The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2022

Alabaster Deplume’s skronky mix of spiritual jazz, freaky folk, and experimental music has the power to make you feel everything at once—and it’s often a thrilling, if unsettling, experience. On *Gold*, a sprawling double album cut from 17 hours of improv-heavy recording sessions with over 20 musicians (including guest vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke), the Mancunian multi-instrumentalist and spoken-word poet deconstructs his own ego in bursts of spontaneity and sincerity. On “F\*\*\*\*\*g Let Them,” he sets forth a passionate manifesto, declaring “I go forward in the courage of my love” before leaning into a breathless, brassy groove. As piercing as his words, his uninhibited sax riffs rustle through rustic acoustic folk on “I’m Gonna Say Seven” and quiver to near-oblivion on slow-burning dirges like “Now (Stars Are Lit).” Throughout, mesmerizing choral chants swirl around, threatening to detach the experience from reality, until Deplume\'s calming voice slides in with poignant reminders. “I remember my ex’s email address/but I forget that I’m precious,” he incants. “Don’t do it/don’t forget you’re precious.”

Somewhere between the literal meaning of psychedelia as the revealing of the mind, and the literal meaning of apocalypse as the tearing away of the veil, this record stands, pulsing, totally blown out. Phase Corrected may be Shit and Shine at its nastiest and most brutal, but it is also––and by virtue of that fact––Shit and Shine at its most transcendent. Craig Clouse, aka Shit and Shine, has been called a genius and a maverick by the Wire. And the Quietus says he’s “uninterested in the self-imposed restrictions of genre.” From danceable electro-psychedelia to grinding, confrontational noise, Shit and Shine has, since 2004, made a practice of evading genre conventions. And the same goes for Austin-based Clouse’s explorations via USA/Mexico, his project with King Coffey from Butthole Surfers. But there is a common thread here, a sense of consistency that speaks to more than just bucking tradition. In fact, in all this experimentation and genre-bending, Shit and Shine seems to be meditating on and celebrating the very existence of the underground. The meditation and celebration continues on his latest full-length, Phase Corrected, an LP commissioned by The Garrote. Clouse wields glacial, staggeringly heavy riffs, industrial drums, and electronics that sound as though they’ve been put through a meat grinder. Or perhaps it all sounds like it’s coming from the basement. One can practically smell the cheap fog machine and the bodies milling about, maybe writhing. But like the most transcendent moments that can be found in the midst of milling or writhing through sweaty basements, propylene glycol coating the nasal cavities, Phase Corrected stands out as something literally psychedelic, perhaps literally apocalyptic. Phase Corrected is the sound of that moment, in that basement, when everything becomes either just too much or just the perfect amount, the moment when a complete saturation of the senses becomes an absolute falling away of everything else. EU/UK version at Riot Season Records with a variant cover. Garrote version available in limited quantities at Evil Greed in EU/UK

Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of less than a year. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad to make the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. For frontperson Dana Margolin, drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall – who met in the seaside town of Brighton and formed Porridge Radio in 2014 – global recognition has been a long time coming, after years of self-releasing and music booking their own tours. In those eight years, Dana has gained a reputation as one of the most magnetic band leaders around with an ability to “devastate you with an emotional hurricane, then blindside you with a moment of bittersweet humour” (NME). But if Every Bad established Dana’s lemon-sharp, heart-on-sleeve honesty, Porridge Radio’s third album takes that to anthemic new heights. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the sound of someone in their late twenties facing down the disappointment of love, and life, and figuring out how to exist in the world, without claiming any answers. It’s also catchy as hell. The title – which was partly inspired by a collage by the British surrealist Eileen Agar – speaks to the “joy, fear and endlessness” of the past few years. Dana’s songwriting and delivery is more confident, with the emotional incisiveness of artists like Mitski, Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief. Though it’s softer and more playful in places than Every Bad’s blowtorch ferocity, there are moments of powerful catharsis, ones that occur when you allow the full intensity of an experience to take hold. In places, that no-holds-barred rawness is on a par with bands like Deftones (their panoramic metal is a key touchstone of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky) or American emo, elevated by Yardley’s ambitious instrumentals. “I kept saying that I wanted everything to be 'stadium-epic' - like Coldplay,” says Dana. With Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Porridge Radio have distilled their myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate. People tell Dana that Every Bad got them through their cancer diagnosis, their break-up, their isolated lockdown. But with their new album, the band are taking a step up and spring-boarding into a bright, exciting unknown.

