Gabber Modus Operandi - PUXXXIMAXXX (2021 Reissue)
Cat. Nr: DN018
Format: LP (splatter)/ DL
Remastered & incl. 3 exclusive bonus tracks - first time on vinyl!
Release Date: 19 March 2021
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/PUXXXIMAXXX

You could call Gabber Modus Operandi’s PUXXXIMAXXX LP a ‘scene-defining’ record. That’s except there’s no real ‘scene’ to speak of where the DIY electronic duo come from, deep in the belly of the neo-colonial beast of Bali—an island province of Indonesia where tourism is its biggest industry, mainstream house and techno its musical staple. “Bali is like an Australian backyard for some people,” jokes Ican Harem about the capital of Denpasar where they both live, just a four-hour flight from Perth. “It’s basically like when you go to Ibiza. Those are the sounds, that’s the kind of the people, that’s how they dress up, that’s how they dance.”

Otherwise known by the project’s GMO initialism, Harem and DJ Kasimyn (aka Aditya Surya Taruna) first released PUXXXIMAXXX on influential Yogyakarta label Yes No Wave in 2018, before performing the Javan capital’s Nusasonic festival that same year. It takes its title from their original name that is a play on an unmentionable curse word, and it’s the result of a clusterfuck of influences that blew up with access to the internet in Indonesia, enabled by cheap Chinese smartphones in the mid-2010s. “Now, all the content that we posted in social media basically came from this layer,” says Kas about this new medium for cultural expression across the country’s diverse and disconnected archipelago—a girl in a remote village dances on Tik Tok, construction workers play act while on the job. “This is like the amazing channel where they make their own content. They make these absurd jokes—like, local jokes. They just celebrate it. I don’t think they think about making content. They just want to record shit, but it’s kind of an explosion of this amazing and beautiful thing; of people crossing the Island and then showing them, ‘Oh, basically behind my house, there is a traditional party where people get possessed by a tiger’.”
From the derivative metal, punk and rock influences of the country’s first ‘indie explosion’ to the ‘lowbrow’ pop and local dance music hybrids of funkot and dangdut koplo, PUXXXIMAXXX is a brilliantly chaotic pastiche. It references breakcore and gabber while framed by traditional gamelan pentatonic scales. There’s the high-pitched trumpet opener of Sangkakala I and the ritualistic beat and looped vocal samples of Hey Nafsu, along with a fascinating montage of the Javanese jathilan possession dance for their wildly popular Dosa Besar music video. “If you think we’re doing ritualistic stuff, or playing gamelan, we’re not,” adds Kas. “We are around that area but at the same time, we also listen to Prodigy.”

GMO’s speculative Indonesian rave is infectious. It’s been dubbed ‘post-alay’ by the duo in tribute to the cheesy cultural phenomenon of the suburban teenager and has since caught on worldwide. Follow-up EP HOXXXYA was released on Shanghai label SVBKVLT in 2019, earning the band slots at CTM Berlin, Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Festival and performances in China with Asian Dope Boys. This is a level of recognition that’s well-deserved for a sound that snubs the western canon in favour of a hybrid post-colonial sound that’s pure imagination. “We just kind of like suck that energy that, actually people kind of enjoy their identity,” says Kas. “Especially the people not from the big city, because people from big cities, they always want to have confirmation from the West. Like, ‘I would love to play techno, and then play in Berghain in Berlin and LA’, that kind of stuff. But there is a layer that people don’t give a shit about that, they just want to have fun.”

Remastered by Beau Thomas
Design by Teknovoid & Niels Wehrspann
PUXXXIMAXX was originally released by Yes No Wave

@gabbermodusoperandi

PUXXXIMAXXX (2021 Reissue)

buy / stream

Gabber Modus Operandi - Ketewel

Gabber Modus Operandi - Balap Liar

Gabber Modus Operandi - Dosa Besar

Gabber Modus Operandi - Pukat Harimau

Gabber Modus Operandi - Goroxxx

Gabber Modus Operandi - Jathilan Titan

Gabber Modus Operandi - Pariah

Gabber Modus Operandi - Hey Nafsu

Gabber Modus Operandi - Kerjakaki Jawa

Gabber Modus Operandi - Nyonyon Rangda

Gabber Modus Operandi - Sangkakala

Yikii - Crimson Poem 深紅之詩
Cat. Nr: DN020
Format: LP (marbled) / DL
Release Date: October 1st, 2021
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Yikii

Yikii’s Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 exists at the foggy threshold where dreams become nightmares. The Changchun-based Chinese producer has released over 20 albums and mini-albums in her relatively short career, but none of them resonate with the same trembling intensity as this latest LP. “It’s the closest to the colour and atmosphere of the new world I imagined, compared to the previous albums,” says Yikii about the relative completeness of what could be described as her first proper full-length. It takes its cue from a particular interest in linear time, where Yikii asks, "if we can meet with the wonders of this world, will there be a new beginning in the next, or will it all fall apart?"

Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 consistently plays with this tension. There’s the rising dread of a hollow hand drum and other traditional instruments knocking up against each other, before they swell into waves of rising choral patches and layered, off-tune chanting on “Five Layers Of Crimson Snow 五重絳雪”. Then there’s the lonely piano and flute that weaves through its own resonance before exploding into noise and dissonance on “Phantasmagoria! 千燈幻景”. These, along with the drunken waltz to close “Liminal Space 虛與實”, echo the eerie fade of a psychological horror.

Inspired by ambient, gabber and post-club; contemporary composition, avant-pop and nursery rhymes, Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 is Yikii’s most complete manifestation of her ongoing creative focus on “sadness and despair in hazy beauty". It’s the surreal sound of a kind of trance-like, in-between state, a hypnagogia that’s not to be confused with the washy psychedelia of ‘hypnagogic pop’. The music here is instead detailed and intentional, with a dark-light chiaroscuro created by the shadows of a haunted gothic. “They are always one step ahead of others in digging deeper into the spiritual realm,” Yikii explains, citing dark fantasy games like Fatal Frame, Fran Bow, and Little Misfortune as aesthetic inspirations.

Initially intended to be an album of mainly microtonal music and special tunings, Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 has become more of an exercise in world-building rather than straight up music making. There’s an anxious beauty here, where destructive noise meets delicate atmospheres that build and bloom. “I want to create my own world through music and drawings, which exists in a separate time and space, and if I leave, you can still feel my existence through them. From there you can experience a whole world that is alive.”

Mastered by Rashad Becker
Photography by Yikii, design by Niels Wehrspann

@yikii

Crimson Poem 深紅之詩

Yikii - Doll's Synaesthesia 人偶的通感

Racine - Amitiés
Cat. Nr: DN022
Format: CD / DL
Release Date: January 21, 2022
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Racine

There’s a lived-in quality to the sound of Racine’s Amitiés. Named after the French word for friendship, the Montréal-based Quebecois artist follows an extended time spent indoors to contemplate what it means to be isolated and in one’s own body, while also staying connected. The album is a follow-up of sorts to Quelque chose tombe (“Something Falls”), released in February 2020 and a kind of accidental prophecy for the crisis that was to come.
Amitiés disintegrates before your very eyes. Opening with a roughshod iPhone recording of Racine playing his parent’s harmonium, the creaky acoustics of "Mon amour je ne guéris jamais" slowly degrade into digital simulations of dreadful organic beauty. That track and the rest of the LP gives the feeling of an abandoned building; a sense of frayed, earthiness dusted with the wisdom of time. And yet, it’s almost entirely made from simulations. Clipped Native Instruments violin patches punctuate the churning atmospherics of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale”. The lonely gongs and bells of “Grosso” resonate in a gust of synthesised ambient. Vocal plugins and the very occasional YouTube samples of a recorded voice are sped-up, glitched, pitched and scrambled into indecipherability. These vocal apparitions rise and fall into the sonic ether like individual ghosts of human contact. They’re bold and expressive, deeply melancholy and yet full of the potential for joy and an awareness of life’s beauty.

It’s in this dearth of social interaction—the heady psychosis of too much solitude—that Amitiés’s tone and mood lies. A score for the numb dissociation from internal chaos and alienation, the album’s sense of acute distress is assuaged only by the small network of collaborators and influences it draws from. Long-time friend and peer Justin Leduc-Frenette (aka Keru Not Ever) contributes drum programming to “Mon amour je ne guéris jamais”. A last-minute reworking of the untitled “Sans titre” by German duo Arigto matches the weight and timbre of Racine’s sooty post-classical soundscapes.

Ultimately, Amitiés is a very human response to an inhuman environment. It’s an intimate homage to friends and the mysterious effects of distance, while somehow finding healing in hardship.

