Before he could begin work on making the first record as Gold Panda since 2016’s *Good Luck and Do Your Best*, Derwin Dicker had a few artistic pursuits to get out of his system. This is how it often works for the producer from Essex: to find the gold, he forces himself to dig deep. “I made an entirely different record first that I don’t know will ever see the light of day,” Dicker tells Apple Music. “It wasn’t a typical Panda record. I did the Selling record \[2018’s *On Reflection*\] with jas Shaw from Simian Mobile Disco before that, and it was quite like that, quite synthy.” Looking back, Dicker sees making an album that may not ever be released as a process that helped him work his way out of a bout of writer’s block. By the time he got to creating the songs that make up *The Work*, his fourth album under the Gold Panda handle, he could see everything clearly in front of him. “I had to get other music out of me first before I could go back to making Gold Panda stuff,” he says, explaining that this is the sound of him being comfortable as an artist. It’s my saving grace to be like, ‘Well, it sounds like me. I’m not trying to make someone else’s music.” That sound is a mesmerizing one where ambient techno, dusty samples, glitchy grooves, twisted beats, and euphoric bangers harmoniously coalesce. Let Dicker take you on a tour through *The Work*, track by track. **“Swimmer”** “I had all these beatless tracks that I’d been making, which were actually chopped-up sounds from other tracks I’d already made and released. I was swimming, and this one was going around my head when I was underwater doing the breaststroke. I could hear it, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’ve got to finish this.’ I just really liked it as the first thing that came on in the record.” **“The Dream”** “This was another track where I had a loop for ages. I had a demo track done as a stereo take, but it wasn’t right, and I could never be bothered to finish it off. Then, when I got comfortable in making the Gold Panda record again, it all came together. I realized that I had to add more to it rather than just hoping it would end up being finished magically. It spurred me on to record stuff properly. ‘The Dream’ is a continuation of me trying to do hip-hop stuff and then it becoming way too melodic for any rapper to be bothered to rap over it.” **“The Corner”** “I was given this record by a friend, *“Well, Well,” Said the Rocking Chair* by Dean Friedman, and it’s got this funny plasticine \[sculpture\] of him on a rocking chair on the cover. There’s this one line on there: ‘More often than not, I’m down here on the corner.’ I was watching *The Wire* for the third time, and they’re always going on about being on the corner, too. The sample was there, presented itself to me. It usually flows quite naturally from that—I just need to be in the right frame of mind to get it done. I need to be not searching for making a different record altogether.” **“The Want”** “‘The Want’ is my constant obsession with online shopping and buying stuff and always wanting stuff. The idea behind it is the constant searching and wanting, which is quite exhausting, especially if you’re interested in art or music. I don’t know what it is, but the need to have stuff—the need to have the album or to have a book or to have that Super Nintendo game you had when you were younger. There’s all this stuff I think I was obsessed with because I thought it would never be available again, so I’d hoard it. But now we live in a time where people are just churning out stuff.” **“I’ve Felt Better (Than I Do Now)”** “This was to do with depression. When my daughter was born, it was great, but it was also a massive change, and I was taking Sertraline, then feeling like, ‘I think I feel better than I have done for ages. I’m married, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a house. I’m fairly settled. I’m fairly happy career-wise. It’s not perfect, but I get to do my hobby as a job, and I’ve made peace with not being famous or whatever or not wanting to have things that I think maybe I should have at this point in my career.’ It’s kind of a paradox. It’s got a typical Panda-y sound, nestled in between something that is quite upfront and high-tempo for me.” **“Plastic Future”** “‘Plastic Future’ is me thinking, ‘Oh, I want to recycle this little bit of plastic, and I feel really bad if I throw it in the bin, but I realize that any of that stuff feels futile at the moment.’ The title was swimming round my head, and this track has the most distance from previous work, I think. The song titles say where I am in my thought process while making the record. I think a title can be quite guiding. You could title something and after reading the title, you could go, ‘Yeah, I see how you’ve got that,’ but I think that can also be a trick of clever naming.’” **“New Days”** “There’s a convenience store chain in Japan called NewDays—that’s where the title’s from. I made a little drum machine patch in a program called Pure Data, and I had a loop from that. Then it got ported to how I usually make music, with an Akai MPC. ‘New Days’ just felt right. It felt like a fresh start for me. It was nice to have after ‘Plastic Future.’ They blend into each other really well.” **“I Spiral”** “‘I Spiral’ is what I do when I’m overwhelmed. I unravel and spiral into a hole of depression. This and ‘Chrome’ are quite close in terms of texture and style. They were actually made as companion tracks. There’s a book by Curtis Roads called *Microsound*, and when I was making *Lucky Shiner*, the first record, people came up with this term called microsampling or microhouse—a tech-house kind of genre, very small snippets of samples. I’ve always been really into that kind of music. I’ve always been trying to make my drums quite digital and glitchy and have quite organic melodies, organic-sounding samples to go with the vinyl crackle. There’s something nice about the nostalgic and vintage with something very modern and digital.” **“Arima”** “This is another one like ‘Swimmer’ which steals samples from tracks that I’d already made, completely rearranged. ‘Swimmer’ and ‘Arima’ were the last ones to be added to the album and probably the tracks that were actually oldest—I just had to go back and rerecord them in a live way to make them finished and fit with the other stuff. Arima is a place where I was living in Kawasaki, in Japan.” **“Chrome”** “‘Chrome’ is a misspelling of ‘chome,’ the Japanese word of the area where I lived—Arima 2-chome Park. It descends into chaos at the end. It’s got that hip-hop influence, but it isn’t a track you could necessarily rap over. It’s got all the glitches, and it doesn’t do any of the pop stuff. If I was confident in myself, I’d probably make a record that’s entirely like that—something that doesn’t rely on a snipped-up vocal or something. In my head, ‘Chrome’ is the ideal track of what I like about electronic music.” **“Joni’s Room”** “Joni is my eldest daughter, and her bedroom is the nicest room in the house. Every time I’m in there, I feel really calm. This track was originally part of the album that never was, plucked from that. It’s the one that has the least amount of Gold Panda in it; it’s a more synthesizer-led track. It’s a nice ending, and it doesn’t really fit anywhere else in the record. It’s leading onto maybe the next record—it’s a departure from the rest of the tracks in terms of texture.”
Los Angeles producer and artist Nosaj Thing AKA Jason W. Chung returns with his fifth album, Continua - featuring a stellar ensemble cast including HYUKOH, Toro y Moi, Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead), serpentwithfeet, Sam Gendel, Coby Sey, Julianna Barwick, Mike Andrews, Slauson Malone, Pink Siifu, Panda Bear & Eyedress. Nosaj Thing's expertise is in crafting exquisite soundscapes that hold a mirror up to his journey from noise and punk shows at DIY venue The Smell, to his debut sets at Low End Theory, to touring with The xx and The Weeknd. Throughout, he has innovated with a live experiences conceived with Tokyo-based AV savant Daito Manabe. Chung's music carries such visceral humanity it feels like a disservice to refer to the 'mood' which pervades his records. But it's exactly that distinct mood which has made Nosaj Thing such a cult artists across his 16-year-deep discography.
CDs: fullmetalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/phantom-world
"A Sky Without Stars is a reality for anyone looking up in our cities or towns. We barricade ourselves from the skies, from the stars, from the universe and our perspective for the position we hold within it. I wonder how much of an unhealthy impact that has on all of us and if there's something we can do about it. This is one of many things I find my attention being drawn to and my thinking behind the title." Bandcamp purchase of the digital album includes the instrumentals Straight Talker, Everywhere I'll Ever Be, ME vs ME and Heat of the Moon. Exclusive to Bandcamp.
Snoopy is hard to follow up. The same brilliant musicality is lavished on Orange — a combination of unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments — giddily imbued with the dark arts of ritual and seance. But Orange is more gripping, focussed and urgent, more intense and ambitious. Next level. Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense. Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We're deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter. Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover. Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues. Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm. Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It's reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way. Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing 'Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe. Similarly Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water. It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.
