Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.
The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.
Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.
While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.
Written and produced by Amnesia Scanner
Iterated by Freeka Tet based on the material written by Amnesia Scanner
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.
The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.
Written and produced by Amnesia Scanner
Iterated by Freeka Tet based on the material written by Amnesia Scanner
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
A peppery smorgasbord of industrial rhythms, razor-sharp stabs and provocative vocals, ‘Deathwork’ is Brixton-based Kamixlo’s strongest statement yet, sandwiching earworm-laced pop between refried layers of euphoric back-room ambience and visceral hard dance distortion. It’s been four years since Kamixlo poured his heart out on his acclaimed debut album ‘Cicatriz’, and he’s been experimenting incessantly since then, figuring out how to integrate bold, memorable hooks into his signature alloy of burnished synths and mangled samples. And if its predecessor represented catharsis after a discomfiting period of loss, ‘Deathwork’ finds Kamixlo’s emotional load lightened, freeing him to survey and tighten his formula by traversing club music’s most eccentric, genre-agnostic fringes.
The young DJ and producer cut his teeth in the early 2010s, forming the iconic Bala Club party and label before deploying a series of EPs that accurately captured the era’s voracious zeitgeist. Muddling references to nu-metal and emo classics with nervy dembow and bass deconstructions and dissociated SoundCloud rap thuds, Kamixlo characterized a new type of inclusive artist, unprejudiced by preconceptions of the underground or mainstream. ‘Deathwork’ builds on this legacy and widens his outlook substantially, urging listeners to step towards the dancefloor no matter how they might engage with music. And for the first time, Kamixlo seamlessly amalgamates his delirious bass-heavy atmospheres and kinetic beats with vocals, incorporating compelling performances from reggaetón sensation Isabella Lovestory, avant-pop outsider Puzzle, and Drain Gang’s infamous Bladee. There’s even an appearance from Berlin’s Mechatok, who shows out with a production assist on the album’s syrupy closing track ‘Insect’.
From the ecstatic opening breaths of ‘Ketamine Fields’, it’s clear that Kamixlo’s in a fresh headspace. Weightless angelic voices curve gracefully around overdriven rave-ready bass twangs, while muffled, blown-out drums echo somewhere in the distance. It’s the perfect pre-game to an endless, messy night, leaving Isabella Lovestory to lurch towards the mass of sweaty bodies on ‘Pitch Black’, rhyming sensually over Kamixlo’s provocative metallic plucks and slow-motion dembow pulse. And by ‘Combe’, the peak time energy is palpable, with carnivalesque percussion and eardrum-popping high pitched squeals that grind against the pummeling gabber kicks. Puzzle brings the album back down to earth on ‘Chaos’, casually free associating and providing a light-hearted counter to the fog of machine crunches and deranged laughter.
On ‘One More Night At The Line’, Kamixlo carves the house blueprint into a neurotic chatter of helium voices and cocky slams, and when Bladee arrives in a wisp of smoke on ‘Death Forever’, the noise has calmed a little. Here, Kamixlo flexes his most exploratory muscles, nesting Bladee’s grungy voice in an erratic tangle of muted, almost pacifying, black metal screams and nursery rhyme chimes. It’s a paradox that perfectly encapsulates the scope of ‘Deathwork’, an album that continually flips expectations, turning in on itself and questioning its own logic without ever losing its momentum.
Written and produced by Kamixlo
Mixed by Felix Lee
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
Artwork by Daniel Swan
Amnesia Scanner drops a schitzo pop anthem to celebrate the neverending cycle of us being so back – it being so over; boom vs doom; hyperoptimism vs hyperpessimism.
Freeka Tet also interprets, or cancels, Amnesia Scanner’s original on FT Over, where an active noise cancelation script reveals a hidden dimension of lowercase ambient sublime.
Written and produced by Amnesia Scanner
Mixed by Amnesia Scanner
Additional mixing by Enyang Urbiks
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
A halucinogenic composite of molten thrash and syrupy, disintegrated electronics, Tongue in the Mind’s provocative debut EP dissolves slowly, leaving a crystalline residue of pulverized words and intimate, literate musical references. The record embraces and untangles the trio’s distinctive personal narratives: Juliana Huxtable is an acclaimed multimedia artist, DJ-musician and writer, Jealous Orgasm a dextrous multi-instrumentalist and composer and Via App a versatile, lavishly experimental producer and DJ. Together they careen erraticaly between eccentricities and expressions, composing extravagant, free-flowing micro epics that don’t so much blur the boundaries between genres, but layer disparate sounds into cornucopian sharing platters spilling over with acid, grain and honey.
‘FREE SEX’ is a smoldering punk-metal riot set ablaze by tempered riffs and seething beatbox breaks; Huxtable’s vocals glide over top with cool, casual grace until the track sublimates into a vaporous techno fever dream. Toying with the ethos of Detroit’s screwiest, most speculative sci-fi experiments, it flaunts Tongue In The Mind’s creative philosophy in widescreen, muddying the gulf between punk rock and cybernetic electro. The trio drift from the main stage to the backroom on ‘PLASMATIC YEARNING (FOR THE HORIZON’S KISS GOODNIGHT)’, shoring up Huxtable’s eroticized dream-pop cries with cracked mirror guitar fragments and subwoofer-puncturing bass. Oceanic cave painting for beached lovers.
The band’s ambition is laid out prostrate on ‘KEY AND STRING’, a prog anomaly of chugging metal guitar riffs and downtempo spines until it spirals into a glazed pool of enigmatic wordplay and eerie electronics before snapping back into an electrified, symphonic union of the three at their most vivid. And ‘PRETTY CANARY’, a live staple that’s become the band’s de-facto signature, draws out their sonic doctrine in vivid, cartoonish colors, Huxtable’s acerbic sung-spoken musings are accented by tweezed Downtown distortions and skipping club beats.
Heith’s debut album X,wheel marked the beginning of a long journey, the start to a tortuous exploration of consciousness and spirit. The Liars Tell…, on the other hand, feels like a kind of respite, a moment of meditation and pause from the fatigue of dimension-hopping. As if the traveller dismounted their carriage and, standing puzzled on a crossroad, listened to the echoes of distant places. Occupying a liminal space and letting thousand of contradictory tales form the lyrics to one unfathomable song.
This EP’s emphasis on the singing voice is itself not casual, but the focal point of a research on language and words, from their uncanny worlding power to their ultimate failure to deliver universally accessible truths. The human voice is treated as the most fragile of instruments, a spectral presence aided into matter by technology. The tonally ambiguous beauty in Heith’s processed singing stands to imitate the immanent wisdom of sacral inspiration while simultaneously belonging to a sketchy trickster. A divine liar is whispering into the ears of the somnambulist, instigating dangerous temptations of knowledge.
The delicate shanty at the core of “<>e” conducts slowly from a shiny synth desert to a cascade of arpeggiated instruments to, finally, a contained eruption of percussion and noise, all while never losing its hypnotic sense of caution. INVERTED VERTIGO’s slow rising chords, prolonged whispers and lamenting flutes feel like a soul trembling to detach from a state of static plenitude, fevering to plunge into the abstract tumult of it conclusion. Similarly, the minimal, stretchy melody of “medicine boy/3cate” gives the vocals the space to alternatively fragment and multiply, only to then coalesce again into one choral force, ultimately giving space to a discharge of broken guitar strings. Closer “The Circus Lodge (Orchestroll Version)” is a mirrored reversion and an addendum to X, Wheel ’s “A Venus Flytrap In The Circus Lodge”, initially riding on the back of a reverb- drenched crescendo to a melancholic slow burn of electronic reeds.
This all makes The Liars Tell…a crucial point into Heith’s evolution, influenced by two years of increasingly ambitious live performances and by the relentless wanderings of an uncompromisingly creative mind.
Written and produced by Heith
Mixed & mastered at Tapewave Studio
While she was waiting for her last album ‘Pripyat’ to be released, Catalan composer and producer Marina Herlop was restless. She was concerned about her (by then) uncertain music career, and felt emotionally unmoored. “Some days I used to sit on the balcony of my flat to catch some sun,” she explains, “I would close my eyes and start visualizing myself as a gardener, pulling out purple weeds from the soil, every bad memory or emotion I wanted to expulse being one of the plants.” As the days dragged on, the fantasy deepened, and Herlop discovered that parts of the garden was withering; the energy she had been putting into the non-musical side of her life had seeped into her creative pasture and poisoned it. She knew what she needed to do to overcome the blight: plant some seeds and tend to her art to help it blossom and bloom once again.
‘Nekkuja’ is a place for Herlop’s warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through the topsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it’s undoubtedly her brightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished ‘Pripyat’ are still present, but blessed with a level of positivity that’s rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness and melancholy. Skittering fragments of ornate acoustic instrumentation provide a serene welcome to ‘Busa’, punctuated by precise electronic processes that shuttle the sound towards abstraction and fantasy. Herlop’s voice grows over the tangle of sounds from a childish giggle into a layered, matted mantra, sounding passionate, hopeful and full of energy. The vitality spills over into ‘Cosset’, where she wraps powerful motifs around ricocheting beats and dramatic piano rolls.
Herlop’s garden opens up dramatically on ‘Karada’ when bucolic field recordings crack like sunlight over harp plucks and willowy vocals. Her voice seems to bend around the whooshing streams and chittering of birds as if she’s singing to the manicured land itself – a utopian paradise that Herlop employs as a metaphor for the creative process. In contrast to the view that an artist is an isolated genius or an idol to be worshipped, Herlop believes that the garden helps us see the process as closer to devotion or perseverance. A gardener brings order to the wild chaos of the outdoors, collaborating with nature to arrange something vibrant and enduring. Blending familiar sounds with fanciful concepts, Herlop traces an imaginary garden, imploring us to wander and wonder. And by the album’s billowing final track ‘Babel’, it’s flowered into a flush of pruned vocal phrases and delicately groomed orchestral rushes, painted in orange, green, blue and red.
Composed, produced and recorded by Marina Herlop
Vocals by Marina Herlop
Mixed and mastered by Joker
Artwork by Mati Klarewin
Billy Bultheel’s debut solo album is an ambitious distillation of the composer’s,’ sprawling litany of influences and his unique approach to site-specific composition. A compilation of pieces created between 2016 and 2023, the album is a forceful testament to Bultheel’s expansive performance practice and collaborations with cutting-edge visual artists like Anne Imhof and James Richards.
Drawing inspiration from industrial music and metal as well as medieval and baroque polyphony, Bultheel devised a way to present this collection of works side-by-side. The record is split into two distinct cycles: the Snow Cycle, which collects Bultheel’s electro-acoustic and compositional work, and the Game Cycle, which assembles his electronic productions. These two suites have unmistakable symmetry; Bultheel’s traditional compositions are bolstered by his understanding of electronic production, while his electronic pieces are moulded by his knowledge of classical and traditional music. “Two Cycles” is an album that exhibits duality, embodying the dichotomy of Bultheel’s roles as both an ensemble composer and an electronic producer.
While ‘Two Cycles’ is his inaugural solo endeavor, it’s not Bultheel’s first foray into PAN’s extended universe. Since 2012, he has been an active collaborator alongside the German visual artist and choreographer Anne Imhof and US artist Eliza Douglas. Notably, their creative synergy bore fruit in the form of ‘FAUST’ in 2019 and ‘SEX’ in 2021, both of which were released on PAN. Last year, Bultheel joined forces with Alexander Iezzi, operating under the moniker ’33,’ where they skillfully amalgamated club music with the raw authenticity of DIY punk and the intricate charm of baroque harmonies on the C.A.N.V.A.S.-released album ’33-69’.
However, Bultheel’s true artistic sanctuary resides within the realm of live performance. From a very young age, he harbored an ardent desire to fuse the timeless elegance of renaissance music with the avant-garde allure of distorted electronics. His quest was further guided by a deep reverence for the ritualistic aspects of communal experiences. Inspired by pioneering composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, and baroque masters like Claudio Monteverdi, Bultheel has undertaken a relentless mission to deconstruct the traditional confines of the concert hall and explore new territories for musical experiences. In doing so, he orchestrates performances in unconventional settings, compelling both musicians and spectators to approach his music as a geographic composition.
The haunting opening track of the ‘Snow Cycle’, ‘The Arcades Project’, — named after the unfinished compendium of architectural contemplations penned by the eminent German philosopher, Walter Benjamin – places four tubas in strategic towers surrounding the audience, creating an immersive auditory experience. Conversely, ‘The Snows of Venice’ — named after Alexander Kluge and Ben Lerner collection of short stories and poems — was conceived for two flautists directed to intertwine their melodies as they traversed through knee-high water.
The ‘Game Cycle’ meanwhile places a strong emphasis on rhythm, crafting a sonic landscape that resonates with overdriven metallic clanks and sharp stabs. Drawing upon his extensive experience in composing for choreography, Bultheel envisions a series of jittery dances that purposefully deviate from conventional timelines. ‘Decreation’ infuses techno with the visceral qualities of noise music and ‘Game Theory’ offers an unsettling skeletal barrage of saturated,
precisely tuned percussive hits. Bultheel brings ‘Two Cycles’ to a close with ‘Gigue,’ a reference to the 6/8 baroque court dance that traditionally marked the conclusion of a dance suite; by merging marching rhythms performed by two percussionists on a single drum set with chaotic and evocative synth leads, he establishes a tantalizing counterpoint.
‘Two Cycles’ is a musical compilation that explores the themes of locale and landscape, elucidating the intricate dynamics that arise between the musicians and their audience, the ears and the architecture. Considering timbre, density and the psycho-acoustic qualities of communal spaces, from the warehouse to the cathedral, Bultheel draws indelible lines between seemingly distant concepts, merging the celestial with the terrestrial.
The double album cover, one for each side and cycle on the record, features a collage created by the Welsh video artist James Richards that merges medieval iconography with snippets of queer memorabilia.
Honour shares ‘U&Me (febfourteen) DJ HBK Remix’, the remix of previously released single ‘U&Me (decemberseventeen)’ from the debut album ‘Àlàáfíà’, which came out via PAN on November 3rd, 2023.
Built and destroyed by Honour
Mixed by Honour
Mastered by Miles Whittaker
Artwork by Honour
Jim C. Nedd ranks among the most captivating photographers of his generation. Remembering Songs, Nedd’s debut monograph, culminates six years photographing his native Colombia in over 300 full-color reproductions, featuring an introduction by Beatriz E. Balanta and an interview with the artist by Octavia Bürgel. A delicate balance of staged and documentary photography, Nedd’s distinct visual language is spun from local mythologies, personal nostalgia and speculative fiction. Vivid, deliberately theatrical scenes of ceremonies and other convivial environments are offset by intimate portraits cast in stark shadow or otherwise opacified. The tension between personal and universal experience is mobilized as a formal sensibility in Nedd’s work, evoking an uncanny potency reminiscent of the Latin American narrative tradition of magical realism.
Remembering Songs is a PAN Monograph. The project additionally received support from the Italian Cultural Institute of Bogotà.
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Jim C. Nedd is a Colombian-Italian artist born in 1991. Nedd makes images with an illusory and carnivalesque vision, fusing episodic encounters from his daily life with elements of the dreamlike and surreal. Transforming the figures and landscapes of his surroundings into poetic works braided with recurring concerns and themes, Nedd’s work is often inspired by a mixture of collective memory, shared experience, and his Caribbean culture.
Nedd’s work is internationally recognized, and has been published in magazines and journals including Aperture, Vogue Italia, Kaleidoscope, Revue and Alla Carta Magazine. He has exhibited work at MACRO, Rome; MAMBO, Bogotà; Cinemateca Distrital, Bogotà; Autoitalia, London; Damien & The Love Guru, CFA, Milan; Athens Biennial, Athens; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool and Sandy Brown, Berlin.
Tongue in the Mind shares ‘Pretty Canary’, the first single from the upcoming EP out via PAN.
Performed by Juliana Huxtable, Via App, Jealous Orgasm
Production by Juliana Huxtable, Joe Rinaldo Heffernan, Fakethias
Vocals by Juliana Huxtable
Synthesizers by Joe Rinaldo Heffernan, Juliana Huxtable
Guitar, Drums, Backing Vocals by Joe Rinaldo Heffernan
Honour shares ‘U&Me (decemberseventeen)’, the first single from the upcoming full-length album ‘Àlàáfíà’ out via PAN on November 3rd.
Amnesia Scanner’s third full-length album titled STROBE.RIP is a collaboration with the artist and musician Freeka Tet, who joins the album and associated live performances as a vocalist and creative collaborator.
Released by PAN, STROBE.RIP is part of a broader series of live performances, installations, videos and physical products created by the group.
Since its inception in 2014, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala have continued to evolve and redefine Amnesia Scanner through experimentation across online and IRL realms. This album brings them a step closer to the latter.
With French-born, New York City-based Freeka Tet on board, STROBE.RIP acquires a new array of influences that draw from the multidisciplinary artist’s hacker mindset, shaping the sound into new forms. As a programmer and technologist, Freeka Tet’s work straddles commerce and art, combining intuitive and performative modes of expression with emergent technology and creative coding. Much like Amnesia Scanner, Tet draws from online vernacular and techno-magic to create satirical, uncanny work – artificially augmented, and highly engineered sounds, textures, images and ideas that translate memes and code into a more human and affective language.
Haimala and Kalliala say, “Amnesia Scanner is now living in the world it has built,” signaling a sincere commitment to the act. The human dimension in STROBE.RIP is chaotic: a reverse hero’s journey that merges deep-fried baroque with the quasi-angelic into a psychotic megamix of tropes, lyrics, genres, and sonic palettes that are both disorienting and deeply resonant.
The opening track Tongue Demons perfectly summarizes this, with blaring synth stabs and frenetic drum patterns paving the way for a broken melody arranged through a digital brass chord progression. Giggle and Bounds follow right after: two outstanding pieces of introspection signaling the melodic turn of the album, with the latter almost posing as a weirdo 2-step ballad filled with deep pads and pitched-up and down vocals.
The 160bpm, 4-to-4 pulsing kicks of Ledge and the palm-muted chords of Disperse serve as a perfect build-up to Ride, right in the middle of the tracklist: a summer hit from hell, a crooked saxophone-graced tune carried by a crusty, Balearic acoustic arpeggio. The alt acoustics continue with Damon, or at least before the track turns from Nirvana’s Unplugged to Slayer’s double kick drum pedals and becomes thrashtronica with Tet on screamo duties.
Things get softer with Clown, specifically in the chanted refrain, and even more aetherial in the almost trip-hop timbres of abandoned.club, where chopped-and-screwed vocals sing “I lost myself in the club.” Scorpions, Bats & Spiders is the abstract gem declaring the death of Deconstructed Club Music—a genre created by journalists and pioneered by the duo, among others. The words “deconstructed,” “club,” and “panel discussion” are spelled out in a vortex throughout the track as if they were to be carved on the genre’s imaginary gravestone. Closing the album, the saw bass of Cat serves Euro-electro à la Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction, while the doomed outro Merge closes the album in a triumphant aggregation of noise and pixelated drums that render the image of a crust-punk ensemble.
Written by Amnesia Scanner
Produced by Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
In the late 18th century, reason and rational thought was idealized and viewed as the most progressive way to comprehend a rapidly industrializing society. The snap reaction was Romanticism, an artistic movement that prioritized emotion, imagination and intuition – things that can’t be quantified but have sustained culture for millennia. Now in a digitally accelerated age where our lives are not only measured but distributed in binary, a similarly hot-blooded creative response is long overdue. On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.
“I know my musical collaborators on an arguably more intimate level than many of the friendships that are exclusively born of word-based language,” says Belaga. The cellist and composer has been developing a relationship with Los Angeles-based DJ-producer Maroof (also known as Asmara) and Svosve, a Swiss saxophonist and electro-acoustic musician, for many years; the three are all part of Moved by the Motion, a “roving band” that also includes artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, performer and dancer Tosh Basco and dancer Josh Johnson. As a three-piece ensemble, their interaction is fluid and physical, and with Svosve and Belaga on sax, flute, piano and cello, Maroof sculpts the sounds into textured, effervescent fantasies. “A lot of the songs were improvised and then I made sense of the madness,” she explains.
The music emerged like smoke from the embers of soundtrack work they collaborated on in 2021. After finishing scores for Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton A/W 2021 collection film, Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light and Bafic’s documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds, the trio were left with unanswered questions and excess energy. They considered the idea of creating an imaginary score to a romantic movie, using love to dictate its movement and narrative. So opening track ‘G Major Kind of Love’ is the intoxicating first blush, characterized by a drowned sax solo that sounds like a siren call from beneath the ocean. ‘Delicate Distance Between Boulders’ is quivering and hesitant, using gentle piano motifs against reverberating flute sounds and subtle, goosebump inducing electronic treatments.
Everything comes into sharp focus on the album’s lengthy central piece ‘The Stranger’, that brings in additional instrumentation from harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward. The three friends saw this particular composition as a journey within itself, charting the anxiety, harmony and uncertainty of love. Shifting from gooey freeform jazz into gurgling noise and bleak ambient drone, it connects the dots between Dorothy Ashby, Arve Henriksen, Jon Hassell and Hildur Guðnadóttir while voyaging into parts unknown. It’s a finale of sorts that wrestles with the complexity of the album’s themes, returning to earlier refrains and prolonging their tension.
Fittingly, the record is tied together by artwork from the trio’s friend Tosh Basco, and several tracks have already been used by Wu Tsang in a piece for SFMoMa. The Sport of Love is powered by physical connection in a digital world, and breathes a mysterious allure that’s never been more urgent.
Mixed by Daniel Pineda
Mastered by Sam John at Precise Mastering
Artwork by Tosh Basco
On her sophomore album “Germ in a Population of Buildings”, upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift, and the feeling of discovering strange patterns in different ecosystems. Often, the Amsterdam-based artist finds herself zooming in and out beyond a place’s most recognizable surface features to inhabit the microscopic and gigantic. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures.
upsammy’s debut album, 2020’s critically-acclaimed “Zoom”, was praised for its careful reimagining of IDM, evolving vignettes that nodded towards the dancefloor without being shackled to its rigid set of rules. On “Germ in a Population of Buildings” her process has evolved considerably; the skeletal trace of IDM is still present but it’s been trapped in amber, allowing her unique sonic landscape to develop organically. ‘Being is a Stone’ is a proof of concept in many ways, layering upsammy’s contorted voice in rickety patterns beneath a lattice of fragile rhythms and faintly melancholy synths. It’s never immediately obvious where the sounds are coming from – a hiccuping beat might be glass cracking underfoot, and larger pulses could be wet concrete, rusted iron or bent plastic. As the sounds develop they morph into each other, demolishing what came before and building on top of the ornamental wreckage.
On the dynamic ‘Constructing’, upsammy’s sound design fluxes through hyperactive bass music structures, abstracting expectations at every turn. Often her sounds are whisper quiet, rattling and vibrating until heavier masonry drops and disrupts the structure. And when discernible rhythms subside into the background, like on the album’s eerie title track, they become almost illusory, morphing between the real world and the electronic. upsammy’s processed voice works like a bridge between these realms, snaking between stark, whimsical melodies on ‘Patterning’, arching from AutoTuned detachment into cooing, dreamy intimacy. By considering the harmonies between each location she’s visited, upsammy has been able to build a unique topology that’s an uncanny digital amalgam of her lived experience. It’s a thoughtful alternative in an era more concerned with flatting the landscape than crumpling it and examining its peaks and troughs.
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Mixed by James Ginzburg
Artwork by Jonathan Castro Alejos and Tharim Cornelisse
Erwan Sene shares full-length album ‘JUnQ’ alongside book out via PAN on April 14th.
JUnQ, or the Journal of Unsolved Questions, is modeled on a parallel exercise: to sketch music and to score sculptures. Part exhibition, part book and part album release, JUnQ seeks to propose a collaborative language that binds the algorithmic needs of an artificial pop star to the performance of the artist himself. Boundaries between reality and artifice are blurred in a continuous chain of confrontation and sublimation, wherein a romance between analog evolution and digital experimentation is born.
The immersive project released by PAN represents Erwan Sene’s debut album and the multifaceted nature of his approach. Composed like a chorus of fantastical beasts, the album wanders atmospherically through a fogged wood. Sounds are never used for their default function–– they are sculpted, distorted and amplified, becoming hybrids of themselves. A haunting banshee, the monstrous growl of an Orc, Siren songs wafting through the trees–– these and more are recreated with sinuous violins, muffled harpsichord and digital instruments, culminating in a a vibrant “jungle” of sound.
The JUnQ book
Each page of the JUnQ book dives into the neon structures of Sene’s Cronenberg-like mutations: miniatures, models and ventilation details echo the micro-evolution of Sene’s “imaginary mundane.” Moments of object recognition flicker before receding from view. Appropriating the mechanisms of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sene seeks to conjure the sense of entrapment brought on by infection, affecting containment in the microscopic abstractions he presents of his own sculptural work. Casting his contained biotope as a friend, rather than a foe, the fragmented view of these works imbues them with a sense of intimacy and primacy.
The JUnQ book features a bespoke type designed in collaboration with Marie Mam-Sai Bellier and Marine Stephan. Evocative of archeology and the imagined glyphs traced by lost civilizations, the type provides an (il)legible scripture to JUnQ’s multi-fold universe.
Mixed by James Ginzburg
Mastered by Rashad Becker
During the Tang dynasty (around the 9th Century CE), traveling intellectual Li Yuanming would routinely leave home to write and debate poetry with likeminded scholars across China, isolating his wife Cifu for sometimes weeks on end. Frustrated, she found comfort in the arms of a widowed neighbor, but when Li remained at home for an unexpected stretch of time, Cifu was prompted to develop a method to signal her lover it was safe to approach. She stitched a special green hat that she handed to her husband as he was about to leave town; when Li was wearing the hat, it worked like a traffic signal – green meant go. But this didn’t last for long, during one trip Li returned home early and caught Cifu and their neighbor together, and when the local community caught wind of the story, the green hat became an enduring symbol of infidelity. On Tzusing’s sophomore album the Malaysian-born artist, who lives between Shanghai and Taipei, meditates on China’s complicated history of patriarchal heteronormativity, and how these archaic double standards continue to dominate the culture in pervasive, often invisible ways. Even in progressive circles, internalized male inadequacy and its inevitable projection of possessiveness and aggression has been brushed underneath the rug, so by addressing it head-on, Tzusing attempts to question these structures using a level of aesthetic anxiety and thematic intensity that’s hard to ignore.
Growing up between Singapore, Taiwan, China, and the USA, Tzusing was living in Chicago when his love of music turned into an obsession. After relocating to China for work, he cut his teeth DJing at The Shelter in Shanghai and began refining his personal musical signature. A slew of EBM-inspired 12″s on Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S. imprint were followed by his 2017 debut album 東方不敗 that was inspired by Jin Yong’s popular 1960s wuxia novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, a story about a swordsman who castrates himself to learn a powerful fighting technique. 绿帽 Green Hat builds on that record’s themes, deconstructing a different facet of gender as it’s perceived within Chinese culture. On ‘趁人之危(Take Advantage)’, Tzusing obscures Daniel Plainview’s notorious growl from There Will Be Blood underneath a patchwork of springy percussion and electrified wails. The message is clear: Plainview’s character represents the darkness underlying American masculinity, and Tzusing is drawing a direct parallel with China. The history and mythology may be different, but the problem remains. Rhythms do the heavy lifting on ‘Muscular Theology’, interlocking and falling apart, and connecting fragments of techno, house, and club templates with disorienting FX. The dancefloor can provide an unorthodox space for outsiders to recognize the dissonance in their cultural programming, and Tzusing suggests this not by sonic fusion but by borderless cohesion that sucks the listener in before they’re completely aware of the message.
