Stroboscopic Artefacts HHV Records 38 Items

Still in shrink but opened. Gatefold cover and vinyl are close to NM.

Lotus Eater is a duo consisting of Luca Mortellaro (Lucy) and Seth Horvitz (Rrose), techno artists just as comfortable operating in the uncharted area of experimental music who have gained a cult following, both influencing and challenging the direction of contemporary electronic music. Eschewing the typical instrumentation of techno but still inhabiting its archetypes, Lotus Eater uses synthesised sound and feedback as fundamental sources to generate both textural and percussive elements. A sense of tension and weight emerge from sources that cannot be easily pinpointed. Each release forms a complex narrative from a paradoxically simple and restrained set of sound sources. Officially formed in 2017, Lotus Eater came to life through several collaborations over a number of years, and finally blossomed with the release of its critically acclaimed debut album "Desatura," which Lotus Eater toured live in 2018 - 2019. 2022 sees the release of the second Lotus Eater album "Plasma" and a new audiovisual live project to accompany it. "Plasma" unfolds with exacting precision by exhibiting a point of focus and expanding on it. It uses a single, throbbing pulse to generate a constellation of sounds and rhythms that form around it like a volcanic eruption in slow motion. Playing with our sense of time and weight, "Plasma" feels simultaneously slow and urgent, spacious and immense. Lotus Eater zooms into the infinite abyss and finds not just light, but fire at the end of the tunnel. Will we be saved, or will we burn?

Serendipities surround the collaboration between Berlin's Stroboscopic Artefacts label founder Lucy and their most recent record with Malaysian Bangkok based emerging artist Wanton Witch. The release culminates in the reimagining of WW debut LP as seen and felt through the lens of Lucy. This is a follow up full-length album by Lucy not approached as a usual remixes record, but instead a fully fleshed out new body of work with the WW material being an integral part of Lucy's sonic palette.

Despite the label hiatus during the first year of lockdowns, the isolation of the pandemic helped create a fertile ground for a back and forth between Wanton Witch and Lucy's own distinct sound palettes to collide. With the normal every day pressures of touring lifted and enlightened by WW's sonic world, Lucy has seen this as a positive opportunity to manifest new pathways of connectivity and process a phase of personal growth. Not simply about the breaking of gender lines, but also about the blurring of creative boundaries, especially when making music.

Lucy's original patronage of Wanton Witch and her relatively fresh and new voice in the electronic music scene can be seen as a contribution to this idea of dismantling industry norms. In more than a decade of SA operations this is a reset moment for the label's mission focusing on empowering new talent, refreshing and growing with them, presenting a dynamic two-way process bewtween the label as a whole and the individual artists output.

Lucy's personal revolution has coincided with Wanton Witch's own discovery of her musical voice and their paths have created a synchronicity. This osmosis of thought and feeling, even through massive distances, can be so real and tangible. Lucy's new album is a testament to the power of connective tissue in collaboration. It is this catalyst of realisation that has allowed the creative work to flourish under the toughest of pandemic conditions.

Xhin's debut album on Stroboscopic Artefacts, 'Sword', showcases the breath of his vision. As the second full-length release on Stroboscopic Artefacts, 'Sword' stretches the remit of the label's identity ever further. Produced and recorded in Singapore, Xhin plucks sounds from the outer edges of electronic music and fuses them together. Xhin's approach revels not only in a hybrid sound palette but it's also an album designed for multiple contexts. It's a record typified by duality. Xhin's process seamlessly traversed analogue and digital production, and 'Sword' harbours electronic music that ranges from brutal club sounds to deep and delicate murmurs.

'You Are Eternity' is the third album to be released on Stroboscopic Artefacts and comes from two of the minds who have shaped the label since its earliest days: Dadub. Recorded over a period of two years, but containing fragments and ideas that stretch back a decade 'You Are Eternity' has been mixed together to form a continuous piece rather than twelve discreet tracks. The effect? An immersive journey that encompasses the descriptors brutal, ferocious, ambient and aqueous.