SOLD OUT 'There are a lot of releases by Irish collective United Bible Studies, and a lot of stylistic ground covered in their two-decade run to date. A lot of it might reasonably be described as 'free folk', which can mean a lot of things – rarely, though, will it sound as lush and plangent as the two sidelong pieces on this cassette released by Cruel Nature. Violin, piano and sax combine for 40 minutes of ambient/jazz/drone minimalism.' The Quietus, Noel Gardner 'David Colohan is a favourite of ours here at Sun 13, and having recently released his latest solo album, A Map Where the Leaves Fall First (also on CN), he returns alongside Dom Cooper (voice, piano), Matt Leivers (soprano saxophone) and Gayle Brogan (violin) as United Bible Studies with The Return of the Rivers. With United Bible Studies, Colohan gets closer to the core of drone, and on The Return of the Rivers we are met with two compositions that mix elements of jazz and fractured folk into something protracted and forlorn. Brimming with locality that pays homage to wide open spaces, The Return of the Rivers is pastoral folk-drone as its finest, and yet another fine release from one of Ireland’s great underground purveyors of experimentation.' SUN 13

"It’s a pop album, it’s a highly intricate sound art album and it’s a virtuoso psychedelic percussion album all in one. (...) But Pimpon’s real triumph isn’t the sonic diversity, it’s how it congeals into a coherent and singular world." - Daryl Worthington / The Quietus

American Rituals collects the recordings of Cheri Knight made during the fertile, DIY movement that flowered around Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in the early eighties. With access to the college’s multitrack recording studios, a lending library of instruments, and an unbridled spirit of experimentation, Cheri and her collaborators created ecstatic amalgamations of minimalism, art rock, and vocal technique that illuminate a rich Pacific Northwest counterpoint to the parallel New Music scenes of downtown New York and San Francisco. Restored and remastered from original tape sources by Josh Bonati, the vinyl edition includes comprehensive liner notes by Steve Peters.

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

Enregistré et édité par Patrice Guillerme à Rezé, La Barakason Mixé par Brice Kartmann Masterisé par Graeme Durham LA COLONIE DE VACANCES : Jérôme Vassereau (guitare), Vincent Redel (batterie), Arthur de La Grandière (basse, guitare), Eric Bentz (guitare, chant), Pierre-Antoine Parois (batterie), Rachel Langlais (synth, chant), Eric Pasquereau (guitare, chant), Grégoire Bredel (batterie), Julien Chevalier (guitare, basse, synth), Frédéric Conte (guitare, synth), Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy (batterie, chant), Nicolas Cueille (synth, chant) (p) & (c) 2022 Vicious Circle under exclusive licence from Molo Mute

Erupt offer up five fiery tracks on Left To Rot. Treading the blurry lines between extreme punk and extreme metal, Left To Rot is a cacophony in all the right ways. Fast as, heavy as, nasty as. Featuring members of Sheer Mag, Geld and Gutter Gods - Erupt brings its own molten explosions to the surface. These burnt offerings are recommended for fans of Sodom, Celtic Frost, Iron Age, Warthog, Mindsnare and the other hordes of apocalypse old and new. For orders outside of Australasia - visit Static Shock Records (UK) for cheaper shipping.

