Boomkat new releases list (DEMDIKE STARE, JAMES BLAKE, BROTHER RAVEN, etc.)

*Brand new 60 minute mix CD from Demdike Stare, a follow-up to the ‘Osmosis’ mix from the start of the year* As we enter the darkest phase of year, your trusted shamens offer an absorbing autumnal almanac. ‘Industrial Desert’ is a follow up to their ‘Osmosis’ mix CD, rifling through their archives and boxes again to provide a kind of cryptic puzzle for the deepest diggers, or equally a psilocybic collage ripe for picking season. Their selections are as broad and esoteric as we’ve come to expect, ranging from arcane folk fed through proto-techno wormholes, to exalted krautrock and the richest jazz, all infected with deep vein drone throbs and spores of mossy ambience, triggering imagery of hulking red brick millhouses and valleys where the light arrives late and leaves early. Their journey traverses a precarious path but we’re safe in the knowledge that they’ve been here before and returned unscathed. Only just. If you’ve had the pleasure of witnessing their semi-improvised live show then you’ll probably feel a familiarity with some of the sounds here, but they seem to be increasingly skilled with their creative looms, weaving ever more intricate and arabesque patterns into their warp and weft…

**Strictly limited edition – includes a bonus cassette album ‘Eaglevision’** Brother Raven’s Jamie Potter and Jason E. Anderson explore their multitude of vintage analog synthesizers and keyboards with a blissful transmission for Belgium’s Aguirre Records. It’s their second vinyl offering in almost as many months, following the cosmic experience of ‘VSS-30’ with a more pastoral, tropically breezy drift of washed-out tones and chirruping mechanical organisms. ‘Diving Into The Pineapple Portal’ occupies most of the first side with an untethered strafe across bloopy analogue textures and Escher-esque synth spirals buffeted by ferric drafts until they float like spores in an artificial paradise. This definitely has all the hallmarks of vintage Kosmische, but the duo pull it off with that essentially sly touch that clearly avoids becoming mere cliche and operates more as a sort of mystical confession. ‘Speaking Whale From My Canoe’ opens the other side with an altered sense of shape and space, changing the tonal palette to glassier, more resonant sounds reminiscent of mid-70s Harmonia and Eno with an undercurrent of very softly burred bass rhythm, while ‘Happy Astronaut’ is happy to lie back and blow bubbles while looking at the moon. For us however, the biggest treat is the accompanying cassette, featuring a blend of more rhythm based experimentation and defined melodic structures while maintaining the potently woozy, unresolved effect of the vinyl. Nearly 1.5 hours worth of ready-made synth dreams in total, snap it up while you can.

This new collaboration between the prolific Greg Davis and Bird Show’s Ben Vida is an absolute masterclass in analogue synthesizer sound design. Over the course of half an hour or so these two musicians line up their assorted Korg and Moog instruments (plus one or two more exotic devices) for some of the finest free-roaming signal manipulations you’ll hear all year. Comparable to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s recent achievements in the field, this album conjures crisp and contoured musical shapes at every turn, whether delving into the richly polymorphous universe of ‘Brilliance’ or flurrying through the continually shifting overtones and ruptured tunings of ‘Piper’. Considering the very specific, even self-restrictive sonic agenda set out by these recordings, the two collaborators dart between ideas at quite a rate, knuckling down to the methodical phasing experiments of ‘Shift’ one moment only to explore a more chaotic, almost percussive environment (such as the excellent ‘Bristles’) the next. In addition to the more fully developed pieces on the album there are a couple of ear-teasing miniatures; one of these, ‘Drop’ covers a sizable chunk of the audible frequency range in a flurry of pure electrical signals – over the course of 48 seconds divebombing into sub-bass plunges from high-up bird-like oscillator twitterings. Speaking of imitative noises, the final piece, ‘Canopy’ is an incredible rainforest-like soundscape mimicking tropical fauna with an elaborate tangle of wandering whistles and whoops. A real joy to the ears for anyone a bit partial to analogue electronic music in its rawest form, this eponymous first outing from Vida and Davis comes highly recommended.

