The state51 Conspiracy Vinyl, CD & Tape 16 Items

A seismic, cinematic double dose from two sonic veterans with previous in Wire, Electrelane, and Better Corners. MEMORIALS’ kaleidoscopic debut covers broad musical territory, encompassing protest songs, fuzz-flooded pop, searing drone, and psychedelic freakouts whilst carving out a sound that is uniquely their own.

Both halves of this dynamic double album were originally conceived as individual film soundtracks but once the multi-instrumental duo of Verity Susan & Matthew Simms brought ‘Music For Film’ into a live space, the desire to shape it into a cohesive whole was more than they could resist. The resulting, intoxicating, musical odyssey can be viewed independently from the associated films and stands proudly as an ambitious artistic statement.

“The music we like and admire ranges from challenging to really tuneful, and we try to bring all that together in a way that sounds natural.” - MEMORIALS

Barabajagal is the seventh studio album, eighth album overall and most fascinatingly the third of our re-issue programme from British singer-songwriter extraordinaire Donovan. It was released in 1969 and again features production duties by Mickie Most.

The songs on this album represent all facets of Donovan's career. Several rockers adorn the album, including the title track, "Trudi", "The Love Song" and "Superlungs (My Supergirl)". "I Love My Shirt" updates the sound of his children's music and there are several slow songs featuring breathy vocals ("Where Is She?", "To Susan on the West Coast Waiting") reminiscent of the For Little Ones portion of A Gift from a Flower to a Garden. It is during the Barabajagal sessions that Donovan's musical vision and work ethic began to diverge from that of producer Mickie Most. The two eventually stopped working together, effectively ending Donovan's chart success.

Singular Texan musician Craig Clouse hurtles unstoppably towards the 20th birthday of his dancefloor-splintering electronic project Shit And Shine, releasing a landmark LP, his first full-length for The state51 Conspiracy, ‘2222 And AIRPORT’. Acid house, minimal techno, electro, funk, krautrock, hip hop, found sound, spoken word, live percussion and industrial are blown apart stupendously and then reassembled – mad-scientist style, in a way peculiar to Clouse – into 13 hypnotic and transportative tracks.

Lead single SWISS, out 24 March, is a gloriously minimalist funk jam that sounds like the exact point at which someone turns the lights off at a lowkey house party and a wild night for the ages gets under way. An almost scornfully skeletal riff, sounding like a misfiring Cyberdine Systems Model 101 summoning up a Prince circa Sign “O” The Times riff while crashing head first into the hyper-processed early work of Prefuse 73, also featuring a cheeky sample of revered Mancunian DJ Luke Una talking about “existential fucking darkness”.

This is followed on 4 April by INFINITE SHITE, arguably the epic central track to the album, is a Shit And Shine banger for the ages, its dancefloor affect, undeniable. An unforgiving, pulsating Byetone-style bass drone worthy itself of being blasted on a Funktion-One rig, is just the background for a colossal acid b-line, destroying all in its path.

Micro details bristle at the liminal level, threatening to only reveal themselves to those in a club, those listening on headphones or those experiencing a heightened sensory state.

The NID Tapes’ presents a collection of early Indian electronic music uncovered at the archives of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Recorded between 1969-1972 the compilation chronicles electronic works from the previously unknown Indian composers Gita Sarabhai, I.S. Mathur, Atul Desai, S.C. Shama and Jinraj Joshipura who worked at the nation’s first electronic music studio founded at the NID during the utopian years following India’s independence - a radical period of visionary experimentation and artistic freethought. The studio was founded with support from the New York composer David Tudor who personally set up a Moog modular system and tape machine in the autumn of 1969, and The NID Tapes also includes an excerpt from Tudor’s work discovered amongst the collection of tapes. The release developed from a long-term research project by the British artist and electronic musician Paul Purgas who travelled to Ahmedabad over many years to explore the origins of electronic music in India. This resulted in the discovery of the electronic music archive at the NID and its eventual restoration and digitising, which featured in the acclaimed BBC radio documentary Electronic India.

What happens when three inveterate unconventional music pathfinders such as Valentina Magaletti, Sarah Register, and Matthew Simms, combine their experimental trajectories to form a new adventurous project interacting remotely with no predetermined direction? A clash of sounds in a stream of relentless outbursts that holds the listener captive in an untamed forest of sound occasionally brightened by glades of epiphanic breath.