In 1990 Ronald Lee Trent Jr. was the teenage creator of Altered States – a raw, futuristic techno-not-techno anthem, which in retrospect was something of a stylistic anomaly for the young artist. Across subsequent years, with time spent in Chicago, New York and Detroit, came the development of his signature sound, and renown as a world class purveyor of deep, soul infused house/garage. This story has already been told, and on casual inspection, the well-worn platitude ‘house music legend’ is an old shoe that still fits. However, in fact, he’s actually so much more, and has been for quite a while. A genuine musician, songwriter, and ‘producer’ in the proper, old-school sense, the artist today has more in common with Quincy Jones than he does your average journeyman DJ track-hack. To those in the know, these broader skills haven’t gone unnoticed, which is why on the highly collaborative, career-topping new LP ‘What Do The Stars Say To You’, it took little persuasion to recruit serious star power. Brazilian royalty Ivan Conti and Alex Malheriros from Azymuth, violin maestro Jean Luc Ponty, ambient hero Gigi Masin, hype band Khruangbin and more performed, whilst NY cornerstone François K provided mastering duties. At various points Ron himself played drums, percussion, keys, synths, piano, guitar and electronics. Harking back to the 70s and 80s boom in adventurous, luxurious albums, WDTSSTY is a love letter to the longplayer, where rich musicality and a liquid smooth, silky flow make seemingly odd genre bedfellows acquiesce harmoniously. Each song its own high-fidelity odyssey, Trent incorporated a broad range of live instruments and electronics into a sophisticated, euphonic whole. Described by him as being “designed for harmonising with spirit, urban life and nature”, this is aural soul food, gently easing you into balmy nights, where everything is alright. Originally wanting to be an architect, Trent’s views his approach to collaboration and music in general as having the same principles. A firm believer in the nourishing qualities of sound, he sees direct parallels between the two disciplines, being as the purpose of good architecture is to improve quality of life. “With WARM, through sound design, I built frameworks for the musicians, who furnished and occupied these structures beautifully, which was a big compliment for me”, he comments. The conditions required for a good collab are more than simply structural though, as Trent expounds, “I’m a huge fan of everyone on the record, especially Jean Luc and Azymuth, who’re part of my DNA. Each track was made with that guest in mind – for example, when I started writing ‘Sphere’, I immediately thought ‘this IS Ponty’. I played the keys in his style, and did a guide violin solo using a synth, which he then re-did, amazingly. ‘Cool Water’ is based around Azymuth themes, so when I sent it to Ivan, he could immediately see himself in the piece; He got what I was going for straight away. For ‘Melt Into You’ I hit up Alex on Instagram, sent him the track, he liked it, and within 24 hours he’d sent back six different bass passes!” “Conversely, Admira began with a sketch sent by Gigi and became something combining Jon Hassell-esque chords and the feel of ‘Aquamarine’ by Carlos Santana, which links back to Masin’s recurrent nautical theme”, he adds. With community, history and the need for racial equality never far from Ron’s mind, ‘Flos Potentia’ translates from Spanish as flower power, but rather than promoting some hippy idyll, instead it refers to plants which drove the slave trade: tobacco, sugar and cotton. Joined by Khruangbin, together they propel Dinosaur L, Hi-Tension and afrobeat into an ethereal, clear-skyed stratosphere. Aside from these esteemed guests, other key influences cited by Trent include ‘Gigolos Get Lonely Too’ by Prince, ‘Beyond’ by Herb Alpert, David Mancuso, Jan Hammer, Tangerine Dream, The Cars, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons Project and pre-Kraftwerk incarnation Organization. A multitude of others are audible too, including George Bension, Vangelis, Loose Ends, Maze, Flora Purim, Weather Report, Atmosphere, Grace Jones, James Mason and Brass Construction Vinyl Tracklist Includes download codes for the François Kervorkian Continuous Mix and full unmixed tracks as MP3 / FLAC / WAV A1. Cool Water feat. Ivan Conti (Azymuth) and Lars Bartkuhn A2. Cycle of Many A3. Admira feat. Gigi Masin A4. Flowers feat. Venecia A5. Melt into you feat. Alex Malheiros (Azymuth) B1. Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tabacco) feat. Khruangbin B2. Sphere feat. Jean-Luc Ponty B3. WARM B4. On my way home B5. What do the stars say to you CD Tracklist 01 Melt into you feat. Alex Malheiros (Azymuth) 02 Cool Water feat. Ivan Conti (Azymuth) and Lars Bartkuhn 03 Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tabacco) feat. Khruangbin 04 The ride 05 Cycle of Many 06 In the summer when we were young 07 Flowers feat. Venecia 08 Sphere feat. Jean-Luc Ponty 09 Admira feat. Gigi Masin 10 Endless Love 11 Rocking You 12 WARM 13 On my way home 14 What do the stars say to you 15 Cool Water Interlude
A collection of eight vignettes constructed via a patchwork sampling process. Out now on Good Morning Tapes. "Sanguine but just the right side of soporific, the vibe dials up echoes of classic balearic bliss crossed with early Terre Thaemlitz in its sound sensitive soulfulness and warmth, washing over yr skin and mind with a classicist balm that’s perfectly in chime with the season. Jazz drums, lissom guitar and synth-flute streaks conjure bright blue skies and cirrus streaks in ‘Dawn Song’, while ‘Two Ones’ doubles the tempo on a swaying ambient jungle flex that also perfuses the hazier hues of ‘Ambergris (Blue)’ and dances around the links between deep house, ambient and D&B like Terre Thaemlitz’s ambient beauty ‘Tranquilliser’ (1994) in the lilting congas of ‘Asp’, caressing strums of ‘Lisle’, and the piano-led ambient blues of ‘Sunchoke. The last gasp of summer, right here." -Boomkat Cassette copies available via the Good Morning Tapes bandcamp: goodmorningtapes.bandcamp.com/merch/gi-gi-sunchoke-cassette-album GMT054
On 2021’s *Memoryland*, CFCF reckoned with his youth by channeling the ’90s through IDM, ambient drum’n’bass, breakbeat trance, and even gothic arena-rock. With *Memoryland Enhanced*, the Montreal producer (a.k.a. Mike Silver) repackages that record with a companion disc that apes the era’s sprawling remix albums. “Self Service 1999 (Instupendo Remix)” is a glitched-out interpretation of the original’s sleek French house. DJ Lostboi (a.k.a. ambient producer Malibu) renders the widescreen electronic pop of “Heaven” beatless and brooding. And Giraffage and Ryan Hemsworth’s duo Bodysync flip the 2-steppy “After the After” into a playful UK garage pastiche. This being CFCF, there are in-jokes to be deciphered: The Cure homage “Punksong” becomes the My Bloody Valentine tribute “Indiesong.” Disc two, meanwhile, reprises *Memoryland* in its entirety, making it even easier to disappear completely into CFCF’s enveloping trip into the past.
New INDEX:Records transmission comes courtesy of Texan vibist Gi Gi. Trodding his own path of introspective, nu-age-infused ambient scapes and trip-hop-laced downtempo divagations, Gi Gi eases us in a distinctively soothing headspace. A self-driven, immersive audio bubble engineering a polychromatic mix of organic field-recording, exotic dub shades, lushly textured envelopes and smooth loungey jazz accents. From the A1, “The Lower”, a steady-churning combo of retro-stepping UK dynamics, 90s-schooled atmospheric dub and low-slung, LA beat-style swagger, down to the verbed-out summer pop of “Sinews” featuring Hysterical Love Project, Gi Gi puts on a riveting synthesis of seemingly distant varietals. On “Maiolica”, the mystique-imbued power of drums and shadowiness of the bass collides with the faux-organic vibrancy of singing robot birds; “Pyxis Glint” shows off an ambiguously feverish ASMR-like temper with its tightly woven web of chimey Andean melody and straight out Rephlex-fashioned escapism, whereas “Palm Slick” heads for further exhilarating heights through Hassellian brass flights a la “Blues Nile" and breaksy off-piste, all set at buckling a few knees along the way. A full-fledged, soulful trip-hop number disguised in matching neo-vintage camo, “Lilted Song” treats us to a fulfilling blend of bleached pads and FX-laden slo-mo percussions swaying with a strong couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude. Gi Gi coming up with the mind trip.
