"Presentism" by Cam Deas & Jung An Tagen is out now on Diagonal.

DIAG059 ➜ Cam Deas & Jung An Tagen — 'That (yGrid/C#)'

'Up All Night' is one piece from a folder of unheard electro-acoustic recordings dating from 2019-2022. The ten pieces have been assembled on afolder.studio so that YOU — intrepid supporter of new music and film that you are ☻ — can listen to them outside of the lifeless, zero-quality environments where most music is now consumed [or skipped]. These recordings were lovingly mastered by Russell Haswell and mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at Park Studios, London. Should you wish to listen to them in higher resolutions [recommended], or just own some music that you buy directly from the artist, you can email the artist direct. He'll send you a unique personalised folder of the music; and you can pay, or not pay, however much you like. Details ➜ https://afolder.studio/af21

Powell ➪ Up All Night [aƒ21]

A wildly conceptual and musically ambitious recording of Powell’s performance with London Contemporary Orchestra at Barbican Centre, London, in 2022 will be released via Diagonal on limited edition PMS 910c vinyl and digital formats on 24 February.

26 Lives [DIAG060]

Powell ˣ LCO '23' live @ Barbican [DIAG060]

POWELL

Edvar Graham Lewis — It’s Hard [Editions Mego]
Rx (20) — Strung Out [Peoples Potential Unlimited]
Explorers of the Nile — We Are All Egyptians [Subway]
JTC — Habit [Rebel Intelligence]
JTC — Creep Acid [Nation]
Traxx — ABC Acid Beat Complete [Anunnaki Cartel]
Powell — Club Music [Ancient Methods ‘Körpersäure91’ Remix] [Diagonal]
Blacknecks — To The Cosmos, Let’s Go [Blacknecks]
Powell — Should’ve Been a Drummer [N/A]
Morphology — Darkstar [The Hacker Remix]

VEREKER

Tracklist includes Coil, Damien Dubrovnik, Sol Invictus, Puce Mary and Rapeman, but Mr. Vereker says you can figure the rest out for yourself . . .

POWELL

Powell — Vox [N/A]
Shit and Shine — Pearl Drop [Diagonal]
Powell — Club Music [Ancient Methods ‘Pogo Im Säurebad’ Remix] 
Radio 4 — Struggle [M. Stewart + A. Sherwood Mutant Disco Mix] [Echo Beach]
The Thoughts — Wait a Long Time For You [Light Sounds Dark]
The Exaltics — The Midnight Connexion [Solarone Music]
A Split Second — Scandinavian Bellydance [Antler]
Powell — Sylvester Stallone [XL Recordings]

Powell 'Melon Magic' on NTS feat. Vereker Mix [01/08/2014]

DIAG016 A2 Club Music [Ancient Methods 'Pogo Im Säurebad' Remix]

DIAG016 A1 Club Music [Ancient Methods 'Körpersäure91' Remix]

NHK yx KOYXEN Feat. XiX

HALLUCINOGECIC DOOM STEPPY VERBS 

A1	218_ 			1:46
A2	845_			11:37
B1	Whispering Gallery 	6:09
B2	234_			1:48
B3	The Spiral of Babel	5:10

DIAG017

MASTERED BY MATT ‘THE ALCHEMIST’ COLTON @ ALCHEMY

EP + DIGITAL

16_01_2015

© DIAGONAL RECORDS 2015


DIAG017 NHK feat. XiX 'A2 845'

Preview from 'Various Artists - 13' [DIAG050] due out on Diagonal Records 18/10/2024. Pre-order 4 x 12" or Digital for a special price now. https://diagonalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/13-diag050

Pre-Order LP

Russell Haswell - Various Recordings (James Ruskin Amalgamation) [DIAG050]

