The Quietus Albums of the Year 2018

D.C. grindcore titans Pig Destroyer—like Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the enigmatic troupe with whom they’ve shared multiple members over the years—have always excelled at finding beauty in brutality. *Head Cage*, their multilayered, ambitious sixth album, keeps in that vein—J.R. Hayes’ dark lyrics, set against aggressive, off-kilter riffs and thunderous blast beats, use poetry as a weapon. This LP is also a more of a collaborative effort than usual: ANb bassist John Jarvis makes his recorded debut with the band (resulting in the first bass to feature on a Pig Destroyer album), and significantly thickens the overall sound. Additionally, ANb vocalists Richard Johnson and Kat Katz show up (on the pummeling hardcore anthem “Army of Cops” and the short, nasty blast “Terminal Itch,” respectively), while Jason Hodges (Suppression, Brown Piss, Bermuda Triangles) joins in on the thrashy, self-explanatory “The Adventures of Jason and Jr.”

After six long, harsh years of absence, the mighty PIG DESTROYER have reassembled to eradicate eardrums and split skulls with their highly anticipated sixth full-length opus, entitled Head Cage (named after a grisly medieval torture device). A visceral vortex of animalistic rage and extreme sonic brilliance, Head Cage is a true work of extreme metal art, that with the addition of a bass player, is hands down their most dynamic and heaviest recording to date. Across twelve tracks, PIG DESTROYER weave together harrowing tales of philosophical dualities, touching on mortality and depression, fear and violence, and the darkest complexities of the human condition, all told through the distorted lens of delightfully transgressive vocalist/lyricist JR Hayes. Musically, the band continues to push the boundaries of metal, grindcore, noise and punk, ramping up the intensity and leaving you bludgeoned in a state of utter shock, all in less than 33 minutes. Head Cage was recorded by guitarist Scott Hull at Visceral Sound Studios, mixed and mastered by Will Putney (Exhumed, Every Time I Die, Body Count) and features striking artwork by Mark McCoy (Full of Hell, Nothing) along with guest vocal appearances by Agoraphobic Nosebleed's Richard Johnson and Kat Katz plus Full Of Hell's Dylan Walker. PLAY AT MAXIMUM VOLUME!

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. 

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” the most chantable song of 2017, introduced the Bronx MC’s lively around-the-way-girl persona to the world. Her debut album, *Invasion of Privacy*, reveals more of Cardi\'s layers, the MC leaning forcefully into her many influences. “I Like It,” featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin, is a nod to her Afro-Caribbean roots, while “Bickenhead” reimagines Project Pat’s battle-of-the-sexes classic “Chickenhead” as a hustler’s anthem. There are lyrical winks at NYC culture (“Flexing on b\*tches as hard as I can/Eating halal, driving a Lam”), but Cardi also hits on universal moments, like going back and forth with a lover (“Ring”) and reckoning with infidelity (“Thru Your Phone”).

"One of the most Hyped Artists operating within the fringes of contemporary Jazz & Experimental Electronica right now" -Bleep "...where the histories of free jazz, early experimental composition, and leftfield club music all cook down together" - Pitchfork 'Ravishing, dramatic, and rambunctious" -Boomkat **** -The Guardian London based artist Ben Vince is best known for his minimal & transcendent saxophone soundscapes. With ‘Assimilation’ we find Ben treading new ground with his recorded output, moving away from the limitations of solo Saxophone, instead embracing collaboration and communication to forge new paths. Whilst Vince’s Sax work still undeniably holds ‘Assimilation’ together, the new territories explored by working with an artistically diverse range of collaborators allows new life and influence to flow through Ben’s work. The album features collaborations with Micachu (Mica Levi), Rupert Clervaux, Merlin Nova, Valentina Magaletti, and Cam Deas. Ben Vince has also recently collaborated on a 12” with Joy O (forthcoming on Hessle Audio). Ben explains 'Assimilation' as being a “demotion from creator to vector, being bounced off by different forces, whilst also allowing the wilder elements of my playing to flourish, which I could previously only get to as band member in other endeavours I’m involved in - Housewives (Rocket Recordings) or Data Quack (with Charles Hayward).“ ‘Assimilation’ dives right in with Vince assuming downtown skronk, perfectly complementing the commanding no-wave theatrical vocal prowess of Merlin Nova. ‘Alive & Ready’ serves as an avant-garde energy blast, launching us into orbit. Ben’s next spatial movement glides towards ‘What I can see’, a collaboration with Mica Levi, here donning her Micachu moniker to deliver her signature downcast experimental pop dexterity across Vince’s beautifully treated sax scape. The results are a moving, considered, crafted piece which undeniably nods towards Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, encompassing that same timeless, ethereal beauty. Mica and Ben’s moment of longing melancholy is short lived, as we’re shuffled along to ‘Sensory Crossing’, a collaboration with Rupert Clervaux in which he evidences his groundings in Jazz percussion, experimental electronics, and deep interest in ethnomusicology - further exploring and expanding on the basin navigated during his collaborative album with Beatrice Dillon ‘Studies I-XVII for Samplers and Percussion’ to create a blanket of bubbling, wired, frenzied yet fluid motorik groove. Vince’s improvisation here remains restrained throughout, conversing with Rupert’s movements rather than attempting to shadow or overshadow them, an idea which perhaps is cemented in his exclamation that “Collaboration, and also the wider idea of 'communicating' in general, is, for me, assimilating the other, becoming the other, at least temporarily, to forge a point of connection. When we are able to let down our barriers, let ourselves affect and be affected, we can truly communicate.” ‘Tower of Cells’, another percussion led collaboration features drummer Valentina Magaletti (Editions Mego), and sonic explorer Cam Deas (Death of Rave). Magaletti’s immersive, hypnotic, & deep styling holds firm Deas’ synth transmissions & Vince’s wandering, brooding, layered sax drone across 10 minutes of truly refreshing alien Jazz – Think the Necks mixed by Scientist on this one. ‘Assimilation’ rolls us out in fine style with Vince riding solo. Fluttering tonal Sax lines build and build before become interspersed with layers of fourth world styled exotic flurries. Held together by a single perpetual hypnotic bass thud ‘Assimilation’ brings to mind the similarly exotic experimental works of Muslimgauze & Jon Hassell. This final track essentially serves as a space for some reflection, joyously winding down a journey which manages to truly make the ethereal and the intense run alongside each other in perfect harmony.

