deconstructed club / halfstep / bass / hyperglitch / postindustrial hybrids

Taken from SBKT040: Yen Tech - Assembler

Release date: 28th May 2021

With Assembler, his second full-length album, Yen Tech re emerges in ecstatic and primordial new form -- a multi-layered and interwoven work that blends futuristic production, meta-science fiction, and anthropic critique into a dizzying array of next scenarios -- a maze-like vision of our technological and exponentially oracular, full-stack future.

This imagined future becomes a construct or place in itself; one in which the record buzzes and swarms; a mechanosphere of towering melodic vocal samples and sound design - all narrated by Yen Tech's unnerving, diaristic vocals - as he channels the form of post-human techno cretin, whispering hyperbolic ASMR to no one in particular. We follow this character from one disorienting experience to the next as he recites a stream of indecipherable neologisms and hyper-descriptives, the existential residue seeping from every line. In the end though, a strange, uneasy beauty comes into focus; the metamorphic lyrics and musical euphorias revealing Assembler as a type of elegy: a wet glass reflection of the failures of what we are and were - and a jubilant celebration of what we may become.

"I imagined Assembler as a type of self imposed simulation, an invisible boundary that the narrator has to navigate out of to move forward. It was a way of looking at how we may carry the issues and failures of the past with us into the future. The psychological baggage of history, the guilt of geotrauma, the addictive melange of technology all become dealt with in this stage of acceptance and recovery. I wrote the album with this in mind, a process to find the slimy pearl of who we are" - Yen Tech

All music and lyrics written by Yen Tech
Produced and arranged by Yen Tech
Vocals by Yen Tech
Additional vocals by Katy Townsend
Mastered by Raphael Valensi
Artwork and vinyl design by Johannes Schnatmann

Assembler

Yen Tech - Leech

Taken from SBKT049: Osheyack - Intimate Publics
Release date: 8th June 2022

Intimate Publics, Osheyack’s second album, is an homage to Shanghai, the city he has called home since 2012. Over the past ten years the producer has evolved from an avid club-goer to a key member of the vital soundscape that emerged from ALL Club and its predecessor, the now defunct club The Shelter. As hinted by the title, which draws on American social theorist Michael Warner’s work on publics and counterpublics, the album expresses a commitment to mining the utopian potential of club music, forging new worlds and generating future social relations, just as the artist bids farewell to the city at a moment of uncertain transition. While tracks like 'Edging' and 'Thrall' continue to present his signature collage of harder club music, the rest of the record reveals a shift to synthetic approximations of acoustic instruments. 'Still', the central track of the album, is a piece composed almost entirely of samples found on Vocaloid (a vocal synthesizer developed by Yamaha, commonly used to give voice to Japanese virtual idols). While echoing themes explored in previous projects, like the nature of realism and authenticity in a techno-mediated landscape, Intimate Publics is charged with an unexpected emotional candor and vulnerability, unveiling a personal side Osheyack is only beginning to explore.

Words by Alvin Li
Artwork by Xiaofei Qiu
Design by Luke Griffiths
Mastered by Raphael Valensi

Intimate Publics

Osheyack - Being Online

Taken from SBKT054: Gorgonn - Six Paths
Release date: 31st January

Artwork and layout by Akihide Monna
Mastered by Raphael Valensi

In Japanese Buddhism, it's believed that when someone dies they are ushered down one of six paths depending on the karma accumulated during their previous lives. A being might end up in the world of humans, animals, demigods, or celestials, but it's also possible to end up reborn as a pitiable hungry ghost, doomed to an existence of insatiable desire, or even worse - be sent to hell, or jigoku. Ruled over by the Japanese lord of death Emma-ō, this hell isn't quite like the Christian hell, it's closer to purgatory, and cleansing the karma can take hundreds of millions of years of excruciating torture in extreme cold or immense fire. Japanese bass alchemist Gorgonn takes these themes as the basis of his debut album "Six Paths", assembling a spiritually weighty set of futurist dubs that consider the possibility that our mortal domain might be closer to hell than we realize.

