pearl shell ⊹

Racine - Amitiés
Cat. Nr: DN022
Format: CD / DL
Release Date: January 21, 2022
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Racine

There’s a lived-in quality to the sound of Racine’s Amitiés. Named after the French word for friendship, the Montréal-based Quebecois artist follows an extended time spent indoors to contemplate what it means to be isolated and in one’s own body, while also staying connected. The album is a follow-up of sorts to Quelque chose tombe (“Something Falls”), released in February 2020 and a kind of accidental prophecy for the crisis that was to come.
Amitiés disintegrates before your very eyes. Opening with a roughshod iPhone recording of Racine playing his parent’s harmonium, the creaky acoustics of "Mon amour je ne guéris jamais" slowly degrade into digital simulations of dreadful organic beauty. That track and the rest of the LP gives the feeling of an abandoned building; a sense of frayed, earthiness dusted with the wisdom of time. And yet, it’s almost entirely made from simulations. Clipped Native Instruments violin patches punctuate the churning atmospherics of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale”. The lonely gongs and bells of “Grosso” resonate in a gust of synthesised ambient. Vocal plugins and the very occasional YouTube samples of a recorded voice are sped-up, glitched, pitched and scrambled into indecipherability. These vocal apparitions rise and fall into the sonic ether like individual ghosts of human contact. They’re bold and expressive, deeply melancholy and yet full of the potential for joy and an awareness of life’s beauty.

It’s in this dearth of social interaction—the heady psychosis of too much solitude—that Amitiés’s tone and mood lies. A score for the numb dissociation from internal chaos and alienation, the album’s sense of acute distress is assuaged only by the small network of collaborators and influences it draws from. Long-time friend and peer Justin Leduc-Frenette (aka Keru Not Ever) contributes drum programming to “Mon amour je ne guéris jamais”. A last-minute reworking of the untitled “Sans titre” by German duo Arigto matches the weight and timbre of Racine’s sooty post-classical soundscapes.

Ultimately, Amitiés is a very human response to an inhuman environment. It’s an intimate homage to friends and the mysterious effects of distance, while somehow finding healing in hardship.

Mastered by Rashad Becker, artwork by Niels Wehrspann

@julienracine

Amitiés

Racine - Sans titre (Ft. Arigto)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeOESvEM9w0&t=14s

restless

The music artist and digital designer from Bangkok, @rab_neba, is presenting an album "(A)Iphoria".
The sound is a mix of electronica, ambient, vaporwave, and dungeon synth, crafted over 2.5 years. The album features futuristic landscapes that weave nostalgia and a mysterious dungeon atmosphere.

Rab Neba has been active in the electronic underground scene since the release of his vaporwave album "チュニック - tunic EP" in 2012 and has also co-founded bands like Goodbye Porsche (shoegaze, ambient trap, established in 2014) and Tomb de Narcisse (post-punk).

(A​)​Iphoria

rab neba — Descent Into Datahell

HEATHEN EARTH W/ LUKA ARON AND BRIDE - 22/11/2023

"some form of presence" is a collaboration of ideas based on visions of summer and the fear of it going away. featuring a 3 second guitar loop by households better sleep and a repeating wordless vocal sample by me, the guitar was recorded on 2108 by and treated further with voice in november + daw processing in december 2023 🤍

-o-

your eye's retina transforms light into electrical signals, or impulses, that travel through the optic nerve to your brain. automatically, your brain is able to decode photoreceptor information and create images. 

do you recognize this subconscious process as you actively experience external visual fields in great detail and pigments? and have you ever wondered how these internal neural firings yield deeper implications on future conscious experiences?

---

every time i close my eyes, i "see" images .... daydreams of my own fantastic design .... but other times i am given landscape apparitions in consistent, singular patterns as a kind of blanket immersion in memory, desire, and an endless need to always feel happiness, warmth, and safety. 

what is my relationship to this phosphene? why has it always been so constant? is it a necessary cellular adaptation to my environment or is it an anxious taunting of my fear of losing? and what is the function of this clarity other than to show me the beauty, depth, and meaning of my wiring?

-x-

some form of presence (w/ households better sleep)

pieces of me

International Blue

The ICO Obernburg is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Therefore a lot of great artists were showing photos, sculptures, paintings. But there was music too and so I had the chance to create half an installation and half a performance the whole day long in a beautiful old working space. I was deeply focussing on working with the ambience of the room itself but also with the visitors coming and leaving. There are 17 takes I have recorded to show how my work has evolved over time.
The photo was taken by Isabella Burkhardt: www.instagram.com/ib_photographie_de/

live at ICO 100 (10:44 a.m.)

Created for @akoyabooks Trust Magazine Vol.2 'Strength'

24/10/17

Akoyabooks

痛 (feat. Mizuki)

GF002

'State Of Dismay'
In the opening track, 'Starvation', xato creates a soundtrack to midnight hour. The ambient piece captures an uncertain & unfamiliar atmosphere wrapped in a blanket of bubbling sound design & warm drones.

'LDX17' a live recorded drone soundscape crafted out of stretched resamples of old demos and heavily processed field recordings.

'Hallucinations' is a delicately processed field recording piece that takes place outside of xato's apartment at 5:50am. The 12 minute piece was made as a reminder of how peace and chaos can be found always at the same place.

Mix & master by xato.
Artwork by aangelwwings.

some form of presence (w/ households better sleep)

giselle

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