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

'REPETITION REINFORCEMENT' EP + Digital

02_03_2015

You talk too loud too eager
Too much modulation and intonation awry
Too much fucking wine
Kid will need to make amends
For nocticeable skin problems slash
Patterns of susceptibility
Petty grasping fucking desperate
For the fucking lot of it
Cunty fingers and some sad excuse
Regarding cunty weakness and imperfection
Qua looking terrible in public
I thought there’d be papers media
Maybe crisis response teams
Fresh from the latest Heathrow hoax
Not just the adult dead
On-the-spectrum mannequined rags
In municipal drab
The extinct and not-to-come
Teeming jumbled creatures
Locusts and calves teeming
Confinement in cells
7 feet long 3 feet high
Aberrations fumbling toward empirical grasp
But you?
You exist

You are a sour leaking body
Wrapped in towels and dropped
Shivering to centre-stage
I am not here to help you
Knowledge equals nothing
The skills of the surgeons nothing
The will to change nothing
You can make a wish
Make a million fucking wishes
Wired to the university mainframe
As chains of amphibians
Squall in blood and gather themselves

Imagine howling
Through every rehearsal and routine
Dying so slowly you’d hardly even notice
Performance anxiety and sorry depravity
Typical bitch perversity
Shaved to the very bone
Tied at the wrists
Here is what we know
Fictitious capital hopeless heat rainforest depletion
North American drought nuclear Pakistan
Vilna Minsk Ladino Amsterdam
Various species of worms and lice
You need to make amends
Bite back hard before we cart you to the furnace
Murder the masters and people the pits
Retreat fold into your 
Solitary protective hibernation
I know where every fucking bone is
And which one hurts the most
Insect-limbed tainted pretty parts
There is hanna whittled thin working indoors
Turn the house slowly around
So feathered-flesh baby can face the storm

Tell me what you like and I’ll show you what you are
Botched scenes and poisons pushed into you?
Fake bonding fake comfort fake nourishment
Nothing in you save chewed hair
Nothing in you save chewed nails and hair
Your fine flayed ladyskin we’ll fly from the flagpole
Moments of clarity as the hooks go in as the lights go out
Ask a 10 dollar whore if she’d like to go to school
Go on ask her again what she’d like to fucking do
Ask the fishermen ask the prostitutes
About biological markers and klepto diversity
If they’ll still listen to your voice tell you what they are

Shut up
Don’t you want to be
Grown up?
Kitty get back to basket
Kitty wake up and clean up
And after you die some part of you lives on?
That’s some fucking reward
Maybe you should think about getting paid up front
Or warm wet hesitation marks
Maybe you should think about the best fucking thing
Cunt could do now
Spill into the lives of others
Cunt could do it now
Just drop down between dry rafters
Maintain this cow-eyed ecstasy
Butchers wire round your throat
Dollhouse songs unwinding ‘til you choke
Relaxed with a knife
Fine red misted oceans shutdown
Learn the swivel and turn
Learn it and learn it well
This improved view of hell
And the sham and pretend of the world

WRITTEN BY BEST, FROELICH AND HASWELL

PRODUCED BY RUSSELL HASWELL

ENGINEERED BY JONATHAN TAMMS

MASTERED BY MATT ‘THE ALCHEMIST’ COLTON 

ART BY GUY FEATHERSTONE

DIAG019 Consumer Electronics 'Murder The Masters'

From the forthcoming LP 'Deep Time' [DIAG066] released on Diagonal Records 18/04/2025. Pre-order:  https://russellhaswell1.bandcamp.com/album/deep-time-diag066

Russell Haswell - 'Unconformity' from 'Deep Time' LP [DIAG066]

From the forthcoming EP 'Diode' [DIAG067] released on Diagonal Records 24/01/2025.  https://jonuseric.bandcamp.com/album/diode-diag067

Mastered by Jason Goz @ Transition

Jonus Eric - 'Shapeshift' from the 'Diode' EP [DIAG067]

From the forthcoming LP 'Metals' [DIAG068] released on Diagonal Records 07/02/2025. 