Having already proven that he is capable of maintaining sonic quality and distinction over the course of a full original program, Chevel (a.k.a. Dario Tronchin) now makes his LP debut for Stroboscopic Artefacts. His other S.A. contributions (including the inaugural entry in the label's singular Monad series, the "One Month Off" EP, his participation to the label's five-year retrospective series) have already hinted that a more complete exposition of his unique inner world would surface, and here it is at last. Over the course of his young career, Chevel has gained a mastery over several compositional elements: Polaroid-like slow melodic fades, sharp ricocheting beats, and simply making one's headphones feel like a viable means of physical transportation. All of these elements come into play shortly after the needle hits the grooves of 'Comb' a euphoric introductory track marked by a spectral panning sequence and by beats chopped with a culinary expert's sense of elegance. The drum kit sounds that feature throughout are used sparely but – either because of this or in spite of this – provide maximum impact upon the listener's nervous system. The almost 'far Eastern' use of 'block' percussion on 'The Windrunner' and 'Low Roof' perfectly complements the synthetic sheen produced... more

The third entry in Lucy's trio of adventurous full-lengths is visually introduced by artwork of a pearl-bearing shell, designed by Stroboscopic Artefacts' resident visual artist (and Lucy's brother) Ignazio Mortellaro. This drops a subtle hint as to the nature of its contents: just as a pearl slowly forms within its enclosing body in response to organic challenges, Lucy's work is also a kind of crystallization of memory and experience into an artifact of great value. Listeners to this album will be struck immediately by how different it sounds from past Lucy productions, while still retaining the feel of relentless questing that defined his previous two solo LPs Wordplay for Working Bees and Churches, Schools, and Guns (or, as Lucy himself defines the feeling, the equal valuation of ''precision and exploration''). Initially feeling like Lucy is guiding his listeners on a slow and slightly apprehensive down-river trip through the Amazon, or some similarly thriving but as-of-yet undiscovered terrain, the album is enriched by several layers of ambience and by the wordless, improvisational (yet still somehow narrative) vocals and flute of Jon Jacobs. Without a doubt, it's an album with an ''initiatory'' atmosphere that listeners should commit themselves to hearing in one sitting, with as little interruption as possible. However, unlike many initiatory rites, this is no arduous ordeal at all: great care has gone into connecting each chapter of the album with the same silver thread of entrancing story-telling. On standout pieces like ''She-Wolf Night Mourning'', electronic arpeggiation and persistent synthetic flutters perfectly merge with the unique tone colors of resonant acoustic percussion and pensive woodwind. Elsewhere, pieces like ''A Selfless Act'' reconcile technoid pulses with melancholic, yet intoxicating echoes of Mediterranean musical traditions. Interestingly, many of the tracks on Self-Mythology refer to old legends and well-known fairytales (e.g. the opening track which references Baba Yaga's magical hut), or to more broadly defined states of consciousness (''Samsara'', which features an especially strong, sustained choral interplay between glassy synth sequences and earthy flute sonorities). This is where the album is truly unique and relevant in its ambition. The interplay between the graphic design, the vocal and flute performances of Jacobs, and the sound design chosen by Lucy aims to be an intimate audio autobiography of its creators while also referring back to the stories that have shaped human destiny for millennia. This work is a meditation upon the reciprocity between personal hopes and fears and collective dreams and nightmares; an exploration of the endless interplay between the universal and the deeply individual. It is the tale of that uncanny process by which our own conscious experience draws from the pool of archetypal information, while also contributing to it.

