Foul Play is definitely a suitable title for this EP as Kessler has brought the big guns to the tea party for this one. Really getting to the heart of what Holding Hands is all about I love how straight up in the face these bangers are.
Expect a lot of gun fingers and shouts of “this one’s a stinky wiiiiiiinky” when these get dropped in the club. That’s probably the best way of describing the vibe here...
OK enough of my blather. Go and listen to the damn things yourself and decide if you like them, rather than trying to work it out from reading a bloody press release you weirdos.
All four tracks are produced and sculpted for the club. They want big sound systems and dark rooms.
Close your eyes, hold hands and experience transcendental space flight...
Manchester UK’s Space Afrika make music of what they term “overlapping moments” – oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture, and shadow, half-heard through a bus window on a rainy night. Honest Labour, the group's first full-length since 2020's landmark hybtwibt? (have you been through what i’ve been through?) mixtape, expands the project's palette with classical strings, shimmering guitar, and visionary vocal cameos, leaning further into their enigmatic fusion of ambient unrest and cosmic downtempo. It's a sound both fogged and fragmented, at the axis of song craft and sound design, born from and for the yearning solitudes of life under lockdown.
The album title is tiered, alluding to a legendary patriarch from co-founder Joshua Inyang's Nigerian family tree (who was lovingly called “Honest Labour” for his loyalty and resilience) as well as the nature of self-designated work, such as Space Afrika's music – a “labor of love” in its truest sense. With fellow co-founder Joshua Reid recently relocated to Berlin, the pair began sharing files last fall, piecing together poetic vignettes of looping haze and found sound, inspired by the notion of “records that leave an impression, and help the listener deal with their life.” As the isolation of Covid compounded with the worsening winter, the songs skewed increasingly introspective and emotive, reflecting a mood of dissipating futures and the infinite nocturnal unknown.
The artists cite two core motivations for Honest Labour: to transcend the sum of their influences, and “to show what we're capable of.” Both ambitions are entirely realized. The collection's 19 tracks flow with a synergy and sophistication as rare as they are radical, untethered to the dusty dub-techno templates of Space Afrika's early years. These are interstitial anthems, expressionistic and open-ended, delirious but deliberate, attuned to the drift and dreamstate of the present moment: “Ultimately this is an homage to U.K. energy, and an album about love and loss.
A1 yyyyyy2222 A2 Indigo Grit ft. guest A3 Lose You Beau A4 Solemn A5 LV A6 Preparing the Perfect Response ~ A7 Ny Interlude A8 Rings ft. guest A9 Noise Sweet A10 B£E ft. Blackhaine B1 Like Orchids B2 Meet Me At Sachas B3 U ft. kinseyLloyd B4 <> B5 Girl Scout Cookies ft. bianca scout B6 Ladybird Drone B7 With Your Touch B8 Strength ft. LA Timpa B9 Honest Labour ft. HforSpirit
The Avalanches’ era defining debut album ‘Since I Left You’ has finally come of age. Now 20 years old, ‘Since I Left You’ gets a timely reissue along with an additional record of fifteen remixes from the likes of MF DOOM, Stereolab and Carl Craig. The Avalanches made ‘Since I Left You’ out of hundreds of vinyl samples, the grand finale and biggest climactic triumph of the Sampladelic Decade. Containing classic singles ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ and ’Since I Left You’, the reissue’s remixes give each track a new lease of life, while still maintaining the sunny disposition of the originals.
a1 Since I Left You a2 Stay Another Season a3 Radio a4 Two Hearts in 3/4 Time b1 Avalanche Rock b2 Flight Tonight b3 Close to You b4 Diners Only b5 A Different Feeling c1 Electricity c2 Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life c3 Pablo's Cruise c4 Frontier Psychiatrist d1 Etoh d2 Summer Crane d3 Little Journey d4 Live at Dominoes d5 Extra Kings e1 Since I Left You (Cornelius Remix) e2 Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life (Edan Remix) e3 Frontier Psychiatrist (Mario Caldato Jr's 85% Remix) e4 Close To You (Sun Araw Remix) f1 Since I Left You (Stereolab Remix) f2 Flight Tonight (Canyons Travel Agent Dub) f3 Radio (Sinkane Remix) g1 Since I Left You (Prince Paul Remix) g2 Electricity (Harvey's Nightclub Re-edit) g3 Summer Crane (Black Dice Remix) g4 Extra Kings (Deakin Remix) h1 Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life (MF DOOM Remix) h2 Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life (Dragged By Leon Vynehall) h3 A Different Feeling (Carl Craig's Paperclip People Remix) h4 Thank You Caroline (Original Avalanches Demo Tape)
Frontiers is the first compositional solo album from ALC-Angelos Liaros Copola creating a mesmerizing soundtrack by blending drone, ambient and dark electronics in a powerful pulsating narrative with a strong cinematic approach.
