Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Tape 416 Items

When Russian musicians Vladimir Karpov (X.Y.R.) and Dmitriy Borodin began making hushed, liminal, ASMRbient dream pop together in the late 2000’s, the underground landscape was thick with artists using mystical monikers, so they chose to troll in the opposite direction: 2muchachos. Although the original intent was to filter out listeners “who judge by name or cover,” they were soon joined by Aleksandra Evseeva (aka Andra Ljos), rendering their banner even more incongruous and comical.

Titles aside, the collaboration was fruitful, spanning nearly half a decade of steadily refined activity. Natura 2009-2012 collects 76 minutes of the trio’s most cloaked and bewitched recordings, evolving from the “northern environmental folktronica” of their early years through to the whispered fairytale ambient voyaging of 2012’s haunted swansong, Forest Is Not What It Seems.

The tracks are sourced from an array of digital singles, compilations, and self-released CD-Rs, mapping a non-chronological odyssey of the group’s skeletal, subliminal songcraft. Karpov’s signature Soviet Formanta synth weaves within windswept guitar, fragile percussion, and field recordings of forest birds and endless steppes, occasionally accented with Andra’s glimmering, ghostly voice. It’s music of isolation and introspection, poetic and remote, murmuring through mists and long winters, flickering with the color of springs yet to bloom.

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. ‘’

There was a time when a person would pick up an instrument to compose yet another song for a loved one. A sad figure humming into a microphone, pronouncing the most basic words and forms to convey quantity, quality, fact, statistics and similar sounds describing pain, loss and sorrow. The human brain would perceive the melody sad and perhaps within herself feel a sense of melancholia.

In another parallel world a new composition would then appear. But not one composed on a wooden built instrument, no, sounds made into structures and tables that would assists the listener into providing an additional context and meaning through digital synthesis and quantised harmonies. But who could really tell if these sounds were real? Or where they just sounds impersonating an idea of something?

Rhyme nor reason is as abstract in its shapes and ideas as it is concrete and elegant in its narratives. A carefully crafted wooden cabinet with an over-whelming amount of different drawers and hidden compartments. Each box storing blissful arrangement; a fluorescent stone, a paper note saying something about lunch, some collectible objects, a forgotten token or perhaps an autograph, all so very vibrant and joyful for its possessor.

Deleted files stored on rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. Small, easy to loose SSD memory cards of recorded corrupt files and digital artefacts. Software engineered compositions trying to grasp the shared belief of an upcoming future, vivid and uncertain; birds, waters and long lost recollections. A release unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world. At least not for now.

Argentine modal master Acid Twilight’s third raga saga maps a dusty plain of tumbleweeds, circling vultures, and bleached bones, across which rides a nameless stranger: Shadow Wrangler. Inspired by visions of high noon dread and the textures of psychedelic twang, they turned westward, layering shakers, synths, spurs, and six-string navigations into 12 crooked canyon instrumentals.

Shades of spaghetti western, Spacemen 3, and outlaw country whisper in the wind, but ultimately AT’s mode is more silhouette than song, at the axis of campfire jam and commune improv. Loping and loose, windswept and waterless, blowing over the sand of trails long since vanished. Another smoke signal rises in the distance; another scorpion sunset begins to dim. The Wrangler rides on.

Ajukaja and Ats got together in a worn-out smoke sauna, behind their rusty synthesizers, squeaking whistlelators and clattering drum-machines and came up with this tape’s worth of loosely funked up improv-not-improv steam-house catching all the night-creatures. Wet monster-toads, eerie moths, springy worms — all gliding in and out on foamy harmonies and rattling beats.

No gimmicks, only drunk alien-bees in the jar. Let's ball.

»Stonewalling« offers a collection of electroacoustic pieces taking as input the Mexican vernacular music from the golden age of Mexican cinema of the first part of the 20th century. In those films, music was used as communication due their poor verbal communication-skills. This is an album about communication, about the impossibility to do so to resolve conflicts. In the technical side, some of the sources used as layering in the tracks come from radio frequencies taken from explorations into the software-defined radio universe, mixed with microphone feedbacks, oscillators, and random textures with field-recordings. In the melodic/harmonic structures of the tracks, the main instrument used is a classical guitar with hyper-processed chords using DSP tools.

