Boomkat – new Boris, Esmerine, Qluster, etc

*Excellent album of head-melting drone and Kosmische made on an Indian Harmonium and recorded to tape – available on vinyl only in an edition of 450 copies for the world* Digitalis introduce the Mind Over Mirrors alias of Jaime Fennelly (Acid Birds/Peeesseye/Manpack Variant) with the endless Harmonium drone topologies of ‘The Voice Rolling’. Five years since his previous solo outing, Jaime expresses timelessly primal yet elevated intentions over seven densely layered vistas of raga-scaling heights and hypnotically seductive bass undulation. All the sounds were sourced from a medium-sized Indian Harmonium and then processed electronically via tape echo, harmonizer and other guitar pedals, diffusing the instrument’s potential into a a grittily textured and dense spectrum of uniquely frictional drone spirits. This celestial flight departs at ‘Brickfelder’, ascending gradually through harmonized clouds of metallic-fragranced tones, almost bitter and gritty, but calcifying into something quite naturally majestic. As XXJFG eulogised, next track ‘You Ain’t Reeling’ reveals itself like “Some drumless-techno-titan stalking the sand blasted bazaars of a near future”, amping the Harmonium to excoriating, almost face-melting levels of grandeur, before drowning in the abyssal subsidence of ‘Coaling’ and being ecstatically extruded through the labyrinthine repetition of ‘Barely Spun’. After a pause to flip over, ‘Point Hammond’ rolls into view, tracing a long, linear path across the plains of primitive American blues to the amp worship of Sunn 0))) and Barn Owl’s narrowed-eye gaze, following the course of shimmering, coppery overtones through the landscape to the delta of ‘Round, Around’, and bathing in a more joyous flow of tones like the expressions of the Sacred Heart singers reverberating a mass of ecstasy to the Ganges. ‘The Voice Rolling’ is overflowing with emotion that you don’t normally find in many drone/Kosmische records, and a visceral affirmation of life itself. Mastered by Scott Colburn with art by Serena Lander. Cut to vinyl at D&M.

**Manchester’s own Holy Other touches down on Tri Angle with five sumptuous jams occupying the spooked space between R&B, techno and dark ambient**. It’s tempting to call it witch-house, of course, but Holy Other’s productions are so subtle and carefully wrought that we’d be doing him a huge disservice if we did. This music deserves to be taken on its own terms: as emotive and supremely evolved electronic music with a real force of personality. We’re drawn in with ‘Know Where’, a sleepy-eyed, mid-paced groover that sketches out the Holy Other universe: hard-jerking drums, synth ambience, technoid bleeps, eerie vocal snatches; it’s from this palette that he paints ‘Yr Love’ (think Kassem Mosse meets Hype Williams on a beach in Ibiza) and the similarly chugging ‘With U’ and ‘Feel Something’. The EP’s unmistakable centrepiece however is ‘Touch’ – it sounds like 2-step pitched-down and re-strung for Valium-munchers, Burial-esque vocal pressure meeting ultra-minimal, jeep-rocking claps and downshifting darkside synths in 10,000 leagues of reverb, making for a track as slickly cinematic as it is disorienting and plain RUDE. Put simply, it’s the kind of twisted but oddly romantic R&B futurism which Tri Angle consistently excels at sourcing. Yes, the tropes Holy Other works with are largely tried and tested, but with his high production values he massages them into something distinctive and truly powerful.