An ethereal, unresolved presence fading into the stereo field, Hilja breathes into life with a haunted synth line and self-sampling vocal hook that instantly creates an enchanted space. Hilja is the debut album by Glasgow-based musician Maria Rossi aka Cucina Povera. Named after a style of southern Italian traditional cooking associated with precarity and making-do, a philosophy of simplicity and stoicism that applies perfectly to the spare but beautiful music Rossi experiments with. Hilja’s marriage of minimal synth, field recordings and the hymnal dexterity of Rossi’s vocal performances creates a new language, sometimes literally, to be spoken in some mythological Fourth World we’ve yet to create. Originally from Finland, Rossi brings an acute sense of space, surroundings, and practicality to her working practice, with each composition often relying on a limited sound palette to create deeply affecting messages which transcend language. Cucina Povera’s power is to communicate purely, often down to the solo-choir nature of Rossi’s multi-layered voice, an achingly beautiful instrument which has seems to have an innate spirituality in its grain. The tension between the means and the end is at the heart of Cucina Povera, the invocation of a kind of secular spirituality at times using nothing but Rossi’s voice. Indeed there’s almost a Dogme-like purity to the arrangements: Elektra is a soothing song based around the lapping waves of Rossi’s wordless backing vocals and a simple field recording of stones knocked together. Kehoitus is completely a cappella, a haunted fairytale told in glossolalia, evoking a quasi-religious experience with very little. For music often minimal and simple there’s a boldness that belies Hilja’s status as a debut. Rossi allows each word, each sound and rhythm to exist in its own space, finding its own relationship with its surroundings. Mesikämmenen Veisu is perhaps the most ecclesiastical sounding composition here; burbling water trickles below a virtuoso vocal, with incredible arrangements in several registers undulating above. A meditation to relieve hunger and restriction, it’s a perfect summing up of Hilja, a music ambient but completely earthed, finding enchantment in what you have to hand, the realism of magic, the magic of realism.

Big Joanie are Stephanie Phillips (singer/guitarist), Estella Adeyeri (bass) and Chardine Taylor-Stone (drums). The band formed in 2013 and released their first EP ‘Sistah Punk’ in 2014 and the single ‘Crooked Room’ in 2016. As part of London’s thriving DIY punk scene Big Joanie have played with locals Shopping; toured with US punks Downtown Boys; and Dutch Punk band The Ex; and performed at the first UK Afropunk festival. Inspired by The Ronettes, Nirvana, Breeders and Jesus and Mary Chain, Big Joanie have described themselves as being “similar to The Ronettes filtered through ’80s DIY and Riot Grrrl with a sprinkling of dashikis.” Big Joanie recorded ‘Sistahs’ over several sessions from November 2017 to January 2018 at Hermitage Works Studio with producer Margo Broom. The album title derives from the band’s belief in sisterhood and female friendship. One of the main reasons for coming together was to create an atmosphere to be “completely ourselves as black women and discover what was possible to realise in those spaces.” The album cover features Steph’s mum Joan, whom the band is named after, and her aunt on holiday in Wales. Outside of the band all three members are involved in communitarian activities whether running the festival for punks of colour Decolonise Fest, volunteering at Girls Rock Camp, or leading the Stop Rainbow Racism campaign which works to stop racist performances in LGBT venues. The Daydream Library Series of records and tapes is the independent house label of Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and Eva Prinz’s publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library.

*Bad Witch* was first envisioned as the final installment in an EP trilogy, following 2016’s *Not the Actual Events* and 2017’s *Add Violence*. But, wary of falling into patterns of musical predictability, Trent Reznor scrapped the concept, and instead released the project as NIN’s ninth, and shortest, full album. It feels like pure experimentation—a direct rebuttal to that sameness he was worried about. It alternates between anxious beats, jarring vocals (“Ahead of Ourselves”), and intriguing ambience (“I’m Not from This World”), clearly influenced by Reznor’s masterful score compositions for films including *The Social Network* and *Gone Girl*.

Rarely does a debut release come with such a powerful impact as this, the self titled recording by AJA. Maximal in approach, AJA deploys rhythmic noise, bomb heavy drum machine, convolving vocal utterance and a dedicated hell-scape of field recordings, abrupt sound design and blistering drone. These recordings feel expelled rather than composed, a lashing of energy captured. The unhinged nature of her recorded work is complimented in what are soon becoming legendary live performances wherein the AJA experience is fully realised. As a collaborator with designer LU LA LOOP, AJA’s sounds have bruised the runway of Berlin Alternative Fashion Week. Her work within the LGBTQ community running workshops in sound art and as an advocate of promoting and increasing the presence of women in electronic music, has seen her work carry throughout Europe and more recently to Brazil. It is in within the context of transgressive art, sexual identity/ politic and grass roots teaching that AJA’s work is elevated into a neo-punk. The self-titled Opal Tapes release opens with the swaggering, drunken lurch of “Rattles”. Claustrophobically building toward release but never achieving, AJA’s voice dominates the track in an almost wordless epiphany which is re-digested by digital bacterium. “Charge” resonates in golden tone as pylon-heavy drones fry away above, the beat, still present; remains leaden, dragging it’s weight forward. “Sweat Pearls” is arrhythmic and paranoid, stuttering kick patterns charge out draped in psychotic wailing. The A side closes out with “XLR”, a mixed resolution of glorious sound design, crunching and clunking like ancient calculators while AJA’s voice soars above. “Tuck It, Tape It” offers minute respite before the immense energy of the B side begins it’s mission to excoriate. Breathlessly oscillating between high speed industrial ache and rubbered up cleaving, the track pushes toward palpitating levels of intensity. “Black Stain” gutturally digests to follow up, textured vocals push rich drones along while grim MS-20 sits low and stern rumbling the track forward. High energy reigns back in for closer “Marbles”. A seven minute flex over a delicate ambient backdrop which climbs up and over into a full on trance denial. AJA is cementing her place at the front of confrontational, psycho-visceral, truly new music. Opal Tapes are enormously proud to work with her on this full debut release. Her previous work can be heard on Perc’s album “Bitter Music” (track title “Spit”) and on the recent Opal Tapes compilation “The Harvest Of A Quiet Eye”.

With each release, the duo of Lee Buford and Chip King continue to defy the constraints of what it means to be a “heavy” band, seamlessly combining composition or production approaches from hip hop, pop, classical, as well as rock and electronica resulting in a rich and utterly singular sound. Equally at home on festival stages, art spaces, or in DIY basements, they transcend musical boundaries. Their ambitious creativity shapes their bleak worldview into propulsive, affecting, and even danceable music often drenched in distortion. On I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer The Body challenged themselves again by turning their compositional approach on its head, choosing to build the record on their own samples rather than recording the basic tracks of drums and guitars and processing those. The results carry the listener towards the brink of emotional and musical extremes. I Have Fought Against It… conjures the sublime from an unexpected and incomparable variety of sounds. The Body are known for their intense, abrasive live shows, whose waves of dissonance create an abiding dread or an overwhelming sense of terror. They create a volume of sound almost unfathomable from a duo and are unaffected by instrument choice: guitar and drums, or keyboard and synthesizers. Inventive producers, the duo expand their recorded sound palate with regular contributions from the likes of Chrissy Wolpert (Assembly of Light Choir), and Ben Eberle (Sandworm), arranged with help of longtime engineers Seth Manchester and Keith Souza (Machines With Magnets). Wolpert’s ethereal calls and Eberle’s vicious growl are augmented by Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter, whose impassioned voice features on the viscerally emotional “Nothing Stirs.” On “Sickly Heart Of Sand,” vocal tradeoffs between King and Hayter’s are punctuated with the howls of Uniform’s Michael Berdan. With The Body’s keen sense of balance, the ferociousness of these extreme performances are underpinned by the elegance of string swells and pensive, even melodies from a lone piano. For The Body, any source of inspiration is fair game to achieve their distinct atmosphere of unbearable dread, pain, and sadness. “Partly Alive” places rolling drum figures, commonly found in pop, and transforms them with a backdrop of horns, skittering synthetic hi hats, and pitched feedback. The oppressive groove of “An Urn” pulls beat arrangement and melodic ideas from disparate electronic influences. Their eclectic sampling choices are both musical and literary from singjay star Eek-A-Mouse to a reading of Bohumil Hrabal to the Clarice Lispector quote on the album’s artwork and beyond. The album title, an excerpt of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter, is an apt moniker for the pervasive themes of loss, desperation and loneliness throughout. Carefully selected samples and literary references bolster the album’s emotional heft. I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer proves how truly adventurous and diverse a creative force The Body has become. The Body continue to push the boundaries and definition of what is heavy music, their ingenuity unparalleled.

