Kingdoms Essentials

Bee Mask - Unripe Pears (Abdulla Rashim Remix)

Master: Cédric Beaude
Photo: Ludovic Tenorio-Hallé

Bacterial Stigmergy (Charles Lcc Remix)

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Hannu Karjalainen - Drift 

Kingdoms welcomes Finnish composer, producer, visual artist and filmmaker Hannu Karjalainen (@hannukarjalainen). His recording career now spans over a decade, beginning under the pseudonym Hannu and later under his full name for 'A Handful Of Dust Is A Desert' on Karaoke Kalk.

Now, this seven track mini album on Francis Harris’ Kingdoms sees Karjalainen continue his explorations in new directions - touching on field recordings, soundscapes and esoteric instrumentation to build a truly meditative and moving record.

'Drift' begins with 'Sermon to the Birds', featuring beautiful plucked strings and ambient atmospheres, before 'Carnivorous Flower' casts us into enormous otherworldly dronescapes.

'Untitled #34' brings about a beat of sorts, but deeply deconstructed to a crawl, allowing acres of space between the hits and sub bass pulses. 'Sunless' is, conversely, a ray of light - bright, weightless pads provide the feeling of being completely cut adrift. Segueing into 'Nightfall', the tones become a little duskier and more intense, building throughout the track.

'That Obscure Object' is another trip into the space, as white noise and fragments of melody intersect. The album ends with 'The Nile' - a treated piano plays a haunting melodic sequence, seemingly suspended in air. It’s a beautiful, emotional conclusion to an album that encourages the listener to take the time to experience its many pleasures.

kds007 November,16th, 2018 Vinyl & digital
A1. Sermon To The Birds 
A2. Carnivorous Flower 
A3. Untitled #34
B1. Sunless
B2. Nightfall
B3. That Obscure Object 
B4. The Nile

Hannu Karjalainen - Sermon To The Birds

Part of Various Artists - Fear And Anxieties [SEMANTICA 111.1 - Part 1/3]

Featuring: Nautil, Buck, Andrea Cossu, Drafted, Eyvind Blix, Mosam Howieson, Primal Code and Alan Backdrop.

Available mid February 2019 on cassette C70 + Digital.

Buy Cassette

Alan Backdrop - Midrov [Part of SEMANTICA 111.1 - Part 1/3]

A1 JP Enfant - Anemones (Snippet)

@DoctrinaNatura releases an EP on Japanese @951Beat. Monument premieres the name track of the release that will be out on June 4th.

MNMT Premiere: Doctrina Natura – Path Of The Monk

@sophiasaze
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"The record embodies my story of duality within the context of identity, insomuch as the idea that every person has a deeper layer we don't show on the surface."

We all know that words are not often able to articulate the deepest feelings buried somewhere in our minds. Sophia Saze the DJ and producer from Tbilisi, Georgia has a lot of those emotions about which she composed a sonic book as her debut album on Kingdoms. 'Self Part 1' is the first segment of the album.

Living in Brooklyn, New York, she chose a home to settle after a lot of moving around. As her parents were political refugees, her life has always been riddled by new places of living, which made it hard for her to define her own identity. Musically, those struggles are manifested in the various musical influences that shaped her special style and thus Self Part 1. Coming from a classical musical education, she soon got entangled with electronic dance music where she rapidly made it up to a thoroughly self-assured name on the scene. Just 1,5 years ago she released her kickstarting EP Solace on Dusk & Haze, her own label she established at he same instant. With remixes by Umwelt and Benjamin Demage the EP thrilled the international dance music press around Groove-Magazin, Dj Mag and Mix Mag, along airplay on BBC Radio 1 and NTS Radio. Also her track 'Fall' appearing on Get Physical's Words Don't Come Easy Compilation left some serious impressions.