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

recorded at the mele room in 2019

Over the course of her career, Tanya Tagaq has committed herself to the cathartic and, at times, deeply uncomfortable process of transforming horror into healing. On past records and in her harrowing live performances, the artist from Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq), Nunavut, has deployed the Inuk tradition of throat-singing to viscerally personify the trauma she’s experienced—sexual abuse, Canada’s genocidal residential school system, the environmental degradation of her homeland—and used her guttural growls to summon a sound not unlike free jazz or metal. But where 2016’s *Retribution* occasionally framed its impressionistic improvisations with spoken-word commentary, *Tongues*, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, fully embraces the narrative form, as she unleashes her signature screams more strategically in service of poems recited from her 2018 novel/magical-realist memoir *Split Tooth*. And while her longtime bandmates Jesse Zubot (violin) and Jean Martin (percussion) make return appearances, Tagaq’s musical DNA has been radically altered by producer Saul Williams and mixer Gonjasufi, who re-situate her graphic, bloodlusty treatises on colonialism, survival, and motherhood in a claustrophobic collage of icy electronics and queasy bass frequencies. “With improvisation, there isn\'t such a cerebral idea or solid concept in the interpretation,” Tagaq tells Apple Music, “but with \[spoken\] word, it\'s very concise and it guides you down a river as opposed to floating in an ocean. I didn\'t know \[my book and my music\] could live together, but when I was recording the audiobook for *Split Tooth*, I was thinking, \'Wow, this is nice and everything…but there\'s no music!\' So I thought, \'How about instead of just reading it, I express it.’” Here, Tagaq provides a track-by-track guide to speaking in *Tongues*. **“In Me”** “I wanted to start by showing my peacock feathers! I wrote this poem out of frustration with vegan activists trolling Indigenous people—there\'s this idea that because we hunt and live off the land, we\'re somehow cruel, or at a lower level of living, when in actuality, it’s a very higher power to be living in harmony with your habitat without polluting your land. The land is still the boss where I\'m from—we have to obey it. So we have a close kinship with animals, and the vegan activists don\'t understand how much we love and cherish other life forms. \'In Me\' became this narrative about skinning an animal—particularly a seal—and how, when you consume a fresh animal, you are eating the energy from the sun. It\'s this idea that you are eating more than your meat. If you eat very sick animals that were raised very unhappily in these giant slaughterhouses full of chemicals and antibiotics, you\'re eating that animal\'s pain and fear and suffering. But when you\'re a really good hunter, and you kill an animal with one shot, and they never knew you were there, their meat is calm, so when you eat them, you\'re eating that, too. ‘In Me’ is about the intimacy in processing an animal and what you glean from it. It\'s about liberating people from this idea that we are somehow doing wrong.” **“Tongues”** “This is a pretty simple, straightforward song: You had all these kids sent to residential schools who then had their language beaten out of them. I, myself, lost my language, and I\'m reclaiming it: I\'m taking Inuktitut lessons now and I\'ve been working on brushing up on my Inuktitut. And I just want to eradicate the shame around that. Canada\'s pushing for Inuktitut to become an official language. I think it\'s time that Canada starts recognizing more than just the colonial languages as official languages.” **“Colonizer”** “I used to do live concerts set to the \[1922\] film *Nanook of the North* by Robert Flaherty, and there are points in the movie where the camera and the actors set it up to show a naivete \[in the Inuit\] where there might not have been. So I loved to sing \'colonizer!\' over that part. But the reason I really wanted to put this out as a song is because Canadians have really got it in their heads that these atrocities \[against Indigenous people\] happened in the past and there\'s nothing to be done about it now. And really, it\'s happening right now, right this second—it never stopped. Every single person needs to wake up and realize their part in that. Often, complacency is what makes room for more violence. There\'s this really false narrative of Canada being this nice place with maple syrup. Yeah, that\'s great and everything, but really, whose land is your house on? So \'Colonizer\' is saying: \'No, you\'re guilty—yes, you! Do something about it!\'” **“Teeth Agape”** “In Canada, the foster \'care\' system—quote-unquote—is the modern version of the residential school program. So I just wanted to say: Enough with taking our children. This isn\'t allowed anymore.” **“Birth”** “I tend to start with a wide-scale general idea, and then a smaller idea, and then a very specific idea. So, \'Birth\' can refer to a birth of a new idea. It can be about the stopping of abuse, because then you are birthing non-abuse. It can be about the end of something, or the beginning of something. But if you want to talk just about childbirth, I really liked the dilation part; the pushing and ripping was not so great. I was very loud in both of my births. And I just remember my mom looking at me, judging me, like, ‘You made noise?\' Because that\'s how tough a lot of Inuit are—there are stories of Inuit women giving birth and being back up and running an hour later. But it\'s dangerous when you\'re giving birth—you are walking the line between life and death, and I really wanted to acknowledge it.” **“I Forgive Me”** “When you\'re abused as a child, you really carry a lot of shame, and anger and fear, and it\'s something that permeates your whole life. So being able to forgive yourself and move past that shame is really crucial. And I find a lot of people are just suffering in silence with these things. I\'m so tired of us not reaching out to each other and supporting each other and understanding that so many of us have gone through these types of things. So I just wanted to say it\'s important to work on forgiving yourself. And it\'s important to open up and talk about it. It\'s part of the healing process. It\'s part of prevention. It was hard for me to make the song and put it out, but I thought about all those other people out there feeling like I do, and how maybe it could help somebody to connect with themselves or forgive themselves—and also simultaneously shame people that are doing this shit. I actually now see the song as quite light, because it\'s shining light where it needs to be shone.” **“Nuclear”** “I was really missing the electricity of the concerts, so there are a few pieces on the album that I wanted to reflect that breakneck urgency that happens in the shows. It gets very, very intense and it grows and grows into a dome and then bursts. And I thought that it was important to have that experience without lyrics on some of the songs, just to make sure the record represents the full breadth of what we do.” **“Do Not Fear Love”** “There\'s an arc to the album, and \'Do Not Fear Love\' is about recognizing the struggle to remain vulnerable after you\'ve been hurt, and learning to trust people, and not going so far into your pain that you begin to close doors that can offer you love. You need to learn to remain open and continue to accept it, even though you\'re hurt. If you open up, it\'s there for you. It\'s an active process. I read somewhere that when you get scurvy, all your scars open up for lack of vitamin C. A scar is actually an active process—it\'s being made. So I think it\'s an active process to clear the path to allow love in, and that\'s something you have to keep an eagle eye on.” **“Earth Monster”** “I wrote this for my \[daughter\] Naia. She\'s 18 now; I think I wrote this on her sixth birthday. Within the intimacy of motherhood, you\'re so close with your children that you can\'t help but have them see your flaws. And as much as we love them, and as much as we want to be perfect for them, they will see our mistakes. This is life and I\'ll celebrate you and do my best to take care of you, but I\'m a seed in the wind when it comes to having control and making things perfect for my child. You cannot do that. The thing about parenthood I find interesting is that when you shield your child from too much, and they eventually go to face the world, the world is so harsh. So you don\'t want to shield your child from life itself—there has to be some sort of acceptance or a better balance between how we communicate with our children. I think it\'s very important that children are able to be children and not live under the oppression of gross adults—yes, they should remain innocent. But should a mother and father never quarrel in front of their child? I think that\'s strange—so your child will not know how to fight? Your child will not know how to say the things they need? Sometimes, I think that bad can be good.”

