Sometimes it’s not enough to pick out the right chords, to write out the melody, sprinkle the notes. Sometimes it’s not enough to play the right instruments, hire the orchestra, space out the mics. Take a listen to some “fake Spotify artists” and you’ll know that it’s true. It seems that these copycats have all the ingredients, but the dish still tastes lukewarm. That is because their course is lacking the true soul of a master which they’ve poured into each piece. That’s the ingredient not listed on the recipe. Now take a listen to this gorgeous track by a composer and visual art collective from LA named Sanctuary. It seems, oh, so simple, straightforward, and plain, and yet, when you play it, it beams with emotion, dynamically charged and expanded within. It’s ripe with that ‘something’ that Jóhann possessed – and that is the best compliment I can give to any new recommendation. “Crystalline, emotional orchestral and choral elements blend with intriguing foley. Sometimes intimate, sometimes epic, Sanctuary caresses dark themes with intense visual vignettes and haunting, widescreen music, challenging the audience to join them on an inward journey.” Released on Safari Riot, the collective offers up a debut of two EPs, both volumes out tomorrow, December 3rd. This is incredibly beautiful and cinematic, and I can’t wait for you to enjoy the rest of the pieces. But for now, here’s my favorite, titled “In Absolute.”

"In my mind ‘In Absolute’ is a very visual piece. Much like a close-up shot in a film, slowly zooming out to reveal an intricate scene, ‘In Absolute’ embodies the same feeling. A simple idea ever-expanding. It would not have been possible without the brilliant string and woodwind ensembles we recorded in Iceland last summer."

Sanctuary Vol. 1

In Absolute

TRACK PREMIERE : Sanctuary - In Absolute

Ahead of the release of their much anticipated 10th Anniversary Remastered Edition of A Matter of Life… 2021, Penguin Cafe share the remastered studio version of the album's closing piece Coriolis, along with a video of Arthur Jeffes performing a 2021 live rendition of the song on the dulcitone in his second home in Tuscany.

Watch: https://youtu.be/Kt0A8vWyM5k

The remastered track, a duet between Arthur Jeffes on piano and Oli Langford on violin, incorporates the aesthetics of the original PCO, seasoned into a confident and redefined style, maintaining that quintessentially English sound, but adding a fresh direction and a sense that they are evolving into something new and very much their own.

"The version of Coriolis that ended up on the record is actually a mix of several takes we recorded on a very slow, cosy day in the studio. It had been raining for days and Oli, our violinist, and I had the basic idea and played around with it. In the end the initial recordings sounded so beautiful I just cut together the best parts to make it into the song we have here. It always makes me think of rain."

Penguin Cafe will be performing songs from the album live at the Barbican Hall tonight, on March 22, the day this single gets released, followed by a UK festival tour this summer including The Great Escape. The album will be released via Erased Tapes on April 29.    

"Some of the most unusual and delightful music of the last 40 years” — The Guardian
“Stylistically, A Matter of Life… is a near-perfect match with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra of old” — Music OMH

Tour Dates:

22.03. London (UK) — The Barbican Centre
29.04. Belfast (IE) — The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (with Peter Broderick)
01.05. Cheltenham (UK) — Cheltenham Jazz Festival
12.05. Brighton (UK) — The Great Escape — Erased Tapes 十五 showcase
14.05. Saffron Walden (UK) — Saffron Hall
29.05. Hay-on-Wye (UK) — Hay Festival
01.07. Swadlincote (UK) — Timber Festival
29.07. Barnsley (UK) — Underneath The Stars Festival
24.09. Stroud (UK) — Hidden Notes (sold out)

A Matter of Life... 2021

Coriolis

Penguin Cafe - Coriolis

A cover version of "Spiraling" from the album "Meadow Rituals" on Experimedia.  It's available as a free download with purchase of the CD/LP.

Spiraling (Lüüp cover)

Species

Mountain Queen

Nils Frahm & Anne Müller live at Radialsystem on 14 December, 2013. In the frame of "The Intention", a multimedia production conceived by the innovative London based performance collective Neon Dance.

Special thanks to Carlo Grippa and Terence Goodchild for the amazing sound.
Recorded at Radialsystem, Berlin.
Published with permission of the artists.

If you like what you hear, support the artists!
www.neondance.org
www.nilsfrahm.de

Visit UM:LAUT on Facebook and spread the word:
www.facebook.com/umlautberlin
www.umlautlive.de

Nils Frahm & Anne Müller - The Intention @ UM:LAUT - Live Snippet 2

A recent ambient piano work. 

Photo: Robb North 

Rhian Sheehan - Liber 1

F.S.Blumm & Nils Frahm - Day Two One

Quick and dirty experiment in ambient throwbackery, experimenting with a few new programming and performance techniques.  Everything is controlled on the fly through touchable and Konkreet performer.  No bus mix, eqs or the like, just straight out to 2-track. 

