Black To Comm is the solo project of German sound artist Marc Richter. Through his output both as an artist and through his eclectic Dekorder label, Richter has established himself as a singular voice of new music. Operating at the fringes of drone and ambient genres, his music is darkly magical and deeply atmospheric, underpinned by a signature surrealism. A relentless sonic explorer, Richter approaches the studio as his instrument, using sampling, analogue production and digital manipulation to offer an almost infinite choice of tones and textures. Audio fragments are liberated from their original context and sculpted into surprising new shapes, creating work that transcends time or genre. Seven Horses For Seven Kings sees Richter reaching out again into the limitless field of sound, summoning forth his darkest and most visceral work to date. Seven Horses For Seven Kings was completed during a particularly prolific period for Richter. Working on a broad range of commissions since his last album - from writing for film and theatre works to composing for art installations, apps and sleep music - generated a flurry of new ideas and influences. Site-specific residencies in particular let Richter shift his focus from melody and song architecture to more abstract sound art. Extensive touring would equally come to inform a key shift in Richter’s music, simulating the raw, unpredictable energy of live performances on record. Rather than ironing out mistakes in samples or his own playing, he exploits or even forces such imperfections. While rhythm has been largely absent from previous Black To Comm releases, here the music seems totally bound to it, from the fractured techno breaks of ”Fly on You”, to the pounding war drums of “Rameses II” and pulsing Mellotron sounds of “Angel Investor”. The album’s breath-taking pace drives Richter’s music to new levels of intensity. Richter’s creative practice is informed as much by careful, attentive listening as it is studio experimentation. Pieces often begin life as a single sound that catches his ear, be it a record from his extensive collection, or something in the natural environment. Samples and instrumentation are sometimes presented authentically, a deliberate reference to an era, place or player, and at other times are twisted beyond recognition. Samples from contemporary artists like Nils Frahm are bent and compounded with fragments of early recorded music and medieval song. Richter blurs the lines between organic instrumentation and digital production to the extent that the two become inseparable. Being able to separate sound from context gives Richter complete command of the emotional impact of his music, imbuing pieces with meaning or stripping it back as he sees fit. While Richter questions whether instrumental music needs to have deeper meaning beyond its sonic qualities, he accepts that the wider world inevitably bleeds into his art. Reflecting the violence and unreality of modern life, Seven Horses For Seven Kings is unashamedly dark, undeniably angry. But rather than be consumed by such emotions, Richter employs them as ecstatic release. Through his mastery of sound, he achieves transcendence through noise, beauty through intensity.
“In this post-industrial, post-enlightenment religion of ourselves, we have manifested a serpent of consumerism which now coils back upon us. It seduces us with our own bait as we betray the better instincts of our nature and the future of our own world. We throw ourselves out of our own garden. We poison ourselves to the edges of an endless sleep. Animated Violence Mild was written throughout 2018, at Blanck Mass’ studio outside of Edinburgh. These eight tracks are the diary of a year of work steeped in honing craft, self-discovery, and grief - the latter of which reared its head at the final hurdle of producing this record and created a whole separate narrative: grief, both for what I have lost personally, but also in a global sense, for what we as a species have lost and handed over to our blood-sucking counterpart, consumerism, only to be ravaged by it. I believe that many of us have willfully allowed our survival instinct to become engulfed by the snake we birthed. Animated — brought to life by humankind. Violent — insurmountable and wild beyond our control. Mild — delicious. This is perhaps the most concise body of work I have written to date. Having worked extensively throughout my musical life with dramatics, narrative, and ‘melody against all odds’, these tracks are the most direct and honest yet. The level of articulation in these tracks surpasses anything I have utilized before.” -Benjamin John Power
Agora is Christian Fennesz’s first solo album since ‘Mahler Remixed’ [Touch, 2014] and ‘Bécs’ [Editions Mego, 2014]. Fennesz writes: “Its a simple story. i had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand.”