On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”

Luminous Foundation's previous releases, Spontaneous Archives Vols 1 & 2, sparked with mineral fire, like shards of kosmische comet debris burning up in the Earth's atmosphere. Haig Fras is an entirely different affair, a semi- melodic, shimmering drift. Occasionally there’s a sense of oceanic melancholy and throughout an enticing organic beauty. Haig Fras collects a series impressionistic soundings inspired by the subaquatic mountain range of the same name found between Cornwall and Ireland, 95km northwest of the Isles of Scilly. 120 metres deep, with peaks 82 metres high, it’s the subaquatic aspect of the Cornubian batholith, a granite bedrock that erupts as vast tors as far inland as Bodmin and Dartmoor. Its unusual geology and unique flora and fauna – anemones, corals, lobsters, urchins, crinoids and sponges – lend their names to the album's eight tracks. Released on 16th March 2022 on LP & Download on Belbury Music The LP comes on translucent sea green vinyl and includes a free download code card, with photography by Curtis Mortimer and design by Jim Jupp. The LP is available exclusively online from Belbury Music: ghostbox.greedbag.com/dept/~belburymusicshop/

in conjunction with the release of 'Top', we have asked many artists who knew and/or were deeply influenced by Peter to contribute words, and those will be added here over the next weeks and months, so please keep checking back. I will put as many as I can here, but also they will all be on our site: www.erstwhilerecords.com/to-pita.html ================================= when our friend and inspiration Peter Rehberg passed suddenly in July 2021, I felt like I had to do something, and what I’m good at is something Peter deeply loved, producing records. so I put together this project with some of his longtime collaborators and friends, Lasse and Jérôme, Marcus Schmickler mastering and Tina Frank designing. it’s titled Top for multiple reasons but one is that Top was often Peter’s entire reply to a message you’d sent, both concise and supportive. a second is that it can also be read ‘To P’, we miss you buddy. — Jon Abbey ================================= I still haven't come to accept that we're living in a world with no Peter Rehberg. His passing last summer was an absolute shock. It hit us all so hard. His music, the labels he ran, how he ran them, his knowledge and love for electronic music, his attitude, approach and work ethic. His influence in the three decades he performed, recorded and released music can not be overrated. He often tried to downplay it, but we all knew how much he meant. But most of all we'll miss his persona - that dry British sardonic humour mixed with genuine enthusiasm and endless generosity. The last time I met him in Vienna he was appalled that I didn't bring records to trade and didn't have time to come visit his office ("What?? No product exchange??") He truly was a parameter for how electronic music was doing at any time. Now he has stepped out of time, and I don't know quite where that leaves us. My guess is he'd want us to keep making weird new music, so when Erstwhile asked if me and Jérôme would be up for recording a duo album in his memory it seemed the way to make sense of the way forward. We discussed the qualities of Peter's music – his love for rhythmic pulse-oriented materal, icy drones, his anti-musician approach (which often results in the most interesting music, just stripped of vanity), his love for abrupt jump cuts and odd album sequencing. We decided to make the album in the same way he worked, to not multi-track or overly polish the material, just try to capture the ideas in their raw state and trust in them. On my end I decided to use several old Macbooks, which all worked but had moody SuperCollider patches that only worked on those OS systems, with idiosyncrasies I had to relearn. I remember Peter saying he stopped working with laptops when they became too stable and reliable, and trying to create music on a nearly 20 year old Macbook in his honour, I understand what he meant. That the unpredictable element is crucial to the creative process. Now we suddenly have no Peter Rehberg, which seems like the hardest jump cut of all. Lasse Marhaug, February 2022 ================================= A long time collaboration between Mego and Metamkine. A long time collaboration as musicians inside or outside of MIMEO. A long time social collaboration around beers and wine (before he stopped). And even with this you realized you don't know the people so well. I've always thought of Peter as a sort of ugly duckling who disrupts the established order only to reveal that he's much more than that, a genius of constantly evolving sound and limitless organisation. Jérôme Noetinger ================================= Whenever i made a cover design for Peter/ his music, i had an initial idea of how the final image had to correspond with the music. For example, a sound that wanted to be expressed visually or a certain process to generate an image asserted itself while trying out things. On one Sunday morning, I found the right routine for this cover. The process, consisting of prepared images at the beginning, the route they travelled through the software, together with the filtering processes, created a variety of images that are all brilliant (in my opinion). You could hang them on a wall if you wanted to. But they all carry a little piece of Peter Rehberg in them. All are derived from snapshots of our last live concerts in 2021. You don't see that. But you might feel it anyway. Tina Frank ================================= about top when i asked lasse about tea music he said that noise is his sweet snack for tea. this now reminds me that pita and other early mego releases were suggested to put under "dance music" label in music stores. that was a great time that some store staffs really did it, and some people really bought them and played as dance music. today i