Gorgonn describes himself as a Japalien exile. He left the country of his birth almost two decades ago, and since then has been working tirelessly to formulate Jamaican dub, noise, techno, and no-wave into a sound he calls "sci-fi steppas". If you've not come across his name before, there's a good chance you've heard his reverberations. An established sound tech who's worked with The Bug, Hype Williams, Seefeel and others, he's part of G36 with Kevin Martin, Dokkebi Q with Kiki Hitomi, and a former member of Devilman with DJ Scotch Egg and Bo Ningen's Taigen Kawabe. Just last year he released the acclaimed "Disentegration Dubs" full-length alongside JK Flesh, the veteran producer who's best known for masterminding Godflesh. All this experience blesses Gorgonn's productions with remarkable sonic force, and "Six Paths" is his most crushing display yet, smelting cannonball bass and osmium beats into sharp-edged soundsystem weapons.

Look no further than opener 'Abyss' for evidence of this: psychedelic synths draw the mind away from the mortal realm, while tangled, distorted beats push us back down to earth, our faces crushed into the grit and gravel. Using tweaked sub bass and unsettling drones, Gorgonn lays out a cinematic backdrop for the album, drawing us into a world that's terrifying, viscous, and nauseatingly familiar. There's a militaristic roll to 'Without Beginning and End', a track that juxtaposes spacey halfstep thrusts with death metal distortion, footwork polyrhythms, and unearthly pads that addresses the crushing endlessness of jigoku. On 'Invisible' meanwhile, Gorgonn torches the skeletal remains of D&B, abstracting familiar rhythmic patterns into fuzzy, ritualistic cycles that sound both ancient and humming with prospective technology. But on the closing track 'Life as a Beast', it sounds as if Gorgonn has come to a conclusion, and in a flurry of acid squelches and doomy foghorn bass blasts, he seems to have accepted that being reincarnated as an animal might be the best anyone can hope for. Who knows, you might end up as a cat.

Six Paths

Gorgonn - Invisible

Taken from SBKT024: Mun Sing - Scissor

Mastered by Raphael Valensi
Release date: 14th December 2018

For the final release of 2018, SVBKVLT are excited to announce the new EP from Mun Sing, the juddering solo project of Giant Swan‘s Harry Wright. 3 original tracks + remixes from Flora Yin-Wong and Osheyack

Mun Sing’s uncompromising ingenuity of sonic weaponry explores bone rattling, fragmented cyber grime and radioactive trap templates. An attack of fluctuating polyrhythms that pan from left to right creating a delirious effect. Amplified dissonant noise. Syncopated and visceral neo-EBM drum patterns that disintegrate, dissolve and accelerate then starkly shrink with an adrenaline fuelled industrial intensity.

Mun Sing is Wright’s tool to challenge the conventions and aesthetics of modern day club culture. To experiment with ideas of inclusivity and positivity, influenced by mainstream pop music by injecting pop’s marketing methods into the more serious, austere club world. Dance routines, obnoxious visuals and brash costumes all feature in the live show, where Mun Sing uses these elements as a means to highlight inclusivity, movement and fun.

@munsing
@giantswan

Scissor

Mun Sing - Fantasy OD

Cathexis

Taken from SBKT037: Hyph11E - Aperture
2 x LP / Digital - October 16th 2020

Artwork by Wang Newone
Mixed by Raphael Valensi
Mastered by Miles Whittaker
Text by megakira✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧

Aperture is the debut album from Hyph11E.

Holes are ontologically parasitic - they are always within something else and cannot exist in isolation. Holes accompany us throughout our lives, dilative and devoured, fillable but indispensable. On one hand, they are the driven force for evolution, on the other hand, holes are also the layer of scab that signals growth. Without tearing, cutting and gluing, we cannot create or eliminate a hole. Topologists use the number of holes to distinguish geometric objects. In the same method, in the closed circuit of Encrust and Erosion, we became idiographic individuals.

In her new album, Hyph11E guides the light to travel within and through the hole, and it becomes Aperture.

Aperture

Hyph11E - Doppelgänger

VOID SEMIOTICS available now on Bandcamp -
https://isolatpattern.bandcamp.com/album/void-semiotics

Cathexis

Isolat Pattern