The tension between the natural and artificial, the body and mind, are central themes in electronic music in general, and Techno in particular, as the means of creation, focused around technology and interactions with machines, contrast with the emotional response to sound, the mystical ritual of collective dancing, and the ethos of liberation and tolerance embedded in the culture it produced. Were navigating a world of engineered pleasures, big data monitoring of movements and consumption habits, and falsely objective representations of reality, further blurred by a reduced attention span and several opaque layers of cultural interpretation and political manipulation. Manichean simplifications are used to create hate and fear in order to achieve domination and impose limits on freedom, and the irrational belief in endless growth, increasingly disconnected from nature, led to massive environmental destructions and waves of unprecedented extinctions of species. Our primal sensuous perception, vastly more abstract, emotional and sensual, make us feel the world as an ambiguous realm we are part of, but not in control of ; a complex network of interacting forces and enigmatic patterns, a matrix of overlapping desires. Rebuilding our bonds with nature, Reconnecting with our senses, and spreading love in the process becomes an essential act of resistance. Hyper Opal Mantis is a triptych on 3 states of desire, and the first long player of Kangding Ray for Stroboscopic Artefacts. Hyper is the primal, sensual lust, Opal is the emotional catharsis, a blissful desire for love. Mantis, like the insect it refers to, is the destructive, fatal attraction.

Flowers From The Ashes is the latest multi-artist project to bear the acclaimed Stroboscopic Artefacts imprimatur. There is a sensibility of decadence and corroded grandeur etched within its four album sides, reminding us that historically ''decadent'' times have nonetheless resulted in some of the boldest acts of individual and collective creativity. Like the floral theme that has remained a consistent feature of S.A.'s graphic presentation, the music here equally presents fragility and intensity in a way that really drives home this visual metaphor for good, while still holding out the promise that similar creations will be seeded in the near future. Though many of the artists involved have set of residence outside of their native Italy, all contribute here to make a captivating portrait of a shared spirit and cultural memory. The album opens with ''Errori,'' deceptively fragile sonic ornaments crafted and suspended in space by Blackest Ever Black artist Silvia Kastel. This is followed closely by the mellifluous, warming glow of percussionist Andrea Belfi's ''Spitting & Skytouching,'' and then by the resolute electric bass patterns and luminous fog of ''Lux et Sonus,'' from Eeri label head Marco Shuttle. Hospital Productions alumnus Ninos du Brasil open the B-side with a similarly dense, amorphous construction built from tribalistic chants and rhythmic patterns, to be followed by Mannequin label boss Alessandro Adriani's ''You Will Not Be There For The End,'' showcasing his distinctive take on the 'paranoiac breakdance' aesthetic of classic EBM. S.A. veteran Chevel rounds out the first record in the program by interlacing several percolating synth lines together into a richly conversational piece. The journey continues with ''Starving The Mind,'' an undulating mini-epic from S.A. founder Lucy that is animated by his signature balance of seductiveness and concentration. The bright, biting acid synth tones of ''prv-hh3-x'', by Lory D, then takes a sharp right turn into an invisible metropolis ruled by reflective high fashion and hidden intrigue. The imposing architecture of ''Virgo Rebellion,'' designed by modular synth futurist Caterina Barbieri, acts as an excellent companion piece, and sets up the closing ''4g'' from Spazio Disponibile co-founder Neel - a crepuscular serenade that accurately sums up much of the foregoing activity.

Lucy and Rrose, now coming together as The Lotus Eaters, have established themselves separately as techno artists who are just as comfortable operating in the uncharted area of experimental music. Running their own labels (Stroboscopic Artefacts and Eaux, respectively), they have gained a cult following, both influencing and challenging the direction of techno. Their first collaboration took the form of mutual remixes. Lucy remixed Rrose, taking on his modern classic Waterfall while Rrose remixed Dadub for Stroboscopic Artefacts, and shortly thereafter contributed an extended EP as part of SAs Monad series. Eventually, the idea of working together became inevitable. Several intense sessions in Lucys Berlin studio followed, using mainly analog hardware. These sessions gave birth to a new project, starting with two EPs signed Lucy and Rrose, called The Lotus Eaters (sa) and The Lotus Eaters II (Eaux). With the Desatura album, the first release signed under the project name The Lotus Eaters, their common work is refined further, also becoming a live act which will debut at ADE (Amsterdam) 2018. With Desatura, Lucy and Rrose explore themes of physical density, emptiness, and space, creating sonic objects which can be rotated and viewed from multiple perspectives. Eschewing the typical instrumentation of techno, the duo use synthesized sound and feedback as fundamental sources to generate both textural and percussive elements. A sense of tension and weight emerge from sources that cannot be easily pinpointed. The resulting album forms a complex narrative from a paradoxically simple and restrained set of sound sources. A mysterious and profound accomplishment.

