Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

Do You(studio version)

from the album Charles Cohen - "Brother I Prove You Wrong" out on Morphine Records 2015 - doser026LP

Composer, improviser, and Buchla Music Easel master Charles Cohen returns to Morphine with a suite of new material. In keeping with the timbre spectrum of his semi-modular system, Brother I Prove You Wrong is built around pointillist analog tones—Cohen's cosmic "beeps and boops"—that swarm and scatter in mesmeric patterns across four sides. Moving through surrealistic textural overlays and industrial miasma, the album's nine tracks reveal a more introspective and personal side of the artist, following from a retrospective LP trilogy released via Morphine in 2013. Those assembled works, dating back to the late '70s, quickly became essential listening and brought Cohen—at the time largely unknown outside Philadelphia's experimental circuit—to critical renown. 

Brother I Prove You Wrong was recorded in Berlin in September 2014 using the Buchla Music Easel, with production help and support from Rabih Beaini. Mastered by Neel and curated and designed by TankBoys; cover art by Nathalie du Pasquier.

Charles Cohen - The Boy and the Snake Dance

Digi + vinyl available to buy:
https://ellll.bandcamp.com/music

ROMANCE

ROMANCE EP

ORDER LP - www.wharfcatrecords.com
ORDER ON BANDCAMP - https://wharfcatrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pre-order-misogyny-stone
PRE-ORDER ON APPLE MUSIC - https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/misogyny-stone-ep/id1201906424

A drone whines in the distance; Horoscope jettisons a new 5-track LP titled Misogyny Stone. It has prescient timing: here we sit at the abyss of masculine power. Originally from Miami Florida but living in New York for over a decade, Rene J Nunez-Cabrera produces raw sonic compositions indebted to the visceral experience of performance. The new LP, his second for Wharf Cat Records, expands his palette of sound and exhibits the artist’s range in 5 succinct opi: from paranoid, buzzing headscapes, to meditative, industrial drumming. Washes and other gestures of contemporary noise abound, but the ultimate descriptor for Nunez’ penchant is mood. The title track contains Nunez’ version of a deep club jam, intertwining light and dark, low and high, with Kathryn Undorfer’s spoken word sitting right in the middle, sonically spotlighted. “Narcissist Vague” has a religious breadth despite its relatively short existence; while “Azebache Necklace Bought to Protect My Daughter” is a snare-pegged story of delivering a totem; “New Piece (for Christian Mirande)” starts with an organ’s lament, creepily. Nunez’ distorted, layered vocals then build into a desperate chorus of screams. Horoscope’s sound is embedded in the struggles of personhood. Through modular manipulations and his acute utility of pedals and tapes loops, Nunez’ de- and reconstructs the dynamics of gender relations: look into the misogyny stone; it is opaque and bleak.

BUY LP

Horoscope - Misogyny Stone (from the Misogyny Stone LP)

Encantada

Title track from the new LP, 'Insignia', out in Japan-only on cassette for Ryo Murakami's Depth Of Decay label.

https://depthofdecay.bandcamp.com/album/insignia

Insignia

Black Sabbath - Planet Caravan 
Wilhelm - Mercurial 
Kevin Carey - Try_Again
Randomer - Percussion Workout 2 
Da Poet - Fly Over Palestine
EPROM - Samurai

MERCURIAL

Taken from Futuro (Music for the Waldorf Project) released on 2LP and download 01/02/19.

• Not Waving’s engrossing, highly original soundtrack to Sean Rogg’s world-renowned art/theatre project
• Ambient tonal works and abstractions written between 2013-2018
• Mastered and cut at D&M, Berlin.
• Limited edition vinyl with full colour insert featuring photographs by Lee Arucci
• RIYL Laurie Spiegel, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Shuttle 358

’Futuro’ is Not Waving’s sublime synth/ambient soundtrack to one of the world’s most intense art/theatre experiences: Sean Rogg’s radical immersive artwork ‘The Waldorf Project’ - fusing choreography, spatial design, music and performance into a cohesive experience.

Drawn from more than 20 hours of material made for the project between 2013-2018, ‘Futuro’ finds Alessio Natalizia exploring a style of tonal and spatial minimalism that works as a fine palette cleanser from much of what you’ve heard from him in the past. 

While not a new solo album, per se, the long form, Eno-like results of ‘Futuro’ demonstrate the full wingspan of Not Waving’s obsessive knowledge and emotive feel for electronic composition, making it in some senses one of the more substantial and unusual releases in his catalogue to date.

BUY!

Not Waving - Emotion 1.4 Decontamination [ELP040]

Taken from th album 'Ecstatic Computation' releasedas LP and Download

Ecstatic Computation

Caterina Barbieri 'Fantas' (EMEGO 259)

An addendum of sorts to his recent 'Faint Hearted' album, Miles' returns with a half-hour EP more squarely aimed at the floor with four darkened, robust variants. 'Blatant Statement' is up first, slowly emerging from a rough alignment of metallic percussion and abrasive stabs not a million miles removed from the kind of racket you'd most likely associate with Vatican Shadow, before the almost-clipped rub of those super-warm bass stabs shifts the perspective to a different kind of environment altogether. 'Technocracy' delivers an oozing House deconstruction, slowed down and inebriated, while 'Infinite Jest' revolves around an industrial cacophony harnessed into a rhythmic anomaly situated somewhere between a technofied Pete Swanson and a sweaty Kassem Mosse. 'Plutocracy' ends the set with a bleached-out warehouse chug, slowed down and menacing, surrounded by a submerged choral arrangement and more of that toughened hammered-metal sound that runs through the EP.

Do You(studio version)

Ensemble Economique