All A Game

Leaving-i'm fly-mr.masi

IV64 - Aera - Running Hot EP

Release Date:
13/05/2016

Running Hot EP

Odessa Step Sequence

IV64 - Aera - Odessa Step Sequence - Running Hot EP

Watching out for urban balance,
might not be there, the hoped for truth!
feeling useless, believing slowly, 
wondering what makes me move?
slow ahead my little brother,
always try to reach the sea,
minor are rash thoughts to bother,
man forges his own destiny.

Urban Balance

Slow Ahead

Last year brought us revival of a masterpiece as Blade Runner, North Korea continued playing war, Planet Earth witnessed once again the destruction brought on by hurricanes like Harvey... but it was also a pretty hectic year for our guy Darlyn Vlys "I became a father of twins when I already had a 2-year-old baby, precisely whose photo appears on the cover of this LP my child's face and his expression, I see myself 100%% reflected in him when I was a kid". In spite of the sacrifice that double and fabulous surprise life brought him, 2017 also became a very creative and productive journey. This debut album, entitled "Prince in the Rain" was designed, a kind of incredibly well cohesive original soundtrack, written within the parameters of a sci-fi film with a good dose of realism, drama and romanticism. The French artist born in Nimes, and now residing in Valencia, Spain- and whose name is Sylvain Soulier confesses about the title "it is inspired by a reverb preset very frequently used during the album composition, and that pays tribute to one of the artists who have inspired my musical career the most: the regrettably deceased Prince. " And if we add to that, that his child, the one in the artwork, is usually called at home Petit Prince (Little Prince), the entire work connects and brings us on another, higher emotional level. Musically speaking, we will find wisely assembled fragments of electronica: fragile melodies, vocal notes, snapping percussive beats igniting an uncertain yet intriguing mood, sometimes just beautiful loops, and reflective pad chords very cinematic sounds! A corner where coexist from synth pop halfway cheerfulness and introspection -shoegaze, dream pop- to atmospheric textures of organic house and deep techno. 11 songs built with melodic structures and very detailed sounds where sometimes the lyrical wins (Retrograde, Map to the Stars), others mild and poetic (Learned to Hide, Tears in the Rain). Other songs might surprise you, Surface where its choral and moral hypersensitivity could transport you to a chef-d'oeuvre like "Goodbye" of Apparat with Soap&Skin. Darlyn Vlys is backed up for this occasion by the vocal collaboration of the Australian singer Haptic. Sparkling and gloomy. Emotional and escapist. Pure and mature. Vivid and full of conflicts, I meanuniversal. The collabs of Andreas Kubat, lead singer of the alt-rock and electro German band Northern Lite (twice over: "Learned to Hide" and "Sun in the Hell") as well as the Belgian Rari in "Paradoxal", a kind of "Smalltown Boy" (Bronski Beat) but quite more contemporary and restrained, are also essential in the LP. We are not going to ignore the participation in the album of the musician and drummer Days Off; Kid Bucle (arrangements and perspective) and of course AFFKT, on the mastering and building a final mix of the overall project. AFFKT himself attests "mixing this album has been one of the biggest challenges, most difficult and complex jobs of my entire career as a sound engineer." All of them played a very important part in making this album one of the year's most absorbing and pulsating.

Prince in the rain

Paradoxal with Rari

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Dwell

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Recondite - Surface

Recondite - Interlude 2

Recondite - Interlude 1

Artist: Kev Sheridan
Label: Maeve
Title : It's Gonna Be Perfect
Catalogue : Maeve 20
Format: Digital
Release date: 03/07/20

Kev Sheridan returns to Maeve with his second EP for the label and it has been worth the wait. Our favourite multi instrumentalist delivers a 4-tracker including a brilliant map.ache remix of the title track. 

Spanning ambient, house and breakbeat, It's Gonna Be Perfect EP, speaks to the many mixed emotions of these strange times we're all experiencing. Combining melancholic moments with pure elation, this record is aware of where we're at but gives you plenty of hope for where we are going.

Kev Sheridan - Wasn't As Hard As You Thought

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/videosphere

Videosphere, the debut album by Kompakt’s latest signing, the London-based artist Lake Turner (aka Andrew Halford), swoons into focus with “The Sunbird”, a teasing drift of lilting, ambient tones, riding out a submerged piston-pulse rhythm. Across its brief 109 seconds, it manages to traverse evocative terrain – something mythopoetic, something both humble and grandiose, a glimpse of the other behind the sky’s curtain. “I wanted to conjure up something resembling an ancient ceremony or death procession,” Turner nods. “Like a hymn to the surroundings of a faraway hill.” It’s both sky-bound and earthen, a ritual incantation to call in the music of the spheres.

Turner was introduced to the Kompakt family by his sometime collaborator Yannis Philippakis of Foals. He’d previously made music in post-punk and indie groups Great Eskimo Hoax and Trophy Wife, but Videosphere is the first time he’s fully articulated his own vision of electronic music, aside from one limited lathe-cut 12”, 2018’s Prime Mover EP, on Algebra. The lush ambient-disco-techno dreams of Videosphere were constructed and completed in his London studio and at his parents’ arable and sheep farm in Worcestershire, which might help explain the hazy, unhurried pastoralism of the album.

“There was a slight bittersweetness in finishing the record (in Worcestershire) as my parents were in the middle of selling my childhood home,” he sighs, before quipping, “on the plus, I ended up shearing a lot of sheep over the summer.” A student of archaeology and ancient history, Turner is no doubt carefully attuned to the twisting cogs of history and memory, and it’s no surprise that Videosphere has a nostalgic, melancholic cast; much of its beauty rests in the way it tugs, gently, at the heart strings – see the tear-stained cheeks of the lush, dappled “Honeycomb”, or the sweetly sad electro-roundelay of “No Way Back Forever.”

It’s not all drift-dream hypnosis, though – Videosphere is very much grounded in the now. ““No Way Back Forever” is a nod to the linear nature of time,” Turner explains by way of example, “and the tipping point of the world climate crisis that scientists have now declared.” Jayne Powell’s vocals are sent spinning through the song, wound like candyfloss; she takes centre stage on the techno hymnal title track, too. Throughout, there’s a sense of forward movement, despite the life stasis we find ourselves collectively bound by in mid-2020; there’s also a yearning for the communal, for community, that’s captured in the album title, a nod to an object Turner encountered at London’s Geoffrey Museum, “a television set in the shape of a spaceman’s helmet from the 1970s.”

“The vision I loosely had was to make an electronic record that had a communal warmth and almost ceremonial or ritual feel. I wanted to examine the relationship of our archaic minds in the trappings of the modern world,” Turner concludes. “What the Videosphere also symbolizes for me is the oneness of humanity and community, prevailing.”

Lake Turner - Hunter's Ballad

Ghostly International and Spectral Sound. Of Art & Artifice since 1999.