»Neon City« is the debut release by Erik K Skodvin & Otto A Totland's Deaf Center project, finally re-issued 18 years since its first appearance.

Jan 28th, Miasmah rec.

Deaf Center - Limn

Chapter http://joinchapter.com has teamed up with Rayna deNiord of San Francisco's artist platform, Modyfier http://modyfier.wordpress.com to launch Chapter's new music series, COMPOSITION_DISORDER. Based upon the blending of disciplines of similar mind and direction coming together as an inspiration of sorts, COMPOSITION_DISORDER features the artist's own uniquely conjured interpretations of dark, distorted but emotionally powerful ambient sound. By creating irregularity in compositional spaces the perspective of scale and the listener's place is shifted.

The first of the music series, Shadows Fall, is provided by The Sight Below http://ghostly.com/artists/the-sight-below, an alias of Rafael Anton Irisarri http://irisarri.org. He is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist based out of Seattle. The music of The Sight Below conjures half-remembered dreams and soft-focus sentiments with elegiac beauty; his compositions are emotionally spacious and mesmerizing ambient soundscapes intertwined with subtle pulsations. As a producer, he’s had remixes commissioned by The Naked And Famous, School of Seven Bells, and Pantha Du Prince. His original recorded works are widely published in over a dozen labels scattered across the globe, most notably Ghostly International (USA), Morr Music (DE), Touch (UK), and Room40 (AU). 

“Shadows Fall” was inspired by Chapter's own take on the potency of minimalism.  Interweaving layers of melancholic guitars and raw bass tones to ritualistic percussions, it focuses on the power of early industrial and post-punk aesthetics, amplifying and echoing Chapter’s own design inspiration.

The Sight Below - Chapter:  COMPOSITION_DISORDER 001 (Shadows Fall)

Second Remix for the new Saroos record was produced by Odd Nosdam who got a littel help form his buddies  Bre'r (( Dhome Herder, by Bre'r )) & Drape.
Dublab wrote: " ambient in its most intense state. A wall of sound that is unstoppable and keep advancing towards you. "
Artwork by Erik Skodvin of Miasmah Rec. 

http://www.miasmah.com/
https://twitter.com/BurncoRecs
anticon.com

Sequoia - Odd Nosdam RMX

From the album 'Illusionen Av Ensamhet' available as a free download from bandcamp:
http://eternell.net/album/illusionen-av-ensamhet

Music by Ludvig Cimbrelius

Illusionen Av Ensamhet

Surr - Himlens Djup ~ free download

(((О))) - Destroy Rebuild Start Again

Here is the alternate recording of 555hz that I played on NTS radio, listen back to that show here http://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/james-holden-luke-abbott-camilo-tirado-13th-may-2016  



555hz (03:2016)

from 'Sanctuary' [CD|LP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den284
available on all formats from [http://denovali.com/mariodiazdeleon]

Performed by the brilliant TAK Ensemble, “Sanctuary” is a ritualistic masterwork of modern classical music, combining acoustic and electronic elements with visionary intensity.

For the third full length document of his classical works, Mario Diaz de Leon presents his most unified offering to date, distilling the modernistic hellfire of his previous releases to a crystalline essence. “Sanctuary” is an album length piece created in collaboration with TAK Ensemble, a brilliant NYC based quintet devoted to energetic and virtuosic performances of contemporary music. Featuring soprano voice, flute, violin, bass clarinet, marimba, and the composer’s own synthesizer work, the album is a hypnotic and ritualistic journey through realms of angelic and demonic experience.

Since 2002, Mario Diaz de Leon has created a significant body of new works for acoustic instruments and electronics. Following his teenage years playing hardcore punk, metal, and electronic music, Diaz de Leon was inspired by the mystically oriented modernisms of Stockhausen, Scelsi, Messiaen, and Dumitrescu, and soon after developed his signature style while a student at Oberlin Conservatory. His debut album as composer, "Enter Houses Of" was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and praised by the New York Times for its "hallucinatory intensity". A second album, entitled "The Soul is the Arena", was released in 2015 on Denovali, and was named a notable recording of the year by New Yorker Magazine. Pitchfork wrote that the album "combines his interests seamlessly into music that throbs with snarling exuberance." Both releases were performed by his longtime collaborators in the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

