Review: Oxide Manifesto serves as an audio sketchbook, exploring a unique approach to music creation by blending obsolete machines with experimental composition. The album embraces the imperfections of magnetic tape, such as wow, flutter, wonky pitch, and tape hiss and so, explains the artist, makes the recording equipment as central to the process as the music itself. The method involved quickly composing ideas, deconstructing them onto tape loops, and performing with reel-to-reel machines and effects. The whole thing was recorded in a tiny, temperature-fluctuating studio on Hornsey Road and the final album reflects a collection of sound-art experiments that are structured and fragmented and capture the raw creativity of what was a hugely hands-on process.
Review: Cologne label Magazine have been releasing some fine leftfield offerings from the likes of Barnt, Drums Off Chaos, Wolfgang Voigt and Naum Gabo over the years. Now they present the debut release from Creme de la Deutz, an enigmatic project from unknown sources dealing in the kind of ambience to stick on while you gaze at the stars. Following exhibitions and performances at noted spots like Salon Des Amateurs, this limited edition pressing is hitting the streets and not likely to stick around for long. If you appreciate rich, synth-driven ambience, this album is for you.
Review: You've always been able to hear the West Coast in Monocoastal, but it's particularly present when you shut your eyes after 12 months of lockdown stopping you from visiting the region. Less active L.A., and more observing in Oregon, Fischer's career didn't end with this in 2011 and the multi-disciplinary artist has produced great things since, but the album is certainly one of turning points in terms of reputation and note.
The idea of slowly watching time unfold in un-rushed places is also highly appropriate. Among the washes of tape and the waves of refrain that make up this beautiful, meditative outing, you'll hear takes and half-harmonies from found instruments including a piano and xylophone. Overall, it feels like a place removed from linearity. A liminal masterpiece, if you are that way inclined.
Review: Based in Bristol, UK, experimental musician and vocalist Lucy Gooch is certainly a name to keep an eye on right now. While boasting little by way of discography, this being her debut EP which follows the self released 2018 record, 'Sun', she has all the hallmarks of an established synth-y siren. You heard it here first (possibly). Compris-ing five sumptuous tracks that are pared back but, upon closer inspection, incredibly deep and immersive, elements of Bjork and Imogen Heap are audible in the songs here. Warm notes, sensitive, ethereal vocals and a sense of real passion behind the work itself. The likes of 'Rushing' comes close to a sombre choral mood at times, 'There Is A Space In Between' could stand with the best ambient work, while 'Stalag-mites & Helictites' is a hypnotic journey into the inner mind. Or somewhere near.
Review: Another collaborative effort from the consistently fascinating US ambient kings Past Inside The President, this time with Hendrix - not that one - and Wayne Robert Thomas, whose atmospheric guitar-led work has featured several times on the label before. If the average ambient album has its head in the clouds, this is more grounding, more gamboling in the fields perhaps than floating in the ether, with gentle flute and guitar giving the walls of synth sounds some perspective. That said, the closing track of the four, 'Retract R (Type K)', sizzles away like something by Growing or even Spaceman 3 left to fry in the sun. Magnificent stuff..
Review: .Rhetorical Islands was originally pieced together from Giuseppe Ielasi's work for l'Audible Festival in Paris. An event dedicated to pushing forward thinking, mind-expanding, experimental and just plain strange sounds, his efforts certainly fit in with all of those terms. Presented here as ten standalone tracks, all without name and many without the usual elements we expect from a 'track', this first vinyl pressing of the work is really an extension of the original idea, rather than a time capsule of it. "Isolated sound worlds" is the phrase Ielasi used to describe what's happening here, and it's certainly true that the individual parts stand alone and can each be heard as autonomous. But together they also make a strange kind of sense, complementing, almost feeding into each other, even at the most stark juxtaposition. Ultimately, then, it's about interpretation, making what we choose from the ingredients.
