Scuba Death is Ricardo Donoso's alter ego. With more of a focus on analog sound, percussion, sampling, and location recordings, there is an organic undercurrent on Scuba Death recordings that isn't as prevalent in his solo work. This music is rich in atmosphere while still tethered to the deeper ideas that Donoso often explores in his work. Treatises on fear and death­anxiety, the underlining thematic framework for the project, run rampant throughout these claustrophobic electronic passages, and teeter on the edge of being oppressive. 

Nitrogen Narcosis marks the first full length and strongest statement in the Scuba Death repertoire after the privately issued, ruthless ‘Demon Seed’ twelve inch back in 2011. The album alternates between surprising lethargic dance inflections all nestled between 75 & 100 bpm, the normal resting heart rate for adults, and the more conceptual, numbness­inducing pieces like "50­-70 Meters" and "Nociception." Sequencing plays an integral role on Nitrogen Narcosis as the listener is suddenly thrust into the darkest reaches of the ocean after dark alley grooves are sucked into an aquatic abyss. 

For a project named after Donoso's near­drowning experience in the South Atlantic when he was younger, there's an impressive amount of reflection & vulnerability present – the field recordings that permeate throughout the album were captured at the same location the undertow caught hold of him that bright Summer day 20 years prior. An inner battle between paranoia and euphoria is played out in well­conceived, precision sonics on Nitrogen Narcosis as Donoso reminds us to look back, break through the surface and go deeper. 

Ricardo Donoso's solo work speaks for itself, but with this new chapter comes new questions and considerations. Scuba Death is enigmatic to a fault and all the better for it. 

Recorded At Vesica Pisces, September­-November 2012

50-70 meters

British musician Jo Johnson’s debut solo album for Further Records, Weaving, betokens an exciting presence in the world of minimalist composition. 

“Ancestral Footsteps” opens the LP with cascades of cyclical harp-like sounds, an homage to one of Johnson’s primary inspirations: Alice Coltrane. Channelling rigorous new age and mesmerizing Riley-esque/Reichian minimalism, the piece accrues heft and intensity, with occasional bursts of synthetic, tribal clapping until it fades out with cinematic flourish. The title track gradually alters simple guitar and keyboard phrases, along with a chiming motif that multiplies in a hall of mirrors. The disorientating arpeggios form moiré patterns against colossal bass notes. The mood lightens considerably with “Words Came After Music,” whose sweeping strings and drones could take you to whatever your idea of heaven is. Interestingly, the title of the piece is inspired by an anthropological theory Johnson stumbled across that musical ability predates language in humans. With its sombre, undulating synths and lustrous highs and lows, “In the Shadow of The Workhouse” plumbs profound emotional depths. Epic closer “Silver Threads” starts as an almost silent retreat in the vein of Laurie Spiegel's Appalachian Grove or Eno and Budd's The Pearl with the faint hum and buzz of telegraph wires, until four minutes in a stoic pulse and suspenseful chiming motif arise, buttressed by glowing synth sighs and the LP's only percussive thumps (think Incunabula era Autechre). 

While inspired by the "serious music" of Arvo Pärt, Wim Mertens and others, Johnson’s mandalas of tone mantras offer a playful, DIY sense of adventure, as you might expect from the former guitarist for incendiary punk group Huggy Bear and a long-term co-organizer of London’s Bleep43 techno club night and label. Weaving condenses Johnson's long love affair with free jazz, minimalism and electronic music and this unique ambient composition is invested with powerful emotional resonance.

Ancestral Footsteps

Words Came After Music

Weaving

Silver Threads

In the Shadow of the Workhouse

The most interesting, advanced electronic musicians create unique, hermetic soundworlds that seem to emanate from unknown realms. See/hear Aphex Twin, Autechre, Farmers Manual, Iannis Xenakis, and Bernard Parmegiani, among a handful of others. If Chloe Harris isn't quite in that echelon yet, she is quickly approaching it with Dose.(This album was originally issued on very ltd.-ed. cassette in 2012 and is now getting a vinyl release, mainly due to the urging of Italian techno magus Donato Dozzy.) A former globetrotting DJ, Harris has shelved that lifestyle and aesthetic for a more stable family life in the Seattle area and a more cerebral approach in the studio. With this collection of exploratory compositions, she decided to experiment with an array of synthesizers, mainly the Waldorf Q. Working on the eight tracks here in her home setup, Harris would “layer as much as I could or sometimes there was no layering at all. I tried to let the machines talk. I was trying to find my own voice. It was sad and melancholy because I stopped DJing and decided to try something new in my career.” This change had financial and creative risks, but Harris has transitioned boldly into this more adventurous musical mode. 

