Pan Daijing - Jade 玉观音
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No. PAN 113
Release Date: 4 June 2021
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Jade

What if a song was not a culmination but a singe, an imprint, or a crater left in the wake of creative process? On her new record “Jade”, Pan Daijing composes at a different scale than that we’ve come to know. Since the release of her groundbreaking LP “Lack” in 2017, Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances at institutions including the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Developed for full casts of opera singers and dancers, and reaching for an all-encompassing durational experience of intensity for both performer and audience, the development of these works was for Daijing as emotionally disarming as it was thrilling. In order to continue accessing her own limits, Daijing had to develop a place of sanctuary within her own practice.

Its nine tracks written and recorded over the last three years, “Jade” is the sound of solitary release and refuge, of creative self-sustenance. Written without the imperatives of direct address to performers or audience, “Jade” speaks inward, while inviting a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials familiar from her previous work: namely, ascetic electronic textures that rumble and pierce, and voice bent in irreverent directions. In place of catharsis, however, her arrangements here linger in tension, extending curiosity towards the delicate void that nourishes extremes. They toy with the minor capacities of song: repetition, chant, observations that conclude without resolving.

“Jade” comes from a vulnerable place, tender as in an undressed wound caught in the midst of healing over. Vocals, mostly Daijing’s own, arrive as wordless sequences of notes soaring alongside a drone, or plain laughter, or in a few places spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In the process of piecing together these fragments, the listener is confronted with the tender parts of her own. “Solitude is like an immense lake you’re swimming through,” says Daijing of these songs. “Sometimes you dip your head in and sometimes you lift it above. On album centerpiece “Let,” she speaks to us over the sound of rippling water, returning between anxious scenes to a refrain: “I take my bath in the ocean.” We are not just consuming Daijing’s story; we are being invited to join her in the water.

The album is mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Pan Daijing, cinematography by Dzhovani & design by NMR.

@pan-daijing

Jade 玉观音

Pan Daijing - The Goat 二月 (PAN 113)

Aïsha Devi returns with new album 'Death is Home' on Houndstooth, her first LP since 2018 and her most personal work yet.

Aïsha Devi nurtures an idiosyncratic approach to her music. She describes her sound as Aetherave, and uses bassy-heavy club motifs and intentional aesthetic signifiers to transport listeners to a dizzying, kinetic environment, harnessing timeless frequencies. On each record, Devi has advanced her philosophy and developed her technology; her last album 'DNA Feelings' (2018) was a radical hybrid of ancient mysticism and rebellious pop, and her upcoming LP 'Death is Home' propels listeners towards the extremes, bending fictile beats and cybernetic textures into transformational songs. This eagerly-awaited new album is a liveable, breathable sonic essence that reveals itself alchemically, reorienting anachronistic cultural preconceptions with its contemporary, ornate language and eerie architecture.

'Death is Home' is ultimately a manifesto. It's Devi's most revealing work to date and a direct result of her personal evolution and ongoing quest. Growing up under the shadow of isolation and abuse, she formed her practice as a healing method, using it to neutralize her past and recreate an alternate, more hospitable reality - beyond the human condition. Her feelings were compounded when she tracked down the whereabouts of her father B.K. Gurung, a Nepali drummer whom she never knew. Devi was informed he had died young, but rather than perceive this as a binary, through mourning, she realized that his existence had already offered her a lifeline and a refuge.

Devi's words and productions reach out to a place where weightlessness has the power to dissolve the corporeal world's manufactured terror of death. Without this trepidation, life's boundaries and limitations fall away. "Burn the flesh, a Deva's born," she sings over tense, pneumatic kicks on 'Not Defined by the Visible'. Her voice is contorted by electronic processes, but the meaning is human: to reach the holy, we must shed our skin. The narrative that guides the album unfurls with the plasticity of an open-world videogame, a space where one can unravel the dogma of life vs. death. On 'Lick Your Wounds', Devi reveals her deepest trauma, pacifying it with rousing, ritualistic rhythms and melancholic pads. "Vapors of violence remain in my broken bones, intoxicate my DNA," she invokes. "I'll lick my wounds and heal at night. I'll take over." She extends this invitation to anybody tuned in to her signals, providing lodging for those that crave it. Birth is virtual. Death is home. 
credits
releases November 10, 2023