The debut album from Aether Flux (Jacob Paddison) is the quintessential soundtrack to a dark and hazy rainy night in a quiet metropolis More releases from Cyan Sun Records: cyansunrecords.bandcamp.com
On their 2019 album, *The Weight*, the Amsterdam electronic duo Weval channeled the fuzzy, psychedelic soundscapes of the 1970s, complete with hypnotic vocals, organ hooks, and syncopated grooves. The LP was geared more toward headphone listening than the club, so when it came time to write 2022’s *Time Goes*, Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers were eager to kick things up a notch. “It was the middle of the pandemic, and we were thinking about what playing live meant for us,” Coolen tells Apple Music. “Like, if we can ever play again, what would we want to play?” Those existential conversations led the pair to revisit some of their happiest touring memories—shows when they really connected with the audience and could feel themselves connecting with each other, too. “Most of the time, it’s when you’re all dancing together,” Albers says. “That was always the most beautiful part.” On this tight, four-track EP, Coolen says their mission was “just to have a huge amount of fun.” For the two self-described studio nerds, this meant digging back into the sounds of their childhood—to hip-hop innovators like DJ Shadow and RJD2, for example—and trying to recreate those beats without using samples. “We really wanted to record those beats ourselves. Most of the records we grew up on used samples from the ’60s and ’70s. But we were like, ‘How do you actually record that from zero?’” Read more about how they achieved it in our track-by-track interview below. **“All Alone”** Merijn Scholte Albers: “This track was made two weeks after a breakup \[and is about\] being alone again. We wanted to make a track that sounds like a hug. It’s mainly about feeling less lonely—about knowing you aren’t the only one with this feeling, especially at this time.” **“Time Goes”** Harm Coolen: “We wanted to make a track inspired by trip-hop and big beat of the late ’90s: DJ Shadow, RJD2, Amon Tobin, even *The Matrix* soundtrack, which was actually the first record I ever bought. It was a whole new world of beatmaking for us. So, with this project, we started with asking, ‘How can we record drums that sound like those records *without* using samples?’ In this case, we had our friend come by to play the drums, and it took hundreds, maybe even thousands of takes to get it right. We had to experiment with all sorts of arrangements in the studio—the number of drums, the number of microphones, the location of the microphones, the drumming technique, and so on—before finally getting close to the samples we wanted to imitate.” **“Minute by Minute”** MSA: “The inspiration for this track was the beginning of Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy.’ We always wanted to have the intro chords as a whole track.” **“March On”** HC: “Since the beginning of the pandemic, Merijn has been trying to learn the drums. After a lot of jam sessions, he made an iPhone recording to see how bad his skills were at that moment, and he found an old loop that actually didn’t sound *that* bad. It sounded usable. We made a whole song around that one wild drum take, which more or less reflected the title and sounded like marching. It’s kind of like our ‘let’s go wild’ track.”
Oliver Johnson aka Dorian Concept will release his new album “What We Do For Others” on 28th October on Brainfeeder Records. It’s the third studio album by the Austrian producer and synthesizer savant, famed for his singular, beautifully detailed sonic tapestries and wild, utterly joyful live keyboard jam videos. “What We Do For Others” is a relaxed, quietly confident and intimate record, founded on delightfully loose arrangements, feedbacked soundscapes and blessed with snatches of his own cryptic vocals that are presented more as additional instrumentation rather than lyrical phrases. All the elements and layers were recorded without interruptions and deliberately not edited. “I think that's why this record has something of a ‘band sound’” says Oliver. “It's me playing all kinds of different key-instruments, singing and using fx-units to create these freeform compositions.” The title came to Oliver in a dream and stuck with him. “One thing I often find interesting about my creative process is that when I believe to be making something that others could like, it tends to not really connect with people,” he says. “Whereas when I get to that special place and just work from my gut – the music tends to often speak to the outside world naturally.” Johnson says that he tried questioning his internal voice of self-judgement and temper his constant urge for improvement during the making of the album. “I feel like for me as a