Based in London, Manni Dee is held in high esteem by many for his spotless production and relentless DJ sets. The gleaming rendition of Manni's creative vision stuns. He knows sounds inside-out, making his studio a favorite stop for many to receive Manni’s expertise. The production of 'The Residue’ was inspired by the city of London and its general living conditions. More particularly, how social cleansing, inequality and the political situation generally - and on a holistic scale - informs internal and external locus of control. 'The Residue’ is disconsolate, and with such heart-wrenching tracks as “In Communal Solitude”, “Vicarious Living” or “Submit. Breathe.” or the mutinous “At Mercy of the Muse” and “Paroxysm” Manni Dee clearly cuts out his insurgent statement.

Seven is the magic number. What’s more, this is about more than the number of days in the week or continents in the world - psychologists have theorised that the human memory’s ability to calibrate information on a short term basis is mostly limited to a sequence of this length. Thus, it seems strangely fitting that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - the Newcastle-based maximalists whose riffs, raw power and rancour have blazed a trail across the darker quarters of the underground in the last five years, have made a second album in King Of Cowards which does its damnedest to take consciousness to its very limits. Moreover, another notable seven is dealt with here - that of the deadly sins. As vocalist and synth player Matt Baty notes “In terms of how the theme came together I’d relate it to throwing paint at a canvas in a really physical and subconscious way, then stepping back to analyse it and seeing it all as one piece. It wasn’t until then that I saw there was this continual thread of sin and guilt in the lyrics throughout the album. For a long time I’ve questioned how and where guilt can be used as a form of oppression... When can guilt be converted into positive action? After typing all of the lyrics up I realised I’d unwittingly referenced every one of the seven deadly sins throughout the album. That’s the fire and brimstone Catholic teachings I picked up at school coming into play there!” The period since Pigs’ Rocket Recordings 2017 debut Feed The Rats - a mighty tsunami of rancorous riffage and unholy abjection that wowed critics and wreckheads alike - has seen the band build on their incendiary live reputation far and wide, from the sweatiest of UK fleapits to illustrious festivals like Roskilde. Perhaps the most relentlessly head-caving outfit of an alarmingly fertile scene operating in Newcastle at present, the band have all been busying themselves in a variety of activities, with Baty running Box Records (home of underground luminaries like Lower Slaughter, Casual Nun and Terminal Cheesecake) and both himself and bassist John-Michael Hedley playing in Richard Dawson’s band - indeed Dawson himself guests on King Of Cowards, both on synth and as part of a vocal ensemble on the opening “GNT” - moreover, guitarist Sam Grant has been working hard on a new incarnation of Blank Studios, which began its life with the recording of this very album. This opus sees the band entering a new phase as a sleeker yet still more dangerous swineherd, with ex-Gnod and Queer’d Science drummer Chris Morley joining the ranks and a new approach being taken to its creation. The Iggy-esque drive to dementia, Sabbath-esque squalor and Motörhead-style dirt may still be present and correct yet the songs are leaner, the longdrawn-out riff-fests sharpened into addictive hammer blows and the nihilistic dirges of yore alchemically transformed into an uplifting and inviting barrage of hedonistic abandon. Against all odds, the writing of this record entailed encounters with actual pigs. “We hired a remote, converted barn in the Italian countryside and spent a week there writing the bulk of the album and trying to make friends with wild boar.” notes Adam Ian Sykes. “The results are shorter, more concise songs with, I guess, a little more focus, especially thematically. We wanted to shift slightly from our old jam-based way of working. In places, the album gets darker than Feed the Rats, especially lyrically but we also tried to get a fair amount of levity in there.” “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” So George Orwell noted at the end of a certain slim volume. King Of Cowards is nothing less than just such a metamorphosis, one in which - in a blur of primal urges and beastly physicality - this band shows us just which animalsare really in charge of the farm.

“Qualm” is the new album by Helena Hauff, released via Ninja Tune. The title has a duality that Hauff enjoys - the German word “Qualm” ( kvalm) translates as fumes or smoke, whilst the English meaning refers to an uneasy feeling of doubt, worry, or fear, especially about one's own conduct. True to form, the record is unapologetically raw and finds her returning to her original modus operandi - jamming on her machines - “trying to create something powerful without using too many instruments and layers”. A former resident of the Golden Pudel club in her hometown Hamburg, Helena’s profile and global standing has grown exponentially since the release of “Discreet Desires” in 2015, purely on the strength of her authenticity and her expertly curated DJ sets spanning acid, electro, EBM, techno and post punk. Gigging incessantly (and still lugging a box of records across the world) Helena’s reputation earned her an invitation to join the BBC Radio 1 Residency, she was the subject of cover features for Crack Magazine and DJ Mag, she played headline sets at Sonar (b2b with Ben UFO) and Dekmantel, and at the end of 2017 Crack Magazine declared Helena “The Most Exciting DJ In The World (Right Now)” and her ballistic BBC Essential Mix was voted the best of 2017. Born and raised in Hamburg, a self-confessed child of the 90s, Helena was obsessed with the music she discovered via the television on channels such as MTV and VIVA. She recalls her grandmother buying Technotronic's 'Pump Up The Jam’ at the flea market for her and watching coverage of iconic electronic music festival Loveparade in Berlin on TV. She has fond memories of borrowing CDs from the local library and making her own mixtapes - these days an archaic practice but from a curatorial standpoint these were her earliest outings as a DJ. Helena picks out Miss Kittin & The Hacker and Toktok vs. Soffy O as inspirations but it was the self-titled album from 2001 by electro icon Radioactive Man that was "a real eye-opener" providing the stimulus for her to dive in and immerse herself in the music and culture. At university Helena studied first for a Fine Art degree, but whilst she enjoyed the emphasis on experimentation and artistic freedom, she realised that she didn’t have an innate need to make visual art, the prerequisite for a career in that oeuvre according to her lecturer. However, she did have exactly that compulsion in regards to DJing: “I was obsessed with DJing, there was no question that I had to do it. It wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to DJ somewhere,” she explains. Next Helena enrolled on a degree in Systematic Music Science and Physics. Heading in almost the polar opposite direction to her Fine Art background, it was a highly technical syllabus incorporating maths, physics and acoustics but perhaps on some level this juxtaposition of science and art has shaped her approach to coaxing music from her machines? Helena made her recording debut in 2013 on Werkdiscs / Ninja Tune. She has since partnered with PAN (as Black Sites alongside F#x), Lux Rec, Bunker sublabel Panzerkreuz, Texan cassette imprint Handmade Birds and established her own label Return To Disorder (2015). Most recently she released a 4-track EP “Have You Been There, Have You Seen It” (2017) via Ninja Tune that “pushed her machines to their breaking point… capturing the ironclad force she delivers in her DJ sets while further carving out her own space in the electro landscape” (Pitchfork).