Mastered by Rashad Becker, artwork by Niels Wehrspann

@julienracine

Amitiés

Racine - Arête coincée dans une amygdale

Taken from 'Gasba Grime' (DN003)
Out June 9, 2014
12" & digital on Danse Noire
Including a Killing Sound (Young Echo, Blackest Ever Black) rework. 


www.dansenoire.com


El Mahdy Jr. - Lost Bridge

Mt. Fuyu - A Mirror To Weave
Cat. Nr: DN024
Format: DL
Release Date: June 2, 2023
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/MtFuyu

A grave and sprawling epic, Mt. Fuyu’s A Mirror to Weave swells with implication. Written, recorded, and produced from the heart of a person who’s lived through life’s struggles much too young, the album is a ferment of ideas and experiences that together capture the sheer strangeness, beauty, and terror of existence. Born in China and immigrating to the United States with his parents in infancy, the Kansas City-based artist—otherwise known as Fu Liu—moved from the coastal province of Shandong to America’s Midwest in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash to follow led to living precariously with his father in Canada, then a short stint in foster care, before settling into a strict regimen of academic and musical pursuits on the family’s return to the US.

This classical jazz education and scholarly background comes through in A Mirror to Weave, where an endless inventory of influences—crossing Coil, The Caretaker, Burial; Mark Fisher, Hito Steyerl, Carl Jung, and more—is steeped in a sublime brew of drone, post-industrial and ambient; hauntology, dub and bass. Rife with the trauma of the past, and the expansive landscapes of the present, opener “Temple” billows with decayed, distended, and eerily pitched vocals, as an arrhythmic pulse grows then crashes in a surge of noise and distortion. The disturbance rumbles through other tracks too, as the subaqueous current of “Swamp Nymphs” roils and fizzes around a crumble of pads and sine waves, while resampled and effects-laden drums charge head-first into the spooky atmospherics of “Ovre” with an erratic urgency.

Although often muted, muffled or restrained, the voice and its whispered words play a central role in A Mirror to Weave. It’s in the existential drift of “Shells”, as Fu Liu’s sweetly sung words (“seen it all/ a black hole”) ripple over a melancholy piano solo; environmental field recordings fluttering delicately just beneath the surface. The audio is taken from the parks, streets, bars, as well as online spaces Fu Liu inhabits, giving the record its heavy sense of grief and alienation. Wandering through the emotional state of pandemic-era estrangement, while also mourning the passing of friends, A Mirror to Weave is a requiem for the worst that’s already been, and an exaltation of the best that’s yet to come. 

Mastered by Rashad Becker
Design by Niels Wehrspann and Solène Gonnet

A Mirror To Weave

Mt. Fuyu - Close2U

Racine uses sound to transcend the contemporary hellscape. Far from indulging in purely hedonistic escapism or nihilistic detachment, the celebrated Canadian producer confronts difficult emotions head-on, embracing tension and turbulence. Each release reformulates uncertainty into haunted soundscapes bristling with detail, weaving fractured samples, mutant melodies and glacial electronics into a hyper-real reflection of modern living. New two-track single Delirium focuses those same future-seeking sonics into Racine’s most direct – not to mention surprising – work to date.

Side A coalesces the producer’s amorphous electronics into a crystalline dancefloor workout. Soaring vocals clipped from a New Age radio broadcast glide atop ruffneck drums, with noctilucent synth pads and fizzing ambience seeping in through the cracks. Racine’s signature sense of unease and melancholy is still very much present, though here lurking in the track’s low-end and on the periphery; an overwhelming endorphin rush threatening to tip into amphetamine anxiety at any moment. Side B explodes outwards from that same sound palette, dancefloor hooks atomised into formless textures, eschewing melody and rhythm as it reaches toward even more ecstatic heights.

Delirium provides an exhilarating expansion of Racine’s soundworld, demonstrating his prowess as a producer even while moving into new contexts, and speaking to a distinct need for ecstatic release and transcendence.

Mastering by James Ginzburg
Artwork by Niels Wehrspann

Delirium

Racine - Delirium I

Semka - Front Matter Dead Souls 
Cat. Nr: DN021
Format: DL
Release Date: September 30, 2023
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Semka

Semka (aka Sem Lala)’s Front Matter Dead Souls is an examination of affect as a construction. A composite of found sounds and field recordings, the New York-based Albanian artist’s album of process-based noise, ambient, and musique concrète sound design ploughs the shallow depths of artifice in this intensely evocative experiment in manufacturing emotion. Ten textured tracks are arranged in a coarse patchwork of sonic elements that exposes the music for its own illusory meaning.

