Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

Gorozhanin — Mirambira

at the oscillator diner

251221 - Winter Solstice

air. light. echo of her story . air light. 

ECHOS of AIR (Deep Soundscape).m4a

Release date: September 29th
Pre-order: https://lullabiesforinsomniacslabel.bandcamp.com/album/l-szl-hortob-gyi-transreplica-meccano

Hungarian composer and musicologist László Hortobágyi, took his first expedition to North India in the late 1960's to record music, study philosophy and learn traditional instruments such as the rudra-vina, sitar, surbahar and tabla. These ongoing trips heavily influenced his musical style and much of his recorded work. LFI is happy to announce the reincarnation of one of his most illustrious works, Transreplica Meccano originally released by Hungaropop in 1988. 

As a child László fantasised about interacting with otherworldly muses and imploring them for the hope and guidance he yearned to escape the intellectual bareness of his surroundings. His early feelings of alienation combined with the almost sensual pleasure he remembers from these interactions, influenced and helped shape his life long musical journey.  In 1980 he established the musical society called Gáyan Uttejak Mandal. It was named after the Hindu-Moslem musician's society founded by Navraojí Kabrají in 1870 (it was the school of the great musicologist, V.N Bhátkhánde).
The society expanded throughout the 1980’s with an archive of oriental music, to be considered unique and unrivalled in Eastern Europe, which has operated parallel to the Gáyan Uttejak Studio and the Gáyan Uttejak Orchestra. The members have made it their duty to practice and study the world heritage of traditional cultures. 

The remastered and revised edition of Transreplica Meccano is reborn after 31 years.     László weaves a tapestry of sample based magic, transcribed from travels across the orient, transporting the listener to a fascinating world of archaic musicality. His sound palette is rebuilt and restructured using PCM morphology and FFT spectrum analysis as well as virtual overtone, processing synthesis software he developed in 1988. 
The new live program's repertoire is based on the classical Indian instrumental technique of the Gáyaki-Ang and the Tablá-tárang polyrhythmic structure and is mixed with his developed sound morphology of the granular systhesis technique according to his original 'computed memesis of music' concept. The result is an incredible amalgamation of musical worlds, allow yourself to be immersed in a truly unique dialect.


L. Hortobagyi : ibm-pc, sampler, been, synths, tabla, sitar, vocoder
Nora Hortobagyi : voice, strings

P. Radvanyi : Sygnus modular-synth (on Cathedral of Reptiles)
Toto : bass
Goezi : pozauna 
Chipy : flute
(on Nono-bol)

Recorded in the Gayan Uttejak Studio, Budpest. 1986 
Remastered and revised by L.Hortobagyi in 2006

László Hortobágyi – Transreplica Meccano (LFI009) Preview

HG1707 - Hallowground.com
Buy the vinyl or digital album here: bit.ly/2xwBugg
Distributed by A-Musik and Cargo Rec.

BUY VINYL / DIGITAL

GONER - YS 2

Aseptic Stir (@as_care) is a new project of the Berlin-based artist Alexandra Zakharenko, whose debut on Klammklang is an examination of sound by means of bodily practices. In ‘Year of Detachment’ she presents the intimate diary of self-study that transcends boundaries and exposes vulnerability through music, voice and movement, creating a subtle medium for desires to emerge.

Woven from drones, hisses and noise, her album seemingly mimics heartbeats, echoes pulsing blood and rustlings of skin. It’s a continuous journey through the body to the transmutation of the libidinal into the liminal. Reflections on corporeal processes and movements, that express the inner self, appear to be so close to flesh and blood, you could hear emotions and desires boiling.

Deeply immersed in overcoming the rift between mind and body, Aseptic Stir shows the ability of the latter to speak so clearly and unequivocally as no one verbally could. A thought always precedes a phrase, but it’s unable to predict actions of the Other. That’s exactly what ‘Year of Detachment’ does by establishing communication between sense and eroticism, revealing what is hidden to the consciousness.

asepticstir.bandcamp.com/album/year-of-detachment

Year Of Detachment

Aseptic Stir – Year Of Detachment (Klamm19)

New track out on @12th-isle 's V.A comp 'Inkosi' alongside Nikolaienko, Cru Servers, Robert Bergman and Luar Domatrix.

https://soundcloud.com/12th-isle/va-inkosi-isle0075

In shops worldwide in early October, limited to 300 copies.
Distribution by Rubadub
Artwork by Al White

The Man Is Out

Taken from Maxwell Sterling - Laced With Rumour: Loud-Speaker of Truth
LP/Download [ELP050] 
Ecstatic Recordings, 24/04/2020

Weaving an intricately detailed tapestry of meditative, spiritual jazz and dream electronics, Maxwell Sterling’s astonishing second album ‘Laced With Rumour: Loud-Speaker Of Truth’ blooms in the gaps between Don Cherry, Talk Talk and Kara-Lis Coverdale, gently coaxing us into a trance- like reverie where the real and artificial morph into one pulsing organism.

Originating as a multi-channel installation commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary in 2018, the four extended pieces here were recorded at home in Morecambe Bay and then subsequently placed in a room alongside works by Moki Cherry (spouse of Don, mother of Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry), Penny Slinger, and a collection of static musical instruments the piece was intended to complement. As a follow-up to Sterling’s 2017 cult hit ‘Hollywood Medieval’ for The Death of Rave, ‘Laced With Rumour’ works with notably more fluid and gently psychoactive structuring that takes in seemingly disparate influences - from Roman mythology to Nottingham’s Lace industry - that results in a sprawling but intimate world of sound, characterised by aetheric arrangements that effectively elide the disciplines of spiritual jazz, chamber music, and art installation into something altogether new.

Much like Kara-Lis Coverdale’s converging interests in traditional vs hyper-modern, acoustic vs artificial and synthetic modes of sound, Sterling’s work here is fluid and unorthodox, but rooted in a deep understanding of convention which he proceeds to bend and re-shape at will. The album opens with a slowly contemplative and almost solemn drift between ‘Laced’, which features samples of Don Cherry weft into its tingling fray of electro-acoustic timbres, alongside the breezy chamber strokes of ‘With Rumour’, the hallucinogenic qualities of ‘Loud-Speaker’, and the darker revelation ‘Of Truth’, which concludes with a transition from mired murk to tones that channel Maxwell’s refined cinematic nous.

One of those albums that seems impossible to fully absorb in one sitting, listening to ‘Laced With Rumour...’ takes you from a swirl of brushed cymbals into harpsichord shimmers, passages of solo piano brushing up against the deepest subs - like a more bruised and flipped Sakamoto + Alva Noto collab, to Arthur Russell’s ‘World Of Echo’ slowly descending into synthesised madness. It’s a rich and stunning meditation for our time.

Maxwell Sterling - Laced [ELP050]

Written and recorded on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land during Winter 2020.

Lisa Lerkenfeldt 'A Garden Dissolves Into Black Silk' (Excerpt) [AV003]

Siberian-raised, Moscow-based label and collective. Not accepting demos, sorry.