🦚 🍄 🌿 🌊 🌒 🌩 🏔 💭 Album description by Max Allison: Fire-Toolz is the flagship musical project of a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. While her orbiting projects like Nonlocal Forecast and MindSpring Memories find Marcloid pursuing discrete, genre-specific composition in styles like jazz fusion or sample collage respectively, Fire-Toolz compresses tropes and ideas from virtually every style of music in her vast toolbox into combinatory pieces overloaded with novel juxtapositions and intricate structural decisions. Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) marks Fire-Toolz’s first release with Orange Milk Records, following two full-lengths on Hausu Mountain (2017’s Drip Mental and 2018’s Skinless X-1) and an album with Bedlam Tapes (2017's Interbeing). While Marcloid maintains the level of compositional density and multi-aesthetic overload she pursued on her previous releases, Field Whispers finds her working within a palette of modern sound design presented at a greater depth of resolution and detail than ever before. While at times splintering her tracks into her typically momentary fragments, she also explores the possibilities of longer, more focused passages of sustained tension within the territory of the Fire-Toolz project while upholding a long-held commitment to never tread the same ground twice. Field Whispers draws inspiration from a wide array of non-musical concepts that Marcloid explores in her extensive reading regimen in subjects like quantum physics, nondual spirituality, and philosophy. While her complex conceptions of fields of study like the holographic principle of reality, Advaita Vedanta, and Epicurianism serve as oblique backdrops for her production decisions and the fractal structural layouts of her tracks, she also channels pure emotion from the mundanities of her daily life: her memories of suburban life growing up, the pure beauty of the natural world around her, and the joy derived from her relationships with her loved ones and cherished pets. While these concepts offer a jumping point for her music, in practice the tropes of innumerable styles and genres pop up in each of her varied compositions. The baroque harmonic structures and intricate lead lines of jazz fusion and prog crash directly into passages of ambient amorphousness or hyper-detailed noise production marked by rushes of static texture and delicately spatialized alien sound sources. While Field Whispers slightly deviates from her previous focus on the tactics of black metal and death metal, including harsh vocal shrieks and rushes of warp speed drum programming, these elements still surface from time to time as striking complements to her more abstract compositional strategies, grounding her pieces in a more technical practice in keeping with the presentation of a full band metal performance. Passages of searing guitar playing, be it two-hand tapped lead lines or towering power metal solos, pop into view for a few moments before getting subsumed back into the bedrock of electronic sound sources that lay beneath each track. Marcloid has a contentious relationship with the international diaspora of vaporware and its many offshoots. She actively produces within the genre’s tenets with projects like MindSpring Memories (see: recontextualization of pre-exisitng muzak and fusion compositions, variations in tempo, heavy effects processing) and has explored the scene through the prolific output of her labels Swamp Circle and Rainbow Bridge. Fire-Toolz, on the other hand, represents a near-complete break with vaporwave by way of the project’s focus on completely original productions, harmonic progressions, and live instrumental input. While Field Whispers might seem allied to vaporware in its post-digital, internet-fueled collage aesthetic and its occasional utilization of chintzy or MIDI-tone timbres, in truth Marcloid carefully programs and painstakingly performs each of the elements she threads through her tracks, pushing the project closer to the realms of combinatory prog and experimental sound design. With Field Whispers, Fire-Toolz once again proves her mettle as a nuanced composer who funnels a vast reservoir of lived and learned experience into complex compositions weighted with enough contrasting emotions and sound sources to match the overwhelming density of her lived experience.
It takes a village to raise a child; Holly Herndon’s third proper studio LP, *PROTO*, holds that the same is true for an artificial intelligence, or AI. The Berlin-based electronic musician’s 2015 album *Platform* explored the intersection of community and technological utopia, and so does its follow-up—only this time, one of her collaborators is a programmed entity, a virtual being named Spawn. Arguing that technology should be embraced, not feared, Herndon and her human collaborators, including a choral ensemble and hundreds of volunteer vocal coaches, set about “teaching” their AI via call-and-response singing sessions inspired by Herndon’s religious upbringing in East Tennessee. The results harness *Platform*’s richly synthetic palette and jagged percussive force and join them with choral music of almost overwhelming beauty. The massed voices of “Frontier” suggest a combination of Appalachian revival meetings and Bulgarian folk that’s been cut up over Hollywood-blockbuster drums; in “Godmother,” a collaboration with the experimental footwork producer Jlin, Spawn “sings” a dense, hyperkinetic fugue based on Jlin’s polyrhythmic signature. The crux of the whole album might be “Extreme Love,” in which a narrator recounts the story of a future post-human generation: “We are not a collection of individuals but a macro-organism living as an ecosystem. We are completely outside ourselves and the world is completely inside us.” A loosely synchronized choir chirps in the background as she asks, in a voice full of childlike wonder, “Is this how it feels to become the mother of the next species—to love them more than we love ourselves?” It’s a moving encapsulation of the album’s radical optimism.
Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria. Holly’s third full-length album 'PROTO' isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn. For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion. 'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards? You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee. “There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty.” Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Just as Holly’s previous album 'Platform' forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, 'PROTO' is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.
