Get Closer - Oct 22

Buy / Stream: https://ffm.to/imagination-remixes

Aiwaska's slamming collaboration with LA electro legend The Egyptian Lover ‘Imagination’ gets two hot and fittingly freaky remixes on Exploited from two big ballers.

Ed Banger Records legend Feadz steps up first, teasing us with snatches of the sultry vocal before unleashing one mother one a squiggly acid line and snappy, authentic electro breakbeat. Slipping by turns into a muted 4/4 rhythm, the track delights with phat snare rolls and endless acidic modulation, while the wide panning on the vocal makes it jump out the speakers. String stab chords add a tense undertone, and the acid line gets sprinkled with a distorted synth mirroring its every twist and turn. This will sound HUGE in the club.

Who else to take things up another notch but Detroit booty bass legend DJ Assault? He goes blow-to-blow with Egyptian Lover, adding his own filthy verses and doubling up on the chorus over one of his trademark stripped back bouncing electro beats. Hilarious vocal sound effects / ad libs add to the madness, and his salacious lyrics take the track into a new level of naughtiness. Topping it all off with a mellifluous G-funk style synth line at the end, he’s delivered as only he can.

Artist: Aiwaska Feat. The Egyptian Lover
Release: Imagination Remixes
Label: Exploited Club
Cat: EXP112
LC: 96788
Publisher: Exploited Ghetto Music Publishing
Beatport Pre-order: 06.05.2022
Releasedate Beatport & Streaming: 13.05.2022
Releasedate Global Download: 27.05.2022

Imagination Remixes

Imagination

Aiwaska Feat. The Egyptian Lover - Imagination (DJ Assault Remix) | Exploited Club

Aunt Sally

Subete Urimono

A Journey

Video for 'I Don't Feel My Legs' youtu.be/FbdaNVrmHhE

In South Africa, the Ama Gogela is large bee known for its strength and ferociousness. Durban trio Phelimuncasi use this avatar as a metaphor for their music. "We believe our music is irresistible, you can't sleep or chill while it's playing," they explain. "The same thing happens when that bee hits you hard. Once it stings you, you can't manage it, it's painful. It's like our songs - once you listen, you can't stop."

"Ama Gogela" follows Phelimuncasi's acclaimed 2020 debut "2013-2019", and once again spotlights the dynamism of Durban's globally prestigious gqom scene. Based in the Mlaszi township, vocalists Malathon, Makan Nana and Khera initially came together in 2012, driven by a desire to illustrate and soundtrack their leftist activist work. Together with some of their neighborhood's most influential producers, they've become notorious for releasing some of Durban's most exceptional music, harnessing gqom's dancefloor futurism and South Africa's ancient theatrical and storytelling traditions simultaneously.

This comprehensive full-length again links Phelimuncasi with regular collaborators DJ MP3 and DJ Scoturn, adding locals DJ Nhlekzin, DJ Ndakx, and SVBKVLT-signed South Korean producer NET GALA as a wildcard. And despite the range of individual talent, the album is exceptionally cohesive, woven together by the trio's conversational call-and-response vocals and unforgettable energy. Phelimuncasi's philosophy is evident immediately on 'I don't feel like legs', as the three MCs alternate between their local language isiZulu and English over police sirens, thick bass and dense percussive chatter. It serves as a call to action for anyone listening, whether you're able to unpack the lyrics or not - like the album's namesake, it's got a sting that won't let you escape.

NET GALA's idiosyncratic sounds underpin the early highlight 'Ngiphupha Izinto', linking ballroom rhythms with early electronic squelches and psy-trance bass to accompany Phelimuncasi's dextrous lyrical back-and-forth. After that brief detour, we're back in Durban with the DJ Scoturn-produced 'Maka Nana', where throaty-voiced MC Bhejane joins the trio for his first guest spot, gurgling bafflingly over gqom staple syncopated toms and ruffled drones. DJ Ndaxy crafts sneak-attack hooks out of mbira clangs on 'Kolamula Ukusa', while Scoturn turns in an inverted bass-heavy slither on 'Uyaphi WeNano', allowing guest vocalist Mafethan the space to shine.

Phelimuncasi manage the impossible on "Ama Gogela", meticulously crafting music that's revolutionary and educational without losing sight of the dancefloor. It's party music that's addictive and indelible, fueled by opposition, dissent and a textured understanding of South Africa's artistic past, present and future.

