Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 297 Items

Pimao's debut album, 'Duangkamol,' is set to hit the shelves on March 22, 2024. The Berlin-based producer, DJ, and avid vinyl collector, Pimao skillfully weaves together samples from Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian rarities, framing them with a cinematic sound design. The title, 'Duangkamol,' means ‘straight from the heart' in Thai, reflecting the album's deeply personal essence. It embodies the culmination of Pimao's long musical journey and his deep thirst for exploring diverse sounds and cultures. From the striking melodies of Southeast Asia to the bass heavy undercurrents of Berlin, 'Duangkamol' encompasses a rich sonic tapestry. The music flows effortlessly, taking unexpected turns but always remaining tethered to a soulful core, as heard on the captivating single 'Suay Isan.' With a musical career spanning back to 2005, Pimao's sound is both forward-looking and nostalgic, evoking the depth of iconic releases from labels like Ninja Tune and Stones Throw Records. Scheduled for release on March 22, 2024, 'Duangkamol' was polished by Blanka at Kasablanka Mastering Studio in France. The album's artwork, crafted by Subwway, features the imposing figure of 'Yaksha,' a protector deity whose calling into ward off malevolent forces. Pimao's 'Duangkamol' is a captivating musical journey, blending traditional influences with contemporary innovation, delivered uncut straight from the heart.

This self-titled LP marks the fifth release of Scottish artist Murray Collier’s Dip Friso project, his longest running alias and the solitary vanguard of his own Real Landscape imprint. Across the six tracks he delivers another collection of warped percussive loops, heavily manipulated guitar work and psychedelic sound experiments that drift between popular music forms ('I’ll Get to Hiding') and whittled down takes on electric blues and shoegaze ('Another Country’). The former features the instantly recognisable croon of Still House Plants vocalist Jess HK embellishing a backdrop of tape loop alchemy, an inspired pairing given the shared history of Glasgow dwelling. ‘Thin Ayrshire’ (written with Hannan Jones) treads a similar path with Collier’s own beyond-unrecognisable voice featuring, broken suddenly by a brief flash of 12th Isle’s Loris S. Sarid & Innis Chonnel’s ‘Spalted Water Portal’ thanks to a recycled tape spool. ‘A Sorry Business’ takes on avant-jazz inspired puddle skronk, a stunted casio bleep propelling forward guitar dirge and cymbal crashes, whilst Australian minimal wave heroes The Systematics are paid homage via a farewell cover of their track ‘Midnight on Balancing Day’ (here ‘Midnight’). All in, the album sees the project incorporating more instrumentation and a full use of vocalists, leaning less heavily on gauzy sample collage styles and providing a more introspective look at the hazy, dubwise world Collier has been building for the past half a decade.

Formed in 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts and now based in Berlin, Germany; Arms and Sleepers is the electronic trip hop project of producer Mirza Ramic (formerly a duo with Max Lewis), who has subsequently released 13 full albums and 20 EPs of glitched-out grooves that take as much inspiration from leftfield hip hop experimentalism as they do from the slowburn ambience and panoramic euphoria of contemporary post-rock. His forthcoming 14th full-length album, `What Tomorrow Brings' is a breathtaking aural account that charts the life-changing journey of being forced out of your home over four distinct, musical sections. Initially inspired by watching Kenneth Branagh's award-winning coming-of-age drama Belfast as the fighting in Ukraine broke out, MIrza found himself reflecting on his own experience as a child and how it has formed the man he is today. As such, the album's four sections, titled `Innocence', `Melancholy', `Rupture' and `Reflection', serve as the reification of the life and experience that Mirza lost as well as a representation of the identity he has since shaped for himself. Whereas more recent Arms and Sleepers releases, such as 2022's full-length `former kingdoms', are peppered with the sultry saxophone refrains, syncopated 16ths and smoky ambience of a New York jazz bar; `What Tomorrow Brings' is instead acute and driving, with complex drum breaks reminiscent of powerful post-rock acts such as Battles, Mogwai and Caspian brought insistently and urgently to the fore

Milanese club experimentalist Piezo takes a novel approach for his label’s seventh release: for the first time, the label head takes himself out of the equation entirely, instead donning his curatorial hat to pull together a vital selection of mind-bending club weapons spanning the 150-160 bpm bracket, bringing together a global crew of trailblazing sound adventurers.

The inspiration for winter Resort Music is derived from a childhood passion for Winter Sports. It's all about the spooky synths, mainlining radiophonic electronics, subconscious TV memories and an awe about what these athletes could do on the slopes when you were living in the suburbs.

Can anyone forget the glowing figure-skaters, dancing into the public consciousness? The perfect beauty that melted girl's and boy's hearts around the world. Sunday afternoons spent watching guys flying on long jumps into the endless white cosmos. Never really sure what was happening, but just thinking "I want to be in the chalets with these people, hitting the glühwein. An alien, unreachable world where fabulous people were doing fabulous things.