A bold step forward, Dawn Chorus is also Greene’s most collaborative project to date, featuring additional production and instrumentation from film composer Brian Reitzell (Lost In Translation), cello by London’s Oliver Coates, additional production from Clams Casino and original vocal contributions from ambient artist Julianna Barwick, rapper Cadence Weapon and singers Ebhoni and Rochelle Jordan, all sampled, processed and stitched back into the album. The Album is available on Limited Edition Clear Vinyl (Exclusive to LuckyMe and Rough Trade) CD and Digital Formats Artwork by Hassan Rahim
Veteran producer Thomas Feriero graces us with his first album in years and his debut LP as Maenad Veyl. Hosted inside a sleeve designed with Tomaso Lisca are twelve tracks made of the same contained abrasion we fell for on his EPs for Death & Leisure, Veyl and Pinkman. A full-on workout devoid of fillers, ambient interludes and other mindless garbage, ‘Body Count’ is as relentless as the name suggests.
The experimental tendencies of electronic duo Matmos have often led to their off-the-wall album concepts, so it may come as no surprise that the avant-garde act’s 11th record is composed entirely using sounds sourced from plastic. Merging found sound and musique concrete techniques with plastic instruments played live, Matmos explore a bold new synthetic sound palette. The results are unpredictable and often spectacular—\"Breaking Bread\" offers a twisted minimal take on samples from the band Bread\'s vinyl records, while the skittering title track is an upbeat march featuring plastic horns and drums.
Thrill Jockey Records is pleased to announce Plastic Anniversary, the new album by Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos. Pushing off from the restricted palette of their last album, the critically acclaimed Ultimate Care II, which was composed entirely from the sound of a washing machine, Plastic Anniversary is also derived from a single sound source: plastic. At once hyper-familiar in its omnipresence and deeply inhuman in its measured-in-centuries longevity and endurance, plastic supplies, surrounds and scares. Seemingly negligible, plastic is always ready to hand but also always somewhat suspect, casting toxic shadows onto the everyday. True to form, the band have assembled a promiscuous array of examples of this sturdy-yet-ersatz family of materials: Bakelite dominos, Styrofoam coolers, polyethylene waste containers, PVC panpipes, pinpricks of bubble wrap, silicone gel breast implants and synthetic human fat. Though it has the tight editing chops, pop forms and bizarre sound palette of their early albums such as Quasi-Objects and A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure, Plastic Anniversary has a distinctive sound because of the foregrounding of plastic horns and plastic drums played by human beings. The bounce and snap of the duo’s programmed rhythms are here supplemented by a sweatier and more unruly human element provided by a surprising cast of guest musicians. Members of the horn and drumline sections of the Whitefish Highschool Bulldogs from Whitefish, Montana were recruited by Matmos and persuaded to take part in recording sessions at Snowghost Studios where they played objects sourced from a nearby recycling center, including massive plastic garbage bins. This was later combined with additional plastic percussion performances by Greg Saunier, a drummer known for his hyper-expressive, mercurial playing as a founding member of the band Deerhoof. Taking the concept of “broken beat” literally, “Breaking Bread” is a bouncy digital dancehall number built entirely out of the plucked and twanged fragments of broken vinyl records by the Seventies soft rock group Bread. A mini-suite for plastic container, exercise ball and an amplified DNA kit that recalls both 80s pop and the hectic minimalism of Michael Nyman, “The Crying Pill” stacks frantic patterns of saxophone-like sobs onto deep sub bass stabs that are almost trap. Amplifying squishy synthetic human tissue created by the SynDaver corporation as a substitute for human corpses in medical schools, “Interior with Billiard Balls & Synthetic Fat” pairs squelchy electro made out of gross-out substances with tangy melodic riffs. This odd combination of Cronenbergian body-horror and sunny grooves continues on “Silicone Gel Implant”, a skanking number that works rubbery basslines out of, yes, a breast implant, but by the time the plastic flutes snake into the mix, the source becomes secondary to the trance-like form. Side one closes in a more reflective and somber key, with the title track “Plastic Anniversary”, whose cod-medieval martial drums and horn fanfares recall Matmos’ penchant for anachronism circa “The Civil War” before giving way to a close-mic-ed cascade of plastic poker chips. If side one is playful and poppy, side two is sharper and darker in its implications, and features more live drumming than any other Matmos album. Things kick off with “Thermoplastic Riot Shield” a single-object study built entirely out of the sound of a police riot shield being stroked, rubbed and struck. The resulting sounds are processed into a tense assemblage of harsh noise, deep dub basslines and jarring cuts of silence. On a squeaky loop straight out of a Jacques Tati film, “The Singing Tube” draws out the pinging resonance of a ten foot long PVC pipe played entirely with plastic toilet brushes, and hits a flanged overtone effect not unlike the string compositions of Arnold Dreyblatt. Bristling with whistles and noisemakers and plastic-gloved handclaps, “Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom” bolts a percussive