Smalltown Supersound Vinyl, CD & Tape 33 Items

Actress' tenth studio album, the celestial and meditative `Statik' is released this Spring via Smalltown Supersound. The cosmic collaboration between Darren Cunningham and the esteemed Oslobased purveyors of elevated sonics evolved organically following Actress' remix of a Carmen Villain cut for the 12" of her Only Love From Now album. In this vein, the entire `Statik' project, from conception through creation and release, has been blessed with an almost unnatural ease. For Actress, who wrote the majority of his subtly majestic new record in an extensive deep flow state, the project serves as a cohesive testament to artistic liberation. Resultantly, the contemplative new album is imbued with a sense of freedom, while belying its creator's expertise through forensic attention to textural detail and signature Actress resonances. Listening closely, influential visions of aquatic realms, such as the mythic Atlantis, and evocations of flying birds (and, perhaps, humans) may reveal themselves. No matter if Statik inspires you to soar above or below the horizon, Actress and Smalltown Supersound promise you a safe and transcendent journey.

Smalltown Supersound’s fantastic Le Jazz Non Series returns with a collection of pure, emotional club bangers, on a tip somewhere between Aphex Twin’s first Analogue Bubblebath and Drexciya’s most direct The Other People Place romancers. ’Slay Tracks’ is Bratten’s 6th album and perhaps the closest to Smalltown’s heart, personally selected from his swelling hard drive by label bossman Joakim Haugland. You can see the tip he’s on too, opting for a sort of refracted view of ‘90s electronics, propulsive but always emotionally driven. ‘Res’ hits most closely to classic Richard D James with its doe-eyed, single note bassline, while screwed acid vignette ‘Tunnel’, reminds us of Sockethead and Michael J. Blood with its slow, square bass grind. ‘Repair’ gives it all gossebump-inducing melodies in a mode not far from classic Titonton Duvanté or even The Black Dog’s earliest, many-monikered excursions, while ‘A Fog’ craftily dices with a vibe redolent of Phoenicia or the Miami lot, and the closing couplet of ‘The Returner’ and ’Strayed’ smartly extend that analogue on a low- down, offbeat bent like some classic Push Button Objects. Effortlessly uplifting, highly enjoyable gear.

Armed with a disdain for pastiche and a penchant for experimentalism, rRoxymore has spent the last decade pushing the boundaries of what constitutes club music. Across a steady stream of releases, the Berlin-based artist has continually reinvented her sound, shifting from hypnotic leftfield techno to UK bass mutations, genre-eschewing dub oddities and so much more. On Perpetual Now, her sophomore album, she again displays this propensity for pushing the sonic envelope. It's a slow-burning record, and one that blurs the lines between the electronic and the organic. Subverting the traditional album format, Perpetual Now is made up of four extended soundscapes - each taking the listener on a journey through tempo, texture and emotional state. Downtempo opener `At The Crest' gently sets things into motion, allowing the sparse percussion to tentatively find its feet. `Sun In C' is a peculiarly meditative excursion, crafting a rich, intoxicating atmosphere across its nine minutes. `Fragmented Dreams', with its pulsating rhythms and fractured melodies, sees the album fleetingly burst into life, before `Water Stain' winds things down in the most effortless of manners. A daring, unconventional album, Perpetual Now is everything we've come to expect and more from one of electronic music's most unique producers. French-born, Berlin-based DJ, sound artist and producer rRoxymore first emerged on the scene with `Wheel of Fortune', a ten-minute epic released on Planningtorock's Human Level back in 2012. She has since put out music regularly, dropping her debut album Face To Phase in 2019, and more recently "I Wanted More", a four-track EP that veered from downtempo ambience to lush deep house.

The US-born, Norwegian-Mexican musician and producer Carmen Villain, real name Carmen Hillestad, has spent the last nine years and four albums gently unraveling song into the sound of emotional impulse. From the tilt and croon of her first two albums to the expansive warmth that flows and pulses beyond ambient in her more recent output, Hillestad's journey is artful musical deconstruction but also somehow spiritual growth. Hence new album Only Love From Now On, her fourth full-length and the culmination of a build-up that really began with the turn in sound evident from third album Both Lines Will Be Blue (2019, Smalltown Supersound) and the subsequent releases Affection In A Time Of Crisis (2020, Longform Editions) and Sketch For Winter IX: Perlita (2021, Geographic North). While the seed of her aesthetic was planted earlier, it has blossomed into something unexpected, benevolent in its composure and altogether luxuriant in its sensuality. If her themes, especially now, are wide, philosophical, and occasionally abstract, the emotional tenor of Hillestad's music is clear and purposeful. Makes sense that her key musical touchstones are dub, ambient, and cosmic jazz - flexible vehicles for tranquil wonder. While it may not contain voice or lyrics, as her two earliest records do, she describes it as, "wishing to maintain a sense of careful optimism for the future, while on the cusp of something unknown." Listening to Only Love From Now On is simultaneously comforting and alluringly strange. Partly it's the contributions of guests Arve Henriksen (trumpet, electronics) and Johanna Scheie Orellana (flutes). Partly it's the fluidity between instruments - such as clarinets - field recordings, the studio, jam, and careful composition. She calls the process a conversation with sound that occurs in her deliberate attempts to experiment with new methods, like granular synthesis, for her music-making. But mostly that strange comfort is in the peace and grateful contentment she has found via the stark recognition of her own privilege - laid bare by the pandemic. Only Love From Now On is fueled by the sense of scale in feeling small in the face of things so large, the contemplation of how the biggest impact we can have is in the people close to us, the attempt to make sure that impact is a positive one, and the choice to try to focus on love instead of fear.