Portugal's Stellarays were also watching and have distilled these memories into a gloriously authentic reimagination of how those memories still reside within us. Winter Resort Music is such a potent memory bomb which takes what we know and enhances it in order to make it better. A prism of nostalgia that speaks to the purity of the whiteout.

This wonderfully handsome release with artwork by Castles in Space mainstay, Nick Taylor is a perfect artefact of library music, beautifully put together by Bruno, Centeio and Corinna.

It pains my heart to report that this is a posthumous release for dear Bruno, who we lost earlier this year at the ridiculously unjust age of fifty.

Safe travels, my friend. May your slopes be finely manicured as you head down the cresta runs to the great frozen lakes. Salut!

Kali Malone's anticipated new album "All Life Long" is a collection of music for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet composed by Kali Malone, 2020 - 2023. Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L'Immaculée-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden. Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone's music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages. Malone's new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019's breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone's compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O'Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve. All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition's internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony. The titular composition "All Life Long" appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ and again in the final quarter, compactly arranged for voice In the latter, Malone pairs the music with "The Crying Water" by Arthur Symons, a poem steeped in language of mourning and eternity. For organ, "All Life Long" moves with a patient stateliness, the drama concentrated in moments when shifting tonalities generate and release dissonance and ecstasy. For voice, each word is saturated with feeling, the singers swooping gracefully downward to capture the melancholy of the narrator's relationship to the timeless tears of the sea. "Passage Through The Spheres," the album's opening piece, contains lyrics in Italian pulled from Giorgio Agamban's essay In Praise of Profanation. In it, Agamban defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs. This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and its fixation on the infinite, but draws its weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime.

Ultravillage is a collective and burgeoning community of new age music devotees, private press fanatics and underground ambient, minimal and progressive electronic aficionados. Their website at ultravillage.com is fast becoming the go to guide for the most obscure entries in the American new age and minimal music canon – a crucial hub for diggers, archivists and label runners recovering lost sounds from by-gone eras.

Mark Griffey, the man behind Ultravillage, has recently made the venture into releasing albums, with the intention of reissuing forgotten personal masterpieces of 1980s and 90s private press synth culture on new label Mid-Air Museum. MM’s first vinyl record release is a collaboration with Scottish reissue label chOOn!!.

Together, they present Accidental Music 1987-1991 by Charles Esposito, a career retrospective of the experimental composer from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The cinematic and the sacred swirl around on Accidental Music, which gives new life to intriguing self-released tapes that Esposito put out in the 1980s and 90s. Heard by few on its original release, the music featured on this compilation ranges from Palace of Lights percussive sonics to an almost minimal techno palette, a meeting of pop and twisted electronics with the hypnotic immediacy of ancient ritual.

Accidental Music 1987-1991 develops a series of resonant harmonic spaces, by adding layers of instruments and played objects. Rather than work as acoustic maps of specific locations, these pieces eddy and gather into positive physical presences. But Esposito’s real strength lies in creating depth of field. The foreground might be dominated by glassy chimes or resonant prayer bowl-like timbres, but beyond it a series of sonic veils seems to recede towards murky imperceptibility. There’s also a kind of surreal decorum at play, passages that sound like an immaculately laid dinner table being shaken by an earth tremor while the tinkling complaints of the silver, glass and muffling linen are scrupulously recorded.

Available for the first time on vinyl, Accidental Music 1987-1991 by Charles Esposito is an exploration into
many inner worlds and dreamscapes, an analogue mirage of avant-garde gems. Produced in cooperation with the artist for Mid-Air Museum and chOOn!!.

Mastered for vinyl and digital and featuring liner notes from Mark Griffey.

"The collection of songs that make up ‘Detached Engagement’ are our most personal and emotionally revealing tracks. Recorded over a period of emotional turbulence where we lost loved ones and uncertainty seemed the only constant. Our studio became a hide away, a place of refuge where we could direct our energies into a creative act of understanding and hope. We reconfigured our subversive pop to fit our present situation, the distortion was dialled back, the gauzy tape worn ambiguity was replaced by a more in focus directness. Every song was stripped back to its essential elements revealing a newfound complexity in our song writing and arrangement.

Our devotion to the power of pop has not diminished, we still hold firm that it is a subversive medium to communicate ideas outside of the conventional messages of love and other frivolities. It still has the power to bring people together around a shared vision of how things could be.

DJ Manny's 'Hypnotized' takes footwork music to exciting new frontiers, blending romantic motifs with experimental shades of blue, while staying accessible, making it a captivating successor to DJ Rashad's 'Double Cup' and showcasing Manny's diverse style from r'n'b rollers to intense dubstep-inflected tracks, marking an album that effortlessly expands footwork's horizons with exceptional creativity."

London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Akusmi announces 'Lines', an exhilarating new collection of works born from the desire to take where the acclaimed debut album 'Fleeting Future' left off - in search of new forms.

