After the label's exceptional latest offering Retakes courtesy of brilliant South London producer Orphan, patten's Kaleidoscope imprint is about to strike again with yet another cassette release arriving in a ridiculously small edition. The concept should be familiar by now: recorded straight to tape, none of the physical items put out sounds exactly like any other. This time coming as 23 unique C30 tapes (and as usual accompanied by a free-of-charge digital version), the fifth instalment of Kaleidoscope's LIMITED DUBS series is by Croydon-born producer Yearning Kru, now living in Taiwan. Judging from the first audio snippet that scores the expectably weird visuals below, patten continues to explore the most thoroughly hidden corners even of the already left field-indebted dancefloors of today – and we surely couldn't be more thankful for that.
Yearning Kru's Cracked Lacquer/Vanadium arrives July 23 at midnight, so keep an eye on this page.
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We've been waiting for this one for quite a while now: Surely one of this year's most accomplished and noteworthy debuts, the self-titled EP by rightfully acclaimed duo Saa is finally out on left_blank and available for streaming below. Having said quite a few things already, for now we're fine with simply urging you to take a proper listen and then head over to Boomkat or Juno to snag your copy. Needless to add: Highly recommended.
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Nostalgia has become a huge buzz-word in music. Musicians are buying specific, old instruments and using dated recording methods to achieve and repurpose classic sounds. A lot of it surrounding modern dance music involves a revisiting of disco and the fuzzy sound of 80s pop. But there is an entire crowd of young beatmakers for which this definition of nostalgia doesn’t apply. By the time they were able to hear music with a basic understanding of genre, they were already messing around with Ableton, Pro Tools, etc. For these musicians, the window of time they are looking back on nostalgically is much smaller than the 30 to 40 years of music history older musicians have been exploring. They have only ever known software music; they don’t have an old 4-track recorder to dig out of their closet. Without as large of a personal musical history to sift through, these young’uns are pushing forward trends in EDM music less than a decade old, in some cases, expanding on ideas so recent, they haven’t yet been categorized as a trend. This has resulted in a pace of new music almost directly matching the alarming rate of progress of all other forms of technology.
At the forefront of this is NY’s Astro Nautico label, who seem to be breaking new ground with every release. They just celebrated their 21st release with Comanche’s Silicon Basilica, which pays as much attention to environment and mood as it does drums and melodies. It’s an album wrapped in its own world, rather than the single-by-single nature of the rest of mp3DM. You may want to get on this one quick, because you know these Astro Nautico kids will be to something completely different by the time their 22nd release rolls around.
Stream Silicon Basilica below or just download it for free from the Astro Nautico website, and donate to their Kickstarter in conquest of raising enough funds to put out music on vinyl, so all of this headlong progress doesn’t get lost in the Web.
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German hip hop has always been a delicate matter, all too often landing firmly on that unmarked musical territory somewhere between ludicrousness and ineptitude, which is why I'd always recommend you just stay away from all that as far and as often as possible. That surely doesn't mean that it can't ever work out right though, but my guess would be that the safest course of action is to stop trying too hard to achieve things others have done long before you even arrived in the game. Enter AB Syndrom: it's hard to deny the fact that the music made by this still fairly new Berlin-based quartet does indeed feature rapping, but to call it something even slightly reminiscent of hip hop would certainly be a stretch, and it's precisely this abstinence – and the awareness that's assumedly attached to it – that turns the whole project into something thoroughly enjoyable. AB Syndrom's work sports a very distinct brand of cleverly arranged and skilfully executed post-euphoric meta pop, never far away from experimental playfulness and always with the right amount of savvy self-irony. Or in other words, invariably a step ahead of most of their local contemporaries.
Next Friday, July 12, AB Syndrom will perform at Berlin Mitte's Hangar 49, supported by the remarkable and fresh local artist Lola Morgenroth and some aftershow beats and clicks provided by myself. Go here to get all necessary details. Definitely worth checking out, so see you there.
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When I was reading about this new album from Sweden's 1991, I was confusing it for that 1993 album (which came out last year) from that dude James Matthew on SLF Tapes. My mistake. But not a huge one, really. There are so many people putting out music under the heading 'electronic,' sharing ideas and sounds with each other that gritty beat tapes, synth exploration, and 15-minute ambient tracks can practically be categorized together, with the amount of overlap between these otherwise varying motifs. So, this track, "Reborn Ice Horn" from the upcoming 1991 full length – first released on tape last year by Astro:Dynamics – is not James Matthew, and it certainly isn’t beat-driven, but a sense of distorted drums accompanying the beaten layers of sound trudging through the middle ground is still intact. And with how far these Soundcloud bands progress their music between releases, it wouldn’t surprise me if 1991 was experimenting with beats on his next release, or if James Matthew started incorporating synthesizers.
Listen to the album opener, "Reborn Ice Horn," below and order the new 1991 LP from Boomkat now.
On Sunday, July 14, 1991 will make his London live debut together with Arclight at Café OTO. Certainly something not to be missed if you happen to be in town. Check all event details over here.
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Montréal-based Chevalier Avant Garde live up to their hauntedly vaudeville sounding name; the duo's chilling take on electro-pop sounds like it would be more at home in an empty cathedral than a modern venue. The minimal darkwave of "Hilary" may drag the duo a little closer to the cemetery gates, but there is a romantic escapism embedded in "Hilary" that brings to mind flashes of New Order. Montréal certainly seems like the place you want to be if you're making slightly left of center electronica, and Chevalier Avant Garde sound like they could be well on their way towards becoming a fixture within the city's thriving scene.
Limited copies of the Hilary 7" are available now through beko.
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London, Ontario's Wormwood (Andrew Wenaus and Christina Willatt) have produced an immensely accomplished debut album. Sunfloating explores the idm–pop ambient–modern classical axis, and to varying degrees, aspects of Bjork, Portishead and turn of the century Warp Records. As one might suspect from these canonical references, the cerebral and accessible operate in tandem throughout Sunfloating.
''Lapse'' and the title track contrast moments of glacial stasis with swollen, intoxicating crescendos. In ''Leaves like Lemons,'' a mid-tempo groove – composed of gated white noise and concrete sounds – ricochets around the stereo field while dimly lit, icy synth tones and cavernous choral lines (comprised entirely of Willatt’s multi-tracked vocal) produce a haunting afterglow. Willatt’s enchanting vocal performance complements the album’s deft production and meticulous compositional form, resulting in a serious and uncompromising work worthy of attention.
Sunfloating can be purchased in its entirety from Wormwood's bandcamp.
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Brooklyn musician Michael McGregor (whom you might remember from Chocolate Bobka) has an invigorating new tape, Midtown Direct, out on the just-launched label 1080p. Yesterday, a video dropped for the track “8 (Dub)”. The song is very, very loosely techno. Starting with some distorted noise and vocal samples, “8 (Dub)” slowly inches its way towards club-ready rhythms before McGregor brings in an intense amount of warping and filtration, taking this track somewhere far stranger in the process. The video, meanwhile, appears to be some nameless tourist's footage of China, only tripped out and edited to be quasi-psychedelic. The effect is unsettling, to say the least.
Watch “8 (Dub)” below. Midtown Direct is available for purchase as a cassette from 1080p and digitally from either Boomkat or Juno.
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