And while 绿帽 Green Hat is unashamed to lean into its layered concept, the album never loses its well-rehearsed dancefloor momentum. Tzusing has been through many metamorphoses during his career, but it’s here where sounds most eager to unify his interests and inclinations. From the ruthlessly funky hard drum inversion of ‘孝忍狠 (Filial Endure Ruthless)’ and the manic uptempo roll of ‘Exascale’, to the gurgling combination of wheezing voices and downtempo rhythms on Suda collaboration ‘Cloud Tunnel’ and the wedding party flex of epic closing track ‘Residual Stress’, there’s a sense that the producer has truly found his groove. It’s an album that underscores dance music’s often manic uneasiness, smoothly paralleling this with the frenzied stress of infidelity. Fear is a well-worn musical theme that transcends genre, but Tzusing approaches it from a fresh perspective; this isn’t blood dripping from skulls, it’s rapid-fire thoughts piercing the mind. Now that’s truly terrifying.
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks
Cover photography by Xiaopeng
Artwork by Virgile Flores
The Story Of Leonora (OST) is the seventh edition of PAN’s Entopia soundtrack series. The first original score by Toxe, the album accompanies a short film of the same name by Clemens Stumpf and Cleis Vandam. Serving as an extended version of the original score, the new release from Toxe additionally presents audio yet unheard by viewers of the film. Created in 2020 between Berlin and Amsterdam, The Story of Leonora is released today as a 10track album and a limited edition sliding puzzle designed by Emir Timur Tokdemir.
The album ebbs and flows while retaining the individuality of certain moods–– sometimes ominous, often innocent. Recalling an elementary introduction to the world, Toxe draws inspiration from sounds sourced in daily life: the clicking of high heels, birds and humming machines. Cascading echos and short breaths merge with delicate synths and incomprehensible human mumble. The simplicity of these elements are distilled to their core, evoking the naïveté of the world to an alien perspective, while maintaining sonic sophistication throughout.
Written, produced & mixed by Tove Agelii
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Film direction & photography by Clemens Stumpf and Cleis Vandam
Puzzle design and artwork by Emir Timur Tokdemir
In evolutionary biology, the term spandrel refers to the features of an organism that aren’t developments for survival, and seemingly possess no obvious purpose. The word is taken from an architectural label for the triangular spaces in the corner of an arch: small aesthetic elements that provide symmetry and demarcate boundaries. Musician and vocalist Evita Manji asks an opaque question on their debut album, wondering in the face of immense loss what elements of ourselves might be for endurance, and what might just be decoration. Their tracks, pieced together from the vapors of contemporary club music, baroque pop, and experimental sound design, are a way for Manji to examine their relationship with the world at large and within, disassembling systems of control and highlighting interconnectedness.
Manji has been an ethereal presence on the scene for the last few years, collaborating with numerous artists as both a sound artist and a creative director. Last year, they launched their own platform myxoxym, where they debuted two singles from “Spandrel?” and assembled an ambitious fundraiser compilation featuring Rainy Miller, Palmistry, Cecile Believe and others, raising money for Greek wildlife fund ANIMA. Performing across the world at festivals such as Unsound, Lunchmeat, and Rhizom, Manji has also appeared at clubs in Berlin and London, and was picked to represent the Shape+ platform in 2022. These experiences teem through “Spandrel?”, helping them weave a complex artistic tapestry that seeks to look far beneath the surface of existence, attempting to balance the doom of global climate meltdown with themes of self-actualization, love, and bodily autonomy.
The album opens on the title track, an introductory précis that prepares listeners for what they’re about to hear. Manji’s vocals hum with a plugged-in sense of cybernetic melancholia, filtering the world’s barrage of rhythms and harmonic themes into lithe, clubwise pop that’s buoyed by their advanced sonics. From there, we’re wrenched into the sadness of atmospheric lament ‘Pitch Black’, a meditation on death that submerges deep bass beneath layers of choral bliss, evoking the church and the dancefloor without sacrificing the power of each polar element. Their darkness is pushed from the inside to the outside on ‘Oil/Too Much’, a commentary on the oil industry from the perspective of the animal kingdom that doubles as a neon-hued expression of contemporary depression. But it’s on ‘Body/Prison’ where Manji sounds most naked, speaking honestly about their life’s darkest moments and confessing their deepest feelings over searing trance-inspired synths and grotesque percussion.
“Spandrel?” is an album that takes time to unravel, and Manji’s themes resonate through history that’s older than pop music. It’s tragic, romantic, and poetic, and resolutely refuses to turn away from the era’s most urgent concerns.
Production, writing, composition: Evita Manji
Mix: Evita Manji
Master: Enyang Urbiks
Artwork: Spyros Droussiotis
There’s not much we can say about Honour that makes complete sense. They may or may not have grown up in the US, making beats with a cousin who sang in a church band; they might have toured as a roadie with platinum-selling R&B outfit Pretty Ricky before acing regional videogame tournaments and moving to NYC; they could have sold their life story to children’s book author C.S. Adler and signed to Violator management; and maybe they ended up stationed in London, working as a runner on music promos. But however plausible it is, the breadcrumb trail provides us with a detailed cultural framework for “Beg 4 Mercy”, a dense fog of pop and underground references that’s as inescapable as it is enticing. It’s a rare debut that engulfs even the most cautious listener, sweeping through tongue-in-cheek Wild West bravado and psychedelic, overdriven club rap, bifurcating into crumbly DIY noise and vaporous euphoric soul. Sometimes barbed and cynical, but just as often deliriously warm-hearted, it’s a record of contradictions that’s as puzzling to unpick as the artist’s baffling backstory, imprinted with more hidden messages than a Renaissance painting. Who needs to play identity bingo when the art’s screaming so loudly?
Production, writing, and composition by Honour
Additional production on SEVEN SEALS by Bridegroom
Poem on 2Yung2Die written and recited by Gwendolyn Brooks
Mastered by Miles Whittaker
PAN presents Baiser Mortel, the original soundtrack to the acclaimed theatrical performance of the same name. Staged at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection over four days last October, the original production – collaboratively realized by composer and director Low Jack, composer and rapper Lala &ce, choreographer Cecilia Bengolea with costumes designed by Marine Serre and Oriana Bekka as creative director and co- director of the performance – merged ballet and urban folklore; sound art and soap opera.
A modern-day danse macabre, Baiser Mortel (trans. “The Kiss of Death”) cast Lala &ce in the title role. Unfolding over thirteen songs, the musical narrative follows Death as she navigates the realm of the living, and the encounters – desire, romance, spiritual awakening, and adventure – which validate the human experience.
“I brought in people who are close to me personally and musically in order to tell a story that speaks to humanity,” Lala &ce says in a video uploaded to Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection’s YouTube channel. Performers Jäde, Rad Cartier, BabySolo33, and Le Diouck joined Lala &ce on stage and in the booth at La Place – Centre Culturel Hip Hop in Paris, where the official soundtrack was recorded.
A sonic representation of the musical’s themes, Baiser Mortel the album – produced by Low Jack and written by Lala &ce with artwork by Pierre Debusschere – moves through the distorted strings of its opening track, “Goûter” and gathers sonic and lyrical intensity on each successive song. “Lune,” the melancholically autotuned midpoint of the album, marks the beginning of the musical’s second act and sets the tone for its tragic resolution. Mechanical sounds mix with sonic influences spanning the Global South throughout the album, honoring both Low Jack and Lala &ce’s musical heritage and influences, while developing a new musical lexicon that defies comparison.
As a theatrical production, Baiser Mortel represents a departure for both artists. A veteran of Parisian subculture, Low Jack’s collaboration with Lala &ce represents a new model of artistic mentorship based not on age but on experience, with each artist leaving a distinct signature on the work.
Baiser Mortel is the soundtrack of a performance commissioned by the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, performed in Paris in October 2021.
Composed and Written by Low Jack and Lala &ce
Vocals by Lala &ce on Goûter, Rose, Bulles, Elle, Gelati, Aidée, Debout, Superficielle, Prisonnière, Top
Vocals by Jäde on Bulles, Debout, and Étoiles
Vocals by Le Diouck on Elle, Gelati and Superficielle
Vocals by BabySolo33 on Rose and Lune
Vocals by Rad Cartier on Rose, Elle and Gelati
Additional production by Félicia Atkinson on Bulles
Additional production by Sam Tiba and Myd on Superficielle
Mixed by Malo Rodolphe / Studio Rod2r
Mastered by William Duvet
Photography by Pierre Debusschere
Artwork by Virgile Flores
Heith’s devout interest in the notion of reality started long before he recorded his latest album. The Italian musician, producer and artist probed the spiritual aspects of sound and its cosmogonic potential already in his previous works released on his own Haunter Records label.
Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable.
Written and recorded across different studios in Milan, Rome and Florence between March 2019, and January 2020, eleven tracks cycle through a world of stylistic references—from psychedelia, psytrance and freak folk tostoner metal, noise and early electronic music—while remaining firmly a part of a singular vision.
Heith crafts a mesmerising and ritualistic subterranean soundscape, aresonant and eclectic collage of distinct sonic elements: from celestial percussion intertwined with jarring, mechanical oscillations to haunting vocals atop murky dubbed-out beats.
Produced and written by Heith
Mixed by Giovanni Ferliga and Daniele Guerrini
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Lettering by Pietro Agostoni
James Hoff’s Inverted Birds and Other Sirens was composed after a visit to Chernobyl in 2018. Both works utilize GPS signals recorded within the zone of exclusion as well as orchestral arrangements for woodwinds, brass, and strings. The first piece was the soundtrack for HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl), an audio-visual work based on a hacked version of Google Street View that PAN released in 2019. The second track is new to this release.
Chernobyl holds a unique cultural and political position and Hoff’s initial visit was prompted by the site’s complicated ideological function for the west and the slippage between its unimaginable horrors and its recreation and fabrication within popular imagination by the entertainment industry. However, when Hoff was in Pripyat and the exclusion zone he found himself more affected by its ghosts than by the site itself. This realization was profound and prompted him to compose works that were emotionally driven rather than overly conceptually.
While there, he recorded GPS signals that surrounded the overgrown landscape, the concrete sarcophagus, and the dark tourist attractions that remain after the catastrophe. Once back in his studio in Brooklyn, he deconstructed these recordings, pulling them apart and layering them with conventional chamber instruments in an effort to create a timbre that reflected the complex emotional layers of the exclusion zone and the people who had lived there. The result is a music that moves, as the artist has characterized it, like “melodies walking through a melting landscape.”
Of course, much has changed since Hoff’s initial visit. The work is now being released in a radically different political context as the horrors of a real-time war are waged around it. Despite this, Hoff feels that the emotional underpinnings of the recordings resonate with our times, or at least his conception of it.
Inverted Birds and Other Sirens is available on all streaming platforms.
Produced and written by James Hoff
Master by Josh Bonati
Marina Herlop is often described as a pianist, a lingering remnant of her classical training. But what strikes the listener on Herlop’s breakout track miu is the intricate trickery of her voice, tracing rhythmical clusters around the subtlest of musical beds, in a technique inspired by Carnatic music of Southern India.
miu, the opening track of Herlop’s new studio album Pripyat, was among the first songs that the young Catalan artist made on a computer, after two albums – 2016’s Nanook and 2018’s Babasha – that brought spectral elegance to the sound of piano and voice. This spirit of adventure continues into Pripyat, Herlop’s first full album produced on a computer, and her most intensely emotional work to date.
Listening to Pripyat you can feel the emotional toil and creative endeavour that went into the record. Fans of Nanook and Babasha will recognise the combination of melancholic piano and elegant vocal lines that is found on Pripyat tracks like abans abans. But Pripyat has a far fuller, almost chaotic sound when compared to Herlop’s previous work, with the addition of electronic drums, electric bass lines and a wealth of sublime production effects.
Added to this production expertise are songs of incredible grace and poise. Kaddisch is a spectral torch song rendered in emotional 3D by Herlop’s gorgeous voice; ubuntu has a feeling of deep longing and lingering sorrow; and shaolin mantis is like a pop song refracted through disorienting production effects and percussive vocal cut ups. Pripyat is the perfect combination of computer production trickery and intimate emotional release.
Songs composed, produced and performed by Marina Herlop.
Mix: James Ginzburg
Mastering: Joker
Mix and mastering of ‘miu (choir version)’: Borja Ruiz
Ukulele and ending synth in ‘shaolin mantis’: Adri González
Electric guitar in ‘lyssof’: Òscar Garrobé
Electric bass in ‘ubuntu’ and ‘miu’: Òscar Garrobé
DJ Spanish Fly — Oh Word Mixtape Vol 1 (PAN 130) CS
DJ Spanish Fly known as the Godfather of Memphis Rap new cassette release titled ‘Oh Word Mixtape Vol 1’ shares 4 new songs on side A, and an original mix on Side B “…dubbed from old vintage cassettes that had to be baked in the oven before playing”. Out now in a limited edition.
This the first collaborative effort between PAN and London based designer Kiko Kostadinov, in a series of music focused projects across different mediums.
“It’s difficult to imagine what Memphis rap music would sound like without the influence of DJ Spanish Fly. Serving as a house DJ at M-Town Clubs No Name and Expo in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Fly spearheaded a generational transition from the disco era towards a slower, more aggressive sound driven by 808 thuds and gangsta themes. His taste – and his own warped bedroomish raps, tacked onto the beginning of his deep catalogue of mixtapes – helped to outline a loose mould of bass heavy menace that later day Memphis acts like Triple 6 Mafia, Playa Fly, DJ Zirk and Tommy Wright III would turn into a city-defining underground hustle. The sound spread quickly from there, to trunks around the country by way of hand-to-hand dubs and embedded itself deeply into the DNA of contemporary Southern rap.” — Noz
Memphis rap, also known as Memphis hip hop or Memphis horrorcore, is a regional subgenre of hip hop music that originated in Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1990s. It has been characterized by its often low budget, repetitive production and its occasional lo-fi sound that utilizes the Roland TR-808 drum machine and minimal synth melodies. The genre commonly features double time flows and samples ranging from soul and funk to horror film scores and classical music, as well as hooks from songs by related rappers in the same genre, although DIY production without sampling is common as well. Memphis artists released recordings on independent labels. The dominance of New York and Los Angeles’s hip hop scenes forced southern artists to form an underground style and sound to compete with the other regions. Artists used a grassroots approach through word-of-mouth in the club scene and mixtapes to promote their music. DJ Spanish Fly is commonly cited as one of the pioneers of the genre, being the bridge between 1980s electro-funk and the heavier gangster rap of the following decade.
Written, produced, and arranged by A. Kimbrough.
Mastered by L & K Nix.
Design by NMR.
Pan Daijing’s exhibition-performance Tissues premiered in the Tanks at the Tate Modern in autumn 2019. A five-part immersion in performance, sound, movement, space, and most of all emotion in its most distilled and conflicted states, Tissues engaged with the conventions of opera and tragedy to present a searing representation of the embattled human psyche in space and time. While the ambitious multi-sensory artwork made use of the range of Daijing’s artistic capabilities, music, particularly the voice, was at its formal and emotional core. The vinyl and digital release of Tissues on PAN serves as a record of that work, in the form of an hour-long, studio-recorded audio excerpt: an invaluable archival document from Daijing’s practice.
Tissues is both a solitary work and a formal study in relation. Composed, directed, designed, written, and performed by Daijing (alongside a cast of twelve dancers and opera singers), the work—its libretto written in a mixture of old and modern Chinese—lingers inside a single human perspective. Daijing conjures states that are by turns delicate and severe, the tension between opposing modes animating the work as it unfolds. And yet, for all its interiority, Tissues foregrounds an intimate relationship with its audience through details like its engulfing visual landscape and its rattling, confrontational narrative arcs. Daijing uses the opera form as a prism through which to question the boundaries of music itself: perhaps, she proposes, music is much more than simply what is heard. It is in the relationship between voice and electronics that this limit is most clearly breached. Across the four parts gathered in this documentation, a counter-tenor, a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and the artist herself voice a mixture of stunning laments and cries over an instrumental landscape, built out from industrial texture. Meant to be heard in a single listen, rather than track by track, the work unfolds through tender hollows and agitated peaks. At its crescendo, the operatic vocals melt away and the synthesizers themselves seem to howl with grief.
Daijing uncovers an essential, sometimes painful, music in all that surrounds us, inviting something like catharsis but also a greater understanding of the thing she and her cast conjure and draw close. A tissue, after all, is both a disposable object one uses to wipe away a tear, and the building block of our fleshy human forms. Daijing reaches and excavates the roiling core of what it is to be alive and full of feeling.
Music from Tissues, an opera of five acts at Tate Modern, London on Oct 2nd, 4th and 5th, 2019
Composed, written, produced and directed by Pan Daijing.
Performed by Anna Davidson, soprano ; Marie Gailey, mezzo soprano, Steve Katona, countertenor and Pan Daijing, additional vocals.
The recording is mixed by James Ginzburg, Jan Urbiks and Pan Daijing, mastered by Rashad Becker.
All artworks by Pan Daijing, design by NMR.
Fourth installment of PAN’s split 12” series, featuring Toronto-based producer E-Saggila (Northern Electronics, Hospital Productions) and Helsinki’s experimentalist and Changeless label founder Exploited Body.
Limited to 300 copies, hand stamped, no repress.
The EP is mastered by Beau Thomas
‘SEX’ is the latest record from acclaimed contemporary artists Anne Imhof, Eliza Douglas and composer Billy Bultheel. It was composed during the development of Imhof’s art exhibition of the same name, previously exhibited at Tate Modern, London, The Art Institute of Chicago and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.
Music is core to Imhof’s work. It functions not only as a soundtrack to perform to, but rather that music itself, and the act of performing music, becomes a work of visual merit by its very nature. Imhof’s performance work, in collaboration with Douglas, is often described as visually being a futuristic, nihilist take on pop culture citing metal and grunge aesthetics while making connections to thematics of classical painting. The concert itself becomes a visual language in Imhof’s performative work which sits evenly placed with her painting and sculpture.
Imhof, Douglas and Bultheel adapted the songs from how they appeared in the exhibition ‘SEX’, with the result being a compelling record that can act as an imaginative accompaniment to the ‘SEX’ performances, as well as stand alone as a progressive collection of contemporary compositions.
‘SEX’ references punk, industrial and grunge, while boldly juxtaposing these forms with music of the classical and baroque period. ‘SEX’s compositions combine classical formals and orchestration with vocals that are rooted in subcultural traditions, thus beautifully overdrawing and overwriting these classical forms with the composer’s own. Harpsichord and oboe are combined with distorted electric guitar, or exuberant string ensembles with heavy industrial drums.
The amalgamation of genres contained in the album was also integral to the choreography of the ‘SEX’ performance, where waltzes and tangos were contrasted with stage diving, slam dancing and moshpits. What resulted was a surreal ballroom, loaded with desire and aggression. In the same vein, the record fearlessly shapeshifts, blending genres and styles to evoke an impressive array of moods. The voices and instruments crush like operatic electric waves throughout wide rages, laughing, shouting, coming close and being far. Oscillating between fragility and flamboyance, Douglas and Imhof’s versatile voices reinvent themselves from one song to the next, while singing songs of love and hate.
The final song on ‘SEX’ ends with a lyric from the band LOW, “All you Pretty People, you’re all gonna die”. This ambiguous moment, a prophecy sung in Douglas’ vibrating baritone voice, rattles the listener despite the mundane truth of the statement. This complexity is reflected in the album itself, allowing for an unusual multiplicity of emotions and interpretations with impressive depth and dynamism.
The record’s release coincides with the final performance of ‘SEX’ at Castello di Rivoli in Turin in September 2021 and the opening of Imhof’s Carte Blanche exhibition ‘Nature Mortes’ currently on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris through October 2021.
The album is mixed & engineered by Ville Haimala and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring design by ZAK Group and photography by Nadine Fraczkowski.
A collective effort from a vital scene in Kampala, KIKOMMANDO takes its name from Ugandan street food of flat bread and beans. As a ‘food of soldiers’ offering maximum energy for minimum funds, the eponymous mixtape, video series and book project is an equally nourishing and ambitious proposition. It all began in the East African summer of 2018, during a two-month residency at the Nyege Nyege label and collective’s villa, in collaboration with their sublabel Hakuna Kulala. Producer and PAN artist Simone Trabucchi (aka STILL) opened the door to his temporary studio in the city and a crucial cross-cultural collaboration was born.
“The intention was to record as much as possible,” Trabucchi says about KIKOMMANDO’s musical showcase of eight Kampala-based artists, coming from the spectrum of musical influences, crossing trap, drill, cut ups, kuduro, electro, smooth jams—the list goes on. In creating a sonic space to support the expression of its featured singers, poets and emcees, the mixtape ties countless styles and flows into a single snapshot of a particular part of the Kampala music scene, at a particular point in time. The invective of rapper and street legend Blaq Bandana’s “Nkwaata” is laid over a spare and brooding ambient. Kampala Unit trumpet player and first-time singer, Florence, rolls a thick melodic texture through the organic clicks, knocks and atmospherics of “Bae Tasanze”. Jahcity’s unique lyricism combines a personal take on traditional music and soulful-reggae with a jerky, wobbly collection of drops and donks.
Meanwhile, Ecko Bazz applies his grimey vocals and rhythmic, introspective words to lead single ‘Ntabala (Rolex Riddim) at a particularly pertinent moment of self-reflection. “I was trying to listen to the voice inside myself and wanted to achieve a higher level of understanding of things, life,” he says about the themes that he felt inspired to explore with Trabucchi at the recording desk. The accompanying video, shot on a rooftop in the Kampala neighborhood of Ggaba, is one of a series of slick and high-definition films complementing each one of the KIKOMMANDO tracks. These also include contributions from Ugandan emcee and key Hakuna Kulala member Biga Yut, don dada of the GabaGaza gang Swordman Kitala (with Omutaba on percussion) and South Sudanese poet and singer Winnie Lado.
Also accompanying a ‘visual mixtape’ of moving images for each song on KIKOMMANDO is a recording diary of sorts, where Trabucchi compiles a vibrant collection of pictures, colours and textures reflecting the its heterogeneous sonic palette into a book. Together this multifaceted, interdisciplinary project showcases, what Lamin Fofana’s liner notes describe as, “amazing originality, complexity”, while “embracing dissonance”.
Trabucchi’s personal take on a kind of ‘digital dancehall’ defined the sound of his ground-breaking rumination on Italy’s colonial history on debut STILL album, I, in 2017. KIKOMMANDO is a different proposition entirely, where he finds new ways to complement the personality and skills of its contributors sprung from a constant stream of visitors arriving at the Nyege Nyege Villa’s makeshift studio. “It was a dialogue,” stresses Trabucchi, who has always preferred collaboration as a means to escape branded and stereotypical identities, while creating something new. “I created the musical platform to make the singers confident, and challenged them at the same time. Working together accelerates ideas and reveals that nothing is your invention alone. That’s why KIKOMMANDO is a mixtape to me, and not an album.”
The mixtape is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by NMR. Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11 & 12 mixed by Ville Haimala. Tracks 5, 6 & 8 mixed by Lorenzo Dal Ri.
Digital mixtape & Paperback:
160 pages
17 x 24.
Includes a set of stickers & mixtape download code.
Design by NMR
Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Oracles; Curses; Gods & Creatures; Places Doors to Hell / Ghost Cities; Paradoxes; Sound Phenomena; Reality—function like a secret dossier inflected with flights of fantasy, speaking to systems of faith and language and its corruptions.
Divining inspiration from meditation, oracles, curses, hexagrams, Cantonese traditions, and superstitions, Liturgy interweaves textual and visual collage to create a multi-layered tonality. Reflected here is the multidisciplinary artist’s interest in the web between fiction, memory, rituals, and incantation, as well as her approach to sound.
Flora Yin-Wong is a London–born, Chinese-Malaysian writer, producer, and DJ who has released material on the labels Modern Love and PAN. Her sonic work uses traditional instruments, software processing, and text-based storytelling, and has been performed at venues including ISSUE Project Room (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Volksbühne Theater (Berlin), and Berghain (Berlin).
120 pages
10.9 x 18 cm
Paperback
Edition of 2200
Co-Published with Primary Information
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Bill Kouligas
Designers: NMR
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky
What if a song was not a culmination but a singe, an imprint, or a crater left in the wake of creative process? On her new record “Jade”, Pan Daijing composes at a different scale than that we’ve come to know. Since the release of her groundbreaking LP “Lack” in 2017, Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances at institutions including the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Developed for full casts of opera singers and dancers, and reaching for an all-encompassing durational experience of intensity for both performer and audience, the development of these works was for Daijing as emotionally disarming as it was thrilling. In order to continue accessing her own limits, Daijing had to develop a place of sanctuary within her own practice.
Its nine tracks written and recorded over the last three years, “Jade” is the sound of solitary release and refuge, of creative self-sustenance. Written without the imperatives of direct address to performers or audience, “Jade” speaks inward, while inviting a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials familiar from her previous work: namely, ascetic electronic textures that rumble and pierce, and voice bent in irreverent directions. In place of catharsis, however, her arrangements here linger in tension, extending curiosity towards the delicate void that nourishes extremes. They toy with the minor capacities of song: repetition, chant, observations that conclude without resolving.
“Jade” comes from a vulnerable place, tender as in an undressed wound caught in the midst of healing over. Vocals, mostly Daijing’s own, arrive as wordless sequences of notes soaring alongside a drone, or plain laughter, or in a few places spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In the process of piecing together these fragments, the listener is confronted with the tender parts of her own. “Solitude is like an immense lake you’re swimming through,” says Daijing of these songs. “Sometimes you dip your head in and sometimes you lift it above. On album centerpiece “Let,” she speaks to us over the sound of rippling water, returning between anxious scenes to a refrain: “I take my bath in the ocean.” We are not just consuming Daijing’s story; we are being invited to join her in the water.
The album is mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Pan Daijing, cinematography by Dzhovani & design by NMR.
Ziúr’s music has always been difficult to classify. A longtime fixture in Berlin’s nightlife, the musician, producer and DJ has cut through decades of threads to arrive on a sound that accurately represents her journey. She’s sung, played guitar and drums and reduced club music to a burning cinder; with “Antifate”, her third album under the Ziúr moniker, she approaches electronic music without any preciousness or reverence to genre.
2019’s acclaimed “ATØ” re-introduced songs to her canon, contorting her vocals over an undulating electronic backdrop. On “Antifate”, she takes this idea further, pushing abstracted pop forms into mists of digital euphoria and extracting unexpected instrumental flourishes from collapsing clouds of distorted rhythm. Electronic instrumentation is melted into acoustic sounds and vice-versa, creating a breathing organic universe that’s entirely Ziúr’s.