Perila (Aleksandra Zakharenko) left her native Russia six years ago, landing in Berlin. Finding her place almost immediately - first at Berlin Community Radio and through that amongst a group of like-minded creative individuals (including her current flatmates Special Guest DJ and exael) - she started a regular practice of working on an expressionistic "sonic diary" of field recordings and electronic sound research for her own pleasure. When the opportunity arose to create her own podcast series, WET (or Weird Erotic Tension) was born. Upon hearing her evocative and atmospheric music layered with friends Nat Marcus and Inger Wold Lund's erotic spoken word poetry, Sferic Records asked to release it, and Perila - a project name originally used for her BCR show - truly came to be. Aleksandra, who was raised in St. Petersburg, has been involved in music since childhood thanks to her melomaniac father. She's been both drummer and singer in local bands in Russia, and is also the co-founder of radio.syg.ma - one of the first online stations in Russian focusing on experimental sounds - but Perila is something else entirely. You could loosely describe it as ambient, but her soundworld is so specific and transportative, filled with detail and movement, it's more akin to hauntological musique concrète, touched by song. Her fascination with voice and language - she studied English literature at university - is still evident, although that's now her voice, her texts, her crooning you can hear on the Everything Is Already There cassette (Boomkat Editions, 2020), her processed breaths on the Meta Door L cassette (Paralaxe Editions, 2020). The Wire Magazine got it right when they said about Irer Dent that, "Sensuality is presented as a secret pass to a higher consciousness." For her debut album, How Much Time it is Between You and Me?, released via Smalltown Supersound on June 11th, Aleksandra takes inspiration from the concept of time, which she felt keenly during the pandemic. Recorded primarily in September 2020 in a rural village in France - her only travel during the first year of the pandemic period - surrounded by mountains but otherwise alone with no internet, her perception of time there differed immensely. She describes the trip as, "an immersive experience into self," viewed through a "silence prism" where everyday sounds usually ignored felt amplified. While her work has always dealt in intimacy - be it the private thrills of WET or the audible closeness of our surroundings - the organic response and consistent feedback she gets for Perila made Aleksandra recognize a longing, a need for it in today's world. Intent on creating work based in honesty and tenderness, Perila's practice also explores how we feel music and emotion throughout the body and how sound can help to release it. How does the sound enter a body and travel through it? Where does movement start? How do you reach and unblock emotional clusters with the help of sound and deep listening of the body responses? Aleksandra likes to describe her music and performances as trips - thick narratives drifting along sound to get closer to self. Let Perila guide you through this journey.

Recorded (mostly) remotely between 2020-2022, but mired in a mutual interiority, their sublimely
smoky venture bridges strains of spoken word, strung-out country folk, jazz and etheric
kosmische with a timeless control of mood and atmosphere that amounts to one of the finest
episodes in either’s oeuvre. In a properly enchanted blurring of identity, they almost entirely
dispense with digital tools in favour of more pastoral and timeless energies; guitar, sax, jazzy
brush drums and a Rhythm Ace FR-3 drum machine, a sort of precursor to Roland’s simmering
CR-78.
It’s that sax that takes you places though, daubing accents of blushed romance over walls of guitar
in various formations, all of which sidestep the widescreen cliché in favour of something more
nuanced and unusual. This ain’t the open road of Lynch and Badalamenti, more the careening
trailblaze of Conny Plank & Holger Czukay, Angela Conway & Bruce Gilbert, The Jesus & Mary Chain
and Hope Sandoval’s Stoned & Dethroned, like a melted Venus in Furs, soft, and fritzed.