was having tea with lasse and jérôme's "top" from speakers again (i did this several times before and after the lunar new year). this music is a great physical existence which comes into mine, like tea. i mean physical vibrations. i can't eat it. but the noise finally meet the sugar, folic, vitamin and caffeine somewhere in my brain. that's what i call solid experience. if i dance i will produce similar materials in the brain. this is an album dedicated to peter rehberg aka pita. since pita appeared i have tried hard to find new language to describe and review this kind of music. i thought a lot about avant-garde and experimental. but now i'd look back to what dance and snack and tea is to me. maybe avant-garde is about look back to these simple pleasure (or pain, to some others. or pain-kind of pleasure...). there are still a lot to talk about. such as structure, dynamic and balance, motive development, randomness and sharpness, and so on. and maybe neuroscience, too. i believe that the first thing is we don't have to use the same language applied to classical music. and in the best case it's not about aesthetics. i'm happy that these people are pushing languages, including computer languages and languages of tape and feedback, to the same solid and plain place that my cup of tea has brewed. my heart is dancing." yan jun ================================= There is an understandable tendency after someone leaves for good, to speak about how lovely and beautiful this person was. I cannot do that writing about Pita: it would be dishonest, and certainly it would not describe the impressions that I have after having shared some moments with him. He was too authentic and socially radical to fit in a one-sided nice picture. I met Pita a few times over the years (10 or so...?), and for unfathomable reasons each time was, at least for me, a memorable situation: a couple of dinners with Mika Vainio or when we played together in a quartet with Keith Rowe and Gerard Lebik (maybe the quietest music he ever played and, to my surprise, he could play it so well) . I met him at a Mika farewell dinner, with my friend Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider), just the three of us, and last summer he was by the other side of the Spree River when I played one of the most personally significant concerts I ever played: this was just a couple of days before he left… Strangely enough, all those encounters are like tattoos in my heart. Pita managed a very successful label - probably, the most successful label in the field of electronic, experimental music- and also toured, played, and hung out with friends, most of them musicians. Sometimes a label runner has to establish a certain distance with musicians, whose knowledge of the career-changing power to release a record in that particular label - certainly the case with eMego - could easily lead to some awkward social moments, unsolicited demands, ceaseless requests. In perfect opposition to the hypocrisy that could eventually surround his life, where the boundaries between business and sociability are easily non-existent, Pita was radically honest: in each word, behavior and gesture. And yes, this means that he could be harsh sometimes - he was, sometimes, with me -, but never I doubted his integrity and - most importantly - his humanity and affection, often shown through hilarious comments, or with the simplest gesture: just an eye contact which made me feel he was with me. He made a joke once, telling me what a terrible instrument the saxophone is (yes, a classic among old school electronic and techno people). Afterwards, talking about my record with Mika, which he released, he told me that he had never heard before a saxophone being played as I did in that record. Probably the best review I ever had. His personality is reflected in his label. He was proud of running a non-funded label, in a continent where so much of avant-garde art exists because of national help, and he ran it mostly by himself and as a proper business venture, making it a monument in experimental arts. In the music he released, I find a connecting theme, a feeling somewhat present in all the records: the rejection of sweetness and obvious beauty, and a harsh approach to life, but not one without hope, or without the trust that there will always be enough people to support and enjoy such radical and strange music. This knowledge led him to make eMego into a huge creature, which could move out of the underground without losing, ever, its spirit and never becoming a mainstream thing. Once I asked him: - Pita how's your relationship with Jon Abbey? - - It is very good - he replied - But he keeps on asking me why the record that Kevin Drumm made with Axel Dörner on Erstwhile does not sell as well as Sheer Hellish Miasma - - And what do you answer him? - - I answer him: well… - By the end of the set that I played that day by the Spree, I went to the other side of the river to say hi to Pita and other friends, and there's this woman that always comes after all the open-air concerts there, complaining: she says that we sound like machines, that we should do happier music, and then she left. Pita looked at me, then at the river, at some kind of imaginary horizon. - Next time you should book Whitehouse - he said, and then he left with Laura. --Lucio Capece ================================= "Peter was a singular artist, with a strong musical compass, draw a straight line and he would follow it. Peter also had a way of finding the best word to describe a sound, I recall in the early days of MIMEO where during live performances the new generation of Powerbook performers would connect live to the internet, very often the connection would drop, restoring the connection would feature the characteristic modem dial-up sound, which Peter termed as “Harsh”. this for me was the perfect term, and Peter’s concept of “Harsh” to this day became an important concept for me. " — Keith Rowe =================================