showcase for the high school marching band playing the signature patterns of drumline and Baltimore club onto jarring edits of LEGO bricks clicking into place and weird smears of processed plastic horns. Since plastic was described by its first developers as a “fourth kingdom” beyond animal, vegetable, and mineral, this track heralds the eventual collapse of the political economy that birthed the oceans of garbage that now choke our world. Thinking the dystopian consequences of plastic through to their post-human conclusion, the final track, “Plastisphere” sounds like a field recording of insects and birds and pattering rain and ocean waves, but is in fact a work of digital sleight of hand: every single sound on this track has been artificially constructed out of samples of bubble wrap, Velcro, plastic bags and straws and, tellingly, an emergency stretcher. After a volatile and vibrant suite of poppy plastic electronics, Plastic Anniversary ends in an acknowledgement of the planetary price yet to be paid. Production Details: Plastic Anniversary was pre-mastered by extreme digital sound artist Jeff Carey. Mastered for vinyl by the renowned mastering engineer Rashad Becker. Cover art, which collages high resolution, up-close photographs of the objects used to create the music, is by Ted Mineo, the creator of the cover art for Ultimate Care II. Back cover image by photographer and activist Chris Jordan depicts the plastic contents from the stomach of a Laysan albatross photographed in an atoll near the Pacific Ocean Plastic Gyre. Touring: Matmos will be touring World Wide throughout 2019. Anniversary: Drew and Martin celebrated their 25th while making the album.
My body is resonant; it has the capacity to radiate power and love. My body is energy; it pulses every moment as it ebbs and flows. My body is forever; it has a form now and will hold new patterns in the future. “Resonant Body”, the third studio album by Octo Octa (Maya Bouldry-Morrison), is her most spiritual and nature--connected work. Maya recorded the songs at her cabin in New Hampshire inorder to channel the resonance of the forest, the beauty of the river, and the energy from the rituals she conducts within it. The album was written and produced at the end of December 2018—after a year of near constant touring—in order to process through art an intense and magical year of change. “Resonant Body” is the second release on T4T LUV NRG, the label co-run by Maya and her partner Eris Drew. It draws on the same themes of togetherness (“Power To The People”), embodiment (“Spin Girl, Let’s Activate!”), love (“Deep Connections”), healing (“My Body Is Power”) and survival (“Can You See Me?”) that animated her acclaimed “For Lover’s EP” (Technicolour, 2019). The album’s art was created by Maya’s partner Brooke, who painted two canvases after a magical day-trip Brooke, Eris, and Maya took earlier this year on the “Sweet Trail” in New Hampshire. Octo Octa’s live performances and DJ sets are known for calling the dancers to move their bodies to a message of love. The dancefloor can be for all of us. It is a communal space that can provide healing when respected, where the dancers can actualize if they can let go and embrace themselves and each other. When we engage with music that heals, through dance or deep listening, we use an ancient technology for its original purpose. Octo Octa believes in the healing power of her music. “Resonant Body” transforms her life and intentions into healing art. 50% of the profits from the album will be donated to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), which works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence.
** for the vinyl: head to Low Company or RwdFwd, or check your local dealer. ** Devil’s Dance – the debut album from Ossia. Heavy-weather, beyond-good-and-evil soundsystem poetics, channelling raw and rootical techno, Isolationist abstraction, and dub at its most turbulent and raw-nerved and space-time-warping. New worlds ahead… Equal parts tuff, tail-thrashing dancehall pressure – see ‘Hell Dub’ – and art-of-darkness ambience and introspection, culminating in the slow-burning, third-eye-opening 23-minute dreamweapon, ‘Vertigo’. Part of the Young Echo crew, Ossia embodies the best tradition of Bristol underground music in that he doesn’t pay much mind to tradition, just does his own thing. Yes, Devil’s Dance shares DNA with those sullen masterpieces we will always associate with the city, from blunted 90s street-soul/hip-hop to sub-loaded dubstep – but like his forebears Ossia is ultimately a mongrel breed, drawing from his own, very contemporary and idiosyncratic well of influences: grime, jazz, steppers, dub, post-punk and industrial abrasion, concrète minimalism… Devil’s Dance could easily be not just a forbidding, but a suffocating proposition. But even at its most angst-ridden it feels lithe and aerodynamic, its darker impulses both intensified, and offset, by a pure soundboy’s delight in detail and colour and higher dancefloor mechanics. The music pulses with energy, a fever to communicate…and Raki Singh (violin), Jasmine (vocals) and Ollie Moore (saxophone) add vivid flesh-tone to the punishing, plasmic electronics. The record was mixed at an infamous, subterranean Bristolian recording studio, using an arsenal of spring and plate reverbs, modded pedals, tape-delays and compressors: systems of black magic crucial to the album’s intense presence and physicality and carefully modulated dread. In the end what we are witnessing, and experiencing vicariously, is a purging, an exorcism: find the devil, dance with the devil… and then chase, chase, chase him out of the earth.
