$39.00
Désaccord Majeur is the alter ego of French journeyman Jérôme Mauduit, a curious seeker and sustaining presence in Europe's post-industrial underground. Beginning his musical activities in the mid-1980s, Mauduit committed his first recordings to tape in 1989, self-releasing La Théorie Du Chaos on his eponymous label home to fellow travellers Internal Fusion, Largo and Moments Présents. It continued to act as a base for his own endeavours and before discontinuation in 1994, culminated in the release of Ophir, an important document propagating the earthy, ritualistic spores of Ah Cama Sotz, Hybryds, Nightmare Lodge and Muslimgauze - the alias of Bryn Jones who would later become his label mate at Staalplaat.
Treading sensitively through a humid urban decay left by Jorge Reyes and Luis Delgado, Manduit inhabits a strange, sticky world shared by O Yuki Conjugate, Z'EV and Nocturnal Emissions: woodlike percussion, melancholic drift and unclean ambience his markers of identification. Alluding to the atmospheric qualities of mid-90s world-weary electronica and the digitised undulations generated by Paul Schütze, Aubrite-era Thomas Köner and early Microstoria, it's perhaps no surprise that the tactility of Manduit's work has gained pertinence and resonated with a new generation of listeners - in fact, it was Vladimir Ivkovic who first introduced it to us in 2019.
Sourced from a productive period which climaxed in an appearance on Rotorelief's Coilectif - In Memory Ov John Balance and Homage to Coil compilation (2006), the tracks on Sunquake reveal the workings of an idiosyncratic, otherworldly artist drifting through dreams.
"This is a tiny yet remarkable entrance into Désaccord Majeur’s world of beautiful introvert electronics. Delicate yet powerful music that sounds like it was never made to please anyone beyond the place it was made. Never overstated but always inviting for anyone who wants to go for a hike through inner spaces."
—Vladimir Ivkovic, June 2020 (via A Colourful Storm)
Label: A Colourful Storm – ACOLOUR027 |
Format: Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, EP, Compilation |
Country: Australia |
Released: Aug 2020 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Ambient, Tribal, Industrial |
$39.00
'Vladislav Delay Quartet' is an album veiled with peculiarity given the various dance material that preceded it. It is the result of Ripatti's return to his homeland in Hailuoto, an isolated island in the Northern Ostrobothnia region of Finland, populated only by 1,001 thousand people after living a good part of his life in Berlin. And as one return brings another, this album emerged from Ripatti's roots in jazz which surfaced again in the shelter of an undisturbed environment where music ceased to be about what surrounds it too. Once reducing production entirely to sensibility, the result came out as an intimate listening involvement where one is enraptured by the communication this album invites to.
The album begins with 'Minus Degrees, Bare Feet, Tickles', a turbulent song that feels like a sonic picture of an abrupt dive into Purgatory. Purification is achieved once the deepest roots of guilt, regret and hatred are faced and ravaged. 'Santa Teresa' follows as a first experimentation of the divine state. Apprehension makes its way out of the spirit through cornered pristine corridors. The sound of closing gates left behind and opening ones ahead is emulated in 'Des Abends' and the seemingly endless walk through them is underlined by the repetitive electric sounds of 'Hohtokivi'. 'Killing the Water Bed' sounds like steps made tiredly into an unknown dark space where flickers of light are moving chaotically, guiding the followers towards their destination. Thick mist suffocates skin pores while earthly lake sounds emerge through delirious clarinet, saxophone and crumbling drums.
All this sinister attempt to escape ends with a dash into 'Presentiment', a ravishing track which encloses scarce gravity between the walls of soft cymbal strokes. This moment of light and clarity is interrupted by 'Louhos' as one last struggle before eternal peace. 'Salt Flat' is a continuously ascending track ending the album in a mood so buoyant that it reinforces the listener to go again through this now known experience. – The Attic Mag
Label: Honest Jon's Records – HJRLP56 |
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Album |
Country: UK |
Released: Jun 2011 |
Genre: Electronic, Jazz |
Style: Industrial, Abstract, Avant-garde Jazz, Drone, Noise, Ambient, Experimental |
$38.00
Most Nine Inch Nails albums play like documents of sharp, turbulent mood swings. Bursts of rage give way to creeping anxiety; momentary ambiance begets nihilism and noise. It’s a routine so familiar by now that fans should be able to predict Trent Reznor’s shifting temperaments like weather patterns. So when he recently announced plans to release his new music in a series of interconnected EPs, there was hope that he might, in this condensed format, locate his best angles, find a few new ones, and leave us wanting more.