“Antifate” is an abstract reference to the mythical land of Cockaigne, a utopia where wine flows freely and houses are made of cake, that provided escapist fantasy for medieval peasants. As the space between our private worlds widens, this fantasy becomes alluring once more – a place where we feel free, with the people who allow us that freedom. With this in mind, Ziúr crafts a soundtrack that’s fantastical and magical, hinged on the idea of closeness and connection at a time when distance is mandatory.
Ghostly voices echo wordlessly over clattering beats and dubwise bass on opener ‘Alive, Unless?’, while the album’s title track sings a more epic fanfare, with a chorus of voices echoing into glittering synthesizer pearls and volcanic kicks. “Antifate” is almost even theatrical at times, something never more evident than on the Talk Talk-esque ‘Fringe Casual’ with its dreamy piano and plucked bass and on closing track ‘The Carry’, where flute is introduced into Ziúr’s rapidly expanding narrative.
It’s tempting to say that this is the album Ziúr has been destined to make, but “Antifate” rejects this concept. Rather, this is the album that Ziúr needed to make now, surrounded by the people that have been able to offer her the place to do it. In mapping out her mythical paradise, Ziúr has produced an album that is deeply tender and inescapably human. It’s an album about freedom, and she has never sounded so free.
The album is mixed by James Ginzburg & mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Stefan Fähler.
Conceived at the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula in Apulia, Patrick Belaga’s Blutt makes music for the unruly imagination. The title is an old German word for ‘naked’, ‘bare’, but it can also mean ‘blood’ when spelt blut. Take away another letter and it makes ‘butt’. None of these definitions and adaptations were what prompted the classically-trained composer and cellist to name his second album with a word simulating the sound of a punctured artery. That came later.
Blutt’s nine woozy compositions are inspired by a contemplative road trip with a friend, and the mysterious muffled music heard from an unidentified source. It was a combination of jazz and classical music that haunted Belaga’s wanderings through the Byzantine town Gallipoli, and soon infected his dreams of long-gone civilizations. This record is its outcome, where organic instrumentals and electronic production merge into a sound that’s both contemporary and ancient. Samples of mewing incantations and tape hiss sway atop the waltzing thud of piano chords on “Sigh”. Composite layers of Belaga’s cello play in downcast harmony on “Rust”. There’s a wistful sense for the romantic, in the eerie rhythm of a piece like “Momentum”. The quarter tones of an Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk scale probe a profound melancholy via Kai Knight’s violin. Its notes are haunted by a field recording of running water on “Unsoft”, echoes of panpipes and a Jew’s harp on opener “Lilt”.
As a consummate composer and performer known for his work with artists Wu Tsang, boychild, Josh Johnson and Asma Maroof, Belaga’s Blutt is itself marked by flawless collaborations. Vocalist and instrumentalist Jazmin Romero sings and composes the surreal melodies of “Grey Eye”. Multidisciplinary dance artist and producer Riley Watts contributes to the muted, motorik movement of “The Tunnel is a Tower”. Together, the record plays as a stunning soundtrack to the strangeness of sleeping, and the heartbreaking transience of time. Like an intense dream half-remembered, the emotions persist after waking but for the sharp machinations just outside of the mind’s reach.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Giovanni Forlino and design by Bill Kouligas & NMR.
In 2020, Eartheater released her latest album, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, via PAN.
Eartheater is now sharing a fully reworked version of the album, Phoenix: La Petite Mort Édition, out February 26, 2021 on PAN. Originally conceived as a “sleep” mix for CRACK Magazine, Eartheater re-sculpted her entire album Phoenix into a seamless ambient edit.
“This is Phoenix crushing, undressing, and compressing like carbon particles under the weight of boulders folded into silky soil, and decomposing. She is folding over and over and over and over like the rolls of young gummy stone. This is one REM cycle. I suggest listening to Phoenix: La Petite Mort Édition while asleep after climax. You are wet ash smudged across a pillow case.” – Eartheater
All music and lyrics written and arranged by Eartheater
Produced by Eartheater
Guitar performed by Eartheater
Piano performed by Eartheater
Harp performed by Marilu Donovan
Violin performed by Adam Markiewicz
Chamber arrangements performed by the Ensemble de Cámara CSMA:
Cello – Laura Sorribas
Violin I – Belén Pérez
Violin II – Celia Álvarez
Flute I – María del Barrio
Flute II – Ana Navarro
Engineered by Eartheater, Santiago Latorre and Kiri Stensby
Mixed by Kiri Stensby
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Recorded in Zaragoza, Spain and Ridgewood, New York
Art Direction by Eartheater and Daniel Sannwald
Photography by Daniel Sannwald
Island of the Hungry Ghosts is a hybrid documentary that moves between the natural, human and spiritual worlds. Located off the coast of Indonesia, the Australian territory of Christmas Island is inhabited by migratory crabs travelling in their millions from the jungle towards the ocean, in a movement that has been provoked by the full moon for hundreds of thousands of years. Poh Lin Lee is a trauma therapist who lives with her family in this seemingly idyllic paradise. Every day, she talks with the asylum seekers held indefinitely in a high-security detention centre hidden in the island’s core, attempting to support them in a situation that is as unbearable as its outcome is uncertain. As Poh Lin and her family explore the island’s beautiful yet threatening landscape, the local islanders carry out their “hungry ghost” rituals for the spirits of those who died on the island without a burial. They make offerings to appease the lost souls who are said to be wandering the jungles at night looking for home.
This album presents the original score Aaron Cupples created for the film. Rich in texture and harmonics, the music is characterised by the bespoke instruments and recording techniques employed in its creation. The soundtrack also features sound recordist Leo Dolgan’s vivid field recordings. All captured on Christmas Island, the four pieces recall insect choruses, strange and ominous bird calls, erupting blowholes, fire, ocean, and Buddhist prayers for the dead.
“Drawing on discussions with director Gabrielle Brady, I began to perceive the island itself as the protagonist, with its own ancient rhythms and cycles set against the transitory human stories it endures. It was my intention to give voice to the island through the score. Imagining what this might sound like, emanating from deep within the landscape, I settled on a handmade long-string instrument. This single 13-foot long wire was tuned, bowed, and electromagnetically oscillated to create slowly evolving textures and deep layers of resonance.
From this foundation, the score introduces rhythm inspired by traditional Chinese festival drumming and chanting of Buddhist nuns recorded on Christmas Island by sound recordist Leo Dolgan. Working closely with him, the score is intentionally kept dark in timbre to allow a merging with the intricate nature recordings, which often play simultaneously with the score.
As the film’s narrative unfolds, harmonic movement and finally melody emerge, bringing a theme to the human stories. Their life rhythms and cycles interwoven with those of the island.” – Aaron Cupples
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring design by N MRE 08. Field recordings by Leo Dolgan.
Kamixlo has experienced a lot of loss in the last two-and-a-half years. His long-awaited debut LP, Cicatriz, is named after the Spanish word for “scar”, taking its intense and energetic tone from the tough times in the Brixton-based producer’s life. An extremely personal album that follows 11 songs with titles like “Sick”, “Poison” and “Destruction”, it pitches soft and hard sonics against each other to create an urgent and exciting tension as the track listing hurtles through its own emotional rollercoaster. It runs from the lurching drone and monstrously distorted vocal samples of opener “The Coldest Hello (Live From The Russian Spiral)” to the bright and melodic kosmiche-reggaeton closer of “Azucar” (‘sugar’), produced with Swedish cloud rap producer woesum.
Only just past his mid-20s, Kamixlo has been making a name for himself with his dembow and bass-influenced dance deconstructions, releasing three EPs since 2015, as well as running the recently defunct Bala Club party and label, named after Japanese pro wrestling group Bullet Club. The night was an inclusive operation that established its own unique style of cross-genre post club music for the margins, while allowing Kamixlo the space to develop his sound—one that was imbued with its own pop immediacy, as well as smatterings of emo, electro and hardcore.
British-Chilean Kamixlo’s Cicatriz is rife with surprising references. These include the thumping industrial of “The Burning Hammer Bop”—taking its title from one of the most dangerous professional wrestling moves ever invented—and the growling sub bass of “DKD Lethal”—named after DJ Lethal of famous nu metal band Limp Bizkit. Meanwhile, long-time collaborator, producer and Endless party founder Felix Lee appears on the scrambled rhythm and cut-up sampling of “Demonic Y”. As the saying goes, there’s no pleasure without pain, no resurrection without destruction, and Cicatriz is all these things at once.
The album is mastered by Beau Thomas, featuring artwork & graphic design by Daniel Swan.
Composed, produced, and arranged by Eartheater alone, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin draws a path back to the primordial lava lake from which she first emerged, as it also testifies to the reincarnating resurrections the project has undergone over its first full decade of existence. While the album renews her focus on guitar performance and legible structure, Eartheater balances the unabashed prettiness of acoustic harmonic songs with the dissonant gestural embroidery of oblique instrumentals. Having fallen back in love with the idioms that first captivated her, she worked to crack open the techniques that had fossilized inside of her, while still seeking to apply the electro-alchemical knowledge she picked up along her journey. The result of a laborious revival in fire, Phoenix recontextualizes Eartheater’s combinatorial approach to production within her most confident abstractions, adjacent to some of her most direct songs to date.
Eartheater composed and workshopped most of Phoenix over a ten-week artist residency (FUGA) in Zaragoza, Spain, housed in a sprawling, cubic glass facility that looked out over wildflower-flecked mountains. Following an intensive period of recording and touring, the residency provided her with an unprecedented period of solitude in the small Spanish town. Her newfound sense of isolation ultimately became liberating, leading her to sidestep the crutches and steady grids inherent to electronic music, and to conceive pieces rooted in her guitar and her desire to perform with other players live. Eartheater’s voice glows brighter than ever at the center of Phoenix’s arrangements — her familiar operatic highs are grounded by newly expanded velvety lows, leaping lucidly up and down octaves. Her intricate guitar work flits across baroque fingerpicked passages and latches into cyclical figures that meet her voice in lush harmonic progressions. From her own guitar parts, to the orchestral string arrangements she wrote for the Spanish conservatory group Ensemble de Camara, to the harp and violin lines performed by her close friends and collaborators Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of LEYA, Eartheater’s applications of acoustic instruments bring an extraordinary emotional emphasis to her compositions. Phoenix prepares for a future where electronic sound — or even electricity itself — isn’t guaranteed, but where her music could still come to life with a group of hands dexterously winding across instruments against the light of the fire.
Eartheater drew inspiration for Phoenix from geological imagery, whose turbulence and potential for genesis mirror the trajectory of her own life and relationships. The album’s instrumental pieces directly reference these moments of upheaval, colliding audio of volcano and lightning storms with resplendent string and vocal arrangements. “Volcano” looks out over the album from its peak at the center, its tectonic plates colliding in towering melodies and layers of vocal harmonies, as piano accents crest and cascade down the mountainside. When Eartheater sings, “I’m still building mountains underground,” she is trying to reconcile the pinnacles of her ambition with the comforts of a simple existence buried beneath the surface. “Diamond in the Bedrock” finds her admiring the gemstone forming under intense pressure inside her, but rejecting the romantic promise that the diamond signifies, choosing instead to escape a relationship that has come to stifle her.
With the album’s subtitle, Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, Eartheater imagines being tempered to a state of perfect equilibrium, suspended between melting and freezing, where fire could streak across her body and appear as a crystalline blush. This image captures the tension at the heart of the Eartheater project, as she decides how best to distill her passion and render it cool to the touch; to find beauty in simple pleasure, while keeping one eye fixed on the peaks that loom in the horizon.
All music and lyrics written and arranged by Eartheater
Produced by Eartheater
Guitar performed by Eartheater
Piano performed by Eartheater
Harp performed by Marilu Donovan
Violin on “Metallic Taste of Patience” performed by Adam Markiewicz
Chamber arrangements performed by the Ensemble de Cámara CSMA:
Cello – Laura Sorribas
Violin I – Belén Pérez
Violin II – Celia Álvarez
Flute I – María del Barrio
Flute II – Ana Navarro
Engineered by Eartheater, Santiago Latorre, and Kiri Stensby
Mixed by Kiri Stensby
Mastered by Heba Kadry
Recorded in Zaragoza Spain and Ridgewood New York
Art Direction by Eartheater and Daniel Sannwald
Photography by Daniel Sannwald
Special Thanks to FUGA and Outlands
For anyone who can remember, Arca’s &&&&& was a moment. Its 25-minute stretch of coiling, contorted grime and glitch; dub and hip hop dropped with the buzz of an impending co-production credit on Kanye West’s Yeezus in 2013. It included cuts of sound and beats that were too weird for that pop project, while becoming a piece of experimental art that what would come to define what is by now broadly known as a ‘post-club’ sound. It’s music that is as visceral as it is experimental; made as much for the mind, as it is for the body.
Released with no warning seven years ago, &&&&& became a bridge between Alejandra Ghersi’s time partying and collaborating with her queer peers, while still living in New York to the next stage of her career releasing on Mute in London. She’d go from making beats for rapper Mykki Blanco and fashion label Hood By Air, posting lurching bass reworkings of pop hits on YouTube, and producing her first fluid mixtapes with DIS Magazine, to finishing off this seminal mixtape on the synths in Daniel Miller’s studio.
After dropping three impressive EPs the year before, &&&&& marked a transition. Continuations and extrapolations of material from Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 appeared in the mangled RnB sampling of “Century” and Arca’s signature vocal layering in the pitched flow of “Waste”. Along with the fluttering, muted heartbeat of “Obelisk”, and the lumbering piano chords of “Mother”, fourteen sonic sketches were elegantly woven together into a single, downloadable whole.
As Alejandra’s course turned toward moving to Europe from the United States, &&&&& became a remarkable challenge to the form of the mixtape, which was a relatively new trend taking hold of the online-oriented underground at the turn of the 2010s. But where many, if not most mixtapes where treated simply as a showcase of individual tracks presaging a more ‘official’ release to come, &&&&& was a complete piece in its own right. “I wanted to make something that was my best work,” Alejandra says about a record that has stood the test of time, “I listen to it very fondly today.”
Now, with the lifespan of the Arca project nearing a decade, Alejandra has entered a new era of ‘non-binary pop’ with her fourth album, KiCk i, out on XL Recordings. It’s more important than ever to look back while forging ahead, and &&&&&’s ground-breaking hybrid dance music is a good place to start:
“A sense of possibility, a sense of the unknown; punk attitude, respect for classical music and formality; cyberpunk, anime, sexual tension; trauma, innocence, fear of death; kink, lots of weed, and wanting to connect with people, but not on the terms of a status quo. That kind of sums up &&&&& for me.”
The release is mastered by Enyang Urbiks, with artwork by Jesse Kanda.
Berlin-based duo Amnesia Scanner have announced the impending release of their sophomore LP, Tearless, a sonic reflection of how it feels to experience Earth at a time when collapse is emerging as the prevailing narrative. As Amnesia Scanner founders, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala watch their icy home country of Finland thaw- the staggering scale of political recalibration and the worldwide climate crisis blows open old norms. “There’s a looming sense of radical change,” they noted pre-COVID, connecting the period of making the album to a fin de siecle horror and curiosity regarding what new world is being ushered in. Tearless has been referred to as “a breakup album with the planet”, to which Amnesia Scanner responds, on the LP’s closing track: “You will be fine, if we can help you lose your mind.” Amnesia Scanner are previewing the album in the form of a video for their accidental quarantine anthem “AS Going,” a clip featuring a cascade of images of spiraling humans.
Tearless marks a turning point in the duo’s trajectory, one begun in 2014 with the AS Live [][][][][] mixtape, followed by audio play Angels Rig Hook, two EP’s for Young Turks, and their 2018 debut album, Another Life (PAN). For Amnesia Scanner in 2020, the walls of the nightclubs, galleries, and institutions fall away and are replaced by full-scale theatrical productions complete with jumbotron stages, animatronics, and a surrealist costumed cast (literally so in the XL version of the album’s live show, Anesthesia Scammer). Likewise, the musical scope of the album is expansive, with guest vocalists — the Peruvian artist Lalita and the Brazillian DJ/producer LYZZA — descending into a vast uncanny valley of sound. With the crossfader on Tearless sitting closer to pop than abstraction, so too does the audience for this record widen in scope. Opener “AS Enter” sets a sombre tone until the fucking riffs of the second track (the titular, Lalita-helmed “AS Tearless”) make clear there’s plenty of roaring to come. A feature from metalcore band Code Orange on “AS Flat” follows, along with “AS Trouble” (feat. Oracle, the third, machinic ghost-member of Amnesia Scanner) and together they hit as black-metal-gaze dirges. Closing Tearless is the sadboy grunge of “AS U Will Be Fine” with a clear statement of intent: doom, despair, insanity, absurdity, it’s all natural, all cathartic, and all OK.
For the art direction of this release, Amnesia Scanner collaborators PWR scavenged the pop cultural unconscious, as if ventilating memory dissociated by trauma. The gatefold vinyl reveals a four-panel comic, full of iconic pre-millennial motifs, which arrive cut up and reassembled collage-style: fitting visuals for an album that channels Deftones as much as reggaeton, menace as much as the drop-outness of grunge. Refuse like the ‘90s and party like the ‘20s—if that seems senseless, you are doing it right.
The album is mastered by Enyang Urbiks, featuring visual direction from PWR Studio.
This album follows intergenerational trauma, fugitives of Christian violence in a twilight called Puruma, returning to Mama Cocha, the sea that theorists call Nowhere.
Dedicated to the life of Paul Sousa, who while incarcerated, worked years as an inmate firefighter across the Sierra Nevada of California. Also dedicated to the work of Sage LaPena and Dr. Gretel Mendizabal Nolte. (Includes misreadings of Jimenez, Saenz, Claudel, & Wright).
Not one, not world, not body, not God, not salvation, not zero; only a ceaseless approaching toward, with, and as the great mystery, Great Condor, by Grace, Tatamama. Jallalla.
ORCORARA 2010 was commissioned and released in 2018 by Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH for the first floor at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 ‘The Sound of Screens Imploding’.
The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox.
All proceeds go to the American Indian Movement West / AIM SoCal chapters.
Hong Kong born, UK-based producer Soda Plains (production for Chynna, Scintii, Ian Isiah) and the Kenyan, Nyege Nyege-affiliated artist Slikback bring their distinct sounds to the third instalment of PAN’s club-focused “Split” series.
Limited to 300 copies, hand stamped, no repress.
The EP is mastered by Jeremy Cox
‘RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer’ is a steeply adventurous, highly structured and rewarding electro-acoustic collaboration between pioneering British/Russian inventor and engineer Peter Zinovieff and preeminent cellist Lucy Railton.’
The collaboration is notably issued as Peter Zinovieff’s first album and also becomes the follow-up to Lucy Railton’s acclaimed solo debut ‘Paradise 94’. It finds Zinovieff, co-founder of London’s influential EMS Synthesizer company and owner of the world’s first home computer, using custom computer software to create and orchestrate a “soft” version of Railton’s vast instrumental vocabulary, modelled from a large series of cello improvisations inspired by objects such as an Egyptian figure, pots, and old computer boards, as well as tales of pre-revolution Russia from his Grandfather. Railton added solo cello to the manipulated results, before these quasi-improvisations were recombined into the work’s filigree matrix during final co-production with members of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Initially conceived as a live project and performed at festivals including Norberg, Atonal, Rewire and FAQ between 2016-2017, the final 33 minute recording thrillingly sustains the duelling, visceral tension and unpredictability of their live shows in its brute scrapes across 17 variated sections. But, with the ability to unstitch/embroider sounds outside the strictures of real-time live performance, the resulting structure is confoundingly labyrinthine, assiduously swerving the prosaic and sentimental in pursuit of explorative, emotively in/human expressions of complexity and unpredictability in a manner that has always been key to the ideals of experimental music.
In effect, the pair speak as one through an electro acoustic prism in a symbiotic, syncretic process of transformation. Railton is here the catalyst for some of Zinovieff’s definitive work in a career spanning 60 years. Her performances provide a radical variable – a sort of spirit in the machine – which is diffused, inverted and scattered by Zinovieff using various software applications, so that Railton plays around herself like a fractal mise-en-abyme, cutting her warped image to ribbons in a double refraction of the “real”, the instrumental, and its virtual allegory. In this (un)common, metaphoric language and poly-temporal syntax, they incisively speak to ideas of an uncanny valley of perception between the haptic and the intangible, conducting an absorbing dialogue that transcends and bends the story of avant-garde and electronic music in beguiling, free fashion.
‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythmobsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro- Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.
Recorded over 2017-2019 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.
‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.
With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.
Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.
Beatrice Dillon – electronics, drum programming, synths, percussion, tidal, bass, Kuljit Bhamra – tabla, dholak, darabukka (A1, A4, B1, B6), Verity Susman – alto and soprano saxophone (A2), Laurel Halo – vocal, additional synth (A2), Lucy Railton – cello (A3, A5), Petter Eldh – double bass (B2, B3), Kadialy Kouyaté – kora (B3), Batu – hi-hat (B1), Morgan Buckley – bodhrán (B1), Untold – electric guitar (A2, A3), Jonny Lam – pedal steel guitar (A2), Kenichi Iwasa – wavedrum, clave (A3, B6), James Rand (additional editing).
The album is mixed by James Rand and mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Thomas Ruff, layout by Johannes Schnatmann & Bill Kouligas.
Angel Lust is a collaborative EP between NYC-based artists Eartheater and LEYA. A follow-up to their track, “666,” on LEYA’s 2018 “The Fool,” Angel Lust creeps deeper into their shared vision. LEYA’s shadowy instrumentation of de-tuned harp and layered electric violin is skated by Eartheater’s vacillating, ethereal vocals. All four songs sparkle in-bristled intensity delivering an unmistakable sound from artists pushing the visceral edge of songwriting.
All music written by Eartheater and LEYA.
Harp – Marilu Donovan
Violin – Adam Markiewicz
Voice – Alexandra Drewchin and Adam Markiewicz
PAN affiliate Toxe and CRYSTALLMESS join forces on the second installment of PAN’s club-focused white label split series.
Limited to 300 copies, hand stamped, no repress
The EP is mastered by Jeremy Cox
AS Acá is the first song to surface from a new collaboration between Amnesia Scanner and Peruvian musician and artist Lalita who has both written and performed the song’s Spanish-language vocals.
More music from Amnesia Scanner and Lalita’s collaboration is forthcoming.
AS Acá is Amnesia Scanner’s first release since the critically acclaimed album Another Life released by PAN in September 2018. It marks the beginning of a new cycle of work to be released throughout 2019-2020.
The single is accompanied by artwork and a music video by Amnesia Scanner’s long-time collaborators PWR. The video features a performance by three Lalitas.
The release is mastered by Enyang Urbiks
James Hoff returns to PAN with a new audio/visual project titled HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl), which utilizes a modified version of Google’s Street View to explore Chernobyl and its surrounding environs. The artist (with the aid of coder Reuben Son) has hot-wired Street View so that it is audio reactive, creating a first-person viewing experience completely dictated by music Hoff has created. Originally commissioned by Unsound Festival, Hoff began working on this version of HOBO UFO in 2017, creating over an hour of music that had the hallmarks of his work on BLASTER: noisy, intense, and chaotic. After spending dozens of hours on Street View while composing, Hoff decided to visit the zone of exclusion in 2018 and his experience there prompted him to scrap all the existing material and start fresh with a less conceptual approach that could respond more emotionally to the zone and his experience there. In particular, he focused on Pripyat, which prior to the meltdown, was a grand city and a “triumph of Soviet urban planning.” Hoff sought to reflect this moment as well as that of the valor of the people affected by the accident and the tens of thousands of workers who fought to contain it. The resulting 14-minute work employs woodwinds, brass, double bass, and synthesized GPS signals, which Hoff recorded on site—reflecting a turn away from his earlier conceptualized and deconstructed sound towards composition that is neo-classical and ambient in nature. In it, we hear a melody that is both uplifting and melancholic, punctured by lurking static and Geiger-counter like pulses. All of this drives a visual component that takes the viewer through the empty streets of Pripyat and into its municipal buildings, schools, theaters, and athletic facilities; into the Cherynobyl nuclear facility and its control room; and eventually to the Duga Radar system and the landscape that surrounds it. The narrative unfolds with the music, creating an experience that is unsettling in its unraveling, yet captivating in its particular form of digital voyeurism. What we see is not a city frozen in time, as many have claimed, but rather an ongoing disaster site of social architecture over-run by nature, helped along no doubt by capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using the UFO as a metaphorical vehicle for traversing Google’s Street View, Hoff transforms the quotidian experience of navigating this platform into a cinematic one. By placing the UFO in the zone of exclusion, he provides an alternate take to the stylized, over-ideologized version of Chernobyl that one sees in contemporary culture. In particular, he locates it as a site of ambient, or creeping, capitalism fueled by Cold War nostalgia and advances in corporate media/surveillance technology—in June, Cherynobyl was labeled an official Tourist Attraction by the Ukrainian government, with President Volodomyr Zelensky proclaiming that it should no longer be considered a “negative part of Ukraine’s brand.” Hoff debuted HOBO UFO in London in 2016 and has since performed with it several times as a site-specific audio-visual work. The program runs in real-time as a backdrop to Hoff’s performance, beginning at the venue where the show is held. The music that drives it is constructed from de-pitched GPS signals and the experience gives the audience a glitchy, confused vision of their city; a journey, if you will, demarcated by rapidly changing weather patterns, time, and geography. The live experience both subverts the AV component that most expect from an electronic music performance, as well as the corporate and commercial aspects of the Street View platform, which aside from navigation, people use to sell real estate, play video games, and promote their businesses.
Watch HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl)
“MOI” is the fearless new full length album by artist and musician Steven Warwick. The record signals a more upbeat reprise following the previous, reflective release “Nadir”. “MOI”, the first physical release under his own name ( having previously recorded under the Heatsick monicker), is a journey considering interior worlds and personal architecture, as found in early spiritual narratives. Recorded in Berlin, the FUGA residency space in Zaragoza and and on location in New York, Warwick’s sonic vocabulary is further expanded with intense frenetic rhythms, prismatic melodies and resonant vocals.
Like the dopamine rush of contemporary life, “MOI” is a sonic roller coaster with a scream -if-you-wanna-go-faster urgency ; “Open Fire Hydrant” bursts out like a pressure valve spiralling onto the dancefloor, while Kaleidoscope offers cheeky anecdotes as told on a ride home soundtracked by a garage beat.
MOI is a spectrum both emotionally and musically, embedded with an underlying spirituality wrestling with existential dread, as witnessed in “Over There”, “Salvation”, “Kind of Blue” or the icy digital pulse of “Cold Light of Day”. “Danke” featuring guest vocals from visual artist Josephine Pryde offers a slightly gothic feel, albeit of the architectural variety, while the purgatorial transmissions of “Consolatio”, bring a moment of respite. “Rush” is a sensuous percussive workout before concluding on the rampaging seductive house track “Silhouette”.
“Do you know who I am? Because I don’t!”