Whether in the stormy environmental sounds and scrambled orchestral echoes on “Thuderdome Exclusive” or the crisp spoken word sample-pack stems on “Secret Sadness of the 21st Century,” Front Matter Dead Soul insists on the artificiality of how feelings are conveyed in art by divorcing it from its source. And yet, this very rejection of music as anything but an instrument of inducement, is what makes Lala’s work so deeply intimate, and, paradoxically, authentic.

Born in Elbasan and for a time residing in Zürich, Lala co-founded the Czarnagora label in the aforementioned Swiss city, releasing music under his Jon Neverdie alias, along with other artists like Jan Vorisek and Tapiwa Svosve. The latter saxophonist—perhaps best known for a recent collaboration with Asma Maroof and Patrick Belaga—appears on the groaning clatter of Lala’s “Technic Angel.” Tobias Koch features under the Maria moniker on the collision of “Attack Angel.” That Swiss composer, in turn, has presented Lala’s audio works on his own As we leave the window open sound art platform, with one such release—Diversity and Inclusion Course Work (Stems)—critiquing the didactic representation of semantic conflicts in educational training. That piece echoes the similarly profound ambivalence of Front Matter Dead Souls, where its name alludes to the emptiness of its own veneer—a surface promise of substance concealing a lifeless void beneath. 

Mixed by Tobias Koch 
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Design by Niels Wehrspann and photography by Virginia Ariu

Semka - Envy 2020

Live recording of mi-el's two hour closing set earlier this year at OHM Berlin. 

Danse Noire V - May 19th, 2023 w/ mi-el, Dis Fig, ZULI, Dmitra & Soraya 

@miellllllll

Danse Noire x OHM Berlin: mi-el DJ set (19.05.2023)

Yikii - Chorion 
Cat. Nr: DN026
Format: DL
Release Date: January 5, 2023
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Chorion

The eerie lullaby of Yikii’s vast creative universe continues with her latest LP, Chorion. Following the anxious beauty of 2021’s ambient, post-club, and avant-pop-inspired Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 album, the Changchun-based artist carries her expansive experiments in harmony and dissonance onto her timeless gothic electroacoustics that operate at the nexus of the past, the present, and the future. Here, avant-garde contemporary classical meets utilitarian videogame composition to create a wholly immersive sonic environment that’s as ravishing as it is terrifying.

Named after the life-giving embryonic membrane that eventually forms the placenta, Chorion takes its conceptual cue from science-fiction writer Andy Weir’s acclaimed short story, The Egg. In it, a god and a dead man on the threshold of reincarnation discuss the notion of a Universal One—the unity of everyone and all things. On Chorion, the idea of whether we are "every human being who ever lived" is presented less as a question and more an inarguable fact, in a soundscape built from a glut of musical material created and collected by Yikii between 2018 and 2021.


Haunting the album cover is a painting of a Rhaphidophoridae—the artist’s entomophobia (an extreme fear of insects) projected onto the spiny silhouette of this blind and unpredictable subterranean cricket, reminiscent of the parasitic arthropods of first-person shooter games like BioShock and Resident Evil. Trained pianist Yikii applies these solitary pursuits of the digital era to her experiments in microtonal music and special tunings, which delve into the dark recesses of the cumulative subconscious. From the queasy hallucinations of her “Dream Cassette” reworking to the acutely physical rhythms of “Melinoë” and “Mongolian Worm,” there’s a twisted interiority to Chorion, where a battery of sonic, conceptual, and emotional material implodes in a dazzling vortex of violent intensity. 

Mastered by Rashad Becker
Design by Yikii & Niels Wehrspann

Yikii - Microtonal Raindrop 微音霖乱

Live recording of Lanav's set earlier this year at FOC Barcelona.


November 24th, 2023 w/ Elvin Brandhi, Ruhail Qaisar, TNTC, BLKM4T3

@l_a_n_a_v

Danse Noire x Jokkoo: Lanav DJ Set (24.11.2023)

Yikii - Chorion
Cat. Nr: DN026
Format: DL
Release Date: January 5, 2023
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Chorion

The eerie lullaby of Yikii’s vast creative universe continues with her latest LP, Chorion. Following the anxious beauty of 2021’s ambient, post-club, and avant-pop-inspired Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 album, the Changchun-based artist carries her expansive experiments in harmony and dissonance onto her timeless gothic electroacoustics that operate at the nexus of the past, the present, and the future. Here, avant-garde contemporary classical meets utilitarian videogame composition to create a wholly immersive sonic environment that’s as ravishing as it is terrifying.