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding. sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music. On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales. In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route... (Boomkat)

Aurora Borealis proudly presents ‘Thee Opener Of The Way’ by Primitive Knot. Hailing from Manchester, UK, Primitive Knot have created a cult underground following with their prolific output and aura of arcane mystery. Primitive Knot cover a lot of musical ground, from motorik Krautrock to primitive thrashing doom metal, garage rock to the kind of industrial pop bombast associated with latter era Sisters of Mercy. Yet at all times, the sound is pure Primitive Knot. ‘Thee Opener Of The Way’ sees Primitive Knot exploring the spiritual outer realms with drone, doom and dark ambient methodology, delivering over an hour of shamanic cosmic drift. ‘Thee Opener Of The Ways’ collects the sold out tape releases of ‘DOOM I’ and ‘DOOM II’, combining them with the tracks ‘Thee Opener Of The Way’ and ‘Devotion And Decay In Interstitial Space’ to bring this material to a wider audience in a cohesive album format. Mastered by James Plotkin. ‘Thee Opener Of The Ways’ will be released on CD, limited tape (with download code) and digital formats. A further Primitive Knot album will follow later on Aurora Borealis.

The blueprint for a futuristic new dancehall style is laid out on this debut full-length release from Miss Red, produced by close collaborator Kevin Martin aka the Bug. A fully realised and precision-tooled longplayer that sits in an outernational beat continuum alongside the likes of Jamaica’s Equiknoxx, Canada’s Seekersinternational and Portugal’s Principe crew. Miss Red’s fierce flow rides roughshod over warped bashment anthems like “Shock Out” and “One Shot Killer”, but the album also showcases her ability to adapt to different flavours with the addition of ethereal harmonies to the psyched out arcade blips of “Clouds” or the plaintive dystopian lament of “War”. Similarly, the Bug’s riddims are a masterclass in restraint, retaining his trademark heaviness but taking a step back from the atmospheric ambience of his recent work with Burial and Earth. Instead this is an example of the dexterity with which Martin can deploy a minimal arrangement, taking a bassline, beat, FX and vocal and sharpening those elements for maximum dancefloor devastation. In 2015 she dropped her first solo mixtape, Murder, with The Bug’s riddims supplemented with contributions from other producers such as Mark Pritchard, Mumdance and Andy Stott. Subsequent singles on her own Red label and the in-house imprint of iconic London record shop Sounds Of The Universe have sold out straight away, and she has received acclaim for her collaborations with Warp Records artist Gaika. The Miss Red persona has developed over time spent in London and Berlin, and as a regular member of the Bug’s touring line-up alongside fellow MCs Flowdan, Daddy Freddy, Warrior Queen and Riko Dan. From before she left Tel Aviv she was magnetically attracted to the sound, style and fashion of the reggae scene in Jamaica: “Nicodemus really influenced me, but as a girl, it wasn’t my voice, and it was listening to those 80s dancehall gyals that i gravitated towards, because they were chatting as proud girls, and from a female perspective, so it was vocalists like Sister Nancy and Lady Ann that really made the biggest impression on me”. Of K.O. specifically, she comments: “For me, reggae is the foundation of this record but the album’s movement is freer. It mirrors my need to move and keep challenging myself. As a white Israeli girl working as an MC in the music industry, and in particular as a singer, it’s a BIG battle to be taken seriously, and as a woman in the music industry, I am in an obvious minority, the situation is clear, the MAN is still in control - that has got to be addressed, and changed.”

So pleased to add Vanishing Twin into our ongoing documentation of music coming from our neighbourhoods. Our friend and Vanishing Twin member Valentina Magaletti ( TOMAGA, Raime ) reached out to us a few months back with the proposal of doing something together, She sent us new recordings from Vanishing Twin, an outfit she has had active duty in from it's inception and we agreed straight away to catalogue this recording through our Blank Tapes series. Magic & Machines was recorded in one long, quiet take, late at night in a mill in Sudbury. 32 minutes of ghostly library-like music, it’s a movieless soundtrack to their own aimless and intuitive finger wanderings, an indulgent lullaby about the kind of mysterious play that happens between you and your instrument, summed up in the single vocal reprise ‘strange feedback between magic and machines’. Since forming in 2015, Vanishing Twin have always blended pop songs and improvised otherness. This cassette is a window into the latter – into a practice of deep listening and telepathic reciprocation that they’re continually trying to develop.

Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is a volume of poetic theory and sound contemplating the bodies of self above and beneath the earth’s surface. On Anticlines, Dalt conjures a sonic space of speculative synthesis and spoken word where South American rhythms rattle contemporary composition recalling Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, and Annea Lockwood. LP / CD version comes with lyric booklet documenting Dalt’s collaborative work with Regina de Miguel and Henry Andersen alongside a multi-format digital download code. A portion of the proceeds from your purchase will be charitably designated on behalf of Lucrecia Dalt to Tierra Digna, an organization dedicated to the defense of Colombian communities affected by economic policies that violate human rights and devastate the environment. tierradigna.org Come! Mend! For More Info: shop.igetrvng.com/collections/all/products/rvngnl47

East Man is a new project from Anthoney Hart and its material predates his previous work as Basic Rhythm. His unique take on grime reduces the sound to its steely fundamentals, bringing in influences from dancehall, drum and bass and techno to gird the voices of the MCs he works with. His own name for this hardcore continuum mongrel is 'Hi Tek'. Anthoney struck a friendship with the academic and theorist Paul Gilroy, who wrote the album introduction below, after starting personal research on representations of working class and mixed race families. He asked Paul for some help after coming across his work via Stuart Hall, Paul's mentor. Their discussions and friendship developed, and it dawned on Anthoney that his research and the East Man album had some synergy, so he asked Paul to write a piece conveying that. - - - London’s young people have been seen as a problem by governments for many generations now. Their distinctive street cultures stretch back into the nineteenth century when, just like today, a stylish public presence signified danger to respectable people. At that time, Britain’s class conflicts were being re-made amidst all the glorious fruits of a global empire. Divisions like class and sex had different shapes and tempos that hardly resemble the machinery of our increasingly networked and unequal world. Religion, racism and nationalism were all important, but work, exploitation and poverty supplied the fiery core of politricks. These days, Britain’s imperial wealth and prestige are long gone. Today’s young people are excluded and marginalized, confined and criminalized, yet they remain at the heart of the vital, energetic best of our city. Their energy and imagination drive London’s convivial culture. They duck and dive just like their predecessors. They hustle, they suffer and they survive. Even where knives are common, most of the problems that come up get resolved without murderous violence. The defining experience of their precarious situation is more likely to be fear or anxiety than warfare between gangs. Their violence is more likely to turn inwards on to their loved ones and family members. There are many forms of self harm and self medication. Yet the space in which those youthful lives unfold has contracted. The scale on which life is lived has shrunk. Moving around can be expensive. Surveillance is constant. Dignity and certainty are difficult to find and hold on to. It can be hard to feel comfortable outside the spaces and places you know best. Those familiar circuits are marked out by the roadside shrines of dead flowers that show just how vulnerable you can quickly become. We have been losing London to Babylon but we are busy making a new place. The edges of the city have become fertile. The weeds grow up explosively between palisaded concrete boxes and the litter-strewn greenery. This is not zones 1 and 2 where houses and flats are capital rather than buildings to live in. The music that comes out of that edgy world isn’t what it was a generation ago, but it’s still fundamental--necessary for life. These shocking sounds can be a part of healing and repair while staying faithful to the pressures that forged them. Musicians can’t make a living from their creativity, but their listeners can’t understand this historical moment unless they get to grips with its local rules, meanings and poetry. This is not America. Even without words, this music speaks for itself and tells a story. It calls out to be understood while seeking ways to escape interpretation. We are always more than either this or that. We are more than either black or white.  Paul Gilroy 2017.