Flautist Johanna Orellana teams up with Carmen Villain for a collection of horizontal, pastoral field recordings and close mic-ed flute sounds that zero in on the instrument’s unstable resonance and levitational magic. There’s no cringe virtuoso business or fourth world firewalking here - just sonic purity, sublime minimalism and the precise capture of time, place and poetry. You might have come across Johanna Orellana before if you’ve listened to Carmen Villain’s music (or seen her perform live), and Villain appears here in a producer’s role, using her engineering expertise to impart a level of restraint and sonic fidelity that’s quite startling. There are only really two central elements to the album: environmental recordings and flute. There’s no psychedelic delay, no cavernous reverb; no audible treatments at all - Orellana and Villain instead force us to consider the flute and its musical lineage. ‘El Jardín I’ introduces the instrument as a physical conduit; Orellana allows her breath to distort the sound - the padded pat pat of the keys forms a kind of rhythm, closely recorded so it’s amplified and jarring, linking to primal wind instruments like conch shells, bamboo flutes and wooden whistles. Recalling the way in which Debit interfaced with the ancient world using AI- assisted tech on last year’s ‘The Long Count’, Orellana uses a comparatively modern contemporary transverse flute, an instrument with roots that stretch back through the baroque era, into Medieval Europe, back to the Byzantine era and into Asia. The component that connects the instruments and eras is breath, and its amplification and modification through differently shaped pipes and vessels. Orellana lets the environment sing: insects, rushing water and zephyr-like winds form a stage that presents her mortal energy, suggesting a harmony between our use of breath and its environmental ubiquitousness. Her technique is steeped in folk history and decouples itself from expectation by rooting itself in nature. It allows her to bridge the gap between equal temperament and less ordered (less commercially-focused) microtonality without overstating the concept. Other sounds waft in from the sidelines; what might be an Indian bansuri, stray notes, a gust of air. There’s a link to the foundational new age recordings that Joanna Brouk made with Maggi Payne back in 1980, but Orelanna also absorbs the outdoor folk magic of Fonal or Stroom, and the improvisational grist of Bendik Giske or legendary US horn duo Nmperign

A composition simply means things being put together. In music, we usually think ofcomposition as a classical idea. But in recent years, the possibilities of what`composing' can be, have dramatically increased.Based in Oslo, Norway, Deathprod (aka Helge Sten) has been making his own formsof music with no compromise since the early 90s. His specialty is a deeplyatmospheric, grainy minimalism that slows time down and explores the very particlesof sound itself. This music can sound forbidding and alien at first, but compared to hismore brutal output, it's an extraordinarily close and intimate experience.The first new Deathprod studio project since 2019's OCCULTING DISK,Compositions is the result of an intense period at his legendary Audio Virus Labstudio in central Oslo. All tracks are released in chronological order - in other words,the order in which they were recorded. Sten used a personal, unique combination ofobsolete digital audio processors and sound generators, c...

Produced by Laurel Halo and released via Norway's respected Smalltown Supersound label, Anja Lauvdal's first solo release, From a Story Now Lost, is a gorgeous musical essay reflecting on time, its perception, and lost histories rediscovered. Finally exploring her own voice after more than a decade of collaborative improvisational playing - starting at her time injazz conservatory in Trondheim - the album is a jewel of subtle beauty and innovative detail. A freeform musician on piano, synthesizers, and electronics, Lauvdal's discography stretches back to 2013 and includes her participation in a myriad of ensembles and collaborations exploring the limits of sound andmusic in many forms, including noise, jazz, and more. Following her move to Oslo after graduation, she became deeply embedded in the music community there, touring with Jenny Hval as well as playing on her records. When pandemic hit and isolation was the norm, Lauvdal began working on her own, recording her improvisations in an attempt to capture something new for herself. Connecting to Laurel Halo via Smalltown's founder Joakim Haugland, the acclaimed American artist agreed to work with Lauvdal in shaping her solo record, becoming integral to its creation through all of its stages. Lauvdal credits Halo as a deep listener and gentle "thought-provoker", who contributed ideas as well as helping to shape the finished versions (Haloalso worked alongside Rashad Becker on the final mix of the album). Together, they found a method of recording Lauvdal's improvisations, making small loops from those, feeding them back into the synthesizers, and making synthesizers out of the improvisations, which Lauvdal would then re-improvise with. She describes the end result, "like seeing different pieces of time around in the universe." While the record is based on Lauvdal's improvisations, some tracks were inspired Agathe Backer Grondahl, a Norwegian classical pianist and composer from the latter half of the 19th century. Lauvdal notes that Grondahl is not widel...

