kiss kiss 2024

kbliss

procure

enms + enmx + enxevp series [cassette]

The rhythms of sleep are unknown to the sleeper. Usually, only with interruption, or dreams, or through wakeful observation, are we made aware of them. And even then, only somewhat. On this cassette, Zenxen uses his research into the cycles of sleep and rest to explore and recreate the phenomenon of neural oscillations. 

The tracks sound as if they’re composed of water, vapor, and dust. Trails of percussive events and simple melodic gestures accompany low end sculpting that moves like water, vapor, and dust. Like a tour of the body’s rhythmic structures, these are the waves within, crashing on interior shores. The electrical activity of the brain’s neurons are measured in hertz—cycles per second. Using a range of sampling techniques, Zenxen recreates alpha, theta, and delta waves to construct sonic models of the brain in various states.

Collaging other compositional elements into the works, such as field recordings of whispering voices, and the rise and fall of cicadas, Zenxen forms a tapestry that resembles autonomic processes, like a breath, or a secreting gland. Lullabies in one sense—these tracks were composed for an overnight drone event in the artist’s hometown of Berlin—in another they are intensely awakening, serving as activations of specific frequency windows. 𝐼𝑛 𝑊𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠 is a sonically cavernous descent, down into the brain’s most mysterious and rejuvenating depths.  

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Zenxen [ˈzɛn ˈdʒɛn] is an interdisciplinary ambient project from Benedikt Ellebrecht, combining academic studies in sociology, literature, and philosophy, time spent playing in post-punk bands, and ongoing participation in the underground electronic music scene in Berlin, Germany. 

Starting with experimentation with sample-based techniques, Ellebrecht has developed Zenxen into a digital musique concrète. He processes and reassembles field recordings from his immediate physical surroundings as well as drawing from virtual spaces such as the internet and videogames. As Zenxen, he has self-released 2 EPs and regularly performs live. 

Ellebrecht also contributes sound design for theatre and performance pieces, including at Ruhrtriennale Essen 2016 and at Staatstheater Darmstadt 2019 in collaboration with Niels Wehr. And in 2017, he co-founded the multimedia label No Disk (https://www.instagram.com/nodisk_/) with Joel AS (Arad Acid).

In Waves

Zenxen - Mesh Of Nodes (ENMX16)

ssabæ – azurescens

Archaic Vaults is pleased to present the first vinyl album for the label, cataloguing ten tracks from ten artists spanning the globe. This curation brings together a multiplicity of genres within the label’s ongoing thematic output - durational ambience, field recordings, oversaturated improvisations and spatialised synthetic loops among them. A diverse cohort of familiar and new collaborators alike.

Edition of 300. Design by Severin Black.

https://archaicvaults.bandcamp.com/album/continuing-a-worn-out-tradition-iii

Continuing A Worn Out Tradition III

A1. Yeong Die 'Part of the Poetic Talent [AV011]

Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s 𝒆𝒏𝒎𝒊𝒙𝒆𝒅, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.” 

In 𝑩𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝑩𝒍𝒖𝒆𝒔 (2023), where Muir sampled various sources to explore gay cruising culture and sensuality, his more expansive, conceptual approach to the form is illuminated. Mixes are not just a linear succession of tracks with transitions—they’re excavations that also result in the creation of new audio artifacts. Inspired by the psychedelic impulses of illbient, Muir uses DJ and sound engineering techniques to melt down genre distinctions and create alien atmospheres.

From the enmossed community, Muir pulls from artists like bad lsd trips, Angelo Harmsworth, Nick Klein, Tetsuya Nakayama, and Patrick Gallagher to coalesce a super-compendium of the global sonic underground, all viewed through his own unique lens. Muir takes major liberties with processing and effects automation to carve new worlds from the soil of these preexisting works. Some of the tracks and material on 𝒆𝒏𝒎𝒊𝒙𝒆𝒅 are heavily edited, emphasizing specific harmonics or bass frequencies, and some portions contain three or four layers, putting artists in direct conversation with each other. 

This heady approach—using the tools of both mixtape and remix—results in a super textual and dense palimpsest of the enmossed catalog. “Because mixes are more open- source,” Muir says, “it’s easier to express some ideas since there is more material to pull from.”