all songs produced by JPEGMAFIA all songs written by JPEGMAFIA all songs mixed & mastered by JPEGMAFIA To Baltimore: 💕 u

Welcome to Whale City. 2018. The second album from Warmduscher. Survival of the fittest: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DElqV4dQVnc

Part string quartet, part radio play, part sound installation, Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s *Landfall* takes us on a journey through the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which battered the Caribbean and the mainland United States in October 2012. Anderson is a thoughtful sound artist, blending electronic and acoustic music with voice narration to tell her tale of loss and destruction. Poignant moments include “Thunder Continues in the Aftermath,” a haunting echo of the departing storm with stunning digital effects, and the vivid, spine-tingling “Helicopters Hang Over Downtown.” The simple, narrated “Everything Is Floating” transforms tragedy into unexpected beauty.

Jerusalem In My Heart (JIMH) returns with Daqa'iq Tudaiq, the third full-length album from the Montréal-Beirut contemporary Arabic audio-visual duo, following the acclaimed 2015 release If He Dies, If If If If If If (year-end lists at The Wire (#39), The Quietus (#24) and A Closer Listen (Top 10), among other accolades). Featuring voice, electronics, buzuk and other instrumentation from composer-producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Matana Roberts, Suuns, BIG|BRAVE) and complemented by the 16mm analog film work of Charles-André Coderre in live performance, JIMH continues to expand the horizons of its profound conceptual and aesthetic engagement with Arabic/Middle-Eastern traditions. Daqa'iq Tudaiq translates as “minutes that bother/oppress/harass” – which presumably needs no further explanation – and features two distinct album sides of music. Side One realizes a long-held dream of Moumneh’s to record a modern orchestral version of the popular Egyptian classic “Ya Garat Al Wadi” by the legendary composer Mohammad Abdel Wahab. JIMH assembled a 15-piece orchestra in Beirut, enlisting the celebrated Montréal-Cairo musician/composer Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush) as arranger and musical director for the session. Anchored by the stately hypnotic pace of plucked and percussive instruments (riq, santur, derbakeh, kanun), the piece unfolds with lush, languid, reverb-drenched manoeuvrings through virtuosic Maqam shifts (oriental scales). Moumneh’s melismatic lead vocals and electronic production sensibility pay homage to the genre’s documented historical recording traditions, while pushing things subtly and respectfully into new territories of sonic distortion and noised, artefact-laden transmission. The song’s original title (with lyrics penned in 1928 by the poet Ahmad Shawqi) translates as “Oh Neighbour Of The Valley”, but JIMH takes a different line from the original lyric as the new title for its orchestral-electronic re-interpretation. “Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam” (“The Language Of Speech Has Broke Down”) is an expression of wordless love and transcendent communication between two lovers’ eyes in Shawqi’s poem; JIMH re-titles the song with this line, exploding the sentiment with more complexity, tragedy and socio-political meaning – also prefiguring the formal aesthetic ruptures JIMH bring to the piece itself. Love in a time of politics, politics in a world conspiring against love, and the specificity of Arab diasporic experience in our brutish 21st century. Side Two comprises four tracks of non-ensemble “solo” material by Moumneh which push rupture and decomposition/recomposition of tradition further into avant-garde territory – voice, buzuk and electronics take the lead on a suite of emotive and evocative songs, including the percussive loop-driven instrumental “Bein Ithnein” (“Between Two” ) and the stunningly unsettling processed vocal track “Thahab, Mish Roujou', Thahab” (“The Act Of Departing, Not Returning, Departing”). Daqa'iq Tudaiq features album art by Charles-André Coderre, whose innovative 16mm film techniques frame JIMH’s entire visual identity – this time using archival photos from the Arab Image Foundation, which have been re-photographed and subjected to experimental chemical treatments of Coderre’s own invention. Daqa'iq Tudaiq is a masterful, mesmerizing artistic statement and confirms Jerusalem In My Heart as one of the most engaged and forward-looking groups at work in avant-garde Middle Eastern music today. Thanks for listening.