Properly transcendent deep-dream jazz fantasy from prolific trumpet virtuoso Arve Henriksen (Supersilent) and Norwegian pianist Kjetil Husebø, together shaping an album that’s much, much more than the not so inconsiderable sum of its parts. Like a fever-dream comedown, it takes us from insanely rich sounding 4th world topographies to fizzing, electric ambience and fluttering prepared piano, perfectly soundtracking the humid un-reality we’re living through. We’ve been snagged on Henriksen’s work since his ‘Chiaroscuro’ album appeared back in 2004 - it’s ‘Opening Image’ often cited here as basically the last word in cinematic framing. But It’s his work alongside Helge Sten (Deathprod) and Ståle Storløkken in Supersilent that’s perhaps thrown us furthest down the Henriksen rabit hole in the years since, his distinctive shakuhachi-style playing often accenting their finest recordings. ‘Sequential Stream’ is Henriksen’s first collaboration with pianist Kjetil Husebø, the pair assembling the album remotely from their respective studios in Gothenburg, Sweden and Oslo, Norway over the course of 2019 and 2020. Henriksen plays Trumpet alongside synths, various electronics and - on ‘Single Sentence’ - a striking vocal delivery that eschews his usual wordless/soprano in favour of a more dense Tenor. Husebø plays grand piano, synths and samplers, and veers from cascading to more fluttering styles as the album progresses. In one sense the album functions in a traditional mode of Jazz reflection, aided considerably by a beautifully pristine recording and subsequent mastering by Helge Sten. Every note skips and shimmers with abundant clarity and depth - like the most affecting Jazz, played on the most luxurious systems; it just sounds rich and impossibly clear on even the most modest setup. At the same time, the pair’s avant garde instincts gradually make an indelible mark - be it through the prepared piano backbone on the remarkable ‘Slow Fragments’ or the percolating, Conjointesque electronics on ‘Sonic Binoculars’, piping in atmospheric depth and disjointed detail like some seismic event rippling through the ocean. Not usually drawn to the Jazz orthodoxy, ‘Sequential Stream’ presents us with something of a paradox - it feels like Henriksen’s most approachable work in years, but also his most complex and multi-faceted. If you’re looking for a late night soundtrack to the most celluloid moments of your life - it works on that level. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll discover much more ambiguous, subterranean delights.

Unrestrained by notions of style or genre, there is a distinct air of freedom that permeates Picture Music, the new project from André Bratten. On what is his fifth album, the electronic visionary didn’t enter the studio with the notion of making a particular type of record. Conversely, it was viewed as an opportunity to simply create - to let the music take over and guide the journey. Bringing together sparse strings, meditative synths, lingering piano chords and fleeting field recordings, the result is a collection of captivating sonic vignettes - deftly assembled into something profound and endearing. Eschewing the darker, more abrasive elements of most recent LP Silvester, Picture Music features some of Bratten’s most accessible and melodic music to date - a shift in outlook no doubt expedited by the isolation of multiple Covid-19 lockdowns. These minimalist compositions ruminate on how the past two years have forced people to reconsider the concept of “normal life”, as well as the birth of Bratten’s second child – an experience he describes as “like death in reverse”. The album title is taken from a compilation on the legendary Sky Records, a label that has been an enduring source of inspiration for Bratten along with that of Klaus Schultze's Innovative Communication. But rather than mimicking the work of these electronic luminaries,Picture Music sees him forge his own path: one that uncovers beauty in the simplicities of everyday life. Norwegian electronic artist André Bratten released his debut album Be A Man You Ant on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label in 2013. He has since released three albums on Smalltown Supersound, and more recently produced Cracks, the acclaimed project from avant-garde saxophonist Benedik Giske. On June 10th Bratten returns with fifth studio album Picture Music.

After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway. Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with Lasse Marhaug. An esteemed avant-noise artist, Marhaug envisioned making music that would fall loosely in line with Throbbing Gristle. Kelly, on the other hand, had planned to create something inspired by Enya, an artist who has had an enduring impact on her creative being. They met each other halfway, pairing tough, industrial sounds with ethereal celtic mysticism, and creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release. One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her `eighth album'.

The second release on Smalltown Supersound’s highly promising offside jazz label, ‘Le Jazz Non Series’ follows Bendik Giske and Buttechno’s mighty label opener with a killer compilation bursting with contemporary/outsider Norwegian free music as a show of solidarity against racism in the scene, with a title that translates to “Freejazz against racism“. Stitched and compiled by Anja Lauvdal and Tine Hvidsten, the set features 18 outsider Jazz burners centered around a varied and diverse cast of characters from the young Norwegian scene. While Norway has long had a positive relationship with free music, its players have invariably looked remarkably similar. “Frijazz mot rasisme” aims to address that by expressing the diversity of Oslo’s contemporary scene and show its commitment to anti-racism; of the players featured on the record, many are regulars at Norwegian demonstrations against local anti-Muslim organization Sian - with the compilation designed to collect funds for local anti-racist work. Musically, “Frijazz mot rasism” is a fractal head-fry of the highest order, dilating a fertile movement thru spiraling outsider-jazz. If musical nodes are needed for a point of reference, it flexes from Don Cherry-inspired communal psychedelia sprawlers to fiery shredders, modal percussive cyclones and lushly expressive instrumental virtuosity of a sort we can only imagine would short-circuit and frazzle a pack of bleating Viking gammons. With well over half the tracks originating from female artists, the set also represents a phase shift in perception, wickedly reprising the form’s historic function as fire music and a soundtrack to civil unrest, but with a decided female energy that’s more agitant than aggressive, in a way that might just calm and enlighten the xenophobes. There’s a tonne to get down with; Sanskriti Shrestha & Andreas Wildhagen’s modal tabla groover ‘Eight hands’ is a real standout, with subtle treats in the liminal thizz of ‘Up There’ by Propan, and a strikingly stark solo performance by Inga Aas, held in balance with tussling razz-outs like ‘One out of town’ feat. Brian Sandstrom, and scatting, Dadaist mischief by Agnes Hvizdalek that’s sure to pique interest along with the chaotic swarm of its shred-out finale ‘Primary Antibody’. Wall to wall enlightening, emotional bangers this one = highest Tip!

