Fraxinus - Position [Displacement]
Label: Powerplant
Catalog #: POW1R
Format: 12” Vinyl & Digital Data
Release Date: 05/11/21

Fraxinus emerges from temporary suspension with a monolithic 6-track offering on his new self-release label Powerplant. This is his debut EP Position [Displacement], carved from a solid block of Devonian granite.

After a 4-year dormancy, the Amsterdam-based artist returns with a 30 minute transmission of earth-shaking kick drums, thunderous percussion and razor-sharp sound design. The label’s inaugural release simultaneously marks the first proper outing for the artist, following a run of compilation features & special edition vinyl excursions dating back to 2014.

Position [Displacement] is a journey of divergent moods & cadences, from the wistful flutes of opener 'Overland' to final track 'Laced'’s uncompromising arpeggios. Billowing melodies & piercing stabs run in tandem with a pummelling & steppy rhythm section; 'Source Code' builds steadily, paving the way for 'Pass One'’s warehouse-ready assault. The blooming, fluorescent synths of '115 (Kondo)' — named for the mythical Amsterdam club — create a mid-way moment of euphoria, before 'Larch' marches on with its clattering drums.

The tracks clearly contain DNA from Fraxinus’ foundations with the Her Records cohort — lean, direct & forward-thinking. This time around the aesthetic is more focused, transferred to techno schematics but veering away from 4/4 fare. The sonics have been compacted into dense slabs of energy, primed for soundsystem dispatch.

Wholly original, crafted with precision; Position [Displacement] serves as a powerful statement of intent for both artist & label.

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Recorded 2015 - 2018

Built by Fraxinus
Mastering: Saif Bari
Artwork: Richard Fox / Enrique Arce Gutierrez / Cameron Leaf

Position [Displacement]

Overland

Taken from SBKT057: mmph - Harvest

Release date: 26th April 2023

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It's been five years since Korean-born, Los Angeles-based sound designer and composer Sae Heum Han, aka mmph, released his last EP Serenade on the Tri Angle label in flurry of activity. "Harvest" arrives after an unintentional pause; three years ago, Han was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that immediately changed his priorities. Bedridden and exhausted from medication, he was only able to work on music for around an hour each day - the rest of his time was swallowed by rest and precarious trips to hospital in the midst of a global pandemic. Now in remission, Han looks back on this period as a time of emotional evolution where the ideas behind "Harvest" could be unravelled. The album emerges from his desire to reconnect with the Korean music he heard when he was growing up in Seoul, using these discernible timbres as building blocks to decorate with his advanced palette of electronic sounds and processes.

Han's music has always balanced precariously between the rigor of classical training and the relative open-endedness of electronic experimentation. This duality is still present on "Harvest", but Han's canvas has widened slightly. He continues to blur the line between the traditional and the modern, emulating and mirroring Korean instruments with synthesizers and sound design elements, and blending them with acoustic sounds and live percussion samples. But where his previous records and scoring work highlighted his ability to weave baroque forms into tight, contemporary sonic tapestries, this album adds the drama, yearning and spirituality of folk. On 'Dialogue' for example, pitch-warped traditional vocals twist through an ensemble of bizarre future-ancient sounds; fluttering strings dissolve into spiked percussive barbs and synthesized wails cut through walls of industrial noise.

'Spirit' follows quickly, coaxing listeners into a trance state with its flurry of microtonal string plucks and irregular percussion. Han is a master of breath control, letting his brief moments of negative space interrupt any expected regularity and guide the track away from electronic music's expected grid. This just about prepares the ground for the title track, a labyrinthine maze of dramatic compositional motifs and dizzying sonics that mutates from gugak forms into a cacophony of pneumatic blast beats before snapping back. From here the album lurches towards the dancefloor for a moment, absorbing and contorting cantankerous club rhythms on 'Avnue' and 'Moon Jar', slowing to a crawl on 'Harvest II'. Despite hijacking its theme from the title track's blast beat section, it transforms into a ballad, acting as a fittingly tearjerking finale.

The record is rounded off by a trio of remixes that draw Han further into the SVBKVLT family. Egyptian producer ABADIR chops up 'Harvest' and reassembles it into a jerky banger, extracting its dancefloor potential and evolving hardstyle thuds into spectral concertina flexes. 'Moon Jar' meanwhile is turned into twitchy trance by Shade Seoul's NET GALA, and Yen Tech stitches together 'Avnue' and 'Dialogue', creating an anxious backdrop that shuttles mmph's android folk to the modern metropolis.

Artwork by Sae Heum Han
Mastered by Raphael Valensi

Harvest

mmph - Harvest (ABADIR Remix)

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Artist: @laughingears
Catalogue Number: IM086
Album: Blood
Release Date: February 26th, 2021
Format: Digital

Laughing Ears is poised to release her second LP this January via club music vanguards, Infinite Machine. Her lengthiest offering to date, Blood consists of 10 tracks that highlight Laughing Ears’s knack for building otherworldly atmospherics within club-ready, dance music structures. Taking the tale of Fenrir as it’s starting point, (a giant wolf in Norse mythology who spent much of his life bound and chained to a rock in captivity), the album conceptually deals with family ties and the melancholic beauty that can be found in the darkness of loss.

Blood opens with the airy, gliding synths and heavy drumwork of Flickering Shadows. The track has a unique sense of space due its wide stereo-imaging as well as Laughing Ears’ haunting melodies and driving rhythms. A 100bpm creeper fit for exploring uncharted virtual lands. On the following track, Loki, things are stripped back to their functional essentials. Tabla hits, bass pluses and strange whistles brush up against each other in a head-spinning assemblage before surging towards a climactic resolution.

The serene Untouched Places showcases Laughing Ears’ unique approach to melody and harmony. With a background in singing herself, her synths lines here seem to tonally intertwine, like vocal DNA, veering from harmonious and dissonant phases. Compared to the tranquility of Untouched Places, LP title-track, Blood, moves the record in a more intense direction. A brick wall of compressed percussion and humanoid-sung samples seem to battle it out for the listener’s attention in an enthralling sonic confrontation.

On Blood’s mid-point, Night Whisps, the producer’s love for the thrilling soundtracks of Satoshi Kon’s anime movies definitely comes through clearly. Bass drones claustrophobically reverberate around the mix - acting as a musical backbone that a wide array of staccato samples are stitched onto. Next up, Murderous Means, as its blood-thirsty title suggests, is a brutal and hard-hitting club track that’ll keep listeners guessing as the composition twists and turns. The song’s furious, ever-evolving drum patterns create mesmerizing rhythms you can’t help but bob your head to.

The polyrhythms continue on the following piece, Buona Fortuna. Like footwork, a genre she looks to for inspiration, on Buona Fortuna, the main groove is built out of a disparate family of drum samples which work in tandem - much like how individual dots of an Impressionist painting cooperate to form a single, concrete image. Laughing Ears then slows things down slightly with Glimmer, which sees the producer mix the low end stylings of UK Funky with strung out horns and gong hits.

On Potcheen, the longest of the record, Laughing Ears ambitiously constructs a track that starts from curious, ambient beginnings before morphing into a ferocious footwork-infused banger. Rounding off the release, Warm as A Lizard is a groove-laided drum freakout, crammed full of dense textures which build into a tonal fever pitch.

Artwork by Nic Symbios
Mastered by Fausto Mercier

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