietus

You can always rely on zake to serve up some of the most magnificent ambient of the moment. He does it at an almost unbelievably frequent rate, too. This latest project is a seance part of the Orchestral Tape Studies series he minted back in 2019 and finds him paying homage to minimalist symphonic composers and orchestras through a series of pieces that focus on tone and timbre, with subtly shifting layers of carefully manipulated sounds, absorbing drones, field recordings and fragmented orchestral loops. Soundscapes shift subtly and manipulate your emotions just as deftly. This is a limited cassette version with several different vinyl versions also available.

Performing in the panoramic splendour of Capela Imaculada do Seminário Menor, Braga, Pardon
spellbinds the attendant audience, and now you at home, across nearly an hour of plangent keys
and synths that elegantly reverberate the space’s stone walls in arcing spirals with a fine grasp of
sublime tension and resolution.
Replete with the sound of audience appreciation in classic live album fashion, the performance
begins with the gentle lift of ‘Beneath the Surface’, with simple piano phrasing buoyed by a bed of
choral loops and strings, and the placid ‘Unsettled Beginnings’ leads to a centrepiece of gloaming
Nordic tension with ‘Blood in the water’ resembling Scandi noir soundtrack taken to further, icier
degrees. The tension resolves with the soothing pastoral wist of ‘April 13th’ appearing like some
spectral reflection on AFX’s ‘Avril 14th’, and ’Silent Rumble’ underscores his melancholic train of
piano thought with a rolling bass menace recalling The Necks via John Carpenter

Two Form a Click (DJ Snaffy, Wretchen Redspiders) collide with Horatio Pollard to deliver two sides of beautifully coalesced psychedelic synthesis, heavy with dub's production values and freed from the grid of analog electronics.

After some time of laying in the dark, the Warsaw-based Syntetyk label and club night series emits waves yet again with their very first cassette release by various friends from the local and global underground. Tape starts with a pathos ambient track by Mchy i Porosty, followed by a desert night drive dub by Rapha. The A side continues with a wavy melodic thumper by Olivia, accompanied by a nostalgic club diver by Czech maestro Exhausted Modern and a punkish fast paced hymn done by the Colombian prodigy – Filmmaker. The B side opens with Dogpatrol’s broken jungle track and carries on with Astma’s industrial dub-driven tune. Album slowly comes to a close with a nasty distorted wave by Dyktando, dystopian radiation emitter by Chino and ends with Mala Herba’s folk inspired epic ambient drone.

These recordings weren't intended for release, they aren't even demos, but rather exercises – process tracks in an attempt to mirror the influences of an aspiring artist as they oriented their emerging work. Most of the tracks were constructed in single sittings and recorded to cassette at home in Glasgow through a Philips Aw-7694 boombox. That they feel finished, even iconic amid the shortlived confluence between Detroit techno and intelligent dance music, is a testament to what was materialising, but also to our collective nostalgia, revisionism, and thirst to understand how we've arrived here and why. Übungen has that youthful and pre-internet utopian aura, without being tethered to the phony maxed-out optimism ricocheting across the Atlantic in a 4G pollution. That I first came to Dave Clark's earliest work in the anxiety-ripening stage of the pandemic while I was becoming chronically sick – a time when it was all too easy to glide through dystopian nightmares and realities alike – only speaks to the work's presence and its allowance to dream, ahistoricism or splice into the affect of histories, and to dismantle the contemporary, not in an arsy or nihilistic way, but to appreciate (questioningly) the passage of time.

Sitting somewhere between an EP and a full-length, these six pieces predate Dave's other archival release – Sparky's 94Archive2/8 [Rubadub, 2015], which also features cassette transfers originally recorded in stereo without overdubs. As a sound archivist myself, it was a welcome experience first listening to Dave's transfers on headphones while walking around the canals of Maryhill rather than handling the digital captures in a studio. I've been enamored with the music ever since and despite the original utilitarian intention, shifting contexts and the chance to listen afresh decades on allows for clearance (dare I say recuperation). It is, for this reason, and the sardonic re-opening of archival material perverted into something on the ground, that's not merely dog shit, that I am very pleased to finally share this collection.

Each of the titles provides the recording year and is initialed by the respective influence: Carl Craig, Aphex Twin (you'll recognise the shimmering hi-hats), Yellow Magic Orchestra, Black Dog, Polygon Window, and Drexycia.

All music was produced by Dave Clark, except "1993cc" produced by Dave Clark & Graeme Slater, and "1992pw" produced by Dave Clark & Roger Elliott.

OKO DJ’s first mixtape, landing on Accidental Meetings. 90 minutes of head banging rock & metal, screwed up saxophone & weirdo dub.

Disciple of the god Apollo, Terpsichore was the Muse of the dance, and it was known to be the most enigmatic of the nine Greek muses. She was the mother of the sirens, and she would lure sailors to shipwreck on their island with their music and hypnotic, beautiful singing. Terpsichore has been invoked as a metaphor for rhythm and ordered movement in the universe. The planets orbit the sun and the sun, with other stars, orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The planets go through the Milankovitch cycles in which their orbits around the sun adjust in very regular, periodic, or rhythmic, ways. Terpsichore’s influence goes beyond just the humane, as It can also be seen in the observable universe. She is now the Muse not just of human dance but also the cosmic dance in which the whole universe participates. Music by Anna VS June, Steve Pepe, Francesca Colombo, Bear Bones, Lay Low, Pannotia, Nixxon, Tassilo Vanhoefen, Yuto Takei, Amerza, Orestt, The Dude Of Stratosphear, Anatolian Weapons, Théo Muller, Konsistent, Vidock & Ghassen Chiba

BAG X COLLAPSING DRUMS is a collaboration between experimental producer Collapsing Drums (Charlie Behrens) and spoken word/electronic duo BAG (Jody DeSchutter and Dan Allison). Modular synth, spoken word, field recording, experimental play and abstract guitar are a few of the practices visited by the project.