Eighteen months on from his last new release, Vancouver-based singer / composer Ian William Craig returns with an album-length release that collects together eleven new tracks. Entitled 'Thresholder', the record sees Craig return towards the smudged and scoured beauty of his 2016 opus, 'Centres', a record which was universally acclaimed, making many end-of-year lists – including the likes of Rolling Stone, Uncut, The Wire, The Quietus, The 405 and Drowned In Sound. 'Thresholder' is released on vinyl and digital formats, with the former packaged in gorgeous inner / outer sleeve artwork from Ian. Recorded, produced and mastered by Ian William Craig himself, the origins of these tracks span a period from 'A Turn of Breath' to 'Centres'. Some were recorded at Ian's old studio on Vancouver's UBC campus, some at home, and one even recorded on tour in a giant secret underground cistern in Sweden. The original impetus for the record came out of sessions for some commission work which was based on concepts of quantum physics, black holes and space. As Ian explains, "this was the lens through which the tracks were assembled: a great boundlessness of space, the sound of the big bang, the spookiness of the quantum world, vacillations of different kinds of conflicting time. I started by making a 20-minute piece that was just stitching together the sound of the decks and the equipment as they went about their business, almost like one was wandering through the different parts of a spacecraft. I then used this piece to coax together the rest of the tracks, envisioning the whole thing as a single 40-minute space which would become the soundtrack of being held in place by a great unknowable force while still being able to meander through the chaos and beauty of that expanded instant." Of its compilation, Ian notes that "I thought this was an appropriate place to bring all of these disparate but full moments together... like memories from different times and places flashing fuzzily before one's eyes, the lonely explorer meeting their end in grand fashion." His beautiful cover artwork featuring a seemingly random selection of found objects is an appropriate reflection of this accumulating: "all of the objects were collected during significant times over the years, and are talismans of the places from which they came. Little Proustian expansion devices - all arranged in the blackness of space. I think mostly all of the music I make is to contemplate the beautiful doom, forces beyond us, celebrations of our inevitable deterioration." 'Thresholder' utilises Ian's beautiful, classically-trained voice alongside an electronic armoury that includes numerous customised tape decks (Fostex X18, Fostex A4, Sony TC-377, TEAC 3440) as well as a Boss Loop Station, a Prophet '08 synth and acoustic guitar. Less a transmitter of lyrical meaning here, Ian’s voice becomes another instrument, a largely wordless textural layer that carries emotion and meaning through melody and contextual position. Separate vocal layers spool through looped tape and entwine. On 'TC-377 Poem' the physical friction of recording is audible, the voice track dragging against the tape head; whilst on 'And Therefore the Moonlight' / 'Some Absolute Means', the emotional core is also carried via keyboard chords. Full of subtleties and tiny detail, 'Thresholder' is a deeply immersive and wonderfully textural record. Unlike Craig's last release 'Slow Vessels' which stripped away the loaded layers to reveal the incredible beauty and strength of his songwriting, on 'Thresholder' we are plunged from the opening into a dense and unstable sound-world that hangs between a kind of gaseous, ethereal shimmer and waft, and a much harsher, visceral feeling of analogue abrasion. Structurally, it shifts from a wraith-like amorphousness that seems in continual threat of collapse and a powerful – if often brief – aligning into more anchored or cohesive entities, with uplifting chords building in arcs out of the entropy. Swathed in blankets of fuzz, static and crack, passing up through veiled, shifting, cloud-like atmospheres 'Thresholder' conjurs a sense of something that might be found in the darkly Romantic, deeply atmospheric landscape painting of Caspar David Freidrich's and works like 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' (1818). It's hard not to feel a similar sense of confrontation with the sublime. Of revelation. Elevation. Momentary glimpses above the clouds and emergence into spaces where the air is thinner and purer. Moments like the end of 'Discovered in Flat' where the fog briefly lifts to reveal a clear, pure vocal hanging alone in the ether. Or the Cavernous choral purity of 'Idea For Contradiction 1', which was recorded in a secret cistern underneath Gothenburg, Sweden, and has an almost Gregorian choral purity - the voice exploring the space and the surface of stone. Besides as the often-quoted William Basinski reference point, the music here recalls the visceral media-decay of early ‘00s operators like Fennesz, Belong, Desormais, Philip Jeck or Pimmon. 'Idea for Contradiction 2' Is like a massively overdriven or sandpaper-scoured version of Brian Eno's 'An Ending' or some shredded Colin Stetson stem. The ending of ‘And Therefore the Moonlight’ - is reminiscent of Sigur Rós (who are fans and recently invited Ian to play their Norður og Niður festival in Reykjavik); whilst ‘Sfumato’ exists in the same dimension as The Caretaker's haunted ballroom with its reverb-drenched and occluded distant vocal. Elsehwere 'The Last Wesbrook Lament' might recall Animal Collective's 'Loch Raven' with the percussion erased. Craig signs the record off on 'More Words for Mistake', a track that seems to define itself through absence, with the spirit of old machinery rattling away as we emerge from the record's 38-minutes scoured and anointed.

“Our time has begun…” Sinking Into A Miracle is the debut album by Glasgow’s AMOR, a quartet of musical travellers exploring the sonic open-ended-ness of dance music.  Following two critically acclaimed 12” Single releases, Sinking Into A Miracle is a fully developed treatise on ecstasy and transcendence. Here, Richard Youngs, Michael Francis Duch, Paul Thomson and Luke Fowler are more honed, razor sharp in focus and timing, testing their instrumental prowess on condensed song structures and new, enlightened feelings of expansive hope and bliss. From the outset it’s an ambitious yet ultimately inclusive journey they are embarking on. Recorded to 24-track tape at Chem 19 and mixed by Paul Savage and Richard McMaster (Golden Teacher), Sinking Into A Miracle  retains the elastic grooves of Paradise and Higher Moment, the group’s previous single releases, but relinquishes the classic Philadelphia International tinged sound in favour of more looser rhythmic patterns.  There are new depths to the compositions ; a more free-flowing approach to percussion and deft experiments in hybridity, making for a full and rounded, emotionally tinged record. Indeed, there are times when AMOR sound like the lost house band from David Mancuso's Loft parties: Richard Youngs’ uplifting, gospel tinged lyrics talk about moving beyond, universal truths, sailing through the horizon. It’s a wide-eyed optimism Mancuso would perhaps have approved of and which is embroidered with spectral details that begs to be auditioned on large, tweaked out sound-systems. On Glimpses Across Thunder, Youngs’ piano chords echo early Blue Nile atmospherics before the band take the song into a funked, minor chord territory that feels endlessly searching, never to resolve. Opener Phantoms Of The Sun relies on Duch’s sublime bass line to drive a dubbed out track complete with a utopian flute refrain. Full Fathom Future stomps relentlessly forward on the back of Thomson’s percussion-heavy groove before collapsing into a moving three chord epilogue played on droning string instruments. Heaven Among The Days introduces a more robotic groove to the album, with a short bass refrain bouncing off stripped drum triggers, its dark rhythms reminiscent of the proto-House tracks that were trademarked by Chicago DJ Ron Hardy. Whilst Youngs contemplates the prospect of heaven in our daily lives Fowler's gliding synthesiers chords underline the more devotional potential of AMOR's music. Sinking Into A Miracle ends with the sublime, Truth Of Life the most expansive and transporting of these compositions. Here the studio as instrument is used to full effect, with the rhythm section in full flow as the melodic elements are twisted, delayed, swaddled in tape echo, delaying gratification before a full, thrilling drop into blissful pleasure.

BLISS SIGNAL is a new electronic metal project between James Kelly (Wife, Altar of Plagues) and UK DJ / Producer Jack Adams (Mumdance). Their eponymous debut album, out September 28th on True Panther Sounds/Profound Lore, is the stunning result of an unlikely partnership soldering together a seemingly disparate mélange of sounds. Formed within the last year and initially begun initially as a simple experiment between the two producers, BLISS SIGNAL sees Kelly return to making harsher and heavier music with a guitar for the first time since the last and final groundbreaking Altar Of Plagues album “Teethed Glory & Injury”. While not a direct continuation from Altar Of Plagues, the music enveloping the BLISS SIGNAL debut album captures the vibe and essence of the more ambient and experimental moments found in Altar Of Plagues, most notably on the final Altar Of Plagues album, almost as an extension of those moments in what would be have been further explored if Kelly were to continue developing the Altar Of Plagues sound through the expansiveness of what he could create for his former musical output. BLISS SIGNAL though is a different a new musical expression coming from Kelly’s musical repertoire. Teaming up with Mumdance, throughout the album's eight tracks, one hears Adams and Kelly trace a line between blackened metal, driving club music, and ethereal atmospherics. The expansive sound fabric of BLISS SIGNAL is one awash with a massive wall of unrelenting sound, intense atmosphere, and shimmering enveloping ambience, ultimately, a sonic reflection of the very moniker that Kelly and Mumdance conjured for their new musical venture.