On a Friday afternoon in the autumn of 2017, Andreas Hoem Røysum and I strolled from Oslo’s Old Town, through Greenland, making a pit stop in Gaza Kitchen, over The Border, up through the Palace Park and onwards to Uranienborg Church. A few days earlier we’d seen a poster - or was it a slightly worn A4 page printed at someone’s house? - with a picture of four beautiful musicians, a bit timid-looking but smiling warmly to the camera. Below the photo was written: Dei Kjenslevare - Meditative music seeking tonalities and timbres from a time past. Our antennas shot up, and with good reason: The music we heard that afternoon burned its way into our hearts. We felt like archaeologists who had just discovered the remaining structures of a prehistoric pagan site. We learnt that Dei Kjenslevare is an ensemble that falls between several stools. Around them, one where the Norwegian folk music tradition is sitting, and next to that, one that the Euro-American contemporary music has found. Then, close by, sits the Norwegian pioneer Eivind Groven. Groven succeeded in building a theoretical foundation for just intonation in folk music. He constructed an organ with chords based on overtones, and in this way was able to integrate the tonality of folk music with that of art music. Thankfully, it is possible to talk to stool sitters if ones sitting on the floor, too. The common subject in this conversation is the interest in just intonation, microtonality and older types of tonality, amongst others those that don’t go up in the octave. Dei Kjenslevare is definitely inspired by the tonalities of Norwegian folk music. You can hear the echoes of the fiddlers Andres K. Rysstad, Erling Kjøk and the Dahle Tradition of Telemark, of singers such as Ragnar Vigdal, Gunvor Uleberg and Aslak Brekke, as well as the old langeleik (droned zither) scales documented by Erik Eggen. From contemporary music their inspiration springs from composers who, each in their own way, made use of microtonality, starting with the pioneers of the 1920’s and 30’s (Wyschnegradsky, Haba and Carrillo), through to the timbre pioneers of the 50’s and 60’s (Scelsi, Xenakis, La Monte Young, Cage, Tony Conrad, Ligeti, Penderecki), right up to the Spectralist movement in the 1970’s, which started with Gerard Grisey and is still alive and kicking (Murail, Harvey, Benjamin, Haas). Put together, these sources of inspiration create a portal into a magical world brimming with uplifting sonic vibrations. The music on this record takes the hand of the listener and guides them to a place of calm. In this tranquility there are tonalities which sound both mysterious and comforting, like something unfamiliar that you feel inexorably drawn towards. This music does not take the form of traditional slåttar (tunes) and stev (short songs), but tradition surrounds it and seeps through it. By presenting a perspective on Norwegian folk music that tears down the barriers between traditional folk and abstract contemporary music in a fundamental way, we trust that those with antennas tuned into the right frequency will find their way to new audible rooms. Perspektiv på norsk folkemusikk is a series on Motvind Records that deals with different traditions that is characterised by giving us a feeling that they bring out a soulfulness that sheds light over a certain significance by the essence of Norwegian folk music. The purpose of the series is to give people that want to listen to Norwegian folk music a broad selection of expressions that hopefully will inspire to further listening and reflections. ‘Kjeslevarulv’ is the fourth edition in this series, after Helga Myhr's debut album "Natten veller seg ut" that came out in the autumn of 2019, and Thov Wetterhus' hard-hitting "Stålslått" and Naaljos Ljom self-titled debut album from 2021. With the combination of unique music and elegant design, we hope that these albums will be sought after collector's items for those who know that physical format still is the most soothing format.