He currently leads the metal band Luminous Vault as vocalist and guitarist, whose “Charismata” EP was released on Profound Lore Records in spring 2017. From 2012-2016, his solo electronic project Oneirogen (o-NI-ro-jen) toured internationally and released three full length albums on Denovali. He collaborated with director Zev Deans to create the score for Alien: Biotic, a short film commissioned by Fox as part of the official Alien: Covenant campaign. In 2016, the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned and premiered his “Lightmass” for their “Noon to Midnight” festival of contemporary music. He has also collaborated with Nate Young of Wolf Eyes on “Standard Deviance One”, which they recently performed at Tectonics Festival Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Minnesota, he has lived in in New York City since 2004, and received a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University in 2013, where he currently teaches.

“21st century chamber music that combines crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex.” - WIRE Magazine

“Plenty of people can write a one-off ‘amplified’ piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon’s.” - Pitchfork

TAK ENSEMBLE
Laura Cocks - flute
Liam Kinson - bass clarinet, clarinet
Charlotte Mundy - voice
Marina Kifferstein - violin
Ellery Trafford - marimba, percussion
with Mario Diaz de Leon - synthesizer

Sanctuary

Mario Diaz de Leon - Sanctuary

From : Gabriel Saloman ‘Movement Building Vol.3’ (SP085)
→ http://shelter-press.org/gabriel-saloman-movement-building-vol-3/

Shelter Press has made good on its promise to deliver the third and final volume of its series featuring Gabriel Saloman, released both on vinyl and collected with Movement Building Vol. I (2014) and Vol. II (2015) as a double CD. For fans of Saloman’s post-Yellow Swans work – an already dense catalog of darkly cinematic compositions mostly conceived as accompaniment to some of Vancouver’s edgier contemporary dance companies, Movement Building Vol. III is not only a much anticipated conclusion to this trilogy, it is the most fully realized album in years. Where as Movement Building Vol. I & II acted primarily as documentation of time-based artworks, Movement Building Vol. III offers a more coherent and narratively rich album that will appeal to admirers of Soldier’s Requiem (Miasmah, 2013).

Listeners will recognize the emotive bowed strings, militant percussion and searing guitar eruptions that evoked memory and trauma in that previous album. Joining this pallet are other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholic appregiated melodies, and a patina of harsh noise. Added to this is a more 21st Century approach to drums and bass, perhaps an effect of his collaborations with producer Michael Red in their dub-ambient project Chambers.

Saloman’s music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O’Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position between “modern classical”, “electronic music”, and the more outer limits of metal. Movement Building Vol. III doesn’t clarify as much as it expands Saloman’s oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man’s land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend – contemporary, retro or futurist.

Movement Building Vol. III’s themes are taken from the dance it was composed for, 2015’s What Belongs To You, created by longtime collaborator Vanessa Goodman (Adhere, Soldier’s Requiem). That work sent its dancers through a physical journey exploring the needs of the body, for shelter, for love and for self-actualization, roughly aligned to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. The resulting album seems to achingly soundtrack the struggle for survival, not simply for bare life but for something greater and more transcendent that would make survival have meaning. It holds dread and hope in equal parts, never quite giving away the end of the story. Though this record was recorded two years ago Movement Building Vol. III could be the perfect album for our current era of civilizational near-collapse, whether at the hands of maniacal politicians, the slow burn of the Anthropocene or the constant enclosure of the corporate driven, social media enabled surveillance state.

Movement Building Vol. III arrives both as a stand alone vinyl release, and as part of a collection of all three volumes packaged in one double CD. The collection of these works allows one to see clearly Saloman’s techniques and approaches to a relatively limited number of instruments – guitar, percussion, occasional piano and tape. Movement Building Vol. I is presented as one continuous piece, moving through an extended set of drone and loping drum play before climaxing in the kind of glorious guitar chording most often associated with My Bloody Valentine, GSYBE or Mono. Movement Building Vol. II explores various combinations of drum and drone, ASMR inducing high end clatter and the now infamous take on Miles Davis’ classic My Funny Valentine. 

Movement Building Vol. III is not only the final installment in Shelter Press’ series but also represents the culmination of a prolific period of creation that began with 2012’s Adhere.