For this third release on Dais, Drew McDowall reaches into concept, ritual, and immersion, in an exercise of unravelling the DNA of hallucination. The Third Helix is McDowall’s product of deconstructive exploration, twisting the fibers of being into new structure, shape, pattern, and pulse, without reconstituting its inscribed template. The result is a true “third act,” in McDowall’s career, that has seen him peregrinate from the late-’70s art-punk of the trio Poems to his work with Psychic TV and Coil throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, into his current home of New York City, where he has composed with CSD, Compound Eye, as well his solo work. That triangulation is central to The Third Helix, as it begins with his dive into the existence of a sensory toolkit unique to McDowall before twisting faculties and reconfiguring consciousness by honoring inherent power, cognizant of memory yet agnostic of context. With the tenet that journey is rarely linear, but rather an omnipresent oscillation of matter, sound is stripped to salient and primal, propelled by McDowall’s boring into the core of memory and impulse, suturing together the silent awareness of excogitating experience. Featuring eight new tracks of McDowall’s dark, experimental electronics, including the opener “Rhizome”, The Third Helix is a churning descent into emotion, provoking thought and reflection while carving out haunting space only to fill it with baffling and wondrous structures of layered sound. McDowall solidifies himself as an architect who transforms otherworldly materials into something fascinating and challenging in the process. Unnerving, trancelike anthems for nervous meditation and anxious relaxation, fans of Coil will immediately connect and immerse, while the complex compositions welcome listen for drone and ambient enthusiasts.

Goatherder is the seventh album from underground London producer Kristian Craig Robinson, AKA Capitol K. This ace manipulator of audio and punk warlord of groove has crossed a tapestry of styles and approaches with his own secret compass since 1998. This latest work was developed and recorded in his native Malta, where he built a studio in a cave (a former goat stable). K gathered bamboo instruments collected around the world, including an ancient Quecha reeded pipe (his new-found lead instrument), and various resonating vessels and percussive objects including dry fennel storks collected from Punic troglodyte sites, and atonal flutes built from fresh cut farmland reed. Ritualistic improvisations took place over a series of seasonal visits, awakening genetic memory and plant communication. Back in London the tracks were interfaced and expanded with post-industrial machine beat and bass guitar lock down. Homage is paid to New Age synthscapes, while a Spirit Jazz overtone arrives from K's recent years as the sonic muscle behind a plethora of luminous albums born in his Total Refreshment Studio. Goatherder follows on from the 2016 collaborative incarnation LOOSE MEAT and sonically abridges 2012's Capitol K album Andean Dub.

Music for the retreating ice-sheets of Iceland, produced whilst on a 'Frontiers in Retreat' residency in Seyðisfjörður in 2016. www.frontiersinretreat.org/artists/richard_skelton Front Variations is composed from sine waves subjected to increasing amounts of feedback in order to simulate the so-called 'ice-albedo' feedback mechanism. This is the process whereby the action of melting glaciers reduces the global surface area of ice, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that glaciers reflect, which in turn increases global temperatures and causes further glacial melting. Ring modulation and distortion were also used to further deteriorate the sound signal. Front Variations is also available as part of Quoin 4 - the annual publication for friends and patrons of Corbel Stone Press. Quoin 4 features data collected by the World Glacier Monitoring Service and aerial photography of arctic glaciers from the US Naval Oceanographic Office. www.corbelstonepress.com/quoin-4

Creep Show brings together John Grant with the dark analogue electro of Wrangler (Stephen Mallinder / Phil Winter / Benge) to create Mr Dynamite - a debut album packed with experimental pop and surreal funk. Recorded in Cornwall with a lifetime’s collection of drum machines and synthesisers assembled by Benge and explored by every member of Creep Show, there’s a real sense of freedom in the shackles-off grooves, channelling the early pioneering spirit of the Sugarhill Gang through wires and random electric noise. This sense of adventure is also part of the interplay between the two vocalists, John Grant and former Cabaret Voltaire frontman Stephen Mallinder, who switch between oblique wordplay to sinister humour as Phil Winter and Benge continue to man-handle the machines. “Creep Show is Hydra,’ says Mallinder. ‘A beast with multiple heads and voices, so no one is quite sure who is saying and doing what. Everything is permitted and everything is possible.’ Grant: ‘I do like theatre of the absurd and some of it is that, but most of it is just having fun. We did a lot of laughing and just had a blast doing it.’ The creepy ‘alter-ego’ title track, ‘Pink Squirrel’’s vocoder kaleidoscope and Grant’s exhilarating croon on the nine minute ‘Safe And Sound’ are just some of the twists and hooks to be explored on this consistently inventive record. According to Mallinder the band “sprang fully formed a couple of years ago but in truth had been bubbling away for decades in a petri dish containing spores of seventies sci-fi, post–punk electronic music, bad taste, broken synthesizers, luscious film soundtracks, and dubious band t-shirts.” Their first show - their name hadn’t yet come to Benge in a dream - was at the Barbican in London late 2016 as part of an event celebrating 40 years of Rough Trade. Preferring not to live on past glories, Grant and Wrangler wrote a whole new set of material together. As Mallinder explains, “we thought the only way to work with someone was to lock the doors and wrestle each other until we could come out with entirely new and original stuff. Why not? If you work with someone, test yourself, see what’s buried under the soil.” Wrangler are no strangers to collaboration. In the studio they’ve teamed up with LoneLady, Tom Rogerson (currently working with Brian Eno) and Serafina Steer on their albums La Spark (2014) and White Glue two years later. As well as remixing Primal Scream, Gazelle Twin and John Grant (on ‘Voodoo Doll’), in 2015 they released a double LP of Modular synthesiser remixes entitled Sparked which included new takes on their music by Daniel Miller and Chris Carter (Chris & Cosey). Cotton Panic!, a forward-looking stage production commissioned by and performed at the Manchester International Festival in 2017, was the result of Wrangler joining forces with actor Jane Horrocks and writer Nick Vivian. Grant too enjoys working with other artists, sharing stages and songs with the likes of Elbow, Susanne Sundfør, Hercules & Love Affair and Tracey Thorn. His passion for electronic music - including Cabaret Voltaire - has influenced his last two albums Pale Green Ghosts (2013) and Grey Tickles, Black Pressure from 2015, eventually leading him to Wrangler’s sequencers and wonky drum machines. However, Creep Show is much more than the sum of its parts. It’s almost as if the four band members and their machinery were possessed by another force: “Mr Dynamite is real,” states Mallinder. “It’s disturbing, he blows shit up.” And it’s a spirit that wants to dance. For every weird, esoteric mood and texture explored there’s always a beat and a fresh sense of adventure, whether through the Space Invader electro of ‘Tokyo Metro’, squelchy synth-funk of ‘Modern Parenting’, the warped, experimental arc of ‘Endangered Species’ or ‘Lime Ricky’s ferocious breakbeat workout. On ‘K Mart Johnny’ ripped-up, distorted sounds and sinister voices accumulate on the cold electronics like flies on neon, but the rhythms and synth stabs still propel it forward, in this case into a bizarre story of childhood name-calling and revenge centred around a yellow-spotted toy dinosaur. The album ends with two of the longest tracks - the beautiful Kraftwerk-in-space, pristine but cosmic ‘Fall’ and the Moroder-esque odyssey, ‘Safe And Sound’. The latter is a brilliant climax to the album, Grant’s vocals at their most opulent and moving as he carries us all into the future with the words, “Billions of stars across oceans and time . . . I’m safe and sound in the arms of my destiny”.