Review: LIMC's Ramp EP is a perplexing thing. Released by Germany's Inch By Inch this year, it sounds like it was born in simpler times, while also being a complex piece of work by anyone's standards. Downbeat? Certainly in terms of tempo, but perhaps not so much when it comes to how you take in the contents, which are designed to keep you hooked rather than play easy on the mind.
IDM? Maybe, there are few genre labels more fitting, although to us it really sounds more like an accomplished, refined, and sophisticated retro-hued video game score looking for a home and finding one not in the colourful on-screen antics of some bright-eyed playable, but the sound systems of forward-thinkers everywhere. A great, if obscure, one to own.
Review: Created and directed by Mike Flanagan, The Midnight Club is a hit original Netflix series with a soundtrack by The Newton Brothers that now gets its own vinyl release thanks to Waxwork Records. It comes across four sides of gatefold orange and purple swirl vinyl and is a tasteful mix of orchestral and synth sounds that are coated in eerie ambient cues packed with emotion and darkness that embody the modo of the film which centers around the stories of eight terminally ill people who all live at the Brightcliffe Home hospice centre.
Review: If you've ever been luck enough to attend the Freerotation music festival than plenty about this remix package will make sense. Not least the interpretation by event co-founder and modular synth hero Steevio, here delivering a remix on vinyl for the first time. Bringing in elements of jazz, ambient, field recordings, dub, house music and - albeit barely audible - subtle shades of tech, it's a sophisticated package that fully buys into the theory of electronic sounds being a form of high art. Running the gamut from the stepping, poised but decidedly free spirited 'Lucid' and Deadbeat's tense, drone-y take on'Sam Gimignano', to the lush keys and white noise of Andrea Cicheki's redo of 'Siegfried 2.0' and Dr Nojoke's beautifully blissed out smoky house, it's as dense as it is accomplished.
Review: The state51 Conspiracy label comes very much correct early on in the New Year with this two-track grey marbled vinyl 12" in a fancy spot-varnished sleeve. It takes the form of two fresh Santaka reworks of original compositions by Rytis Mazulis and avant-garde choir Melos Collective which were first released back in 2020. Santaka, which means "confluence" in Lithuanian, is the coming together of DJ and producer Manfredas and drummer and producer Marijus Aleksa and here they layer up disembodied vocals and dark jazz melodies on 'Ramybe' and then 'Autoportretas' is a textural ambient exploration packed with fascinating sound designs.
Review: .Schneider TM is the multidimensional music project of Dirk Dresselhaus, and over recent years has been increasingly focused on freeform electronic compositions, conceived and constructed in the moment. This improvisation technique is hard to hear, with the producer seemingly capable of crafting these dense soundscapes that feel painstakingly constructed over time and space. Ereignishorizont, or Event Horizon is the latest case in point. Informed by science fiction, ideas around the unknown, dark matter, black holes and such phenomena at the very limits of human understanding, at times it feels like we've stepped through the portal and wound up on the other side of the dimensional scales. Performed using electroacoustic guitars - some of which he made himself - and effects fed into tube amps, taking a lead from modular synthesis, it's powerful, intriguing and, at times, oddly playful.
Die Rebellen Haben Sich In Den Bergen Versteckt (18:32)
Jupiter (18:57)
Review: 'Conny' Schnitzler's name needs to be remembered by more people. Born on the cusp of World War II, he would prove instrumental in the post-war surge of sonic experimentation that took Germany by storm from the 1960s onwards, playing an integral part in West Germany's krautrock movement having already been an early member of seminal band Tangerine Dream and founding father of Kluster. But it's his solo work that really needs more attention. A proponent of the Dusseldorf school - arguably Germany's most important city for popular music in the late-mid-20th Century - in 1974 he released Blau, a bold record comprising two extended tracks, 'Die Rebellion Haben Sich In Den Bergen Versteckt' and 'Jupiter'. One feels like the late night synth soundtrack to rain-soaked city streets. The other as though we've opened the hatch and stepped out into retro outer space. Take from that what you will.
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