On her previous releases for Hyperdub, Loraine James has developed a musical language of broken beats and granular textures, one where catharsis arrives in splintered glimpses through a smashed-up windshield. But on her eponymous debut under a new alias, Whatever The Weather, the UK experimental musician explores more subdued energy. It’s a concept album of sorts: The song titles are each keyed to a different temperature meant to evoke an emotional response. The ambient “25°C” summons a drowsy summer afternoon, while “0°C” is brittle as fresh ice, and “2°C (Intermittent Rain)” is as gloomy as ‘80s dream-pop goths This Mortal Coil. What it all shares (apart from the jittery “17°C,” a flashback to the artist’s roots) is an interest in slowing down and tuning into more meditative mind states, where immersion takes precedence over disruption.

(DB plays with radio for a while - horrible noise drowns out our voices on the tape) "The station's not there now - usually they've started by 5.30... They've no announcements - when they go off it just stops, when they come on it just blasts in... It's enormously loud - I get it accidentally sometimes when I'm just fucking about. So I've been listening to it, and I really like the way they do it on the radio - I have to say that in recent times it seems to have got softer, a lot less abrasive in some ways. There are more vocal samples, for example... But what I like about the radio is the live quality - although the stuff is records, they don't leave them alone - they'll talk over them, advertise gigs, order a pizza - the music's constant but with interruptions. It's very live - and with that sustained pace, which of course is inhuman... And it's nice to play along with, particularly as opposed to free jazz situations where the pace is often very slow. I've found it fantastic to practice with. So for a long time I've been doing that... I've always liked the parts where the music stops and drifts along - you get some ridiculous string orchestra, then it just slips a bit, the pitch goes or they slow it down or something. Then the drums come back - it's completely meaningless! I like that... What is a pain and can sometimes dilute it is the repetitive - looped or sampled - vocals... The funny thing is, I've never heard a jungle record, all I've heard has been off the radio..." Derek Bailey [talking to Stefan Jaworzyn] full interview here preparedguitar.blogspot.com/2014/01/derek-bailey-interview-by-stefan.html also hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/pirate-radio-in-hackney-early-1990s/

QUICK NOTE: VINYL WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR consistency AT THE END OF 2022. WE'LL KEEP YOU UPDATED. As everything in life changes, one thing is consistently true: everyone is alone, but loneliness results when there is no self love, reliance, or understanding I hope that this album can encourage whoever listens to reflect introspectively and feel ok being: alone, and not lonely i-sef u-sef

Ever since an early Obongjayar demo first surfaced on SoundCloud in 2016, it’s been clear that Steven Umoh, the man behind the moniker, possesses a completely unique talent. Known to his friends simply as ‘OB’, the Nigerian-born, London-based musician pens stirring and spiritual lyrics, while commanding a distinctive voice that flits between rap, song and spoken word. With afrobeats, soul and hip-hop influences, he has created a bold, genre-defiant musicality. Despite rich successes over the last few years; OB has never felt ready to release an album, until now, and his debut full-length, Some Nights I Dream of Doors represents a real levelling up for Obongjayar. Across twelve tracks, he deftly moves through diverse sounds and subcultures while navigating a wealth of personal and political topics. OB recently featured on the latest Little Simz album and the most recent Pa Salieu project.

