Electroacoustic, Electroacoustic Improvisation, Experimental Ambient, Electronica, Musique concrète
Eka Faune - Ce Ciel De Folie
from Healing Of The Nation, Akuphone, 2022
Eka Faune offers a surprising mix of Asian cultures, shamanism and post-punk in the form of a record called Healing of the Nation.
The band merges dark mantras, hypnotic rhythms, ethnic samples and the acid sounds of Seika Faune. Delphine Poupard's voice and
Robin Plastre's sax are added to produce a haunting music, dark and luminous at the same time, alternating dance and trance, taking the listener far inside...
Similarly to the other albums by Eka Faune, Seika first recorded his drums and sounds machines as well as his sampler-sequencer in one take.
Then he added the instruments and voices. Sax, bass, sarod, tambourine and vocals accompany loops captured on the streets of Delhi, the mountains of Asia or old acid house vinyls.
Eka Faune is a musical project based in Nantes, France, initiated in 2014 by the artist Guyseika.
The project evolves under the influence of guitarists, cellists, singers or dancers who join the band for a concert, a recording, a tour - or more.
Over the years, Amélie from Breedz Insane, Steph from Modules Étranges, Budwarrior or Vincent Roy, have taken part in the project.
Recorded in 2021, the album Healing of the Nation is a deeply thought-out answer to the crisis we are all going through. It offers a way to heal from it:...
released September 15, 2022
Sangam - The Path to F All
from Hope You Don't Leave, Decaying Spheres, 2022
'Unobscured and unapologetically bleak, Sangam’s
Hope You Don’t Leave brings the listener face to face with feelings of sadness and angst.
With melodic sequences that radiate with a refreshing clarity, each track gives a sense of true realness and with this comes an unforgettable, immersive listening experience.' LISTENCORP
released February 25, 2022
Max Würden - Summiteer
from Landmark, A Strangely Isolated Place, 2023
Max Würden returns with his second album on A Strangely Isolated Place after 2019’s ‘Format’,
experimenting with a new style of music creation on ‘Landmark’.
Landmark sees Max Würden combine and integrate various external forces into his usual studio production process.
Inspired by many paintings of powerful landscapes found in thrift stores throughout his hometown of Cologne,
Max set out to bring various elements together as one whole over time - allowing an organic process of experimentation and collage.
Short phrases of music and field recordings that weren’t originally meant for each other were realized in isolation,
such as sounds from his Klangkiste (sound box) built by Max himself, guitars, an old out-of-tune Schimmel piano, and samples of early jazz and classical music.
These separate elements eventually, over time, connected and came together as Landmark - a recognizable moment and formation.
The collage of elements found throughout ‘Landmark’, expresses a number of different vantage points from which to gaze and focus your attention.
From the more storied and instrumental-based ‘Reprise’ and ‘Range’, to the wide-scape visions of ‘Summiteer’, or the off-world portrayals in ‘Stereo A’ and ‘Stereo B’.
Max can be found depicting a montage of intricately detailed moments that invite you to stand and ponder their storied creation,
be it emerging from found sound, synthesizers, guitars, samples, or simply his own production sorcery.
released January 23, 2023
Arovane - Sinter
from Sinter, laaps, 2023
Arovane is Uwe Zahn and is someone who can conjure up, arrange and thread together music and sonic texture that is so lush it feels like you could reach out and bath in it.
This is a record couched in ambient music but that leans heavily on the classical sounds he has also showcased over the last two decades.
The whole thing is meticulously crafted with exquisite sound design and plenty of sensitivities, lush melody and rich emotions that all linger long in the memory and add up to a beautifully escapist listen.
released January 23, 2023
Pulselovers - Leisureland
from Various - Arlo’s Sounds of Norfolk. Waxing Crescent Records, 2023
Neil Stringfellow’s aka Audio Obscura son Arlo used his Dad’s equipment to create six field recordings called Sounds of Norfolk for a school project.
This triggered an idea to use the recordings and send them to different musicians to create their own tracks and form an album. Arlo, aged 9,
recorded six sounds in total, all made around half term October 2022 and the last from November 5th bonfire fireworks.
Profit will be sent to Action for Children www.actionforchildren.org.uk
released May 19, 2023
Oval - Cresta
Oval - Glockenton
from Romantiq, Thrill Jockey, 2023
The music of Markus Popp is endlessly curious. Since the early 90s his pioneering albums as Oval have continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. Popp’s playful and singular approach to sound has continually left critics and peers alike confounded by his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. Celebrated collaborations with Jan St. Werner as Microstoria remain foundational texts in underground music,
while a rare split record with Liturgy exemplifies Popp’s reach and influence outside electronic spheres. With each release Oval continues to blossom into new digital spaces, combining a wide-eyed sense of wonder with astute technical prowess in his exploration of cutting-edge technologies. His new album Romantiq turns the producer’s inquisitive ear to an omnipresent
and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art – the romantic. The album foregrounds the emotional drive that has always been present in Oval records, providing a genuine and unabashed interrogation of its subject matter delivered with delectable sophistication.
Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt -
a huge outdoor projection covering the museum building. From the project’s inception both Seidel and Popp sought a more expansive definition of “romantic”, extending outward from the museum’s comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art. Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion in dialogue
with Seidel’s dense, intricate digital imagery and animations. From those initial foundations Popp continued to develop his initial sketches into something even more ambitious and diverse in its outlook.
Romantiq surveys a staggering amount of source material, looking as much to literature, architecture and artistic traditions as it does music.
Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future.
Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion.
Throughout Romantiq, Popp masterfully blurs the line between the organic and digital, obscuring or revealing instruments in service of atmosphere.
Original source material of an opera singer provided by Seidel for the installation takes on new life in album opener “Zauberwort”, atomized into smoke trails that glide beneath spidery guitar and trombone architectures.
Stately piano figures on “Rytmy” balance analog nostalgia with digital processing, while the ethereal flute melody anchoring “Elektrin” is concrete and tangible one moment, fleeting and incorporeal the next.
Cliches are either skilfully sidestepped or harnessed to powerful and unexpected effect – “Wildwasser”’s deliberate 80s exotica kitsch or the near-devotional extremes of feeling on display in “Touha”.
Each arrangement is deceptively detailed without clouding the work’s narrative arc, shifting from quiet contemplation to euphoric bliss.
Through exploring the shifting notion of “romance” across time and space, Popp sculpts spaces that feel both familiar and uncanny, nostalgic and futuristic.
Much like the transient emotions it surveys, Romantiq’s evocative sonics conjure flickering images that glitch, evolve and collapse in on one another – opulent neo-chamber music lit by the paradoxically heartwarming screen glow of social media flirtations. Romantiq’s omnivorous approach to its core theme and source material provides a wry and expansive definition of romance, capturing in surprising detail the essence of this intangible, yet universal human emotion.
released May 12, 2023
Ossa - Spixwork TapeLoop
from Various - Arlo’s Sounds of Norfolk. Waxing Crescent Records, 2023
Neil Stringfellow’s aka Audio Obscura son Arlo used his Dad’s equipment to create six field recordings called Sounds of Norfolk for a school project.
This triggered an idea to use the recordings and send them to different musicians to create their own tracks and form an album. Arlo, aged 9,
recorded six sounds in total, all made around half term October 2022 and the last from November 5th bonfire fireworks.
Profit will be sent to Action for Children www.actionforchildren.org.uk
released May 19, 2023
Twinkle³ - If I leave No Trace
from Upon This Fleeting Dream, cortizona, 2022
On ‘Upon This Fleeting Dream’ Clive Bell’s Twinkle3 embraces medieval and 16th century Japanese poems and haiku about death and saying farewell.
Bell and Twinkle3, consisting of Dave Ross and Richard Scott, expand their sonic borders to unknown territory: bringing these pithy epigrams to a new Fourth World where electro-acoustic sounds glitches into an hypnagogic, if not unconscious level of fragile beauty.
The distinctive voice of David Sylvian, who reads the English version of the poems and created field recordings and the artwork for this album blends in the most organic way with the shakuhachi, Thai reed flutes and mouth organs played by Clive Bell.
The narrative voices of David Sylvian and Kazuko Hohki’s (Frank Chickens, Kahondo Style…) velvet timbre are the cornerstones of this compelling journey while the tangling and abstract rhythms transcending
from Dave Ross’ modular synths and Richard Scott’s sampler and analogue electronics, unravel and unfold a mesmerizing universe with unknown dimensions and frequencies of a fleeting dream.
released October 28, 2022
Gilroy Mere - Blackfriars
from Gilden Gate, Clay Pipe, 2023
Oliver Cherer is back with a new Gilroy Mere record which follows on from his other much lauded Clay Pipe releases (The Green Line, Adlestrop and last year’s D Rothon collaboration, Estuary English).
Over the last two decades Ollie has released numerous collections of music in an ever shifting array of modes, from folktronic, singer-songwriter styles through psychogeographic electronica to jazz-tinged,
confessional ghost-pop and most recently, the “guitar tainted machine rock disco” of Aircooled.
Gilden Gate is an album of two halves. Side 1 ‘Rising’ celebrates the sun-drenched beaches, pastures and heaths of rural Suffolk,
whereas Side 2 ‘Falling’ explores the underwater world of the lost city of Dunwich and its five church spires.