rRoxymore's long-anticipated debut album, Face To Phase, was born of her annual creative hibernation practice. Whereas her previous appearances for Don't Be Afraid - Thoughts Of An Introvert, Parts 1 & 2 - revealed inner worlds of saturated colour and natural expressiveness, she retreated into her studio at the turn of winter 2018 occupied with the idea of dismantling the dancefloor-centric pressure paradigm. The resulting album, Face to Phase, finds rRoxymore methodically and mindfully stripping back to fundamentals: rumbling minimalist dub, sparse polymetric drums, boldy unpredictable melodic narratives and subtleties which hover out-of-reach or disappear into vapour. Forged by the spirit of club music cultures, Face To Phase favours deep listening; resisting the temptation to reflect on the past or project towards the future, it's an album that is firmly rooted in the contemporary. Sparked by her own archive of field recordings, and produced primarily but not exclusively in the box, Face To Phase adds several facets to rRoxymore's already wide repertoire. The pensive and beatless opener "Home Is Where The Music Is" was inspired by her longtime friend Planningtorock, while "Forward Flamingo" is a spiraling dream-state of house music dissociation; elsewhere "Energy Points" remains anchored to the ocean floor, radiating heavy dub waves, "Passages" is a ghoulish skeleton of UK break beats, "What's The Plan" closes the album in a blissfully blunted fashion, while twisting, shape-shifting rhythms push and pulse "PPS21" into series of ever-evolving shapes and forms. Through and in between the eight songs of Face To Phase, rRoxymore fortifies her status as a seasoned artist, grounded by over a decade of live performance and touring, collaboration, composition and experimentation. With a new live performance collaboration with a percussionist set to debut the LP at Atonal on 1st September, rRoxymore is primed to expand her reputation even further as one of the most vital and distinctive artists on the fringes of contemporary club culture.
On his debut album “Scattered Memories”, the composer, musician and true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh SABA ALIZADEH blends his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian music instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned Tar and Setar virtuoso HOSSEIN ALIZADEH, SABA ALIZADEH studied the Iranian spike fiddle with SAEED FARAJPOURY and KEYHAN KALHOR plus photography and later experimental sound art with MARK TRAYLE at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. His musical activities that lead him all around the globe for performances (a.o. at Carnegie Hall) branch into 2 different areas: on the one side ALIZADEH is a highly reputated virtuoso on his traditional instrument, on the other he likes to approach music from a more experimental / technological aspect in his electronic / electro-acoustic pieces. This not being enough, he founded Noise Works in 2014, a platform and label for organizing experimental concerts and for the transfer of knowledge of music technologies among young Iranian musicians which makes him a central figure at the forefront of the current, very vivid Persian music scene that gained a lot of attention through artists like SIAVASH AMINI, PORYA HATAMI and of course SOTE who included a track by ALIZADEH on the compilation “Girih: Iranian Sound Artists” that he had curated. In 2018, ALIZADEH self-released his debut “Scattered Memories” on CD in Iran which now, in a reworked version, sees its deserved world-wide release as LP and DL. Over the course of 10 tracks ALIZADEH melts his 2 musical worlds into 1: tradition meets modernism, eastern sounds meet western production, folklore meets contemporary electronics. An album that will appeal to an open-minded “world music” audience as well as fans of current streams like ambient or drone in its most subtle forms.
