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Honest Jon's Records
Laurel Halo - In Situ
$39.00
Visit product page →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
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Honest Jon's Records
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
$39.00
Visit product page →Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is an eight-piece, Chicago-based brass ensemble consisting of eight sons of the jazz trumpeter Phil Cohran. Their musical style ranges from hip hop to jazz to funk and rock, including calypso and gypsy music. They call their eclectic blend of sound "now music", or "Hypnotic". Reared in the teachings of music since they were children, they grew up on the stage playing as the "Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble". - Wiki
Label: Honest Jon's Records – HJRLP42
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: UK
Released: 2009
Genre: Jazz, Funk / Soul
Style: Jazz-Funk, Contemporary Jazz
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Honest Jon's Records
Actress – R.I.P
$39.00
Visit product page →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
Item description:
Artist:
Title:
R.I.P
Label:
Format:
2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Pressing:
UK
Release Date:
2012
Genre:
Electronic
Style:
Leftfield, Glitch, Techno, Experimental
Catalog No:
ZEN 241
Condition:
New