Momentary Lapses was born of an improvisational outburst sewn into a back and forth process, the three diverse perspectives nurturing creation and dissection along the way. This album maps multiple landscapes and conditions as drawn by the trio in an exploratory document, providing a journey through textures and atmospheres, beats and spaces, construction and reassembly. During the 18 months of the album’s creation, a series of bereavements disrupted and informed BXCD’s journey.

DeSchutter’s dada-esque verse moves purposely forward, fragmented through synaesthetic habitats. Her words, woven into the electronic compositions of Behrens and Allison, touch on themes of re-interpretation, incongruity, and longing. Momentary Lapses celebrates all that is unknown, pluralistic, and paradoxical as proposed antidotes to a binary mode of knowing. Sonically bridging the gaps between postpunk, IDM and experimental, BAG X COLLAPSING DRUMS promises a fresh take on the possibilities of sonic abstraction.

‘DeSchutter treats words and syllables as malleable matter; haptic objects to be stretched out, twisted and molded. Allison and Behrens’ electronics, taking in dub-deep negative space, pristine sound design and ghostly frequencies, add not so much a backing track as a dialogic component. Pronunciation weaves into beats, language harmonises with pure music, to create an outline of the slippery worlds that can’t be pinned down by either sound or words’ Daryl Worthington, The Quietus

Cold neon lights. Dreamy sounds. Pure, hypnotic visuals. Welcome to the brand new, mesmerising universe of synthwave - unlike one you've seen before, where the future is in the past, and the past in the future. If you’re looking for alternative background music to accompany your work/study/chill sessions, you’ve arrived at the right destination. Hazy resonances, lush synth pads and electronic drums with gated reverb will have you gliding through outer space, mixed with nostalgic reverberations reminiscent of the ‘80's - recharging your energy and creative inspiration upon returning to the present. There are mysterious faces to meet thrilling stories to be uncovered on the road ahead; but for now, let your thoughts drift to a place of pure focus and relaxation.

Nico Niquo’s ‘Esperanto’ sees the Australian artist return to Orange Milk Records six years since his album ‘In A Silent Way’

Shmu (aka Sam Chown) has spawned back and drops an updated cartridge of exploratory and vibrant, gamified electronic music.

It doesn't stop. NRW is proud to present something very special for your ears. Beautiful soft synths with vast and dynamic chords make "Fermi Paradox" an instant definitive Retrowave album. A must listen to for all synth lovers.

Between December 2018 and 2019, Canadian composer Stefana Fratila went on a series of research trips throughout North America – including to Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre – to meet with astronomers and scientists to answer a complex question: “If each planet in our solar system were a room, what would each room sound like?” Her findings culminated in Sononaut, a collection of open-source VST plug-ins for digital audio workstations emulating each astral body’s atmospheric conditions. (Artist Jen Kutler collaborated on the project as well, using calculations by Nasa astronomer and planetary scientist Dr. Conor Nixon). During a residency at Cmmas (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras) in Morelia, Mexico, Fratila began writing the album on an octophonic sound system, then added additional synthesizer, finalized arrangements, and incorporated Sononaut at her home studio in Toronto. The results are surreal, expansive, multi-colored, and mesmerizing. I want to leave this Earth behind is an odyssey of cosmic voyaging and technological innovation, fusing science, sound design, and stargazer reverie into eight cosmic portraits of our vast galactic family.

Properly absorbing electronic enigmas from Zaheer Gulamhusein (Xvarr, Waswaas) and Justin Tripp (Georgia), following their noses down the rabbit hole into aether-chamber interzones adjacent to Coil, Conrad Schnitzler, Werkbund, and Jeff Mills’ deep space missions.

A strong case of two artists transcending the sum of their parts, String present an immersive exploration of the unknown, realising a “virtual vacation” from which they never returned. Their quest somehow made it into the mitts of Hamburg’s V I S, where it follows the label’s Ditterich von Eulberg-Donnersberg (Werkbund) album with uniquely engaging findings from the brink; eight tracks rendered in swirling sci-fi noir tones, siren-like chorales and plangent off-planet pads scried with a kosmiche twinkle in their 3rd eye. In other words: the sort stuff you may well have come to these pages for.

In its elusive fluidity and unfathomably spatialized scope, we find the duo fusing to project a sound that, without prior notice, would be difficult to attribute to either artist. There are no doubt traces of Zaheer’s new age toned work as Xvarr and the microtonal shimmer of Waswaas, and likewise Tripp's mutant sensibilities carried over from Georgia, but they’re distilled to a darker substance than anything we’d come to expect.

It’s not so much gothic dark, more dark as in full of negative space, with a richly meditative appeal that threads their hardware improvisations from the Millsian deep space intrigue of ‘Phase Transition’ thru the eldritch eeriness of ‘World Line’, to the illusive choral motifs of ‘Fringe’ and oceanic abstraction of ‘From the End to the Beginning’, with glimmers of a more lush, idealistic hope in ‘Plus Operator’ and the cinematic ‘Degrees of Freedom’ that beautifully moderate the journey.