Thanks Specially To Far East Recording Soichi Terada RUSH HOUR Hhatri: History Has A Tendency To Repeat Itself HighHoops Sound Of Vast Artist & Repertory:Soichi Terada Compilation concept and selection by Shinichiro Yokota and Soichi terada Mastering byStephan Betke at Scape Mastering ,Berlin Artwork by Kentaro"ANI"Fujimoto Released by: Far East Recording Release date: 18 June 2019 P-line: ℗ 2019 Far East Recording C-line: © 2019 (C) 2019 Far East Recording
On Mtendere Mandowa’s first album since 2014’s *E s t a r a*, the Los Angeles producer better known as Teebs reminds listeners what makes him one of the beat music scene’s most distinctive talents. To begin with, the beats themselves are never the main event: Mandowa is far more interested in texture and atmosphere than he is rhythmic propulsion or kinetic fireworks. He’s hardly a stranger to a seductive groove, but the drums aren’t so much timekeeper or anchor as they are a kind of shadow creeping beneath a verdant swath of gentle keys, guitars, and even the occasional harp. Lush is the operative term: The opening “Atoms Song,” which pairs bit-crushed chords with rustling percussion, is ambient by another name; “Prayers I” and “Marcel” are beatless tone poems, while “Prayers II” puts a liquid spin on shuffling boom-bap. The biggest surprises come courtesy of Teebs’ collaborators: Sudan Archives turns “Black Dove” into woozily atmospheric soul; “Mmntm,” featuring Ringgo Ancheta, aka Mndsgn, and Former Boy, is practically a folk song, right down to its nylon-stringed guitar and airy vocal harmonies. And on “Studie,” featuring one of the album’s most propulsive beats, Panda Bear’s reverbed cries tilt the song toward psychedelic pop. It’s a fine reminder of Teebs’ versatility: Never overstuffed, his productions nevertheless contain multitudes.
The wait is finally over for new music by Teebs, aka Mtendere Mandowa. It’s been 5 years since his last body of work, but 25 October will mark the release of his next full length album “Anicca”. With the help of a host of musical friends including Panda Bear (Animal Collective), Sudan Archives, Ringgo Ancheta aka MNDSGN, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Anna Wise, daydream Masi, Former Boy, Pink Siifu, Jimetta Rose and Thomas Stankiewicz, the 47 minute LP fuses Teebs’ signature bright and fluid productions with the grounded and colorful elements of his collaborators. With roots at the ‘My Hollow Drum’ collective, Dublab, and Low End Theory, Teebs is a staple in Los Angeles music. “My creative family in LA is so important,” he explains. “It’s a part of who I am when I step outside and how others in LA view me. I love the feeling of community and trying to understand how I can be useful in it.” A consummate artist with a completely unique style, his ideas seemingly flow from a cloudy hidden realm of the ether straight through the medium and onto the canvas. As both a producer and a painter, his projects possess a flawless consistency that pull one deep into the worlds he creates. Reflecting on his 5 year hiatus from releasing music, he says: “It feels like it [the music] comes from a different place now. My inspiration to work has changed and my choices with it. I’ve explored more with what tools and instruments I used and tried to be more open to collaboration.” The record showcases just how effortlessly his work lays landscapes for his guests’ contributions to blend in with his own production and Teebs himself is full of admiration for his collaborators. For example, of Panda Bear from Animal Collective, who is featured on lead single ‘Studie’ he explains that: “Everything he decides to do is pure gold or fine wine.” It’s a similar story with kindred spirit Sudan Archives who graces ‘Black Dove’ - of whom he says, “She really is a scary genius who deserves the world’s ears and eyes.” The album was recorded mostly at home using his Roland SP-404 sampler, Mellotron M4000D synthesizer, seprewa (Ghanaian harp-lute), guitar and laptop - “If you listen closely you might hear my daughter speaking or my wife typing on a laptop on the record,” Teebs says smiling. Family is at the heart of Mtendere’s life now and they are his primary source of inspiration. “My daughter was born the year after ‘Estara’ and taking time to watch her grow meant everything to me...” he explains. “Also my relationships with my wife,mother, brother, and the friends around me, and the mistakes I’ve made through my life have all inspired Anicca.” He also cites the American poet David Antin and his 1976 work “Talking at the Boundaries” as a notable read and a quote about art, nature and form from Hans Arp’s “Notes from a Dada Diary” that struck a chord with him during the making of the record. As for the title - “Anicca” - it describes the impermanence of all being in Buddhism. Recognition of the fact that ‘anicca’ characterizes everything is one of the first steps in the Buddhist’s spiritual progress toward enlightenment. “It’s a reminder to myself that nothing is permanent,” he says. A highly respected visual artist, Teebs created the artwork for “Anicca” just as he has done for his previous albums. “I’m using the two disciplines [music and art] together to explore the worlds of communication and semi abstractions” he explains. The artwork for “Anicca” started as a drawing about his wife and mother and evolved into an enamel pin that transformed again as he collaborated with his friend Megan Geer-Alsop to make a stained glass replica. That work later got photographed and digitally enhanced to make the cover. “The artwork is so special to me because of all the hands working together to create an idea,” says Mtendere. “The piece went through so much change and landed in a state of constant change being made out of glass with its colors and reflections… no matter how you look at it or what time of day it is, it’s always something different, yet the same... quite like nature works. It felt like life, like semi abstractions and like the album title.”