Mastered by Russell Haswell

Scott Gordon - 'And Away II' from the LP 'Metals' [DIAG068]

UNKNOWN — FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY

Single-sided 12"

300 copies

*** No digital ***

As played by Powell at last year's Diagonal vs. LIES Boiler Room


DIAG021 Unknown 'For Promotional Use Only'

Stairwell is taken from the 4LP Diagonal compilation '13' — available now from https://diagonalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/13-diag050

Powell Tillmans — Stairwell [DIAG050]

We Do Recover, the new album from Powell and his first album proper on his own Diagonal Records, is a vitalising record of recovery and a statement of reassurance. The music is intensely emotional and lean, and forms a uniquely expressive story that opens up new ground in the artists’s bizarre continuum of synthesised sound — this time triggered by experiences of grief and addiction.   

The suicide of one of his life-long friends in 2024 was a life-changing loss which eternally altered Powell’s life, and consequently his music. A period of recovery followed, one accompanied by the assembling of this album from hours of music made between 2018 and 2025. “After my friend’s death I felt I went into a tailspin, but really, I was already in one,” he says. “I found myself unable to handle anything – my way of coping was always to run away and escape. I realised it was going to kill me, so I made some changes. It made me see the music I had been making through a different lens, one that mirrored my experience of recovery. It’s not linear, it’s often difficult, but there is beauty there if you look hard enough. I wanted it to be a message of hope, if only for myself.”  

Powell has existed of late in an intensive mode of creation that utilises stochastic processes (probabilistic events) and a particular sonic palette. But where previous releases – such as the many prongs of his a ƒolder project, or the hyper-synthetic Piano Music 1—7 on Editions Mego – interrogated and developed formal processes for synthesised sound, on We Do Recover the processes are subsumed as tools for expression. What unfolds is an extended suite of minimal music that articulates and traces an intensive period of upheaval, pain, and hope; tight envelopes of sonic architecture are led astray; energies explode beyond bounds previously set. We can feel the collapse of control, and an overflowing sense of something starting anew. It is, in turn, surprising, baffling and beautiful.

The story begins with the radiance and glittering synthetic tones of ‘All These Feelings’—like looking up into the vastness of the night sky. By track seven the wonder has become unsteady, with wayward keys, stochastic shapes, brittle fizz and hurried words emerging, unprompted, from the stillness. There is percussive brutalism in ‘Relapse’, and ’Afterlife’ brings weight and solemnity in its funereal refrain. Four-to-the-‘floor ‘Newborn’ turns the lights on as an equilibrium of sorts is sought and wrestled with, before ‘So Rivers Plunge’ sings like nobody’s listening — a MIDI orchestra warming up in the box while the laptop remains asleep. Closing track ‘The Bitter End’ is no ending at all, instead promising a future in shimmering torques, caught on the wind of hope. It returns to us, with renewed awe, the starlight we began with. 

WDR LIVE will premier as an expanded audio-visual show in London at the ICA in London on 4th October — a specially-curated evening of mutant electronic music featuring Florian Hecker and Marcin Pietruszewski, and as a rare live appearance of Concrete Fence (Regis x Russell Haswell). The show continues Powell’s ongoing collaboration with Swiss filmmaker Michael Amstad and Norwegian visual artist Marte Eknæs, who worked on the film/image component of a ƒolder. Amstad and Eknæs also took the photograph on the album cover, a technicolour image of a pregnant male seahorse, its swollen belly at once fragile and beautiful.

WDR is the first full-length solo album Powell has ever released on his own label Diagonal – all other releases have been EPs, 12”s, or collaborations — and so it represents a landmark in his catalogue in more ways than one. “I nearly added a question mark to the album title,” he says. “Recovery is a long process, and the album reflects that. There’s a lot of short termism in the world right now, but recovery, in whatever guise, is the opposite of that… It takes time.” 

