One by one they each left the experiment, the room began to empty and soon there would be very few people left in the hall. There were bright lights perched in each corner of the room, the radiant glow beamed down upon each individual with delicate precision so as to amplify their every expression and movement beneath the illumination. They had been stood there for hours, each participants' every thought analysed as an example of human behaviour.

Up on the balcony a collective of white coated scientists watched with expert focus - it was their job to root out the weak one by one and look for who might be fit to study further.

One reached over and pressed the switch for the final time as the music blared into life once more. The sound of drums filled the hollow room...

Laura BCR is set to release a new EP on the prolific record label Live At Robert Johnson. It is her first time releasing music via the imprint and marks a significant achievement for a producer and DJ who continues to grow from strength to strength.

This track is called "Human Behaviour" and features a collaboration with Colombian artist Launaea. It's a pensive, minimal track with close attention to detail.

PREMIERE: Laura BCR - Human Behavior (with Launaea) [Live At Robert Johnson]

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/agartha_lp_dl

‘Where is Agartha? What is the specific region in which it lies? Along what road, through what civilizations, must one walk in order to reach it?.’ Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in 1886

Agartha, the debut full-length album by Japanese producer Wata Igarashi, is a mysterious, divine thing. Named for the mythical secret kingdom, understood as a complex maze of underground tunnels, perhaps designed by Martians who colonised the Earth tens of thousands of years ago, it’s a similarly mystical, perhaps even cosmic trip – but this time, exploring an inner, deeply personal cosmos. Beautifully detailed and bustling with rich incident, it takes Igarashi’s music to new places, which still retaining his unique sonic imprimatur; in this respect, it’s perfectly at home with Kompakt, a label that’s always encouraged artists to make the visionary music they need to create, to take risks and make sideways steps into uncharted territory.

An eloquent producer and DJ, Igarashi has been releasing techno for eleven years now, appearing on such imprints as The Bunker NY, Delsin, Midgar, and Time To Express; he has also self-released his productions via his WIP net label. Throughout, Igarashi has consistently explored his unique approach to techno and electronic music, one that’s eloquent and poised, even when it shifts into more psychedelic terrain; he’s a master at balancing the sensual and the functional, and he has an unerring ear for the right texture, the right tone, at the right time. He brings all of this into Agartha, his most thorough-going expression of self to date.

For Agartha, Igarashi had a strong concept he wanted to explore. Visualising specific scenes from an imaginary film based on the titular secret kingdom, he created soundtracks for those scenes, spending time during the pandemic in his studio, working away carefully at the ten tracks here. Given his background in creating music for television and advertisements, Igarashi is well-placed to explore the marriage of the sonic and the visual in such intimate ways, but freed from commercial concerns, he let his imagination run riot. He also drew on a rich palette of musical influences – techno is in there, of course, but you can also hear the smoky, improvised jazz of the likes of Miles Davis (to whom the album’s title is an indirect nod), and the minimalism and systems music of Steve Reich.

The latter is particularly pronounced on the gorgeous, beatless drift of “Floating Against Time”, where an arpeggiated sequence lingers, lovingly, around your ears for nine blissful minutes, coasting across swooning drones and waves of ambient noise. “Ceremony Of The Dead”, originally composed as part of a Sony 360 Reality Audio spatial sound concert, is a deep pass into systems composition, with various patterns overlaid and interlocking, before a wordless vocal rises from the depths, a gorgeous counterpoint to the swarming textures that gather across the track. On the other hand, tracks like “Burning” and “Subterranean Life” nudge toward Fourth World territory, painting deluxe dreamscapes of uncertain provenance; the title cut is an abstract drift-world, Igarashi painting an alien tableau dotted by shape-shifting creatures.

Agartha’s conceptual framework means that everything on the album sits perfectly together; listening to it in one sitting is a dizzying, lush experience. Its imaginings of inner landscapes recall, in some respects, the nautical, aqueous mythologies of the Drexciyan universe, though from different perspectives. But the result is Igarashi’s own creation, a deluxe, enchanting trip through the visionary Agartha of this unique producer’s cinematic mind’s-eye.

Agartha

Wata Igarashi - Searching

Erik Luebs - Pretending

Sequel EP

Refract

sanguine

Voices From the Lake Donato Dozzy & Neel - Drop 2

Buy/Acquista

Alan Backdrop - Lán

DONATO DOZZY - CLEO

La Via della Seta

Morgana

Survived

bandcamp

Antigravity - Rubicon (Andy Martin Remix)

Bandcamp: https://bnjmndelsin.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogia-remixed

BNJMN - Indub (Luigi Tozzi Reshape)

Italian DJ

Straight from Northern Italy, Alessio Meneghello or better known for his moniker Alan Backdrop, has been attracting his listeners through his productions characterized with deep atmospheres and a mixture of genres melted together in the classic, hypnotic and repetitive way of Techno music.
He is the kind of producer that certainly enjoys his studio jam sessions—this is the reason why he spends most of the time in his studio tweaking knobs on synthesizers, recording and experimenting with the aim to capture and create his own sound.
After releasing music on reputable labels over the years, Alan is now releasing music mainly on his own, having already released three well received albums on Bandcamp.