The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring cover photography by Ilya Lipkin, and layout by Bill Kouligas and Johannes Schnatmann
Movimiento Para Cambio, is the full-length and debut for PAN from Montreal based duo Pelada. Comprising of vocalist Chris Vargas and producer Tobias Rochman, they have gained international attention through the city’s underground warehouse rave scene.
An urgent, headstrong body of work, the LP uses the music as a mechanism for delivering ideas central to the group’s moral and political ethos. Vargas explores themes of power, identity, surveillance and environmental justice atop Rochman’s raw mix of rave synths, acid basslines, breakbeats and dembow rhythms.
While at times unpredictable, the album is unified in its fast and loose approach. A Mí Me Juzgan Por Ser Mujer (‘I Am Judged Because I’m a Woman’) is an anti-machista anthem, stylistically nodding to NY house. Though Vargas doesn’t identify as a woman themselves, they understand their experience as a woman in an imbalanced patriarchal society that excludes women, femmes and non-binary people. Habla Tu Verdad (‘Speak Your Truth’) emphasizes the need to overcome the stigma around discussing sexual harassment, offering courage and strength to those who may need it. Asegura (‘Secure’) deals with the unprecedented power of Big Data, which monetizes a surveillance based economy through its users’ data and behaviours.
These themes are set to fierce unrelenting bpms, nods to gabber, and samples of a reality show where young men compete in a prison fitness contest. Caderona (‘big hips’), features a hardline perreo-tinged beat that carries Vargas’ vocals with refreshing ferocity. Inspired by a cumbia song, Caderona offers a counterpoint to the male gaze, acting as an opportunity to demand space. Aquí describes the reality of a global corporate domination, where capitalist insatiability meets government inaction as we sit on the precipice of a mass extinction of our own making.
Pelada hope to inspire critical self- reflexivity through engagement, building power, demanding space and action. Or as it is written in their liner notes: ‘ABRE TUS OJOS, LA BESTIA SE ALIMENTA DE LA EXPLOTACIÓN’ which translates to ‘OPEN YOUR EYES, THE BEAST FEEDS ON EXPLOITATION’.
All lyrics written and performed by Chris Vargas.
All music by Tobias Rochman.
Track 8 written and produced in collaboration with Pierre Guerineau.
Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 recorded by Phil Rochefort at the Phi Centre.
Tracks 6, 9, 10 recorded by Tobias Rochman.
Additional mixing on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 by James Benjamin at Breakglass Studios. Additional production by Pierre Guerineau on tracks 2, 3, 4, 5, 7.
Additional mixing, production on all tracks by Tobias Rochman.
Final mixes and Mastering by Jeremey Cox
Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition—staged by Anne Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live event.
Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of power and paradise. The music for Faust was written in a band-like process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to its premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice. From the chaos of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque intricacy, each track a testament to the energy that brought it into being.
Faust is anchored around three pieces—Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen Song—written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner, whose sonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new arrangements that couple the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the studio. Throughout the album and culminating in its closing act—the brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last Song, a pulsing canon of looped and layered voice pierced by black metal screams—the record admits the listener into the inner space of Imhof’s dramatic vision of power, complicity, and vulnerability.
Shifting hypnotically between times and spaces, between cries and calls, between polyphonic antiquity and polyrhythmic complexity, Faust is the record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice. Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began in 2013, and this generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently her performance trilogy Sex (2019).
The album comes with an expansive booklet of photography by Nadine Fraczkowski, another long-standing collaborator of Imhof and a prolific photographer, whose images of the performance and portraits of its cast offer intimate views of the work far beyond documentation.
It was mixed by Nanni Johansson at Hansa Studios and Ville Haimala, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, and designed by Zak Group featuring artwork conceived by Imhof together with Douglas and Fraczkowski. Co-published with German Pavilion 2017 and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York.
Aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness and our planet, nimiia vibié sounds the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and microscopic footage of extremophilic space bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation.
Drawing on nimiia cétiï, Jenna Sutela’s project on machine learning and interspecies communication, the record manifests a more-than-human language. This language is based on the computer’s interpretation of a Martian tongue from the late 1800s, originally channeled by the French medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela, as well as the movement of Bacillus subtilis, an extreme loving bacterium that, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, can survive on Mars. The bacterium is also present in nattō, or fermented soybeans, a probiotic food considered as a secret to long life. Beyond Bacterial-Martian culture, or Martian gut bacteria, the project attempts to express the nonhuman condition of computers that work as our interlocutors and infrastructure.
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living materials. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20.
PAN welcomes back the Lifted ensemble for a second cross-continental adventure off the grid, simply titled Lifted 2.
Lifted’s latest release expands on the expression of improvised fusion that brought about the spectrum of styles explored on their 2015 debut album for PAN. Expansion is a key theme to Lifted 2, primarily in the musicians involved; Lifted is now a core group of Future Times boss Max D, Matt Papich aka Co La, Jeremy Hyman and Motion Graphics. Expansion also relates to musical ideas Lifted explore and the studio techniques executed.
Whereas the way they approached the idea of improvisation on Lifted 1 was framed in jazz terms, the seven-tracks on this second LP step even further into the vivid unknown. Zero boundaries for the exploratory impulse. “On this record we went a lot deeper into our kind of studio technique,” Lifted say. “We tried to cultivate the sound using the studio as a primary tool, almost a member of the group in a way.”
As with the debut Lifted LP, listening to Lifted 2 is an open invitation to experience the worldwide creative framework surrounding these artists. The collaborators for each track, whether present in the studio or online, show what a fluid and freeform exercise Lifted can be.
Max D’s international crew of Future Timers play deft roles throughout Lifted 2. Jordan GCZ and Dawit Eklund both return for ‘Lifting’ alongside 1432r’s Sami, NYC’s Will DiMaggio and Sao Paulo’s Repetentes 2008. Beatrice Dillon and Bass Clef, two highly-decorated artists from the UK underground, make telling contributions which mark the latest in a long line of celebrated creative collaborations for the pair. Further input comes via Aya, vocalist and bassist for crucial Japanese experimentalists OOIOO, and Martin Kasey, a friend of Papich with a background in Baltimore theatre, summoned for Lifted duty to provide some striking saxophone blasts.
How do all these collaborations manifest on Lifted 2? It’s a sort of inverse process full of blind takes with the results more bruised than polished. “The song stays fluid until the end. We pile the ideas really high and then decimate them,” Lifted say. “We delete until the songs are crystallizing; lay a grid of silences to organize the tracks. The breathing spaces become definitive.”
These seven tracks adroitly weave through mood and vibe, demanding heads lock in with an initial blast of whip sharp percussive hits and contemporary no-wave blowouts before letting off steam with soothing ambient synthesis. “Black Pepper” acts as the album centerpiece, an unhinged mangle of SH101 basslines, freeform flute & saxophone and multiple percussive sources brought to order by Papich’s studio dubs. “Rose 31” edges closest to the kind of jazz fusion that inspired the project from the off, Lifted utilising the various classic instruments deployed by the greats of the game. Closer “Near Future” smartly foregrounds Motion Graphics’ stunning piano talents, gradually stripping away all other elements until all that is left are his swirling notes.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Johannes Schnatmann & Bill Kouligas.
Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called ‘Capital Crisis (New City Loop)’ seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme.
Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like ‘Leave Them All Behind’ tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent. Confused
narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It’s one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it’s one of the most recognisably human.
The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like ‘Lizard in Fear’ whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds – five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced world-building. Movement is key.
Chemical Flowers features string parts arranged and recorded by JG Thirlwell (Foetus / Manorexia / Xordox). Additional cello played by Lucinda Chua and saxophone by Karl D’Silva.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Johannes Schnatmann & Bill Kouligas.
Lexachast is an ongoing collaborative work by Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas & Harm van den Dorpel.
Initially birthed as a joint, improvised performance between Amnesia Scanner and Kouligas at the ICA, London in 2015, it was later recreated and extended with visual artist van den Dorpel into a 15-minute online-only audiovisual work – known simply as Lexachast. Since then, it has expanded into a live show that has been performed at Transmediale, CTM Festival, Unsound Krakow & Adelaide, Next and LEV Festival and during Paris Fashion Week in collaboration with the brand Ottolinger. Now to be released on PAN, is a new document of Lexachast in its current, full-grown form.
Whilst broadly inspired by the experience derived from and exposure to algorithmic patterns as generated by visual artist Harm van den Dorpel’s specially-devised program, the work is a sonic reference to the fallouts of avant-EDM and cyberdrone. This in turn is simultaneously mirrored by the perturbing visuals, created by a unique algorithm that sources and blends various filtered imagery from DeviantArt and Flickr in real time – with a bias towards the NSFW, extreme banality, and ornamental melancholia. The results were a perfect fit for the deliberate intention of non-intent, an anti-video of sorts, which ended up as a defining element for the project.
The artwork is created with Harm van den Dorpel’s ever-evolving, image-sourcing algorithm and it is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin.
Written and directed by Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko, Kuro tells the tale of Romi, a Japanese woman living in the suburbs of Paris with her paraplegic lover Milou. Tending to Milou by day and working in a karaoke bar by night, Romi reminisces about a time she and Milou once lived together in Japan with a mysterious ailing man named Mr. Ono. Weaving together personal history, anecdotes and myths, her stories soon turn ominous.
When we first decided to ‘split’ the film into what might be described as two parallel layers — the narrated story and the visual story — we found that it opened up an ‘in-between’ space, a space where what is heard and seen continually wrestle with one another. We envisaged that the true setting of the film would emerge from this friction, as something imagined and projected by the audience. After a few screenings we were struck by how some audience members would refer to scenes or events in the film that, for us, did not take place… We both thought of the music of Kuro as a score to this space in-between.
-Joji Koyama
Composed and recorded during the editing of the film in Berlin, the Kuro OST by Tujiko Noriko (with contributions from Joji Koyama, Sam Britton and Will Worsely), is a crucial and integral part of the film, acting not only as a glue to bind the layers of the film together, but along with the sonic palette of the film’s sound design, evokes it’s claustrophobic atmospheres and moments of haunting beauty.
I tried to think of the pieces in abstract terms, like moods and atmospheres. In a way, the process was quite similar to how I usually make music, in the sense that I have images in my head. Of course in this case there were actual images and a lot of them very close to me, but I didn’t want to get overly conscious about them either—I didn’t want to get stuck by trying to be too specific.
-Tujiko Noriko
The music, which in the film is largely heard in tandem to the narrating voice of Tujiko Noriko (who also stars as Romi), is presented and arranged here as a separate piece in its own right.
Written and produced by Tujiko Noriko. Mixed by Sam Britton and Will Worsley at Coda to Coda, London. The album is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin featuring photography by Joji Koyama and layout by Bill Kouligas and Johannes Schnatmann.
ENTOPIA is the latest offshoot series from PAN seeking to amplify and redefine our ideas of what a soundtrack can be. The series will survey critical works across the spectrum from musical composers on PAN and beyond, commissioned for the worlds of film, art, performance, installation works, theatre, dance and fashion.
Tzusing and PAN mainstay M.E.S.H. join forces for a club-ready split EP, the first white label in a new series.
Limited to 300 copies, hand stamped, no repress.
This EP is mastered by Jeremy Cox
One year after the release of STILL’s debut album ”I” comes a surprise remix pack with contributions by NÍDIA (Principe), Kenyan producer Slikback as well as Nyege Nyege associate Zilla, Low Jack and E-Unity from France, Duppy Gun Productions feat. I Jahbar, Primitive Art’s Jim C. Nedd, Dominican Republic via LA producer Kelman Duran.
The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring artwork by Invernomuto, costume by Jules Goldsmith and photography by Giulio Boem.
Vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her instrument of the voice, and the ways in which it can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, the backbone of Janvin’s projects focus on the physical aspects of sound, and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, organic/synthetic, and minimal/dramatic.
Fake Synthetic Music is Stine Janvin’s latest live performance for voice, echo, lights and spatial distribution. The concept was created to present a full-body physical and ambient experience with the frequency range of her voice. Inspired by past and present producers of architectural electronic music, Janvin presents a new take on ‘deconstructed rave’ by exploring both sonic and optical illusions, otoacoustic emissions and minimal melodic sequences in reference to pop, techno and trance.
The release introduces a recorded version of her ‘fake synthetic material’, and through her ongoing live performances, she continues to work between the music and art scenes, developing further her methodology of imitation and resonance through audio visual concepts.
The tracks on Fake Synthetic Music reflect the concept of sonic illusions and Janvin’s use of the voice as a sound source. “…I wanted to explore how I could vocalise in a way that would combine architectural sound with dance floor sequences.” she says. Each track is based on a different take on these ideas, some being pure studio production, using only her vocal archive of sustained notes, chopped up into innumerable pieces of different lengths, and re-attached. Tracks, such as ‘Like Right Now’ and ‘Like Last Night’ are examples of live material converted to a recorded format, keeping the simplicity of the direct voice signal through a digital delay effect with no post-production processing.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Camille Blake and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
PAN welcomes back Objekt for Cocoon Crush, his first LP since 2014’s Flatland. Over the past four years Objekt has continued to challenge conventions with his club output (the Objekt #4 single release and the Kern Vol. 3 mix CD for Tresor), while maintaining his reputation as a DJ who deploys impeccable technical finesse in crafting elaborate narratives from a diverse and challenging palette of electronic music.
Written between 2014 and 2018 in Berlin and on the road, Cocoon Crush once again sees the producer jettisoning the functional requirements of the dancefloor. Marking a further evolution from the youthful exuberance of Flatland, Cocoon Crush explores a more introspective side, with themes of human interaction resonating throughout the record as it ruminates on a spectrum of complex moods rooted in 4 years of sometimes turbulent personal experience.
Cocoon Crush represents an aesthetic departure from Flatland’s largely synthetic tonality, drawing from organic source material and natural textures to illustrate perplexing and unfamiliar sceneries in photorealistic detail. In Cocoon Crush, Objekt diverges further still from his musical influences to craft the purest manifestation of his own musical personality to date: an intriguing and enigmatic album whose reference points are hard to pin down, in which ghostly synth passages weave through mind-bending, weighty drums, and ASMR-triggering foley collages scrape and sparkle. Through meticulous sculpting, Objekt traces a rich and impressionistic journey through claustrophobia, hope, guilt, anxiety and joy, nested in layers of sonic detail which reward with every listen.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring photography by Kasia Zacharko, and layout by Bill Kouligas.
Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.
Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatised body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centred on first person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.
“To Possess Is To Be In Control” makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while “Red Desert,” named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic “The Size of Our Desires” acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologises a transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring cover art by Torbjørn Rødland.
‘Another Life’ is the debut album from Amnesia Scanner, the Berlin-based music duo, performing arts group, experience design studio and production house, created by Finnish-born Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala.
Founded in 2014, Amnesia Scanner’s approach is informed by a unique perspective on technology and the way it mediates contemporary experience. System vulnerabilities, information overload and sensory excess inform their work, which has found a home in both clubs and galleries.
Building on their mixtape ‘AS Live [][][][][]’ (2014), Amnesia Scanner’s critically acclaimed audio play ‘Angels Rig Hook’ (2015) laced a potpourri of dancefloor tactics with a machinic narrator. Their dual EPs for Young Turks, ‘AS’ and ‘AS Truth’ (2016), distilled this immersive environment into an abrasive collection of cryptorave tools. The most striking detail of ‘Another Life’ is Amnesia Scanner’s use of both human and inhuman voices. The latter is provided by the latest addition to the production unit, a disembodied voice called Oracle, which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner.
Oracle’s vocal performance ranges from exuberant mania to anxious dread and beyond. Coupled with the pop song structures that Amnesia Scanner employs for the first time, the avant-EDM productions of ‘Another Life’ evocatively explore a schizophrenic present marked by narratives of a slow apocalypse or salvation via technology. Indeed, the lullaby of ‘AS Another Life’ swings between trill hope and casual threat, lending a precarious gait to the song’s staggering rhythm. The album’s first single, ‘AS Chaos’, is its most powerfully direct track, with Pan Daijing’s English and Mandarin vocals taking over for Oracle. At its most intense, as in ‘AS Faceless’, Amnesia Scanner’s doombahton overheats into nu-metal-gabba.
Amnesia Scanner has presented work at art institutions such as ICA London, HKW Berlin, and the Serpentine Gallery Marathon in London. They collaborate with PWR Studio for their design and visual direction. The AS live experience is co-created with Stockholm-based Canadian designer Vincent De Belleval. When unplugged from the Amnesia Scanner stream, Haimala works as a composer and producer with a wide range of musical and visual artists, and Kalliala co-directs the think tank Nemesis.
The album is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring photography by Satoshi Fujiwara, and visual direction from PWR Studio.
Swedish producer Toxe’s sharp ascent through club-cursed climes has elicited the highest praise from the start. In just a few years she has linked up with Staycore and Halcyon Veil, presented an A/V project with The Vinyl Factory, and scored KENZO’s FW 2016 prints presentation with close collaborator Mechatok. Her new EP ‘Blinks’ is a fractal bloom of candied melodies and minor laments set in a sweep of frenetic rhythmic scenes.
Developed throughout last year, ‘Blinks’ journals a period of inward flux. And though this is never presented in an overtly self-conscious way on the EP, Toxe binds a sweet juvenilia with a bustling and eager pensive tone to outline her tessellating sense of self just below the surface.
Meditative glimpses of soaring synthetic landscapes are woven across ‘Blinks’ in brief snatches. Awash in horrific and gripping fluorescent hues, these environments are augmented by a comically mischievous patchwork of voices and saccharine rasps that clamour for attention, hinting at Toxe’s impulse to voice a simultaneous and unorganised set of experiences.
The release is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring art by Jasper Spicero.
Eartheater (aka Queens based artist Alexandra Drewchin) distills foley-filled digital production, a three-octave vocal range, and classical composition into works suspended between obsessively detailed sonic tapestries and almost recklessly romantic and gestural electronica. A body of viscerally emotive live performance stands alongside her recorded output, realized by her fearless physical investment and gut-wrenching vocal sincerity.
IRISIRI, Eartheater’s third full-length record, lays out a shifting network of abstract song craft, laced with sudden structural upheavals and collisions of mutated tropes from numerous sonic vocabularies. Modular synth staccato plucks hammer out in arrhythmic spirals over a carefully muzzled grid of pumping kicks – unleashed in unpredictable disruptions. Technoid stabs mingle with crushed black metal. An icy OS reads poetry against a bed of granular synth swells. Drewchin’s sirening whistle-tone vocals drape over relentless harp arpeggios. Eartheater confounds expectations of structure and resolution before deciding to thread in a sugary melody that snaps us back into some conception, however hazy, of pop songwriting. Guest spots on IRISIRI charge Drewchin’s ideas with concordant energies, from the stark imagist poetry of Odwalla1221 on Inhale Baby, to the sheer lacerating force of Moor Mother’s unflinching verse on MMXXX.
Drewchin’s lyrics, strewn with flourishes of wordplay and symbolism, explore themes of her autodidactic experience – playing with the tutelage of the ‘pupil’ within the ‘iris’ mirrored in the palindrome IRISIRI. One motif appears as a song name, C.L.I.T., which Drewchin breaks down into “Curiosity Liberates Infinite Truth.” The acronym stands as a microcosm of the Eartheater project in its holistic combination of idiosyncratic spirituality and cheekiness, presented with an earnest confidence that some could consider confrontational. In spite of this lexicon’s maximal effect, it comes from a very personal place as she states, “curiosity has had to be the currency of my education”. On OS In Vitro, she reminds us that “These tits are just a side-effect,” and “You can’t compute her,” as if to acknowledge the clouding effect of sexuality and technology in the face of a higher self-significance. In the record’s accompanying video piece, Claustra, she slides between “the owning of my loneliness” and “the end of the loaning of my onliness”, encapsulating images of self-purifying isolation and the rejection of artistic exploitation with the flip of two syllables. The transmuting landscape of IRISIRI is riddled with evocative poetry and evidence of Drewchin’s development as an artist since her debut in 2015.
Drewchin performs and collaborates with art duo and close friends FLUCT. In February 2017, she starred in Raul de Nieves and Colin Self’s opera The Fool at the Kitchen. In April 2017, featured on two tracks from Show Me The Body’s Corpus I mixtape alongside Denzel Curry and Moor Mother. She’s currently composing work for the contemporary chamber orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, that will debut in May 2018. Her new live set sees her accompanied by the concert harpist Marilu Donivan.
The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Elise Gallant.
Contributing production on ‘Inkling’ and ‘Not Worried’ by Ghostdrank
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Last year has been tough in many ways. Several people close to me faced (and fought) death.
In response to that, it strengthened my awareness of impermanence and made me reconsider what I found important in my own life. I made a roll of packaging tape with an encrypted poem (Peter Amdam’s last message) that was used to wrap every package that PAN distributed the last months. The message was distributed worldwide without much notice.
Decrypted Poem:
ONCE, death was much in demand,
you hid in me.
(from Lightduress / Paul Celan)
Further departing from both the cinematic abstraction of ‘Piteous Gate’ and the hectic drums of ‘Damaged Merc’, Berlin producer M.E.S.H’s new full-length, ‘Hesaitix’, is marked by its hyper-ornamented rhythms and a sense of pensive, moonlit spaces.
The atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in strange territories. Shifting from the meditative to states of manic unease, Hesaitix is an unnerving injection into both the social space of club music and the interior space of digital audio fantasy.
How did I become so stupid?
A sound can be both formless and over-rendered, like a boneless but fleshy hand from a life drawing class.
What agent could set these broken sounds in motion?
A laugh behind an evil curtain. A drummer that’s cool and grotesque, a detuned siren. A brushfire under a full moon.
Recorded in Berlin and Umbria, Hesaitix sees Janus resident and PAN staple M.E.S.H. firmly engaged in a kind of sonic worldbuilding, a place where the unconscious and the alien intersect.
Returning with his first album in 13 years, Errorsmith’s ‘Superlative Fatigue’ long-awaited release on PAN arrives as his perhaps most optimistic record yet.
Placing a strong emphasis on spectral exploration, the tracks tell an inherent story and span a musical arc with his recognisable synthesised tones, computerised vocal effects and timbral changes in motion.
In comparison to his previous productions, Errorsmith (Erik Wiegand) sees the release as less abstract, harsh or aggressive: “I would say it is rather accessible and cheerful; at times ridiculously cheerful but still very sincere and emotional.” He suggests. “I find it touching when this little android raises its pitch at the end of ‘Lightspeed’ or the android catching its breath in ‘My Party’ for instance.”
The album title, ‘Superlative Fatigue’ reflects this tension between an over-the-top, hysterical emotion, against more deeply felt expressions or realness.
Besides collaborating with the likes of Mark Fell, to Berghain resident Fiedel as MMM, and Soundstream as Smith N Hack, Wiegand has released a string of seminal dancefloor tracks. Building his own instruments using modular software synthesizers is a large part of his work. Where almost all the sounds in the LP were created with his synth, ‘Razor’, (a synthesizer plug-in he developed for Native instruments, released in 2011) or slightly modified versions of it.
Premiered at Unsound Festival last year, this new material he has developed since has finally taken form in this epic full-length.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by James Hoff and layout by Bill Kouligas.
Shapeshifting through his vernacular worlds of sound and imagery, Milan artist and musician STILL (Simone Trabucchi)’s practice is defined by a unique, nomadic approach. Previously known as Dracula Lewis, a project developing his personal take on ‘folk’ music, he has accumulated a number of releases on various seminal labels, alongside running Hundebiss Records.
His new moniker, STILL, follows the unearthing of the histories that connect his hometown of Vernasca to Ethiopia and Jamaica, explored under his visual arts project Invernomuto as an in-depth fieldwork lead to ‘Negus’: a series of sculptures, installations, a book, and a long-feature experimental documentary, screened at Unsound 2016.
‘Negus’ revolves around a cleansing counter-ritual performed by Lee “Scratch” Perry in the Vernasca square where 80 years earlier, an effigy of Haile Selassie I was burned. The documentary then follows a trajectory connecting Italy’s overlooked colonial past seen through personal history to a reverberation of symbols in Ethiopia and Jamaica. Within STILL, he connects these research threads, evolving their sonic and linguistic aspects further, where ‘computerized riddims’ sustain a shared gospel channelled through a polyphony of voices.
Six Milan-based African-Italian vocalists and singers voice a complex, overarching past that is both communal and individual. Using the medium of language, the record is a multi-layered with meanings contemplating the historical weight of words. Both the city and the studio became workshops for the shaping of their complex network.
The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Invernomuto & Bill Kouligas.
Culminating as the purgative ‘finale’ to her improvisational live performances, Pan Daijing’s debut album also offers an insight to her future works. The process was intuitive and raw, born out of her previous explorations. Over the past 2 years, she has composed, recorded and edited different concerts and field recordings across Europe, China, and Canada, forming the basis of the record. Arriving as her first full-length album, ‘Lack 惊蛰’ was crafted from this long, painstaking mental and physical practice.
Daijing’s pieces are created around a very intense and intimate mental catharsis, often expressed through a close physical interaction with strangers in her live sets which seek to engage them in a highly personal way. “When I was finalising this album, they didn’t feel like tracks to me anymore, but more like a psychoanalytical process,” she says. “I saw myself being this absurd, mad person ‘acting’ out the sounds… It’s rather physical, and became like a mindgame. All things came out naturally as part of me.”
The narrative of the album presents a perspective of the world as ‘the theatre of our minds’ – where Daijing sees the record as an ‘opera piece’ in its storytelling and drama.
The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Ralf Marsault, and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer and artist, Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar.
The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performance – sounding at once like an electronic instrument, a drum computer, a guitar, a harpsichord, even at times as a full orchestra. Hiller has long collaborated and performed with minimalist Arnold Dreyblatt, and musician/instrument builder Ellen Fullman amongst others, and first built primitive acoustic mechanical instruments, gradually developing a more complex, digitally-controlled system. “My guitar gives me the possibility to discover almost every aspect of the sound produced by the excitation of the string – as if scientifically under a magnifying glass.” He says. “I can control such parameters as the speed and time, length of the attack, the intensity, the pitch (allowing the use of different tuning systems), and the location of each string in space by the use of 6 speakers.”
Early on, Hiller realized that the harmonically complex sound of strings are impossible to reproduce digitally, and therefore became interested in the development of mechanical instruments, visiting European collections of Pianolas, Orchestrions in Belgium and Holland. Within his live performances and on this new recording, his music is influenced by the insistent rhythms from Minimalism, Krautrock and Techno, and their shared focus on transcendence through a propulsive, full-spectrum sound.
Informed by early American folk music and its descendants (John Fahey et al), his new album Stack Music presents a selection of recordings over the years from residencies and live performances, such as ’Opening’, an early live performance of the digital guitar system recorded in New York and composed at Phill Niblock’s Intermedia Foundation Loft, whilst ’Rondo’ consists of recordings of the guitar played by a motor with shoelace exciters, horns, and piano harp. In ‘Largo’, he utilises the software Melodyne to generate midi notes from a original guitar system recording.
The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.
mono no aware (もののあわれ) is the first compilation to be released on PAN, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists.
Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called ’ambient’, to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term.
