Osàre! Editions HHV Records 15 Items

Duo Lucas Brell and Marvin Uhde deliver fire-powered percussion to Osàre! Editions. Longtime friends and collaborators, they channel a liquid medley of drum menace that flips sideways, swiftly pivoting between wildly different tempos. As disorientating as it is formidable, Purest State Confusion offers up a fractal prism of ever-shifting beat patterns – an endlessly warping vortex of guttural, narcotic sounds. The titular number, a wormhole techno ordeal, builds steadily, layer upon layer. A crystalline dancefloor pleaser, it subverts classic four-to-the-floor with a delayed kick drum that punctuates every 8th beat. Like black oil diffusing in water, the bass creeps in menacingly to 'The Disappearer', in hard and fast contrast with the sharp fluctuations of the amen break. Slamming in mercilessly, 'Channeling Bryn Jones' opens up the B-side, its fluttering rhythms joining together with an infectious klaxon melody before the IDM stylings of 'Brain Massage' closes out. Purest State Confusion was recorded at various locations in Leipzig and Berlin. Final touches and mixing assistance were performed by Mike Bierbach at the Wsnwg studios. The pioneering techno producer inflects the record with his staunch taste for aerobic club rhythmics, teasing out the whirling tempos and pointillistic harmonics.

Welcome to the magenta world of Emil Valev. During the late 1980s and 90s, at the helm of Violetov General, he pioneered a darkly melancholic, avant-garde formulation of the new wave sound. The band enjoyed international acclaim, spending time in the underground scenes of Bulgaria, Berlin and Slovakia. Since then, Valev has gone on to refine his hypnotically idiosyncratic style with a number of solo releases and appearances at electronic music festivals. Now, Osàre! is honoured to present Gentle Reactor. Collecting together twenty-five years of remastered and more recent material, the album is powered by the sensual fission of harsh textures, metronomic beats and playful excess.

Label boss Elena Colombi initially received over eighty songs from Valev, two of which appeared on the compilations Il Monte Analogo (2021) and Il Lupo Della Steppa (2020) respectively. But it was clear that a full album dedicated to Violetov General needed to be in the works. The pair spent two years combing through recordings, selecting the tracks that would eventually form the double-sided LP. From the locked-groove beat of ‘Valahoveine’ to 'Poliani’s sizzling industrial refrain and the slap-bass finale of 'Black Cat', Gentle Reactor is a wild ride.

The record takes the darkwave genre on a cosmic journey across the realms of prog rock, noise, Eastern European folk-tinged melodies, ritualistic percussion and a patchwork of vocal breakdowns. Driven by an intuitive compositional process and slick production, the retrospective is a fascinating slice of experimental music history that's anything but backwards facing.

Following on from the celebrated first instalment, the second part of The Male Body Will Be Next compiles an entourage of daring sonic experiments, composed in response to bell hooks’ landmark book The Will to Change. Prompting artists and musicians to envision cross-gender solidarity, Osàre! Editions founder Elena Colombi presents an enrapturing, narrative album, conceptualised around collective transformation.

Resonating with hooks’ challenge to men to reclaim the sensitivity that patriarchy denies them, the name of the record arises from a photograph by Peter de Potter and Rebecca Salvadori’s film of the same title. In these depictions, naked flesh is exposed, made vulnerable and trembles with emotion as the fragility of masculine bodies are examined through the queer and female oppositional gaze. Transforming this visual language into musical expression, The Male Body Will Be Next swirls with punk vitriol, electrified noise, acid, electro and free-wheeling encounters charged by love, lust and limerence.

Gently plunking chords signal Pose Diva’s reimagining of lover’s rock before Sissy Fuss smashes in with a heavy-weight instrumental version of their erotic anthem ‘No Restraint’. Made up of Turkish musician Etkin Çekin and Belarussian songstress Galina Ozeran, God is God delivers a gentle lullaby, while Low End Activist flirts with dark and brooding bass, shattering penetrating frequencies into luminous fragments. Riffing off the 2020 documentary about female early electronica pioneers, Loma Doom crafts a slowly oscillating drone zenith, the ultimate climax. In line with the conceptual underpinning, there are plenty of collaborations – Daytripper’s Riva and Sitar player Tommy Khosla, Lebanonese experimentalist N R and Swiss-French producer John Silvestre (aka Typhon), as well as Colombi herself and trans author/activist Juno Roche. Within these partnerships, new modalities come alive as mediums, practices and perspectives are ignited and pushed in otherworldly, metamorphic directions.

Novo Line – aka Berlin's algorave maestro Nat Fowler – delivers a noisy, ultramarine voyage into the depths of his archaic hardware. Clawing at the periphery between leftfield electronics and avant-garde pop, Zeit is an entirely new sonic universe, eerily familiar yet utterly uncharted. A visionary synthesist, Fowler is renowned for his productions that make use of mainly '80s equipment including vintage digital synths, discarded Midi Hi-Tech, tape delay and even an ancient Atari ST computer. But, despite the aged technology, the result is far from nostalgic.