Dolphins Into The Future is the alter ego of Lieven Martens, a hugely intriguing character at the core of the whole kosmische/knew-age synth revival. From his base (presumably) in a floatation tank somewhere in Antwerp, Belgium, he runs the Cetacean Nation Cassettes and Dreamtime Taped sounds labels, home to tape releases from James Ferraro, Uton and Oneohtrix Point Never among others, and a tonne of his own virtual soundscaping experiments. ‘Ke Ala Ke Kua’ is his vinyl debut, “A lucid collage using tapes, synthesizer, two portable cassette players with pitchshifting, regular cassette deck, small hand instruments, alt saxophone, cassette four track, and recordings of Pacific Ocean waves floating in Seven, Polynesian choirs, simulated poly-rhythms, and site specific bird sounds. The composition is translated into three chapters, to evoke the extreme dramatics, spirit, multi dimensions and beauty of Kealakekua Bay, the God’s pathway”. More interestingly Lieven completed the LP while in a lucid wake-dream state after two weeks of self-implemented sleep deprivation, heavy-going by anyone’s standards! The results are potently somnambulant to say the least, plotting instinctive coordinates between his sources to create artificial bubbles of blissed-up and washed out 2D new age hallucinations. Listening to this while operating heavy machinery or doing anything remotely taxing really isn’t recommended! Its quite easy to hear why the likes of Oneohtrix and James Ferraro appreciate this guy so much, he totally nails the vibe of their most smudged, intuitive and evocative moments, think ‘Last American Hero’ gone to Hawaii for a sabbatical or ‘Russian Mind’ with more volcanoes and picture postcard beach scenes, with a briefcase full of prescription pharmaceuticals for company. We’ll leave the awesome A4 sleevenotes for you to discover yourself, if you wish to do so. We’ve only got 50 copies of this, housed in colour picture sleeves. Highly recommended to the most smudged and dreamy heads!

Cool Water’ is Maxmillion Dunbar’s debut album, and one of the best records Ramp have released this year. It follows two teasing 12″s which established Dunbar’s brand of screwed Boogie and slow disco dreams within the orbits of neon ’80s revisionism and something slightly more psyched and avant, at once within the scene, and just outside out of it. The trippily smudged ‘Girls Dream’ is just one highlight among many here, embedded in a set of complementary drum machine workouts weaved with hazy samples and studied synth washes. ‘Pretty Please’ sets the agenda with heavyweight ’80s R’n’B bowing at the altar of Prince, but imbued with a lushly psyched drift. ‘Sno Mega’ follows into a more exotic space perfumed with cosmic synths and spiked with ominous Afro vibes, while ‘Rhythm Track For Rashied Ali’ pays tribute to that anomalous strain of American ’80s R’n’B, Chicago House, in wickedly freeform style. We also get a sparse, beats-driven version of ‘Lemon & Lime’ from his previous 12″, followed by the darkly cinematic pre-cert vibe of ‘Original Soundtrack Flutes’, kinda like a less glitchy VHS Head cut, or a minimalist Games. ‘Breathe What You Say’ finishes on a beatless experimental tip, savouring the effect of warped vocoder vox and morphing synth shapes with a distinct pleasure. Highly Recommended.

Edgar Wappenhalter is a co-founder of Belgian psychedelic occultists Silvester Anfang and the Funeral Folk collective, and this amazing, brain-scrambling solo outing finds him combining his affection for out-there Kosmische, psych-folk and tapeloop drones in a remarkably fresh and immersive fashion. If the album title had you expecting a Neil Young tribute, think again. You’ll still find some gorgeously submerged songwriting hidden away on here – particularly the reverb-corroded tones of acoustic guitar-driven jams ‘Missing Heights’ and ‘Dierenriem’ – but it comes bundled with some impressively experimental fare such as the metronomic space blues of ‘As The Kid’s Clock Breathes Sweet Hasjiesj’ or the clockwork lo-fi distortions of ‘Last Call Before The Tide’. Better yet are ‘The Cyclone’, a surreal campfire techno experiment, and the flotation tank kosmische opus ‘Revelatory Pathways To A Place Of Rebirth’. “On The Beach” basically plays through passages of every kind of music that we love, combining them into a brilliant and hazy patchwork of original ideas that we just can’t stop listening to. Amazing album – very highly recommended!