Clear hat-tip to Mixmaster Morris in his Irresistible Force guise. Flying High was one of the records that made me get into writing electronica, particularly Symphony in E with it's violin line for obvious reasons.  I was re-listening to it tonight and wanted to try something in that old school vein rather than what Loscil's The Making of Grief Point describes as the 'tight and perfect digital palace' of most contemporary ambient electronica. 

Made me nostalgic for the days of old AWM synthesis - the washy, raw pads and hypnotic simplicity.  Sometimes it's useful to understand where things have come from to explore where you might want to take them to.

Strictly for fun, not meant to be anything releasable.  

Flying Eye (experiment)

from 'Calibrate' [CD|LP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den311
available on all formats at http://denovali.com/ricardodonoso

“Quicksilver frequencies, gravelly formants and shimmering, mirage-like washes of tone. Sometimes his sounds feel like signals picked up by a radio telescope, or pure electricity poured through a sieve” Pitchfork

“He displays a resistance towards the boundaries of genre, taking experimental, techno and noise templates and blending them with different range of sounds, delivering some of the most wonderfully eccentric and evocative music in recent memory” Dummy  

“Transcendently dark permutations” The Ransom Note

“A genre-defying electronic explorer” Exclaim

On November 30th Denovali records presents ‘Calibrate’ – the new album by respected underground figure, composer and producer Ricardo Donoso. As has now come to be expected from the questing musician, once again he has endeavoured to do things differently, pushing beyond any comfort-zone parameters. 

‘Calibrate’ proffers the highest of fidelity, with blockbuster sci fi levels of production value and bombast. Donoso channels sonic spirits across fluro pointillism, futuristic industrial tribalism and more serene moments of synthetic reflection.

Having never courted accessibility, Donoso remains as unbending as ever in his approach and unwavering in commitment to his craft. Calibrate takes Donoso’s polymetric abuse and sound design to all new extremes. Conflicting rhythms and swathes of electronic debris move in tandem, to create pieces that expand and contract in on themselves.

A journey through Calibrate is an exercise in instability and failure; its aggressiveness serves as a warning against the urge to seek safety on common ground, and its entire approach seems to display a hostility towards the increasingly homogenized nature of new electronic music. 

The first in a two-part series, ‘Calibrate’ seeks to explore not only the literal connotations of instrument accuracy, gauging and tuning, as represented by the constant flux of machinery and computer noise, but also explores calibration as an adjustment; to take external factors into account, or to allow comparison with other data. With ‘Calibrate’ Donoso continues to question what music is, and what it expects of him. 
Ricardo Donoso is a composer, percussionist and electronic musician from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil who currently resides in Boston. After having studied composition at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, he has participated in a slew of projects over the years, from holding down the drum chair in avant-metal visionaries Ehnahre, to scoring for recent documentary features such as Greg Barker’s ‘Homegrown: The Counter Terror Dilemma’ (HBO pictures 2016) and the Grand Prize short film winner in Brazilian cinema ‘Casimiro Effect’. Donoso has since collaborated with film makers and video artists on commissions worldwide, creating immersive environments and performances. 
As a solo recording artist, Donoso has released music on esteemed labels such as Denovali, Digitalis, Further Records and Hospital Productions, and continues to tour throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. He is most concerned with building and manipulating an immersive sound world that blurs the line between light and dark, hope and despair, past and future. Under a chain of progressive rhythms, cinematic textures and elegant melodicism, Donoso’s work pushes through with piercing strength, manipulating a sonic wave through space with nothing but mind-blowing intensity.

Calibrate

Ricardo Donoso - In Search of Lost Time

Due out on limited CD on September 4th

DR-70 : DAVID CORDERO - Honne (本 音), CD / DL
 
In Japan, Honne (本 音) are a person's true feelings and desires.
This album is the musical result of my first trip to Japan, a mix of pleasure trip and live tour. These are eight new songs where I try to express with my music the incredible landscapes, sounds, culture and people that I had the pleasure of meeting.

All of these songs were later recorded in my home studio, using some new recording processes and instruments, also influenced by this journey and my shared experience playing with Japanese musicians.
In addition, I have received contributions from my friends Miguel Otero, Carles Guajardo, Shuta Yasukochi and Kenji Kihara, the last of whom I met during our performance in Tokyo.

I hope you like these new songs as much as I do.
They were made with my true feelings.

- David Cordero 

Mastered by Ian Hawgood

TRACK PREMIERE: David Cordero - Un Drama Mudo (feat. Miguel Otero)

Snowdrops - Trapezian Fields

Cinematic electronica's chief complainer.  Andy Dobson has been recording as Digitonal since the late 90s.  Part of the late phase of UK melodic electronica, he came to prominence on the seminal Toytronic Records label with a track on the Neurokinetic compilation and a debut album on the label shortly afterwards.  Since then he has recorded for Seed Records, Cactus Island, Uncharted Audio, B12 and Just Music who released Save Your Light for Darker Days in 2008, followed by a retrospective compilation.  Alongside frequent collaborator, Egyptian violinist Samy Bishai, and a flexible array of band members, Digitonal have toured extensively and have been in demand as a live act, known for their improvised sets of great range and beauty.

Flying Eye (experiment)

Digitonal

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