Set in England and in the States, between March and December 2021, Modern Dance Gold: Vol. 1 recounts the first sonic adventure of the trio referred hereafter for more conventional purpose as Better Corners.

This is the jagged sound-scape of a remote interaction shaping up across ether. Not much physical interaction occurred between the musicians who managed to deliver their own distillates adding organic, singular approaches to this magical pot.

The powerful merging of their multifarious background finds renewed drives throughout the eight stations that make up this impressive sonic assemblage – an undaunted secular hymn to the dreads and forethoughts that have haunted our last two years. Prepared piano, pandemic flute, melting metals, modular boxes, lavish vibes and spectral voices lead us from dreaming to waking up abruptly, modulating promises through the dark and the light for a better version of us. Distance, kindness, urge, madness propel this assertive eruption of creative endurance.

FFO: Grouper meeting Thelonious Monk for an impromptu jam with the Incapacitants, Muslimgauze, Della Derbyshire, Stars of the Lid, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kim Gordon, The Creatures, Sunn o))), and Sun Ra

Donovan Philips Leitch is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist who in the 1960s developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music. He emerged from the British folk scene and reached fame in the UK in early 1965 before replicating this in the US the following year, baring the fruits of the blossoming, successful, and eventually long collaboration with record producer Mickie Most.

Eco-mix vinyl is comprised of recycled vinyl compounds. This means that each vinyl will be a completely unique colour or effect.

Lou Terry is a South London-based musician, genre-mangler, and software builder. Warmly, Alexandria, Terry’s first EP with state51, sees the Radio 2-tipped artist fusing strange technology with timeless songwriting.

Dubbed a collection of “folk songs”, Warmly, Alexandria, certainly stretches the limits of Lou Terry’s modest description. A juxtaposition between digital and organic, synthesised and natural, runs through the EP like a message in a stick of Brighton rock. Irregularities litter each song, like drum machines, or the chattering feedback on 'Yellow Top', or the cello in ‘Tiptoe’. The bedroom pop atmosphere - warm production, compact arrangements - is disrupted by the strange sonic protuberances.

Though conventional instruments are still used, the various departures from tried-’n’-tested music-making methods speak to Terry’s desire to look elsewhere for inspiration. In one such example of his penchant for creative serendipity, the title track was initially recorded for a radio set at Deptford Music Complex, then deemed appropriate, and subsequently taken away and gutted, with Terry adding extra instrument parts. On ‘Tiptoe’, Terry even built a software patch that interfaced with a Myo band taking electrical signals sent by the muscles in his arm to manipulate the vocals and guitar parts; this innovative approach can be heard in the strange, bristling electronics swooping around the edges of the arrangement.

A collaboration between Turner-Prize winner Tai Shani, The state51 Conspiracy and Strange Attractor Press: a beautiful collection of music, image and text presented across a fabulous cherry marble 12" vinyl wrapped in an arresting gloss sleeve, stunning accompanying hardback book and a very small number of folio prints.

The 40 minute album features a reading of the Shani's text by Molly Moody, backed with a captivating, hypnotic score for cello and electronics by Maxwell Sterling (Warp Records). Mastered by Rashad Becker.

Tai Shani's new solo show 'Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding With the Angels' is currently running at London gallery, Gathering.

Heavyweight double gatefold vinyl with remastered audio and new and updated artwork reworked by the designer of the original sleeves

Heavyweight double gatefold vinyl with remastered audio and new and updated artwork reworked by the designer of the original sleeves.

Steve Jansen, the co-founder of new wave legends Japan and bona fide collaboration multi-hyphenate, is reissuing his first two solo studio albums: Slope and Tender Extinction.

But how to accurately parse Steve Jansen’s path through music? It’s a journey that’s taken him from 80s royalty as what The Guardian calls “a key component” of one of the UK’s premier new wave acts, releasing classic records like Tin Drum and Quiet Life, to a renowned collaborator, working with artists as diverse as Ryuchi Sakamoto, Anja Garbarek, Annie Lennox, and, most recently, Maiya Hershey. His is a career of ever-changing styles and genres, from blissed-out electronica made with YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi, to his work with jazz-rock group Nine Horses, to the heavy atmospheres of his transcendent Exit North project, and far, far, beyond.