Phelimuncasi - I Don't Feel My Legs (prod DJ Nhlekzin)

Blame

South (feat. Lex Amor)

Choose To Be Gay (Femenine)

Melon / Yep Yep

Yep Yep

CLEARING

Breaking Ground

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

With The Tiger, Matias Aguayo returns to Kompakt with his first EP for the label since 2014’s Legende. Since then, he’s been busy with all manner of experiments and explorations – a monthly radio show on Worldwide FM, 2019’s Support Alien Invasion; the essential El Rudo Del House series; an album on Crammed Discs with his group The Desdemonas; collaborations with Sano and Gladkazuka (as Rionegro), DJ Spoko, Mujaji, Julianna, a new trio with DJs Pareja, named MDM Factory, and the latest offering on his Cómeme imprint, El Cameron featuring Ricardo Villalobos. But something special happens when Aguayo returns to the mothership, as though he’s reconnecting with something essential: “pop melancholy is just right there,” he says.

On The Tiger, Aguayo is in touch with the core of the flame, the music that’s at the centre of his being. While most of the music may have originated “in the foggy Mexican forest,” he’s sure that the EP is “still a Cologne record,” something you can hear as soon as the prowling bass, shuffling rhythms and ghostly voices of the title track lope stealthily into earshot. The titular character is caught up in the sensuous tangle of the night, that space between dusk’s delirium and dawn’s dreaming. Aguayo sings, “Do you see the same I see? Are we having the same dream?” – here, he’s picturing an after-hours revelation, “on a warm muggy night with all sorts of background noise from various nightwalking animals – but at the same time, I was a city dweller stranded in the jungle, who still dressed like he was about to go to the disco.”

The ascending, ever-circling bass of “Nightshift, The Red” tells another story, a spiralling mantra that’s hypnotically psychedelic, yet elegant, refined, filled with sonic textures you can almost reach out and touch, like knotted twists of exotic fabric. “The lyrics are very associative and somewhere between urban and jungle nightlife,” Aguayo mentions, “fireflies shine, but also the reflections of the disco ball.” “Show Me What You’re Feeling” takes us back to the 1990s, with Aguayo re-working some vocal and lyrical fragments from three decades ago, its beautiful uncertainty remarkable in what Aguayo calls its “extremely emotional openness”. Dappled with melancholy, it’s a lover’s hymn to intimacy and vulnerability.

Aguayo signs off The Tiger with “El Propio Propio”, a celebratory ending to an EP that’s rich and complex, full of lovely musical moments – the tender melodies woven through “Show Me What You’re Feeling”; the warping, pliable, plastic textures that Aguayo crumples and crinkles through “El Propio Propio”. Like much of Aguayo’s music, The Tiger highlights the senses, to advance a new sensibility, one that inhabits a fever-dream of hints and clues, a mystery that’s solved by the deep, dark sensuality of the rhythms here, fully in love with the nightlife. It finds its exoticism in unexpected moments, sideways glances, surprising twists and turns. After all, as Aguayo says, “moths are far more glamorous and mysterious than butterflies.”

The Tiger EP

The Tiger

Ariel Zetina-Cyclorama released by Local Action 20 of October

Cyclorama

Slab Of Meat

Heith - X, wheel
Label: PAN
Cat.No. PAN 119 
Format: LP / DL
Release Date: 07 October 2022
Purchase: https://pan.lnk.to/Xwheel

Heith’s devout interest in the notion of reality started long before he recorded his latest album. The Italian musician, producer and artist probed the spiritual aspects of sound and its cosmogonic potential already in his previous works released on his own Haunter Records label.
Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable.

Written and recorded across different studios in Milan, Rome and Florence between March, 2019, and January, 2020, eleven tracks cycle through a world of stylistic references—from psychedelia, psytrance and freak folk to stoner metal, noise and early electronic music—while remaining firmly a part of a singular vision.

Album opener “Letter 4” staggers along collaborator Leonardo Rubboli’s winding guitar melody, while second track “Dero” cycles into layers of assorted sine wave lines and tonal systems outside of the Western diatonic scales. X, wheel sits calmly at the centre of its own vortex of dissonance and diversity, moving through a spectrum of ideas, moods, and emotional states with uncanny ease. A glimpse of contributor Jesse Osborne- Lanthier’s synth melody briefly surfaces from a cacophonous flood of reverb and distortion on “Stoned Witch”. Aase Nielsen’s lonely saxophone wanders around the nostalgic hypnagogic noir of “Ensemble For Somnambulists”.

Heith draws together an array of philosophies and fictions together into a sonic tableau that exists outside of linear time. As the titular wheel spins, it does not bring about repetition, rather constant change and movement, spiralling into infinity.