musician - up until now I've always had this drive to do things 'properly' - to somehow strive for perfection.” Oliver explains. “But this is an album about me letting go of that urge – about understanding that there's something magical that happens in these first takes we often call drafts... a spirit is captured. And once you try to re-record it, the essence of the idea gets lost. So in a way I wanted to see how little ‘control’ I could exert on the music whilst recording it... to almost let the music make itself.” Based in Vienna, Johnson has nevertheless been a stalwart of the experimental jazz/electronic scene that has flourished and diversified in the orbit of Brainfeeder’s figurehead Flying Lotus. With early releases on Kindred Spirits imprint Nod Navigators and Affine Records, Johnson played Brainfeeder’s earliest international label nights in 2009 (Off-Sonar in Barcelona and the infamous Hearn Street Car Park session in London) forming a strong family bond with the Brainfeeder crew founded on a mutual love of freakazoid electronic-jazz fusion. Oliver contributed production to Thundercat’s “The Golden Age of Apocalypse”, played keys on Flying Lotus’s seminal album “Cosmogramma” and has toured in the live bands of both FlyLo and The Cinematic Orchestra. He also contributed keys on MF DOOM's "lunchbreak" which was produced by FlyLo and Thundercat. Most recently he collaborated with Kenny Beats on his debut album “Louie”, playing keys on three tracks, and partnered with another don of future-facing electronics – Mark Pritchard – to compose music for Damien Jalet's contemporary dance performance "Kites" at the Gotheborg Operan. In 2020 Oliver worked with one of the world’s leading ensembles for contemporary music – Klangforum Wien – composing and performing a piece called “Hyperopia” at TRANSART Festival in Austria. The album artwork is by the Austrian artist Kurt Neuhofer with Oliver himself taking on video production duties armed with a vintage 90s video mixer and inspired by analogue video art and the world of home movie entertainment. “To an extent it’s about me re-connecting with my teenage self – but with a certain scepticism towards the sentimental and nostalgic energies that come up when you look back,” he explains. “I like that Carl Jung once said that ‘sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality’. I wanted the videos to capture this feeling of unease you can have towards your own past.” Johnson released his debut album “Joined Ends” (2014) on Ninja Tune, before landing on Brainfeeder in 2018 to share “The Nature of Imitation”: an album of dizzying swells, cacophonous breakdowns and formidable rhythms with Pitchfork gushing “Dorian Concept creates something that 70s and 80s electro-funk auteurs like Kraftwerk, George Clinton, and Roger Troutman hinted at: computer music that uncannily imitates the funk, rather than just faking it.” “What We Do For Others” is released on 28th October on Brainfeeder Records.
Love Reversed is a thrilling sophomore album by Vaal that will be released 4th November on Bedouin, with the single 'Song Zero‘ on 7th October. Eliot Sumner started producing electronic music under the guise of Vaal in 2012. The idea behind the moniker was to be anonymous and for the music to speak entirely for itself. ‘Matteo of Tale of Us got in touch after my second self release Cine. They signed me as a Life and Death and Afterlife artist. I worked with them for 5 years producing records such as Wander To Hell, Concor EP and Monument.‘ says Vaal on how they started to carve their way in electronic music. ‘I decided to start another label of my own, Pale Blue Dot and debuted my first album as Vaal named Nosferatu. The album was Mixmag’s album of the month in 2019 and the music video for song ‘Blue Eyes‘, directed by Sergei Rostropovich was very well received.‘ Love Reversed is a consistent cinematic journey. The album sees emotional depths underway layered with breaks and vocals brought to the front resulting in charged and on occasions laid back instrumental narrations. Love Reversed digs deep and uses its polarities to its functional benefit, calling forth both intensity and dreamy sonical restraint. Vaal on how the collaboration with Bedouin started for Love Reversed: ‘I have been a fan of Bedouin Records for a long time and last year I bought a cap from their merch site, I accidentally entered the wrong post address and I got in touch with label boss Salem who wrote back to me. We started a conversation and went from there. I am very happy to be working with the label on my current album Love Reversed. The video for first single ‘Song Zero’ is directed by childhood friend Finn Constantine and David Spence aka Constantine//Spence. The album picks up where Nosferatu left off. More noise, more guitars, and more emotions.