Having first entered our lives in 2009 with an album so singularly terrifying that it still gives us nightmares, Pepijn Caudron – the elusive mastermind behind Kreng – plunges even deeper into the heart of darkness with a new full-length offering for Miasmah. The results are just phenomenal, combining a palpably European antique grandeur with cutting edge sound design and a pervasive occult charge (a ‘grimoire’ is a book of spells, don’tcha know). ‘Karcist’ is the curtain-raiser, wherein ambiguous midnight ambience soon gives way to hands-around-the-throat dread; ‘Le Bateleur’ is a zombie waltz of baleful clarinet, muted horns and snares flapping like bat’s wings. On ‘Opkropper’, Kreng’s neo-classical ambitions swell to the fore, plangent cello lavishly swelling amid Ligeti-style piano jabs and snatches of soprano opera singing that sound like Edith Piaf trapped down a well. ‘Petit Grimoire’ is the album’s seductive highlight, impish strings hanging off a muffled techno pulse, and ‘Wrak’ is a veritable symphony of things that go bump in the night: shrill violins and discordant woodwind scrapping and scraping over a steadily iterated, Morricone-esque motif. The stately orchestral vibe returns for ‘Ballet Van De Bloedhoeren’ only to dissolve into a fetid swamp of the sickest drone; ‘Girl In A Fishtank’ sounds like one of Leyland Kirby and Philip Jeck’s clammiest nightmares, a real Death In Venice dirge, its 1920s pomp racked by the threat of cholera, drowning, forbidden lust and war. ‘La Poule Noire is a grimm tale with an almost industrial momentum, its reverbed percussion rolling horribly, unstoppably onwards like a steam train to the death factory. Has gothic minimalism ever sounded this vivid, this all-consuming and three-dimensional? Not to our knowledge.

‘Channel Pressure’ is the debut LP from Ford & Lopatin, formerly-known-as Games (Daniel “Oneohtrix Point Never” Lopatin & Joel “Tiger City” Ford). Without a shadow of a doubt it’s one of the years defining records, a postmodern pop dazzler patching elements of discoid ’80s pop and jazz-funk fusion with early ’90s R&B in a lucidly fractal digital simulacra that sounds like an updated and oddly screwed version of classic Scritti Politti. Like any “progressive” album worth it’s gatefold sleeve, there’s a conceptual narrative at its core: “The year is 2082. Joey Rogers is a Teenage Tech head whose dream is to unplug from reality and jam in the style of his MIDI equipped ancestors”, and however corny, it’s an idea we can relate to, somehow. It’s reflected quite literally in the spot-gloss sleeve, and manifests over 14 geometrically ornate and synco-sensual minor anthems, notably featuring a rare and most welcome vocal appearance from Autre Ne Veut on the cunning R&B couplet of ‘Break Inside’ and ‘I Surrender’, and mixing by Guillermo Scott Herren aka Prefuse 73. For the duo, it’s a long held childhood dream fulfilled, realising a schoolboy fantasy (they met in sixth grade, bonding over drawing fictional album covers and later, synthesizers) in the authentically equipped studios of Mexican Summer and Jan Hammer, and even features Jan’s son, Paul Hammer playing drums on ‘Voices’. While there’s a laregly unfu**able sincerity to their intentions, it’s not without a wry sense of humour, embracing the saturation of modern digital life yet subverting it with subtle ambiguities, warping the collective memory banks like some cunningly implanted psychoactive memory chip. We can’t wait for the lazer disc version, but until then this is pretty much an essential.

Kanding Ray’s 2008 LP Automne Fold is one of the stand-out Raster-Noton releases of recent years; within it, David Letellier managed to impose a unique pop sensibility and structure upon the kind of disciplined, fanatically detailed brand of computer music that’s relatively common to his label brethren. For OR, his third LP to date, the producer offers a similarly focussed, bass-fuelled attack in a bid to depict “the disillusions of modern civilizations”; the title is a reference to the English word indicating the possibility of another choice, and to the French word for gold, a substance which has retained its value over many thousands of years – both ideas pertinent to Kangding Ray’s critique of a global economy and culture gone awry. Ben Frost plays keyboards, Rose Tizane Merrilland lends her voice to ‘Monsters’, and Magne Mostue to ‘Coracoid Process’ and a vocal edit of last year’s single ‘Pruitt Igoe’. Highlights come in the shape of jackhammering industrial stepper ‘Athem’ and ‘Leavaila Scheme’, the only R-N track we can think of that so prominently features guitar (albeit heavily distorted). It’s another fierce and singular statement from Kangding Ray, surely one of the most interesting electronic artists operating today, and as recommended to fans of sub-heay techno/dubstep from Sandwell District, Anstam, T++ and Andy Stott as it is to R-N regulars.