Each track on Dose is a distinctive foray into beatless sound design. There's too much happening here to describe this album as “ambient” or “chillout,” yet it's not typically academic-sounding, either. Harris lets her intuition guide her and those finely calibrated instincts lead to gripping pieces that subtly evolve over their three- to six-minute durations. A thrilling sense of otherworldliness becomes the norm on Dose. “Water Dragn” achieves an aquatic grandeur with its teeming drones beneath elastic pulsations, throbbing with the subliminal ominousness of mid-'70s Tangerine Dream. “Tiwie” is the most uptempo track here; marked by a wonky motif of what might be pitch-shifted seal utterances or some other sea life's emissions, it generates a woozy pattern that nudges you into a delirious reverie. “Couchfire Dron” is a deeply poignant and morose atmospheric work that suggests an infinite expanse of gloom, which is paradoxically exhilarating. Similarly, the dank, frigid auroras of “Skrt” are shot through with skittering rhythms not made by drums but rather what seem like rapid intakes of breath, its textures hitting the ear like frantically sweeping ice-scrapers on windshields. “Harchone” unspools a psychedelic mélange of tones and textures swirling in a chromium abyss, reminiscent of Nik Raicevic's mind-altering synthesizer abstractions recorded in the early '70s. When album-closer “Entrldam” blooms into earshot, its profound whorl of gray drones signifies a momentous conclusion to an opus that proves Harris has reached a new peak. 

Made with : Doepfer Energy + Dark Time, Waldorf Pulse+, Waldorf Q, samples and love.

Slep_Non

Tiwie

Satmor

Rrose has found her own niche in the American techno underground. Her hypnotic tracks incorporate ideas from ambient and minimalist music as prominently as they do the history of dance music, operating in the same fruitful cross-section between techno and the abstract as many other Further Records releases. Rrose’s debt to experimental music has never been more obvious than on September 20, 2012, when he performed James Tenney's "Having Never Written A Note For Percussion" live in Washington, DC. The simple yet colossal piece is one of that American composer's most famous works, requiring the performer to play one percussive instrument constantly, taking it from the quietest point to the loudest and back again. Done well, it's a fascinating exploration of tone, volume and decay, and a showcase for drone music's unusually transportive powers. 

"Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" has always been a personal favourite of Rrose's. He was struck with the inspiration to try it out after touring a disused trolley tunnel beneath downtown DC, where the possibilities of "seemingly endless and unpredictable reverberations" seemed like the perfect environment for Tenney's composition. He made a 32-inch gong played with two mallets the central device of his performance, creating a towering leviathan of sound capable of the softest highs and the deepest lows. It’s a vastness that comes across especially well on the live recording of that 2012 performance, a breathtaking 30 minutes that seems daunting at first but moves with a grace as easy as breathing in and out. 

What makes Rrose's take almost definitive is not only does he stretch out the piece to 30 minutes beyond its usual 8-12 minute duration, but even more importantly she offers two versions made in two very different settings. The A-side of the 12-inch features a performance recorded in a studio during his practice sessions. Dry and mic’d up close, its almost stuffy quality is the direct opposite of the live version, like it’s coming from inside your head where the live-recording B-side surrounds you with the booming sound of the gong. That duality makes for a valuable insight into the power of Tenney’s original composition and its wide-open potential for interpretation. "Never Having Written A Note For Percussion" is a powerful study not only in minimalist composition but the importance of the room and environment that a performance, or just pure sound, takes place in, and a potent example of the kind of experimental tendencies that make Rrose one of techno’s more fascinating figures.

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (Studio Version)

Few artists have crafted a catalog as rich and deep as Donato Dozzy has done in minimal techno’s more atmospheric realm. The Italian producer—who also performs in the excellent Voices From The Lake duo with Neel—has become revered for his unerring ability to create tracks that are at once ethereal and oceanic, inducing both a sense of tranquility and urgency. His debut album, K, which Further Records originally issued in 2010, stands as a towering example of Dozzy’s skill for electronic music that triggers profound feelings with only a few scrupulously selected elements. 