Heavy Machinery Records is proud to present Alter Schwede, the stunning new album from Melbourne experimental legends MY DISCO. MY DISCO formed between long-term collaborators Rohan Rebeiro, Benjamin Andrews and Liam Andrews in 2003. Renowned for their experimentation and refined minimalist approach to dark and heavy instrumentation, MY DISCO have built a reputation on their arduous tour ethic, having reached remote areas of Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico and Russia, as well as a headlining and supporting on multiple tours across Europe, UK, US, and Asia Pacific. MY DISCO have released many acclaimed singles, 12” limited editions, and five studio albums including: Cancer (2006), Paradise (2007), Little Joy (2010), Severe (2015), and Environment (2019). Compiled remotely by the band and mix engineer Boris Wilsdorf at his AndereBaustelle studio in Berlin, Alter Schwede continues the band’s recent trajectory of ambient experimentation, utilising elements and sounds from their last album, Environment, as well as continuing their interest in unique percussion, dark FM synthesis and industrial noise.

Image Langage Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022

C0URTESY OF GUSSTAFF RECORDS WE CAN SH0W THIS ALBUM HERE. THANX! RELEASE INFO: Artist: RSS B0Y 1 title: MYTH0L0GY format: CD / FILE / DL cat-number: GRAM2206 (Gusstaff Records) release date: 10.06.2022 format: 10" limited clear (Don't Sit On My Vinyl) cat-number: SIT 650 release date: 20.05.2022 www.sklep.gusstaff.com Mythology dissolves. Last vanishing points on the wide horizon. Barely visible. So where we stand now? Here or anywhere? Is it the global feeling yet, or a local one already? Are you having vivid fun when dreaming? Or all your nightmares became the lucid dreams? You do not remember? „MYTH0L0GY” - RSS B0Y 1 first solo album proper. After travelling the world for the decade with RSS B0YS , RSS B0Y 1 decided to go parallel path of the solo creations. He did not abandoned the band, actually not at all, as he is the only one surviving founder member of notorious „duo”, but B0Y 1 just needed to work in the new directions, much outside the „techno” vision-diminishing frame. Training in the new ways of making music, using brand new instruments, trying to think outside the box outside the all boxes. But probably most of all by inviting GUESTS from the various parts of the World, finally he feels enough freedom to make refreshed, next step. And mythology from the title is one of these effects coming out from the many meetings with the people - what we all have in common, who is our mutual friend, if anything, if anyone? Definitely it’s too early for the answers, but questions are told and floating in the air now already anyway. From famous Iranian „mythical” poem written years ago by Siavash Kasra’i here in recitation by Arash Bolouri (you can know him from recordings and concerts with master Sote) to points of view on a living in the present day post-pandemic Tokyo coming from emerging Japanese rapper Judicious Broski. From Polish winds and twists coming from the likes Wacław Zimpel (beside his succesfull solo career he is working closely with Shackleton and James Holden for example) or Adam Witkowski (Nagrobki!), to Malaysian traditional song performed in the highly unusual way by Marianne Mun; or the ancient Italian reminiscences flying from Damiano Notarpasquale. And even the cover-art made on the Indonesian Jawa island by talented Nawaawel - RSS B0Y 1 together with this community of guests they are producing unique amalgamate of vibrating thrills, memories and thoughts. Sometimes abrasive and glitchy, in other moments just beautiful and soothing. Maybe it all happens because sometimes it is enough just to stop for a while and do something in a different way. Looks like times are good for making things in better and deeper way. Saying more - times are demanding this. Good that RSS B0Y 1 want to join this way. Definite answers will never come. Feel absolutely free to find yours. Share them with the World. Album released on CD and as digital is accompanied by lathe-cut vinyl EP titled „B0W”. Not bad set it is. You can purchase this album also directly from Gusstaff Records here: sklep.gusstaff.com/rss-b0y-1-myth0l0gy.html AND the very special limited to 66 copies vinyl 4tracker EP: sklep.gusstaff.com/rss-b0y-1-bow-vinyl-10-clear-limited-download.html