One of the first beating of wings by Melbourne-based label Plasma Audio was "Yoga", a track by which DJ Gove Kidao aka Sabre combined sinister catchy sonorities and bouncing wonky beats; the label recently decided to reprise it and include that tune in a release, which includes a couple of remixes of a young wizard of drum 'n' bass scene, the Noth-London-based Belgian DJ and producer Alix Depauw aka Alix Perez, who already collaborated with Sabre on some beat-driven sonic patterns. Both his Club mix and his Warped mix features a higher ratio of inertia as the elements of the original version sound more burdened with distortion, an aspect which got slightly mitigated by wider echo and reverberation as well as by some funny collisions of "bumps" against "swishes" on the first one, which I mostly prefer for shrewdly inoculated embellishments.

The fact I'm writing one day before the 103rd "birthday" (even if passed away in 1984) of the Swiss-born sound artist, composer and brilliant inventor of new instrument Walter Smetak is a pure coincidence. As the well-informed should know, he mainly lived and worked in Brasil and his inventiveness as well as his "pioneering spirit", spurred by the alchemical belief that music and sound were nothing but mediums to reach different levels of knowledge and awareness, had a strong influence on the birth of the so-called Tropicalia or Tropicalismo - named after "Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis", a collaborative album by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil - in the late 60ies, which fused popular and traditional aspects of Brazilian culture with avant-garde and "exotic" elements. Walter Smetak could be considered the main source of inspiration of Marco Scarassatti, who inherited both the spiritual framework, which has been the subject of his essay "Walter Smetak, the alchemist of sounds" (Perspective/SESC, 2008), and his knack of making new musical instruments, but after listening to this "Novelo Eletrico", where he used some of his inventions, I could say there are even some stylistic similarities - if you check Smetak's self-named album that came out on Philips in 1974, you can easily notice them -. I can't really say how a flugelsax cretino, a magnum chaos, an ikebana-flor, an ovni or an harpa paleolitica - some of the instruments used by Marco - work, but I can check how they sound in the five tracks of this album: I particularly enjoyed "dream work", a tribute to the well-known short film by Peter Tscherkassky, as it sounds as hypnotical and hallucinatory as that kind of video art, and the oblique sonorities of the final "magnum chaos's portrait", but the other moments of this release are likewise interesting.

Anytime I listen to something by Spanish sound artist Ferran Fages, who gained some acknowledgements in the improv scene for a set of interesting experiments mainly on electronic devices but also on turntables and guitars, I have the impression he manages to enhance silent brakes in between more or less drone-like sounds. On the occasion of this release, he co-signed with Ernesto Rodrigues, who inserted some snippet of more or less modified tones of his viola, you could imagine that those silent brakes is the field recording they took in the middle of some street, which features the 37-minutes lasting track and is the really pervasive elements of this recording, where their inserts (I'm not sure they recorded and inserted in different moments or simultaneously, even if I could guess Ferran and Ernesto put their resounding stuff in different moments as the linear notes say that "CRU" was recorded in Barcelona in 2013 and in Lisbon in 2014) could be like thoughts or feelings in between the overwhelming and somehow disturbing "silence" of road traffic noise, which managed to interrupt the stream of consciousness of the sentient passer-by or bystander. It's neither an exhibition of samples nor of compositional skills, but it could be considered a likewise fascinating listening experience.

The mixing board of Alexey Sysoev has no input, but its hissing white noise sounds like a fog which gradually submerge the hits on piano's strings and board by Yury Favorin and the strangled sound that got emitted by Konstantin Sukhan's trumpet, two instruments which are closer to somehow phantasmagorical entities in the rising magnetic saturation of seemingly empty noises or I could rather match them to dangerously radioactive objects, whose radioactivity got measured by the noises coming from the mixer in the first part of this release. The second part got ignited by the ringing noise of a sort of broken intercom, where this skilled sound artists implanted a set of almost disturbing interferences, a sort of metallic chewing and locking that got supposedly derived from piano elements, a wheezing tone of trumpet and occasional hits on piano keys by rendering an electrically charged cloud, which gets more and more evanescent, but the peak of compression got reached on the third and last part of this output, where the three sonic entities seem to mirror the noises of invisible bugs in a nocturnal urban scape. Anyway don't try to look for a meaning of what these guys made while Maxim Khaikin recorded their sessions in Moscow (it dates back the 1st of July 2014), as It Do(es)n't Mean a Thing and this kind of intellectual honesty can only be appreciated.

You can guess a certain skill in approaching somehow old-fashioned sonorities of Stockholm-based producer Alexander Kassberg, the guy behind Starving Insect's torn curtains, since the opening "Overhead Without Any Fuss, The Stars Were Going Out", whose fuss lies on a typically thumping bass tone that was extensively used by gabber-techno makers in the glorious age of pink elephants, which rises together after getting down the shaft of claustrophobic industrial sonic entities in the first part of the track, where a menacing voice states that "all life is a waste of time" sets the slightly disquieting emotional ground. The knocking dry beats got intersected by the rubberlike "gabberesque" ones, squeaking chains, weak claps and morbid blowbacks on the following "Breeding The Threnodies", the first collaborative track with Robin "Omnicide" Alander as well as one of the most recently recorded by the insect, which keeps on digging mazes into previously fertile grounds on the more dark/EBM oriented "Sleep Is Death", over the agonizing roars of distorted bass of "There Are No Doors", the slaughtered bass-pumped procession of "IDDQD" - "something different" or "nothing at all" according to the sampled voices that Alexender inserted in the track -, the quasi-epic sinisterly fetid breezes of "Dormant Storm" - the atmosphere of a forthcoming tragedy got nicely emphasized by an alerting shout, warning of a coming storm - and the snarling hits of "Visions of the Blind Dead", which features an ill gothic dulcimer melody over the same old mincing of sharp hammers. The second collaborative track with Omnicide, which ends this release, titled "Allt Dor", is maybe the one where the above-described pre-apocalyptical poisonous fumes got their better shape, whose combination of dark nuances and wisely decelerated hardcore techno steps could let you imagine a rave-party for zombies (or maybe for a growing part of our plagued societies, which seems to be haunted by starving insects...?). The author suggests to play it loud...consider his suggestion!