Norwegian duo Lost Girls, artist and writer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, release their first album after collaborating for more than ten years. Volden has been playing regularly in Hval's live band for more than a decade, and their duo project goes back to an acoustic collaborative album from 2012, using the moniker Nude on Sand. Instead of resurrecting the previous band, Hval and Volden opted for a fresh start for their 2018 EP Feeling, taking nomenclatural inspiration from the 2006 graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and comics artist Melinda Gebbie. For their first LP, Hval and Volden booked an actual studio (Ora studios, Trondheim, Norway), which they had never done before. Recording sessions took place in March 2020, even if they felt like the material wasn't really ready for recording. This left a lot to improvisation, and so Menneskekollektivet was created in-between set structures and the energy of collective exploration. Perhaps this is what makes Menneskekollektivet unique: The quality of trying something, to see if the structures fit. In a way this is a more physical version of what Hval has been exploring lyrically over the past decade in her solo work. The title is Norwegian and translates to human collective, which adds to the feeling of a recording made as part of a strange, improvised performance project. The music flickers; between club beats and improvised guitar textures; between spoken word and melodic vocal textures; between abstract and harmonic synth lines. Throughout the piece, Volden's guitar and Hval's voice come across as equals, wandering, wondering, meandering. Sharing the space. The writing process began with short, more concise forms, but then Volden brought in experiments with seasick synth loops and drum machines, and the work went off on a longer durational tangent, inspired by chance and intuition. This allowed for an unfinished, raw feel, and the song structures and words were expanded and improvised in the studio. Hval says: "There are lots of late night ideas at work, begun as half-asleep, slack vocal takes on top of something really strange Håvard has sent me. We both record before we know what we're actually doing."

When Lindstrom And Prins Thomas Get Together, Expect The Unexpected. The Norwegian Production Duo's Third Album Iii Is Also Their First Outing Together In Eleven Years, Since Ii From 2009 And As Ever, Lindstrom And Prins Thomas Have Crafted Their Own Unique Sonic World Between The Two Of Them. This Is Expansive, Luscious Electronic Music Rich With Texture And Intricacy, Patiently Revealing Every Eccentricity While Constantly Pulling The Listener In. Getting Lost Never Sounded So Good. Since The Release Of Ii, Lindstrom And Prins Thomas Have Remained More Than Busy With Their Respective Solo Careers, But Work On Iii Was Taking Place Behind The Scenes The Whole Time - Slow And Steady By Sending Files Back And Forth. "There's A Different Process With Every Album," Thomas Explains. "With The First Two Albums, We Had A Door Between Separate Rooms In The Studio, So I Could Open My Door And Play Him Something. We Also Toured Together A Lot After The First Album, And After That Experience We Realized That We Work Better Together At A Distance. We're Doing Our Best Work By Not Worrying Too Much About What The Other One Of Us Is Doing." Eventually, The Bulk Of Iii Came Together Over The Last Year, As Lindstrom And Prins Thomas Teamed Up To Craft A Lush And Lovely Work That Recalls The Hazy Atmospherics Of Air, The Loose-Fit Jazz Of Lonnie Liston Smith, And The Genreresistant Electronic Music That Both Artists Have Made Their Name On Over The Course Of Their Impressive Careers. "Our Partnership Is Very Democratic "We Never Turn Down Each Other's Ideas. And If It Goes Wrong, We Blame It On The Other Guy," Thomas Says With A Laugh. "The Tracks That Lindstrom Sent Me This Time Were Almost Like Standard House Tracks. I Already Had An Idea Of What I Wanted To Do, So I Forced Those Tracks Into New Shoes And Dresses." Above All Else, Iii Is A Testament To The Adventurousness Of Lindstrom And Prins Thomas When It Comes To Soundcraft. Both Artists Have Established Separate Careers On Bodies Of Work That Feature Infini...

