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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

.gif have earned critical comparison to the likes of Bjork, Yukimi Nagano, The xx and Portishead, but the illustrious pair have managed to retain a fresh and unique dynamic to their chimerical sound, one that proved so compelling that the pair began filling a void of their own making within the Singaporean music scene. 

Following the acclaim of their past releases, .gif's sophomore LP HAIL NOTHING still showcases the haunting vocals, deft lyricism and obsidian production that has become their distinctive sound. The album is named after a line in Ernest Hemingway' s A Clean Well Lighted Place - "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee." 

The duo digs deeper on HAIL NOTHING; an ode to chaos and nothingness, a love song to the void. Expanding on their synth-driven soundscapes, haunting vocals and poignant lyrics, the album also features guests Bani Haykal and Usaama Minhas. 

The Analog Vault is supremely honoured to be working with .gif for their first-ever vinyl release on TAV Records. 

Matthew Dear’s contribution to the DJ-Kicks series is his most engaging commercial mix yet. Intricately and intuitively mixed, it incorporates a handful of his own unreleased tracks.

Dear’s mixing is a treat. Unless you know the tracks inside and out, it’s virtually impossible to tell where they begin and end; he favors long, careful blends, and rarely leaves a given track to play out by itself for long. His selections benefit from the hands-on style. Pay attention to the way energy pulses between two cuts running in parallel, and you imagine the motion of a pinball as it ricochets off bouncers and flippers: wildly kinetic and keenly controlled. - Pitchfork

 Marie Davidson is a spoken-word poet and electronic artist who is also one half of the duo Essaie Pas. Her third solo release, examining club culture, shows near-exponential growth in her abilities…

…One of the most successful and captivating practitioners of spoken-word electronic has been Marie Davidson, one half of the Montreal coldwave duo Essaie Pas. Her two previous solo releases (Perte D'Identité and Un Autre Voyage) mingled gothic ambient music, poetic repetitions, and analog synthpop to great success. Her work has never felt campy, but is darkly rendered, probing, and redolent of Lizzy Mercier Descloux. In her third solo release, Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson presents a project that indicates exciting and near-exponential growth in her ability as a writer and producer. - Pitchfork

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

A futuristic collection from Midnight Shift and Voitax!

Tobias. returns to Ostgut Ton with his third full length Eyes In The Center and expands the musical narrative laid out by his Helium Sessions EP (O-TON, 2016). The Berghain resident keeps exploring the vast modular synth-driven Techno, Experimental and Ambient territories on a journey in-between genres. 

"This is the new album by Modeselektor. It has been in the works for two years and was made within a month. It’s a record offering essential Modeselektor, a record formed by experience, self confidence and the usual madness. It raises a question and answers it straight away. „Who Else” is yet another counteraction to boredom and formulaic approaches. Hear Modeselektor casually kicking against the pricks. Somebody’s gotta do it. Who else?" - Monkeytown Records

“Moriyama is the first release on Palto Flats by Nagoya-based experimental producer Foodman. A 5 track 12” focused on deep, tactile rhythmic and offbeat tracks, Moriyama tilts on some of the producer’s most dance-friendly work. “Mizuboro,” (meaning water bath) elicits the feeling of soaking in a tub of warm bassy synth pads, metronomic patterns of woodwinds and skittering percussion suitable for latenight winds. Elsewhere, on “Soudesu,” Foodman experiments with traditional instrumentation & vocal forms to create a special post-ambient/dance hybrid of familiar sounds reconfigured.

Named after the district he lives in, Moriyama represents some of Foodman’s most direct, accessible work - a full helping.” – Bandcamp

“Nagoya-based artist Takahide Higuchi will release some of his most "direct, accessible work" to date, the label says, with an emphasis on "deep, tactile rhythmic and offbeat tracks." It's the second release of the year for Palto Flats, the New York label that's perhaps best known for reissuing rare Japanese albums from the '80s—Mariah's Utakata No Hibi, Midori Takada's Through The Looking Glass and Yasuaki Shimizu's Kakashi among them.” – Resident Advsior

 

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"5 years since Midnight Shift’s first release in 2012, the label assembles a collective of artists, most of them are in advance of their full EPs releasing later.

Representing the now and future sounds of the label, the motley crew also comprises the alternate sides of familiar faces — Amato (The Hacker), Terry Lamborgini (Marco Bernardi), INNYSTER (Seixlack), Hodge in a new formation with Gramrcy, and an electro moniker from an undisclosed artist: Thermocline. From abstract acrobatics to the abrasive and the ultimate gob smack to the floor — The Midnight Manual is in the bag." - Bandcamp

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Ten years after his first release, UK artist Lone is putting out his 
first ever commercial mix CD. His entry into the celebrated 
DJ-kicks series lands on 29th September and features four of his 
own new and exclusive tracks. 