TENGGER is a traveling musical family, made up of Pan-Asian couple, itta and Marqido, who create their brand of psychedelic New-Age drone magic through the use of harmonium, voice, and toy instruments (played by itta) and analogue synths (played by Marqido). The duo originally started out with the moniker “10” but since the birth of their son RAAI (who joins them on tour and often on stage) in 2012, have called themselves TENGGER (meaning ‘unlimited expanse of sky’ in Mongolian) to mark the expansion of the family. It also means ‘huge sea’ in Hungarian. Travel, as spiritual experience in real environments, and the sound between the space and the audience have been central themes of their works. The family’s yearly pilgrimages inform every aspect of their art. Fans of Cluster, Laraaji, Emerald, and Neu! will find lots to love in the music of TENGGER. “Spiritual 2” was created with this simple ancient Asian philosophy in mind: if you’re looking at something, you should recognize that there is something invisible behind it. The cover art is from Mt. Ishizuchi in Shikoku, Japan. Ishizuchi is a symbolic, holy mountain. There is an old shrine near the top and there’s a small mirror at the shrine which reveals the peak of the Ishizuchi. Beyond Beyond is Beyond is honored to be the mirror for you to reflect the beauty, strength, and power of TENGGER’s brand-new masterwork, “Spiritual 2”.
The Cinematic Orchestra are back with a definitive new album that explores a timeless question of vital importance in 2019 - what to believe? Founding member Jason Swinscoe and longtime partner Dominic Smith have enlisted album contributions from collaborators old and new: Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend (vocalist on Bonobo’s 'First Fires’), Dorian Concept and Tawiah (Mark Ronson, Kindness), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (Flying Lotus, Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote) features on strings and photographer and visual artist Brian “B+” Cross collaborated with Swinscoe and Smith on the album’s concept. The record was mixed by multiple Grammy winner Tom Elmhirst (David Bowie, Frank Ocean, Adele) in Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Lady studios. The album artwork comes courtesy of The Designers Republic™ (Aphex Twin). The album announce is marked by the general release of new single ‘A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life’ featuring Roots Manuva. The track, revealed via an innovative website only accessible on offline devices - a paradox illuminating the album’s core question of what to believe, was available initially on 12" in independent record stores and sold out in a matter of hours. The artists first collaborated in 2002 on fan favourite ‘All Things to All Men’, 17 years later the partnership has lost none of its urgency and searing insight as Roots Manuva laments how our “situation is strange to us, stranger things are claiming us” over a pounding, hypnotic rhythm section that concedes to the choruses’ soaring strings. In 2019 it is easy to see the bands influence, jazz is all around us, London and LA have recently produced scene’s more prolific than anyone expected; Kamasi Washington has been nominated for both Grammy and Brit Awards, Sons Of Kemet a Mercury Prize, BADBADNOTGOOD provide jazz soundtracks to high fashion shows and Kendrick Lamar has put the jazz palette at the top of the charts. When The Cinematic Orchestra released their critically acclaimed debut album “Motion” it helped pave the way for this moment, incorporating as it did an interpretation that had been lacking in the oeuvre and encouraging a new generation of musicians to break rules. “To Believe” doesn’t shy away from this ethos - its articulation of the band’s unique sonic language, encompassing not only jazz but the sort of transcendental orchestration combined with the elegant electronics of artists like Ólafur Arnalds and Floating Points, artists they have helped forge a path for, has never been more cohesive and compelling. Since “Motion”, The Cinematic Orchestra have sold hundreds of thousands of albums, generated almost half a billion streams and enjoyed critical support from the likes of Pitchfork (8.6 for second album “Every Day” which featured two collaborations with legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago singer Fontella Bass), The Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, Resident Advisor, Fader, Mixmag, NME, Crack (whose Simple Things festival the band headlined in 2016), Rolling Stone, Gilles Peterson, Benji B, Jason Bentley, Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Lauren Laverne, KCRW and Mary Anne Hobbs. ‘To Build A Home’ has been synced to dozens of films and TV shows including the Orange Is The New Black finale and This Is Us, adverts include Burberry, Armani, Nike and Apple. The ‘To Build a Home’ short film was directed by Andrew Griffin and stars Peter Mullan (Trainspotting, Harry Potter). The band have also been touring, consistently performing to larger and