Kelly Lee Owens' masterful second album Inner Song finds the convention-blurring techno producer and singer/songwriter diving deep into her own psyche — excoriating the struggles she's faced over the last several years and exploring personal pain while embracing the beauty of the natural world. It's a leap in artistry from a musician who burst forth on the scene with a confident, rich sound, and Inner Song is endlessly enticing when it comes to what Owens is capable of. Inner Song follows the star-making debut of her 2017 self-titled album, a quixotic blend of body-moving beats and introspective songwriting that garnered numerous accolades from the music press. Owens has indeed come a long way from her backgro
und as a nurse, since then she has remixed Bjork & St Vincent, released an indelibly clubby two-tracker, 2019's "Let It Go" b/w "Omen," and teamed up with likeminded auteur Jon Hopkins on the one-off "Luminous Spaces." Her latest album also comes off of what Owens describes as "the hardest three years of my life," an emotionally fraught time that, in her words, "Definitely impacted my creative life and everything I'd worked for up to that point. I wasn't sure if I could make anything anymore, and it took quite a lot of courage to get to a point where I could make something again." So while the lovely cover of Radiohead's "Arpeggi" might strike some as an unconventional way to open a sophomore effort, to Owens the winding take on the classic tune — recorded a year before work on Inner Song properly kicked off — represents the sort of sonic rebirth that's so essential to Inner Song's aura. Inner Song was largely written and recorded over a month last winter. As with her debut, Owens holed up in the studio with co-producer and collaborator James Greenwood — and letting loose in the studio and being open to whatever sonic whims emerge was essential to Owens' craftwork. The evocative title of the album is borrowed from free-jazz maestro Alan Silva's 1972 opus, which was gifted to Owens Smalltown Supersound's Joakim Haugland for her 30th birthday: "I'm so grateful for him and his perspectives — he's always thinking outside of the box. Those two words really reflect what it felt like to make this record. I did a lot of inner work in the past few years, and this is a true reflection of that." The hair-raising bass and tickling textures of Inner Song drive home that, more so than ever, Owens is locked in to delivering maximal sonic pleasure — as evidenced by the decision to make the album's vinyl release a sesqui album, or triple-sided album: "I'm still obsessed with frequencies that don't do well on vinyl if they don't have the space." "The power of conceptualizing who you are has really informed this album," Owens states about Inner Song's essence, and her second album is truly a discovery of self — the latest statement from a fascinating artist who continues to surprise, gesturing towards a rich and varied career to come.

Matt Karmil's fifth album is a meditative collection of woozy loops and soft focus house. STS371 is the follow-up to IDLE033, - - - -, ++++ and 2018's acclaimed Will. Matt Karmil is British born - growing up in the rural town of Salisbury, near Stonehenge. Suffering a prolonged illness as a child, he spent much time indoors whiling away the long hours by playing with a classical guitar. Eventually he was well enough to see the world that had almost left him behind, and he spent his early twenties as an international traveller, DJing, record collecting and working as a producer-engineer in London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin. In 2012 he decided to settle on Cologne âÇ" a city famed for its excellent club scene and ultra-minimal take on techno via the collective of artists and producers around the Kompakt label. With a studio established in Cologne, Matt made his LP debut with the well-received (but hard to Google) "----", combining dusty samples and elegant tape hiss with scuba-diving grooves and minimalist vibes. In the same year he released the jubilant club anthem 'So You Say' on Tim Sweeney's Beats In Space label and remixed John Talabot and Axel Boman's (Talaboman) single 'Sideral'. Recent years have seen a raft of new releases from Matt, remixing XPress 2 for Skint, the albums idle 033 and ++++, as well as 12"s for YumAc Records, Idle Hands, Endless Flight and Studio Barnhus, received with great reviews in publications from The Wire to Resident Advisor and beyond. 2016 also saw Matt much in demand for his skills in engineering, mixing and mastering, working extensively with Matias Aguayo for Crammed Discs, Kornel Kovacs for Studio Barnhus and Talaboman for R&S, among many others. At the invitation of artist Christine Sun Kim, Matt composed a sub-20Hz piece for Bounce House at Sound Live Tokyo 2015, while his video collaboration with Boston's MIT Media Lab, Time Moods, was premiered in late 2017.

The Tokyo based producer Yoshinori Hayashi presents a new 12inch with remixes from Bjorn Torske and Prins Thomas. These are the first remixes of his debut LP, Ambivalence, from 2018 which received a glowing 4.0 review from Resident Advisor. Hayashi has studied under Japanese avant-classical composer Mica Nozawa. When not DJing, he works in a record store in Tokyo. Thus far, Hayashi has released a string of 12"s on labels including Going Good Records, Jinn Records, Lovers Rock, Gravity Grafitti and Moscoman's Disco Halal. Check out his recent mix for Resident Advisor here. Previous work by Hayashi has been called "a complex patchwork of studio gear, live instruments, dusty jazz records and smartly cut library sounds, whose textures are soft and inviting. But its arrangements are constantly ruffled, squeezed, brushed and pinched_which is to say, nothing stays still for long" (Resident Advisor).

Earlierthis year PrinsThomasreleased his 6th solo albumAmbitions - and as always with Prins Thomas- the albumisjust the beginning of the journey. Now we are releasingtwo12"s with remixes from thealbum.On the second 12" (STS367) Isolée has remixed the title track Ambitions with a new 12" version ofUrmannen byPrins Thomason the flipside.