'Ain't That a Mess' slams in with Monica Kremidi's crooning à la Little Annie Anxiety with reeving car engines and guitar-rock static fed through a pan effect. Multilayered melodies soar on 'Stein', the pounding drums matched by gliding strings, crafting that holy grail of cavernous, booming textures and uplifting euphoria that mark out the most transcendent of rave tracks. The deceptively gentle opening bars of 'Morning Star' are interrupted by a viscously squelching bassline, Cass McCombs' vocals dancing deliciously with the raw beat.

Rejecting contemporary tech-fetishism, Novo Line has a near-supernatural ability to exorcise novel sequences, weaving together a record that speaks to the ghost in the machine.

In 2022, Osàre! Editions founder Elena Colombi approached artists and musicians with a prompt: Every body, everyone needs love to flourish. In her book The Will to Change, the eminent author and social activist, Bell Hooks, invites men to excavate their innermost selves, challenging the way that patriarchal society limits their capacity for intimacy, tenderness, care and emotion. As hooks lays out, feminist thought and work requires the collective participation of all genders in order to realise a liberated world. How can we imagine cross-gender solidarity through music and art? And how can we tell sonic stories that facilitate our full potential as desiring beings? These are the questions that The Male Body Will Be Next starts out from.

The title of the record draws connections between hooks' writing, a film by Rebecca Salvadori and Peter de Potter's stunning photo series of the same name. In de Potter and Salvadori's depictions, men's bodies appear as vulnerable, naked and exposed.

Divided into two parts, the first instalment of The Male Body Will Be Next hinges on colliding energies – the melding of club dance floors and haunting ambient textures, agile techno and noisy experimentation.

'The sun on my skin… it’s so warm and gentle,’ speak-sings Olivia Salvadori on ‘Su Di Te M’Infrango’, visualising utopias. Laurel Halo crafts a dreamscape spun from golden threads of synth and strings. Pensive and reflective, Ben Bertrand’s bass clarinet roams searchingly, its piercing tonality full of longing. Yet, in between these lucid, cinematic passages and spoken word, The Male Body Will Be Next finds space to dance together. Moving in fervent, rhythmic patterns, Sepehr’s ‘Divooneh’ pivots between tension and release. Filmmaker unleashes a wave of energy and The Spy delivers a potent take on vintage electro, the track title hinting at the double-bind of gendered expectations. Propelled between these eclectic styles, the record encapsulates the full spectrum of sonic expression.

L/f/d/m, aka Richard Smith, makes his debut on Osàre, exploring the more delicate side of his intoxicatingly abrasive sound. Gold Like Glass is razor-sharp and elemental, with each track cast from long passages of synth dissected into heavy edits. According to Smith, this composition process is akin to printmaking, where the ink on a series of images deviates from the original stencil, becoming looser, softer and increasingly ghostly. ‘After Whitney’ is haunted by peak time rave energy; the drums are disembowelled, leaving a rolling climatic melody, utterly euphoric and disorientating. The track is followed by ‘Blood Byze Leech,’ a thunderously jagged affair, and ‘Delicate Push’ that fizzles like an electrified spinning-top, its frozen melodies accompanied by a lolloping beat. Turning over to the B-side, ‘Plute’ winds its way into dark psychedelia while ‘m-two nine’ descends into the realm of mutant de-accelerated bleep techno. Combing the ciphers of hardcore, its cruxes and suspense, with the serrated edge of minimal synth EBM, Gold Like Glass presents an
alchemical fusion of deeply danceable and cerebral noise.

The idea for Suemori's new alias arose in conversation with Osàre! Editions label boss, Elena Colombi. An inheritance from his grandfather, the name sets the tone of the album that synthesises traditional Japanese instruments into an electronic format. Dub and drone’s eerie resonance collides with staccato electro and fizzling acid on ‘Yakkosan.’ Driven by a meditative beat, flutes and choral voices glide through 'Senpai Kouhai' while ‘Hankumoi’ shudders with lucid synth. The cultural iconography of Japan emerges from this dark, textual landscape, haunted both by the ghosts of the past and spectral sound of the future. Words by Hannah Pezzack

Turbulent synths ooze and oscillate, roaming like searchlight beacons across darkened shores. The experimental and idiosyncratic sound of duo Inkasso explores the feeling of being cast adrift in disorientating, mechanical worlds. In the studio, the pair jam with drills, string instruments, field recordings and everyday objects to create a hypnotic cacophony. Hear the penny drop on ‘Asso,’ chains rattle on ‘Träume aus Draht;’ the junglist murk of ‘Tag der Imker,’ and the sharp, crystalline beat of ‘Punkervirtel.’ Inkasso invites you to get lost in the uncanny spaces between dub, drone and techno; static introspection and the primal desire to dance.