All compositions are structured based on four main instruments. Two analog synths, a Greek lyra string and an electric piano. Chord progressions constantly evoke turbulent emotions through the album from remote isolation to desperate sadness and warm cathartic crescendos full of hope.
Frontiers LP is a soundtrack collection of hidden gems and past unreleased archives of Angelos, also known for his industrial techno moniker Blakk Harbor.
Squarepusher Theme Tundra The Swifty Dimotane Co Smedleys Melody Windscale 2 North Circular Goodnight Jade Theme From Ernest Borgnine UFO's Over Leytonstone Kodack Future Gibbon Theme From Goodbye Renaldo Deep Fried Pizza
From a stylistic perspective, all bets are off as modernist bass music bowls forward with its sights on the dance. Over the past three years, J-Shadow has embodied that ethic more than most with a hybridised flex snapping fluidly between lurid grime waveforms, rave-indebted structures and hi-tech sound design. A perfect fit for Sneaker Social Club’s own omnivorous tendencies, then.
Following drops on Super Hexagon, Nous, Comic Sans and Bun The Grid, Shadow lands on Sneaker Social with no less than six shellers packing a potency which has to be heard to be believed. Proceedings start off comparatively mellow with the atmospheric, vocal-laced ‘Fade’ – all cascading breaks and airy pads, before pivoting towards a kind of weightless style sprayed with blaster fire and dislocated snare rushes on ‘Kugelblitz (The Inescapable Rewarp)’. ‘Diffraction’ leans in on grime rudeness, albeit with a flamboyant twist up, before ‘Atlantis’ shakes up the B-side with an aquatic excursion into jungle territory clearly nodding to early Bukem. ‘Particle Horizon’ continues the uptempo charge, but straps starry-eyed arps to the barefaced breakbeat choppage with soul-quaking results. ‘Hibernation (Lumina Falls)’ acts as a kind of mood leveler to round out the EP, but even in these more patient moments the sound palette is vast and dynamic.
At every step, Shadow’s production prowess shines through in glorious technicolour, all shimmering surfaces and molten sonic matter. The degree of detail is frankly staggering, from cascading sample arrays to infinitesimal FX tweaks. His vibrant personality comes through whether he’s tearing it up at 160 or dropping the kicks out altogether, celebrating the eclecticism that embodies modern club music.
a1. J-Shadow - Fade
a2. J-Shadow - Kugelblitz (The Inescapable Rewarp)
Cignol has cemented himself as one of the brightest lights in the burgeoning nu-skool electro scene, here he debuts on UTTU with 4 tracks of expertly produced deep emotional electro vibes.
Originally released on CD in 1999, Astral Industries present a first vinyl issue of Monolake’s much-loved Gobi, licensed from Imbalance Computer Music. Set to the backdrop of the Gobi desert in eastern Asia, two shimmering vistas plunge the listener into a vast and deeply hypnotic nocturnal soundscape. The perennial hiss and rattle of insects float along the fresh night air in soft waves. The desert thrives with quiet activity as a westerly wind skitters across moonlit dunes, granulated folds dancing like sheets of thin silk. Tectonic plates murmur beneath the shower of stars overhead, their millennial cycles whispering of aeons past. Vividly textured and enticingly synthetic in its sound design, Gobi succeeds as a stunning piece of minimalism.