- Rob Goyanes

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Berlin based sound artist, DJ and field recordist Jake Muir was infatuated with sound from an early age, surrounded by California's buzzing, whirring sonic landscape and his father's collection of beachfront rock LPs. So it wasn't surprising when, as he developed his ear, Muir was drawn to work that dexterously manipulated these elements, particularly musique concrète, field recording and experimental turntablism. He approaches his practice as a listener first, carefully choosing, layering and processing sounds that help him deconstruct and contextualize his lived experiences and influences. Using investigative software methodologies, DJ techniques and the engineering skills he acquired while studying, Muir makes deeply personal sonic art that fluidly traverses genre membranes, encouraging reflection and sometimes prompting psychedelic states.

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Artwork source photo by Jake Muir
Design by Glyn Maier
All proceeds to Cadus (Berlin, DE): https://www.cadus.org

enmixed

Jake Muir - enmixed [Side B Excerpt] (ENMX-xb)

“On 𝑹𝒆𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝑴𝒂𝒅𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒊, Expugnantis brings to Enmossed a compendium of nine dubs of minimal, crystalline excellence. Reflecting on “foggy” memories of a long car ride from the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg portion of the Great Escarpment, the album texturalizes Expugnantis’s grainy sentimental remembrance. The aquatic production is filtered through cloudy synth pads and plucky percussion. Here the expanse sits in the gestures of the minimal, not hampering the listener with dense maximalism or dramatics, but evoking focus through precise and considered repetition.

While the rooting of the compositions is hypersomnic and sentimental, they are filtered through the geographical contexts of recording and operating in the isolatory confines within Columbia, South Carolina. The murk of the percussion is the architectural foundation for the recordings, the pivoting agent between what Expugnantis thinks of as the immersive aquatic field and the game of going within and out. Emotive but not cliche, driving but not oppressive; Expugnantis takes us to Madadeni or somewhere akin.”

- Nick Klein, June 2024

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Marcus Mtshali is a producer and DJ based out of Columbia, South Carolina.

Recorded by Marcus Mtshali
Audio and design finalized by Glyn Maier
Interview by Rob Goyanes

Return to Madadeni

Expugnantis - Configure (ENMS-04)

Mix made with 95 % exclusively prev unreleased original materials - edits, outtakes, versions, takes + oneoffs from recording sessions over the past few years.

Made with stems from recent projects and collaborators, including: raw nug tape recordings + snippets Jordan playing flute in a waterfall cave (the one i used in 'Night') + drum edits, live recordings from decks mixing sessions, Róisín's harp and vocal takes from upcoming project, track with more eaze, remix for Felipe’s well frozen piano album, Etienne de Lavaulx zither improv mixed from youtube, demos, outtakes and voice memo type field recordings, unreleased track with Joel, unreleased edit of guitar part from JQ,+ outtake from Planet Inc sessions

Trax Versions

"The aquatic is a concentric point of reflection within the latest release for Enmossed, procured as the split pairing of compositions by Finnish artists Kati Roover and J Koho. Both artists cull medial studies, collaborative processes, field recording, and geographically informed identitarian positionings in the audio works cultivated for cassette. Kati Roover’s aphotic meditations span across one side of the cassette, chiefly mirroring reflections on her Izhorian heritage, hydrofeminism thinking, and whale song captures. For the other side of the cassette, J Koho takes frameworks from Sound Studies paradigms to apply within his processed field recording efforts. Here, both artists service the latest edition of Enmossed’s ENMS catalog with mediated field recordings and sculpted isolatory liquidity formalism. Somewhere inside, the listener can be positioned enveloped in the dewy, aqueous sonorous realm of these two Finnish composers."

- Nick Klein

Kati Roover is a Helsinki-based, multidisciplinary artist. Her practice spans across the mediums of moving image, sound, photography, text and installations, draws upon and addresses a broad range of topics that are connected - from human, place and elemental interactions, mythopoetics, animisms and hydrofeminism, to the natural sciences and ecology.

J. Koho works extensively with sound and acts in many different roles in the field of sound art. Koho’s listening based artistic practice combines the methods, techniques and theories of acoustic, concrete, electronic, electroacoustic music and improvisation and simultaneously looks for meaningful and more sustainable ways to keep on working in this often technology-oriented and resource-intensive field. 

design template by RJM Vanderheyden
audio finalized by Glyn Maier for PLEN Audio
interview by Rob Goyanes

Split

J. Koho - Sijainteja [Excerpt] (ENMS-05)

"𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 is an affirmation of communion. An invitation to contemplate that we are threaded by the same material traces, imprinting us —first through our senses, then through the distillation of experience into memory and its gifts: perspective, continuity, belonging. An analog photograph contains traces of the light that touched who or what was pictured. A body of water is the link between anything that was ever in it, no matter whether it leaves or stays. Words, tarot cards, and any other signs are portals to all the previous and future times they emerge. The walls of a room in a gallery or a house are coated with what happened inside it. A harp string disrupts the elements with the same vibration that travels and interacts with our bones. 𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 is an invocation of the tangible as encounter, of the shared object as a site that refracts punctual experience into a new kind of collective knowledge. A portrait and a prayer that suture the wound between body and instrument, between voice and name."