Free Range are back with their second outing for Osàre editions. ‘Camry Horses’ is a mesmerising dive into the brutal pop-tinged electronics of the duo, taking the mutant surrealism of their first release on the label a step further. Deliciously droning, Matt Weiner and Ernestas Sadau warp melancholic synth over a stomping-techno pulse in ‘Jet Lag is Calling.’ ‘Thunder God’ predicts transmogrifying weather patterns, while ‘Liquid Latex’ casts a touch of dominatrix energy, all powered by hypnotic dancefloor occultism.

Uniting under the moniker of Free Range, prolific US underground producer Matt Weiner (2MR, Night People) and Lithuanian experimentalist Ernestas Sadau (Pinkman, Digital Tsunami), provide Osàre’s first release with ‘King of Snakes’. A lovingly sludgy collaboration, the record mixes DIY electronics, droning atmospheric and space-inflected new wave influences, underscored by a surrealist edge glimpsed in track titles such as ‘Relax, It’s Just Eggs’ and ‘Washing Machine Speaking
"Osàre is the new label from Elena Colombi, the much-respected and always intriguing DJ and NTS resident. Known for her unique ability to connect the spirit of records from her wide-ranging collection, Osàre translates in her native Italian to “daring” or “bold”, setting a precedent for what to expect from Colombi’s curation; future facing music culled from a legacy of forward-thinking experimentation and abandon, imbued with a sense of complete freedom, transcending expectations of time or genre."

The project by Jens-Uwe Beyer and Thomas Venker boasts a remarkable origin story. In 2017, Venker, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Cologne’s Kaput magazine, hosted a gathering at Beyer's house, bringing together journalists, creatives, and musicians. To mark the occasion, the pair decided to join forces for an impromptu ambient-electronic performance, presenting themselves as a two-man band. That evening, donned in special costumes designed by artist Sarah Szczesny and fuelled by a generous amount of Japanese whisky, Hasan Poppu was born. Over the course of the pandemic, the duo thought about creating a record based on the live recording of their premiere show. However, the synergy of their collaborative creative energies led them in entirely novel directions. Their self-titled, double-sided album traverses a wild and raucous terrain, moving swiftly from hybrid noise-techno to giddy party ecstasy, to strange and shadowy atmospheres.

Including remixes by YPY, Hibotep, Lena Willikens, Efdemin and Barnt, the 11 tracks span a dizzying array of experimental dance-facing styles. 'Die-Biden' kicks off as a high-vibrational vocal experiment seemingly voiced by a sentient German vocoder. 'Kodō' follows, featuring Venker's playful mantra set against a stomping beat. Willikens' reimagining of 'Teiko' transports the track to obscure realms inhabited by strange creatures emitting ungodly sounds. Meanwhile, Efdemin's take on 'Ekusutashī' pulsates with a kinetic buzz. Flipping over to the B-side, 'Sakura' is a euphoric wall of drone punctuated by eerie whispers and mystical singing. Then, the second installment of 'Kodō' takes a fresh trajectory with a touch of Barnt’s electronic groove stylings. Finally, Hibotep's 'Shojo no yo ni flp' serves as the finsher – an unrepentant trance belter that disintegrates into sampled fragments. Loosely translating to "broken pop music," Hasan Poppu is informed by Beyer and Venker's shared love for Japan. The band takes their cues from the country’s rich sonic cultures while also drawing on Venker's wordsmith background and Beyer's flair for melding melodic tech-house with song-based synth-pop. Originally out on Beachcoma Recordings, Hasan Poppu’s debut album gets a new lease of life on Osàre! Editions with a digital and limited edition cassette tape release. Sarah Szczesny reprises her role in shaping the visual identity of Hasan Poppu by creating beautiful, painterly artwork for the record. words by Hannah Pezzack

Novo Line – aka Berlin's algorave maestro Nat Fowler – delivers a noisy, ultramarine voyage into the depths of his archaic hardware. Clawing at the periphery between leftfield electronics and avant-garde pop, Zeit is an entirely new sonic universe, eerily familiar yet utterly uncharted. A visionary synthesist, Fowler is renowned for his productions that make use of mainly '80s equipment including vintage digital synths, discarded Midi Hi-Tech, tape delay and even an ancient Atari ST computer. But, despite the aged technology, the result is far from nostalgic.

'Ain't That a Mess' slams in with Monica Kremidi's crooning à la Little Annie Anxiety with reeving car engines and guitar-rock static fed through a pan effect. Multilayered melodies soar on 'Stein', the pounding drums matched by gliding strings, crafting that holy grail of cavernous, booming textures and uplifting euphoria that mark out the most transcendent of rave tracks. The deceptively gentle opening bars of 'Morning Star' are interrupted by a viscously squelching bassline, Cass McCombs' vocals dancing deliciously with the raw beat.