Oliver says:-
“A few years ago I discovered the lost city of Dunwich. I’d made a trip to Suffolk to shoot a short film about Sizewell Nuclear Power Stations and stayed in the old Coastguard’s Cottage on Dunwich Beach within sight of Minsmere Nature Reserve and the power plants.
It’s a wild, sleepy place of pines and heath and North Sea winds and a strangely mysterious air – Sutton Hoo is nearby and Eno’s reference to the very beach that I was staying on made perfect sense.
In the small museum at Dunwich I learned that this tiny hamlet had once been a major medieval city of international trade. It seemed unlikely and even now, knowing Dunwich as a small village,
I find putting what I know about the place into perspective as a city a certain kind of impossible.
It seems that over a period under the influence of the weather, natural erosion and market rivalry the thriving harbour port was inundated by the North Sea and eventually slipped into and under it.
The city of churches was lost and all the spires engulfed and toppled. What remains are the few houses, and the ruin of Greyfriars crumbling inexorably down the cliff and exposing the bones of buried monks as the graveyard follows the building’s stones into the sea.
There are local legends surrounding the site including stories of fishermen hearing the bells of lost churches and seeing the ghostly, lighted city beneath their boats as they return to the shore.
Gilden Gate is named for one of the entrances to the old city and is a musical meditation on Dunwich past and present. Frances Castle’s beautiful sleeve art depicts the surface and the sub-marine,
the warm and the cold, the past and the present. The glass rises and the glass falls and in the background there are sirens, fog horns, church bells and Eno, and on the sea bed there are the scattered remains of a once great city.”
release April 14, 2023
Beam Weapons - Absolute Fucking Scenes
from Old Powers, Preston Capes, 2023
‘Old Powers’ is Beam Weapons' second album, and is rooted in two things. The first is a Boosey and Hawkes library record from 1970 which has the most incredible titles, but is represented by not particularly interesting music. We took some of the titles and decided to create our own versions.
Secondly, it builds upon our mission to make as little music as possible instead concentrating on creaks, clicks, buzzes, bangs, beeps and, most importantly, atonal hums.
We are not always successful in this and, at times, bits of melody creep in. For that, we can only apologise.
We are supported in our endeavours this time around by David ‘Dolly Dolly’ Yates, who lends his velvety voice to four of the album’s ten tracks.
Dolly wants to make it clear that he only speaks the lines, he didn’t write them. In short, it’s not his fault.
Thanks also to our man in Koln, Tom Ashforth, who has extraordinary ears (as well as excellent hearing) and has made the dingy, oversaturated mess that we presented him with sound almost commercial.
Made by Paul Bareham and Gary Zammit and Tom Ashforth
Words by P.B. recitation by David 'Dolly Dolly' Yates
released May 5, 2023
Foster Neville - Delia's Depths
from The Edge of Destruction, Subexotic Records, 23 June 2023
The Edge of Destruction is the debut album from Durham-based artist Foster Neville. 19th century German poetry, the theories of Prince Matila Costiesco Ghyka, and fellow Northerner Basil Bunting’s long poem ‘Briggflatts’, together with the architecture of Le Corbusier (especially the Modulor), are the reference points for the techniques employed on this new release.
Influenced by the early methods of Brian Eno it sounds as if it might be generative but it isn’t. There is a total rejection of the loop; instead the album develops an evocative language of its own, one which attempts to revive some of our earliest pulses as sentient beings but also one that is more suitable for the shifting structures of the dying stages of the second Elizabethan age.
The title is an appreciative nod towards Doctor Who, in particular the third serial broadcast in 1964. The tracks progressively map out a collective narrative of threat and survival in a strange and uncertain world,
with a strong folk horror element running through - as titles like ‘Hookland’ and ‘The Devil’s Arrows’ suggest.
The human voice is absent from all but one of the album’s tracks, appropriately enough the title track, and those enumerations are like a countdown to some unstated and yet imminent disaster and are in Chinese (spoken by Wang Tiao)
as if to demonstrate even further alienation (for English speakers at least) from the information which language would conventionally carry.
Blending analogue, electronic and acoustic sounds, the album’s dark romanticism and gothic qualities are evident in the way familiar sounds are mixed with the more exotic and treated, and primitive elements have been combined with the melodic.
The aim was to present a sonically rich journey and one which it is pleasant to immerse yourself in, rather than the more avant-garde sounds the processes drawn from poetry and architecture might imply.
The album is produced by John Pilgrim, a member of the inner sanctum of the Folk Horror Revival and whose approach to production is shaped by his longstanding interest in dislocated memories and unsettled landscapes.
The Edge Of Destruction will be released on 23rd June via digital platforms and limited edition pressed double vinyl.
Mixed Bag Murmurs Archives