“Mono no aware”, ‘the pathos of things’, also translates as “an empathy toward things”, or “a sensitivity to ephemera”. A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life’s transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Molly Matalon and design by Bill Kouligas. A limited version of 100 copies will be released as a special art edition in collaboration with Mount Analog for the LA Art Book Fair 2017, going on general release via PAN both physically/digitally on 17th March.
‘THROAT’ is the new album by composer/producer Aaron David Ross (ADR). Arriving as the New York artist’s second release on PAN, ‘THROAT’ is made entirely from vocal sounds. It could only be crafted in the ultra-present; an age where the poetry of songwriting is flattened into catchy hooks. As words are sliced into sounds, ideas are reduced to sibilant syllables that still contain a range of emotional power, but deliver it in subversively different ways.
‘THROAT’ exploits these ways, borrowing vocal fragments from everywhere to collage a choral congregation of singing servers; pinging one another to create open-source equal-opportunity electronic pop music. Reichian polyrhythmic EDM drops into Bieber-esque beatboxing. Hypothetical K-pop stars conduct holographic choirs in altruistic ritual. Virtual summer festival DJs transcode into pure phonemes; anthropomorphizing formant-shifted vacuums of communication. When you drop the cargo of making sense, you can go so much faster.
As a classically trained musician inspired equally by pop and contemporary art & technology practices, ADR’s work has distinguished itself through its formal deliriousness and playful tenor. Besides ongoing collaborations with an international community of vocalists, producers, artists and fashion designers, Ross releases solo recordings, composes music for film, TV and advertising, and maintains a practice of live performance and sound installation.
The release is mastered by Jeremy Cox featuring artwork by Alex Gvojic.
The Berlin-based producer and artist Steven Warwick presents a unique audio-visual ‘mixtape’ on PAN, compiled of a series of darkly lyrical and sonic musings, as well as personal snapshots, written stories and videos taken across trips whilst residing in LA and Berlin. Arriving as his first musical release under his own name, Warwick (aka Heatsick)’s latest venture also utilises a new sonic repertoire allowing for a new route for his music, “It’s a reset in a way, creatively and emotionally”.
Titled ‘Nadir’, the release reflects on a somewhat sardonic, and at times melancholic and unsettling mood. Recorded in both Los Angeles, New York and Berlin, it is a soundtrack and document of time spent in and around those environments both urban and rural.
The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Rashad Becker’s new full length album, ‘Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II’ is a newly developed continuation and exploration of work since his highly-acclaimed first volume.
Incorporating more instrumental-sounding components, the record moves through both fluid and dissonant sounds which take on different structural and sculptural challenges through carefully-layered compositions. Following ‘Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I’, the new album expands in various elements, distorted and warped, focusing in on the tension and energy of synthesized sounds that appear to exist hauntingly physical.
Known for his unrivalled attention to sonic detail across his work, Becker’s unique techniques and expressive manipulations of sound are laid bare in an exhilarating new form, stylistically distinctive and uncompromising.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.
The enigmatic Tennessee-raised, Turin-based Yves Tumor presents a poignant new album, recorded between Miami, Leipzig, Los Angeles and Berlin over the past three years.
Evolved from a diverse and prolific creative history under an expansive plethora of covert aliases via various forward-thinking labels, ‘Yves Tumor’ emerges as his most personal and matured incarnation to date.
With involvement across various artistic outlets expanding to fashion such as a visceral live performance for LA’s Hood By Air earlier this year, the global artist has built a distinctly bold personal aesthetic both musically and visually as a performer.
Painstakingly written from pieces developed upon since 2013, the new record, titled ‘Serpent Music’, was initially composed as a soul record – based around delicate and emotive songwriting in various forms. It was a highly difficult project to undertake on both a creative and personal level, weaving thematic links through paranoia, social anxiety, and missing loved ones. “The songs come from a much more emotional and very vulnerable place… They’re very close to me and I’ve been cautious of how I would eventually present them to the world.” he explains.
The album spans sonically diverse and richly-textured pieces, formed from live, organic instruments, samples and various field recordings. Dreamlike lo-fi psychedelia sits alongside broken electronic experimentations, ambient compositions between abrasive noise offer insight into a haunting otherworld. From melodic choral vocals and soaring synths, to screeching guitar riffs, dramatic spoken word samples and live drumming, ‘Serpent Music’ evidently moves through a strange and intriguing personal journey.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Daniel Sannwald.
eAR is a location-based augmented reality sound and text piece in the form of first-person fiction. It presents a series of dramatized field recordings from our digitally mediated environment together with commentary inspired by the Let’s Play format. eAR allows the listeners to reimagine their immediate surroundings via augmented hearing, and to take the scenic route through sound.
Sound by Ville Haimala, text by Jenna Sutela, design and programming by Harm van den Dorpel.
Finnish music producer and artist Ville Haimala currently lives and works in Berlin. With his background in architecture and electronic club music, he is now focusing on more experimental studio work. This work, produced under different monikers and often blurring the boundaries between music and contemporary art, has been presented and performed at various internationally acclaimed institutions including MoMA PS1 and Volksbühne in Berlin and events such as Unsound, Ultima and CTM Festivals.
Berlin-based Finnish artist Jenna Sutela’s installations, text and sound performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments – most recently, the relationship between the body and its technologically-mediated environment. Her work has been presented, among other places, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and South London Gallery and writing published by, for example, Fiktion, Harvard Design Magazine and Sternberg Press.
view eAR: ear.fi
‘Motion’ is the new EP release on PAN’s sublabel CODES from Belgian producer SKY H1.
Having previously collaborated with producers and collectives such as Bala Club and Creamcake, Brussels-based SKY H1 has since performed at the likes of multi-media 3HD Festival and Amsterdam’s Sonic Acts to high acclaim for her distinctly forward-thinking sound.
Drawing from a background of widely-varying musical tastes from Ambient to Grime, her own work is an amalgamation of emotive compositions of orchestral Elysian synths, often displaced with sparse percussive elements.
The new record, ‘Motion’ is a highly personal endeavour, constructed from the results of a turbulent time where she describes it as ‘a flash of her emotional state over the last few months’. “It signifies leaving behind a period in my life and stepping into something new.” She explains.
Moving through bleak soundscapes layering vaporous choral synths, ethereal vocals and glassy, lucid tones crafted in complex structures, the record bears moments of melancholy as well as joy on tracks like ‘Tell Me’ and ‘I Think I Am’. “It’s about going through the different stages of grief and accepting the positive effects the loss of someone can have on you.” She says. “It’s about experiencing an intensely emotional time with a lot of ups and downs, and I think this is transparent in the way the tracks are ordered.”
The experimental Italian composer returns to PAN with a new LP, titled ‘Clonic Earth’. His ongoing output for the label has long-presented his electroacoustic sound compositions where since the mid-’00s, he has utilized analogue live sampling and real-time editing of field and studio recordings by means of manipulation of 1/4 inch tape.
Asides from being a founding member of the Italian avant-rock group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, he has worked extensively with various musicians, choreographers and multimedia artists including Thomas Ankersmit, Antoine Chessex, Werner Dafeldecker, Anthony Pateras, and Robert Piotrowicz.
His studio compositions, documented on few records, often explore themes of the internal – represented both by the psychological and the physical – and of the occult, which with the use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within.
The new record, ‘Clonic Earth’ is a perturbing, compelling and eventually mind-expanding work, marked by compositional strategies of exploded narratives, psychological insight and oracular literary references, where questions about the boundaries of spatial perception in the decoding processes of acousmatic music are overturned into existential, metaphysical questions.
Tricoli’s allegorical and philosophical universe takes the form of an unhinged mind’s landscape swarming with estranged sound objects, and sometimes reminiscent, in the complexity of details and surrealistic effects, of Hieronymus Bosch’s larger paintings. Compared to his previous works, the content of ‘Clonic Earth’ explores more synthesized and heavily processed sounds, especially vocals, often appearing in the form of a religious, electrified chanting.
The record is described by its author as a natural consequence of the internal collapse depicted in his previous record, ‘Miseri Lares’: “As if all the debris left inside my loudspeakers have been ignited to expand into the ether, to find a justification at the principle of Chaos, or Cosmos alike.”
This movement is expressed by references to the theme of fire as original matter in the Chaldean Oracles which, together with the later work of Philip K. Dick, are the main sources for the vocal/text elements of the composition. Fire, intended as the convulsive principle of existence, but also an ontologically terminal element – hence a representation of the infinite decay and a mean of communication with the otherworldly – serves the author a metaphor for the acousmatic listening experience itself: a borderline perception of sounds eternally fixed in their spasmodic disappearance, which could eventually drag us into a different layer of reality, drastically changing, subverting, or expanding the space in which they are diffused. A ritual, somehow, which may link the listener and the perceptive space that he inhabits with whatever lies beyond the loudspeakers, beyond the vibrating surface of the world.
The 2xLP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Beatrice Dillon and N1L remixes of HELM’s Olympic Mess for the dancefloor. Hand-stamped limited edition of 300 copies.
Emerging as an entirely different beast to the experimental producer’s previous works ’Piteous Gate’ and ‘Scythians’ for the label, the new record sees a departure from the off-grid, theatrical densities of his long player, instead taking an unabashedly club-oriented approach. While conserving various stylistic tropes heard across previous releases and in his sets at Janus club nights, the new record is distinct in its direction and tone—a play on some of the cerebral aspirations rippling through club culture.
The EP is led by ‘Damaged Merc’, which frantically intersplices broken arpeggiated notes with brash vocal snippets and triplicated snare blasts. ‘Follow & Mute’ is full of gratifyingly frenzied percussion on urgent attack, while ‘Kritikal Thirst’ pieces together fragmented moments of industrial and latin sounds. ‘Victim Lord’ is stumbling drums and hydraulic distortion behind tinted SUV windows, its heavy-paced rhythm dirge grinding to a murky halt to finish it all off.
The young Liverpool-based producer LING releases his debut EP on PAN & Visionist’s CODES label.
‘Attachment’ is a data-centric collection built from field and browser recordings, loosely exploring the themes
of habitual mental tendencies. “The idea that taking an instinctual interpretation of information potentially warps and distorts reality. If data triggers internal responses, it risks following a predetermined path that can stray from reality.”
The heavily processed sample material re-explores recordings collected from over the last 4 years. Reconstructed within sound collages across the record, they strive to find an independent voice but at times back away in order to grapple something else. Merging explorative futurist sounds, Ling’s glacial and at times glitchy constructions feature fleeting snippets of differing vocals or malfunctioning machines, whilst dipping into tentative, broken melodies. Loose references to UK culture and contemporary sounds are restructured, offering moments of something teasingly familiar before withdrawing into abstraction.
The EP was made in summer 2015 in Liverpool, mixed by Chris Pawlusek, mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy, and features artwork by PWR Studio & Bill Kouligas with additional art by James Whipple.
Deceptionista is a new audio-visual work by composer and artist Aaron David Ross (ADR). Realized as both an album and a fully immersive virtual ecosystem, Deceptionista unpacks and further mystifies the spiralling inconsistenciesthat permeate our globally networked lifestyles.
Released through PAN via digital and a limited edition SD card as well as a series of live performances, Deceptionista combines the relentless unknowability of the real-time internet with ADR’s distinct compositional approach. As a classically trained musician with a propensity towards contemporary art & technology practices, ADR’s work has distinguished itself through its formal deliriousness and playful tenor. Deceptionista seeks to accelerate detailed, high-definition visions of public intimacies into a form of 21st century psychedelia; which embraces the cognitive derangement of the senses that defines the habits of today’s internet browsing constituency.
Utilizing the free online tool Vpeeker, which provides a feed of the most recently uploaded Vine clip at any given moment, ADR has discovered an untapped world of internet detritus, ranging from the clean and corporately produced, to a blissfully ignorant preteen with an iPod Touch. Inside Vpeeker, the internet voyeur is no longer carefully curating their content consumption from safely behind a screen… they are deep inside your pocket. Vpeeker lets you view the world through the smartphone camera of a random, time-zone determined user some- where on the planet, only to disengage and reattach to another 6 seconds later. Sourcing both audio and video from this tool, ADR has accessed a real-time feed of the entire connected population, totally unfiltered and united only by timestamps.
The project’s visual representation takes the form of a playable video game-like environment where users can explore various geometries and particle systems, all skinned entirely in video texture maps sourced from Vpeeker. The dynamic color palettes and ephemeral energy that emerges from the onslaught of these randomly selected clips creates strings of incongruous alternations; where real conflates with virtual, irony conflates with true belief, and human emotion and spirituality conflate with the limitations of broadband upload speeds. Deceptionista seeks to dramatize these dichotomies by traversing the deep chasms between them; often looking forward, backward and in between the cracks to find the most profound and poetic juxtapositions in the most unlikely places.
Aaron David Ross is a composer, producer and artist preoccupied with music’s affective potentiality. In addition to his work as one half of the critically acclaimed Gatekeeper duo, Aaron releases solo recordings, composes bespoke music for film, TV and advertising, hosts an array of ongoing collaborations and maintains a practice of live perfor- mance and sound installation.
With a background in classical composition and a propensity towards contemporary art & technology practices, Aaron’s work dances precariously on both sides of the chasm between irony and true belief, often conflating the two completely. He explores the failures or impartial successes of cultural ephemera through detailed, high-definition visions of optimistic resignation.
Kamixlo lands on PAN and Visionist’s newly relaunched imprint Codes with his debut EP, ‘Demonico.’ A Brixton- based producer with Chilean blood, Kamixlo is a key member of South London’s roaming Endless party, now being singled out as an incubator for up-and-coming talent. Following an appearance on collaborator Blaze Kidd’s ‘Exclusivo’ mixtape, ‘Demonico’ is a stark, raw, and militant opening statement.
From the satanic drones of opener “Otra Noche,” Kamixlo’s club-forward approach combines Latin influences of reggaeton and bachata with punishing crunch and spat percussion. Brash, anthemic, and primed for club play, this year has brought “Paleta” into heavy rotation in London’s underground scene. “Splxcity” sweeps distortion’s outer bounds, and in “Lariat,” hints of melody provide brief cover from a hailstorm of ballistic vocals before the whole track dissolves into oil.
Having just delivered his inaugural LP ‘Safe’ on PAN, Visionist re-grids “Lariat” with signature cut-and-paste techniques and glacial synths.
The EP is mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy, and features artwork by PWR Studio & Bill Kouligas with additional art by Daniel Swan.
Having recently partnered with Bill Kouligas to relaunch his Lost Codes imprint as Codes, Visionist takes a defining step forward with the release of his PAN debut album, ‘Safe’.
The South London artist born Louis Carnell broke during a period of experimentation in UK music when, with the disintegration of the dubstep scene, emerging producers began looking to juke and Chicago house for inspiration. A pair of EPs on Lit City Trax (and a collaboration with Fatima Al Qadiri) in 2013 and ’14 introduced Visionist’s minimalist take on fractured R&B and liquid grime, establishing him as a leading voice in new-wave UK soundsystem culture.
On ‘Safe’, Visionist sculpts and extends that signature into new terrain and makes his most personal statement yet. Distilling his influences down to a sparse palette of manipulated folk, pop and R&B acapellas, icy synths, and metallic drum samples, he plays off ever-present anxiety and his own battle not to let it overwhelm him. “Comfort, protection, salvation—this is what we search for,” he says. “We are taught that a life of no worries is better for us, and therefore we try to create one that is ‘Safe.'”
But while safe as a musical concept implies conformity, ‘Safe’ as an artistic statement is anything but. At a moment when the UK scene, once known for innovation, has settled into rehashing old tropes, Visionist continues to propel his sound into more experimental territory. The album traces the arc of an anxiety attack, from its onset through to recovery. Following the stately discord of brief opener “You Stayed,” the grimy, ballistic assault of “Victim” sends its targets diving into mirrored corners. “I’ve Said” is a brutal, almost militant advance, its sound cutting in and out as though transmitted via shortwave radio. “Too Careful To Care” trades in skittering paranoia, with the soporific “Sleep Luxury” closing out affairs.
Since 2012, Visionist has toured extensively throughout Europe, Unites States and Asia, appearing at industry standard clubs and festivals like Fabric, Berghain, Sonar and Unsound and as well as various underground venues. He has scored music for Kenzo, Liam Hodges and Roxanne Farahmand in the world of fashion, and remixed Kelis, Ghost Poet and Glasser. In 2014, he supported FKA Twigs on her first-ever UK tour.
The LP was mastered by Jeremy Cox and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, and pressed on 140g LP and CD. It features photography & artwork by Daniel Sannwald and layout by Bill Kouligas.
Following his acclaimed Scythians EP on PAN last year, M.E.S.H. returns to the label with his debut album, the opulent and dystopian Piteous Gate.
Alongside fellow members of Berlin’s Janus collective, recently behind nights at Berghain and Corsica Studios, M.E.S.H. is known for his futurist approach to club dynamics and production. On Piteous Gate, tightly gridded and sculpted sound juts up against loose-wristed improvisation, automated processes, and collage. Standard club synco- pation is twisted by sliding tempos, cut and paste time signatures, and indeterminate pacing. Its sound design and compositions are ornate, even courtly, with neo-feudal moods offset by the recurrence of hydraulic hiss and flanger.
A synthetic fuel injector revs opener ‘Piteous Gate’ to life. Drawing from action-scifi film trailers and the sound design of festival trance, its hardcore synthlines shatter into ‘Optimate’—stately, spatial, and whiplash-luxurious, with meandering cybernetic drumming. ‘Thorium’ sends a slow-motion camera through a melting test reactor: all burnt VSTs and synthetic theorbo and loose drums. ‘The Black Pill’ smears high-end renaissance sample libraries through arcs of static. In ‘Epithet,’ temple sewer atmospheres are ruptured by ‘Scythians’-style cut-up drums. ‘Jester’s Visage’ indulges a minute-long baroque guitar improv, and territorial youths air their beef in ‘Kritikal & X.’ Closing out the album, ‘Methy Imbiß’ is a machinic rhythm track, and ‘Azov Seepage’ mingles birdlike granular noises with rusted steel clanging.
The LP was recorded in Berlin in winter 2015, mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, and pressed on 140g LP and CD.
Limited pressing / white label featuring two unreleased tracks.
‘B23 Steelhouse’ is a rework of ‘Steelhouse Chaconne’, itself an unreleased Lee Gamble dub from 2013. On the flip is ‘Motor System’, a track taken from last year’s Koch album and extended.
Both tracks have been remastered and sound much louder and dynamic than the album cuts – primed for the DJs.
PAN presents the first collaborative single from electronic composers Mark Fell and Erik Wiegand, the latter appearing under his Errorsmith alias for the first time in eleven years.
Both Fell and Wiegand have contributed hugely to the development of alternative dance forms and are no strangers to collaboration; Fell alongside DJ Sprinkles and as one half of SND, Wiegand as Smith N Hack together with Soundstream and more frequently accompanying Fiedel as MMM. The seminal Errorsmith albums from the turn of the millennium are often referenced beside Fell’s early works as pivotal moments in the evolution of club music, owing as much to dub and the hardcore continuum as they do to minimalism and the avant garde. This project is a relished opportunity to combine their creative approaches.
Made in June 2014 at Wiegand’s Berlin studio, the Protogravity EP explores different working methods and musical structures, yet results in a cohesive collection of subterranean techno. Engaging with dance music’s rich lineage through an anamorphic lens, the pair yield maximum effect from lucid, idiosyncratic sound, offering up three hypnotic cuts with a playfulness that often underlies their solo work.
The 12” is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
London-based experimentalist Luke Younger (a.k.a HELM) returns to PAN with ‘Olympic Mess’, a record born of destructive practice, competing desires, and troubled optimism.
Where his previous effort, 2014’s ‘The Hollow Organ,’ dealt in dense, distressed sonics, ‘Olympic Mess’ is Younger responding to a period spent engaged with loop-based industrial music, dub techno, and balearic disco. These musical references, all of which can induce hypnotic states and feelings of euphoria, inform ten evocative aural landscapes which unfurl over the course of an hour and act almost as a counterpoint to the turmoil that spawned them.
“It’s about exploring a perverse desire to pull the rug from under yourself, and the struggle to achieve a healthy equilibrium between one’s personal and artistic lives,” Younger says. “Dealing with the problematic consequences of pushing your own limits, forming and dissolving relationships, transient lifestyles, physical and mental exhaustion, excess, and other kinds of personal chaos”.
Crafted using an array of heavily processed samples, found sound and electroacoustics, personal conflict manifests in “I Exist In A Fog” and “Outerzone 2015,” where visceral noise disintegrates into veiled, ambient strata. The disquieting crescendos of “The Evening In Reverse” and “Fluid Cloak” offer no such relief, while the title track and “Don’t Lick The Jacket” are mineral, multilayered abstractions twisting around a brittle pulse.
Following a period of extensive touring throughout the States and Europe, which included 20 dates in support of Danish punk group Iceage, ‘Olympic Mess’ was recorded in London, New York and Berlin by Sean Ragon, Luke Younger and John Hannon.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g 2xLP and CD. It features photography by Kim Thue and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Antwerp-based nonconformist Dennis Tyfus debuts on PAN under his Vom Grill moniker with the ‘Knerpen! (bevel)’ LP. Tyfus’ dealings in unstable media—spanning paintings and illustrations, films, radio transmissions and more—reflect the freeform, sometimes parodic nature of his sonic output, which has been archived on his own Ultra Eczema imprint alongside many outsider, weirdo and noise underground artists.
‘Knerpen! (bevel)’ is a jarring collage of skewed electronics, tape loops and treated vocals. Opening sequence ‘I’ writhes and seizes with electricity. Skull-resonant clangs are sucked and “scrunched” back into themselves, before throbs of condensed static give way to the sound of someone rummaging around inside the bodies of acoustic instruments. On b-side ‘II,’ Tyfus multitracks the vocalizations of opera singer Emilie Fleamountains into an empyrean choir, before winding back the tape into a foaming-at-the-mouth mechanical meltdown.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g LP. It features photography by Dennis Tyfus and layout by Bill Kouligas.
“What arouses the interest of Dennis Tyfus, with his difficult feet, is a clear, artful and wild realism whose extravagance never leaves one indifferent and can be summarised above all as the attempt to have fun in the end, after all”. — Wim van Mulders
Interference is the first joint release from PAN and Visionist’s Lost Codes, which is re-baptized here as PAN sublabel Codes.
Two of Visionist’s key discoveries, Mancunian hybridist Acre and Cambridge’s transplant Filter Dread both cut their teeth on UK soundsystem culture and have appeared on vital outlets like Tectonic and Ramp. The pair’s EP updates 8-bit grime, warehouse rave, and dark bass with hyper-modern sound design and bastard club rhythms. Rather than rely on mimicry, they contort familiar aesthetics, giving rise to the baroque, processional gloom of “Drumz 34” to “Flash Speed”‘s bassbin elasticity and the modem drones of “Trashed” (for the steppers).
The EP is mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy, and features artwork by PWR Studio & Bill Kouligas with additional art by Max Shannon.
PAN is pleased to announce the debut release from Lifted, an ongoing collaborative project initiated by Matt Papich (AKA Co La) and Beautiful Swimmers’ Max D.
Drawing on studio sessions recorded in their respective hometowns of Baltimore and Washington DC, the album sees the pair break free from the constrictions of the grid and exercise their versatility through improvised fusion. Working outside the framework that underlies their solo output, the eight tracks on offer showcase experiments in freeform techno, hyaline electronics, and ambient, with the duo reaching out to Motion Graphics, 1432 R co-founder Dawit Eklund, and Jeremy Hyman for additional synthesis, drumset and percussion.
The album also exhibits solo performances from Gigi Masin and Jordan GCZ (Juju & Jordash), who submitted overdubs from their bases in Venice and Amsterdam.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g LP. It features photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
In 2010, acclaimed German sound experimentalist Florian Hecker and multidisciplinary artist Mark Leckey came together for the first time. Their combined Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera—a mutant configuration of two geneti- cally discrete solo works—was originally presented as part of a two-day performance event at the Tate Modern called Push and Pull, and arrives as PAN’s inaugural offering of 2015. Both artists, as the art historian Alex Kitnick notes in his text accompanying the release, have a demonstrated interest in sound and its material effects; Hecker’s acute, algorithmic computer music is noted for impacting the very molecular infrastructure of its listeners, while Leckey’s work across performance, sculpture, and installation takes up transcendence and the occupation (or animation) of new bodies and modes of being.
In Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, Hecker decomposes, modulates, and re-synthesizes the vocal track from Leckey’s 2010 performance piece “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction” (for which Leckey intoned the inner monologue of a black Samsung fridge) and his own “3 Channel Chronics” installation from that same year, where distinct sounds from three speakers telescoping down from the ceiling were combined and altered by visitors’ movements. The result- ing work—like that three-headed beast of Greek mythology—is a multivalent, tri-part hybrid in which heavily distorted fragments of Leckey’s narrative intersperse Hecker’s synthetic textures and fidgety tonal patterns. On the PAN release itself, channel 1 from Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera corresponds with side A and channel 2 with side B; channel 3 is available as a monophonic mp3 download.
Florian Hecker returns to PAN following his 2011 vinyl issue of Sun Pandämonium. Trained in computational linguistics and fine arts, Hecker’s work deals with specific compositional developments of post-war modernity, electro-acoustic music and psychophysical domains of audition. A fixture of the Editions Mego roster with releases on Rephlex and Presto?!, Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera is included in his recently published artist book Chimerizations, which both documents and extends the concept behind his project for for documenta 13 (2012) and includes texts by the writer and philosopher Reza Negarestani, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, and curator Catherine Wood.
Mark Leckey is a British artist, pop-culture provocational agent, and self-described autodidact working across sculp- ture, sound, film, and performance. His notable video works (collaged from found material) include the 1999 cult short Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Industrial Lights and Magic, for which he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2008. A career retrospective, “Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials,” was recently presented at WIELS in Belgium, and his work is included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Hammer Museum, and Walker Art Center, among others. He has served as Film Studies professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, and is currently Reader in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London. The first comprehensive monograph of his work, On Pleasure Bent, was published in 2014.
Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera is written and produced by Florian Hecker; GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction courtesy of Mark Leckey. The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It includes liner notes by art historian Alex Kitnick, and artwork by Florian Hecker & Bill Kouligas.
PAN digs into the archives of WordSound label founder Skiz Fernando Jr. (a.k.a. Spectre) to reissue his 1998 experimental hip-hop mixtape, Ruff Kutz, originally released as an extremely limited edition cassette. A 90 minute, mixtape featuring hits and remixes, previ- ously unreleased tracks, and dub-plate specials featuring Sensational, Mr Dead, Bill Las- well, Jungle Brothers, Kevin Martin and many more.
The early ’90s witnessed a spike in mutant strains of future dub. In Bristol, trip-hop and jungle were on the rise; in Manhattan it was noise and breakbeat. But in Brooklyn, hip-hop experimentation was gaining momentum, led by Skiz’s independent label WordSound. With support from Bill Laswell, WordSound charted the experimental edge of hip-hop and dub, taking equal inspiration from Bronx Rap and Jamaican Roots music as they pioneered a lo-fi sound both primal and futuristic. By the turn of the decade, the combination of dub, ambient, and hip hop aesthetics had been baptized by The Wire magazine as Illbient—a short-lived classification now being exhumed in the form of Spectre’s obscure mixtape, Ruff Kutz.
