10 Years Of Acid Test

Ephemoral

2022 rework of a early 2003 Monolake track. I just wanted to see if i can still open a Live set I made with Ableton Live 2 in Ableton Live 11. And then I spent the afternoon playing with it and decided to share the result. There you go! :-)

Atomium-2022-rework

Atomium - 2022 - 13

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

‘Where is Agartha? What is the specific region in which it lies? Along what road, through what civilizations, must one walk in order to reach it?.’ Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in 1886

Agartha, the debut full-length album by Japanese producer Wata Igarashi, is a mysterious, divine thing. Named for the mythical secret kingdom, understood as a complex maze of underground tunnels, perhaps designed by Martians who colonised the Earth tens of thousands of years ago, it’s a similarly mystical, perhaps even cosmic trip – but this time, exploring an inner, deeply personal cosmos. Beautifully detailed and bustling with rich incident, it takes Igarashi’s music to new places, which still retaining his unique sonic imprimatur; in this respect, it’s perfectly at home with Kompakt, a label that’s always encouraged artists to make the visionary music they need to create, to take risks and make sideways steps into uncharted territory.

An eloquent producer and DJ, Igarashi has been releasing techno for eleven years now, appearing on such imprints as The Bunker NY, Delsin, Midgar, and Time To Express; he has also self-released his productions via his WIP net label. Throughout, Igarashi has consistently explored his unique approach to techno and electronic music, one that’s eloquent and poised, even when it shifts into more psychedelic terrain; he’s a master at balancing the sensual and the functional, and he has an unerring ear for the right texture, the right tone, at the right time. He brings all of this into Agartha, his most thorough-going expression of self to date.

For Agartha, Igarashi had a strong concept he wanted to explore. Visualising specific scenes from an imaginary film based on the titular secret kingdom, he created soundtracks for those scenes, spending time during the pandemic in his studio, working away carefully at the ten tracks here. Given his background in creating music for television and advertisements, Igarashi is well-placed to explore the marriage of the sonic and the visual in such intimate ways, but freed from commercial concerns, he let his imagination run riot. He also drew on a rich palette of musical influences – techno is in there, of course, but you can also hear the smoky, improvised jazz of the likes of Miles Davis (to whom the album’s title is an indirect nod), and the minimalism and systems music of Steve Reich.

The latter is particularly pronounced on the gorgeous, beatless drift of “Floating Against Time”, where an arpeggiated sequence lingers, lovingly, around your ears for nine blissful minutes, coasting across swooning drones and waves of ambient noise. “Ceremony Of The Dead”, originally composed as part of a Sony 360 Reality Audio spatial sound concert, is a deep pass into systems composition, with various patterns overlaid and interlocking, before a wordless vocal rises from the depths, a gorgeous counterpoint to the swarming textures that gather across the track. On the other hand, tracks like “Burning” and “Subterranean Life” nudge toward Fourth World territory, painting deluxe dreamscapes of uncertain provenance; the title cut is an abstract drift-world, Igarashi painting an alien tableau dotted by shape-shifting creatures.

Agartha’s conceptual framework means that everything on the album sits perfectly together; listening to it in one sitting is a dizzying, lush experience. Its imaginings of inner landscapes recall, in some respects, the nautical, aqueous mythologies of the Drexciyan universe, though from different perspectives. But the result is Igarashi’s own creation, a deluxe, enchanting trip through the visionary Agartha of this unique producer’s cinematic mind’s-eye.

Agartha

Wata Igarashi - Searching

Some kind of up and down yes (asusu remix)

Astral travel with Cybotron into the meta-narrative of the Parallel Shift, a new sonic fiction that raises many questions about military science of the near-future and the possibility of other worlds. 

Descending backward through the rhythms of time, the Skynet module retracts from the hyper-structural society of 2100, edging toward the mid-century modern age teetering on the brink of what was then the frontier of “the future”. The system boots the Infiniti process, morphing into a cosmotechnic vessel coursing the superhighway of burgeoning general intelligence, seeking data from just before “the overshoot and collapse.” 