K’s seven untitled tracks offer a masterly seminar in subtly altering the grid-like beat programming that dominates techno. Dozzy puts odd emphases on certain beats and adds percussive eccentricities and effects to others. Which means that this isn’t a collection of bangers geared for hands-in-the-air, goofball moves. Instead, Dozzy’s working on a much more refined level, one where tricky, intricate drum patterns trump simple booming kicks—although track 3’s staunch, methodically funky kick and hi-hat pattern and track 5’s swift and elegantly propulsive beats could heat up a club. 

The greatest pleasures of K occur in the way Dozzy’s eerie, aquatic drones swirl around his well-wrought rhythms, submerging everything in a restorative, algae-tinged film. At their best, these pieces convey a Chain Reaction-like rigor and a cinematic quality (of the Jacques Cousteau variety) utterly devoid of cliché. This reissue of K reminds us that it remains a crucial component of Donato Dozzy's catalog, the first major statement in a career that's becoming a manifesto of understated, underground-techno brilliance.

Those who know the respected Irish producer John Daly for his bubbly, melodically nuanced house and techno tracks may get thrown off balance by his latest work under the Smoke Clears handle. While his 2011 release for Further, Sea Level, hinted at his fondness for Manuel Göttsching/Klaus Schulze-like kosmische ambience, on Listen Daly veers off into more introverted and arcane abstraction terrain. 

The title track kicks off the album on a decidedly downtempo, contemplative note while maintaining Daly’s knack for understatedly beautiful melodies. It sounds like the best song Morr Music never released. “Plumb” exudes a paradoxically chilled and urgent aura, with woodblocks seemingly made out of ice and heavily reverbed claps providing the hypnotic rhythm. The glistening IDM of “Star Shine” could be an outtake from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 (it’s that gorgeous). The beautifully hoarfrosty “Trace” evokes Seefeel’s forays into fusing shoegaze atmospheres with abstract electronic beat matrices. 

With Listen, the Smoke Clears decisively steps off the dance floor and enters one of the chilliest chillout rooms a ’90s clubber ever chilled in—but the music’s still abristle with all sorts of fascinating movement and textures. Despite Listen’s banquet of ultra-cool tones, your neurons will work up a nice sweat.

Star Shine

Listen

In April of this year, Donato Dozzy took a set of mouth harps back to his parent’s house in the Italian countryside and set about exploring the possibilities of that most basic of instruments. The mouth harp had been calling to Dozzy ever since childhood, when he had discovered the “marranzano” on a holiday in Sicily with this parents at the tail end of the 1970s. Almost four decades later, Dozzy had begun to see in this peculiar, ancient sound, the roots of the music he’d been making and playing in clubs all these years. It was time to find out how far he could trace it all back. 

The Loud Silence is the result of those explorations, an accompanied deep-dive into childhood memory, social history and the roots of psychedelia. Recorded indoors and outdoors, half-way up mountains and on the edge of the Mediterranean sea, the record is meditative but also powerful. Dozzy has distilled his ideas into an incredibly intimate sound, one that invites an inverted sort of exploration, pushing you further and further into your own head. Each track maintains an inviolable central pulse, while delicate, fluttering sounds hint at vast spaces that might open up at any minute - they’re just waiting for you to connect with them. Field recordings hover below the resonating harps, adding to the mysterious atmosphere. Tracks like ‘The Loud Silence’ and ‘Downhill to the Sea’ are wrapped up in simple rhythms, their strict throb drawing you deeper and deeper into the primitive sound. 

Where so much of today’s trance-inducing music is mechanical, born of grids and microchips, The Loud Silence pulses with the presence of the human body. As Dozzy says, “The hand gives the tempo, together with the breath.” It’s all about the mouth, the ears, the hands. The organic physicality of the sound, made in concert with the body itself, generates a primal response in the listener, an undeniably visceral understanding, an empathetic resonance. “When you play such an instrument, you'll feel all your bones vibrating to the sound in a sort of chain reaction!” says Dozzy. "It becomes an emotional and physical clean up. In Italy, one of the ways to call the jew's harp is 'scacciapensieri', which literally means 'It kicks thoughts away'". 

