● CD01_SPLIT : Humbros / R​.​I​.​P. ●

❊ Composé et mixé par Humbros
❊ Masterisé par Ernest Bergez (Sourdure)
❊ Artwork par Josué Confort ©
❊ Sortie le 9 juillet 2021
❊ Cassette, 80 exemplaires, papier recyclé

→ champdoner.bandcamp.com/album/cd01-split-humbros-r-i-p

Sumac

A1 - Humbros - Sumac

Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spontaneous and confessional improvisations, despite that fact that making them was a way of “making peace with myself and the reality around me” for the Kraków-based artist. The artwork created by costume designer, sculptor and illustrator Julita Goździk and track titles also allude to an interest in rituality, repetitiveness and the cyclical nature of our existence.

Constant listening, instinct and intuition are key to Martyna Basta’s practice. Having studied classical guitar for many years as a child, Basta now focuses her energies on more abstract forms of art as a photographer, musician, member of the PROGREFONIK collective and Radio Kapitał resident. Making Eye Contact With Solitude follows a string of shorter self-releases and is her label debut, and a wonderful introduction to her back-catalogue for many. Slotting in somewhere between the vocal mantras of Cucina Povera, the emotional immediacy of Claire Rousay’s recordings and the carefully crafted sonic environs of Félicia Atkinson, Martyna Basta is carving out a unique corner of the ambient world for herself. 

Pre-order: https://martynabasta.bandcamp.com/album/making-eye-contact-with-solitude

Making Eye Contact With Solitude

Martyna Basta – Awakening

re /0

"Spectral is a collection of tracks using either the Buchla 296 or 296e
Spectral Processor. It was fun taking it into different sonic universes to see 
what it would reveal. Enjoy!" - Todd Barton, 2022

TODD BARTON - SPECTRAL ( excerpt)

MBE Series founder Giovanni Napolano continues his research of the Mediterranean, offering up his own personal Porta Del Mediterraneo.

Unfolding along two sprawling 15 min sides, Napolano stitches threads of chopped & screwed folksong with a discrete dub strategy, seamlessly leading the mind down labyrinthine ginnels of his imagination in a sort of uchronic regression session where the ghosts of the past inform the present. In the process it humbly speaks to Naples’ position at the frontier of the current migrant crisis, and necessarily takes a standpoint against Italy’s resurgent, nationalist fascism, revealing the beauty and energy of its indigenous mixture of peoples, rather than erecting borders between them. 

Taking his native Naples as a locus of Mediteranean culture, Napolano plunges the port city’s palimpsest of energies embedded by successive waves of Greek, Northern African & Eastern migration to discover an underlying, rhizomic connection and commonality linked by dub and hip hop as a contemporary iteration of folk music. 

Under its titular, mythical metaphor for the fall of Babylon, and usage in Rastafari culture, ‘Le Macerie Di Babilonia’ imaginatively examines a sense of self via a historic lens, drawing on Napolano’s upbringing in the chaotic port city and his autodidactic research into the rich mosaic of Napolitan heritage, to model how a folk class solidarity and shared character, with its own rules and rituals, has emerged from its syncretic milieu. 

Variously a treatise on provenance; an impressionistic tale of the European north meets a global south; a dub-abstracted, allegoric, ethnomusicological collage; ‘Le Macerie Di Babilonia’ is a fascinating and immersive listen that presents its maker’s dilated world view at its most mesmerising.

Limited Edition LP & Digi out 27th October.

© sferic 2022.

@nplgnn

Giovanni Napolano - Le Macerie di Babilonia (SFERIC11) [Preview]

Very kind and lovely

'CS92' taken from the forthcoming album by TKB.

Artist : TKB
Title : CS92
Cat : WTNCD03
Format : Limited, hand stamped & stickered CD / Digital
Release Date : 20.01.23

Mastered by Rupert Clervaux
Sleeve design by Liam Cosford

“It seems unlikely that Where To Now Records would want to release something made in a shack on a river conservation property outside Melbourne Victoria. I've attempted to make the music that I hear in the dance clubs I dream about. I've never really been to a dance club.. but I'm trying to be sophisticated.”

Club music reimagined in an off grid Australian floodplain, of course this is something we’d want to release. Thankfully the accompanying music to the above sentence submitted by Timothy Brown aka TKB is every bit as intriguing as you might hope. ‘Dream Nightclub’ is a truly downbeat and dubbed journey through murky and swamped fourth world bass ambience, and longing, freeform minimal electronics.

TKB’s drum programming throughout is primitive, minimal, and unnervingly off kilter - shuffling its way through a world which waits… There’s a palpable sense of spirituality lurking low level below Timothy’s electronic works, where ambient scapes move from the deeply minimal, to the lush sublime, to the dense and agitated seamlessly, all underpinned with this submerged experimentalism - conversing with the still oddities which lurk the swamps and plains that consume Timothy’s day to day.

“The floodplain below my house is full at the moment. It's serene with the mountains behind, but as soon as you step outside the air is throbbing with the sound of frogs…”

Seeming to draw influence from the minimal pulse of Jan Jelinek, the fourth world ambience of Jon Hassel, and the open Dub experimentalism of Early On-U-Sound acts like The Missing Brazilians and African Head Charge, TKB has channeled these experimental strands into something truly dreamlike - a submerged trip which is shrouded in a dense fog…

TKB 'CS92'

homeless AI

Ecstatic is thrilled to announce Foreign Body, the latest release from Barcelona-based Dania Shihab, who crafts dreamlike transmissions into the evocative concept of the 'foreign body' in the context of forced migration and cultural loss. 

A tapestry of sounds and emotions, this work is a product of Dania's exploration of her experiences as an Iraqi-born individual who grew up in Tasmania, Australia, an island where her native culture was completely absent. The profound sense of longing for a homeland that has never truly been experienced reverberates throughout, with each track poignantly capturing the complexities of feeling like a stranger in one's own body and society. 

Inspired by her work as an emergency doctor, the artist delves into the idea of removing foreign bodies, and sees forced migrants as 'foreign bodies' within their adopted societies. This release serves as a window into the emotional displacement of forced migrants and the struggle for cultural identity. 

Foreign Body was written and recorded at home in Barcelona, using a 4-track tape recorder, vocal looping techniques, modular synthesis, and collaged samples of Iraqi musicians and poets from the post-Gulf War era into an amorphous cloud of magnetic drones and soft hypnogogic vocal textures to entrance the listener. 

An emotive and evocative release, Foreign Body weaves together sounds and stories to explore a universal human experience. It is a testament to the sublime power of music to communicate emotion.

A1 - Humbros - Sumac

Champ Döner

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