Ruff Kutz revisits the years between 1994-98, a formative era for WordSound and experimen- tal beats in general. The original cassette, according to Skiz, was comprised of alternative mixes, obscure beats, and unreleased tracks and edits. Unsigned material from Dubadelic (supergroup of Bill Laswell, Ted Parsons, DXT, and others), rapper Sensational, Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin’s Techno Animal project, Professor Shehab as his lyrical alter-ego Psycho Priest, Djini Brown, Mr. Dead of the Metabolics, Doc Israel, Scotty Hard, and Slotek all feature throughout this vinyl reissue, fully mastered for the first time from the original DAT tapes in their original sequence.
The album is mastered and cut at D&M, pressed on 140g 2xLP.
Live Knots, Oren Ambarchi’s first release for PAN, presents two live realizations of ‘Knots’, the epic centrepiece of his Audience of One (Touch, 2012) release. Built on the interplay between Ambarchi’s swirling, guitar harmonics and the metronomic pulse and shifting accents of Joe Talia’s DeJohnette-esque drumming, the piece merges the organic push and pull of free improvisation with an overarching compositional framework.
‘Tokyo Knots’ presents the complete recording of a duo performance of the piece by Ambarchi and Talia recorded at Tokyo’s legendary SuperDeluxe in March 2013. The performance builds gently on the foundation of Talia’s insistent ride cymbal and the shifting tonal bed of Ambarchi’s rich overtone-drenched guitar, eventually going into a free rock free fall of buzzsaw harmonics and crashing drums. From within the maelstrom, Talia picks up a pulsing motorik rhythm that leads the piece back to where it began, with the addition of the shuddering, elastic tones of a hand-played spring reverb unit.
‘Krakow Knots’, recorded live at Unsound Festival in Krakow in 2013, works with the same basic structure but stretches it out to nearly twice the length and adds strings played by the Sinfonietta Cracovia, led by Eyvind Kang on viola. The strings expand the piece’s textural range with lush chordal blocks, uneasy dissonances and occasional Ligeti-esque swarms of micro-activity, the swelling string tones intensifying the ecstatic nature of the piece as it moves towards its mid-point crescendo in which Ambarchi unleashes a particularly malicious continuum of stuttering harmonic fuzz. The strings then enter with a series of swelling chords, announcing the piece’s final movement, and reaffirming the uniqueness of the tonal and compositional language that Ambarchi has patiently developed over the last two decades, in which the influence of post-minimal composers such as Alvin Curran, Gavin Bryars and David Behrman can be felt alongside the inspiration of raw free jazz, harsh noise and academic psychoacoustics. The final moments of the performance pit Talia and Crys Cole’s amplified objects and spring reverb textures against a field of gently gliding string glissandi before the audience erupts in much-deserved applause.
– Francis Plagne
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g 2xLP and CD. It features photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
M.E.S.H.’s track Scythians from the eponymous EP gets reworked by Jersey Club producer DJ J Heat, Janus resident Lotic, Grime auteur Logos and club upstart Grovestreet. The four remixes push deeper into the rhythmic spaces suggested by the original’s broken percussion and cavernous acoustics. Available as a digital release only.
Helena Hauff and F#X finally unleash their second record as Black Sites. Returning to PAN following 2013’s Prototype EP, the two hardware fetishists and resident DJs at Hamburg’s iconic Golden Pudel club turn out two cauterizing, long-form acid/techno cuts on Unit 2669 EP.
A-side “Unit 2669” is built around a narcotic, modulated 303 line and protean drones, while on the flip, “Москва” is an exercise in tape manipulation and visceral mechanics; with its circuitry corroded by parasites, the track’s lurching pulse of paranoid sirens is eviscerated by surges of tearing feedback.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g vinyl with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Peerless rhythmist and sonic explorer Afrikan Sciences makes his PAN debut with ‘Circuitous,’ the third full-length, freeform offering from the New York-based artist.
At the nexus of Afrofuturism, science fiction, transcendental free jazz, and future hip hop, this new work from Eric Douglas Porter casts itself and its creator in a liminal zone most recognizably charted by astral traveler Sun Ra. ‘Circuitous’ follows from nearly a decade of releases for Deepblak —the Oakland-rooted imprint of frequent collaborator Aybee— and shares common blood with both the elevated consciousness of late ’80s club culture and contemporary West Coast beat scene.
Built around Porter’s signature polyrhythms and complex melodies, the unorthodox agility demonstrated throughout the album’s fourteen tracks reflect his long history of live, improvised sets combining multiple turntables, upright bass, and a command center of digital tablets and controllers. Each track maps the artist’s own movements, tracing paths of flight, highway trajectories through tunnels and over bridges, and rides through rough and gated neighborhoods. If familiar on the surface, deeper or repeated listenings to ‘Circuitous’ reveal the dynamic multiplicity embodied within.
‘Circuitous’ is a free and unbound body of work—one that defies easy classification yet translates fluidly across multiple environments—compiled over double LP in order to fully realize the scope of Afrikan Science’s sonic palette.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on a double 140g vinyl & CD, featuring artwork by Louis Reith & Bill Kouligas.
PAN is excited to announce the release of Objekt’s debut album, Flatland. Written between 2012 and 2014, Flatland follows up a succession of dynamic single releases from his base in Berlin, including the recent split 12” with Dopplereffekt on Leisure System, Cactus b/w Porcupine on Hessle Audio and three 12” singles on his eponymous white label series. His recorded work so far has toyed with techno and electro conventions and has turned dancefloor tropes on their head, tickling the boundaries of what can or can’t constitute an effective club record.
Approaching the album format on its own terms, Objekt makes full use of the larger canvas to explore a framework of competing truths, multiple perspectives and conflicting accounts. Flatland imagines a world in which any scene can be seen from every angle at once. Sem- blances and cross-references entwine the eleven original tracks and Objekt’s existing record- ings, shaping a powerful and absorbing album that weaves between the alien and the haunt- ingly familiar.
This is an effervescent body of work, its sound design evoking vivid imagery and conveying the same unmistakeable sense of detail and movement for which Objekt has become known. On his first attempt, Objekt has constructed a mature and multilayered album with its own story to tell, from whichever angle you choose to approach it.
The album is mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy, pressed on a double 140g vinyl & CD. It features photography by Joe Dilworth and artwork by Bill Kouligas & Kathryn Politis.
Following up from the success of his emphatic PAN releases ‘Dutch Tvashar Plumes’ and ‘Diversions 1994-1996’ in 2012, we are excited to announce ‘KOCH’ (pronounced “cotch”), the new album from London’s Lee Gamble.
Sharing some stylistic affinity with his previous records, which excavated his deeply personal history with UK jungle and rave, and techno, this new work dives even deeper to reveal a singu- lar and intimate musical vantage point, shifting to approaching music as projection, state, hallucination, an other place. In ‘KOCH’, we experience an artist constructing a future after time spent deconstructing the past.
In the music we witness such dimensional abstraction, zooming between epic macro scenery and claustrophobically close detail, disorientation and absolute focus. Rhythms fuse together and phase apart, club tracks tunnel into an anxious wilderness, with themes and textures emerging as threads throughout the record, wormholing between each track.
There is a sense of the seen and the unseen, an honest tension between music as function (for this world) and as artistic exploration (for another world) as cracks in the surface appear to reveal the odd and alien minutiae within. ‘KOCH’ represents an intimate and revelatory new phase in Lee Gamble’s practice. Producing tracks that can live and grow on their own in a club or personal listening environment, the artist’s exploratory framework creates threads of consistency and tension between disparate spaces, locations, and mental states.
The LP is mastered and cut at D&M, with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Lee Gamble is a UK-based artist and electronic music producer with roots in the original jungle-techno and extreme computer music fields. In 2012 he released a couple of highly acclaimed records via PAN, ‘Dutch Tvashar Plumes’ and ‘Diversions 1994-1996’, that refracted dancefloor and home-listening dimensions into trippy new head-spaces which touched a raw nerve with ravers young and old(er). He’s since expanded those records into live audio-visual performance with fellow CYRK collective founder Dave Gaskarth and continues monthly broad- casts of his NTS radio show.
The ‘Kuang’ EP heralds the release of Gamble’s keenly awaited 2nd LP ‘KOCH’ (due September ’14) with three tracks of dissociative ambient/techno. ‘Kali Wave’ opens with a bittersweet breakbeat roller sounding something like early AGCG playing in a hall of mirrors, whereas ‘Mimas Skank’ diffuses oily acid and dry dub techno inna dancefloor wormhole, and the detached ambient drift of ‘Girl Drop’ rends a gasp of post-rave bliss into twelve minutes of spectral sublime or precipitous dread, depending on your perspective.
The 12” is mastered and cut at D&M, with artwork by Bill Kouligas & Kathryn Politis.
New York based conceptual artist James Hoff returns to PAN with ‘Blaster’, a document of his explorations of computer viruses as agents within the composition process. Specifically, Hoff used the Blaster virus to infect 808 beats and then utilized the mutated results as building blocks for seven new compositions.
Hoff’s interest in computer viruses lies in their ability to self distribute through (and ultimately disrupt) networks of communication and Hoff’s agency as an artist centers on placing these parasitic forms into pre-existing genres, such as dance music. BLASTER is a timely exploration of the infectious qualities of sound, and how it too, as a carrier, makes it’s way through social networks, reduced to bits and programmed to infiltrate and replicate.
“Viruses, like art, need a host. Preferably a popular one.”
Interested in ways in which the virus works could mutate and spread socially, the first side of ‘Blaster’ contains these sonic presentations, and the second houses all of the artist’s infected samples and serves as a scratch record for DJ’s, an object of utility, and ultimately a provoca- tion, mobilizing its new hosts as a point of potential transmission.
Blaster is a logical progression from Hoff’s PAN debut LP “How Wheeling Feels when the Ground Walks Away”, which dealt with aural documents of riots and disruptions and the record is part of a larger body of work by the artist that also includes virus paintings.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. The artwork was constructed using viral images from the artist and typography by Bill Kouligas.
A resident at the now infamous Janus party in Berlin, M.E.S.H. follows up releases with kindred labels Dyssembler and Black Ocean with his debut PAN EP, ’Scythians’.
In addition to his club experience, M.E.S.H’s work is equally well contextualized by his community of peers – he is a frequent collaborator with contemporary artist Aleksandra Domanović, has exchanged remixes with Arca and Fatima Al Qadiri, and is a formative figure in an ascendent community of net aware underground club artists in Berlin including Lotic, Renaissance Man and TCF.
Opener ‘Scythians’ introduces the textural depth of foley blades and draining sewers to his distinctive combination of synthetic sheen and abstract breaks. ‘Interdictor’ is a high drama production, combining staggered sub kicks and crunching metallic textures with wavering chords over a staggered rhythm. In ‘Captivated’ – 808 kicks and an ominous voice punctuate hypnotic washes of noise and hi-hats. ‘Imperial Sewers’ frames synthetic voices and growling pads within a majestic up-tempo hip hop track. In the beatless ‘Glassel Finisher’, metallic, resonant scratches cut through air above the sounds of fabric dragging.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, with artwork by M.E.S.H. Bill Kouligas.
UK soundboy Beneath makes a shocking step forward with the ice cold bassbin futurism of his PAN debut. Since 2012 the Sheffield-based producer has carved a steadfast reputation with an ascetic production technique augmenting the dread torque and atmospheres of early DMZ dubs with the velocity of classic Grime and Bleep Techno, and the haughty rudeness of early New York House, minting a distinct new sound which sent shockwaves thru the scene thanks to his now-legendary showcase mix for Keysound.
Beneath’s PAN 12″ consolidates up-to-the-minute electronics and rooted dancefloor dynamics with incisive style and pattern. All four tracks are skeletal but big-boned rollers’ riddims and masterful exercises in dancefloor pressure. ‘Bored 2’ rent with cattle-prod Grime stabs and a show-stealing, radioactive bass roil, whereas the hunched, grimy rolige of ‘Occupy’ is all about his shifty, idiosyncratic syncopation. ‘One Blings’ cools out on buoyant subs with glass-cut electronic motifs standing miles out from his scene, and ‘Stress 1’ trips out with restless drums and lucid electronics tessellating dipping rhythms with skin-prickling harmonic resonance.
It adds up to the freshest mutation of accelerated UK dub/SoundSystem culture, stoking an aesthetic extant since the first rumblings of Saxon Studio International and Coxsone in the late ’70s/early ’80s, thru the forward leanings of the contemporary UK sound in 2014, mapping the software timbres and possibilities of new technology to the timeless mantra of rudeboy dub proper, yielding maximum affect from optimised elements. Come test.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Composed in Berlin and Munich, 2011/2013.
A former version of Miseri Lares was originally presented in 2011 at the festival “l’Audible” (Paris), curated by Jerome Noetinger.
It has been 7 years since ”Metaprogramming from within the eye of the storm’, the last solo full length release by Valerio Tricoli. In the years between he has established himself as a formidable presence on the international experimental live circuit and released acclaimed collaborations with Antoine Chessex, ‘Coi Tormenti’ (Dilemma Records, 2010) and Thomas Ankersmit, ‘Forma II’ (PAN, 2011) along with the fifth full length release by his band with fellow Italiancohorts 3/4HadBeenEliminated, ‘Oblivion’ (Die Schachtel, 2010). Throughout these shows, collaborations and ongoing explorations Valerio has developed upon his signature style of beautifully unsettling Musique Concrète. The result of his tireless explorations, ‘Miseri Lares’ is his magnum opus, a multilayered and heavily nuanced work which epitomises the uncanny in the realm of sound.
‘Miseri Lares’ explores a variety of interlocking themes and sonic tapestries that combine in a quietly disturbing and deeply existential work. As a contemporary take on Musique Concrète Tricoli utilises his full explorations of the Revox tape recorder alongside digital processing whilst retaining all of the mystery and surprise elements found in the classic approach of pioneers such as Bernard Parmegiani, Eugeniusz Rudnik and Michel Chion.
Themes of the internal, represented by both the psychological and the physical, play throughout the record. A mind lays waste to it’s own self abasement the immediate surrounds (casa or ‘home’) feeds on the collapse of the individual. As a symbol of spirits preying on the grief within, haunting wisps of sound swirl around a throbbing bass in ‘Hic Labor Ille Domus et Inextricabilis Error’, whereas ‘La Casa Deviata’ emphasises the paranoid structure as looming creaks make way for abandoned pipes and a cloud of escaping water. Here, the tension at play is injected with a treated dictaphone recording: “Tell me what happened”,”I can’t remember… THE SMELL!!! There was a tape recorder, where is the tape”?
Spoken text (Italian and English) appears throughout the record, mostly as texture or as a dehumanised floorboard. A play on the albums themes of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within. Texts by Italian poets Dante and Guido Ceronetti appear alongside excerpts from The Ecclesiastes (in hebrew, Qohelet), H.P. Lovecraft, E. M. Cioran, and writings by Tricoli himself. These add an extra weight to the recording, making it reminiscent of Robert Ashley or even the comedic tragedy of later day Scott Walker (baritone aside).
Valerio Tricoli’s release for PAN adds another piece to the puzzle of narrative based concrete music, yet deviating from all conventional forms and playing out like a literary form of unsettling sound sculpture.
The 2xLP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with with photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Eldritch electro-acoustic explorer and uncompromising sound artist Luke Younger aka Helm presents his first new material since casting the subterranean concrète psychedelia of his ‘Impossible Symmetry’ album for PAN across end-of-year lists in 2012 and petrifying numerable witnesses to his granite-hewn live set.
Issued as a split release between PAN and his own Alter label, ‘Silencer’ documents four studio actions conducted in the wake of his renowned LP, charting the alchemical relationships between base, stripped down rhythms, cruddy electronics and acousmatic source material manipulated on cassette tapes. The magic of these four tracks lies in the curious sense of detachment and friction between those fractured, awkwardly reactive elements, klanging flinty drums against detuned, cryptic synth scrabble and buckled tape FX to create charged and metaphysically affective atmospheres intended to corrode and infect your listening space.
The title track follows a tumbling line of inquiry between primal percussive clatter and salted, scratching synth drones into the boggy, noxious ambience and quaking bass slap of ‘Mirrored Palms’, which features a desolate, sustained peal of foghorn brass from John Hannon of Liberez. In the tunnel of ‘Bergamo’, effluent rhythms and vapourous brown gases deliver a cold, claggy soundsphere, with Barrow-based multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott contributing metallic scrape to the para-dimensional murk and insectoid shivers of ‘The Haze’.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. It is pressed on 140g clear vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Ralph Cumbers’ debut Bass Clef 12″ for PAN sees the modular maestro stalking the ‘floor with typical, technical suss and cheeky UK humour. The ‘Raven Yr Own Worl’ EP is the latest and most sharply focussed in a golden streak of releases which have seen the London-based producer tour some of the bastions of British electronica, from Punch Drunk to Alter and Public Information, not to mention his own, cultishly adored Magic + Dreams label.
Thru the prism of his favoured BugBrand Modular system – handmade by Bristol’s Tom Bugs – the four tracks of his ‘Raven Yr Own Worl’ EP patch a lattice of reference ports between Radiophonic experimentation, bedroom electronica, classic dub production techniques, and the not-so-distant spirits of halcyon UK rave music. His ‘Self-Perpetuating Fun Loop’ is razor-sharp acid funk in the tradition of Luke Vibert and the Rephlex hordes, and ‘Fluorescent City Shining City’ a deftly playful piece of acid dub strut recalling early Two Lone Swordsmen. His bleep techno tribute ‘Euphoric Nihilism’ is possibly the most intricate and evocative number, also flashing glimpses of ‘ardcore whistles and EBM in its tightly coiled matrix, whilst ‘Adventures Unventured, Tenderness Untendered’ is a blissed steppers’ kiss off meeting digi-dub and misty-eyed IDM at the warehouse.
The effortless fluidity and charm of these tracks belies the skill, personality and intuitively dextrous approach of Bass Clef and his affinity with the machine. They’re timeless pieces of UK electronica carrying the weight of heritage forward. Bass Clef is due to tour in his Some Truths alias with Tom Bug, promising uniquely alien electronic soundscapes with each performance.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘The Hollow Organ’ toes a deliberate line in the mud between his previous transgressions and a chokingly dank realisation of his most untoward, paralytic sound. Poised as a dark interpreter between the grotesque and the transcendent, he activates research gleaned from his petrifying live performances coupled with an increasingly squalid and visceral palette of anguished machine voices, sub-zero drones and bone-scraped rhythmic noise to divine unearthly space somewhere between semi-legal horror soundtrack and hyperstitious surreality.
Its opening gambit, ‘Carrier’ is the most succinct and uncannily ambiguous; perilously close to Gas-like ambient pop but rescued from serenity by manic tape spool and excoriating, demonic vocal. The vortex of ‘Analogues’ proceeds, ploughed by stereo-twinned engines of churning tape loops to a pitch black, eschatalogical climax, and ‘Spiteful Jester’ feels like the unshakable onset of a panic attack, ratcheting the intensity with blank-eyed, stoic method. For ten minutes ‘The Hollow Organ’ drains last with an unnerving, quiet blood-letting of carmine iron drones evaporating ferric overtones whilst percussions clank in your blind spot behind the screen.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
This is a music of upheaval. Continuing with themes established on his previous ‘Commercial Mouth’ LP, ‘Financial Glam’ reflects the flux and tension of his home city, a gripping opus of grandiose crescendo and collapse, broken rhythm and disquieting calm.
These intricately composed collage works, constructed from hundreds of archived samples, provide a fitting and highly personal soundtrack to austerity in the shadow of empire. The craft hints at a year’s worth of meticulous assembly and industry; the album title hints at a biting critique of the circus outside.
The combination of Jar Moff’s technique, ear and unique perspective on, and proximity to, one of the defining stories of our era makes this release a truly important work.
A side ‘Financial Glam’ and builds with growing fanfare and unease, the malaise occasionally tamed by sublime stabs of synth and rhythm. B side ‘Kresentosiagona’ (translation: “Crescendo of the Jaw”) is characterized by a complex rhythmic treatment of individual orchestral samples. The perpetual escalation of the instru- ments begin to form a fragile and perilous platform over time, it’s fragile movements and majesty ever close to the crash.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
RE-ENGINEERING is the bold new album from Heatsick, aka Berlin based British artist Steven Warwick.
Well known for his epic multi-hour live club sets and acerbic wit, he characterizes this collection of new material as a “cybernetic poem” that both indulges us in the mores of hypnotic dance music while holding a critical, and at times satirical, lens toward the culture writ large.
The opening title track is symbolic of this balance, the crisp spoken word poetry communicating hypermodernity in crisis in a piece that equally evokes the masked humour of Chic and the biting surreality of Chris Morris.
“Modern life is still rubbish you say. Modern rubbish is still life”
The tracks ‘MIMOSA’ and ‘SPECULATIVE’ play with a similar conflict, warping the themes of modern luxury familiar to Malcolm McLaren’s seminal ‘Paris’ album, and delivering rare vocal lines that convey distance and a degree of uneasiness.
The masterful club tracks that constitute the bulk of this album feel all the more powerful and honest when framed in this hyper aware context, confirming the underlying inclusiveness in Warwick’s music and perspective.
We dance together, we crash together.
Kouhei Matsunaga’s ‘Dance Classics Vol.III’ is the continuation of his ongoing development of his more dance oriented material, as seen from his sets with Sensational and also his other minimal techno project NHK. Not feeling tied down to one genre, Matsunaga nestles in the PAN roster, and however that isn’t to say that he is dance per se as witnessed from his recent collaborations with Conrad Schnit- zler. The album focuses more on bass/base electronics, music for the dancefloor and/or altered state reflection. Having composed pieces for WDR based on Henry Chopin, Kouhei is equally at ease jam- ming with Sensational, whilst simultaneously executing a obsessively numerical sequence of dance pieces that borders on Hanne Darboven-like compulsivity.
Born in Osaka, Kouhei Matsunaga is a musician and an illustrator. He started drawing during child- hood under the influence of his grandfather. He grew up listening to hardcore- techno and hip hop, studied architecture and has been mainly making music since 1992. Under many different aliases (NHK, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen) he has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster Noton and his first ever album “Upside Down” on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He has also collaborated with artists like Merzbow, Jungle Brothers’ Sensational, Autechre’s Sean Booth, Mika Vainio, Conrad Schnitzler, Anti Pop Consorium’s High Priest, Rudolf Eb.er, Puppetmastaz crew, Asmus Tietchens, Ralf ‘RLW’ Wehowsky and so on. His own label Flying Swimming was founded in 2002 with the main purpose being to publish and curate events of experimental contemporary music and art.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro- press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Chris Douglas’ story reads like a lesson in the development of outsider electronic music over the past 20 years. He began throwing the first ambient techno parties in San Francisco at just 16 years old, and moved to Detroit a year later to begin working with Mike Banks (Underground Resistance) and James Stinson (Drexciya).
He relocated to Berlin in the early 2000’s after being invited to support Autechre on their Confield tour (and perform at the now legendary Autechre curated ATP Festival), and has since steadily released challenging and intense records as Dalglish, O.S.T., Scald Rougish and Seaes, all the while maintaining an elusive personal profile. He has also worked extensively in film music as having recently composed the soundtrack for the film ‘Out of Competition’ for the 70th Venice Biennale, as well as Anna Eborn’s recent film ‘Pine Ridge’ among others. Furthermore he is a founding member of audiovisual collective SYNKEN featuring members of Transforma.
His PAN debut, dedicated to his friend, the sadly deceased musician and Isolate Records founder Wai Cheng (Optic), is a complex and cavernous exercise in texture and rhythm, marrying the freedom and tonal breadth of electroacoustic composition with percussive patterns disjointed to the point of collapse.
It is easy to see how his work is often critically received as emotionally challenging. There is a closeness to these compositions, and his muscular, full spectrum passages are often counteracted with brittle and delicate detail. Unhinged and unrestrained, you will be hard pressed to find a single loop throughout the entire album, with each of the compositions mutated through vividly reverberating, clangorous landscapes.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on a 140g vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve featuring artwork by Ian Liddle, Bill Kouligas & Kathryn Politis.
An important figure in the American underground since his teens, over innumerable releases the aesthetic choices of Jeff Witscher have prophesized many of the pivotal shifts in US underground culture spanning the last decade. Most recently receiving critical acclaim for experimental synth albums ‘Porcelain Opera’ and ‘The Terminal Symphony'(Type) and a 2012 split release with Oneohtrix Point Never, ‘Vanilla Call Option’ represents Rene Hell’s most abstract and refined vision to date.
Witscher is a notoriously unique artist, a magnetic and nomadic SoCal intellectual everyman. An avid chess player, he occupies the role of both trickster and aesthete, an embodied example of a time where experimental ideas and attitudes travel fluidly between the club and gallery.
Travel is a central theme of this work, with the digital and minimalist palette for ‘Vanilla Call Option’ being built whilst on the move between airports, performance spaces and public libraries. In his own words, Witscher attempted to construct “vertical narratives” that at times evoke the musique concrete of Bernard Parmegiani and probing electronic experiments of Charles Dodge. Rejecting melody to form a new language of timbre, timing and flight, these crisp compositions oscillate between flux and grandeur, piercing synthesis and meditative piano, strings and voice.
This is bold futurist music, characterized by deliberate decisions and an uncompromising clarity of vision. One would be advised to pay attention.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on a 140g vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Marginal Consort is a Japanese avant-garde improvisational collective made of sound and visual artists, who were all students of Takehisa Kosugi at the radical Bigaku school of aesthetics in Tokyo in the 70’s. The group is a reformation of the East Bionic Symphonia, who released an incredible long-form drone record in the early 80’s, a large improvisation ensemble in the spirit of his Kosugi’s Group Ongaku and Taj Mahal Travellers projects. Marginal Consort is formed around musicians, Kazuo Imai, (a student of Japanese Free Jazz linchpin Masayuki Takayanagi and also member of both Taj Mahal Travellers and Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit), Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, and sound-artist Masami Tada (also in group GAP).
Their extended set explores forms of sound and ways of playing that never coalesce into music, but create a group dynamic of ebb and flow, of exploration and fluidity. Marginal Consort also featured previously artists Yasushi Ozawa, bassist in Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, and Chie Mukai, from dreamy psychedelic group Che-Shizu. With this cast on board, they took their free improvisation to the streets to create drones and percussive interplay in urban communal harmony.
“A form of sound that does not turn into music and a group that does not produce harmony; individual concepts and group fluidity; individuals who are at once independent entities and components of the whole; coexisting time frames and intersecting rhythms – these are among the images of group improvisation that have occupied my mind since the ’70s. These images neither presuppose specific elements nor regulate the entire process. There always remain, however, the fundamental premises that sounds are separately produced phenomena and that their accumulation forms the whole”. – Kazuo Imai
The boxset is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 4x 140g vinyls which themselves are housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve. It features liner notes by Barry Esson, extended photo documentation by Bryony McIntyre and artwork by Bill Kouligas.