On a creative roll of late, Linkwoods productions have branched out in many directions, a collaboration LP with jazz Genius Greg Foat, Another with Local Edinburgh Legend Other lands and a load more yet to surface. Linkwood now comes back to solo work with a hyper focused piece of electro goodness. Lo-fi but all the better for it, Mono comprises 14 deeply distilled tracks. After producing some more complex records it was time for a pure palate cleanser so we locked Nick in the Athens of the north studio for a week with his friends Moog and Oberheim to see what might happen. Somewhere between Electro, Early 80s Synth pop and techno the album is an extremely listenable piece as a whole, unpretentious and timeless. Sprinklings of Dave Stewart pop noodles, Newbuild, Early Era Nu Groove but very much Linkwood at the same time, I cant recommend this enough.
After taking over the globe with a career of offensive releases with the likes of Dirty Bird, Suara, Ovum, Pets, and his own Fantastic Voyage, global house slimeball Justin Jay gets yucky 4 childsplay with 6 nasty traXXX ranging from filthy techno and slimy acid electro to vulgar baltimore club.
Constructed from a library of sounds collected by the artist in the rainforests of Borneo, Llyr’s debut album is an expansive documentation of natural beauty and human interference. Out July 29th on Max Cooper’s Mesh imprint, it is the first full-length album from the Berlin resident.
The result of painstakingly manipulating these recordings via a multitude of cutting edge production techniques, Biome is an expression of precarity and beauty. It invites the listener to be enveloped by Llyr’s augmented reality rendering of the tropical rainforest, one of the Earth’s most biodiverse and iconic biomes, and encourages them to consider our impact on the natural world.
Split into two sections - Pre-Anthropocene and Anthropocene - Biome tells its story with vast sonic ecosystems of molecular detail. Opening to the sounds of bird call, faint monkey hollers and the gentle crackling of mist-enshrouded trees, the album sets its tone with an archetypal impression of the jungle; one of instant familiarity. This is then expanded on across eight tracks, with the first four offering an abstract meditation on the marvels of nature, and the remainder of the album presenting a sonic vision of human interference - more chaotic and complicated than before.
Llyr’s recordings include signifiers of human presence left untouched as an integral part of the story, with natural phenomena manifesting in different ways on each track. The resulting creations are a testament to the inherent musicality of the natural world. ‘Courtship Signal’ uses a recording of frogs singing in Kubah National Park to map out the rhythms and pitches of its composition, reconstructing an exact structural replica of these mating calls before manipulating and recomposing. Elsewhere, ‘The Hawthorne Effect’ captures a swarm of insects engaging in a rare mating ritual, sampling both a collective hum and individual percussive moments to build an entire library of sound. Similarly, ‘Winged Chamber Music’ carves out a majestic sonic cave using recordings of water dripping and the chattering of bats pitched down to human hearing range. Having engaged wholeheartedly with these moments as they occurred, Llyr extracts themes and motifs with a sincere respect for their origins.
The first section is made in its entirety from Llyr’s own rainforest recordings with no use of drum machines, synths or samples. The recordings feature at every possible scale from macro to micro: unmodified binaural field recordings set the scene; granulated layers add pseudo-synthetic textural atmosphere; iteratively processed one-shots provide punctuation; and carefully designed custom instruments, forged from short fragments and cycles, express harmony and rhythm. The second half, heralding the arrival of humans, relaxes the rule book and a smattering of synthetic elements enter the fray to maximise visceral impact.
The resulting work is a debut album that considers extensive themes by weaving these rare recordings into a remarkably coherent sonic blueprint. Biome resonates as both an affecting listening experience and a thematic exploration of the changing world we inhabit.
Beto Beto is a new label from Bristol releasing house-centric uk inflected club and ambient music.
BETO01 is a hand stamped white label in the tried and tested format of the disco 12” single ~ two floor ready mixes of the title track Poliziotteschi (one club/one dub) and a weirdo left field bonus cut. The Chosen Mix offers bold smokey Chicago and Italo influenced techno whilst the Mirrors Mix is much more rooted in Bristol, with its sparse dubbed out structure, low tempo and trippy progression.
Acclaimed UK electronic musician Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound) releases a stunningly powerful rescore of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal 1972 movie Solaris on Phantom Limb.