Written, composed & produced by Aïsha Devi
Track 4 features Slikback
Mixed by Theo Karon
Artwork by Niels Wehrspann
Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, London
Manufactured at optimal-media, Germany
Cat. No. HTH172 – All rights reserved
℗ & © Houndstooth 2023

Aïsha Devi - Dimensional Spleen (feat. Slikback)

A Thread, Silvered and Trembling

Out of Strength comes Sweetness

@violentquandonaime

helen island - last liasse
Vinyl/Streaming/Digital
- 21.02.24 -

Ghastly and hallucinatory – Last Liasse is a sign of the times, alternative pop record by Helen Island. Within this debut album, the artist captures the saccharine gaze of digital escapism through characteristic filtered high notes, cut-up genres, and processed vocals. Providing a comprehensive overview of Helen Island’s self-distributed initiatives, with the ethos of the Parisian Simple Music Experience collective, the twelve tracks set a solid musical score that resonates with the age to come.

helen island - alice dj

tHe sTAr

this fleeting feeling

FROM MY NUMBER ONE HIGH/TAKE ME DOWN THE DUNES 7" SINGLE OUT JUNE 2016 ON DUNNO RECORDINGS DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE BY RUBADUB GLASGOW

'First track sounds like dark twisted fantasy about carnival in some cheap tropical spa. The other one will reach your guts and throw them upside down.' 

COVER PAINTING BY TOMASZ KOWALSKI

MY NUMBER ONE HIGH

From the new 12inch with remixes from Biosphere and Klara Lewis. Out now on Smalltown Supersound. 

Purchase the release here: smarturl.it/sts32512

Carmen Villain - Borders (Klara Lewis Remix)

STREAM / BUY: https://houndstoothrecords.lnk.to/dnafeelings

Aïsha Devi has announced the release of her second album ‘DNA Feelings’ out 11th May. In conjunction with the album announcement comes first track ‘Inner State Of Alchemy.’
 
TWO SERPENTS OF FREQUENCIES CIRCLING AND ELEVATING, HEALING ATOMIC AND ENERGETIC FORM 

Follow Aïsha:

https://www.aishadevi.com
https://www.facebook.com/aishadeviaura/
https://www.instagram.com/aishadevi5d/
https://twitter.com/aisha_devi
https://soundcloud.com/aisha-devi

DNA Feelings

Inner State Of Alchemy

STREAM / BUY

Aïsha Devi - Inner State Of Alchemy

STREAM / BUY: https://houndstoothrecords.lnk.to/dna...

Aïsha Devi has announced the release of her second album ‘DNA Feelings’ out 11th May. In conjunction with the album announcement came first track ‘Inner State Of Alchemy.’

The second track to feature 'Dislocation Of The Alpha' shows Aïsha creating an almost dreamlike aural state as she calls for her listeners to “Unlearn, dislocate the Alpha.” It’s a significant statement that delves into both the political and the philisophical and yet is only something that could have been made by Devi.
 
TWO SERPENTS OF FREQUENCIES CIRCLING AND ELEVATING, HEALING ATOMIC AND ENERGETIC FORM 

Follow Aïsha:

https://www.aishadevi.com
https://www.facebook.com/aishadeviaura/
https://www.instagram.com/aishadevi5d/
https://twitter.com/aisha_devi
https://soundcloud.com/aisha-devi

Dislocation Of The Alpha

Aïsha Devi - Dislocation Of The Alpha

oqbqbo & Scandinavian Star “Airdrops / Coercion” 


A digital postcard from oqbqbo & Scandinavian Star from their home in Copenhagen. 

Two collaborative tracks sent with best wishes. We hope that they find you safe and well in these strange and troubling times. 


Posh Isolation 234

oqbqbo & Scandinavian Star - Airdrops

UK record label based at fabric, East London. Run in part by Rob Booth (Electronic Explorations)