Alex the Fairy is an artist based in Berlin producing music with an emphasis on electronic and concrete methods. Alex the Fairy is also part of the 3Ddancer trio, a live act focusing on improvisation and expression using electronics.

Alex The Fairy writes: "I had sent The Tapeworm tracks before, but I was being difficult so was asked to send a new bunch, with a deadline. I sent the new bunch, a fairly odd collection expecting perhaps some of them to be combined with the older stuff but not seeing any coherence in them. I figured The Tapeworm would find at least something. To my surprise the suggestion that came back was exclusively the tracks I had sent the second time, and, re-listening through the tracks in this new order after returning from a Christmas dinner lying on the floor of my nephews bedroom gave them a completely new context. Despite them being quite varied in terms of age (one had been flung together a few days earlier on the train while another was approaching Schulreife) they seemed to meld together in such a way that I hardly recognised them…

Last year my grandmother died. My last grandparent. I had put off seeing her during corona, as I thought it best not to put her at risk and had almost left to visit her days before her death but had delayed my departure because of a medical appointment. My failure to her weighs heavy on my mind - fates grimacing grin: too little, too late. The approaching march of death, one generation closer was a confrontation I wasn't prepared for.

While clearing out her flat in the following weeks I had kept some of my grandfathers cassettes, live recordings of jazz greats, Pink Floyd, Sade and some classical among them, none originals, several presumably from the radio e.g. a church organ rendition of Bach. At the time I wasn't sure why I was hanging on to them, other than the urge to hoard, and that it felt wrong not at least to keep some. Half a year later, half way through mixing this cassette, suffering from my first bout of Covid, I had the insatiable urge to hook up the cassette player I had received from my grandfather after his death around nineteen years earlier and had been dragging along with me since. I stuck a cassette in only to immediately return to the safety of my covers. I began to work my way into what I had saved, hearing the fruits of my grandfathers labour decades before. It felt like quite an intimate interaction with someone I had long lost contact to/was long gone. Quite a wonderful thing, these time traveling cassettes.

I returned to the tracks to mix them shortly before my corona/cassette experience, with a new mixing console at hand. I had been looking for one for several years, but nothing had ever clicked, until I found this old broadcast desk 30 minutes from my place (it also coincided with a payment from a job the sum of which matched the price identically… fates return). Installing became a massive hassle and I doubted my decision continuously, but the further it was implemented the more it made sense. The first track I recorded with the mixer is on this cassette. Shortly before the mixing I was introduced to an Effektgerät by a friend, Rapha. Another good friend Art lent me their one, and I ended up using copious amounts of it throughout mixing, alongside my usual space creators. All the tracks on this release were mixed again on this mixer and are in a sense all a bit of a dub of the originals. I wouldn't have worked this way without the mixer, and the effect gave me a dimension I hadn't had before, so, from a technical perspective, the mixer and this effect define this release, giving it a coherence, at least for me. Emotionally of course the chaos and turbulence of the preceding year and my newfound appreciation for the medium give it a meaning I will struggle to formulate." – Alex The Fairy, Berlin, 9 May 2022

»Therapy« is a new experimental electronic music album by Alexandre Bazin that explores musical reasearch on the edge of ambient music, with a reminder of classical music. His instrumental music revolves around sonic textures, saturations, feedback, allowing new fragments to emerge to create melodies, timbres and tone colors. The saturated sounds recall the presence of the electric guitar, encompassing orchestral materials and acoustic instruments which are the basis of this album, with the exception of the first two tracks, which are solo synthesizer pieces, the first one that opens the album is a solo by Synthi A, and the second by Buchla Music easel.

Alicia is a DJ, producer and musician making deeply rhythmic, off-kilter dance music inspired by a love of club culture and the avant-garde. This mixtape delves into deeper worlds of spaced out hazy trips through dubwise ambient & downtempo niceness.