Renouncing from this rather dancefloor orientated matters, she now managed to create an Ambient-kind of album, yet defying any categorization. For 'Self Part 1' she paused: took a deep breath and looked inside her mind and soul. Then she transferred the bundled emotions into these fourteen tracks, mainly within a sleepless 48-hours studio session. Processing raw field recordings and samples that relate to her childhood, such as from soviet cartoons and VHS recordings from her family make a well seasoned and personal storytelling. The tracks itself are short but on point, considering the whole piece as a concept album that needs to be listened at once all the more, or as Saze points it out:
"I feel that the element of patience is somewhat of a lost commodity in our generation, I wanted to reiterate the idea that if you don't have the willingness to sit through the whole thing, then you're not really stepping into listening to it with the right mindset to begin with."
The sounds in 'Self Part 1' paint pictures of underwater worlds with a density of noises and soundscapes that consist of all manners of samples and distinct crackles from her machines. Nothing is still, liquid like raindrops falling from cloudy skies the tracks cover the listeners souls. Slight edges of beats are sometimes shimmering through, then going under again in thoughtful and melancholic layers, strictly held in minor. The feel meanders between ice cold harmonies and touchingly warm sound-design.

kds009, June 16th, 2019, Cassette & Digital

A1. Sophia Saze: Salome (სალომე)
A2. Sophia Saze: Bare
A3. Sophia Saze: Tsminda (წმინდა)
A4. Sophia Saze: Punches
A5. Sophia Saze: Howl
B1. Sophia Saze: Flower
B2. Sophia Saze: Orbits
B3. Sophia Saze: Volk (волк)
B4. Sophia Saze: De Dios
B5. Sophia Saze: Torn
B6. Sophia Saze: Safe
B7. Sophia Saze: Kera (კერა)
B8. Sophia Saze: Mirror Mirror
B9. Sophia Saze: Aliens

Sophia Saze - Tsminda (წმინდა)

@sophiasaze
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Fleeing her Soviet ruled home of Tbisili at a young age with her parents, Saze grew up as a nomad living in Russia, France, Canada and the USA before finally settling down and pursuing a career in NYC. A classically trained musician and dancer, before long the Georgian turned her back on corporate life to pour her heart and soul into the arts. Becoming a diligent and versatile electronic music producer, DJ and live act, Sophia Saze is as comfortable sculpting intricate and atmospheric productions in the studio as she is decimating dancefloors with robust Techno and frenetic Breaks. 

Reflecting on her turbulent life and how it’s formed her own identity, Saze composed her aptly titled debut album, ‘Self’. Released on cassette in two instalments, ‘Part I’ dropped in June and was critically acclaimed with support from the likes of BBC 6MUSIC’s Tom Ravenscroft, Mixmag, DJ Mag, XLR8R, Resident Advisor, Future Music, Attack Magazine, TRAX, Tsugi, Ransom Note and Groove Magazine, with the latter drawing a
parallel between hers and Burial’s music.

Completing the journey, ‘Part II’ meanders through genres like Ambient, Hip Hop and Breaks, and features very personal insights including handpicked samples from Soviet television shows and VHS cassette recordings from her childhood.
Hidden allusions of her classical music education bring up distant memories and melt together the organic but thoroughly electronic ambience. Crackles, hushes and hisses are elaborated so well that the record virtually gushes over the ears like mountain torrents. It appears peaceful and quiet, then rousing and it is sparked with bewildering sounds. It lets scattered beats arise from the thicket and drown again in streams of noise. But in the end, especially the haunting seriousness of the album is compelling.
As a concept album, ‘Self’ consists of short and precise tracks mixed together, signifying a proper way to redefine a musical work in the modern age.

Mixed by commended Kingdoms label head Francis Harris, Sophia Saze’s detailed sound-design is brought to the front for an illuminating listening experience.

Sophia Saze - Mtvare (მთვარე)

Lune [Lowless]

Full stream of Aleja Sanchez & Dino Sabatini's "Rama Y Cuerno," taken from their forthcoming EP on Northallsen Records.

