$39.00
TAV Records presents electronic producer Intriguant's 3rd album, Spirits on vinyl.
When it comes to the relationship between electronic music and its interaction with Singapore, we always find the theme of longing connectivity through its panorama even within the many concrete walls and high-rises we have grown accustomed to living in. With Spirits, Intriguant takes the role of an observer and explores the landscapes of many different cultures and sounds that have taken habitat past and present.
Driven by hauntingly futuristic break-beats of the 90s, shaped 808s, imagined club sounds of dancing folks, bass-heavy textures reminiscent of Burial, Spirits is both for the late-night vanguards and personal home listening rooms. Intriguant's third album encompasses his experiences as an artist most vividly, highlighting his ability to use the flexibility of electronic music to link floating ideas to the physical world.
Your Love
Absence is an invitation – a prerequisite for possibility and blastoff. “Your Love” fills up sonic space by affirming two things: That the call of the dance floor is undeniable and that house is a hyper-ripe canvas for articulating the many nuances of longing. Over an immaculate 4/4 drum pattern, gothic vocal samples percolate the mix, like a celestial chorus emptying the contents of its heart. But this is no ethereal remove: Textures clash with rhythms, spirit intermingles with blood, abstraction sublimates into the visceral, all under the almighty mandate of movement. Every pause is but an allowance for reflection before the inevitable hush of the ending and the echoes it brings. Not a single word is sung here – but it’s still an anthem.
Hours
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Label: TAV Records – AV003LP |
Format: Vinyl, Album, 33 RPM, Limited Copies |
Country: Singapore |
Released: 20th November 2020 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Electronic, Breaks, Breakbeat, Future Garage, Post Dubstep, Ambient |
$20.00
Roots Manuva celebrates Record Store Day with yet another cutting-edge vinyl packed with the kind of combination of “bass and verb” which has made him one of the UK’s most essential musical artists. Off the back of the universally-acclaimed Bleeds album, Manuva has cooked up three brand new tracks to go alongside the astounding “Crying” and “One Thing” from that collection.
Label: Big Dada Recordings – BD274 |
Format: Vinyl, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, EP, Limited Edition |
Country: UK, Europe & US |
Released: 16 Apr 2016 |
Genre: Hip Hop |
Style: Conscious, Instrumental, Bass Music |
$39.00
With an obsessive determinism to sharpen her sonic palette, Laurel Halo finds a home at Honest Jon’s with a graceful and fascinating blueprint for releases yet to come on her latest, In Situ, a double EP marked by perfectionism. The record appears to hearken back to her first instrumental release, 2011’s Antenna, a collection that saw her shifting away from her heady, abstract pop material to become more attuned to making music with sound and shape as the focus. As with In Situ, those songs were ambient, ecological sketches. With the current release, the basic structure of each of each track is revealed at their very beginning, followed by a reconfiguring as each progresses. In a way, it’s similar in approach to Actress‘s work on Splazsh, or much of Drexciya‘s output. There’s a speculative feel with this approach, especially given her introduction of modular-synth work and her dub and world-music influences.
The EP begins with the pointedly titled “Situation”: Built around high-frequency bells, an aquatic, drifting piano line and staunch drums, the song’s feel sits between that of a mesmerizing Basic Channel workout and the spectral ambience of Oren Ambarchi‘s Suspension. The track swings and topples, as it develops and dissolves all at once. On this track, as on the others, is no structural payoff, per se—no “ah ha” moment in which the pieces all come together to wash over the listener, as with her past works. Instead, there’s a drifting aura, ushering you from one track to the next.
Elsewhere on the EP, there’s a sense of her desire to build a more congealed, material music, picking up where Aphex Twin left off with his ambient works. “Nebenwirkungen” recalls a standard Hessle Audio cut or a track from Kassem Mosse, but stretched out and dismantled even more than they allowed.
The aim here seems to be slippage: Rotating, percussive synth lines build momentum as broken techno drum patterns attempt to bridge together the individual melodic parts, submerged in deep bass pressure. This is readily apparent on “Drift” which uses a muscular, all-consuming kick drum as the core, while various metallic objects funnel around caught in the broken established groove. The closer, “Focus 1,” takes on Afro-jazz with a Vladislav Delay mindset, scooting along for eight minutes while a improvised lead piano line glosses over.