The sound and its effects also carry with them a sense of history, of community and of social ritual. Trance states, whether shamanic rituals in the Amazon or DJ sets in dark night-clubs, have always relied on a social element, a communal understanding of what is going on, what is expected to happen. The Loud Silence is a personal album that speaks to this communal experience, that wonders implicitly why these ancient ideas of society and community have been so devalued today. “In a moment where all individuals seem to act egoistically and not as a tribe,” says Dozzy, “This music gives me the sense of continuity with the past.” 

Throughout history, states of altered consciousness have been religious, political, poetical or nihilistic, but rarely ever just a means of innocent entertainment. There is something inherently transgressive about removing the shackles of individual will and succumbing to something larger than yourself. Giving up your base desires and ambitions in favour of a sound, to submit yourself to something as simple and fleeting as vibrations in the air, the sound of some metal resonating in another person’s mouth, is a way to communicate with the part of you which is in everyone else too. It’s a way to reach both in and out at once, to the heart of what it is to be human on this planet. At a time when nations are burning and whole continents are on the edge of breaking apart, recognising the bonds that bring and hold people together, recognising that what we share is what truly defines us, couldn’t be more important. 

Downhill to the Sea

The Net

The Loud Silence

Cross Panorama

Personal Rock

In May 2013 at a nondescript Seattle space called 1927 Events, two-thirds of Magic Mountain High—Germany's David Moufang (aka Move D) and the Netherlands' Jordan Czamanski of Juju & Jordash—teamed up for a live performance that made everyone in the room feel privileged to have witnessed it. It was the kind of set during which you say to yourself, “I hope to hell somebody's recording this.” Thankfully, somebody was doing just that, and the 99-minute Live In Seattle is the sterling result. 

People throw around the word “deep” to describe electronic music with cavalier frequency, but in the case of Moufang and Czamanski (who also records as Jordan GCZ), that adjective barely encapsulates the kind of fathomless sound they create. Their work as Magic Mountain High—which includes Juju & Jordash's Gal Aner—combines the two artists' spring-loaded, psychedelic techno and libido-stoking house, exponentially multiplying their propulsive and disorienting qualities. Live In Seattle captures them working at the zenith of their improvisational powers for a rabid crowd—despite their European gear not functioning and having to use unfamiliar equipment, which is a testament to the pair's ability to create and adjust on the fly. 

The show begins with anticipatory cymbal taps and a beautifully morose melodica motif that wouldn't sound out of place in an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. A few minutes in, faint pulses enter earshot and a minute later the clap-enhanced beats and synth bass burst into the forefront to form a strutting midtempo rhythm with a subliminal drone swirling beneath it. Masters of dynamics, Moufang and Czamanski incrementally intensify and ingeniously arrange the elements, especially that underlying keyboard drone, until you're in a state of panic and ecstasy. 

Over the course of the set, the two producers flaunt their expertise for pacing. They avoid the obvious and subvert expectations throughout the performance, sporadically letting the beats drop out in order to luxuriate on a particularly alien organ oscillation (see especially the one near the beginning of the vinyl version of Live In Seattle's A-side), a sinister bass rumble, an ominously pulsating synth, an unsettling thumb piano motif, or a mind-warping 303 acid ripple, to name just a handful of examples. 

Of course, Moufang and Czamanski also keep things danceable for stretches of time and about 78 minutes in, they even shift out of their foundation of oddity and into heavenly techno mode with a gloriously ascendant melody (which you can hear on the B-side of the vinyl version). For their well-deserved encore, Moufang and Czamanski reprise the intro's mournful melodica reverie and then infiltrate it with a series of percolating and disorienting bleeps and a celestial drone worthy of New Age legend Laraaji. This stellar ambient coda reflects Moufang and Czamanski's exceptional, eccentric musicality. 

Techno is not known for its live albums, but regardless, Live In Seattle sets the standard for the format. With its abundant and sublime tunefulness, textural richness, and enchantingly enigmatic tangents, Live In Seattle takes you on a trip that's as long, strange, and stimulating as anything Miles Davis' electric bands of the '70s engineered.

Further Records

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