‘Summvs’ is the fifth and purportedly final collaborative album from the dream-team of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto). Since 2002 the two musicians have fused their disciplines near-faultlessly, with Sakamoto’s evocative piano-based compositions melting effortlessly into Nicolai’s skillful digital rhythms and cautious manipulations. Each album has brought the duo slightly closer together, and ‘summvs’ (the title an amalgamation of the words summa and versus) sees their work reach critical mass. With Sakamoto apparently working on a rare piano (one of only fifteen in the world) using 16th interval tuning, and Nicolai expanding on his newfound love of harmony and melody, the results are much warmer than their earlier experiments, and all the better for it. While Nicolai’s glacial digital hiccups were always a draw for some, I found at times they distracted from the focus of the pieces – and here rather than eliminate them altogether Nicolai tempers them, working them into a more harmonic framework. The familiar bass-heavy shuffle we fell in love with all those years ago on ‘Transform’ still crops up occasionally, most noticeably on ‘Pioneer IOO’, but it’s balanced by an unforgettable cinematic haze of ‘Naono’ (a clear standout – think Deaf Center, Ben Frost or The Fun Years) and ‘Halo’. There is something elegiac and deeply final about ‘summvs’, it feels like an ink stamp, an underline, a statement from the duo saying ‘this is it, and this is the best it can be’, and it truly is. Memorable, atmospheric and beautiful – even if you’ve missed all four of their previous albums, ‘summvs’ is the one to buy. Easily a highlight of 2011 thus far – you know what to do.

*Thick card gatefold jacket* Beguiling, unsettling and deeply mysterious, The Haxan Cloak’s eponymous debut album is a riveting experience. In case Demdike Stare hadn’t inspired you to read up on the pre-1900 occult, the term “Häxan” is an old German word for witchcraft, a theme shared by the two artists besides their northern English latitude (which would technically intersect with northern Germany, geography geeks!). But for that, and the monotone artwork aside, The Haxan Cloak takes a very different approach to his craft, one rooted in his studies in sound art and more concerned with “the very real potential and power of the actual physical properties of sound” he can elicit from treated strings and primal percussion, and the space between them. His unrevealed, alchemical processes summon an immersive spectrum of ethereal drones and often shocking sounds, from the nerve-jangling, near-infrasonic subbass fluctuations of ‘Fall’, to the stereo-dynamic fata morgana of ‘The Growing’. Occuring at the apex of the album, this astonishing track is a work of pure black magic sorcery, transporting us through a digital wormhole into shuddering, hallucinatory electro-acoustics and heart-quaking subs to a climax of percussion recalling both Zoviet*France and Scorn. Equally, when focussed on strings the effect is vividly arresting, like with the petrified drones of ‘In Memoriam’ or the sustained dissonance of ‘Parting Chant’, both achieving something more than just an evocative cinematic appeal. There’s a more hallucinatory and abstract narrative to these compositions, which may be dissipated with leaden concrete imagery. The finely rendered mixing and dynamics create an illusory space all of their own, much akin to Raime’s breathtaking gothic architectures, but probably more connected with the likes of KTL and Sunn 0))) overlord, Stephen O’Malley. A massive recommendation.

He’s served tirelessly in the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, but now Sasu Ripatti takes centre-stage with his own improv ensemble, The Vladislav Delay Quartet. He’s joined by Lucio Capece on clarinet and sax, Derek Shirley on double bass and – most interestingly, and most audibly – Mika Vainio on electronics. The Pan Sonic man’s sonic signature makes itself felt from the off, opening cut ‘Minus Degrees, Bare Feet, Tickles’ driven by roaring industrial noise as only he can style it. Things get really interesting with ‘Santa Teresa’, Shirley’s bass plucks conspiring with Delay’s pots ‘n pans to create an almost dubstep skank. Across this lurching groove, Capece uncurls scything sheets of sax drone and Vainio squirts the kind of trebly sine tones that will be blissfully familiar to fans of his Ø recordings. Unlike the more pensive MVO Trio, the Vladislav Delay Quartet explore darker, harsher terrain, as heard especially on ‘Des Abends’ which crashes and groans and growls like a drunk Godzilla trying to find his missing spanner. ‘Hotokivi’ is a power electronics assault in the vein of Prurient or Kevin Drumm, but with a depth and dynamism that betrays its studied and patiently wrought creation, and ‘Killing The Water Bed’ is perhaps closest to what we’d expected from the album: smacked-out, dub-inflected free jazz, Capece’s bass clarinet billowing through Delay’s ride and cymbal crashes. The near-ambient ‘Presentiment’ cleanses the palette for the face-melting ‘Louhos’ – it’s the sound of the Quartet collective freaking-out, Vainio and Ripatti serving up ear-smacking techno rhythm and layer upon layer of electronic scree, while that looped sax lacerates all that lies before it. Seriously intense and provocative stuff, this; an essential purchase for adventurous ears and minds.