Rejecting contemporary tech-fetishism, Novo Line has a near-supernatural ability to exorcise novel sequences, weaving together a record that speaks to the ghost in the machine.

Limited Edition Vinyl (Hand stamped. Comes in a transparent PVC sleeve with Riso printed paper strip. contains download code)

Making a threateningly potent debut on Osàre! Editions as The Spy, Wessel Janssen combines classic boot-stomping techno with cybernetic groove, jittery IDM and sinister electro. Crackling, liquid synth, as slick on oil on water, channels the potency of club dancefloors through a gripping conceptual underpinning. Capturing fugitives on the run from a mysterious axis power, the mini LP is an action-packed adrenaline buzz.

Launching off with 'Cobra,' the momentous opening track sets the steely tone of the record. ‘Time to Strike’ stabs with polymorphic, stuttering beats, while 'Never Again' wields the high-drama of an urgent getaway. Screeching like a security system gone haywire, 'Cigarette' is set ablaze by J.C.'s monstrous vocals.

Think The Matrix, Mission Impossible and 007, but for dark, pounding basements devoid of time.

In October 2021, Spazio Per Azioni Luminescenti culminated the Close Range music residency programme at Het HEM contemporary art centre in Zaandam, the Netherlands. A haunting audiovisual performance and site specific immersive installation, it evokes elements of sound, spoken word and articulated light design. The recording is a twenty minute sonic journey in four moments, each interlinked with one another. This format reflects the iterations of the work which was performed live twice a day over two days. The piece was presented by Tutto Questo Sentire, an artist collective consisting of experimental soprano Olivia Salvadori, composer and cellist Sandro Mussida and filmmaker and video artist Rebecca Salvadori. The group is accompanied by guests Osàre! founder Elena Colombi on synthesiser, vocalist and producer Coby Sey and light artist Charlie Hope.

Conjuring the afterglow of creative encounters; the dying embers that linger when the curtain has fallen, Spazio Per Azioni Luminescenti illuminates impressions embedded in architecture; the echoes of the past that emanate as sensations, affect and memory. Interweaving classical instruments and singing with synthetic production and field recordings, for each performance, Hope sampled the colours of the evening sky, projecting the fluctuating shades of orange like a slowly revolving lighthouse beacon. Emerging from the captured footage, sound and light design processes are concepts of fragmentary action, stillness and rotation, the passage of time and circular motion of circadian rhythms.

Located along the banks of the North Sea Canal, Het HEM is a former industrial munitions factory. Unfolding between the looming white metal girders that make up the building’s infrastructure, Spazio Per Azioni Luminescenti opens with a low hum from Colombi’s modular synth, the oscillations reverberating through the concrete and steel. Filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori plays out fragments of her videos, inviting the audience to listen and imagine the missing images, envisioning “what remains” absent, while Mussida draws a slow, incandescent chord on his cello strings. Voices echo, snippets of conversations between the artists involved, Het HEM's director and curators. Sey harmonises with Olivia Salvadori’s otherworldly soprano, their vocals amplified through a quadraphonic, site-adapted speakers. Slipping into the surreal and uncanny, Spazio Per Azioni Luminescenti plays deftly with spatially: utterances surface, then disappear into the shadows, as ephemeral as a sunset.

Words by Hannah Pezzack

An icy wave of distortion. Gristle and bone bass. Incantatory, bloodcurdling poetics. Anna Funk Damage returns to Osare! Editions with a full-length LP, laying down 13 occultist tracks, turbocharged by industrialism, dissolution and heartbreak. The Italian producer more than lives up to his namesake, delivering his signature, genre-destroying blend of experimental-punk-techno and steely dance floor deviance.

Opening with a howl, clatter and smash, on 'Sono Spento’, Andrea Natale takes the shape of a self-annihilating robot, his heavily pitched-down vocals laden in layers of FX. ‘Maybe I’ whirls into a slow build screech while 'Allegri Rimpianti’ joins together organic, pummelling percussion, sharp synth chords, and jangly guitar for a nightmarish trifecta of throbbing noise. Occasionally, Natale's presence falls away entirely, allowing for unadulterated machinic ecstasy to take over. Cogs grind on 'Memoria, Solitudine’, a dark and lolloping track, thrumming with sinister, malicious intent, before 'La Fine’ signs off, lurching skittishly like an anxious, artificially pumping heart.

Interweaving elements of avant-garde ambient, rock, and even black metal, all rewired through a Moog Dfam and a Mother-32 interface, II Corpo Che Si Rompe is powered by unrelenting energy as Natale descends to ever more demonic, punishing depths.