Metaprose - DJ Picks

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

For Böser Herbst, Thomas Fehlmann returns to the sediment of ages, drawing from a similar lexicon of sounds to that used on 2018’s ‘1929 – Das Jahr Babylon’. Like that album, Böser Herbst was produced as the soundtrack to a documentary made by Matthias Luthardt, ‘Herbst 1929, Schatten Über Babylon’, which offers historical insight to the third season of the television series Babylon Berlin. It adds yet another string to the bow of this most forward-thinking and creative artist, whose history takes in NDW (Palais Schaumburg), techno (3MB) and psychedelic ambience (The Orb), plus a clutch of gorgeous solo albums that explore wide terrain, from the dancefloor through supine home listening to compelling soundtrack work. Fehlmann’s approach here was to ‘capture’ samples of contemporaneous music, “picking up the dirt and dust of original 1920s archive sound and music excerpts and shaping the essence into this selection of tunes,” he recalls. After delivering the material to the editing room, Fehlmann “threw all the pieces up in the air, deliberately lost the overview in consequence, researched the atmospheric thread and assembled it for this album.” That explains the singular nature of the material here, and its ability to sit together so neatly and discretely, as its own entity. For Böser Herbst is a music box of possibilities, shadowed by its historical provenance, but never crudely beholden to it, rather “keeping the references only as a distant nod, a scent.”

It’s certainly an evocative listen, a cornucopia of textural pleasure and sensual, tactile assemblage. The spiralling, psychedelic cycle of “Karnickel” winds its way between the ears like thread to the needle; “Mit Ausblick” immerses the listener in deep, gaseous tones, only to be lifted into the air by the glassy drones of “Umarmt”. “Wunschwechsler” crackles with the unpredictability of weather systems while a guitar-like loop unspools across the horizon. Throughout, you can catch tiny tastes of the source material, but they’re pressed into greater service, Fehlmann using these sources for their evocative capacity and then saturating them with grain and rumble, abstracting outwards. It’s a music of temporal disjuncture and clairvoyant resonance, “speaking with the past – alert, distant and quixotic.”

Thomas Fehlmann - Auf Die Spitze

outside of your lifetime

Moderato

Entangled Routes

The Long Now

Labyrinth

Mixed by Antonia Gauci 
Mastered by Calyx

4 YA BLISS

aya and BFTT - Up And At Them!

aya and BFTT - Planet Of The Vapes

'Violence' is the first track to be taken off Andy Stott's forthcoming album 'Faith In Strangers' due for release via Modern Love on November 17th/18th 2014.

Andy Stott - Violence

empty grids

Metaprose - Presage

The first single for the forthcoming album 'Grief'

2024 Scaline Audio

Grief

Presage

Metaprose - Presage

Tortoise - Ten-Day Interval

The Haxan Cloak - Consumed

Fated

Watch

Nostalchic

Kelly Brook

Without You

Guuurl

Geogaddi

Music Is Math

Polygon_Cities

Wasteland

Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almost a year of studio work the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. 'Numb' opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more f*cked. 'Lost and Found' follows and deploys a growling rave bassline and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. 'Sleepless' started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of 'Passed Me By', here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. 'Hatch The Plan' ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low end grind that probably doesnt quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow - it's just a beautifuly inverted pop song. The second half opens with 'Expecting', the most recognisably 'Stott' moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at halfspeed; those heavy kickdrums sucking in everything around them. 'Luxury Problems' is next and offers up the album's most quietly euphoric and open 5 minutes; conventional arrangements and drumloops disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the box" switches up the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down Amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic Jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbareably beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant.

04-Hatch the plan

Grafts (Expanded Reissue)

Purchase: bit.ly/3oh8DpK
Catalog #: GN59
January 22, 2021
CASS+DIGI

Ever the aural adventurer, Carmen Villain has long traversed a boundless array of sounds, deftly moving from art nouveau pop to fog-laden avant-dub. Yet at every artistic turn, the Norwegian-Mexican’s chameleon-like charm seldom loses its alluring, organic beauty. Fresh off her contribution to 2020’s A Little Night Music… compilation, Carmen joins Geographic North’s Sketch for Winter series for its 9th installment. Perlita, named after Carmen’s grandmother living in Puebla, Mexico, is a sweetly somber reflection on the ever-present cycle of and hibernation and reemergence.

The A side begins with “Everything Without a Shadow”, a wide-angled and windswept vista of expansive permafrost and still-glowing embers of a recently extinguished fire. A sign of life in an otherwise desolate place. “Two Halves Touching” continues to drift through the frigid scene, lightly pulsing underneath a muted but vibrant tundra until coming upon echoes of voices chanted into the snowdrift. “Light in Phases” follows the cue with hurried hesitance, uncovering a sonic slush of radiant zither, blurred voices, and calm resolution.

“Things That Are Solid” begins to thaw the B side, strolling through newly uncovered verdancy, welcoming murmurs peeking out of the snow. With “Molina”, any last remnants of Winter have disappeared, leaving only a solemn suite of piano motifs breaking ground like seedlings bursting to life. With help from Johanna Scheie Orellana on flute and alt-flute, the album’s closer “Aqua Azul'' floats along with unencumbered motion like a happy stone skating across a tranquil pond.

Carmen Villain - "Agua Azul"