Marsen Jules returns with an astonishing suite that combines a stirring orchestral grandeur with chilly, cinematic ambience. An obvious reference point is the stately creations of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS, but Jules’ compositions have a crystal-clear quality that Voigt’s tracks lack, and are also completely beatless – they feel more exposed, more vulnerable. His sixth full-length to date, following releases on Autoplate, City Centre Offices and Genesungswerk, and appearances on no less than four Kompakt Pop Ambient compilations, Nostalgia is billed as a continuation of his 2005 classic Herbstlaub, and as a meditation on “desire, rebellion and immortality”, and sure enough it’s a similarly oriented work of sober minimalism that privileges unflinching emotional enquiry over touchy-feely reassurance, splendidly evoking both the pleasure and the pain of dwelling on the past. The first half of the album is beautiful but a little bit harrowing, like having a bird’s eye view down on yourself as you trudge hopelessly across the loneliest Arctic tundra, but the later tracks let some light in: ‘Sweet Sweet Longing’ stretches out low piano notes and bowed cello into widescreen drones, and ‘Kundera’s Dream – a reference to the august Czech writer? – flecks finger-picked guitar notes over the most sweepingly romantic string overture imaginable. Jules is that rare thing, an ambient composer whose command of atmosphere is equalled by a strong sense of narrative and melodic progression. Fans of Biosphere, William Basinski, Klimek, GAS, Lawrence English, Thomas Koner and other isolationist maestros will instantly grasp how special this record is.

Following up one of 2010’s most extraordinary debuts, the ‘King Felix EP’ for HIT, Laurel Halo returns on a blissed-out cassette for the brilliant NNA Tapes. In stark relief to the ebullient song-writing which defined her debut, ‘Antenna’ opens up the ambient techno side of Laurel’s hyperprism, which we’d sensed from her interviews and mixes was just waiting to be revealed in her recordings. From the onset of ‘Impulse’ we’re immersed in an amniotic ocean of swelling synth, swirling field recordings and distant, disembodied voices. The parameters of her sound here are just immeasurably, almost intangibly, vast. Next, ‘Dia Sapiens’ is more distressing, dystopian even, trapping us in an vivid synth storm, like a sonic fictional Christina Kubisch sound walk through the disorientating electromagnetic fields of New York. That intense passage is beautifully resolved with ‘Zoo Hypothesis’ and ‘Heuristic Gag Factor’, gyroscoping us in 3D hyperspace before anchoring to a boiling sea of coruscating techno rhythms. The flipside is more positive, entering the finely simulated palatial surroundings of ‘Strength In Free Space’, before we’re extruded through the perfectly off-key chords of ‘Factory Reset’ and posited on the T++-like aquatech pulses of ‘Head’. Essentially, it’s one of the most sincere and instinctive updates of the original AI aesthetic that we’ve heard in years, but applied with the anachronistic obfuscation techniques of this generation to become that bit more transcendental and strangely affective.

