Taken from the upcoming LUST FOR YOUTH &amp; CROATIAN AMOR ”SISTER” 7”&#13;
 &#13;
Two reworked tracks from the <i>Pomegranate</i> collaboration from last year in brand new club versions. Ambivalent synthetic sex music from the masters of romance.&#13;


Lust For Youth & Croatian Amor - "Sister"

Faith In Strangers’ was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener ‘Time Away’ featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track ‘Missing’ a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore who also appeared on 2012’s ‘Luxury Problems’. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with ‘No Surrender’- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty Warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ finds the sweet spot between RZA’s classic ‘Ghost Dog’ and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. ‘Faith in Strangers’ is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott’s mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott’s career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

On Oath

Science And Industry

20 - 10 - 2016

marzipan rhombus  [birthday eDit]

https://utopianmechanics.bandcamp.com/album/reflections

The 8th phase of the Utopian Mechanics operation comes courtesy of Preston-based DJ and producer Raze. Plucked from the artist's secretive back catalogue, 'Reflections' drags into the light five tracks of supreme heft destined to threaten the wellbeing of bassbins across the land.

Starting with the sparse, hollow sounds of the title track, Raze leads us into an oppressive hellscape with fully realised, monochromatic vision. Lines fizz with electrical feedback while the restrained percussion allows space and form to collide in ice-cold darkness. 'Holy Specimen' takes this into the realms of Tartarus, with biomechanical feedback enveloping the track in a thick fog of cosmic horror as the gauntlet is repeatedly thrown down, challenging the listener to survive the towering plumes of toxic smoke.

Over on the B-side, the tempo decelerates but the music maintains its potency, with 'Porchia's almighty low end given even more room to wreak havoc in a gruelling march towards nuclear annihilation. The outlook remains bleak with 'Sticky', as a chorus of failing electronics mourn in motorized unison above the lurching, colossus driving the percussion.

The raucous, chaotic energy of 'Destroying Standards' rounds off the commanding EP as an essential digital bonus.

RAZE 'Reflections' (um008) (Samples)

Full quality - https://scrasemusic.bandcamp.com/track/sh-101-mega-process

Buy / Support

SH-101 Mega Process

Andy Stott, "New Ground"

"How To Swallow A Sword"

4. HOW TO SWALLOW A SWORD

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.

02-Lost and Found

modernlove