Lone’s DJ-kicks very much feels alive, lived-in and authentic. It is 
a hugely personal view into his unique musical world and marks 
another landmark entry into !K7's long running series – Bandcamp

“Tapping Detroit techno, IDM, and boom-bap hip-hop, Lone’s horizontally inclined DJ-Kicks mix uses expert selection and programming to highlight his own distinctive musical sensibility.” – Pitchfork

“Unlike his productions, it's not a seamless weave of trends, genres and ideas. Instead, DJ-Kicks lays out each of his influences piece by piece, almost like listening to a deconstructed Lone album. For fans of Cutler's singular music, it's an essential entry in his discography.” – Resident Advisor

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Hieroglyphic Being’s debut album for Soul Jazz - The Acid Documents - is an album made up of tracks first released last year only ever available in a bespoke edition of 100 copies (yes 100) – in the form of a homemade CD-R – made exclusively for the Sounds of the Universe record store.

This album is now released officially as a one-off edition of 1000 copies on coloured double vinyl, CD and digital, fully remastered with artwork by Japanese artist 2Yang.

Hieroglyphic Being, aka Jamal Moss - who features on the front cover of Wire magazine’s current issue – is a DJ/composer/sound artist who makes pioneering, experimental, boundary-pushing Afro-futurist electronic music.

Born and based in Chicago, Moss’s music embodies two of the cultural foundation blocks of the city’s musical lineage; that of Chicago’s original Acid House sound (c. 1986), that of Frankie Knuckles, Phuture, Marshall Jefferson et al, alongside a rigorous experimental sound searching that taps into the cosmic musical lineage of pioneering artist Sun Ra whose Arkestra landed and was based in the city from 1946-61.

This association with Sun Ra is by no means hypothetical, having just been in the studio with the Arkestra leader Marshall Allen and a host of free jazz players for the album Hieroglyphic Being & JITU Ahn-Sahm-Buhl’s ‘We Are Not The First.’

Similarly his relationship to Chicago’s original acid house pioneers of the late 80s is no hyperbole. Originally menotored by artist/producers Adonis and Steve Pointdexter, Moss also now runs his own Mathematics label which has released music by foundation acid house pioneers Lil’ Louis, Adonis and many others. To quote Moss, ‘I am the last of the line of producers directly influenced by Ron Hardy (the pioneering acid house DJ) at the Music Box.’

Moss grew up in the south side of Chicago. After being thrown out of the home of his adoptive parents, he then spent three years homeless living on the streets of Chicago, living a nocturnal existence as a gigolo in Chicago’s alternative clubs. He began his career as a DJ at the pioneering Liquid Love parties at Chi-town’s legendary Power House (home of Ron Hardy’s MusicBox) around 1989.

What clearly defines Moss’s music is that while sometimes pushing the limits of sound to an ear-splitting dimension of experimentation and DIY-electronics – the music is always clearly a progression of the lineage of black music. In the words of fellow Chicagoans, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, it is simply ‘Great Black Music.’ And yet in this uniquely defined sound, Moss somehow manages to draw into this world elements of industrial music, German electronic music (Cluster, Harmonia etc), Detroit’s sci-fi techno artists (Atkins, Saunderson, Craig) and more. – Sounds of the Universe

“Jamal Moss' 'The Acid Documents' album sees a necessary vinyl issue on Soul Jazz Records. The ten tracks now have titles but don't worry; they're still raw as f**k and unaltered from the original CDr.

In full, psychedelic flow he jacks-a-body from lo-fi, curdled house in 'Culdees' thru to the gurgling ceramic acid of 'Aurum Solis' and a warped slow motion ace, 'Hollow Earth', peaking out at the cryptic tribal patterns of 'Illumiates of Thanateros' and the spannered, chaotic harmonics of 'Burlesque Degrees'.” – Boomkat

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A suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion.

Right from Hazyville, Actress’s music has been deeply marked by London’s rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh, R.I.P heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments.

R.I.P underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Basic Channel, Burial and Aphex Twin. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also ‘slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.’ – Honest Jon’s Records

“Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.…It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.” – Pitchfork

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’

So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.

Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.

Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”

Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Faure in Chrome,” a byproduct or development from his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in which he “repatterns” aspect of Faure’s Requiem into a piece which sounds like the very institution of classical music being encased in electronic ice and scanned through a high frequency bandwidth. In between are gems like “Runner,” a personal re-soundtracking of Blade Runner “its from the deleted Fade Runner scene where AZD in a Peckham Cafe realises his barber has over the years etched a faded scroll into his head using early 80s African synthpop as a vexing serum“, or “Falling Rizlas,” an alienated music-box ballad. It’s a remarkable piece of work, that harks back both to Actress’ previous productions and to earlier iterations of the (broadly conceived) “techno” project without being beholden to anything but Cunningham’s forward-facing, individual and disembodied vision. – Ninja Tune

The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian

“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork

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