Picking up the baton from both the richly cinematic, stakeout music of his two-part 2020 series with Black Acre and the grunge-y ‘90s punk of recent curveball EP, ‘Deft 1s’, Mysterious Trax 001 only heightens Commodo’s mystique. Across five tracks, he traces everything from Fear And Loathing- esque psychedelia (‘cclarity’) to dark, oddball saloon jazz (‘Widebody’) and eerie, garage-rock funeral marches (‘V8 Hearse’) on a record built to showcase the tones, textures and moods he’s worked into the fabric of his music for the past two-and-a-half years.
»Music for Shared Rooms« is B. Fleischmann’s eleventh solo album and his first since 2018. It is also not an album, or at least not in the conventional sense of the word. These 16 instrumental pieces provide a kaleidoscopic glimpse of a forward-thinking musician at home in many different musical worlds, including experimental and abstract music, pop and more classically-minded compositional forms. These pieces were culled from an archive of roughly 600 compositions for theatre pieces and films written throughout the past twelve years. The Österreichischer Filmpreis-awarded composer, however, aimed for more than simply documenting his extensive work in and with different media. To do so, he edited and re-mixed the individual recordings for this release, taking them out of their contexts and reworking them for an audience who can experience them in a different setting. »Music for Shared Rooms« makes it possible for its listeners to engage with the sounds and to fill the spaces they open up with their own imagination. Roughly speaking, music for theatre or film can serve two functions: it either takes the lead, or underscores what is happening on stage or screen. The marvelous thing about these pieces is that they manage to do both. Fleischmann’s work as a prolific producer has always drawn on contrasts, at times combining pop sentiment with rigid experimentation, the seemingly naive with the intricate and complex. This approach also marks the tracks collected here: bringing together acoustic elements and electronic sounds, at times working with conventional structures but always de- and re-contextualising them, Fleischmann constructs a vivid dramaturgy out of discrete singular compositions, letting them interact across the record. Take, for example, the opener »Träumerei« and the following »Brenne«: after the soothing acoustic sounds of the former, the latter quickly picks up speed with hard-hitting drum machine rhythms. It’s a stark contrast sonically and stylistically, however both tracks are tied together by a certain harmonic sensibility. This sort of dramaturgical interconnectedness of varied musical materials is the thread that runs through »Music for Shared Rooms«. A droney piece for string instruments like »Sehnsucht« is followed by a trip-hop beat, before »Schock« lives up to its title with skittering beats and piercing high frequencies. The differences between the pieces may be striking, but the progression from one to the other is subtle. It goes on like this through different moods and tempos. There’s soothing-yet-eerie piano pieces like the »Für Elise«-inspired »Der Lärmkrieg«, gentle house grooves, joyful synthesizer excursions and, finally, »Die Erde ist mir fremd geworden«, a collage of abstract textures and concrete sounds. All these pieces create distinct situations through the juxtaposition of diverse musical elements, but are also bound together by a single vision. Writing music for theatre pieces or film requires a composer and his pieces to engage with people and their movements in space, which is exactly what Fleischmann offers on this record. He breaks down the fourth wall and invites his listeners into his world, a wide-ranging musical panorama. »Music for Shared Rooms« is indeed not an album in the conventional sense of the word, but more like a photo album in which each page opens up a new space to get lost in; recreates different scenes in which you can immerse yourself. These are shared rooms indeed.
𝑊𝑒𝑙𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒, 𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟. 𝐷𝑖𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑡𝘩𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑔𝑚 𝑠𝘩𝑖𝑓𝑡? 𝑂𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑑𝑒 — 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝐹𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡𝘩𝑎𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑘𝑒𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑠𝑦𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦. 𝑊𝑖𝑡𝘩 𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑛 𝘩𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑠 𝑡𝘩𝑒 𝑘𝑒𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒. 𝑇𝘩𝑒 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑢𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑙𝑜𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟 𝘩𝑒𝑟𝑒, 𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑢𝑠 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑟𝑎 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝘩𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐺𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑛 𝑒𝑎𝑐𝘩 𝑑𝑎𝑦. 𝑅𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟: 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝘩𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝘩𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑡𝘩𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑡𝘩𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒. 𝑊𝑒𝑙𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑑𝑒. ©Hello Meteor and Evergreen Prefecture, 2022
