Ideal HHV Records 11 Items

Kali Malone’s 'The Sacrificial Code’ is a major work featuring almost two hours of concentrated, creeping organ pieces aligned to non traditional intonation/tuning systems. It's a stunning realisation of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigour, with a perception-altering quality that encourages exploration without a preordained endpoint.

The Sacrificial Code’ takes a more surgical approach to the methods first explored on last year’s ‘Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017’. Over the course of three parts performed on three different organs, Malone’s minimalist process captures a jarring precision of closeness, both on the level of the materiality of the sounds and on the level of composition.The recordings here involved careful close miking of the pipe organ in such a way as to eliminate environmental identifiers as far as possible - essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces were then further compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse - an approach that flows against the grain of the prevailing musical hegemony, where sound is so often manipulated, and composition often steeped in self indulgence. It echoes Steve Reich’s sentiment “..by voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.”

With its slow, purified and seemingly austere qualities ‘The Sacrificial Code’ guides us through an almost trance-inducing process where we become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness. As such, it’s a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self restraint and by this point inarguably a modern classic.

For anyone keeping a keen eye on these pages in the past 10 years, Human Inferno may be feared and regarded for a 2013 split with Lasse Marhaug on Sonmoi that still sounds like nothing else. ‘To Piss Warm And Drink Cold’ is their feral return after interim sides with Weltschmerz Verlag and Entr’acte, unleashing a torrent of possessed hardware grot and gunk that knows no chill. It is equally applicable to the scuzziest clubs and ritual bedroom practices with a sort of DIY spirit that resonates the mentation electronics of Fortress Crookedjaw (Black Mecha/Wold/Fauchion), the blasted-mind styles of Black Zone Myth Chant or the grotesqueries of The Body, but with an ogre- in-the-basement quality that the band can safely claim as their own. Very loose traces of anglophilic behaviour lurk in their manipulation of raw dub elements and the coarsest noise, as well as track titles such as ‘Derbyshire Collission’ and ‘Brexit Rid’em’, intersecting naturally Norwegian leanings toward BM recordings virtues and pure noise in a manner that places them in very good company among iDEAL’s roster. It serves a frankly filthy good time, descending from the bestial growl of ‘Locust’ to a spannered 16 minutes of slurred power electronics ‘Yout’ via prongs of electro-dub like the iDEALIST jamming with Bzmc over a pack of special brew on ‘Liquid Breakfast’, or going on like Liquid G meets Vox Populi in the hobbled trot of ‘Derbyshire Collission’, and hopping like Tory lizards adopting their true form in the scaly ragga- noise-techno beast of ‘Brexit Rid’em’.

Carla Boregas is best known from her tenure in São Paulo’s genre-bending experimental post-punk scene, playing in long-running outfit Rakta as well as other related offshoots. Her solo material has been knottier to unpick, here developing ideas from a collection of unfinished fragments and notebook scribbles exploring the possibility of finding a wind instrument that could be played collectively by several musicians. Coinciding with the pandemic, however, she soon realised the inherent risks involved with sharing breath and so the concept took a different direction, with added resonance. Boregas developed a synthetic alternative, layering vocals and environmental recordings to suggest wind instrumentation without attempting to mimic it. The sounds here are airy, but rarely diegetic - on the title track, Boregas uses analog arpeggios and plucked, sustained tones to approximate the kosmische world of Ash Ra Tempel or more recently Emeralds, as if trapped in a wind tunnel, moved forward by an unseen force. There’s a whisper of the ancient past that harmonises with Wojciech Rusin’s speculative medieval gasps, and Bloedneus & de Snuitkever’s severely underheard ‘Milli Mille’, an examination of the ancient Greek aulos. On ’Grafia Do Invisível’ the sound is completely different again, but the concept remains, using precise analog drones and minuscule timbral shifts to imitate the character of a wind instrument and simultaneously harmonise with the deep listening meditations of Éliane Radigue and Kali Malone. A voice enters the frame on ‘Sopro’, chopped into deviated gulps and syllables, creating a language that’s unfamiliar and percussive. The use of breath is subtle, and vocalisations criss-cross between synths and faint whistles, forming an expression that’s different from its predecessors but intrinsically interlinked. This is where ‘Pena Ao Mar’ excels, by viewing breath and its application in electronic music from multiple angles simultaneously.

The debut album from group A's Tommi Tokyo is an illusory marvel made up of snatched half-heard voices, ritualistic rhythms, digi-fucked power electronics and emetic sci-fi drones. Impossible to classify, incredible to absorb - like Vainio, Stockhausen, Anima, Porter Ricks and Ramleh playing in a small room.