- Marta Núñez Pouzols

A1 Marta Núñez Pouzols and Glyn Maier - Space Regained
A2 tremella and RJ Gitter - asifaflower (reflections)
A3 Secret Boyfriend - Total Eclipse (edit)
A4 Lotta Petronella - Somewhere
A5 Tether - Harnesses
A6 Unguent - Entozoon-glossalalia
A7 White Gourd - Last Breaths of the Ovenbird
A8 Virusse - smokedance

B1 Danielle Vogel - the sacred same
B2 Chaperone - Hypoglycemia For Tivoli Radio
B3 Ana Cristina - Así Se Levantan y Danzan con la Lluvia
B4 Jessika Fancy - let’s go live where wild figs grow
B5 Iruka María Toro - Golden Light Flower
B6 Lily Herman - I have come to you with your names
B7 Yanara Friedland - from planetary rupture
B8 Cornelius F. Van Stafrin III - Resonant Essence Senses
B9 Kelli Frances Corrado feat. M.Sauder on bass - Cry Wild
B10 Liz Migliorelli - The Singing Fir Tree

Individual tracks and booklet included in album download. 

curation, photo, and poem by Chanelle Allesandre
drawing by Gelsey Amelia
design and layout by Joe Bastardo
mixed by Glyn Maier
mastered by Nathan Taylor

in essence

in essence [Side B Excerpt] (ENXEVP04)

Presenting a brand new composition from Taiwan based sound artist, Yannick Dauby's The Growth of Artefacts.
A rich atmospheric soundscape based on british anthropologist Tim Engold's  'On Weaving a Basket'.

For more info go to: http://www.discrepant.net/products/550616-yannick-dauby-the-growth-of-artefacts-cs30

Yannick Dauby - The Growth of Artefacts (Tape preview)

BLWBCK061 | Release Date : June 6, 2015
Limited to 66 copies
C40 / 6 panels J-CARD

FOUDRE! is a new experimental project created by Frédéric D. Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête, FareWell Poetry, Le Reveil des Tropiques), Romain Barbot (Saåad) & Grégory Buffier (Saåad, Autrenoir, Mondkopf). This, their debut cassette, compiles their first meetings and rehearsals. The resulting "Magnum Chaos", almost 40 minutes of total improvisation, is like the centre of a black-hole, a total, almost oppressive collapsing of  the trio's energies. Experimental, noise, drone, dark-ambient, electronic, lo-fi, chiaroscuro, these varying aesthetics converge to create a darkened room full of flickering stars and fading shadows. "Magnum Chaos" is too dense and too rich to be considered a demo tape. It is, rather, a sincere recording of the birth of a project. A recording where unedited events and audio clips are there to document and remind that for all the hours of fine tuned arrangements there must also be the pure expressions of three musicians in a free environment.

Music improvised & recorded by Frédéric D. Oberland, Grégory Buffier & Romain Barbot / Oct.14 – Toulouse, France. (Dozen Bows & Concorde39 studios)
Mixed by Frédéric D. Oberland / Apr.15 – Paris, France. (Magnum Diva studio)
Mastered by James Plotkin / May.15
https://foudrenoise.bandcamp.com

A2 - Cellarius

Nothing Is What It Seems

Closed

syzygy (raw tape edit)

www.hinakoomori.com
www.instagram.com/hinakoomori

Debut EP Auraelia released on 22nd November via Injazero Records.

Buy the EP here >>> http://bit.ly/auraeliabc

Co-mixed by Peter Lyons. ❤️
Mastered by Cicely Balston. ❤️
Artwork by Gustavo Eandi. ❤️

Auraelia

Buy EP

auraelia.

High Speed Wind

TTT BANDCAMP

DJ Trystero – 賛辞

§ focused on contemporary sound and growth
✔ hand-constructed out of recycled materials as possible
♥ all proceeds to positive endeavors