In Situ is ultimately beautiful in design, and speaks quite a bit to where Laurel could potentially go, now that she’s spent some time exploring her understanding of sound design and club music. You can definitely hear her thinking her way through each track, treating each as packets of sound, to be observed and experienced in a loop. - XLR8R
$38.00
Limited to 300 copies on white vinyl!
Composed only with analog keyboards, MPC, turntables and live recording: Instinctive, fat and groovy.
Label: Inflamable – BBMV001 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition, White Vinyl |
Country: Europe |
Released: 2014 |
Genre: Hip Hop |
Style: Bass Music, Instrumental |
$45.00
Drew Lustman leaves his ‘Falty DL’ persona at the door and dons his Cowboy hat for a new alter ego - ‘The Crystal Cowboy’ - his cleanest, most concise record to date.
The eleven tracks here are a body of work that Drew put together quickly, free of the connotations and associations of his Falty DL moniker. Creating music in the small hours of the morning rejuvenated his sense of experimentation and freedom. Under this new name Drew found himself making the kind of music he would DJ with or play to friends without the pressure of the conceptual weighing him down. Like all great projects between Planet Mu and Mr. Lustman, these songs found themselves in Mike Paradinas' inbox with little fanfare, letting the music speak for itself. The album often uses the speed or tropes of hardcore and drum & bass, assembling tracks a bit like lego, but adding in Drew’s own almost opaque elements of sophisticated soul and funk to give the roughness some melodic light and emotional pull.
The album opens with ‘Watch A Man Die’ which relives memories of mid-nineties drum & bass, weaving delicate melodies and smooth strings into brisk latticed drums. ‘Time Machine‘ is a stab-heavy recall of hardcore, with reverbed animal calls giving the track a humid jungle feel. ‘Angel Flesh's‘ delicate looped soul voices blend into a gaseous haze over jazzy drums, while ‘Green Technique’ layers intense beat and synth loops into a dark and disorienting vortex. ‘Wolves’ is Drew's melodic take on dub techno building crunchy, rolling drums and shivery chords into one of the albums many highlights. Placed at the albums midpoint, ‘Hyena’ takes a broken diva vocal and repeats it into an intense howl, leading into the title track whose carefully poised rhodes jazz chords and vocals are balanced against rough hardcore breaks and dense distorting bass which makes you feel like your bouncing on water. Drew takes things slower with ‘Onyx’ which featuring the rapper Le1f’s first ever sung vocals, over xylophone and light raindrop rhythms. The album finishes on the pumping electro of ‘Sykle’ whose itchy overexcited rhythms rub up against plaintive childlike piano and shimmering synths making it one of the album's most memorable highlights.
"The Crystal Cowboy asks the listener to lose themselves and any inhibitions they may have as he takes the time to hold your hand and lead you through his thrilling and immersive wonderland. Good night and good luck."
$39.00
After a run of dates playing “obtuse, strange” music as a warm-up act for the xx, Sam Shepherd translates that experimental energy to an album of mischievous, melodic, stripped-down electronic music.
The album was born in the aftermath of a 2017 tour opening for the xx. After touring Elaenia for a couple of years with a full live ensemble, Shepherd suddenly found himself alone onstage—in 20,000-capacity venues, no less—improvising with just a Roland drum machine and a Buchla synth. While he initially planned to keep things mellow, he quickly threw that plan out the window, choosing instead to embrace a more “chaotic” vibe and warm the crowd up with what he describes as “some of the most obtuse, strange, difficult music of my life.” It was a risky choice, but the shows left Shepherd feeling invigorated, and he was determined to continue these focused machine experiments once he returned to the studio.
Knowing that, you might expect Crush to be an intense, frenzied effort, but in Shepherd’s case, economy doesn’t preclude elegance. While certain elements—a distorted rhythm here, a shuddering synth there—can be traced back to those rough-and-tumble live shows with the xx, the LP as a whole is strikingly melodic and often beautiful, even in its most frantic moments. - Pitchfork
Label: Ninja Tune – ZEN259 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album |
Country: UK |
Released: 18 Oct 2019 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Bass Music, Deep House, Experimental, Future Jazz |