We Do Recover

Buy 'We Do Recover'

Powell 'Life' from We Do Recover [DIAG070]

Powell
WDR-EP1
Digital 
Released: 14th November 2025
Diagonal Records (DIAG073)


2_Nowadays [version] (DIAG073)_M_4824

7_Shuffle Me (DIAG073)_M_4824

3_First Dance (Sometimes) (DIAG073)_M_4824

4_goblin-mode-i (DIAG073)_M_4824

1_Nowadays (DIAG073)_M_4824

5_goblin-mode-ii (DIAG073)_M_4824

6_Shuffle Me Fast (DIAG073)_M_4824

8_HOPE (DIAG073)_M_4824

Third track from Russell Haswell's forthcoming album, 'As Sure As Night Follows Day'. 

Released 18th September 2015 

2LP + CD + Digital

More info: http://www.factmag.com/2015/08/27/russell-haswell-as-sure-as-night-follows-day-diagonal/

DIAG024 Russell Haswell 'Wholly Unaware'

Single-sided 12" released late November

300 copies

DIAGO26

info@diagonal-records.com

DIAG026 Not Waving 'Get Serious'

NOT WAVING — ANIMALS [DIAG025]

2LP / CD / DIGITAL

Pre-order: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/gb/album/animals/id1072925077

Animals harnesses the wanderlust of Natalizia's spate of self-released albums and records for Ecstatic and Emotional Response but dials up the wildness, spitting out a careering sequence of tracks that feel as warped, deep-raved and giddy as a night out in the city they were forged. These are tunes — no, songs — for post-work smash-ups, weekenders and sore commutes. And make no mistake, although Animals occasionally bites hard at the business end of the ‘floor, this is Diagonal’s most POP record yet, with Natalizia’s songwriting sensibility conjuring moments of tenderness and beauty to offset the manic strobe lighting and drippin’ sweat. 

DIAG025 Not Waving '24'

IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF

'NEED OF ANGELS'

+	Ancient Methods returns to Diagonal after remixes of Powell's Club Music EP
+	Collaboration with post-industrial legend Gordon Sharp a.k.a. Cindytalk
+	Obliterated techno / EBM / tech-step drama
+	12” + Digital


DIAG028 In The Mouth of the Wolf  'Sleight of Hand' [B1]

March's Melon Magic, w/ loads o' new music from Prostitutes, Powell, NMO etc., plus a deep and deadly guest mix from the wonderful Lena Willikens . . .

Leave a comment for iDs and we'll try get back to ya. 

Powell 'Melon Magic' on NTS w/ Lena Willikens [09032016]

ELON KATZ — THE HUMAN PET [DIAG029]

12052016 — LP + Digital

Pre-order: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-human-pet-ep/id1106628080

CARE INSTRUCTIONS:

The Human Pet is always hungry.
The Human Pet can only be satiated with attention and sustenance.
The Human Pet is highly obedient, but also opinionated.
The Human Pet does what it pleases, and is often punished in exchange.
The Human Pet is socialized, but takes some acclimating to new situations and environments.
The Human Pet requires open space to avoid neurosis.
The Human Pet is sweet and fun, but has a vicious bite and bark.
The Human Pet is a loving companion to its master.

Elon KatzDiagonalPopCitric


DIAG029 Elon Katz 'The Human Pet'

B4 from 'Doom Steppy Reverb' 

LP / CD / MP3

+	Japanese computer dance avatar NHK returns to Diagonal

+	NHK's second LP following releases for Raster-Noton, Pan, Line

+	7 tracks of chewy garage techno and new beta bounce — plus extra trax on mp3

+	Art by Guy Featherstone

+	Mastered by Matt ‘The Alchemist’ Colton 


DIAG034 NHK yx Koyxen 'L'

N.M.O. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK---S2LX88

2LP / HOT SAUCE / DIGITAL 

‘NORDIC MEDITERRANEAN ORGANIZATION / NUMEROUS MISCOMMUNICATIONS OCCUR’ [DIAG031]

7 OCTOBER 2016

To celebrate Diagonal’s HOTTEST AND SWEATIEST release yet, the first 100 copies of the record will include a battery acid popper of HOT SAUCE by Alexander Krone, a sauce maker and visual artist with a background in the Amsterdam and Mexico punk squat scene.

Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur [DIAG031]

RIYL Roma

iTunes Pre-Order

DIAG031 N.M.O. 'RIYL Roma'

ON EARWIGS

There is a commonly circulated urban legend concerning earwigs that their name is a reference to a particularly horrifying type of parasitism: that they propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal, then tunnel their way into the brain’s gray matter where they lay their eggs.

In modernity, most discover this myth by encountering a statement of its negation. Nearly every text concerning earwigs includes, somewhere in the first few sentences, language similar to this: “Despite their nomenclature, earwigs do not actually propagate by burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal to lay their eggs, though this is a commonly circulated urban legend.”

This commonly circulated statement of the myth's negation propagates by either burrowing into the human cranium through the ear canal as sound, or through the pupils as written word, before becoming memory in the brain. From there, it multiplies through repetition by the tongue or fingertips.

As a result, the original urban legend occupies the body of any statement of its negation, a parasite embedded within its own extermination, quietly spreading from one mind to another.

Uel Aramchek 
https://www.northofreality.com

DIAG051 'EVOL' Wabbit Trax 1

Self Split EP

DIAG047 NHK yx koyxen feat. Speedy K 'Step Move #01'

From DIAG049 Not Waving / Jim O'Rourke - Side A / Side B

Side A / Side B

DIAG049 Not Waving / Jim O'Rourke  'Side A'

'Artificial Neutrailty' is the first in a series of new electro-acoustic works from @sotesound, released by Diagonal in 2019. It precedes a full-length LP, 'Parallel Persia', that arrives in May — accompanied by a new AV show.

Artificial Neutrality

DIAG056 Sote 'Artificial Neutrality'

Sote has created an hour’s worth of brand new material specifically for Melon Magic following his recent record on Diagonal. https://sote-sound.bandcamp.com/album/parallel-persia-diag054

All material produced by Ata ‘Sote’ Ebtekar

Santour (prepared & extended technique) by Arash Bolouri

Tar (prepared & extended technique) by Pouya Damadi

Setar (prepared & extended technique) by Behrouz Pashaei

'Melon Magic' w/ Sote 29052019

on the feet of a wind is a wild assemblage of carbonated synthetic music from Powell and a sister record to ‘flash across the intervals’ and ‘multiply the sides’ — two albums already released in 2020. The record is released via a folder, a new music and film platform created by Powell, Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs that bundles up music, film, image, text and other forms of madness into folders that are shared/expanded online.

➜ afolder.studio

The release is accompanied by a ‘Hi-sensitive’ film directed by Amstad and Eknæs entitled ‘flares, currents’. The film contains a recombined live version of ‘rise, world unfold’, the musical series that concludes this album.

➜ watch film

a folder is a collection of disorienting works of experimental film, ambiguous texts, and other assorted media set to the most brazenly strange and formlessly mesmerising musical structures of Powell’s career. It’s also a work of artistic assemblage — without fixed notions of time. Tarkovsky once described his filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” and a folder exists in a similar kind of “zone;” it is a project continuously added to, subtracted from, abstracted, and injected into the glut of cyberspace like a slow moving pathogen that refuses to be defined or categorised. Shunning titles in favour of oblique category markers, films like aƒ34 present a mosaic of images of biological forms and sublime landscapes set to super-synthetic, carbonated compositions. All of this signals an artist liberated from the confines of the narrow branding signifiers an electronic musician can find themselves in. While it is aware of its place in cyberspace, this project also connects to something primordial and awesome. “Xenakis talked about creating universes with sound,” says Powell, “and we are all free to create our own worlds in life, art — whatever. This is what happened to me in a way: I have been in this world for three years or something, and I don’t really want to leave. The folder is a refuge.’