Depending on who you ask, the refreshingly cohesive Bad Witch is either the final EP in that trilogy or his first full-length in five years. Even Reznor himself seems slightly bewildered by it: “It wasn’t necessarily what we thought it was going to be when we started,” he explained coyly about the project. While the six-song, 31-minute record is easily the shortest thing to ever pass for a NIN album, it’s hard to deny that it does feel distinct. Its preceding releases, 2016’s Not the Actual Events and last year’s Add Violence, were concise and sporadically thrilling surveys of Reznor’s oeuvre, but Bad Witch stands on its own. Like his greatest albums, it works best as a whole, played loudly on headphones in a dark room. Like his celebrated film scores with bandmate Atticus Ross, it successfully creates an atmosphere and invites us to explore every inch of it. – Pitchfork
Label: Caroline International – B002818021, Caroline International – 00602567473367Z, The Null Corporation – B002818021 |
Series: NIN – HALO THIRTY TWO, NIN – HALO 32 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, 180 Gram |
Country: Europe |
Released: 22 Jun 2018 |
Genre: Electronic, Rock |
Style: Industrial |
$39.00
Umwelt allies with Midnight Shift for the release of the mini LP Superior Life Forms, featuring six devastating tracks on the vinyl release and an exclusive number seven for the digital release.
Known for his take no prisoners approach to searing hardware-based broken electro with the spirit of 90s French rave parties where he participated in, Umwelt himself is founder of labels such as Fundata, New Flesh Records and Rave or Die, and a diehard scene activist, pushing the resistance for the past twenty years and more.
A dark, sci-fi bleak horror theme runs through his prolific cosmos of productions and Superior Life Forms continues the narrative. It’s a tri-invasion attack between man, machine and foreign sentient beings. From the snarling Shadow Entity creeping from the sidelines to the ominous sound of the day of reckoning depicted on title track, Superior Life Forms, Umwelt has full control of the genre – telling a story with tightly programmed sounds, deadly textural atmospherics and an uneasy, foreboding tension of a world signalling its end. - Bandcamp
Label: Midnight Shift Records – MNSXLP0001 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Mini-Album, Limited Edition, Grey Marbled |
Country: Singapore |
Released: 18 Oct 2019 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Dark Ambient, Electro, Industrial, Techno |
$38.00
Pan Daijing, a Chinese artist now based in Berlin, discovered techno on her first trip to Europe, when she was 20. But unlike many who have had a similar epiphany in Berghain's dark halls, Daijing didn't suddenly dedicate herself to dance music. "It's not so much 'music,' but 'sound,'" she told RBMA last year. "Sound has always been the thing I've been the most interested in." Or maybe "noise" is a better way of putting it, as her interests in industrial and experimental music have been a major part in the intense, sexually charged performances she's become known for. All of which is to say that Daijing has taken a roundabout path to making techno, which gives her second release an interesting angle. A Satin Sight isn't light on rhythmic force, but the drums are sometimes utilized more for their sonic blasts than time keeping. "What I like about techno is the energy," Daijing said in that same interview. "Whether you're making it, playing it, listening to it or dancing to it, it's an energy exchange. – Resident Advisor
Label: Bedouin Records – BDN 013 |
Format: Vinyl, 12", EP, Limited Edition |
Country: United Arab Emirates |
Released: 2017 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Techno, Industrial, EBM |
$39.00
Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm.
I AKA I is Kooshanejad's second album under his Ash Koosha alias, following last year's GUUD. He's a multimedia artist, dabbling in film as well as expressing an interest in virtual reality. "At some point in my life I thought it was good to specialize, but now I think it’s good to build a bigger product than just music," he told Philip Sherburne last year; he's diversified, in other words. But I AKA I is a complex sonic statement, one where sound qua sound is the order of the day. Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them. - Pitchfork
Label: Ninja Tune – ZEN228 |
Format: Vinyl, LP |
Country: UK |
Released: 01 Apr 2016 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Dubstep, Industrial, Broken Beat |
$48.00
A futuristic collection from Midnight Shift and Voitax!
Label: Midnight Shift Records – MNSVOI 01, VOITAX – MNSVOI 01 |
Series: Midnight Shift X – MNSVOI 01 |
Format: Vinyl, 12", Compilation |
Country: Germany |
Released: 07 Feb 2020 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Breakbeat, Breaks, Broken Beat, Deep Techno, Dark Ambient, Dub, Dub Techno, Electro, Experimental, IDM, Industrial, Noise, Techno, Ambient |
$45.00
Asher Levitas is perhaps best known as part of Old Apparatus, the acclaimed and enigmatic London experimental outfit. Over the last few years he has featured on releases for labels including Deep Medi, Houndstooth and Left Blank as ‘Saa’ with the singer Linn Carin Dirdal.