Movement Building Vol. 3

GABRIEL SALOMAN 'What Belongs To Love' (SP085 / SHELTER PRESS)

Svarte Greiner - Knive (2017 re-issue) coming oct. 6th. on Miasmah

11 years since it´s inception, the surreal and darkly romantic Knive still sounds like a mystery and something that´s hard to pin down. Svarte Greiner´s debut album feels like a trip into the forest at midnight, with all the sounds and impressions that comes with it. Spiritual, horrific and fragile in essence, it´s melancholic core is hard to shake off, and feels as present today as it did back then.

While starting off the sub genre of “Accoustic doom” back in 2006, it´s difficult to say what else to name it now, with it´s inspiration and elements from countless genres. The record flows through the dissonant cello´s and washed out vocals of “Ocean out of Wood” past the introverted church organs of “The Black Dress”, distorted guitars and wooden beats of “The Dining Table” to the operatic finalé of “Final Sleep”. Everything scattered with field recordings from crows, branches, walking, sleeping, rain, wind and who knows what. Knive stands on many feet, wherever they may be.

Erik K Skodvin´s path as Svarte Greiner have since been dwelling more and more into this world, picking each element apart to focus on them, stretching them out or cutting them down, looping, experimenting and flooding with reverb - trying to make time stop and night fall. But for now a re-visit to where it all started seems appropriate.

Knive

Svarte Greiner - Ocean out of Wood

from the album 'mourning jewelry' available aug21

Mourning Jewelry

Mounting Jewelry

less bells 'fiery wings'

It may be the first time you hear of FOUDRE! but it's already their fifth full-length album. Previously appearing on BLWBCK and Gizeh, this exclamatory named project is actually a supergroup [that's when numerous established solo artists come together for a unique collaboration], comprising of Frédéric D. Oberland (aka Oiseaux Tempête, Le Réveil des Tropiques, FareWell Poetry), Romain Barbot (Saåad), Paul Régimbeau (Mondkopf, Extreme Precautions, Autrenoir) and Grégory Buffier (Autrenoir, Mätiss). If those names are familiar to you, then so is their music, which is generally evocative, post-apocalyptic, drony, noisy, and dark. So you can imagine their potential at conjuring the spirits of the underworld during a joint ritual. This particular gathering "stems from a desire to probe the invisible forces that live within us, through a ceremony that brings together occult sciences, forgotten landscapes and the fever of the unconscious." Such is the case with their latest release for the French NAHAL Recordings, a label run and curated by Régimbeau and Oberland themselves. The music is brooding, stirring, and menacing. The synth pulses chase after heartrate, the instruments wail, the organ evokes a post-spiritual creed. I can only imagine this music performed live on the stage - an experience from which this semi-improvised exploration in texture originally flourished. Yes, I miss feeling live music so very much. The closest I can come to this encounter is by putting on a record at home and turning it up to eleven. So here's a teaser from the group's upcoming Future Sabbath album, released early next year, with a premiere of a track titled "Black Swan Theory I."

"Gathering regularly since their debut in 2015, FOUDRE! brings together electronic and acoustic instruments, merging incarnate and disembodied souls, past and snippets of a post-apocalyptic future. After the ghostly and hovering EARTH (2017) then the wild and telluric KAMI神 (2018), Future Sabbath travels even further into the tangle of genres and textures, offering a luxuriant palette of moods and emotions. Passing through the tracks with evocative titles, mystical symbols, and spiritual signs set this Sabbath of machine sorcerers ablaze."

The album is out on January 15th, 2021, available as a digital release, as well as on a deluxe 12″ vinyl [with a stamped metal red hot foil]. The album features fantastic cover art by Faye Formisano sourced from her La Danse Secrète series of drawings using a blue crayon. It looks nice and sinister in red!

Future Sabbath

Black Swan Theory I

TRACK PREMIERE : FOUDRE! - Black Swan Theory I

some original solo piano pieces...  some mixes from my podcast... some exclusive track premieres...  and some tracks from the albums I review for Headphone Commute... Enjoy!

TRACK PREMIERE : FOUDRE! - Black Swan Theory I

Headphone Commute

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