Full of dreamy textures and languid melodies, Xoomin is a soundtrack for drifting off into the abyss, but in the hands of Alloy Sea (a.k.a. Mor Elian), that journey feels downright playful. Although the Berlin-based producer is best known for her dancefloor-focused creations, 2020’s Petrichor (a 50-minute composition that officially debuted the Alloy Sea project) showcased an unexpected talent for abstract soundscapes and arrhythmic jitters, hinting at ambient techno but ultimately offering something much more adventurous.

Xoomin—an album that was specifically written for Paralaxe Editions after label founder Dania Shihab reached out to Elian about working together on a new Alloy Sea release—ventures into similarly ethereal waters as Petrichor, but it’s also brighter and more colorful than its predecessor, its gleaming FM synth improvisations flanked by scuttling rhythmic bursts and the occasional wonky bassline, not to mention celestial snippets of Elian’s own voice. It’s not pop, but it’s not quite ambient either, floating instead in a nebulous (and sneakily fun) zone that borrows from new age, IDM and the weirder corners of bass music.

Alvars Orkester was formed in 1987 in Johannishus, a small village in the south-east of Sweden by a group of young boys interested in the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, industrial music culture and the power of sound. For the first very creative years, Alvars was very active within the independent cassette culture scene releasing their stuff (that quite soon drifted from the industrialism inspired by Test Dept, TG, SPK and z'ev to an atmospheric, psychedelic and quite ambient version of noise) on small labels in Italy, Portugal, USA etc.
Joachim Nordwall writes: "1990-1991. In the middle of all teen confusion going on, me and Zwarre had a long creative time together. Recording every weekend, connecting with like-minded (or at least we thought so) people around the world and trading tapes with whoever. Our world was analogue synths, Party Zone late Friday nights on MTV, zines and out-there experimental music. By then, we had a few tapes out and had "Nobody Finds Nothing" being released on the Italian super-label (in our opinion) Biotope Art Organization. We were in the midst of something and recorded "Nuthull" for another Italian top level label called Old Europa Café. However, they did not like it and the tape was abandoned and forgotten. Then years and years later, close to present time, Zwarre was in touch with OEC for some reason and had the master returned." - Joachim Nordwall, Gothenburg, 21 February 2023

Hailing from Baltimore, Punjabi-American sitar player, songwriter and ambient musician Ami Dang unites the disparate worlds of Indian classical music and dreamy synth-infused song composition on beguiling new album The Living World’s Demands. Envisioned as a lament to the challenges to which humanity has subjected the world and itself, Ami Dang’s newest album builds on the floating, blissful ambience of 2019’s Parted Plains and the vocal-led, pop structures of 2020 collaborative release Galdre Visions (a bona fide ambient supergroup also featuring Green-House and Nailah Hunter). The Living World’s Demands is an immensely evocative and expressive collection, just as complex, nuanced and precious as the living world in its title. Within are themes of trauma, survival, resistance, desperation and righteous vitriol, responding to greed, fear and injustice, yet the music is often euphoric, disarming and breathtakingly beautiful. Lilting sitar lines sparkle about an unpredictably broad spectrum of synthesis; Indian classical percussion rattles and snakes through its drum programming. And atop, Ami’s astonishing singing voice - with lyrics of English and Punjabi - deftly weaves her two worlds together with silken threads of both contemporary and traditional textures. Amrita “Ami” Kaur Dang has studied North Indian classical music (voice and sitar) in both New Delhi and Maryland, and she also holds a degree in music technology & composition from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Following in the footsteps of artists like Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, she seeks to advance the sound of contemporary experimental, pop, and electronic music with the sounds of South Asia—through vocals and sitar, ragas, and sampling. She has collaborated with Animal Collective, William Cashion (of Future Islands), James Acaster, Thor Harris—to name a few. She has performed onstage with Beach House, black midi, Grimes, Lower Dens, Florist and more. The Living World’s Demands is a co-release between Phantom Limb and LA’s Leaving Records.