*Amazing debut collection of location recordings and drone works somewhere between The Caretaker and Thomas Köner, presented in a beautiful screen printed digipak* Fascinating debut release from Skjølbrot, aka Bristol’s Dan Bennett. ‘Maersk’ is a sort of spectral travelogue using field recordings from various locations together with electronics, vocals and cloaked instrumentation to create a deeply engrossing and peculiar sound world of disparate textural juxtapositions. The seven songs are based around specific locations or events, each designated in the track’s title. For example, the first track ‘Rue Victor Masse to Gare d’Austerlitz’ refers to Iannis Xennakis’ time in Paris during the ’61 Algerian massacre, and uses field recordings of streets and metro woven with plaintive piano and spatially dynamic electronics to evoke a strange sense of energies colliding, almost attempting to capture the resonance of their aftermath. Later, ‘Migrated’ conflates the imagery of birds, from the impact of a bird strike on the Bibliotheque Nationale to Senegal Parrot recorded in Bristol’s Victoria park, using their half-erased field recordings and nature to lend a trace of environmental sensitivity over his chilling drones. There’s also a certain preoccupation with container ships, not least in the album’s title, but clearly in ‘Shipbreaking’ which references the Unimask Pass in Alaska in an austere piece of creaking, deeply tormented electro-acoustic scenery, and ‘Idle Fleet’, filtering maritime VHF radio signals with the “…resonance of demolition equipment impacting on shipbuilding shed in Plymouth” and the imagery of hundreds of idle container ships in Singapore, eliciting majestic Ballardian imagery. This feel for traversing time and space is never more literally vivid than ‘Ballad Of Windfarming’, putting an Alan Lomax recording of a Scottish folk standard ‘Braighe Loch Iall’ to suspenseful use against the sound of supermarket refrigeration units and a wind farm at Whitelee, the largest onshore wind farm in Europe. Together, the subtle execution of , the eroded grid references, and the handmade execution add up to something far beyond the sum of its parts.

“Of Psalms” is the fabulous Root Strata debut of Date Palms, set up by Marielle Jakobsons and Gregg Kowalsky (author of such fine releases as Kranky outing Tape Chants). The label very aptly describes the release as “a suite of slowed-down music of the spheres, with a canopy of glowing fog and a heavy narcotic bass pulse that keeps the whole thing rooted straight into the earth.” The album certainly introduces itself in regal style, sinking into a deep, low-end haze with ‘Psalm 7’, a kind of minimalist raga full of bowed strings and commanding bass routines. In addition to some of the more expected experimental reference points, you might be reminded of hazy loveliness of the earliest Air releases, or indeed the latest material from The Alps. Over the course of the record, violins, electric piano, harp and tape treatments all convene to shape a drone record that feels utterly organic and more purposeful – more thoughtfully composed than most. Both musicians are steeped in the more academic side of the contemporary music scene, each having studied Electronic Music courses at Mills College, yet the very natural sounding, raw instrumental materials are unfettered by any heavy-handed post-processing or excessively cerebral theorising. You will, however, hear some great synthesizer sound designs running through a piece like ‘Psalm 4′, lining up alongside Noah Philips’ electric guitar screech, and the steady, modal oscillator meditations of ‘Psalm 3’ lay the foundations for a wonderfully full-bodied tonal landscape. This LP is limited to just 500 copies and comes very highly recommended.

Capping a very special year for James Blake, R&S drop the highly anticipated ‘Klavierwerke’, his most refined and sombre transmission to date. While his previous 12″s were defined by their unstable and unique sense of soul, these tracks have a more esoteric, modern classical air to them, clearly reflected in the monotone artwork and centre labels. It’s like chamber music for the post-dubstep crowd, utilising lofty meditations on the techniques and feelings gleaned from the style, distilling their essence from a removed and considered standpoint. The title piece feels torn between wanting to be there, in the dance, and longing to be somewhere else entirely, sequestered in dancefloor solipsism, shutting out surroundings until rhythms are worn down to the faintest flickers of filtered drums creating a richly woven blanket in which to hide oneself from the world. ‘Tell Her safe’ is a little more optimistic, focussed on Blake’s innate rhythmic intricacies and soul-burning chords, while ‘I Only Known (What I Known Now)’ slips back into that rarified sense of autumnal English melancholy, dappled with watery piano keys and deploying moments of reflective silence to stunning effect. Redressing the balance ‘Don’t You Think I Do’ offers a spurt of tormented internal funk, making a brief but lasting closing statement. Held up against everyone else out there right now, this record is just essential.

Superb return from original Chain Reaction figure and all round techno legend, Vainqueur aka René Löwe. ‘Range’ is his first solo 12″ in over 13 years and is worth the wait, following a string of Scion Version productions with DJ Pete and a sublime remix for Basic Channel’s ‘See Mi Yah’ series. ‘Range-Expanded’ is the more driving, dancefloor friendly of the two tracks, crafted with lissom licks of effervescent dub chords and grandly spaciously atmospheres over an elegantly motorik dub bass. This is a true masterclass in the subtleties of refined, hypnotic arrangements with a pedigree perception of space and time in the most classic sense of dub and techno music. On the flip ‘Ranges – Theme’ alters our perception of space with a retuned reverb setting, opening the dub chord shapes into wispier tendrils of static ephemera dissipating to the peripheries while the bass holds a leaner steppers pattern. These tracks aren’t about walloping bass weight, they’re about firm, supple pressure and rich dub principles which have been lost in translation over the last decade. Highly recommended!

