Arté - Modus [IC005]

The post-club and high emotional ambient sound of Siberian producer Arté.

Modus

Arté - Solar Bridge

Break Free

Three years after their debut album ‘When My Darkness Came To Light’, Exploited Body has returned with their new album ‘Here, I Abandon’.

‘Here, I Abandon’ marks a new beginning, documenting the grievous first steps on the path of healing. The title references reaching a point, where all that doesn’t serve oneself must be left behind. The record is an exercise in “noise pop”, featuring prominent vocals from Exploited Body while combining their signature blistering distortion with their love of catchy melodies.

The album opens with ‘Only Your Eyes Could See My Wings’, a fragile and minimal ballad dedicated to their partner, who helped them find their way out of their pain-shrouded mind. Emerging from the fog, echoing vocals and thunderous piano drones lead into the disarmingly vulnerable vocal passage, the most personal song Exploited Body has ever shared with the world. ‘Demon Of Hatred’ is a slow-burning mantra about ending the cycle of trauma that began long ago, that manifests itself as a rage-filled beast. The screeching metal and cavernous bells collide under the somber vocals until it’s all ripped to shreds by violent pillars of noise. ‘After All (In The Ruins Of Limerence)’ deals with losing oneself in another person and awakening from the fever dream that is limerence. Along with the swinging vocal melodies, the dissonant mechanical humming break out into an onslaught of distorted kick drums before dissolving into harmonic bliss.

‘Replacing A Scar With Another’ explores themes of self-sabotage and self-harm, how we often reject help that is offered to us, creating new wounds to tend to instead of mending the old ones and trading old harmful beliefs into new even more detrimental ones (“replacing a god with another”). ’Self-Surrender’ is about shame, self-deception, requesting others to ‘hold your light’ until the sun’s out while you wallow in the dark abyss of self-pity, but now the time to has come to face yourself. The ethereal production paired with a delicate melody is reminiscent of a haunting lullaby with ghostly voices creaking in the midst of ringing synths, before everything comes to a head for a disjointed crescendo.’ Abandon’ is the purge that marks the point of no return, stripping off your weakness piece by piece, like an exorcism through the brutal wall of noise that the song builds up to. The closing track ‘Tear Me Apart Until All That’s Left Is Love’ is the bittersweet moment of letting yourself disintegrate and splinter into pieces to make room for what lies at the core of it all. A soft landing back into your body, before the colossal aftershock kicks in and sends you on your way to what comes next.

The album is written, produced, mixed and mastered by Nori Kin and features artwork by Changeless-affiliated Helsinki-based photographer Markus Watkins & Nori Kin.

Here, I Abandon

Exploited Body - Tear Me Apart Until All That's Left Is Love

olé - 'Calyx' (TAR029)

olé refines and re-armours his hologram-projected dembow blueprint on 'Calyx', triangulating his vision in some third plane between grounded and otherworldly. It’s a hybridisation of earthly filth and uncanny cyberperfection, a world where fury and focus meet and meld. 

It’s big. The soaring, panoramic strobescape of ‘Sunflower Cache’ conjures glossy, hyperreal environments and piercingly blue skies stretching into infinity. The blistering urgency of ‘behind the windowpane’ pairs euphoric pad n synth interplay with primal drum lashings and a gradually unleashed gabber kick that could crush sand to glass. It’s a dance on a battleground where everyone wins, aural brutality and delicately wound melodies on a united front. It’s hard but it’s elegant. 

This is more than a show of force. ‘Embrace’, ‘Copper Fields’ and gasp-inducing bonus track ‘Behind the Windowpane (Airport Ambience edit)’ offer trance-like moments of drum-stripped sway and swoon. Whether it bangs or soothes or both simultaneously, 'Calyx' is a collection of dizzying heartstoppers, music to lose and gather and reconstitute yourself within.

Written & Produced by olé
Artwork by Tristán Alcover
Mastered by Isabel at OLO Mastering
Words by Madjestic Kasual

olé - Copper Fields

SAMBUCA 2

oxhy - critical threshold (feat. Felix Lee)

LUCIFEAR x GREYSCALESOUND - FAITH

Abenteuer erleben

an electroacoustic exploration of the state of my creative burnout

[more of the same]

SLA07: 'Angels In The Sand' by @avastarr

"Angels in the Sand is the second album from Berlin-based artist ava*. Told through swaths of ambience that reference ava*’s own childhood spent on the shoreline, Angels in the Sand poses the ocean as something metaphysical and elemental, the solid ground of the shore rooted in reality while the waves and endless abyss beneath them represent memories and the allure of nostalgia.

Floating in the depths of memories provides a sense of weightlessness, their currents blanketing and comforting but also overpowering and suffocating. Memories are all we have to cling onto, but they can’t be changed. The longer you spend underwater, the more you uncover, and the more it closes in on you. The ocean’s tides are cyclical, but unpredictable: you know you’ll return to its undulating patterns, but it’s unclear who you’ll be when you emerge. Its a sacrifice to go in, but you innocently fall into a belief that heremust lay the answer.

Angels in the Sand is a project about loss. It’s about spending too much time underwater, too much time in reflection, too much time in your childhood, where benign symbols like the beach or the gardenia tree planted outside of your bedroom window become tainted by trauma, their glow of purity tarnished as the picture becomes clearer and clearer. It’s teary eyes in the water, where childlike melodies still play on repeat, the echoes of your voice as a little girl barely audible through the crash of the water.

Angels in the sand is a deeply personal record written, recorded, and mixed by ava* during intense periods of self-isolation, with little to no influence or reference, the writing process itself a silent, lived-in wave of reflection."

Production, vocals, mixing - ava*
Mastered by Jesse-Osborne Lanthier
Artwork by Amalcrossing
Video by Jenna St George
A&R by Otis Dehaes

ava* — Seahorse Serenade

Nothing Remains

Helsinki • Est. 2019

info@changeless.net