R&D methods, rhythmanalytically applied, dissect the aftermath of an industrial society that burst through the ecological capacity of Spaceship Earth. Fractal visions of war and innovation spike and recede from and into the surfaces of reality being bent and guiding the eyes, ears, touch towards a laboratory in the year 1961. A nuclear expert, Don Lewis, receives orders to decrypt the mysterious black dodecagonal disc known as Fortec and the extraterrestrial biology unearthed in Roswell. He joins a team disassembling Fortec and studying the recurrent dodecahedral patterns linked to the human nervous system. 

Through dismantling and probing, the team cycles through a saecular search devoid of finite conclusions, limited by Earth’s intellectual and technological prowess. One 1960s night, Lewis, while meddling with Fortec’s cyborganic innards, accidentally electrifies himself. His cyclotron and missile experience guides him to circuit-bend Fortec, stirring the entity from a mechanical slumber. Lewis and Fortec communicate in resonances, until it drifts back into a tranquil stasis. 

The US Defense and contractors, unbeknownst to them, observe this breakthrough. They later permit Lewis to exit military service as the Air Force forms the Foreign Technology Division. Concurrently, MJ12 evolves into CY12, delving into second-order cybernetics. Lewis clandestinely keeps working on Fortec fragments, transitioning from military engineer to musician, pioneering the LEO module, a fusion of Fortec’s essence and audio engineering. 

He shares his insights with Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, aiding the creation of the iconic TR-808. Meanwhile, Fortec branches out, coining “Cyberspace” – a collective illusion of liberty unshackled by physical, political, or spiritual bounds, anchored in the equitable distribution of The Golden Ratio across realities. Yet “Cyberspace” morphs into a chaotic truth reservoir, spilling over into deception. 

The Parallel Shift manifests in the perpetual “Now,” a collapsed event horizon where past and future are ensnared in a relentless present, unfurling along a dissolving timeline, overseen by a monolithic simulation under ceaseless watch… 

— The Rhythmanalyst aka DeForrest Brown, Jr.

BANDCAMP

Cybotron - Parallel Shift

http://www.juno.co.uk/products/aurora-halal-shapeshifter/571992-01/

Just Tell Me (MD002)

DONATO DOZZY - CLEO

In a Landscape

Rose Bay

Stone Circle

BUY: https://sepehr.bandcamp.com/album/shaytoon
We are proud to welcome back San Francisco based DJ and producer @sepehr-a
Sepehr Alimagham for his debut album ‘Shaytoon’. Drenched in nostalgia from his upbringing, ‘Shaytoon’ pays homage to 1970s Iranian albums that were on rotation throughout his youth. Eight tracks of twisted acid, left-of center electro, sludgy psychedelia, and things-you-can-maybe-call-techno are a few of the sonic elements found within. Regular listeners will find Sepehr’s signature perspiratory dance-floor vibe, but some songs also showcase a low-slung, cerebral approach. Sepehr's unique sonic palette carves an interesting space in the dance music world by harnessing the spirit of his cultural ancestors. The artwork pays tribute to ‘70s Iranian pop and funk albums with bold Farsi calligraphy and portraits by Sahra Jajarmikhayat. In relation to the music, the album cover creates a dichotomy much like Throbbing Gristle's ’20 Funk Jazz Greats’. Berakhs (Dance).

Shaytoon

Sepehr - Neophyte Delight

Malta-born Keith Farrugia aka Sound Synthesis has been highly productive through a great amount of quality releases during the last two years. 
This time he joins eudemonia for his next strike. 
The record consists of three masterly crafted tracks which evidence his talent to produce wonderful melodic electro music. 
Each of them tell their own unique story, rounded up with a remix by Motor City mastermind Shawescape Renegade.

Sound Synthesis
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sound-synthesis-official
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoundSynthesisOfficial

Eudemonia
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/eudemoniarecords
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eudemoniarecords
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eudemonia_music/

Floating Away EP

PREMIERE: Sound Synthesis - Floating Away (Eudemonia)

Label, booking agency & online record shop

Demo submission: 
We receive a lot of demos every day. Please understand that we are unable to listen to everything. Send your private soundcloud link to: label@kompakt.fm.