powell ⤴︎ a line of flight, 1-3 → aƒ20

❏ afolder.studio ❏ 
segment taken from 2020's 'flash across the intervals' lp on sister platform 'a ƒolder' ➜ limited physical run of 250 vinyl copies with sleeve art by Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs and 4-page text insert by Oscar Powell ➜ pre-order via ↯ BUY ↯ ➜ released 11 september

✲

↯ flash across the intervals ↯ is the first new powell LP since 2016’s Sport on XL Recordings ⨧ the first music available physically since his 2018 collaboration with Turner-Prize winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans ➬ oscar wanted it known that this is not intended as a definitive album ↪︎ the realisation/release of some bold new statement, a singular mark of identity or triumphant elucidation of years of valiant work ↩︎ rather, it is simply 35 minutes of music segmented from an overall flow of stuff ⥄ a variable torrent of hyper-synthetic composition brought about by entirely other things ⇩ circumstances that relate in no way to a previous life led within the toxic/capitalist bubble of taste, music, entertainment and ‘community’ ▷ as René Char once wrote, ‘no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions’, and so it was that oscar found himself bereft of courage, stripped of any enduring connection to his work, dissociated from many of the fragile and reactionary structures that had previously held him up. when your own distributor won’t answer your emails ☀︎ when the illusion of reality dissolves around you ☀︎ how can you not think as Leibniz once did: ‘we thought we had arrived at port, but found ourselves thrown back out on the open sea.’ it is easy to be moulded by a contemporary space that leaves you with no possibility of creating anything at all, in a kind of zero state of expression that inevitably forces you to look elsewhere ↙︎ to pursue a Deleuzian line of escape out towards a horizon line that never draws closer. here at least, out on the waves, new cartographies can be traced and new connections formed. 

this album thus functions as a message in a bottle: cast from unknown coordinates, it maps some of these connections, not least in its close relationship with the visual work of michael amstad and marte eknæs ➔ their imagery fills this music ➔ oscar’s music inflates their films. what emerges from the fog is a luminous three-headed constellation of melodic lines in non-sensical interplay with one another ⥄ here on record, though, spinning at a speed of your choosing, and with eyes closed and no imagery to hand, the feeling remains of a profound decentring, music discontinuously carb✲nated by an alternate geography of relations, the depths of which are only just beginning to be explored.

flash across the intervals

↯ Buy ↯

powell ☀︎ performance to a harsh critic ☀︎ aƒ18

on the feet of a wind is a wild assemblage of carbonated synthetic music from Powell and a sister record to ‘flash across the intervals’ and ‘multiply the sides’ — two albums already released in 2020. The record is released via a folder, a new music and film platform created by Powell, Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs that bundles up music, film, image, text and other forms of madness into folders that are shared/expanded online.

➜ afolder.studio

The release is accompanied by a ‘Hi-sensitive’ film directed by Amstad and Eknæs entitled ‘flares, currents’. The film contains a recombined live version of ‘rise, world unfold’, the musical series that concludes this album. 

➜ watch film


a folder is a collection of disorienting works of experimental film, ambiguous texts, and other assorted media set to the most brazenly strange and formlessly mesmerising musical structures of Powell’s career. It’s also a work of artistic assemblage — without fixed notions of time. Tarkovsky once described his filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” and a folder exists in a similar kind of “zone;” it is a project continuously added to, subtracted from, abstracted, and injected into the glut of cyberspace like a slow moving pathogen that refuses to be defined or categorised. Shunning titles in favour of oblique category markers, films like aƒ34 present a mosaic of images of biological forms and sublime landscapes set to super-synthetic, carbonated compositions. All of this signals an artist liberated from the confines of the narrow branding signifiers an electronic musician can find themselves in. While it is aware of its place in cyberspace, this project also connects to something primordial and awesome. “Xenakis talked about creating universes with sound,” says Powell, “and we are all free to create our own worlds in life, art — whatever. This is what happened to me in a way: I have been in this world for three years or something, and I don’t really want to leave. The folder is a refuge.’

DIAGONAL

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