Freakishly good Berlin School electronics from 1979, with a strange and wonderful jazz influence worked into its future-thrusting sequences, all mixed by Harald Grosskopf of Synthesist fame. This is the kind of shit that people like Oneohtrix Point Never and Roll The Dice bug out to in their downtime, and in some cases rip off wholesale. Hard to pick favourites, but the fusion-y title track is a doozy, like Weather Report if Edgar Froese and Peter Baumann had joined their ranks. ‘Magooba’ is proper proto-techno, distorted guitars spurting across time-melting analogue arpeggios, while the ‘Sequential Spectrums’ diptych sheds the drums for a slow shuttle-ride into more open-ended drift psychedelia – Part 1 in particular sounds like a direct ancestor of Dylan Ettinger’s New Age Outlaws. Often when a genre is as plundered as kosmische and krauty synth business is right now, each new “find” is more ephemeral and weightless than the last; not so in the case of Electric Day. This is the gut stuff, make no misake, and thanks to this timely reissue, you don’t have to sell your gran to get hold a copy.

Another blast of superlative Berlin School kosmische reissued for modern-day space cadets and those who missed it the first time around. You need only look at the sleeve of You’s Time Code – all mystic pyramids and spheres floating across airbrushed alien terrain – to perceive its relevance in the age of such new age revivalists as Oneohtrix, Stella OM Source and Dylan Ettinger. Recorded in 1982, using a hefty bank of Moog and Prophet synths and state-of-the-art digital sequencing, Timecode found the pared-down You line-up of Albin Meskes and Udo Hanten exploring the deepest spiritual recesses of man and machine. Like so much astrally-inclined music of the period, Time Code’ has a utopian, almost bucolic quality; the doomy plainchant that dominates the title track is a red herring, as pretty much everything else on the LP is all sweetness and light, the kind of sincerely futurist twee so lovingly pastiched by Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle today. If you’ve been digging the space-doodling of the aforementioned hypnagogists or you’re a fan of Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Harald Grosskopf, Klaus Schulze and other contributors to the seemingly limitless treasure-trove of 70s-80s German synth artistry, then Time Code is for you.

*Limited edition vinyl pressing packaged in thick black jacket with two-colour adhesive rap* Fresh from dropping her jaw-droppingly beautiful sophomore album The Magic Place, Julianna Barwick teams up with Ikue Mori of legendary New York no wavers DNA for a 12″ of vocalisation and eldritch electronics. In the years since DNA tore apart the Gotham art scene, Mori has been busying herself as a distinguished developer of digital synth and drum machine and synth technology, and here she applies her considerable laptop chops to casting Barwick’s plangent, patiently looped plainsong in a chattering, whirring, ever-shifting electronic setting that’s too busy, mischievous and unsettling to be called ambient. The resulting work sounds resolutely modern, but has that eldritch, occluded quality of the BBC Radiophonic workshop and its hauntological devotees; it’s certainly a more oblique and challenging listen than Barwick’s more pop-influenced solo work. The music arose out of a performance commissioned by Manhattan’s White Columns art space (which hosted Thurston Moore’s seminal 1981 Noise Fest); something of a musical blind date, the duo improvised their parts live with a custom-built wall separating them, and the sounds they made were cut direct to vinyl via portable lathe. What you hear on this 12″ isn’t those lathe cuts, but rather recordings made in the same space a week later without an audience or dividing wall – “an exercise in actual engagement”.

**Limited to 600 copies, includes official certificate of ownership** Vinyl On Demand focus on the unique and captivating minimal synth and guitar recordings of Daniel Malempré with ‘The M.A.L. Tapes’. The breadth and scope of this label’s excavations never fail to amaze us and this one is no different. The A-side covers eight relatively brief, almost baroque recordings released on various labels such as Grafika Airline and Insane Music in the early eighties, including selections from ‘Chemistry’, ‘Two Faces’, and ‘Outlaw’. The first track is an eleven minute composite mix of seven pieces originally released on ‘Chemistry’, segueing from ultra-cute synth-pop to more urgent Darkwave, exquisite Kosmiche and gorgeous miniatures which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Ghost Box release. There are plenty more highlights found on the Chris Carter-esque ‘There Is A Man At The Door’ and not least the inward-loops of ‘The Human Mind’ featuring strings organ from underground lynchpin Alain Neffe of Pseudo Code/Bene Gesserit and the Insane Music label. But, for many the B-side will offer the most extraordinary revelations. It features two truly mind-blowing and spine-tingling extended guitar and wha-wha pedal experiments created in 1974 with synthesizer accompaniment from Alain Neffe. The tracks, ‘Orion’ and ‘Andromède’ running to 20 minutes and 8 minutes respectively, were originally released some time later on the ‘Two Faces’ cassette (release date unknown), quite some time after Malempré had sent the original recordings to two famous record companies, only to later suspect that a famous guitarist working for one of the companies would copy his concept. In all honesty, they do sound a hell of a lot like the style of Ash Ra Tempel’s Manuel Göttsching, but we really wouldn’t wanted to question the provenance of either artist. We should just say these are stunning pieces of music and totally recommended.