Hinter Deathprod verbirgt sich der norwegische Musiker Helge Sten, seines Zeichens Ex-Mitglied bei Motorpsycho und Supersilent. Neben seinem Pseudonym Deathprod nahm Sten auch unter dem Namen Audio Virus als auch unter seinem eigentlichen Namen zahlreiche Alben auf. Zudem kollaborierte er mit Biosphere, Arve Henriksen, John Hegre, Lasse Marhaug, Sidsel Endresen, Christian Wallumrod, Nils Petter Molvær sowie mit seiner Frau Susanna Wallumrod, als Sängerin vor allem unter dem Namen Susanna bekannt. "Occulting Disk", das erste neue Album von Deathprod seit fünfzehn Jahren, ist ein antifaschistisches Ritual. Aufgenommen in Oslo, Reykjavik, Berlin, Köln und Los Angeles zwischen 2012 und 2019, ist es das erste Deathprod-Album seit "Morals And Dogma" aus dem Jahr 2004.Aus den "Occulting Disks" Liner Notes:"I remember driving over a mountain with my mother, she was in the passenger seat and we were being mauled and cuddled and battered and fried by sound; together. We were together experiencing something previously unimaginable, and we were facing the same direction, and we were moving through space and time knowing that a geographic destination some way ahead would bring an end. And the sound surrounded us, and for once our mutual silence was loaded with good. Because we were in the presence of each other, and we knew so much about how we had failed each other (it wasn't a mystery any more), and we knew how we had maimed others when we worried too much about ourselves, how we had contributed to the faults of others simply by focusing in instead of out. Our mutual silences were laden with what that could only be called love. I used to hear love in music until I learned to hear love in sound." - Will Oldham

Im Herbst 2018 komponierte Lindstrom ein Auftragswerk für eine Premiere im norwegischen Kunstzentrum Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Skizzen der drei ausverkauften Aufführungen wurden zur Grundlage für die vier Tracks von ,On A Clear Day I Can See You Forever" (ein Titel, der sich an das Musical ,On A Clear Day You Can See Forever" mit Barbra Streisand anlehnt). Alle Songs basieren auf langen, einteiligen Aufnahmen. ,I felt totally unrestrained making this album", sagt Lindstrom. ,I've listened to Robert Wyatt's solo albums and his ,Matching Mole's" debut album a lot lately. It so effortless, fearless and free. And not insisting. I was very inspired by this." Dies ist auch das erste Mal, dass Lindstrom ein Album komplett mit Hardware statt mit Computer-Plugins veröffentlicht. Während seiner Performance im Henie Onstad Kunstsenter setzte er über 30 Synthesizer und Drumcomputer ein. Diese Erfahrung inspirierte ihn, bei der Erstellung des Albums ein ähnliches Setup zu wählen. Die Zugänglichkeit seiner beneidenswerten Sammlung von Musikinstrumenten - die größtenteils aus begehrten Synthesizern bestehen - ermöglichte es ihm, frei mit Ideen und Klanglandschaften zu experimentieren. ,The joy of making music on actual physical objects and devices makes a lot of sense to me now. After working on a computer for over 15 years, I don't think I'll ever look back," sagt Lindstrom mit einer fast kindlichen Aufregung. Lindstrom hat in den letzten Jahren die klassische Musik als Inspiration genannt. ,I used to study classical music at school. Back then I was listening to a lot of Opera, orchestral music and solo music on the piano. Listening to classical music again has been a revisit to my childhood days, just like I did when I embraced the 80s in the early 2000s". Als Lindstrom die Freiheit und die Freude am Musizieren ohne jedwede innere Befangenheit annahm und sich in das physische Reich des Musizierens mit Hardware vertiefte, lernte er nicht nur die Musik kennen - sondern auch sich selbst. ,I guess I've been tryi...

Im Herbst 2018 komponierte Lindstrom ein Auftragswerk für eine Premiere im norwegischen Kunstzentrum Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Skizzen der drei ausverkauften Aufführungen wurden zur Grundlage für die vier Tracks von ,On A Clear Day I Can See You Forever" (ein Titel, der sich an das Musical ,On A Clear Day You Can See Forever" mit Barbra Streisand anlehnt). Alle Songs basieren auf langen, einteiligen Aufnahmen. ,I felt totally unrestrained making this album", sagt Lindstrom. ,I've listened to Robert Wyatt's solo albums and his ,Matching Mole's" debut album a lot lately. It so effortless, fearless and free. And not insisting. I was very inspired by this." Dies ist auch das erste Mal, dass Lindstrom ein Album komplett mit Hardware statt mit Computer-Plugins veröffentlicht. Während seiner Performance im Henie Onstad Kunstsenter setzte er über 30 Synthesizer und Drumcomputer ein. Diese Erfahrung inspirierte ihn, bei der Erstellung des Albums ein ähnliches Setup zu wählen. Die Zugänglichkeit seiner beneidenswerten Sammlung von Musikinstrumenten - die größtenteils aus begehrten Synthesizern bestehen - ermöglichte es ihm, frei mit Ideen und Klanglandschaften zu experimentieren. ,The joy of making music on actual physical objects and devices makes a lot of sense to me now. After working on a computer for over 15 years, I don't think I'll ever look back," sagt Lindstrom mit einer fast kindlichen Aufregung. Lindstrom hat in den letzten Jahren die klassische Musik als Inspiration genannt. ,I used to study classical music at school. Back then I was listening to a lot of Opera, orchestral music and solo music on the piano. Listening to classical music again has been a revisit to my childhood days, just like I did when I embraced the 80s in the early 2000s". Als Lindstrom die Freiheit und die Freude am Musizieren ohne jedwede innere Befangenheit annahm und sich in das physische Reich des Musizierens mit Hardware vertiefte, lernte er nicht nur die Musik kennen - sondern auch sich selbst. ,I guess I've been tryi...