Named after the life-giving embryonic membrane that eventually forms the placenta, Chorion takes its conceptual cue from science-fiction writer Andy Weir’s acclaimed short story, The Egg. In it, a god and a dead man on the threshold of reincarnation discuss the notion of a Universal One—the unity of everyone and all things. On Chorion, the idea of whether we are "every human being who ever lived" is presented less as a question and more an inarguable fact, in a soundscape built from a glut of musical material created and collected by Yikii between 2018 and 2021.

Haunting the album cover is a painting of a Rhaphidophoridae—the artist’s entomophobia (an extreme fear of insects) projected onto the spiny silhouette of this blind and unpredictable subterranean cricket, reminiscent of the parasitic arthropods of first-person shooter games like BioShock and Resident Evil. Trained pianist Yikii applies these solitary pursuits of the digital era to her experiments in microtonal music and special tunings, which delve into the dark recesses of the cumulative subconscious. From the queasy hallucinations of her “Dream Cassette” reworking to the acutely physical rhythms of “Melinoë” and “Mongolian Worm,” there’s a twisted interiority to Chorion, where a battery of sonic, conceptual, and emotional material implodes in a dazzling vortex of violent intensity.

Mastered by Rashad Becker
Design by Yikii & Niels Wehrspann

Yikii - Melinoë 墨利诺厄

Yikii - Heavenly Hell 天狱

Yikii - All The Rain, All The Dying Dreams 所有的雨，所有濒死的梦

Pollution Opera - s/t
Cat. Nr: DN027
Format: DL / LP 
Release Date: April 24, 2024
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/PollutionOpera 

Elvin Brandhi and Nadah El Shazly refuse to turn away from the horror. The intercontinental duo’s Pollution Opera album is an uncompromising futurist depiction of our disfigured, dystopian, and dying reality. Facing hell in full defiance, the experimental noise album catapults itself through a volatile compound of breathless shouts, screams, and screeches, in collision with vocal samples, environmental recordings, and acousmatic sounds. Ten tracks cover the spectrum of electroacoustic fragments and vocalizations, treacherously suspended between the roar of engines and synth distortion, of evocative intonations or guttural retching.

First conceived in 2020, Pollution Opera bubbled up organically from a first tandem motorbike ride through El Shazly’s hometown of Cairo. Singing and screaming through the second-loudest city in the world, Brandhi and Shazly found the extreme noise pollution served as catharsis from the suffocating smog that surrounded them. They then took these sonic specimens into studios across years and countries—from the initial recording and sessions in Egypt to Uganda, where their so-called “cacophony carbon orchestra” would carry into simultaneous but separate residencies at Nyege Nyege in Kampala. There, Brandhi and Shazly reprised the role of the motorbike as their “stage,” in a city where motorbikes are the main mode of public transport. They then developed a live A/V performance from video material captured by Arno Mery, collected from their travels, and reworked by Egyptian artist Omar El Sadek during Banlieues Bleues Festival 2023 in France.

The result is what the artists themselves describe as “an uncompromising world-spew, a shameless alloy of love and hate.” Haptic knocking, barking dogs, and human growls trample El Shazly’s famously evocative Egyptian singing style on “CRÎi Me A River.” Breathless vocal cut-ups and samples are bulldozed by arrhythmic acoustic percussion on “Danse Le Flou.” There are moments of respite within all the chaos, however, whether in the heavily pitched, Auto-Tuned opening of “Pollute Bold” or the wonderfully melodic closer of “Crisp Heart”—its derelict rhythmic thrust giving a listener something to dance about.


Both artists lend their unique positioning and idiosyncrasies to Pollution Opera, whether it’s in artist, vocalist, and musician Brandhi’s avant-garde noise music pedigree as both a solo artist and member of father-daughter duo Yeah You, or
singer, composer, and producer El Shazly’s hybrid catalogue combining electronic music with contemporary classical. Together, in asking the question of what a postmodern opera might sound like, the duo offer their existential answer in the true spirit of the often playful and ironic philosophical position by offering no answer at all. 

Voice & electronics: Elvin Brandhi & Nadah El Shazly
Violin on ‘Crisp Heart’: Ocen James
Soprano on ‘Attention’: Marie Requa Gailey

Artwork by Omar El Sadek & Niels Wehrspann 
Mastering by Rashad Becker

Pollution Opera

Pollution Opera - Cairo ???