*Incredible 2nd single from Ital, aka Mi Ami aka Sex Worker, backed with a brilliant Hieroglyphic Being remix* If you’ve checked their tête-à-tête on the 20 Jazz Funk Greats blog, your interest will no doubt be piqued for this record, but we honestly couldn’t predict how wonderfully strange it would actually work out. Ital’s ‘Culture Clubs’ occupies the A-side, really taking the slanted House sound of his 100% Silk release to dizzying heights. Also, like his amazing Sex Worker cover of ‘Rhythm Of The Night’, it’s all about those sliding synth phrases; helplessly smeared melodies which melt and buckle at any given moment to leave us awestruck and totally destabilised. With it, and the equally zonked ‘Eternally Yours’, he’s toying with the original sexual groove of Chicago, flipping that synthetic sensuality into something  more ambiguous and warped, like a discombobulating dose of GHB instead of MDMA tactility. Hieroglyphic Being’s ‘Culture Clubs (No Culture Remix)’ complements the vibe exquisitely, riding his untethered drum machines through sloping tempo drops and cross-eyed key changes to leave us utterly floored. This has got to be be one of the most warped records we’ve heard all year.

The enigmatic Anstam duo follow up the killer ‘Albert’ and a wicked Fact mix with their first full solo 12″ in three years. At the risk of repeating ourselves, these guys make some of the most crushingly dynamic, dead ON-IT beats around. This time they’re investigating a more squashed and cryptically moody style with ‘Baldwin’, stamping sub-loaded breakbeats with a brooding, twisted synth torque leading to an unmistakably Teutonic conclusion. On ‘Carmichael’ they swipe away the breakbeats and engage with pneumatically compressed steppers patterns, oily, squirming acid bass and intoxicatingly dystopian synth pads. It’s the sort of gear we dream about and should be massively recommended to fans of T++, Ben Frost, Kangding Ray, or Shackleton.

Collossal darkside jacker’s grooves on Sound Signature! Your man from Chicago, Spekter, has appeared on some ace sides for Sistrum and Downbeat to date, before passing this tune to Theo Parrish who promptly signed it up for Sound Signature. As far as we can tell it’s the same track on both sides, but what a freakin’ track! Don’t sleep on this, it’s deadly!

Keysound commendably unite two of UK Bass music’s foundational architects, Steve Gurley and Zed Bias, for the first time on ‘Roll’. Both producers require little introduction: Gurley was an integral member of seminal jungle unit Foul Play, and one of the very first UK Garage producers, while Bias is credited with the creation of Dark Garage, and both sewed the seeds for early Dubstep. Their collaboration is a sharp-edged fusion of swingin’ Garage and edgy electro rooted with dread intent. However, we’re feeling Blackdown’s ‘A Debt Paid’ remix much more. The dippin’ accents on the bass; the darkly cloaked pads; those darkside bell chimes; them tucked Toms; all add up to an out-and-out and up-to-date killer for our money. Recommended for that at the very least! Big big twelve.

Reissue of a massively sought-after digital rarity originally released on Alpine Records in 1987. Niney The Observer and G. Phipps are at the desk, driving an monstrously swaggering riddim under Ricky Melody’s sing-a-long vocal. This and the murderous Computer Radics dub on the flip have been reserved as genuine secret weapons by a handful of UK soundsystems for the last two decades, until now.