As for many musicians, if there was anything positive about the lockdown in the spring of 2020, it was having more time to create music, to experiment and to maybe even start a completely new project with someone you may never have worked with before.
when dominik grenzler aka an moku, a sound artist and bass player based in zurich, approached stefan schmidt (guitarist, composer and improviser from baden-baden) with the idea of collaborating, it turned out the initial spark for a fruitful process and artistic exchange: within just a couple of weeks they managed to craft an album which turned out edgy and harmonic at the same time. despite its abstractionism, „raum“ has a very organic feeling to it, provides a richness of details and finely processed sounds of different origins like bass, cello, field recordings and a vast array of electronic equipment. according to the 2 musicians, the process of creating the ten tracks was a smooth and intuitive one with hardly any need to discuss the concept or details, the communication took place within the music and the exchanged files.

the third and closing chapter of the „raum“ trilogy by an moku and stefan schmidt – „raum im raum“ serves f inely crafted ambient / soundscapes, and is the most intense and darkest album of the series. as written in the previous infosheets, the „raum“-trilogy (named after and inspired by a sentence from david foster wallace’s unconventional bestseller novel “infinite jest”) is a child of the recent pandemic: when public life more or less came to a hold, dominik grenzler aka an moku , a sound artist and bass player based in zurich, contacted stefan schmidt (guitarist, composer and improviser from baden-baden) with the idea of collaborating. It turned out a fruitful idea and within just a couple of weeks they not only managed to craft “raum” but indeed had so many ideas that it was impossible to put them all in just one album, a trilogy was the logical consequence. this series now sees its 3rd and final part with „raum im raum“, maybe the most intense and darkest chapter of the trilogy that deals with the abstraction of a possible space within a possible space. grenzler and schmidt continue their adventurous sonic trip into abstract voids, crafted by finely processed sounds of different origins like synthesizer or fretless guitar, field recordings and a vast array of electronic equipment – like they did before, but without simpy re-cooking the approved recipe, instead adding new spices like a kalimba or saz (schmidt being a vituoso on many stringed instruments). the atmosphere is dark and alien, with references to hauntology and musique concrète, and yet organic, and rich of details. „..soon, i loose the ability to distinguish between the two kinds of darkness. i can no longer tell if my eyes are open or closed. but as my eyes became used to the darkness, though, i began to pick out slight differences...“ - h. murakami

Both albums by Russian Armenian artist Aleksandra Evseeva aka Andra Ljos are themed around mythical wellsprings: last year’s debut of bewitched synthetic exotica, The Oasis Of Little Birds, and her latest, Fountain Of Inspiration. Conceived as a suite of imaginary ancient Grecian compositions for organ and sampler, the songs thread the saga of a sacred Greek island water sanctuary where the nymph Castalia drowned while escaping Apollo, and where visitors to the Oracle of Delphi bathed before receiving prophecy. Fountain feels appropriately holy and harrowing, eight cryptic processionals of keys, strings, sitar, backward whispers, and percussion, like hidden hymns for forbidden temples. Her background as a member of St. Petersburg wilderness ambient trio 2muchachos (alongside Vladimir Karpov / X.Y.R.) manifests in the music’s devotional mood and arcane reveries, conjured in mystic solitude at her Vilnius home studio. Andra is her mother’s pet name for her and Ljos is Icelandic for ‘light,’ due to having white hair; but combined they create an enlightened presence, channeling the siren frequencies of enchanted thresholds to realms both unreal and, till now, unheard.

The fourth album by Vilnius-based composer Aleksandra Evseeva aka Andra Ljos is as runic and ritualistic as the Bronze Age monoliths for which it’s named: Megalithic Statues of Vishapakar. Found mainly in the Armenian Highlands, vishaps are cigar-shaped slabs of stone carved with fish heads or snakes, depicting a sacred serpent of Armenian folklore thought to protect sources of water from drought and ruin. The music evokes a similarly arcane and devotional air, between raga, séance, and 4th world hallucination.