Since 2012, Tokyo-based duo group A have been toying with the concept of performance, attempting to melt various art styles - from body art and live painting to noise and performance - into their jaw-dropping live sets. Tommi Tokyo strikes out solo with "Senno I", her debut under the Tot Onyx moniker that appears a couple of years after an impressive collaboration with Hiro Kone emerged on "More Light", 2020's Berlin Atonal box set. Alone, Tommi is able to approach her art from a more personal, even biographical angle. She describes the record as a "study of her interior life", and played from beginning to end it feels like being plugged into someone's brain as it dumps its most polar content, "Johnny Mnemonic" style.

Each track appears to comb through a different cortex: opener 'Voice Calling' juxtaposes her voice with distant ritual drums, cyber-animal gurgles and plucked strings; 'A Leaf Laughs' is distorted close-mic'ed fauna crunches set against low-end rumbles; and the lengthy 'Inhabitants of Brain' is a dial-up powered flicker of faint floppy disk buzzes, indecipherable voices and nauseating electronic burbles. The album shifts into a different gear when it hits 'a-h5n1', referencing the flu subtype to help evoke a crushing mood punctuated by ketamized percussion, dissonant string scrapes and retching industrial noise.

It's a record that's honest enough to capture the ugliness and cavernous depth of the mind; all its beauty is inevitably snatched away to be buried by guttural screams or digitally rehashed machine belches. Any rhythm - which emerges frequently and pointedly - is disrupted by Isdn cable interference or ghostly muttering. At its best, the record tips fully into cyberpunk dystopia, coming across like a ghastly simulacrum of recent Porter Ricks transmissions and Slikback on the submerged 'Maggots' and pneumatic 'Plague'. The latter is a particular highlight, electro-plating acoustic drums and forming them into stuttering error-pools of post-Schematic grit and grind.

It's a harrowing journey, tipped to William Gibson fans or anyone who scoures the lower levels of Discogs for rare Japanese improv.

Venerable avant-gardist John Duncan supplies quietly jaw-dropping new fruits from his fertile relationship with iDEAL Recordings, rendering a concept album for the times split between thoughts on social energy/failure, and intimacy, in his singular style In quizzical pursuit of the haunted muse that’s informed Duncan’s boundary-pushing work since the late ‘70s, and which has lit up the iDEAL catalogue over the past half decade, ’Soft Eyes’ renders Duncan’s oblique reading of the psychic zeitgeist in subtly contrasting sides of furtively rhythm-driven and richly atmospheric songcraft. In keeping with Duncan’s reputation as a sort of avant garde shaman or psychopomp, there’s something unfathomably timeless and ineffably eternal about his work on ’Soft Eyes’, which follows the course of his modern classics such as the songbook of wizened covers ‘Bitter Earth’ (2016), and last year’s ‘Red Sky’ 2CD, without feeling like he’s re-treading old ground, and still sounding vitally unusual. The record’s first half revolves around Duncan’s thoughts on social energy and failure, from crowds to tribal gatherings, in a low-key but extraordinary style. Chamber wind meets a metallic pulse somewhere between dembow and Yemeni folk to underline his achingly hoarse vocals on ‘The Rabid Position’, while the lurking vox of ’Say No’ smartly reaffirms his counter-cultural cache, and the queered ambience of ‘Homecoming’ sees him slip into a sort of curdled tribal reverie. On the other hand, the B-side dwells in a starker, intimate half light, with songs stripped to a spectral quintessence between the petal-fall keys and prickly sax of ‘Foreplay’, a face freezing, ASMR-triggering beauty titled ‘Frenzy’, and an unmissable, abyss-hovering vision ‘Resolve’, and pooling into the miasmic folk strings and stygian glyde of ‘The Beautiful Attempt.’

Following releases for L.I.E.S, Alter, Bank Records NYC, Viewlexx, Ascetic House and Unknown Precept, Nick Klein makes his debut appearance on iDEAL with a strong album of morose, self reflective productions that will strongly appeal if you’re into anything from Nate Young to Depeche Mode to Nine Inch Nails and Caustic Window. The album marks the end of an era for Klein, his last work recorded in the USA before a move to Europe, and feels like a kind of sad kiss-off to the city, delivered in five parts that drill into a signature style of sourest synths and machine rhythms that revel in the thrill of grinding dissociation, seething with a seat-edge tension with jolts of rawest electronic expression. The thrumming velocity that took Klein up to 2018 feels tempered and chiselled into some of his most unyielding work, offering palpably pensive nerviness to his typically bullish styles in a way that has begun to bleed into his most recent releases on Psychic Liberation and Viewlexx. ‘Tail Eating’ and the fierce traction of ‘Every Move Move For The Monitor’ are countered with keening choral voices and serotonin-depleted strings of opener ‘Choking On Ice’, while the sparing strokes of ‘Pear Brandy’ casts a long shadow of midnight blooz guitar, and bony flutes creep over the stygian flow of ’Spider In Brown Powder’ in a salty balance of his patented, dissociative dryness with more esoteric, emotive urges. It feels like an album tailor made for this moment, full of uncertainty, sadness, staring into the bleak unknown.

