V.A. Berlin Atonal - More Light

In a year which made impossible the now highly anticipated annual unveiling of new projects and collaborations that usually accompanies Berlin Atonal, the festival has compiled a major selection of new works by a range of artists from across the advanced musical landscape. Entitled More Light the compilation traverses the vast spectrum of musical experience. French producer Aho Ssan - who made his debut at Berlin Atonal’s 2019 edition - has smelted the vocals of Exzald S into a multi-layered track that gestures towards a future language for computer-produced music. New York’s Hiro Kone pairs with group A’s Tot Onyx to debut their collaboration with an outstanding showpiece of groaning power-surge electronics, while legendary futurist Gerald Donald XOR Gate alias. Speculative widescreen-electronics protagonists Roly Porter and Paul Jebanasam unveil the first recorded track of their collaborative Altar project, conjuring up an entire ecology composed of both positively and negatively charged emotional-electronic particles. Enchanted Belgian magicians Pablo’s Eye offer a new track that grows out of the melancholic ambient-pop that the collective has been making since the 90s, while Nkisi hones in on a section of her premiere Atonal ’19 set ‘’Initiation” and reworks it into a brawling, bleak, hard-edged trampler. These tracks sit beside a transformational collab between Abdullah Miniawy and Carl Gari, evocative synthesised works from Caterina Barbieri and Laurel Halo, unclassifiable post-ambient from exael and Kazakh-British violinist Galya Bisengalieva and much much more. The festival’s legendary revived imprint which has previously hosted contributions from Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Marshstepper and others now has a monumental new chapter.