Lit Harness’, his first solo album, started forming as a project in 2015 alongside the artist and writer Michael Crowe who worked on the live A/V show while Asher created the music with vocalist Marina Elderton (from the Ethereal Psych band Kull) who features on the tracks.
The record follows personal themes in a time of extreme emotion: anxiety and madness but also serenity and acceptance, hence the term ‘Lit Harness’, which is a Harness that holds you in a calm place while chaos happens all around. Asher also wanted to describe the experience of the sleep paralysis, which he has had most of his life, into a musical sound world. That’s not to say the album is totally dark, but there’s intensity and transcendence here as well as an otherworldly beauty.
The music on ‘Lit Harness’ plays out in a shadowy hallucinogenic dream-like state where it’s not clear what’s meant to reflect reality or pure fantasy. Part of this process was the way the audio and visuals developed in tandem with each other, Michael passing Asher images and video, which Asher used to inject drama into the tracks and finish them.
‘Lit Harness’ could be described as ambient, but every track is filled with detail and a strange clanking drama, the hammering noises of ‘Withdrawn’ and the cold fever of ‘In The Eyes’ playing out like a dream. ‘Sheathe’ turns the record around with clouds of swirling choirs and ‘Waiting By An Open Door’ plays a hazy piano, with wind rushing through the soundfield. ‘Strongest Bonds’ has held descending chords with watery drum hits; ethereal vocals building in the background into a haze of noise. ‘Blessed Mother’s’ repeating vocals and rising chords ripple with a transcendent, gentle hopefulness, which gives way to the flatline drone and otherworldly voices of ‘Premature Exit’. ‘Anticipating Violence’ finishes the album with a sad, angry surrender, punctuated with rushes of cold hammering and reversed breaking glass. - Bandcamp
Label: Planet Mu – ZIQ379 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo |
Country: UK |
Released: 10 Jun 2016 |
Genre: Electronic |
Style: Dark Ambient, Experimental, Industrial, Noise |
$45.00
Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, returns for a new second album on Soul Jazz Records, after last year’s debut The Acid Documents. this time under the name Africans with Mainframes.
Hieroglyphic Being and fellow Chicago producer Noleian Reusse have been releasing music under the name Africans with Mainframes for over 15 years now, ever since their debut on Hieroglyphic Being’s own Mathematics Recordings label in 2005. ‘K.M.T.’ is the debut album from the group, a collage of apocalyptic Chicago acid meets industrial and transcendental post-house machine funk.
Both intense and unique, the album of forward-thinking, experimental, boundary-pushing Afro-futurist electronic music shows why Hieroglyphic Being is regarded as one of the most serious purveyors of experimental black music today. You can't stop the prophet! – Sounds of the Universe
“Devastating album of epic dancefloor rituals and visions from Jamal Moss (Hieroglyphic Being) and Noleian Reusse in their prized Africans With Mainframes guise, amounting to their most substantial and impressive collection.” – Boomkat
“…Working with fellow producer Noleian Reusse as Africans With Mainframes, [DJ and producer] Jamal Moss swings from Windy City jazz to Chicago acid at its most caustic. While the duo have released a slew of 12”s dating back to 2001, K.M.T. is their first full-length. Kemetic Modulating Textures is eight tracks of Moss and Reusse at their most unrelenting and there’s a coarseness to every texture that at times might make you mistakenly think it was just slapped together. Yet the frequent references to Egyptology (Googling each track title reveals a profound knowledge of prehistoric culture) suggest a greater thought at work, and if you manage to survive the bruising BPMs of the album's first half, it becomes mesmerizing.
Opener “Anachronistic” sets the table for what lies ahead: everything in the red, a snare fill stumbling and slipping across the grid, the 808’s edges increasingly fuzzy with distortion. And then just when it verges on pure noise, that telltale acid squiggle worms through and the snare coheres into a visceral thrill.
Last year, Moss explained his first encounter with Sun Ra’s music as a shock to the system: “His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge.” It’s a lesson that Moss carries forward with K.M.T., suggesting that while some of his tracks might scan as scrambled transmissions, continued exposure reveals a profound signal beneath the noise.” – Pitchfork
Item description:
Artist: |
|
Title: |
K.M.T. |
Label: |
|
Format: |
2 × Vinyl, 12", Album, Limited Edition |
Pressing: |
UK |
Release Date: |
2016 |
Genre: |
Electronic |
Style: |
Acid, Techno, Industrial |
Catalog No: |
SJR LP333 |
Condition: |
New |