MAL Vinyl, CD & Tape 3 Items

Elle Andrews & Jon K’s MAL label pushes left with Foql’s new album of polyrhythmic sidewinders and blacklit electronics, edging into crankier spaces on a tense flux somewhere between Raime’s blasted-earth topographies and Anthony Manning’s crystalline FM sequences. Justyna Banaszczyk aka Foql was raised in the post-industrial decay of a city beloved by David Lynch for its abundant, knackered architecture (think ‘Eraserhead’, or run go check his warehouse photo studies). ‘Wehikuł’ translating to ‘Vehicle’, echoes its provenance and dark surreality across eight cuts of intricate post-techno pulses webbed with brooding synths that lend a fine new stripe of influence to MAL’s unpredictable ‘Rebel Music’ agenda, perfectly in step with its off-road vectors. Banaszczyk has been a part of her country’s grassroots underground for many years at this point, making music with a diverse cast of collaborators, co-founding the Oramics Collective and Radio Kapitał, running the Ignorantka space in Łódź, and helming the Pointless Geometry label. She brings this wide-ranging expertise and boundless motivation to her music, charging through her undulating productions with a rare sense of urgency and intensity. Foql patently has a taste for the tang of metallic tones too, coupled with a keen proprioceptive awareness of dubbed-out reverb in wide, vertiginous industrial space that manifests in her ductile, spatialised production. ‘Myrhh’ is a gummy introduction to her distinctive sound, a ruffled clash of bell-like synthesised sequences that harmonise with Anthony Manning’s brilliant (and still underrated) “Islets in Pink Polypropylene”. But Banaszczyk really lets rip with ‘Escapist Dubbbbb Machine’, building up from spliced drum hits into vaporous synth textures and pulsating electronics. Escapist dub is a good descriptor, finding a malleable mid-point that touches Tackhead to Sandwell District without treading into overused “dark” tropes. Her influences coalesce on the album’s title track, adding tense strings to jerky acidic dub, refining the rhythm into a disorientating, convulsive gallop. From here, Banaszczyk’s compositions hover around a similar thematic locale, interpreting her sense of turmoil but driving through it regardless with a relentless sense of purpose. ‘Twój Mózg’ adds fractal synth sequences over rolling loops and paranoid vocal snatches; ‘Shhhshh’ steps into the warehouse, syncopating industrial drums with a voice that’s begging for mental quietude; and ‘Divine Horseman’ dispenses with the rhythm altogether, connecting with Banaszczyk’s DIY noise roots and serrated foghorns over tape-saturated, microtonal rounds. Grim but not suffocating, “Wehikuł” is a flaming torch through inky black territory.

Jon K & Elle Andrews MAL imprint returns with its second release - a long rumoured excursion from Equiknoxx skippers Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair and Jordan “Time Cow” Chung operating under the Gav & Jord masthead for the first time. It’s their most probing x tight set of productions thus far - showcasing that naturally wild rhythmic mutability that’s earned them followers in every corner of the experimental paradigm over the last few years. ‘Writings Ov Tomato’ ties off a certain loop between Equiknoxx and their early supporter Jon K, who was pivotal in bringing their productions to the attention of Sean Canty at DDS, who went on to release their by-now seminal ‘Bird Sound Power’ album a good half-decade ago. This new set of tracks came about after MAL suggested to the duo that they explore any under-excavated musical territory they’d been thinking about since they began to tour the world, and the result is this incredible, purely instrumental LP that romps between Autechrian mutations, avant R&B swangers, Jersey-style sluggers and proper, wig-flipping club missiles. Who else would boot off a new LP with a track titled ‘Childish House Mafia’? The fact it sounds like Actress formulating an industrial noise tape using ritual chants just makes it all the more screwy. The title track returns the duo to more familiar ground, with prickly “Bird Sound Power” drums notched up a few BPM and spliced with whirring trap hats and disorienting synths. ‘A Yow Jon K’ is a Kingston-fried take on sun-bleached Miami electro, with a rolling beat filled out by Gav & Jord’s hard boiled soundboard x foley crunches, before ‘Pig Pilot’, the record’s most substantial cut, loops JBC Radiophonic Workshop convulsions around a booming 4/4 that wouldn’t sound completely out of place at Berghain’s Klubnacht. Saturating the hook and allowing ferric hats to fill in the gaps, the pair manage to fabricate a sound closer to 1970s library music than Villalobos, and we’d wager you ain’t ever heard owt like it. Combine all this with lower-key slithering industrial-ambient moments like the plughole-wonked outro ‘Brent Bird’ (named after Gav’s producer brother), the tuned tinkle of ‘No Sweat in my Sweatpants’ and the airborne elegance of ‘Appinness’, and you’ve got another Equiknoxx joint that draws from the syncretic mosaic of Afro-Latin-Sino-US influences and re-contextualises them into remarkably odd and effective structures that dance in the integers of a myriad styles.

Hot on the heels of a sold out first volume, Elle Andrews & Jon K’s MAL serve a sick second battery of broken club PRESSURE featuring new and exclusive cuts from Jana Rush, Filter Dread, Time Cow, Avon Blume, Soltura and King Maceeyar, together making for the label’s hungriest delivery to date with skews of grime, breakbeat hardcore, footwork and gqom from friends and fam strewn between the Caribbean, South Africa, the US and the UK.

Avon Blume lights it off with screwed hardcore jungle drumfunk ‘3 Minutes Short’ like some vintage Mo Wax cut that's had years of heavy rotation by the likes of Tom Boogizm, while the consistently brilliant Filter Dread fires up the Amiga for the cuboid amen atom-splitting of ‘Digital Voodoo’ on a Rufige Kru flex, beside a sharp twist by Soltura, who makes good on the promise of her All Centre releases with a deadly new one on a sci-fi-drill tip.

‘A Study Of Asoa’ features Duster Valentine indexing the Soundcloud commentary of internet figure A Study of Arpeg (something to do with AYYA from PAN’s ‘Mono No Aware’ comp, maybe?), while ‘Real Pirates Don’t Say Okie Dokie Then’ finds Equiknoxx’s Time Cow on a freaky, tracky NYC buzz, based around a box of samples Jordan ripped after spending an afternoon pillaging Jon K’s record collection in Manchester, 2016.

South Durban’s enigmatic King Maceeyar came to Elle and Jon’s attention via Okzharp and the track included here has been heavily rinsed in recent MAL sets - 'Our Memories' serves a mad slice of emosh gqom, marrying melancholy pads to the taxi techno template including a literally tear-inducing spoken word section, and Chicago legend Jana Rush closes things off by reducing footwork to its sexiest, jazziest and most minimalist ends on the real future shockout ‘Pink Guava’ - a weightless monster.

All Killer²