The debut 12” by Black Sites, is a collaboration between Hamburg based artists Helena Hauff and F#X. Both residents at iconic Hamburg club ‘The Golden Pudel’, Hauff and F#X are stellar repre- sentatives of an experimental approach that has earned the underground spot it’s growing reputation. Emergence is a fitting theme, as 2013 is already shaping up to be a breakthrough year for the duo. Hauff is soon to release a solo 12” on Actress’s Werkdisks label, and F#X recently releasing a dubbed out single on Pudel’s own ‘Pudel Produkte’ imprint as a member of ‘Circuit Diagram’.
This is riotous and cerebral club music. The analog artifacts of A side ‘Prototype’ permutate in tandem with melodic Detroit chords, a pounding rhythm section and a central ascending 303 line. B side ‘N313P’ maintains the intense pace. Building around competing resonances, the untethered Drexciyan melodies probe, expand and contract to rapturous effect.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
The pedigree of this collaboration should need little explanation. Luminaries of British electronic music spanning over two decades, Russell Haswell (Gescom, Haswell & Hecker) and Downwards label founder Karl O’Connor (Regis, Sandwell District, British Murder Boys) have come together to produce three tracks of inimitable experimental techno in their debut collaborative release.
With each track built upon a permutating sonic foundation, these are muscular and expertly paced compositions that effortlessly transition between hypnotic rhythms and textural and timbral experimentation.
‘Industrial Disease”s mid paced dark dancehall rhythm snakes around ominous and monu- mental roars of synthesis, hard transitioning into an abstract concrete composition. ‘Caulk’ relocates the dark and delayed mood into a sonic wind tunnel, amidst roughly textured radio transmissions and epic resonant sweeps. ‘The Unabridged Truth’ introduces the first unswerving 4/4 beat of the release, which grows in stature until the violent electronic bursts are eventually wrestled into an unsettled closing passage.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas & Russell Haswell.
‘Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I’ is a devastating display of potential which ensures a journey unlike any you have encountered. In the vast world of electronic music, where sounds, signifiers and gesture’s are recontextualized to a numbing degree it is increasingly rare and refreshing to encounter a release as perspective distorting as the debut full length release by Rashad Becker. The album is a masterpiece of focussed non-referential electronic environments. It is is both warm, alien, paranoid and exhilarating. Sounds are stretched in the most unusual manner, foreign bodies are frequent and the structure is simply bewildering. Split into ‘Themes and Dances’, the 8 tracks guide the listener through Becker’s brave new world. Despite being entirely synthetic there are sounds which appear like a distortion of the world around us, on occasion ‘voice-like’ sounds are present, elsewhere there appears the sound of cicada’s, only these cicada’s are made of mercury and swim through time. The end result is beautiful in a way only a unique work of art can be. PAN is proud to present the outside from within.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
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Rashad Becker creates precise, phantasmic computer sound designs encouraging audiences to focus their hearing. His carefully constructed, sparse improvisations, have unexpected qualities, and have been called conversational not only for his sampling of dissected human voices, but for the way these samples integrate with the timbre of his electronics. “It sounded like a long stream-of-consciousness sentence made up short syllables, electronic oohs and wahs, sections of muttering, and occasionally bickering. Whatever he does, it seems Becker has the knack of giving sound its voice.” (Scott McMillan in the Liminal)
MOHAMMAD is a chamber music trio consisting of Coti K (contrabass), ILIOS (oscillators) and Nikos Veliotis (cello). Based in Greece, Mohammad make long form work drone works that explore the lower end of the frequency spectrum whilst retaining an intense emotional capacity. The results are monumental slow moving physical blocks of sound, both daunting and musical. The sheer weight of these recordings is impressive, the interplay of the musicians and instruments staggering, this end result being an album rich with immense harmonious abstraction which highlights years of dedication to their unique path.
Following on from their previous releases (the highly regarded ‘Roto Vildblomma’ CD and the ‘Spiriti’ 3LP box, both on Antifrost) ‘Som Sakrifis’ follows the trio through three tracks of deep space experimentation where the acoustic and electronic blend together as a monumental whole. Listening to ‘Som Sakrifis’ takes the listener on an expansive journey through the netherworld of the low range whilst retaining distinct traces of musicality. The time and space in these works have a logic more akin to that of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr than any contemporary music references. Monumental monochromatic movement is the order of the day. Sit back, strap in and let these fine explorers take you way out into the nether world.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with with photos by Babis Makridis & Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘Commercial Mouth’ is the debut LP from Jar Moff, an Athens based artist working in collage forms. Following on from his previous remix on the Harald Grosskopf Synthesist / Re-Synthesist LP on RVNG last year, and a digital release for Leaving Records, this is his first full-length LP. Both his visual and aural oeuvre take the form of cut up and reformations in the manner of previous PAN stablemates like Joseph Hammer and Ghedalia Tazartes, remodeling the past in order to create something new out of the modern detritus, and nestles in nicely alongside the recent ‘Diversions 1994-1996’ release from Lee Gamble. The result is a baffling yet functioning head-on collision between early plunderphonics and an abstracted futuristic hip hop aesthetic.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Déviation Heat-treated is Mark Fell’s (SND) response to Heatsick’s recent Déviation EP on PAN. Somewhere between cover version, remix or deconstruction, just over 34 minutes of re-layering of patterns and sounds.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g black vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘Dutch Tvashar Plumes’ seems to map the changes in Lee’s approach to music making over the last 4/5 years. From his initial exposure and subsequent immersion into Jungle as a teenager, he soon began experimenting with structure and sound design which led him to a more ‘academic’ approach with ‘Computer Music’. There were many self-imposed rules he adhered to during this time. These last few years he decided to break with that and make an intuitive venture forward. This record is the first real document of that.
Lee Gamble started out as a teenager dj-ing on pirate radio and on the emerging Jungle scene, however his own approach to music has taken a more experimental direction. Exploring the outer realms of abstraction through digital synthesis/resynthesis, Lee has described his current compositional process as: “…The configuration of material (ex nihilo) via various digital synthesis methods, prompts further disfigurations and reconfigurations. What you then have left is often the detritus or debris of an idea. Phantasms of both previous and current musical, pseudo-scientific and sculptural influences are manifest as new material abstractions, created from the digital blank canvas. This abstraction allows several interests to appear in the works simultaneously…”. He is a also a founding member of the UK-based CYRK collective and has curated/co-curated several Cyrk events. He has also produced and curated three radio series for London based radio station Resonance104.4FM and he continues to DJ. Lee has released his computer compositions on the Entr’acte label and has collaborated with composer John Wall and artists Yutaka Makino and Bryan Lewis Saunders.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Kouhei Matsunaga’s ‘Dance Classics Vol.II’ is the continuation of his ongoing development of his more dance oriented material, as seen from his sets with Sensational and also his other minimal techno project NHK. Not feeling tied down to one genre, Matsunaga nestles in the PAN roster, and however that isn’t to say that he is dance per se as witnessed from his recent collaborations with Conrad Schnitzler. The album focuses more on bass/base electronics, music for the dancefloor and/or altered state reflection. Having composed pieces for WDR based on Henry Chopin, Kouhei is equally at ease jamming with Sensational, whilst simultaneously executing a obsessively numerical sequence of dance pieces that borders on Hanne Darboven-like compulsivity.
Born in Osaka, Kouhei Matsunaga is a musician and an illustrator. He started drawing during childhood under the influence of his grandfather. He grew up listening to hardcore- techno and hip hop, studied architecture and has been mainly making music since 1992. Under many different aliases (NHK, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen) he has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster Noton and his first ever album “Upside Down” on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He has also collaborated with artists like Merzbow, Jungle Brothers’ Sensational, Autechre’s Sean Booth, Mika Vainio, Conrad Schnitzler, Anti Pop Consorium’s High Priest, Rudolf Eb.er, Puppetmastaz crew, Asmus Tietchens, Ralf ‘RLW’ Wehowsky and so on. His own label Flying Swimming was founded in 2002 with the main purpose being to publish and curate events of experimental contemporary music and art.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
James Hoff’s “How Wheeling Feels when the Ground Walks Away” presents an audio landscape comprised of various historic riots, from the concert hall and music venue to the sounds of modern warfare. Presented in surround sound, the work relentlessly envelops the audience as the tumultuous panorama of over-layered riots travel around the gallery. Part of Riot Radio Ballad, which explores the performative and futurist aspects of spoken word, audio, and radio material. Curated by Mark Beasley. Commissioned by Performa. Co-presented by Performa and Artists Space. Produced by Mike Skinner and James Hoff – sound design Mike Skinner and James Hoff.
James Hoff is an artist, editor and art curator living in New York City. He has been working with sound and performance since 2003. He is also co-founder and editor of Primary Information- an organization devoted to publishing lost works of the avant-garde and artists publications vital to discussions in contemporary artistic practice.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 200 copies, pressed on a 140g one-sided picture disc, housed in a silk-screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘Diversions 1994-1996′ is made up entirely from samples from the collection of Lee Gamble’s Jungle cassette mixtapes. The audio has been subjected to analog and digital deformations, whilst trying to extract, expand upon and convey particular qualities emblematic of the original music. The effect is that of a musical body scan, all that is solid melts into air. Sounds are unearthed, dissected on the operating table, melted and unlocked , evoking sonics not unlike the heavy dub processes of Jah Shaka and Scion in a INA GRM frame of mind or bearing a similar methodological approach with what explored Mark Leckey in his piece “Fiorucci Made me Hardcore”. It can be heard as a ‘memory’ of a period of music and for some could work as a ‘cued recall’, which is a form of memory retrieval.
Lee Gamble started out as a teenager dj-ing on pirate radio and on the emerging Jungle scene, however his own approach to music has taken a more experimental direction. Exploring the outer realms of abstraction through digital synthesis/resynthesis, Lee has described his current compositional process as: “…The configuration of material (ex nihilo) via various digital synthesis methods, prompts further disfigurations and reconfigurations. What you then have left is often the detritus or debris of an idea. Phantasms of both previous and current musical, pseudo-scientific and sculptural influences are manifest as new material abstractions, created from the digital blank canvas. This abstraction allows several interests to appear in the works simultaneously…”. He is a also a founding member of the UK-based CYRK collective and has curated/co-curated several Cyrk events. He has also produced and curated three radio series for London based radio station Resonance104.4FM and he continues to DJ. Lee has released his computer compositions on the Entr’acte label and has collaborated with composer John Wall and artists Yutaka Makino and Bryan Lewis Saunders. ‘Diversions 1994-1996’ E.P is is the beginning of a longer-term collaboration with PAN which also includes a full length album later this year.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Catching Net is a collection of selected installations and compositions Eli Keszler created during the last two year. The double-CD set includes both stand-alone recordings of the installations and the integrated ensemble scores performed in conjunction with those installations. The first disc features two ensemble versions of Cold Pin, previously released in a 2011 LP of the same title on PAN, plus a 26-minute, previously unreleased live ensemble recording (mixed sextet and piano quintet; these are captured in contrasting acoustical spaces). The personnel for all three tracks is Eli Keszler drums, percussion, crotales, guitar; Ashley Paul, alto saxophone, bass harp; Geoff Mullen, prepared guitar; Greg Kelley, trumpet; Reuben Son, bassoon; and Benny Nelson, cello. The second disc begins with the title track, Catching Net, a 17-minute score for string quartet and piano with the Cold Pin installation. It is performed by pianist Sakiko Mori and the Providence String Quartet: Carole Bestvater, violin; Rachel Panitch, violin; Chloë Kline, viola; Laura Cetilia, cello. The score is fully notated, timed with stopwatch markings rather than tempo or meter. Following are two recordings of Keszler’s large-scale installations functioning on their own. Collecting Basin features piano strings/wires up to 250 feet long splayed from a two-story water tower in Shreveport / Louisiana, across two large, empty water purification basins, which acted as an amplifier for the sounds produced by the installation. A ‘solo’ version of Cold Pin (without live performers) concludes the album. Tracks 1 and 3 on the first disc and track 2 on the second disc were recorded at the historic Cyclorama, a massive dome at the Boston Center for the Arts. Cold Pin was installed directly on a large curved wall in the dome, using micro-controlled motors and beaters to strike extended strings ranging in length from three to 25 feet.
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, visionary composer/percussionist/multimedia artist Eli Keszler began playing drums at eight, and composing at twelve. Before finding an interest in experimental music and improvisation, he played in rock and hardcore bands; his work retains an intense physicality and churning, often ferocious energy. He is a graduate of the New England Conservatory, where he studied composition with Anthony Coleman and Ran Blake. A self-taught visual artist, his aesthetic outlook owes as much to Richard Serra and Robert Smithson as it does to musical icons like Xenakis, Nancarrow, and Ornette Coleman. He has collaborated with Phill Niblock, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe McPhee, Loren Connors, Jandek, and many others, and has recorded more than a dozen CDs and LPs for ESP-DISK, REL, and PAN. Keszler’s installations employ piano wires of varying lengths; these are struck, scraped, and vibrated by microprocessor-controlled motorized arms, giving rise to harmonically complex tones that are percussive yet resonant. These installations are heard on their own and with accompanying ensemble scores. Said Keszler in a NPR All Songs Considered interview, “I like to work with raw material, like simple sounds, primitive or very old sounds; sounds that won’t get dated in any way. I was thinking of ways I could use strings or acoustic material without using pedals or pre-recordings, so the live aspects appealed to me.” In addition, the patterns formed by the overlapping piano wires allow Keszler to create visual components that relate directly to the music, without having to use projections or other electronic equipment.
The 2xCD is mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. It is packaged in a pro-press digisleeve jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with extensive images from the installations, program notes, sketches of the installations, scores, electronic schematics from the projects, and accompanying drawings and artwork by Eli Keszler and Bill Kouligas.
Aaron Dilloway: synth and tapes recorded at Tarker Mills, Oberlin OH
Jason Lescalleet: synth, tapes, and Dell XPS recorded and mixed at Glistening Labs, Berwick ME
‘Grapes and Snakes’ is the first collaborative work of two of the most respected American underground experimental/noise artists, Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet. Using purely analog synths and tape manipulation, they build a foggy psychoacoustic mass that lies between dynamic yet patiently treated tape-music and industrial howl.
Jason Lescalleet’s sound world occupies a space between noise, contemporary composition, and minimal electronics. Using decidedly primitive tactics and equipment (e.g. antiquated reel-to-reel recorders, damaged tape, etc.), his work focuses on extreme frequencies and microscopic audio detail. He’s been a member of Due Process, performed and recorded with Keith Rowe, Joe Colley, Jason Kahn, John Hudak, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley (both separately and as Nmperign), and most recently Graham Lambkin in their Breadwinner project which has yielded unprecedented and glorious results in the electroacoustic music of today. He lives and works in the state of Maine.
Phenomenal live performer and recording artist, Aaron Dilloway utilizes magnetic tape, synths, contact mic growls, and various other electronics and evocative sounds to create experimental noise and electronic sets that tend to start with a slow burn and build to mindmelting climaxes of intense energy and catharsis. A very physical and versatile performer who has shared the stage and collaborated with a who’s who in noise and experimental electronic sound, audiences tend to walk away from Aaron’s sets completely dumbfounded. He is a former member of the band Wolf Eyes, and currently also works with his solo modular synth project Spine Scavenger and an ever-changing cast of sound artists under the name The Nevari Butchers.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and it is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve.
If “Dream Tennis” was any indication, Heatsick has struck a nerve with his singles that stretch preset washes of polyphony through sunset-hued landscapes of disco and house. Equipped with only a Casio keyboard, he has played alongside everyone from Omar Souleyman to DJ Harvey, Daniel Wang and Legowelt, and has demonstrated his ability not only to extend his keyboard to its limits, but to transcend its musical territory, opening up a diverse range of styles, genres and gestures to his dance-addled mimicries and musings.
“Déviation” marks Heatsick’s most expansive dance release to date, featuring four tracks of kaleidoscopic house that combine a lo-fi aesthetic with clear, textured structures akin to wandering through a densely gridded, sultry urban environment. With influences ranging from Fela Kuti to Todd Terry, the EP revolves around as much of a disco aesthetic as it does a leisurely soundtrack to a casual day of hanging out.
The dub-influenced title track begins with a rhythmic, Latin-oriented introduction that delicately deviates towards its shimmering second half as the pitch spirals in a locked progression. The climax refuses to come quickly, however, and a flow of excitement frames the track until it finishes in step. The EP’s subdued second track, “C’était un rendez-vous”, presents a sort of chill-out vibe with a cinematic consciousness. This track features backing by the prodigious saxophonist André Vida, whose snippets of smooth to free jazz are seamlessly interlaced within the last two tracks as well.
On the B-side, the B1 track “The Stars Down to Earth” is overlaid with a vocal sample and brims with a frenetic energy that calls to mind an ebulliently bassy, Bristol mentality. The concluding track, “No Fixed Address”, takes the territory of the B1 and introduces it to a 90s Todd Terry treatment, providing a jacking conclusion to this varied, densely-packed release worthy of multiple listenings.
The 12″ was recorded by Mauro Martinuz & Luca Sella at Transfert Studios and mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
The original idea of this project was to allow musicians from different scenes (but who shared common ideas) to work together. In this case, a development of two pre-existent duos.
Quite often musicians from different sonic languages are seen being put together, in an attempt to be prompted into developing unexpected works. Vainio, Drumm, Dörner and Capece have many strong points in common, that have been executed within different contexts. The music map is generally divided into categories that are determined by it’s most evident and often banal elements; if it has beats or not, if it is quiet or loud, if it has raw material or a carefully worked aesthetic. These four musicians have been working using all the previous elements, but these elements did not determine the music; instead they were used at the service of deeper ideas related to time and perception. How the sound of our environment can become music; how music can be attractive without telling a story; the work of sound in it’s extreme: noise, granular and delicate, digital, electronic, instrumental extended techniques, preparations. Kevin Drumm and Axel Dörner started working together in the late 90’s as part of a trio with Paul Lovens. As a duo they released an influential album on Erstwhile Records. Vainio and Drumm met in 2005 in Australia, both as part of the touring festival What is Music? and although both musicians declared to have had a great time touring the country, they never actually played together. Drumm’s and Vainio’s music is often compared by critics. Capece has released a duo CD on L’Innomable label with Axel Dörner and a trio with Dörner and tubist Robin Hayward on Azul Discográfica label from New York. Dörner and Capece have worked on several projects together, including a residency with Keith Rowe working on ‘Treatise’ by Cornelius Cardew. Mika Vainio and Lucio Capece have released the album ‘Trahnie’ – an album they worked on tgether for three years, and have also played several concerts as a duo.
In May 2008, the quartet completed a 6 day residency which culminated in a concert at Vooruit, in Ghent, followed by a 5 concert European tour, that took them to Venice. In 2011, the group played at Konfrontationen Festival in Austria. Meanwhile Capece and Vainio have been part of the Vladislav delay Quartet. Capece has played, and toured, with Kevin Drumm as a trio with Radu Malfatti and Dörner has played with Drumm as a trio with Paul Lovens at the Meteo festival in France. The recording in Venice is a multitrack. It was mixed by Capece with minimal edits, basically panning and volume adjustments.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with photos by Traianos Pakioufakis & artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
HELM ‘Impossible Symmetry’ (PAN 27)
Impossible Symmetry is the third full length record by Helm, the project of London based artist Luke Younger. It marks a new chapter in the artists’ canon as it’s his first to be informed by live performance rather than studio experimentation. The recording and engineering was primarily a solo venture, with some technical assistance from John Hannon on a few tracks. Most of the compositions were created out of ideas / improvisations that were conceived in a live context and then fed back into the studio work. The album was recorded over the duration of a year in London with source material culled from acoustic sound sources in a similar methodology to his previous album ‘Cryptography’, whilst also simultaneously incorporating more extensive use of electronic elements and moments of rhythmic dark ambience recalling the outputs from early Coil and Cabaret Voltaire to even Traversable Wormhole’s industrial minimalism.
Helm is Luke Younger – a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. Younger’s compositions build a dense aural landscape that touches on musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, noise, and hallucinatory drones. His most last LP Cryptography, presented a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study which uses processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal and broken guitar strings. Younger creates a world where these instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation. This sound is steered through a melange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in a post-industrial fashion with a commitment to homemade exploratory zeal. For the past ten years, Younger has also performed extensively in Europe and the US with Steven Warwick as pioneering avant-drone duo Birds of Delay.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with photos by Traianos Pakioufakis & artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Split 12″ between two of the artists at the forefront of the experimental dance scene, SND and NHK. Aside from sharing 3 letter names and having an upcoming Japanese tour together, the two acts also nicely compliment each other via skewed electronics which come out of mutual dance and minimal electronic sensibilities. SND offer a cut of jacking minimal loops, flows of repetition crafted at once as structured yet simultaneously unfolding before your eyes (and ears), whilst on the flipside NHK is suitably equal part bass squelch with rudimentary snare motorik via pirate radio broadcast.
SND formed in Sheffield, UK, in 1998 by Mark Fell and Mat Steel. Three critically acclaimed albums for Mille Plateaux alongside the continuing series on their own label put SND at the forefront of new digital minimalism, pioneering a sound that always influenced but also resisted the so called ‘clicks and cuts’ movement that built up around them. After their third album — Tender Love — for Mille Plateaux in 2002, SND became disillusioned with the recording treadmill and proliferation of the genre they seemed to inhabit, and turned to other projects; solo work, curating events and installations, the occasional contribution to compilations, an album for Raster Noton from side project ‘Blir’, remix work for the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and sound design for fellow Sheffielders The Designers Republic. During this time they also honed their impressive live performance through extensive touring of Japan, America, and Europe (most notably with Autechre), and one off shows at major festivals and venues around the world. Experiencing an SND performance can be alienating, engaging, dynamic, and unforgiving; each event a unique exploration of the relationship between performer, audience, software and context. Snd continued an active year with another European tour supporting Autechre, a reworking of Billie Jean for the ‘Recovery’ box set on Fractured Records, a major feature in the Wire magazine, a tour of Japan and the recording of another album.
NHK formed in 2006 in Osaka, Japan by Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro. Mainly as a side project of prolific producer Kouhei Matsunaga (who is working under many different aliases such as NHK’Koyxen, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen), they started making experimental dub techno with a more raw and harsh edge to it. Kouhei has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster Noton and his first ever album “Upside Down” on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He has also collaborated with artists like Merzbow, Jungle Brothers’ Sensational, Autechre’s Sean Booth, Mika Vainio, Conrad Schnitzler, Anti Pop Consorium’s High Priest, Rudolf Eb.er, Puppetmastaz crew, Asmus Tietchens, Ralf ‘RLW’ Wehowsky and so on. His own label Flying Swimming was founded in 2002 with the main purpose being to publish and curate events of experimental contemporary music and art.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Prolific producer Kouhei Matsunaga’s ‘Dance Classics Vol.I’ LP documents his more dance oriented material, as seen from his sets with Sensational and also his other minimal techno project NHK. Not feeling tied down to one genre, Matsunaga nestles in the PAN roster, and however that isn’t to say that he is dance per se as witnessed from his recent collaborations with Conrad Schnitzler. The album focuses more on bass/base electronics, music for the dancefloor and/or altered state reflection. Having composed pieces for WDR based on Henry Chopin, Kouhei is equally at ease jamming with Sensational, whilst simultaneously executing a obsessively numerical sequence of dance pieces that borders on Hanne Darboven-like compulsivity.
Born in Osaka, Kouhei Matsunaga is a musician and an illustrator. He started drawing during childhood under the influence of his grandfather. He grew up listening to hardcore-techno and hip hop, studied architecture and has been mainly making music since 1992. Under many different aliases (NHK, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen) he has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster Noton and his first ever album “Upside Down” on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He has also collaborated with artists like Merzbow, Jungle Brothers’ Sensational, Autechre’s Sean Booth, Mika Vainio, Conrad Schnitzler, Anti Pop Consorium’s High Priest, Rudolf Eb.er, Puppetmastaz crew, Asmus Tietchens, Ralf ‘RLW’ Wehowsky and so on. His own label Flying Swimming was founded in 2002 with the main purpose being to publish and curate events of experimental contemporary music and art.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Five pieces for Computer Controlled Modular Synthesizer and Digital Signal Processing. Composed and recorded from February 2010 – April 2011 in Brooklyn, New York. ‘esstends-esstends-esstends’ is a collection of spatial compositions in which audio focal points shift between external and internal emanation sources. The intent with this work is to escape the stereo image and create an activated listening space of expanded spatialization. Using just intoned pitch combinations to produce difference tones and harmonic distortions, sound materials are created that emanate from both the playback speakers and inner ear of the listener. By engaging the listener’s sense of aural perception and sound localization in relationship to compositional structure, these pieces act to reframe the listening experience and encourage an engagement with, not only the form and aesthetic of the music, but the sonic space a recorded piece of music projects. Higher amplitude will help to reveal.
Ben Vida is a composer, improviser and sound artist who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Ben led the group Town and Country and experimented with world musique concrète under the name Bird Show. In collaboration with Keith Fullerton Whitman and Greg Davis he explores cross control voltage integrated improvisation and real time automatic group composition. Ben has worked with artists Hisham Bharoocha (duo as Soft Circle), Siebren Versteeg, Doug Aitken, Nadia Hironaka and Mathew Suib. He has played in ensembles led by Tony Conrad, Rhys Chattam, and Werner Dafeldecker. As an improviser he has performed with Milo Fine, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Chad Taylor, Kevin Drumm, Yamatsuka Eye and C. Spencer Yeh among many others. He has released over twenty records on such labels as Thrill Jockey, Drag City, PAN, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna and Kranky. In 2011 Ben was Composer in Residency at Diapason Space, NYC and at EMS Studios, Stockholm and was awarded a Swedish Arts Committee Travel Grant, ISSUE Project Room Emerging Artists Commission and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona “Composing with Process” Exclusive Works Commission. As both a solo artist and in collaboration Ben has presented his work in the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea and Japan.
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
As a composer, John Wiese is an elusive one. Employing a very healthy range of conceptual framework throughout his oevure, he’s unmistakably recognizable, but rarely easy to predict. No matter what the sound, we find it always sounds like Wiese. Seven Of Wands contains a romanticism only hinted at previously. Comprised of pieces from a range of eras and sequenced into a narrative arc, this very unique album has a quality of being beautiful, listenable, immersive, and transportive all at once. He probably wouldn’t like this, but I dare say “musical.”
Let’s look for a second at the development of Wiese’s solo albums to date: Magical Crystal Blah (2003), Soft Punk (2002–2005), Dramatic Accessories (2007), Circle Snare (2008), Zombie (2009), and now Seven Of Wands (2004–2010). With the exception of Zombie’s rigid conceptualism, what we can see is a development of a completely individual approach to cutting and stereo spectrum, with a constantly fluctuating degree of severity in choice of sounds. On this latest, we see this transposed to a longer-form, with more emphasis on beauty and musical qualities (well, don’t get me wrong), employing strategies and techniques of musique concrète and electroacoustic music throughout, all the while further emphasizing the mixing desk as a true instrument.