Brand new album

With the Norwegian disco movement having given birth to many international dance stars, its most fundamental pioneer Bjorn Torske is an essential name to know. Bjørn laid the foundation for the disco scene in Norway that gave birth to Prins Thomas, Lindstrom, Andre Bratten and Todd Terje. Inspired by DJ Harvey, Ron Hardy and Idjut Boys, Bjorn Torske brought underground disco and house/techno (Chicago/Detroit style) to the country, developing a new style of dubby disco with its characteristic humorous and psychedelic twists along the way. The reclusive cult innovator is back with a new 12” for Smalltown Supersound in advance of a full-length release out later this year.

Carmen Villain follows last years ‘Only Love From Now On’ with this new full length exploration of soporific, slow-moving ambience and disemboweled dub, a score she composed for a contemporary dance performance by acclaimed Choreographer Eszter Salamon. Simply put, it’s one of the most captivating things we’ve heard this year; all luxurious texture-cycles in possession of a delirious, dreamlike quality that hits a rarified spot somewhere between Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol.II’, classic Chain Reaction and Jim O'Rourke’s meditative electronic recordings.

‘Music from the Living Monument’ was written for choreographer Eszter Salamon's dance performance of the same name, a lavish and sculptural show for 14 performers dressed in ornamental fabrics (which you can see on the album art) while surrounded by slowly shifting environments. Carmen reflects the measured gestures of the dancers, ruminating on slowness and burying instrumentation in sensual abstraction.

Edited down from almost 3 hours of music, the album opens with ‘Multicolor’ and triggers the same sense of suspended animation you get from ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol.II’, its brooding mix of glacial gestures and fizzing pads suggestive of fuzzed, liminal states. From here it only gets deeper and more disorienting, peaking with the frankly majestic ‘Silver’, deployed at a pace that makes Rhythm & Sound’s beatless dub abstractions seem almost giddy by comparison. Villain locks us into infinitesimal movements with a slow, heartbeat-thud of a bassdrum crumbling around choral pads that grow in intensity over its 9 minute duration. Its one of those pieces you could get lost in for hours, such is the power of its swirling, meditative vibrations.

‘Pink’ ends the set by flexing more angular muscle, contorting what sounds like glassy clangs into electroacoustic pulses in a way that feels effortlessly engrossing, harmonising with Jim O'Rourke's stunning 'Hands That Bind' OST. Microtonality is an overused buzzword right now, but Carmen penetrates the essence of its magick, emphasising sensuality and mysticism in a way that feels like someone whispering softly into your ear as you pass from the waking world into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Trym Søvdsnes is a relative newcomer to the scene, but he’s been putting in work in and around
Bergen for years, scoring a residency at the infamous Café Opera, where he snagged the attention
of local house legend Bjørn Torske. Soon, the duo were DJing, producing and performing together,
eventually running the monthly radio show Pigs in Space where they would go head-to-head for
six hours at a time, plumbing the depths of their immense record collections.
It’s this lust for bottom-of-the-crate oddities that guides Søvdsnes’ self-titled debut album, a
concoction of dub techno, hard-swung house and percussive club music that positions itself a few
paces away from any conventional modes. Basically, a perfect fit for Le Jazz Non.
‘Gølles Dans’ opens with a filtered acid bassline and bone dry kick that’s like some psychedelic,
slower variant of Basic Channel’s ‘Enforcement’, slicing into the groove with gristly acoustic
percussion that drags it up from the basement. The producer leans into asymmetry on
‘Døgnrytmen’, wrangling 303 squelches with booming Berghain kicks and tight snares, enhancing
the psychedelic potential by layering ticking percussion into loopy spirals. If you’ve ever caught an
extended Dozzy set, this is the kind of ruff-edged gear he would likely play an hour before sunrise.
‘Ordnings Mix’ is weirder still, slopping chirpy bleep/rave stabs into a jazzy hybrid that sounds like
a bossa meltdown.
Søvdsnes saves his most cosmic mettle for last, on ‘Cowboy Acid (Solstikk Dub)’ he strips the
kickdrum to a faint knock, before building up into a sort of screwed Metro Area mirrorball that
sounds brilliantly out of time.