“We were so inspired last year,” Kevin Abstract told Beats 1 host Julie Adenuga about the making of the sprawling LA mega-group BROCKHAMPTON’s fourth album. “I can’t really explain where the inspiration was coming from. Success messes with the way artists create at times.” So does adversity: Ameer Vann, who was literally the face of the self-styled boy band’s three previous projects, was ousted in 2018 amid allegations of domestic abuse. While he was regarded as one of the group’s best rappers, BROCKHAMPTON has a particularly deep bench; rhyming skill is hardly the only draw. Assembled in part via a Kanye West fan-club message board, the group’s 14 members hail from different corners of the United States, save one from Belfast. The evolving musicality, divergent perspectives and inspirations, and emotional honesty that sent the collective into orbit are all present, if not elevated, on their major-label debut *Iridescence*. An abundance of vocal distortion that sometimes makes it difficult to identify individual contributors lends a sense of cohesion, and underneath it, the album plays as a beautiful hodgepodge of genres. There’s the traditional gangsta rap bounce of “NEW ORLEANS,” the UK grime-inspired charge of “WHERE THE CASH AT,” and an acoustic guitar ballad in “SAN MARCOS,” all emblematic of a group whose ambition is commensurate with its head count. “We’re nowhere near where we wanna be,” said Abstract. “I’m tryna do Travis Scott numbers.”

Hailu Mergia — Lala Belu Side A 1. ትዝታ Tizita 2. አዲስ ናት Addis Nat 3. ጉም ጉም Gum Gum Side B 1. አንቺሆየው ለኔ Anchihoye Lene 2. ላላ በሉ Lala Belu 3. የፍቅር እንጉርጉሮ Yefkir Engurguro Hailu Mergia — Keyboards, Accordion, Melodica Tony Buck — Drums Mike Majkowski — Upright Bass Produced by Hailu Mergia Recorded at EMS4, London, UK 
Additional recording by Javon Gant, Cue Recording Studios, Falls Church, VA Cover image drawn live on iPad by Jenny Soep, Stockholm 2013 Back cover image photo by Piotr Gruchala

In the near-twenty year period of Rocket Recordings’ existence, its ethos has expanded in untold directions, yet always with the destruction of boundaries and the expansion of consciousness high on the agenda. Nonetheless, the original spirit of the label remains a universe that revolves around the twin planets of Fuzz and Wah - the mind-frying six-string duality that warps sound spectrums and overheats speaker cones in pursuit of reckless sensory overload. What’s more, few guitarists have been richer exponents of just these two ingredients than Paul Allen, who not only appeared on the very first Rocket 7” of 1998 with The Heads, but who also fronts Anthroprophh, an outfit who take both garage-bound filth and wayward, abstract artistry to zones beyond comprehension. ‘Omegaville’ - the third release on Rocket for his power trio alongside bassist Gareth Turner (who appeared on the other side of said debut Rocket 7” with his then-band Lilydamwhite) and drummer Jesse Webb - lives up to its name in driving just such demented predilections into head-spinning chaos. A feverish tirade of maximalism battling with a no-holds-barred approach to structure, ‘Omegaville’ finds equal space for everything-on-11 riffage of a distinctly Stoogian/stygian stripe, bracing musique concrete, Butthole Surfers-esque bedlam, Chrome-style sci-fi noise-pop, surreal British humour, and what sounds essentially like a ‘60s NASA HQ going up in flames. Structured by Allen’s admission akin to Can’s ‘Tago Mago’ as a double album which places the more conventional tracks at its start and the more explicitly experimental and outré adventures on the second disc, this is a cliff-edge into sanity-risking overload which has much in common with the glory days of 1971 - the Nurse-With-Wound-list realm of record-collector gold where heavy rock, nascent prog and wilfully art-damaged netherscapes thrived - a harmonious and thrilling marriage between transgressive over-amplification and the avant-garde. “With a double LP you can usually get away with some form of experimentation on the second disc and ‘Tago Mago’ is a prime example” notes Allen “‘Echo’ by AR Vs Machines (Achim Reichel) being another example, with its zonked-out a cappella ending. It was nice to cover all aspects of what the band are all about, It kind of happened by accident really. I’m amazed we had that much material” At the forefront of much of this, however, is Allen’s guitar playing itself, globally renowned amongst freaks and connoisseurs alike from his contributions to The Heads. Taking Hendrix and Asheton-esque shapes and warping them beyond recognition into new paradigms, he also cites guitarists like Michael Karoli “with this spindly thin fuzz sound and use of the whammy”, early-‘70s Robert Fripp, Giles Buchan of Human Beast, Fred Frith and Geinrich of Guru Guru (“with his love of sonic mulch”) as influences, yet this ear-splitting treble-heavy scree and these heavenly FX-driven cacophonies could be the work of no-one else but this particular six-string iconoclast, who drives his trademark sound beyond anything he’s previously attempted in any incarnation. Who’s to say exactly where Anthroprophh move on from this guileless aural endtime mission. ‘Omegaville’ - in the tradition of most great out-rock and psych-noise - feels very much like a foot placed firmly on the accelerator in search of dimensions unknown - a liminal zone where fuzz and wah transcend space and time.

A thrilling 9-song set, Murmurations is as perfectly pitched for headphones as it is for clubs, named after giant cloud formations of starlings and themed around the stunning emergent behaviors that appear within them. To mirror these movements in the sonic landscape and visuals of Murmurations, SMD’s James Ford and Jas Shaw collaborated with the celebrated Hackney-based vocal collective The Deep Throat Choir, as well as creative directors Kazim Rashid of ENDLESSLOVESHOW (Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawk) and Carri Munden. Finding time in between Ford’s work as a producer and Jas' club gigging last year, the duo arranged a session in Shaw’s countryside studio. Via an introduction from a friend of Ford’s wife, The Deep Throat Choir’s director Luisa Gerstein and SMD began swapping some production and melodic ideas. They decided to bring the whole East London-based choir into the studio to experiment, and the results were intense. Jas says, “Listening to them moving their voices around a tone, altering the timbre, making chords, was like working with an incredible new synthesiser.” Rashid and Munden explore related ideas centered on kinetic energy and communal movement throughout the visuals of Murmurations. Rashid says of the collaboration, “We were both having discussions around the purity of collective human experience and how transcendental this can be. Techno and the dance-floor is one of the last true expressions of this euphoria.” From the beat-less introduction “Boids” onwards you can hear uncanny patterns and sounds rising up from the sea of voices -- not traditional chords or harmonies, but complex interference patterns that play tricks on the mind and merge perfectly with SMD's distinctive synth tonalities and instinctive dancefloor nous. At times you might hear hints of Bulgarian choral music, or Cocteau Twins, or avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis or Pauline Oliveiros – but really, thanks to the creative freedom of SMD's working methods, it is a sound completely of its own, something all too rare in an age of retro and reference. Ford and Shaw still have the same love of pure sound, human harmonies and electronic possibilities that they did when they first met at university, and it's clear that their career path has allowed them to nurture this love and express it as vividly as ever before. Murmurations Tracklist: 1. Boids 2. Caught In A Wave 3. We Go 4. Gliders 5. Hey Sister 6. A Perfect Swarm 7. Defender 8. V Formation 9. Murmuration