Pollution Opera - s/t
Cat. Nr: DN027
Format: DL / LP
Release Date: April 24, 2024
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/PollutionOpera

Elvin Brandhi and Nadah El Shazly refuse to turn away from the horror. The intercontinental duo’s Pollution Opera album is an uncompromising futurist depiction of our disfigured, dystopian, and dying reality. Facing hell in full defiance, the experimental noise album catapults itself through a volatile compound of breathless shouts, screams, and screeches, in collision with vocal samples, environmental recordings, and acousmatic sounds. Ten tracks cover the spectrum of electroacoustic fragments and vocalizations, treacherously suspended between the roar of engines and synth distortion, of evocative intonations or guttural retching.

First conceived in 2020, Pollution Opera bubbled up organically from a first tandem motorbike ride through El Shazly’s hometown of Cairo. Singing and screaming through the second-loudest city in the world, Brandhi and Shazly found the extreme noise pollution served as catharsis from the suffocating smog that surrounded them. They then took these sonic specimens into studios across years and countries—from the initial recording and sessions in Egypt to Uganda, where their so-called “cacophony carbon orchestra” would carry into simultaneous but separate residencies at Nyege Nyege in Kampala. There, Brandhi and Shazly reprised the role of the motorbike as their “stage,” in a city where motorbikes are the main mode of public transport. They then developed a live A/V performance from video material captured by Arno Mery, collected from their travels, and reworked by Egyptian artist Omar El Sadek during Banlieues Bleues Festival 2023 in France.

The result is what the artists themselves describe as “an uncompromising world-spew, a shameless alloy of love and hate.” Haptic knocking, barking dogs, and human growls trample El Shazly’s famously evocative Egyptian singing style on “CRÎi Me A River.” Breathless vocal cut-ups and samples are bulldozed by arrhythmic acoustic percussion on “Danse Le Flou.” There are moments of respite within all the chaos, however, whether in the heavily pitched, Auto-Tuned opening of “Pollute Bold” or the wonderfully melodic closer of “Crisp Heart”—its derelict rhythmic thrust giving a listener something to dance about.

Both artists lend their unique positioning and idiosyncrasies to Pollution Opera, whether it’s in artist, vocalist, and musician Brandhi’s avant-garde noise music pedigree as both a solo artist and member of father-daughter duo Yeah You, or
singer, composer, and producer El Shazly’s hybrid catalogue combining electronic music with contemporary classical. Together, in asking the question of what a postmodern opera might sound like, the duo offer their existential answer in the true spirit of the often playful and ironic philosophical position by offering no answer at all.

Voice & electronics: Elvin Brandhi & Nadah El Shazly
Violin on ‘Crisp Heart’: Ocen James
Soprano on ‘Attention’: Marie Requa Gailey

Artwork by Omar El Sadek & Niels Wehrspann
Mastering by Rashad Becker

Pollution Opera - Tusker Light

emma dj - Lay2g
Cat. Nr: DN028
Format: DL 
Release Date: June 7 2024
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/Lay2g

Emma dj doesn't give much away when it comes to his music. Thirteen effortless stabs at post-bloghouse electronics brings the Paris-based, Finnish producer’s oeuvre out of the trap torpor of recent releases on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, into the ecstatic crush of a world in chaos with the Lay2g LP on Danse Noire. Looking back at the late-2000s, early-2010s collision of the club and the stage, the album beckons to another era. It’s one of warehouse bands and indie sleaze, dance punk and industrial noise; a turn-of-the-millennium time where youth culture was rife with an after-9/11 nihilism so potent that an electro-drone band with a name like “Fuck Buttons” could be part of an Olympic opening ceremony.

Lay2g’s direct and dance-floor-friendly tracks with meaningless titles gleefully bump up against each other, whether in the crumbling industrial force of “I Fuck With Lies” or the propulsive gabber tempo of “Kd9.” It’s inspired by Emma’s early music education through hype.fm music charts and Dim Mak Records, with its echoes of Atari Teenage Riot’s digital hardcore or The Bloody Beetroots’ hoover synths. Crunchy, distorted, subs prop up the epic organ patches and math-y rhythmic structures of “RR.dkn.” A lumbering bass on “bQosYe” follows the lead of shattered top-end breakbeats and a syncopated vocal cut-up.