Hypnotic swingers from the revered DJ and now producer, Elgato, making his debut on the equally esteemed Hessle Audio. Ask almost anyone who’s been tracking this underground UK thing for the last decade and they’ll have come across an amazing Elgato DJ set, crossing from Grime to Techno and all points in between with consummate style. Essentially these tracks sound like a distillation of all those mixes; the mesmerizing flow of ‘Tonight’ incorporates dubstep subbass intensity with fluid percussive programming, aligning patterns from Garage, Hardcore and House for an inescapably locked-in groove, recalling everyone from LD to Scuba and Bok Bok in mongrel style. On the flip, ‘Blue’ is aimed squarely at the Funky/House nexus, rolling out devastating subbass pressure under typewriter rhythms with squashed R’n’B vocals and hovering strings maintaining a sublime tension. To be totally honest, we’ve not heard anything quite like this from the scene yet and it’s going to be getting a lot of plays round these ways. Fans of Narcossist, Ramadanman, and the deeper ends of Doc Daneeka and co need this!

Yes bwoyee!!! The most anticipated and overdue collaboration of the year finally lands on Numbers, pitting two titans of the UKs bass music rhizome in an advanced Funky masterclass. Both cuts have been circulating in the hands of scene heavyweights like Ben UFO and Jackmaster for some time, but now us proles on the (dance)floor can get a taste of the action! Starting the party, ‘Myth’ is some rinsably exotic beast, laying a wickedly whining Saz-like motif over drum patterns kinkier than yer ma’s Anne Summers parties, and backed with descending bass riffs dropped from the very top deck. ‘Long Range’ is a slinkier groover, heating puckered organ stabs amidst a humid riddim bustling between crisp congas, slippery wet splashes of claps and cone-pumping bass hits. We could chow down on this all night. Highly recommended to anyone with an ounce of bounce in their bones!

Complementing the ‘Future Bass’ album, Untold drops ‘Fly Girls’ backed with the deadly exclusive ‘Come Follow Me’. While ‘Fly Girls’ squarely caters for the party end of the night, ‘Come Follow Me’ is where Untold really cuts loose in his ultra-contained style, reducing the twystin’ essence of hardcore jungle to calligraphic flourishes of liquid metal syncopations and economically dry, stoic atmospherics, no bruk-out business but one for the ruffneck steppers. Tip-f**king-Top! Recommended!

Essential 4-way split 7″ nugget from Belgium’s Kraak label, including a ruff diamond from Ducktails and a screenprinted fold-out insert. Köhn make a dramatic opening statement with the cryptically titled ‘U C I M’, recalling the work of Vangelis, Carpenter and a whole host of cinematic synth scores, while Alien Radio take a bloopier, ’60s style Radiophonic route with richly pure analogue results. These tracks contrast quite sharply with the Velvets-meet-Forest Swords sound of Peaking Lights’ ‘Creatures Of Day Creatures At Night’, and a dash of H-Pop magic in Ducktails ‘Sprinter’. We reckon fans of the Atelier Ciseaux or Captured tracks output of late will be very impressed with this record – limited copies only.

Reality Or Nothing is a moniker used by Karl O’Connor (Regis) and Peter Sutton (Female) for a series of releases between ’96-’98 on Housewerk records. They’ve revived the alias for some seriously prime reworks in 2010, one each, exploring the deepest strains of rhythmically sensual and darkly sublime techno. Female’s remix on the A-side is simply one of his best in years, and coming from some of his biggest fans, we hope you know what that means! On the flip, Regis’s Kalon 08 Sandwell mix spikes the groove with a tightly syncopated Latin dynamic and deliciously brooding synth pads, while the original ’98 mix shows just how far ahead of the game these two Brummies have always been. ESSENTIAL techno!!!

Regis and Female task their Sandwell District boys (CH Signal, Function, Silent Servant) with remix detail on their Reality Or Nothing tracks from 1998. He might not put much out, but CH Signal always delivers hi-strength goods and his deeply submerged throbber is no exception. On the flip, Function’s mix is subject to some crafty LFO treatment, making the bass pound like a Richie Hawtin’s finest while icy-numb hi-hats shudder in the upper echelons, preparing the ground for an ultra-efficient stomper from Silent Servant. No f*cking about, these are serious tracks. Techno heads – do not sleep on this 12″!!