The hypnotic nature of the release is translated in the album’s liner notes. It’s a collage of sorts, constructed from Heith’s own diary entries using the non-phonetic alphabet and linguistic experiment called “Angel’s Hair” developed with artist Pietro Agostoni. Together with contributions from ZU drummer Jacopo Battaglia and didgeridoo player Fabio Goldaniga, X, wheel is an exercise in creating new forms of meaning through sound, turning spectral vibration into conscious awareness.

2 Dero - Heith (PAN 119)

Juju

Into The Light

For a Reason

Good Side

Second release for the Decouple ][ Series, a project that aims to showcase artists working, in their own ways, at the bold fringes of electronic composition, experimenting around the topics of increasing complexity, dependencies and miscommunication in a media-saturated digital era.

British producers Dale Cornish and Sim Hutchins join the project, the former playing with an anti-sober, almost eccentric euphoria, the latter with nostalgic and slighty eerie ambient feel. The thinness of reality is made of transparent things and refractions – external and internal points of view of the same subject.

All cover pictures for the Decouple ][ Series are taken from Alice Bonfanti’s ‘Transparent Things’ [1997] courtesy of the artist.
credits
releases February 22, 2019

Master Helmut Erler, D&M Berlin Cover-picture Alice Bonfanti Vinyl transfer D&M, Berlin

Decouple ][ Series

California

DALE CORNISH - California -  Decouple ][ Series [OOH-012]

Baby Boy III

Untold Stories

Makaya McCraven, one of Chicago’s most versatile and in-demand drummers, performed at Le Guess Who? 2019 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

About:
Makaya McCraven moves between genres like jazz, hip-hop and funk at lightning speed. Unquestionably respected as a jazz artist, he believes that a receptiveness to other styles is what truly makes a good jazz player. Ceaselessly inventive and productive, McCraven worked with an impressive array of world class musicians, including Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Bernie Worrell, Soulive, Charles Neville, Marcus Strickland, and Shabaka Hutchings.

Performers: Makaya McCraven – drums; Junius Paul – bass; Greg Spero – piano; Marquis Hill – trumpet; Irvin Pierce – saxophone. 

In These Times composed by Makaya McCraven
Atlantic Black composed by Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Tomeka Reid, Shabaka Hutchings
Songs Of The Forest Bugaboo composed by Steve McCraven
This Place, That Place composed by Makaya McCraven
The Bounce composed by Makaya McCraven, Theon Cross, Joe-Armon Jones, Nubya Garcia

Captured on Saturday, 9 November 2019, at TivoliVredenburg's Grote Zaal during Le Guess Who? 2019.
Recorded and mixed by Marc Broer & Martijn van Waveren.

https://www.leguesswho.nl

Makaya McCraven - In These Times

Summer Has Become Cold

At the Domestic Help

Written, produced and mixed by @lotoretina
Mastered by Mathieu Berthet
Artwork by Vica Pacheco
PRMSSS009
℗ & © 2020 Promesses

BUY VINYL or DIGITAL

Loto Retina - Flûtes

Watch Official Video: https://youtu.be/ISn0aN6dZFU

by Lucy Martin
https://www.lucylaramartin.co.uk
Painting by Michelle a.k.a. Fruschian Void Woods https://www.instagram.com/fruschianvoid/
Drawings behind face sculpture by: Leah Walker & Mica Levi
Face Sculpture inspired by: Jim Geddes

Stream: https://backl.ink/143760374

Following up from stellar debut album 'LONGING' on Them There Records in 2019, Bunny Hoova looks to a bright future as one of the most interesting and understated new artists in the UK. Originally from Rotterdam, producer, songwriter and band leader D.Loman studied at the Conservatory of Amsterdam but now resides in Manchester and this movement and subsequent restlessness inspired early work. "WEAK" on the Slow Dance '20 compilation is introspective, dedicated to 'the actions we know will do us and / or others wrong, to know and choose better instead'. 
Their music is characterised by off-kilter guitar sounds and hip-hop inspired beats, warping between asymmetry and catchiness, melancholy and euphoria, and always experimenting with samples and unconventional production techniques. Slow Dance had the privilege of hosting one of their last shows before the first lockdown, where they played alongside influence and artistic collaborator Mica Levi's band, Good Sad Happy Bad.

06 - Bunny Hoova - WEAK

Battling Dust (Prod. Val Clipp)

Lafayette Anticipations is a Fondation structured around its production activity and support for creation as a whole. It is a catalyst that offers unique tailor-made resources for producing, experimenting and exhibiting new works by international artists from the fields of contemporary art, design, music and the performing arts.