Based on his consistently excellent creative output, it’s not surprising that he’s also had time to fit in a clutch of excellent solo albums. Although on first listens the music on Slope and Tender Extinction can seem austere and chilly, it certainly bears further listening. Songs that might seem impenetrable can shyly give up their secrets - a moment of tenderness, say, or soaring strings, or a wistful chord change. Slope, his debut, was described by The Observer upon its release in 2007 as “unclassifiable”, a description that goes some way to detailing the album’s crystalline synthetic peaks, dusty analogue depths, and wide experimental sweep. To hear the icy IDM of ‘Grip’ rubbing up against the drone-led modern classical in ‘Sow The Salt’, and the strange sound experiments in ‘Gap of Cloud’ juxtaposed with the fractured emotion of ‘Playground Martyrs’ is to hear an artist capable of ploughing his own unique furrow through music.

Steve Jansen and Maiya Hershey today share new single Neither Present Nor Absent out via The state51 Conspiracy. Steve Jansen, the English multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer, is best known for his work with the art pop band Japan and subsequent solo works. Maiya Hershey is Beirut-based audiovisual artist and sound designer whose interest in anthropology and philosophy forms part of her creative process. The duo’s musical collaboration and accompanying single is a work meant to expand upon its title and their mutual interest in experimenting with sonic techniques and exploring their connectedness with identity and the past. In Neither Present Nor Absent industrial sounds slowly expand then flow into a wash of deeply layered, metallic textures which gamelan melodies weave within, as the track builds into a choir-like crescendo of bells and drone sounds. Certainly, its five quiet instrumental pieces, fashioned via piano and electronics, have a dignity and depth that deserves corporeality. Assembled remotely over some 12 months by Steve Jansen and Maiya Hershey, who live in London and Beirut respectively, this is their first collaborative release. Age-wise, they may be a generation apart – Jansen’s first record, as a core member of high-minded art-rockers Japan, was released 15 years before Hershey was born – but share much in their musical philosophy, with instruments (Hershey’s piano, often, but also saxophone, cello and bells) manipulated and folded into various field recordings and other aleatory sonics. And yet, while this is by any measure experimental music, there is a pop sensibility in the kernel of Neither Present Nor Absent: take the central melody of Toward The Surface, or the mournful, cinematic As We Drift. Jansen can claim over 40 years’ experience forging experimental/popular music links, while Hershey has rather more modern credentials, with a solo piano piece heard by several million people thanks to its inclusion on a meditation app.

NIK Colk Void (Factory Floor, Carter Tutti Void, Nvpr) and Alexander Tucker (microcorps, Nonexistent, Grumbling Fur) new collaborative album as Brood X Cycles.

In the spring of 2019 Void and Tucker convened at Void’s Demna Studio to record two days of modular improvisations. Using their individualised modular cases they connected the two configurations to create one whole system where they could integrate and meld sequences, beats, drones and samples. Key to the duo’s process was bringing the organic textures of guitar, cello and voice together with machine rhythms, creating a balance between circuitry and the human body.

The duo edited down the raw recordings into their crucial moments, expanding upon the improvisations into eight cohesive pieces. Sleep Nameless Fear carves out a world of heavy percussive patterns, monolithic drones, disembodied voices and noise frequency manipulation into one detailed vortex.

1992: Minty came together around Leigh to present ‘actions’ on the fringes of music, art, and politics and to explode (sometimes literally) in the face of the growing celebrity culture. The band represented those marginalised through sexuality and delighted to challenge all that which usurps the established order. Word of their live shows spread fast, Leigh was a mainstream figure back then and Minty were becoming notorious for what were considered outrageous and disgraceful performances. At a time just before the internet, scandalous talk and sensational press articles brought the band to the attention of the authorities. The UK’s draconian, indecency and public licensing laws soon led to bans, legal action and police raids. Every show opened with ‘Useless Man’ - an amazing unapologetic, foul mouthed, pro-femme, pro-sex, pro-queer club anthem with lyrics made to shock and a playful homage to a Pepsi Cola ad byline from the 70’s.

New album by phonk/vaporwave/vaportrap pioneer NxxxxxS. Features Soudiere, DJ YUNG VAMP and massive dutch rapper Ray Fuego. Summer vibes are here.

Donovan Philips Leitch is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist who in the 1960s developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music. He emerged from the British folk scene and reached fame in the UK in early 1965 before replicating this in the US the following year, baring the fruits of the blossoming, successful, and eventually long collaboration with record producer Mickie Most.