Silvercoat the throng

Mundus patet

Reciprocal capture (ft. Speaker Music)

Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

There’s a body of water in the woods near Carrboro. Dappled light on the trail leads you to it. Crunch of leaves underfoot. A river feeds the swimming hole where people plunge, naked and alive. On a chair you sit reminiscing about the future. After a dip, you lay on a big smooth rock - let the sun bake you dry. Then you walk further into the woods.

Like coming upon some keyboardists situated at the mouth of a cave, the entreaties on this record are calming but enigmatic, tinged with melancholy and reflection. Recurring motifs are given room to grow—there’s much space, and the progressions percolate, an auditory mapping of emotional crevices. Sentimentalism given a rougher edge. It lures you in; an orb appears, bright and buzzing. It motions for you to continue. As you do, a fragrance floats through the cave and fills your psyche, like a thousand roses hidden in the dark.

On "Keyboard Suite Vol. 1", MARV imbues analog subtractive and FM synthesis with a distinct physicality. Dub studio techniques and rigorously hand-played performances create an 'environmental' keyboard masterpiece strongly connected to the lineage of 1970s-80s private press ambient and electronic recordings-- but elegantly modern sound design and production methods center the album in the present day. A timeless quality pervades "Keyboard Suite Vol. 1", allowing for easy repeats, marinating the subconscious ache of loss with a dreamily resolute hope.

keyboards and effects ~ Geoff Schilling and Nathan Taylor
french horn (A2) ~ Aaron Smithers
mixdown assistance ~ Glyn Maier
audio finalization ~ Nathan Taylor
design and layout ~ Joe Bastardo (www.josephbastardo.com)

all proceeds to Carolina Abortion Fund (Durham, NC) ~ www.carolinaabortionfund.org

ALSO WILL BE STOCKED BY:

Tobira Records (JP)
All Day Records (US)
Commend (US)
Boomkat (UK)
Industrial Coast (UK)

LP details ~
black vinyl, printed center labels
lacquer cut ~ Amy Dragon
recycled black paper jackets ~ Middle Press
silkscreened with water/soy-based ink ~ Goatmother Industrial
recycled plantable seed paper insert ~ Greenfield Paper, debossed with Braille text* ~ Middle Press
custom scent ~ Meadow Maker Apothecary (www.instagram.com/_meadowmakers_/)

*may not be readable due to paper thickness and texture

*ALL LPS WILL BE SHIPPED OUTSIDE OF JACKET FOR SAFETY*

Keyboard Suite I

MARV - Stable Mate (ENM10)

Catherine Danger & Dark Mimosa (17.02.22)

Burning Pyre ripples outward a new aural 'alloy' for Amulet of Tears  — all filtered through the vapor murmurings of a synthesiser and emerging phonography.  The flux as the respective halves float in the immersive aspect of synth drift & cultivates a new modality as an emblem of modernity by syncretic belief.  The mix remains largely fertile in impressive arrangement of electronic ingenuity.  More broadly, Christopher Macarthur has crafted a graceful approach to contemporary ambient and minimalist works across a number of releases for Opal Tapes, Perfect Aesthetics, Vaagner, Eastern Nurseries and Vienna Press under the moniker Burning Pyre.

Amulet of Tears 024: Burning Pyre

Music: @burningpyre

Artwork: @anasisana

Amulet 024: Burning Pyre

info + tracklist: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/guests-180-syntax-erika
https://syntaxerika.bandcamp.com
https://ambientflux.bandcamp.com

GUESTS

GUESTS 180 – Syntax Erika

Harmony

remixes and interpretations for ooo & MA'AM - /0/

@s_olbricht @ooo_no1 @anna-makay

mastered by Roland Nagy
artwork by Zoltán Márton Nagy

original album: exiles-electronics.bandcamp.com/album/ooo-maam-0

Buy Album

ooo & MA'AM - Gamma Candies (S Olbricht interpretation)

Vladislav Delay - Rakka
Format: LP/DGTL
Cat.No. CR11
Pre-order: http://bit.ly/35ZwaBQ

It’s been 5 years since “VISA”, Sasu Ripatti’s latest release under his iconic Vladislav Delay moniker. Time of the study, of exploration and reconstruction, a time in which his sound, his methods, and practice have never ceased to evolve. It is now time for a new release which he titled Rakka, and it only makes sense for it to find a home on Cosmo Rhythmatic.

Ripatti makes it very clear that Rakka is not a ‘nature recording’, though it is inspired by the time he spent in the wilderness above arctic circle and tree lines, and the feelings and thoughts that traversed him while there. The music on the album is thus directly inspired by the arctic tundra: the elemental struggle to survive or thrive, the living creatures’ fight for existence. The raw, undefined, uncontrolled and uncorrupted power that exists within it.

Ripatti remakes these values into music, in monumental yet humble forms. Reductionist though not minimal, setting each part to prove its meaning, stripped from the meaninglessness of hooks and melodies. Sounds feel like carved off the flesh, leaving the bones bare. Beats emerge as ripples, as the motion of isolated forces, thwarting with the icy textures and backgrounds and trembling with strenuous energy.

A truly extreme ecosystem of sound, unleashed in the album as much as in the new Vladislav Delay live set, visually given life by Ripatti’s wife, artist Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF).

Written and produced by Sasu Ripatti
Artwork by LCR
Graphic Layout & Type by Pasquale Ascione
Mastering & Cut @ Dubplates & Mastering
Publishing by Warp Music LTD
© Cosmo Rhythmatic 2020

Vladislav Delay - Raajat (CR11)

From 'Magelungsverket', to be released 22nd of January 2021.
https://www.self-titledmag.com/linus-hillborg-magelungsverket-album/

Linus Hillborg - Vårbergsobservatoriet

Cosmo Rhythmatic is a Berlin-based label curated by Shapednoise with the collaboration of Ascion and D. Carbone.
The imprint presents the abstract, noisy and organic side of REPITCH Recordings.