Managing the pain of contemporary reality with a sense of humor and humility is fundamental to the Nordic artist’s output, whether it’s in the wobbly subs of 2019’s Support Your Local Enemies or the offhand titling of 2023’s follow-up to Godrime, g0drm2. Meanwhile, Lay2g is a powerful, lightly-sardonic signpost in the no wave and mutant disco continuum, and a welcome harbinger of Paris’ deeply buried underground as it rears its uninhibited head. 

Photo by Evgenia Nirka
Design by Niels Wehrspann 
Mastering by Rashad Becker

RR.dnk

Lay2g

emma dj - RR.dnk

Pollution Opera - Crisp Heart

Pollution Opera - Your Tracks Are Too Dark (ft. ZULI)

Pollution Opera - Danse Le Flou

Pollution Opera - CRÎ Me A River

Pollution Opera - Bite

Pollution Opera - Attention! (ft. Lil Baba)

Pollution Opera - Pollute Bold

J.G. Biberkopf
'Fountain Of Meaning' EP
DN010
Format: vinyl / digital
Release Date: 8 December 2017
Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M
@jgb-k


Fountain of Meaning is a new sonic fiction from sound artist J.G. Biberkopf following last year’s Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess released on Knives. Emerging out of a situation of overflow, the record burrows deeper into his practice of palpable audio theater with a study of object and relations across space-time specific sounds. 

The Fountain as a theme reflects a spouting and spilling of information, an erotic gushing of imagined aural history. “The Fountain was the source of water in the public space in cities,” J.G. Biberkopf explains. “Now it’s pretty much a sexualised architectural gesture of both beautification and the spectacle of dominant ideologies.” 

The western classical musical canon, much like the perpetual coming of the fountain, flush the headphone space with stimuli. Reflex and memory guides the listener through a semiotic architecture of processed recordings of masses in Catholic churches and contemporary performances of pre-medieval music. A liquidity of structure has an anxious influence and is a closed system approach to form and imagination. When water flows, it fills every space, then spills over to claim more. History is equally abundant and alive. We have never had as much history as we have now. We have never been able to see ourselves as we can now. 

A knowledge of a grander architecture of knowing and recalling oppress the ecologies of human decision-making.The nature of the archive has  transformed into a total and panoptic intelligence. A life is a gamble as the inventory of the world overflows into the production of a spectral third, an other, a confrontation. Fountain of Meaning offers a dynamic tension and release. A molecular tragedy, our abject recovery into a collaborative reimagining of a trauma long forgotten. 

What can be gleaned from this overflow?

DN010 - Fountain of Meaning

Fountain Of Meaning

J.G. Biberkopf - Delirium

Meuko! Meuko! 
'鬼島 Ghost Island' EP (DN013)w/ remixes by Dutch E Germ & GIL
Format: digital / limited edition CD  
Release Date: 6 July 2018
@meukomeuko

Dreamscape:

The fog, snow, streets … everything had only altered slightly from my memory yet I perceived this world as one that might be a couple years, or even a few centuries, into the future. I was amongst a group of futuristically dressed children, school dropouts turned street dwellers, who had just run away from their homes, and I seemed to be one of them, wearing dark sailor clothes, with black hair just past my shoulders.

We had been hiding for quite a while in the white stairwell of a newly built building, uninhabited since its completion. The children set up a den in the stairwell, equipped with a TV and video games. I had somehow become their leader, directing the others where to safely spend their nights. These children were not afraid of the darkness in this world.

One young girl even managed to communicate with rabbits living in the snow. She often hid in a corner of the stairwell, listening to an old yellow cassette player. The girl believed the sound she heard was a gift from the ancestors – music had vanished in this world, you see. She would listen to recorded lectures and pray in the temple left by her predecessors.

Eventually the hideout was discovered by the building’s construction workers when the children were returning from their scavenging mission, so we were forced to leave and seek new shelter. Once again we retreated along the bustling streets, where neon lights were beaming everywhere, and creeping smog rendered peoples’ faces lost and helpless. Elder street vendors were selling every last bit of their wares, hawking outmoded objects of their forefathers. Finally we arranged some cardboard boxes in an alley, just for one night’s sojourn. We knew it was still a long road ahead. That night felt like a year.

Another morning we were driven out from previous night’s hideout, as we had become accustomed to, and while out scouring the streets for food the girl stumbled upon a forgotten temple. A dense fog hovered in the air, as if the place was high up in the clouds. The temple was too crammed with dark painted bronze figures of canine deities for her to even find a way in. She sensed from these figures, a time of strife and warfare harkening back thousands of years, a time when mankind destroyed the earthly body of Buddha and the Gods. These sacred bodies had subsequently been sold and dispersed throughout the world for thousands of years. This temple had become the haven for these anthropomorphized animal figures since then.

