Ambient Electro

From Am Shhara's Shinsoko, available now for pre-order:
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/shinsoko

Am Shhara - Ano

@johancaroe

Our friend from CPH Johan Carøe, multi-instrumentalist and composer shares a new mix for a new season. It's "a cinematic spring mix of ambient, experimental, contemporary music and soundtrack. A mix of early and recent influences from new york city and copenhagen."

Johan Carøe - Spring Reeds

The 51st release of katharsis is the album Afterlife by Danish artist Johan Carøe. The album takes shape through a collection of synth vignettes and spectral landscapes, where fragmented strings and ephemeral pads merge into weightless, hyper-lush forms. Created in a period of both new life and impending loss, Afterlife lingers in the space between presence and absence—a fragile transmission of shifting states, quiet relief, and fleeting sonic imprints. It stands as an isolated relic of a time that no longer exists—a collection of echoes, projecting the paradoxical nature of life and death.

Created in solitude on headphones and a MIDI keyboard in a transitional period in life, the album embodies a raw and intimate catharsis—the word in its truest sense. Without the usual studio space, these pieces emerged through line-in synths, VST textures, and fragments of old recordings—saxophone, cello, violin—stitched together like distant memories resurfacing. The absence of microphones and monitors lends the music an eerily virtual quality—a small life in a small box, a stretched-out portrait of a passing moment. It is introspective yet expansive, a meditation on the transient nature of memory, sound, and being.

releases March 31, 2025

mastering by jjjacob
artwork by jjjacob

Afterlife

Early Song

premiere: Johan Carøe - Early Song

pre-order

premiere: Johan Carøe - Theme from Attachment

main theme for the documentary short "Fares", dir. Thora Lorentzen.
feat Christoph Berg on violin

Fares & Aziz

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Tristes Tropiques
Format: LP/DL
Label#: Faitiche14
Release date: November 11th

Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 album Ursula Bogner – Sonne=Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book). Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Andrew Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.  

Find out more about Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques in the following interview:

Jan Jelinek: You’ve titled your album Tristes Tropiques – a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?

Andrew Pekler: Both. Lévi-Strauss’ constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler’s tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it’s the author’s attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me – and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music. 

JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here? 

AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and 60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been ‘ruined’ by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of ‘traditional’ music, I’ve come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I’ve described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand. 

JJ: I know that you perform Tristes Tropiques not only as music, and that there is visual and spatial aspect to the presentation. Can you reveal more about this?

AP: I made an accompanying video – mainly close-up footage, shot in Thailand, of various tropical flora. The video was recorded at very slow speed and this gives the plants, flowers, trees, bamboo, etc. the appearance of rather abstract objects. In live performance, this abstracting effect is further emphasized through real-time modulation of the colors, brightness and other parameters of the video image. There is also an installation version of the video that is meant to be projected on multiple screens / walls and with its own soundtrack of heavily manipulated field recordings captured in the same locations in the jungle.  

JJ: We can get an idea of what this looks like from the beautiful video stills on the back cover of the album.

Andrew Pekler: Theme From Tristes Tropiques / Avian Modulations / Life In The Canopy

Arch Waves

A1. Sval

from "Gave In Rest," Sarah Davachi's new album out September 14th, 2018, from Ba Da Bing Records, Preorder here:https://tinyurl.com/y93h4zbl

Gave In Rest

Pre-order

Sarah Davachi - Evensong

'Zinnen' from the upcoming Release 'Moto Perpetuo' on Marionette.

Video by Frode&Marcus: https://vimeo.com/315931008

Written and Produced by Benjamin Kilchhofer and Michael Anklin
Cat. no.: Marionette09
Format: 12” Vinyl (180g) + Digital
Release Date: March 2019

Moto Perpetuo

Zinnen

Bandcamp

Kilchhofer Anklin - Zinnen (Moto Perpetuo LP)

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Sound From Phantom Islands
Label#: Faitiche20
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.

Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.

Andrew Pekler: Description Of Rain (Over Frisland)

Having spent many years as a soundtrack composer, 28-year-old Johan Carøe now puts out his first solo release, ‘zenmetal’, a seven-track EP filled with minimalistic synth improvisations, tape loops, and sparse string and organ arrangements.

While working on ‘zenmetal’, the Copenhagen-based composer and electronic musician sought a refuge from anxiety - escaping into music performed and constructed on intuition and a spontaneous whim, as opposed to the more premeditated and meticulous way of writing music for film. The result is a series of unassuming sketches that pave way to a deeper level of meditation in his music.

TRACKLIST

zenmetal
failed circle motion
human
charlie
used to be your favorite month but not anymore (w. Sofie Birch)
happy dogs (w. Gabo Barranco)
pink desert (w. Gabo Barranco)

Release date: October 17, 2019

https://soundcloud.com/no-technique

zenmetal

Premiere: Johan Carøe - failed circle motion [No Technique]

Goldberg Variations in Self-Isolation - Aria

Artist: Frank Bretschneider
Album: abtasten_halten
Label#: faitiche21
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 18th 2020

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

"One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization." Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.
abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.
The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.
The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Frank Bretschneider: abtasten_halten C

Peter Jørgensen is a composer & sound artist based in copenhagen, denmark. 

His current work "...continues to blur the boundaries between the genres of neo-classical, ambient and drone. The music is exquisitely composed with delicate strings weaving through an array of found sounds at a slow and delicate pace. The pieces are full of wonderful textures and sounds and Jørgensen dramatically uses space and silence to give the music added weight."

pressquotes on Gold Beach (Low Point):

"supremely atmospheric album"
-Norman Records

"Gold Beach is a masterful effort that makes a lasting impact"
-A Closer Listen

"Captures an artist in rapid, thrillingly ambitious transition"
-LMYE

"Excellent record!"
-Vital Weekly

pressquotes on Soundtrack_Remix (Under the Spire):

"As a single-disc album, this would be a mightily strong release, but the remix disc makes it all the more essential."
-Boomkat

"Jørgensen has re-invented the album as a creative sun around which a galaxy of ideas and implications rhizomatically revolve. It is a return to the essence of what music by its very nature has always been: A stimulation of all senses, of emotion and intellect alike."
-Tokafi


pressquotes on second album "To" (Low Point):

"It shouldn't take you longer than two seconds to figure out that 
this is one of the releases no to miss this year."
-tokafi

"Drone music of the highest order."
-vital weekly

A piece of work that is instantly striking due to some awesome sound 
design and sublime textures which continue throughout the CD....
Ranging from the powerful to the minimal, the relaxed to the intense 
and pretty much every flavour in between....
A huge recommendation on this one. Wonderful."
-smallfish

"Impressing as a complete and concise statement."
-textura

"This is totally sublime and as it evolves it’s very lovely."
-norman records

Fares & Aziz

peter jørgensen

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