A strong look for Errorsmith, Evol and Peder Mannerfelt heads - Reece Cox debuts a charmingly daft and animated style of syncopated, technoid dance music on iDEAL. Berlin-based, ofc, Cox generates playfully raving and nutty results from a concept-driven approach on ‘Clang’, which takes its title in tribute to what he describes as; “…a term coined by American Composer, James Tenney to describe a musical unit composed of discreet elements that come together to form a cohesive and singular sonic event… a sonic cartoon aimed not at as sophisticated sonic experience, but sophisticated perceptual one”.

At long last, Boston’s Isabella Koen delivers her long-in-the-making debut album of raving mutant body music, Trance riffs and industrial synth topographies forged with raw and brooding industrial sound design that marks her out among N. America’s most interesting new producers of electronic music. Big tip if yr into Jasss, Helena Hauff, Gesloten Cirkel, AFX. Spanning proper techno artillery, Trance riffs and noise excursions, ’Melody Depleted’ expands on the ruffcut but classy ideas put forth on her tapes and 12”s for the likes of Peder Mannerfelt Production, Börft and Jacktone over the past half decade. It serves a broad but singular showcase of her ability to generate club punishing rhythms, barely-tamed electronic noise and surprisingly sensitive ambient space probes that revel in electronic music’s capacity to evoke fine spectra of technoid feelings with a say it-without-saying-it instrumental finesse.

Echoes of classic Italian industrial experiments ricochet thru Riccardo Mazza’s crackling 2nd album of cyberpunk techno and inquisitive ambient incursions for iDEAL. Where RM’s ‘Unfit’ (2016) LP perhaps tentatively dipped his tootsies in technoid waters after years of encrypting noise filth as Lettera 22, his follow-up for iDEAL betrays a steelier confidence and physicality to his music, manifest in a turbulent range of daring club music mutations intersected by spacious industrial percussion experiments and atmospheric pieces blessed with the romance of abandoned factories. In effect, ‘Spazi Futuri’ bridges dimensions between Maurizio Bianchi and the kind of experiments collated by the Trax label, with the modern freeform industrial of Roberto Crippa and the immersive structures divined by Donato Dozzy.

A precedent of sorts to, erm, Armand van Helden vs Fatboy Slim’s 1999 bout, ‘The Heavyweight Sound Fight’ takes pride of place among iDEAL’s hall of oddities with one of the zaniest recordings by three international leaders of the avant-garde. Adapting all the pomp and ceremony of a boxing match to ludicrous ends - including a flier depicting each artist with their dukes up - they produced what sounds like a great night out for NYC’s experimental cognoscenti with Charlie Morrow (usa) vs Carles santos (Spain) each backed by a band - Soho Baroque Opera Company with the assistance of the New Wilderness Foundation - while Sweden’s Sten Hanson acts as referee, and Armand Schwerner takes the role of announcer in thick, nasal New York brogue. It’s brilliantly daft and subversive but accomplished in a witty way that maybe escapes too many solemnly po-faced avant-garde conceptualists nowadays, and remains a strange outlier in the history of NYC avant garde and beyond. “Operating as an aural window into an happening that occurred more than 40 years ago, “The Heavyweight Sound Fight” unveils a different context of experimental music than is not often encountered today. Running across the album’s four sides, within all the seriousness of art and technique, is the unmistakable presence of humor, play, and the absurd. The audience can’t help but laugh and cheer as the announcer - effecting a deep New York accent and nodding toward notable attendees like Allison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Mac Low - takes an active role in the fight, each artist delivering an array of vocalizations - from extended technique utterances to rants - against the next, with the bands weighing in and engaging in their own battles, ranging from big band dirges and marches, to outright experimental electronic madness. It’s a trully raucous affair that brings that radicalism carried by its sounds into entirely new zones. According to Marrow, he was deemed “winner” in an “off-script” move by the judges, and Santos never spoke to him again, continuing the wild and wonderful mystery and humor of the performance into the present day. Who knows what Santos, who sadly passed away in 2017, would say.”