The film is intense, psychologically devastating and bleakly compelling. Interweaving themes of love, horror, sorrow, nostalgia, memory and dystopia, Martin’s score expertly mirrors this expansive breadth of psychic weight, from existential dread to heartbreaking poignancy, with immense emotional gravity. Drawn to its “narrative struggle between organic, pastoral memories of a lost past, and the harsh, dystopian realities of a futuristic hell,” Martin employs atonal noise, simmering waves of distorted synthesis, undulating drones and otherworldly, astronomic sound-design to crushing effect. Subtly submerged recurring motifs - reflections of individual characters - rise and fall amidst the fog, occasionally illuminating the doom like motes of starlight, before settling back into the density of space.
Side A 1. Opening credits (theme for Kris. ) 2. Solaris 3. Concrete Tunnels
Side B 4. Hari 5. Together Again
Side C 6. In love with a ghost 7. Weightlessness 8. Resurrection
Incienso is excited to announce ‘basement, etc…’, the debut album from Brooklyn producer downstairs J a.k.a. Josh Abramovici.
Combining elements of Trip-Hop, Acid House, Dub, Korg Triton timbres and a healthy dose of the most chilling beats of the ‘20s, J steps out into the world from down below with an entrancing set of seven songs that warmly elude to his previous releases under the aliases snacs and VOSE 106, but taken in new directions and heights - strangely familiar but fresh, friendly, and uniquely J…
In the beginning, there was just a box of tapes and “Fate’s Gentle Hand.”
It was the autumn of 2010, and an anonymous figure known only as the Head Technician, an employee of Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services (“Magnetically aligning ferrous particles since 1970”), found himself at an auction in the village of Coldred, pop. 110. He was on the hunt for tobacco pipes when he chanced across a trio of boxes listed in the auction catalog, which described their contents only as “archived magnetic recordings.” The sole bidder, he won the lot, and upon receipt of his purchase took possession of an unspecified number of mouldering cassettes and ¼" reel-to-reel tapes. The collection contained no identifying information save for a single phrase scrawled on each box: “Black Mill Sessions.” And so, armed with razors, eyedroppers, and a bevy of solid-state circuitry, the Head Technician sat down at his machines and got to work.
Whether anyone believed it or not, this was the framing device surrounding Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Volume I: Avant Shards, which took the mysterious tactics of artists like Boards of Canada and Burial and raised them exponentially. Much like the narrator of a 19th century novel, the anonymous Head Technician purported merely to be the messenger of secondhand sounds. These were not compositions, we were told; they were tape transfers—“transcriptions” of an unknown author, slathered.
Just a continuation of things that have been done before and that will be done in the future. The plan is that there is no plan and the story goes on! 18 tracks about distinct moods, patterns and the pure joy of creation itself.
*Strictly 1 per customer only - any multiple copies or orders will be cancelled and refunded*
‘A ceremony that invokes ancient spirits like the Dom & Roland productions, the early raw sound of RZA and the bleakness of the Birmingham techno scene in the 90's.
A cinematic trip of film noir aesthetics mixed with an eastern european sci fi sensibility.
Touch Of Evil meets Zulawski's On The Silver Globe.
Pessimist runs the voodoo down for the first time on Berceuse heroique and we are proud to release some of his most honest work.’
Cult UK producer Iglew returns with his highly anticipated sophomore record after a six year hiatus, finding a perfect home on Facta and K-LONE’s label, Wisdom Teeth.Iglew first burst through during the instrumental grime boom of the mid-‘10s, debuting on Mr Mitch’s Gobstopper imprint with the now-verified classic ‘Urban Myth’ EP. A run of massive edits, remixes, radio rips, plus a feature on legendary label Boxed followed -and then he went into hiding. Six years on, his follow-up EP expands and consolidates his sound into something truly unique anddistinct. Hiscentral talents -glacial synth work, timeless melodies, pristine sound design -are all on show here in abundance, but twisted to fit new, refreshed patterns and structures.
‘Caffeine Dream’ is mutant UK techno that offsets distorted bass and glitching synths against warm chords and a noodling melody. ‘Gold’ is cool and stepping, sitting somewhere between early Night Slugs and the refracted deep house of DJ Python. Title track ‘Light Armour’ is the EP’s understated climax -a lowlit and psychedelic take on modern pop, sounding something like a Charli XCX record A&R’d by the Freerotation crew. To close, ‘Microfunk Lament’ and ‘Hakwsworth Woods’ lean into microhouse and Reich-school minimalism, putting Iglew’s immense knack for melody and soul on full display.
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