Hot on the heels of his preliminary EP on Stroboscopic Artefacts, Embryo, which paved the way to the present album, and two years after the landing of his 2016-released inaugural LP, Montagne Trasparenti, Mannequin helmsman Alessandro Adriani returns with his highly anticipated full-length debut for SA, Morphic Dreams. Throughout eleven cuts painstakingly executed but lacking not an iota of the fresh, spontaneous oomph that made his sound stand out of the crowd of techno producers to have emerged over the past decade, Adriani lays the foundations to a suspended sound imaginarium, governed by its own rules and principles of gravity. Revolving around the notions of sublimation and quest for inner balance, Morphic Dreams is comprised of four distinct sequences, conceived and designed as reflections of four mental states, each of them linked to the four alchemical elements i.e. Water, Earth, Air and Fire here represented by the A, B, C and D-sides. Fluid and enveloping, the A-side bathes the listener in some zero-G uterine vortex, pitching and rolling from the slo-burning exotic sensuality and tribal spell of The Tropical Year to the trunk-bending, arpeggiated fast-track pulse of Storm Trees, through Raindances feverish electro swing. Entering a further abrasive, minerally rich phase, the B-side unleashes Adrianis dark side with optimum conviction. Deeply anchored in earthly materiality, this new evolution stage starts off to the frantic Italo bass of Dissolving Images, rushing headlong into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of fractured reflections and nasty Giallo-like ambience. The delirious body stretch sequence then rather abruptly swerves onto a calmer flux with Dust/Mist, a much enticingly hip-swaying collaboration with Simon Crab, ex-member of the seminal 80s UK industrial-experimental band Bourbonese Qualk, before Casting The Runes engulfs us into a tormented world of swollen eeriness and disquieting esoterism. Back to a widescreen showcase of droney distortions, nasty acid swashes and other quirky drum programming, Hors De Combat opens a new chapter, shortly followed by the playful bass intricacies and modular jeu-de-piste of Invisible Seekers, featuring Avian affiliate and longtime friend Shawn OSullivan. A further mind-expanding piece, C-side closer Crow deploys its blackened wings wide and high as a chaos of martial percussions and liquefying synths slivers crash past the red-hot skyline. A fluttering melodic interlude, Things About To Disappear blazes a clean trail for Make Words Split And Crack to flourish, slowly but surely blooming into a nonstop grandiose twelve minute-shy finale geared up with the stirring cacophonic force of a Ligetian symphony and something of an epic-scale Kubrickian soundtrack.

Transparent vinyl! Tin box has a few slight scratches and bumps.

A Download code is included. The Malaysian-born, Bangkok-based producer delivers an 11-track strong release that flows like a complete soundscape. Employing caustic electronics and diverse sound textures, she challenges traditional track conventions by deconstructing elements of IDM, experimental, hardcore and rave.

Sharing the same forward-facing approach to techno music, it was about time that Roman DJ and producer Adiel lands her debut EP on Stroboscopic Artefacts. Following on from an array of 12-inches on her own imprint, including a recent joint effort with Anthony Linell, 'If Not Now When?' is an ode to the all-enveloping strangeness of eternal nights that cuts a path of ecstatic light in the dark.

For her first sortie away from her usual recording homes, Adriana steps up in no real unknown territory either, with Stroboscopic Artefacts’ Totem series providing a much suitable shelter for her deep-penetration, quaky club weaponry to grow and expand.

This 2LP comes in a gatefold cover.

Six years on since his latest appearance on the label's main series, Stroboscopic Artefacts boss Luca Mortellaro, aka Lucy, returns with 'Dyscamupia' - an introspective, multisensory techno triptych revolving around the core sequence of Albert Camus' classic existentialist novel, 'The Stranger'.

