Drone experimental

While Los Angeles mixed-media artist Celia Hollander is preparing her full-length album drop for Q2, Leaving Records presents the first tease from forthcoming Timekeeper.
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Timekeeper is a collection of temporal impressions. Each track is entitled with a time of day, mapping the ways that changes in energy and emotion form a continuously shifting sense of time. Using a palette of acoustic recordings and digital synthesis, each piece depicts either a temporal field (expansive, unpredictable), wave (swelling momentums) or rope (singular linearity).
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cover art by Celia Hollander

5:59 PM

Celia Hollander - 5:59 PM

Far from static clouds and close to the moving beam in pursuit as an overflowing blue wave and a star beneath, appearing along with the moon.

Text by FH HF.

Anasisana - Infinite Horizon

from upcoming "Seed" album available April on Spectrum Spools.

"Luau" by Brett Naucke

N-Plants

Monju-1 (Modified)

Patashnik [Decrypted By Sketch]

Caboose (Sketch Remix 2)

04 - Cuore Della Trinacria

Seahawks - Time Enough For Love (Purelink Mix)

Lava Love

Banha da Cobra -  Machango (from Lava Love, CREP110, 2025)

Based in Texas, USA, Field Designer of Language Instinct features the liminal space between composure and harshness, like the clash of force. Capturing the contrast of brittle elements shifting with the raw, unpredictable nature of distortion - both expansive and constrained at once.

Amulet of Tears 055: Field Designer

Music: Field Designer

Artwork: @anasisana

Amulet 055: Field Designer

About Starlight
Julius Smack engages in a dialogue with a fictional AI assistant to create an album using the prompt, “Make an album that tells the story about the origins of Julius Smack.” Starlight emerges as the imagined response, envisioning a world where beauty and violence intertwine, and memories and dreams are excavated to craft stories.

In a near-future Earth, where artists are among the planet’s last inhabitants, a symbiotic relationship has formed between humans and AI—each relying on the other for nourishment and healing. At the sight of a shooting star, artists mine their memories and dreams with generative AI to produce art, which sustains them but generates toxins that must be expelled upon the next shooting star by creating more art.

To compose Starlight, Julius Smack drew inspiration from all facets of life, with the album’s “dataset” serving as a kind of diary. It weaves together old demos, bookmarked TikTok clips of AI-generated content (such as a deepfake of Biden and Trump singing in Mandarin alongside Kamala Harris’ laughter), 2000s dance music, and ‘90s cyberpunk anime, including Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Everyday experiences also became part of the dataset: learning Yaqui in online classes with fellow diasporic Yaquis, riding the train, walking the dog, and dreaming. These disparate threads coalesce to question AI’s role in creative and labor economies, forming a counterfactual narrative where everything—and nothing—is art.

In 2025, Julius Smack will perform iterations of Starlight across the US, Europe, and Asia. Blending dance, music, theater, and video, the shows center around a painted toilet that acts as an intermediary between ingestion and expulsion.

About Julius Smack
Julius Smack is the musical alias of Peter Hernandez, a Los Angeles-based musician, performer, and director of Practical Records. His work explores intuitive and imaginative landscapes, envisioning new modes of perception and existence. Drawing inspiration from vogue, postmodern dance, Japanese environmental music, and contemporary dance music, he synthesizes these influences into a singular artistic vision rooted in queer and indigenous heritage. With releases on labels such as Leaving Records, Noumenal Loom, Practical Records, and now Constellation Tatsu, Julius Smack’s music resonates across diverse audiences. He has performed at prestigious venues including MOCA Geffen and The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Stavanger Kunsthall in Norway, and Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco.

Credits
Written, produced, and mixed by Julius Smack between Los Angeles and New York, 2024. Additional vocals on “Waiting For The Daylight” and “Green River Water” by Josephine Shetty. AI assistant vocal performance by Anna Luisa Petrisko on “Waiting For The Daylight” and “Starlight”. Mastered by Salz Mastering. Artwork by Danny Espinoza. Layout by Peter Hernandez.

Julius Smack - Green River Water

Missing You Already - A remix of "M-Corp's" original version found here:
https://m-corp.bandcamp.com/track/24-missing-you-already
From Album: Alecto Nerva Muzak 24
https://m-corp.bandcamp.com/album/alecto-nerva-muzak-24

https://soundcloud.com/maxwilliamsmcorp

Missing You Already (M-Corp) Remix

BlackHole The Ocean - NEW TRACK

Vegetal Negatives is a game of sonic mutations, mimicry, inversions, and association inspired by a text called "On pataphotograms", by the French writer René Daumal – a quasi-metaphysical essay that toys with breaking the conceived separateness of natural forms through poetic imagination. 

The four electroacoustic compositions on the album combine and arrange field recordings, electronic feedback, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, bowl gong and harmonium, textures of detailed acoustic sound, and sustained tones with gentle microtonal beating into a precise musical narrative. She juxtaposes recordings of rooms and empty vessels, natural and artificial climates, spontaneous and staged events. Ahti draws upon Annea Lockwood's ideas about associative movements between sounds based on shared characteristics and sonic energy. Her approach to field recordings is neither diaristic, documentaristic, nor purely acousmatic, but rather it starts out from somewhere in between these notions: the sounds hover between abstraction and the deeply familiar, moving into a realm of poetic metaphor where they are set in relation to each other, fleetingly mirroring or shadow-dancing. Acoustic environments mutate into synthetically derived shadow forms. 

The opening track, "Coastal Inversion”, moves from a seemingly familiar seascape into an ocean of wavelike synthetic staccato patterns, turning itself inside-out on the shore, before diving back into a sea of resonance. ”Rooftop gardens” arranges a series of largely unprocessed field recordings into a dream-logic sequence of upward movement towards the clouds. On the other side, ”Symbiogenesis” brews a slow evolution of wet, airy and earthy sounds and resonant friction. The closing track, ”Chora”, imagines a meditative space of breath: filter resonance posing as organ pipes against a backdrop of breezy industrial hoovers merges halfway with a harmonium improvisation that foregrounds the frictions of the wooden instrument itself, just before filtering out into resonant harmony. 

Releases March 29, 2019 via Hallow Ground 

Marja Ahti: composition, production, field recording, Buchla 200 and ARP 2600 
Recorded at EMS, Stockholm, WORM, Rotterdam, and on locations in Greece, Alaska, Finland and Sweden. 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi 
Designed by Ruth Stofer

Vegetal Negatives

Coastal Inversion

Released on Longforms Editions March 2019
The title Stereo'frogi'ic is a play on the word stereophonic – to play with the illusion of multi-directional audible perspective – in this case presenting a quasi-bioacoustic sound piece, crafted from found recordings of frogs, insects, a recording of an animal scattering in the bushes and other 'vocal' animals wavering about in a stereo field. This piece was recorded and edited in the summer of 2019.

I have used slightly modified animals sounds to create aural illusions, morphing the perception of animal and machine generated sounds or raw recordings and digitally effected sounds. I wanted to create a tempo that would mimic something similar to the meditative sense you can experience from the flow or sound of the wind and other elements, when you are sitting in an open field while recording.

Coastal Inversion

Marja Ahti

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