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

For Böser Herbst, Thomas Fehlmann returns to the sediment of ages, drawing from a similar lexicon of sounds to that used on 2018’s ‘1929 – Das Jahr Babylon’. Like that album, Böser Herbst was produced as the soundtrack to a documentary made by Matthias Luthardt, ‘Herbst 1929, Schatten Über Babylon’, which offers historical insight to the third season of the television series Babylon Berlin. It adds yet another string to the bow of this most forward-thinking and creative artist, whose history takes in NDW (Palais Schaumburg), techno (3MB) and psychedelic ambience (The Orb), plus a clutch of gorgeous solo albums that explore wide terrain, from the dancefloor through supine home listening to compelling soundtrack work. Fehlmann’s approach here was to ‘capture’ samples of contemporaneous music, “picking up the dirt and dust of original 1920s archive sound and music excerpts and shaping the essence into this selection of tunes,” he recalls. After delivering the material to the editing room, Fehlmann “threw all the pieces up in the air, deliberately lost the overview in consequence, researched the atmospheric thread and assembled it for this album.” That explains the singular nature of the material here, and its ability to sit together so neatly and discretely, as its own entity. For Böser Herbst is a music box of possibilities, shadowed by its historical provenance, but never crudely beholden to it, rather “keeping the references only as a distant nod, a scent.”

It’s certainly an evocative listen, a cornucopia of textural pleasure and sensual, tactile assemblage. The spiralling, psychedelic cycle of “Karnickel” winds its way between the ears like thread to the needle; “Mit Ausblick” immerses the listener in deep, gaseous tones, only to be lifted into the air by the glassy drones of “Umarmt”. “Wunschwechsler” crackles with the unpredictability of weather systems while a guitar-like loop unspools across the horizon. Throughout, you can catch tiny tastes of the source material, but they’re pressed into greater service, Fehlmann using these sources for their evocative capacity and then saturating them with grain and rumble, abstracting outwards. It’s a music of temporal disjuncture and clairvoyant resonance, “speaking with the past – alert, distant and quixotic.”

Thomas Fehlmann - Vergessen

Underwater Lament

pensive praise

'We Stay Together' is a brand new doublepack from Andy Stott, a companion piece of sorts to the radical inversions of the 'Passed Me By' EP released earlier this year. Its predecessor left many heads dazed upon impact - in the best possible sense - and these six tracks, produced in its wake, amp the pressure to throttling degrees. Entering the digital compression chamber of 'Submission' you become a willing participant, before the lights are cut and you're forced to adjust to the humid atmosphere and bruising, muscle-contracting darkroom throb of 'Posers'. Suitably initiated, the EP's fearless centrepiece 'Bad Wires' plunges into full on mud-party mode, dropping the tempo while intensifying the kinaesthetic funk with slow, clusterf*cked syncopation until you're drowning in synthesized oil and crushed-glass textures. Fully submerged by 'We Stay Together (Part One)' time becomes elasticated like worn VHS tape, calling to mind Jamal Moss and James Ferraro soundtracking a rave in a sodden, flooded sauna, before inescapably tumbling into the sheer black hole of 'Cherry Eye' and left to the slompy jack of 'Cracked'. Blatantly, we rate this record massively, and although it's not for everyone, those looking for a more visceral, intense form of dancefloor pressure would do very well to check in

Posers

Stabil

Sub.Res

Persan

Listen to all tracks from ‘Utility’ in full at https://sambarker.bandcamp.com/album/utility

On his debut solo LP ‘Utility’, Barker [@voltek] turns his focus toward melding experimentation and dancefloor pragmatism with the psychology behind the musical decision making process.

‘Utility’ is a playful but non-ironic musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanist ideas: from models for quantifying pleasure and “gradients of bliss” to abolishing suffering for sentient beings (not just people) through the ethical use of drugs and nanotechnology. Over nine tracks, Barker’s vision ebbs and flows through waves of deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; free-floating and futuristic melodies and rhythms as targeted brain stimulation.

Listen now in full

Barker | Wireheading

Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almost a year of studio work the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. 'Numb' opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more f*cked. 'Lost and Found' follows and deploys a growling rave bassline and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. 'Sleepless' started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of 'Passed Me By', here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. 'Hatch The Plan' ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low end grind that probably doesnt quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow - it's just a beautifuly inverted pop song. The second half opens with 'Expecting', the most recognisably 'Stott' moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at halfspeed; those heavy kickdrums sucking in everything around them. 'Luxury Problems' is next and offers up the album's most quietly euphoric and open 5 minutes; conventional arrangements and drumloops disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the box" switches up the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down Amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic Jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbareably beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant.

06-Luxury problems

Credits :
Cover design by nibo
mastered by - bo kondren
all tracks written and produced by david letellier
Tracks 5 & 7 contain keyboard samples
by Vincent Feuillet.

© 2006 Raster-Noton.
Archiv für Ton und Nichtton.


Nn-Peaks

Half Light of Dawn - Abul Mogard

From his early releases on the legendary german imprint raster-noton, to his more recent output aimed at the club, Kangding Ray managed to trace a singular trajectory, navigating the unexplored territories between experimental music and dance music.

Through his consistency as both Live performer and DJ, and a number of critically acclaimed releases, Kangding Ray showed his ability to keep a genuine artistic approach, while slowly crafting a unique universe, equally focused on emotional response and visceral impact.

Kangding Ray’s music tests boundaries, evolving constantly in its exploration of texture and rhythms, while talking equally to the body and the mind.
From his past as architect, Kangding Ray kept a multidisciplinary approach to art, applying his craft in diverse artistic fields such as visual arts, film scores, audiovisual installations and dance performances.