A download code is included. Lucy and Rrose, now coming together as The Lotus Eaters, have established themselves separately as techno artists who are just as comfortable operating in the uncharted area of experimental music. Running their own labels (Stroboscopic Artefacts and Eaux, respectively), they have gained a cult following, both influencing and challenging the direction of techno.

The second release to be pressed into Totem's slabs of 10-inch vinyl is from techno impresario Luke Slater's L.B. Dub Corp moniker. Slater has been operating as a pioneer, with a full deck of aliases, throughout the genre's many corners since the days when techno was a newborn phenomenon. The stripped back sounds of L.B. Dub Corp's last releases on the imprint have resounded naturally within the psychotropic space carved out by Stroboscopic Artefacts.

This is transparent 10-inch vinyl. Stroboscopic Artefacts is releasing its latest addition to the forward leaning edge of electronic music with the Totem series.Unfurling as a chain of transparent 10" vinyls, each of the Totem releases will have a subtly divergent take on the aesthetic space defined by techno and club culture.

A download code is included. The release comes on 180g heavy weight vinyl in a deluxe matte-finish Gatefold cover. Flowers From The Ashes is the latest multi-artist project to bear the acclaimed Stroboscopic Artefacts imprimatur. Silvia Kastel, Andrea Belfi, Marco Shuttle, Ninos Du Brasil, Alessandro Adriani, Chevel, Lucy, Lory D, Caterina Barbieri & Neel

The Tel-Aviv centered Yotam Avni officially joined forces with Stroboscopic Artefacts last year, turning in a sensual an invigorating entry for the Monad series. Thanks to his personalized fusion of esoteric and worldly sound elements, Avni immediately made a case to deliver more work to the label, and now he has done so with "Perlude to Dybbuk," the second in a new series of S.A.

Adriani's debut EP for the label, Enter the Fire, is the first evidence of a new mutation in the Stroboscopic DNA, as can be seen by a shift in Ignazio Mortellaro's design work for the label.

Writing on labels.

The Israeli producer Yotam Avni, though not one of the main players in the Stroboscopic Artefacts story to date, nevertheless shows that he is definitely here for a reason: having contributed with an entry in the Monad series back in July,he returns with a new set of tracks that fit perfectly into the label's overall aesthetic of evolving hyper-reality, while also being a strong personal statement.

Whereas many electronic producers aim at being the most prolific in their genre, or the most extreme, Lucy and Rrose have wisely chosen to be the most consistently curiosity-provoking representatives of their craft. Their decision to team up as a production duo for the newest Stroboscopic Artefacts EP may have seemed inevitable, given their shared responsibility for shifting techno’s focus towards the facilitation of profound psycho-acoustic effects. And yet, even those who saw this coming will still be in for a wild ride.

The release is 2x180g vinyl in a gatefold cover with luxurious gloss print and a free download.

His partnership with the label has already resulted in a collaboration with Modern Heads, as well as one of the first entries in the Monad series, and now a fascinating new EP that showcases his talent for testing the limits of perception.

The remixes are by Paula Temple, Lee Gamble, Perc, and Minor Science.

Zeitgeber is a project that sees Lucy and Speedy J exploring roots and limits.

Jonas Kopp / Dadub / Eomac / Chevel

Maybe the most varied collection of ‘Chapter V’ material yet, leaving a lasting reminder of the depth and quality of artists SA have accrued.

Zeitgeber and L.B Dub Corp split the second in Stroboscopic Artefacts' series of fifth anniversary records.

Very special 2 x 10" boxset - non returnable! Gathering sounds from the experimental frontiers and outer edges of electronic music, Stellate 3 collects together Kangding Ray, NSI, Xhin and Reformed Faction’s visions. The polished tracks are layered to the -nth degree, filled with minute details and whispered asides. These productions use an array of analogue machines and the most cunning digital means to vividly render disquieting questions.