Realizing she had in fact lost consciousness, the girl awoke to find the temple floating among the clouds, an island in the sky. Only then did it dawn upon her that humanity will inevitably return to its primal state among the ancient forests, and that the temple suspended in the heavens contained the ghosts of humanity.

鬼島 Ghost Island

pre order

Meuko! Meuko! - 眾神廟 The Temple

From the Aura 4 Everyone EP
Out June 3 on Danse Noire
Including remixes by Cooly G and Willie Burns

Aïsha Devi - Jesus & The Math

Gabber Modus Operandi - PUXXXIMAXXX (2021 Reissue) 
Cat. Nr: DN018
Format: LP (splatter)/ DL
Remastered & incl. 3 exclusive bonus tracks - first time on vinyl! 
Release Date: 19 March 2021
Buy / stream: dansenoire.ffm.to/PUXXXIMAXXX

You could call Gabber Modus Operandi’s PUXXXIMAXXX LP a ‘scene-defining’ record. That’s except there’s no real ‘scene’ to speak of where the DIY electronic duo come from, deep in the belly of the neo-colonial beast of Bali—an island province of Indonesia where tourism is its biggest industry, mainstream house and techno its musical staple. “Bali is like an Australian backyard for some people,” jokes Ican Harem about the capital of Denpasar where they both live, just a four-hour flight from Perth. “It’s basically like when you go to Ibiza. Those are the sounds, that’s the kind of the people, that’s how they dress up, that’s how they dance.”

Otherwise known by the project’s GMO initialism, Harem and DJ Kasimyn (aka Aditya Surya Taruna) first released PUXXXIMAXXX on influential Yogyakarta label Yes No Wave in 2018, before performing the Javan capital’s Nusasonic festival that same year. It takes its title from their original name that is a play on an unmentionable curse word, and it’s the result of a clusterfuck of influences that blew up with access to the internet in Indonesia, enabled by cheap Chinese smartphones in the mid-2010s. “Now, all the content that we posted in social media basically came from this layer,” says Kas about this new medium for cultural expression across the country’s diverse and disconnected archipelago—a girl in a remote village dances on Tik Tok, construction workers play act while on the job. “This is like the amazing channel where they make their own content. They make these absurd jokes—like, local jokes. They just celebrate it. I don’t think they think about making content. They just want to record shit, but it’s kind of an explosion of this amazing and beautiful thing; of people crossing the Island and then showing them, ‘Oh, basically behind my house, there is a traditional party where people get possessed by a tiger’.”
From the derivative metal, punk and rock influences of the country’s first ‘indie explosion’ to the ‘lowbrow’ pop and local dance music hybrids of funkot and dangdut koplo, PUXXXIMAXXX is a brilliantly chaotic pastiche. It references breakcore and gabber while framed by traditional gamelan pentatonic scales. There’s the high-pitched trumpet opener of Sangkakala I and the ritualistic beat and looped vocal samples of Hey Nafsu, along with a fascinating montage of the Javanese jathilan possession dance for their wildly popular Dosa Besar music video. “If you think we’re doing ritualistic stuff, or playing gamelan, we’re not,” adds Kas. “We are around that area but at the same time, we also listen to Prodigy.”

GMO’s speculative Indonesian rave is infectious. It’s been dubbed ‘post-alay’ by the duo in tribute to the cheesy cultural phenomenon of the suburban teenager and has since caught on worldwide. Follow-up EP HOXXXYA was released on Shanghai label SVBKVLT in 2019, earning the band slots at CTM Berlin, Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Festival and performances in China with Asian Dope Boys. This is a level of recognition that’s well-deserved for a sound that snubs the western canon in favour of a hybrid post-colonial sound that’s pure imagination. “We just kind of like suck that energy that, actually people kind of enjoy their identity,” says Kas. “Especially the people not from the big city, because people from big cities, they always want to have confirmation from the West. Like, ‘I would love to play techno, and then play in Berghain in Berlin and LA’, that kind of stuff. But there is a layer that people don’t give a shit about that, they just want to have fun.”

Remastered by Beau Thomas 
Design by Teknovoid & Niels Wehrspann
PUXXXIMAXX was originally released by Yes No Wave

@gabbermodusoperandi

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