More: www.orbmag.com/music/premiere/

@northallsenrecords
@djalejasanchez
@dino-sabatini

El Resplandor de los Ciervos

Orb Premieres

Premiere: Aleja Sanchez & Dino Sabatini - Rama Y Cuerno

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Francis Harris’ Brooklyn-based label continues to release adventurous new music, blurring the boundaries between jazz, contemporary composition, ambient, and electronic music. Next up on the label is Lights Fluorescent - The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons. 
Made up of Dave Harrington (Darkside) and Benjamin Jay (Benoit & Sergio), "The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons" blends lopsided guitar loops and synth washes amid acres of reverb, while its vocals ascend toward violet altitudes. 
The single is also the title track to their upcoming debut album on Kingdoms.

The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons

Lights Fluorescent - The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons

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Made up of Dave Harrington of Darkside/Dave Harrington Group and Benjamin Jay of NDF/Benoit & Sergio, Lights Fluorescent is, as the two describe it, an ‘experiment in the spaces between song and texture, idea and reference, past and present.’ On their debut album, The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons, the duo develops an atmospheric, slant-pop sensibility that lists toward the experimental tendencies of improvisational and ambient music.  


The result is a set of songs meant to be lived with. Entirely percussion-less, recordings drift on a tenderness of guitar, revenant feedback and vocals of autumnal intimation. Space Metal and July 9th process layers of bespoke noise and washed out chords to tarry with integral depth, light, and shadow, while Hotels distills country-western longing into its nth dimensional essence always unrequited. 

From within these sonic panoramas, vocals emerge more as watercolor traces than coarse etchings. They aim to capture evocative, lyrical intensities, eschewing the solace of the literal. As such, the album favors 'the gestural, the implicit, and the miniature over the more adolescent urges of grand narratives and epic.’ These preferences map onto the album in all of its moves. J Girls reveals a hint of story buried, like its context, deep in whorls of feedback. Fleeting images of monuments, cathedrals, or epitaphs on tracks like Palace Walls or Small Sacrifices speak to a sense of memory and community paradoxically ungrounded by the material instantiations meant to keep things in place.

Lights Fluorescent - Our Earlier Years

@sophiasaze
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A key player in the New York scene and boss of her own Dusk & Haze label, it was Francis Harris' Kingdoms that initially released Sophie Saze's standout two-part album, and that is where this forward looking package of highly original remixes lands. 
First up is German artist Roman Flügel, who’s responsible for a myriad of musical aliases and just as many different sounds. Here he is in experimental electronic mode and reworks 'Cure' into an elongated groove with twisted synth lines layering up over the shimmer, shadowy beats. It's a ghoulish track with a creepy atmosphere. 
Swede Anthony Linell makes tripped out, heady techno on Northern Electronics, always with a stylish aesthetic. That continues here as he reimagines 'Aliens' as an absorbing cosmic soundtrack. Supple, rubbery drums bubble down low while broad pads and astral motifs colour the airways above and sink you into a state of trance. 
New York beat maker and Blueberry Records boss FaltyDL then steps up with a remix of 'Self'. It is a typically off-kilter groove that seems to float on post-jungle drums while distant synth details make for a dreamy atmosphere. 
Closing out this killer package is Saze's original track 'Dreams', an intense techno cut where coarse textures peel off the industrial clatter of the drums.

Sophia Saze - Aliens (Anthony Linell Remix)

Fifth story of NFR series delivers talented Berlin-based artist Anders Hellberg. 4 futuristic, modular-style deep techno originals followed by 4 remixes from Knay, Antonio Vazquez, Infinity and NFEREE.

Release date: 28th of February.

NFR005

Regeneration EP (OUT029)

Regeneration

Marcelus - Intrigues

Sixth chapter of NFR series comes from Croatian artist based in Berlin - Infinity.
5 ambient/deep techno well written pieces stand out with their rich pads and atmospheric harmonies.
Remixes come from Argentinian producer Vanoni, Swedish artist Eyvind Blix and NFEREE.

releases April 17, 2020.

NFR006

Scissor & Thread is cut from a different cloth than your average dance imprint.

Hannu Karjalainen - Sermon To The Birds

Kingdoms

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