larger audiences and selling out the likes of London's Royal Albert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Rome’s Auditorium Park Della and the Sydney Opera House. Coachella, Glastonbury, Fuji Rock, Montreux and Sonar have all played host to the band’s much loved live performances. Beyond the obvious they have also appeared at the Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards for Stanley Kubrick and New York’s Summerstage with the legendary Majavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin, they curated a series of events at London’s prestigious Barbican Centre featuring commissions from the prodigiously talented Austin Peralta (RIP) and seen the likes of Dorian Concept, Thundercat, Moses Sumney and Gilles Peterson support them on stage over the years. They scored Disney’s feature length nature documentary “The Crimson Wing” including the track ‘Arrival of the Birds’ which featured in the closing scene of the Oscar Winning Stephen Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything". They also released a Late Night Tales compilation featuring music from Flying Lotus, Burial and Björk. It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since The Cinematic Orchestra released their last studio album, “Ma Fleur” in 2007. Did you achieve what you hoped to in the time since? 12 years from now will be 2031. What will you do before then? We are powerless to answer of course, mere passengers in our own existence, improvising as events deliver themselves into our lives, struggling with the question - what to believe? Births, deaths, success, failure. Money, drugs, temptation, rejection. Trump, Brexit, fear, hope. Art, relevance, pressure, belief. It’s this that accounts for the past 12 years for The Cinematic Orchestra, it’s this that characterises the process of recording the new album and it’s this that has been distilled into a work that is not only their best and most definitive to date but by asking these questions it’s also that which best reflects the great beauty in life.
It’s always after midnight in The Juan MacLean’s world. Cobbling together bits of house, disco, and the punkier end of club culture, their music offers an idealized view of nightlife, writ large—decades’ worth of dance floors rolled up into a single potent package. The beats are even more powerful on *The Brighter the Light*, which gathers six years of the duo’s singles, yielding an hour of the kind of smoldering grooves that typically greet the dawn in warehouses from Brooklyn to Berlin. The ’80s influence so integral to their music remains pronounced on “What Do You Feel Free About?” and “Zone Non Linear,” which invoke the glory days of Jellybean Benitez B-sides. They also flirt with dub techno on “Quiet Magician,” while “Can You Ever Really Know Somebody” (featuring one of frontwoman Nancy Whang’s standout performances on the record) summons the iridescent textures of Luomo’s *Vocalcity*, which helped kick off the deep-house revival of 2000. The title track, an instrumental, closes the LP with some of the deepest grooves in TJM’s catalog—moody piano house touched up with a silvery hint of acid, suggesting the first rays of sunlight peeking through basement windows.
The Juan Maclean return to DFA with a compilation LP of 12-inch singles they’ve amassed over the past six years – re-edited, re-mastered, and ready for fans who may have missed the tracks the first time around. From the dub house sway of 2013’s “You Are My Destiny” to the high-energy stomp of this May’s “Zone Non Linear,” and featuring two never-before-released tracks, “Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger,” The Juan Maclean once again justify their longevity as a musical force that is more than capable of repurposing club tracks for every setting. The Brighter The Light is put together in a way that lends itself to appreciating the sheer banging quality of the songs while simultaneously being able to dance to them in your living room. For example, take “Feel Like Movin,’” which Pitchfork called “gloriously beatific” and “pure DFA gold.” In the new remastered version, the fullness of the keys and the kicks takes over, unfurling across the listener. Deep house rhythms, sparkling synths and a certain spaciousness are what’s emphasized across the record. Gone is the slow-motion melancholy disco from their recent full-lengths – The Brighter The Light is all fierce enthusiasm and dance floor missives, perfect for those who aren’t quite ready to let go of summer. Juan Maclean is a DJ and producer who has been a mainstay of the New York club scene, as well as maintaining a rigorous international touring schedule, since the release of his first records on DFA in 2002. Vocalist Nancy Whang is his longtime collaborator, best known as a founding member of LCD Soundsystem and a busy touring DJ. Together, the two artists have released an extensive catalogue of 12” singles and full-length albums for DFA, including 2014’s seminal In A Dream LP. The proper follow-up studio album will follow in 2020.