Two of the albums central pieces were developed while touring the US, UK and Europe with Liars, No Age, and (in quadraphonic) Matmos, and feature source material contributed by Angus Andrew (voice, field recording) and Julian Gross (percussion) of Liars. This is Wiese’s second release on PAN, following the vinyl edition of C-Section, his duo album with Evan Parker.
The CD is a limited edition of 1000 copies, and is packaged in a pro-press digisleeve jacket which itself is housed in a one-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by John Wiese and Bill Kouligas.
Over two years in the making, Cold Pin is the new full length record by Eli Keszler. Both a composition and stand alone installation, 14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables. Recorded in Boston’s historic Cyclorama, a massive dome built to house the Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg painting in 1884. The b side features in addition, a ‘dry’ version of the installation with motor attacks on metal squares rather then strings, creating dense percussive clusters. Cold Pin works within the frame work of left to right time and vertical structure. The installation acts as the architecture of the music, surrounding and immersing the live instruments into incredible density and sharp angular mass shapes, and functions alone as the performers stops. Rather then an individual sound the sustained horns, strings, drums and metallic attacks function as a singular unit, and continue too when they stop alongside the installation. Cold Pin features Eli Keszler (drums, crotales installation and guitar), Geoff Mullen (guitar), Ashley Paul (clarinet, guitar, greenbox) Greg Kelley (trumpet), Reuben Son (bassoon) and Benjamin Nelson (cello).
Eli Keszler is a composer, artist and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City. In performance, he often plays drums, bowed crotales and guitar in conjunction with his installations. In his ensemble compositions, he uses extended strings, motors, crotales, horns and mechanical devices to create his sound, balancing intense harmonic formations with acoustic sustain, fast jarring rhythm, mechanical propulsion, dense textures and detailed visual presentations. Eli has toured extensively throughout Europe and the US, performing solo and in collaboration with artists such as Phill Niblock, Aki Onda, Joe Mcphee, Loren Connors, Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, C Spencer Yeh, Greg Kelley (Nmperign), T Model Ford, Ran Blake, Ashley Paul and Steve Pyne. He has recorded solo releases for labels such as hiw own REL Records, ESP-DISK’ and Type (Red Horse). His installations have appeared at the Boston Center for the Arts and Nuit Blanche NYC and the Shreveport MSPC New Music Festival. He has most recently won the Mata composers competition for the 2012 season. Eli Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston where he studied with Anthony Coleman and Ran Blake.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Brud is a three volume compilation of recordings from 1995 to 2011 by Andre Vida, morphing seamlessly between a sense of total irreverence and the sublime. His spontaneous compositions and notated works are the angled mirrored counterparts of a transient saxophone driven performance language, drawing on elements of 1970s performance art, new music, improvisation cult, folk and pop hybrids, channeling them into asymmetrical tunes of feral beauty.
BRUD traces the development of Vida’s wayward language through 16 years of copious ruminations. The three delightfully polymorphic perverse discs unite sparkling solo sax, pieces for cello and woodwind sextet, synth / concrete electronic music, nocturnal improvisations, rare 90’s New York free jazz compositions, and the Kreuzberg suite — a distilled culmination of a hundred nights of Berlin mayhem into ecstatic swinging lyricism. Both solo works and as well as various collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Rashad Becker, Axel Dörner, Matt “MV” Valentine, Tim Barnes, Helen Rush, Olaf Rupp, Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas, Brandon Evans, Elisabeth King, Steve Heather and many more.
Andre Vida is a Hungarian American saxophonist, composer and lyricist living in Berlin. More downtown cheeky grin than mere caveman smile, he is cosmically notorious for continuing the Rahsaan Roland Kirk one man horn section legacy with hydra headed style. He has been at the forefront of several major developments in experimental music, being mainly in Anthony Braxton’s original Ghost Trance Ensemble, as founding member of New York collective the CTIA, subsequent ‘freak folk’ groups such as The Tower Recordings, and his extensive collaborations with electronic music visionaries Jamie Lidell, Tim Exile and Kevin Blechdom, Elton John, Gonzales, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman to name but a few, sewing up some heavy threads in downtown sax patchwork refracted through a Borgesian lens.
The 3xCD is a limited edition of 1000 copies, and is packaged in a pro-press digisleeve jacket which itself is housed in a one-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Andre Vida and Bill Kouligas.
Intersex is the debut LP by Steven Warwick a.k.a Heatsick. The title references the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld looking at how music and sexuality can operate in flux on a constantly sliding scale. Executed on just a Casio keyboard and manipulated loops via guitar pedals, Intersex deliberately evokes “ersatz” notions of electronic dance music and early electronics in the line of Roberto Cacciapaglia’s Ann Steel record , the work of Warner Jepson and the kaleidoscopic sound of Ron Hardy, pushing dance/body music through a saturated psychedelic lens.
Steven Warwick is a Berlin based performer, also known for his work in the electronic duo, Birds of Delay. His approach is one of carefully thought out loops which are then sent into varying interactions and play. Active in the club, art and music scenes, Warwick’s work is one existing in a liminal space, meditating both at once in real time and the “just past”.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Steven Warwick, Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Real time extreme music improvisations presented at Lampo in Chicago and No Fun Fest in New York City. ‘USA’ is the second full length release by the leading electronic music duo, follow up to their 2007 ‘One (Snow Mud Rain)’ on Erstwhile Records.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
An extraordinary combination of culled found and taped fragments juxtaposed against drums, field recordings and mystery noises, sound loops, birdsong, keyboards and emanations of his own throaty drones and voice propelled by hypnotic, ritualistic rhythms balanced on a razor sharp edge.
This is the complete work of Repas Froid; previously released on cd as brief tracks of source material and palette of various sounds. It includes archival and as of yet previously unreleased recordings from the late 1970s and early 1980s, strung together to form two long compositions.
A French musician of Turkish parentage, Ghédalia Tazartès is an uncompromising character who defies categorization. Born 1947 in Paris, is one of France’s most idiosyncratic talents. He has spent over 30 years within musical practice and experimentation, letting his musical work wander from chant to rhythm, from one voice to another. Utilising magnetic tape recorders into a rough collage and loose ethno-instrumental mulch, he paves the way for the electric and the vocal paths, between the muezzin psalmody and the screaming of a rocker. He traces vague landscapes where the mitre of the white clown, the plumes of the sorcerer, the helmet of a cop and Parisian anhydride collide into polyphonic ceremonies.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘Forma II’ is the first collaborative output by Thomas Ankersmit and Valerio Tricoli.
Composed and recorded in Berlin from 2008 to 2010 the music consists of four electroacoustic pieces based largely on analogue synthesizer material and one long-form swarm-like composition for multiple overdubbed saxophones. Additional sounds range from metal foil floating on ultrasonic sound-beams to mechanical clickers recorded in the abandoned radar domes at Teufelsberg. The raw materials have been extensively processed and re-constructed using analogue tape and digital methods. The five pieces shift between sharply detailed blizzards of electronic interference to passages of delicate balance, between calm and turbulence, between stasis and rapid shape-shifting, between multiple virtual spaces and non-spaces.
Thomas Ankersmit is a saxophonist, electronic musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam, who combines abstract, intensely focused acoustic saxophone work with hyper-kinetic analogue synth and computer improvisation. He also creates installation pieces that use sound, infrasound and “modifications to the acoustic characters of spaces” that disrupt the viewer/listener’s perception of the exhibition space and their presence within it. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock. Other recent collaborators have included Kevin Drumm and Borbetomagus.
Valerio Tricoli is a Berlin-based composer, improviser, sound installation artist, producer, sound engineer and curator bridging musique concrète and conceptual forms of sound with a radical interest in how reality, virtuality and memory relate to each other during the acoustic event. He mostly uses analogue electronic devices (reel-to-reel tape recorders, synthesizers, microphones, light effects, ultrasonic speakers). The structure of the setup is ever-changing however, seeking multiple relations between the performers, the device and the space in which the event takes place. He is one of the founders of 3/4HadBeenEliminated and the Bowindo label/collective.
The CD is mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. It is packaged in a pro-press digisleeve jacket which itself is housed in a one-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs, with artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
“One of the most beautifully recorded bits of unpleasantness” – William Bennet (Whitehouse)
Deluxe vinyl issue of one of the most important albums of modern music and quite simply some of the finest computer audio excursions unleashed in recent years. Sun Pandämonium is the third full- length album from Florian Hecker, originally released in CD format on Mego in 2003. Sun Pandämonium also received the Award of Distinction Digital Music at the Prix Ars Electronica – the “International Competition for CyberArts” – the same year.
Striking the listener from many angles with a diverse range of fiercely dynamic electronic scenarios, Hecker utilizes the computer to materialize new compositional strategies, leaving behind standard musical structures and seeking out unusual timbral and textural effects. As one reviewer stated, “This record is electronic music as psilocybin science.” Or, as the American online journal Pitchforkmedia states: “Loud and overwhelming at any volume setting,” Sun Pandämonium contains “the sounds and frequencies not only of diamonds being sharpened, but then being used to etch directly on the lenses of your optical readers. Call him a sick fuck, a genius, or even Mister Antichrist, but this will cleanse the audio palate as it blows your teeth out.”
Florian Hecker’s releases under his own name contain some of the most subtle, nebulous computer music. His extensive discography includes: NEU CD, Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2010; Acid in the Style of David Tudor, Editions Mego, Vienna, 2009; Haswell & Hecker: Blackest Ever Black (Electroacoustic UPIC Recordings), Warner Classics, London, 2007; Recordings for Rephlex, Rephlex, London, 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2010), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2010), Bawag Contemporary, Vienna (2009) and Sadie Coles HQ London (2008).
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 800 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly- lined inner sleeve. It is packaged with six monochrome lacquered sheets which are housed in a silk screened PVC sleeve with the original artwork by Tina Frank & Florian Hecker.
Berlin’s berserk Frieder Butzmann composes an uninterrupted stream of timbre changing and alternating sounds. Taking influence from aspects of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work, albeit certainly far from Serielle Komposition methods, using an entirely different array of equipment and caring less for technical finesse, a raw and sometimes absurd quality emerges. In spite of the dramatic character of the compositions, Butzmann works with the same joy and intuition of when he first heard them almost 40 years ago. Manipulating analogue sounds culled from old electronic recordings that he made at STEIM in Amsterdam back in 1995 (using the infamous ‘Black Box’ modular system), a dadaistic influence shines through in the semi-naive use of electronics, vocals and undefined sound sources – the basic idea is always more important than the perfect realization. The lyrics are excerpts of articles … wie die Zeit vergeht …, Telemusik and Kurzwellen by Stockhausen plus re-writings of lyrics used in the first section of the composer’s concrete and electronic composition Hymnen.
Frieder Butzmann is a veteran German composer, radio play author and performance artist. He has been playing overt eccentricity for quite some time (since the end of the 60s), though he would find his true metier during the NDW zeitgeist, a period during which his work was hugely influential, having been an early member of D.A.F as well as Din-A Testbild. A self-proclaimed “spokesman of the people,” more specifically of the Berlin underground, at a time when electronic music was taking over punk, dada and new wave, replacing teenage angst. Butzmann’s work threw longer and more disturbing shades out of the Berlin behind the wall – not unlike Die Tödliche Doris or Minus Delta T. He has collaborated with artists such as Genesis P. Orridge, Malaria! / Gudrun Gut, Thomas Kapielski and most notable is his ongoing work with Wolfgang Müller. His ‘Vertrauensmann des Volkes,’ debut album often states as the cornerstone of the German experimental and electronic scene.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
Keith Fullerton Whitman bursts back with his first full length record in four years, “Disingenuity b/w Disingenuousness”, comprising of two pieces of forward thinking electronic music with a deep exploration into the analogue sound. Live and studio recordings of the past two years (Cambridge-New York-Toronto) were used as source material, which were then realized into two longform compositions. Using a Musique Concrète approach of deconstructed sounds (ala Pietro Grossi, Costin Miereanu, Basil Kirchin, Dub Taylor, etc) “Disingenuity b/w Disingenuousness” encompasses various reference points from François Bayle, Jacques Lejeune, Richard Pinhas & Heldon to the minimal textures of Basic Channel-Chain reaction axis…
Both tape-collage pieces which derived from an hour-long improvisation based around a setup involving a tape of chance field-recordings (a helicopter, walking on snow, children) bounced to a mono nagra tape machine, which is covered in contact mic’s that translate not just the sound coming from the speakers, but the actual mechanical “interface” of the unit into control voltage & triggers that drive a modular synth that’s processing said audio using the classic electronic music toolkit (i.e. ring modulation, panning VCA’s, filters, etc).
Keith Fullerton Whitman is an American electronic musician who has recorded albums influenced by many genres, including ambient music, drone, electronic, drill and bass, musique concrète and krautrock. He records and performs using many aliases, of which the most familiar is Hrvatski and has been also member in many 90s bands, including El-Ron, The Liver Sadness, Sheket/Trabant, The Finger Lakes and Gai/Jin. He started recording using his own name in 2001, and most of his work recorded today is under that name. He studied computer music at Berklee College of Music, where he was exposed to modern electronic music composition and synthesis. His moniker ASCIII has released music distributed with an academic journal. His studio and live setup usually consists of computer devices and other analogue instruments, such as guitars, ouds and synthesizers. Whitman has released albums on labels such as Planet Mu, Kranky, Carpark Records, No Fun Productions, Root Strata as well on his own Entschuldigen and (now defunct) Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge labels.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas.
Issue of two very important works by this early British sound art composer, compiling one of Trevor Wishart’s first ever pieces ‘Fanfare & Contrapunctus’ (from 1976) and one of his latest, ‘Imago’ (from 2002), documenting a modern approach in composition and an extremely unique progress in sound manipulation and music technology.
‘Fanfare & Contrapunctus’ (1976) “These two short pieces were made at the newly opened electronic studio at the Sydney Conservatorium, before the advent of music computer technology. The source material derives from free improvisations by Trevor Wishart and Martin Mayes using “soft trumpets”, pop-guns, French Horn and virtuoso eating noises, plus recordings of birdsong and other environmental sources.”
‘Imago’ (2002) ‘…the universe in a grain of sand…’ “Imago is a piece of magical sound metamorphosis in which the single ‘clink’ of two whisky glasses gradually metamorphoses into a multitude of other sounds, eventually alluding to the sounds of birdsong, a junkyard gamelan, the ocean and the human voice, but never entirely abandoning its links to this minimal source. The piece was made using sound transformation software written by the composer, available through the Composers Desktop Project, and the original source sound was taken from Jonty Harrison’s ‘et ainsi de suite’.”
Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. He has been very active since the early 1970s in the area of electro-acoustic music (first with tape manipulation, later with computer pieces) and musical theatre pieces. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. His compositional interests deal mainly with the human voice. He has also written two major books, ‘On Sonic Art’ and ‘Audible Design’.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly- lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened PVC sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.
‘Urban Disease’ is the new radical work by Billy Bao, Mattin, Taku Unami, Tim Barnes, Barry Weisblat and Margarida Garcia.
It’s important to remember that before Mattin and anarchism ruined his life, Billy Bao was a bit of a troubadour who accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and warbled wild songs of protest in his native Nigerian patois. This new album, his third on vinyl, finds Billy in a transitional phase toward the end of 2006, before the gaztetxes of Bilbao burrowed into his marrow, before Mattin became the Merle to his G.G., before Billy turned into herpes sore in the mouth of global capitalism.
“Billy doesn’t believe in hypnagogia,” we’re told, “because he always sleeps with one eye open, and when he dreams, all he sees is AIDS denialists, German shepherds, and soldiers disguised as UN peacekeepers.” Before Taku Unami fucked it up, this session found Bao relaxed and in high spirits as he conducted a pickup band of itinerant improvisers through a song-by-song cover of Amon Düül’s Psychedelic Underground. Margarida Garcia lent her astounding skill and highly personal idiom on the electric double-bass, in her hands an instrument with the tension of string on wood and the disruptive potential of a crackle box. Barry Weisblat, meanwhile, teased out a century of drone from a Cornell lunchbox of filament and circuitry. Who better to play drums and percussion than the sainted Tim Barnes? Mattin, thumb and forefinger compulsively pinching or stroking his Hitler mustache after every take, funneled Billy’s malaise through laptop, percussion, and folk instrumentation. There was even, astonishingly, a women’s choir on hand, eerily filling out the atmosphere with wordless vocals and incantations. But this is after, and the result is a fragmentary, extremely loud hippie jam session punctuated by stretches of uneasy silence and scrape.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened PVC sleeve with original artwork by conceptual artist Henry Flynt.
British free jazz phenomenon Evan Parker with electronic and tape noise artist John Wiese in a set of real-time evolving improvisations intended for maximum volume. Vinyl version of the CD released earlier this year, but slightly different containing all the final mixes and edits of the sessions with a new and more intense mastering for the maximum listening experience. C-Section finds density in scarcity – deep, glacial muck bubbles emerge beneath Parker’s inhuman circular breathing, only to plunge into an incessant clatter of industrial landscape.
Evan Parker is a free sax legend, best known for his work with Keith Rowe (AMM), Anthony Braxton, Joe McPhee, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brotzmann (including on his epochal ‘Machine Gun’), Derek Bailey, and for his inspired, individualistic take on musical freedom. Being the UK’s equivalent of Peter Brotzmann means that as far as free jazz saxophonists go, Evan Parker has very few equals. Hugely respected with a rich and varied back catalogue, Parker has graced the cream of the free jazz racks for the last forty years.
John Wiese is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California. His recent works have a focus on installation and multi-channel diffusions, as well as scoring for large ensembles. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering the US, UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He is also a founding member of the concrète grindcore band Sissy Spacek.
The Lp is mastered by Diane Maroney, cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
With “I love you please love me too”, Joseph Hammer continues his journey into playful yet heavily focused idiot-savant infinite psychedelic inertia. Utilising consumer audio technology and 20th century detritus, Hammer lovingly decodes his passion for mid century sci fi and AM radio station beyond all point of recognition like a snakecharmer. Multi-dimensional audio collage techniques to a free form and completely unorthodox plunderphonic hypnosis. Baked devotionals for tape loop minds.
Joseph Hammer, a sound artist from Los Angeles, has actively created experimental works since 1980 as a member of the LAFMS collective. His practice draws on the complexities of the process of listening and playing, reflecting on the role of the audience versus the performer, and uses music as it influences our notion of time, memory and intimacy as the basis for improvisation and abstraction. In various collaborations, solo, and as a founding member of the trio Solid Eye along with several other projects (Joe & Joe, Dinosaurs With Horns, Dimmer, Points of Friction), Hammer has performed widely and is an influential contributor to the Los Angeles underground scene.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
Following on from his Kassettmusik release, ‘Vidöppna Sår’ is an evolution in scum-brow field recordings and voice recorded to mono tape, akin to OU revue recorded on a building site. This record shows the development, as witnessed from his recent live performances of aggressive blur build up and ominous restraint, tape speed replacing effect pedals, going beyond the mere “junk noise” description closer to the original idea of musique concrete, namely altering everyday sounds onto tape into a wholly other vocabulary.
Sewer Election is Dan Johansson, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is most known for his extreme and nasty noise on often limited edition cassettes and obscure vinyl releases on labels such as iDEAL, Troniks, Chondritic Sound, Release the Bats!, Freak Animal, Segerhuva, Gameboy to name a few.. He is a member of the swedish collective Utmarken and lo-fi group Ättestupa. What separates him from the rest of the wall-of-noise-heads is that he is great at creating uncomfort and filth. To experience his stuff is like experiencing pure power and energy through subtle and restrained soundscapes of a world falling into pieces..
The Lp is mastered by Viktor Ottosson and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened PVC sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
“A dinner is a dinner:
Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant) & Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock) bite, chew, smack, gulp and slurp in order to tickle your ears and your digestive system. Instead of decay and corruption, Lanz and Eb.er deliver a true and undiluted composition of this existential act of annihilation.
We believe that, what we are doing, is right, because we are endeavouring to remain true. We want to create no false illusions, no sickly aesthetic or anything beautiful. We want to find things that we are not even looking for and we wish to unite them together to form a new reality.” – Joke Lanz & Rudolf Eb.er, 1991.
This historical document of an early Schimpfluch Gruppe performance is an absolute must for fans of actionistic noise and performance-art.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl and is packaged in a pro-press folded cover including all information and photos which itself is housed in a silk screened PVC sleeve with the text from the original documentation of the performance. Limited art edition to 200 copies.
Words are more often then not the point of departure for many works of Das Synthetische Mischegewebe. The track – titles here stem from ‘El Mundo Alucinante’ de Reinaldo Arenas, which itself is inspired by François-René de Chateaubriand’s ‘Mémoires d’outre-tombe’. It is about time rather than history and about being in history. Having lost the war of time, the only thing that remains to do is being, and here we go, ‘being infiniment exigent’ in it’s means of expression.
DSM began in Berlin armed with a visual education from the early 80’s. They quickly became part of the international industrial cassette scene. Composing for light installations with open-reel machines, cassette recorders, microphone and guitar fuzz boxes with both loud, quiet, occasionally full blast and frequently sneaking in little sounds, all alternating within a few seconds, create an electroacoustic anti-music. With unusual concerts in the underground network as well as in high art institutions and museums (such as Centre Pompidou) and later on with performances for mixed media installation, exhibitions and conferences on cognitive science and neurologic research related topics, the group toured with changing casts since the early 80’s, and participated in international festivals throughout Europe and the US.
Since 1982 they continue to produce vinyls, CD’s and tapes on many international labels:
Discos Esplendor Geometrico, RRRecords, Hypnagogia, Vinyl-on-Demand, Auf Abwegen, Harsh Reality Music, Equation Records, Das Cassetten Combinat and many others.
Live and recording collaborations with musicians such as:
The New Blockaders, Ralf Wehowsky, Frans de Waard, Ios Smolders, Zeitkratzer Ensemble, Artificial Memory Trace, ERG, MSBR, Toy Bizarre, Roel Meelkop and others.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. All artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
Blood Stereo is the duo of Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance. ‘Your Snake Like King’ picks up where last years ‘The Magnetic Headache’ left off, a shape shifting and strange mix of tape collage, free vocals and electro-acoustic mischief. Midnight to 3am recordings fueled by grape and smoke conjour up a blurred narrative, the meaning of which is never quite clear, like weird off camera sounds in some tripped out movie.
“Anal fins tucked in tight behind them, Blood Stereo look like a pair of ill-kempt roosters, fighting over a doughnut. The guy rooster is jibbering in some unknown tongue, turning his face inside out, while shoving the microphone slowly through a hole in his cheek. The girl rooster appears to be pecking at him, either that or she’s picking at various trash they have strewn around the stage. Every time she ducks
her head there is the sound of a jet passing overhead. But when you look up at the sky there is no sign of a comtrail. After a while you think you are starting to get a handle on what they are doing, but the guy falls down and starts doing a spazz
dance so utterly convincing you begin to worry about him. Then the girls starts screaming and it seems as though something is really profoundly wrong. And it is.
But it’s not like they’re in any kind of trouble. They’re just wrong, y’know? So savagely wrong from every angle that it’s really tough to imagine there ‘s anything you could do to really help them. As if they’d even want in. In their masks or out, they sow confusion like wheat.” – Byron Coley
The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
‘Kenrimono’ is a type of pachinko machine for advanced players which gives certain privileges during the course of a high-risk game. This LP is entirely based on field recordings and manipulations made from sounds in pachinko parlors in Kansai area, Japan in 2007. A very intense and meditative atmosphere to be played at maximum volume.
Active since the early 90’s in sound art and image, ILIOS has been exploring the extremes of sound and image derived phenomena. Through constant change in his sound palette touching and surpassing the limits of the sound spectrum he definitely advocates for an anti-career. By 2009 ILIOS has performed more than 170 times in various venues and festivals in Asia, Europe, South and North America, pushing the space and body resistances to a hard test pursuing a state of alert for the human senses. He has done studio and live collaborations with the likes of: Francisco Lopez, Jason Kahn, Keiichiro Shibuya, Mattin, Michael Gendreau, Norbert Möslang, Coti K, Xabier Erkizia, Julien Ottavi, Bernd Schurer, Ralph Steinbruechel, Takehiro Nishide, Tzesne, Thurston Moore amongst many others. Since 1997 he runs Antifrost, a publishing label for sound media with more than 40 works published to date.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
Made up of junk sounds, be they acoustic or electronic, ‘Ploughing Furrows into Rotten Burrows’ is informed by a caustic patience and steady pacing. With a concentrated approach, Mark Durgan makes the space, and even silences between sounds, an integral part of his constructions. He builds up tracks from the beginning with loops, samples or acoustic sounds, then the sound becomes quite automated due to the influence of the feedback generated from the electronic devices.
For the past twenty years, Mark Durgan, known under the Putrefier moniker and his label Birthbiter (1986), is one of the few genuinely curious anomalies operating today. Disassociated with a lot of noise, he is more of a true outsider of this scene, somewhat akin to the older sound poets. Although their realm of art is very different to that of his, comparisons can be made. The lack of concrete documentation, both written and recorded, could be construed as an attempt at mystery, but the reality is that it all comes down to a total ambivalence about having a public persona.
Despite that this is his first official work under his own name, it still bears similarity to the Putrefier concept. From the influences of Power Electronics and especially early nineties Japanese noise (‘Cog Dominance’ cassette, 1987 on Broken Flag), his music has developed into different areas of the avant garde spectrum, such as musique concrete, improvisation and electroacoustic music, demonstrated in one of his latest works done with The New Blockaders. Being able to appreciate other forms of experimentation, he takes noise to a different level.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened PVC sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
‘Provocative Electronics’, first in a series of Electronic Music recordings from Andy Ortmann, is an exploration in analog synthesizers and recording techniques (eight different synthesizers were used on this record). As in the days of Musique Concrete and the beginning years of synthesizer development Ortmann experiments with tones and his own brand of electronic tweakage.
Provocative Electronics is not an homage, but yet another document in the ongoing history of Electronic Music. Focusing on the aspects of 60’s-70’s era electronics, part academic (for fans of the 20th century Greek composer Xenakis, minimalist John Cage or pioneer of Musique Concrete Pierre Schaeffer, Mort Garson, Milton Babbitt, Tom Dissevelt, Ruth White, Delia Derbyshire, Lejaren Hiller, Raymond Scott, Jean Jacques Perrey and Pierre Schaeffer) and part cheesball (aka Mort Garson, Bruce Haack).
Andy Ortmann is also known for his work with the transgressive experimental group Panicsville, acid psych freaks Plastic Crimawave Sound and sole curator of the equally bizarre Nihilist Records label (USA).
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened PVC sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
Delving into the realm of deep listening, transported by way of analog synthesisers, Family Battle Snake weaves an electronic web that cocoons the listener in warm cascading frequencies. Calls to mind classic electronic composers such as Charles Dodge, Eliane Radigue and even a hint of NWW.
Astro is Hiroshi Hasegawa of the legendary and now defunct Japanese noise unit C.C.C.C. Sonic waves of squealing feedback and oscillating waveforms meld with biting distortion in the appropriately titled “Lunatic Luminescence”. Enveloped by haywire electronics and burbling loops & skree, Astro has constructed an impressive piece of modern electronic music of devastating magnitude.
The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs. Artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.