The track titles allude to significant vishap discovery sites, spanning lakes, bays, mountains, and temples. Wood block percussion wobbles beneath lattices of looped keys, golden organ, synthetic strings and flutes, distant birds, muffled voices, and the soft wash of restless waters. Evseeva’s muse may be mined from her Armenian heritage but the songs conjure a mood more elusive and expansive – pensive pastorals for a land of long shadows and ancient fears, strewn with cryptic relics swiftly dissipating into myth.

Andrea Benedetti mixes the 90's Italian electronic continuum. LYL's radio Vanishing Points show goes physical with two exclusive tapes.

The first tape, Intervallo, selected and mixed by Andrea Benedetti (New Acid Generation) pays homage to the 90's Italian electronic spectrum. Covering from 1993 till the turn of the millennium, the mix covers IDM and electro, exploring obscurities and rarely heard tracks from a sprawling, unique scene.

A key player as a producer, DJ and label owner, Andrea Benedetti was at the helm of Final Frontier, actively involved in the creation of a mass of classic material.

Limited to 50 copies

Composer / saxophonist / multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bernstein has been an essential part of the Baltimore experimental music scene as a member of avant-rock champions Horse Lords, a frequent collaborator with acts like Dan Deacon and Matmos, and an erstwhile member of the High Zero Collective – Baltimore's premier experimental music presenter. Based in Baltimore for much of the last two decades, he currently resides with his family in Germany. Under his own name, Bernstein composes music focused on the material of sound, typically oriented around the tuning system of just intonation: the selection of notes based on the physical properties of sound which yields frequencies that provide more "perfect" harmonies outside of the capabilities of the 12-tone scales that appear in Western music in idioms ranging from classical / orchestral composition, to mainstream pop, and most everything in between. Bernstein's work can swell into flights of virtuosic sheets-of-sound overload or stretch individual tones into time-dilating durational exercises that emphasize the relationships between overtones and explore the unique harmonic series that he lays out for each piece. Andrew Bernstein returns to Hausu Mountain with a new album called a presentation. Oriented around his long-form, layered saxophone performances and presented with occasional drone-based accompaniment from electronic sound sources, the album finds the artist pushing the limits of both his compositional ideas and the physical reality of his craft. The result proves just as spellbinding as Bernstein's work on the more rhythmically busy side of the spectrum, showcasing his patience as a composer, his deep tutelage in the properties of overtones and microtonal harmonies, and the improbable precision with which he can produce sounds from his saxophone - an instrument not necessarily designed to easily achieve these specific frequencies / pitches - in order to match the ideas in his head.

Hardly anything is known about the person behind the pseudonym Anom Vitruv. The artist who has previously released music on UK techno label Tabernacle Records and Los Angeles-based experimental powerhouse Total Stasis, among other outlets, chooses to remain anonymous and lets his music speak for itself. Over more than a decade, the Switzerland-based musician has carefully constructed a body of work that is closely interlinked with his public perception: Always vague, elusive, and thus open.

Anom Vitruv took his time with 6.4311—his first release in more than six years. The artist’s latest project is full of philosophical references around being, time, space, death, and the worthwhile life that not only are visible in the album title and through the artist’s use of samples but are directly manifested in the structure and atmosphere of the music itself. The album is deeply contemplative in its approach. The constant oscillation between the abstract and the concrete, the elaborate build-ups, the subtle emergence and disappearance of elements, and his careful take on layering sounds are all factors that make 6.4311 an engaging album from start to finish.

With his latest full length, the enigmatic artist sets an example on how to incorporate references and concepts into music—all without it being a shallow gesture.

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.

C30 cassette. A download code is included. Arthur Mine is a keyboardist and electronic musician from Kyiv, Ukraine. An ex-member of several live bands from punk to indie and experimental. In 2017 Nikolaienko's collaborator on the Nostalgia Por Mesozoica 7" single. For the collectors of New Age cassettes to put somewhere between Sven Grünberg and Vangelis.