" 'Secant', I must have listened to this tune 3 times in a row, this one soundtracked my night drive through the winding roads" - Benji B, BBC Radio 1

'Lines' is presented as a Limited edition clear vinyl (500 copies only worldwide), printed in heavy-weight reverse board sleeve with a hand-numbered edition sticker. The vinyl edition also features 'Oblique' (A2), an exclusive version for the vinyl format, plus the now revered 'Longing for Tomorrow' - (Brandt Brauer Frick Remix), previously unreleased physically and now pressed on vinyl format, ending side B. The cover artwork features another collaboration with Dutch visual artist Sigrid Calon and design by label founder Adam Heron.

Formed with a sense of urgency and a reductive approach 'Lines' is almost entirely comprised of alto saxophone, clarinet and piano with embellishments of ambience and minimal percussive elements. Recorded in full at his home studio in London, Pascal Bideau speaks about the process:

"I wanted to go a bit more a bit more horizontal and ambient, work with layers of lines, might they be dotted or straight, and leave them to unfold and see where they would take me."

Akusmi uniquely finds the spaces in between experimental jazz, crossover classical and ambient music.

Essential repress of this great LP of experimental Belgian folk music. Original pressing sold out within weeks and was listed at number 10 in the Quietus' best albums of the year so far. Horn of Plenty casts its gaze into the thriving contemporary Belgian underground with Annelies Monseré’s Mares, a remarkable body of experimental compositions that taps the deep well of raw, emotive expression rumbling below numerous traditions of European folk music.

As a member of Ghent’s experimental music scene, over the past two decades Annelies Monseré has slowly refined a singular approach to musicality, moving from the sparse, instrumental piano works from that defined her early career, toward increasingly complex arrangements of instrumentation that offer a central place to her own voice, issued by noteworthy imprints such as Morc Tapes, Stroom, and three:four. Like her work within the widely celebrated ensemble, Luster, as well as Distels, her duo with Steve Marreyt, Monseré’s solo efforts establish a strikingly beautiful and remarkably unique territory that elegantly balances between rigorous experimentalism, minimalism, drone, and folk.

Recorded between 2016 and 2022, Mares is arguably best approached through the song that marked its inception and conclusion, a rendition of Cyril Tawney’s Sally Free & Easy. Written in 1958 and popularised by Pentangle during the early 1970s, it has been approached by so many artists - Davy Graham, Trees, Tony Caro & John, Marianne Faithfull, Flying Saucer Attack, etc. - that it’s become a “standard” within the folk scenes of the last half century or so. Initially drawn to the melodic qualities of the tune, Monseré became fascinated with the lyrical content, which she points out are “ethically problematic: a sailor ‘slutshaming’ a woman because she left him.. blaming her for his (planned) suicide”. Refined from paired down beginnings over a six year period, a droning, feminist dirge slowly emerged from her hands, incorporating male backing vocals and harmonium as brooding counterpoint to her voice, that entirely recasts the song into a new and radically prescient form.

It is this sense of contrast - the elemental humanity and tension that runs below countless traditions of folk, reconceptualized within the forward thinking temperaments of contemporary experimental music - that defines Mares as such a distinct piece of work. A departure from her previous solo efforts, being the first to leave behind her main instruments, the guitar and piano, the album was conceived by Monseré as something akin to timbral painting; “adding similar layers upon each other with (slightly) different hues”. Taking the image of the sea and the ethical tensions within Sally Free & Easy as a conceptual departure point - weaving these themes like a thread through the record - amongst complex sets of harmonic relationships and varied durational structures that unfold within the remaining seven compositions, she intertwined her own childhood memories of the sea with interrogations of how “these memories are often arbitrarily fixed and tainted by the present, and more metaphorical (even biblical) connotations of the sea, hinting at toxic human relationships and intoxication in its multiple senses.”

Appearing with the immediacy and emotiveness of folk music, imbued with sense of adventure of experimentalism and bred with the restraint and elegance of minimalism, Mares’ is a deep body of sonority that draws upon the fundamental human need to express and commune through sound, projecting this ancient need into forward-thinking forms without sacrificing its roots. Profoundly beautiful, elegant, and poetic, these eight tracks offer immersion into the singular creative voice of one of the most unique artists currently working in the Belgian scene.

‘Gentle Confrontation’, Loraine James's third Hyperdub album, opens a new chapter of her real and sonic life in which she examines her past and present. It's a positively languid, enjoyably disjointed set made while listening to her teenage favourites; math rock and emo-electronic such as DNTEL, Lusine and Telefon Tel Aviv. The album also features an ever more diverse set of peers, placing them in her unusual musical settings and drawing out sensitive and reflexive performances. At other times the album stretches out into a drifting ambience as if seeking a sense of bliss in the everyday. ‘Gentle Confrontation’ is about relationships (especially familial), understanding, and giving back a little grace and care, while the tone of the record criss-crosses watery ambience with denatured rhythm and asmr beats. These 16 tracks are Loraine's best work yet, and a personal and musical leap forward, delivering a totally unique vision of electronic pop music.