BIT-TUNER: THE JAPAN SYNDROME
* Vinyl Edition Release: March 26th, 2014
* more infos: www.hulahoneys.net

On March 26hth 2014, Bit-Tuner's second live album «The Japan Syndrome» will be released as 12“ vinyl. After a successful digital release in late 2013, Hula Honeys is teaming up with Berenice Recordings to bring you this special edition live album.

Recorded at Zurich's Helsinki Klub, it's a fragmentary snap shot, a rampant audio(visual) trip through Japan's largest cities, that Bit-Tuner visited in spring 2013. The swiss producer captures these cities via field recordings to then transform the found sound into his characteristic dark beats and minimalistic sounds. 

The latent humming of Osaka, rumbling old train cars, threatening sounds of police helicopters and ravens on their low flying rounds over the parks of Tokyo. These are the sounds Bit-Tuner elaborately stacks to a slowly and heavily resonating sound construct. Doing this, he picks up a chapter of the emergence of electronic music and simultaneously demonstrates how organic the body of his music is, despite its absolute digital composition.

«The Japan Syndrome» pulls the listener through the gloomy alcoves of a country that seems to be well known to us. Still, Bit-Tuner creates the sinister feeling that arises when one stands at the deep cliffs between cultures. 

Bit-Tuner recorded «The Japan Syndrome» live at Zurich's Helsinki Klub, where he works on new material regularly within his residency. Accordingly, this album is influenced by a singular Swiss musical institution. The album's live synthesizers and minimal beats give it an athmospheric denseness, that works just as well in a club at 3am, as also on the following early evening in the shaded bedroom.

The album «The Japan Syndrome» was mastered by Marcel Gschwend and will be released on March 26th, 2014 as 12“ vinyl and digital download via hulahoneys.net and berenicerecordings.com, and the label's Bandcamp, Beatport, iTunes, etc. channels.

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Bit-Tuner: TJS_4.2 [hon14 | The Japan Syndrome - Vinyl Edition]

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Boidflow - Blue Parka

DJ Nobu has long been Japan's best kept secret, but lately it feels like the cat is well out of the bag as his global touring schedule fills up for 2016. Nobu has been producing the legendary Future Terror parties in Japan since 2001 and launched his Bitta label in 2012. More than anything though, he is known for his completely unpredictable yet always mind-melting DJ sets. We were totally floored by both his prime-time set at The Bunker in Tokyo and his opening set at The Bunker in Osaka in September, 2015. He will be playing the closing set of The Bunker NY takeover of Berghain in February, making his North American debut at The Bunker in Brooklyn in March, in addition to playing alongside The Bunker resident Eric Cloutier at Smart Bar in Chicago. Few DJs demonstrate the depth of vision that seems to come naturally to Nobu. 

The Bunker Podcast 117 - DJ Nobu

Big Times Buster

Summertrax_Depthmix

The best way to really LISTEN to the end of the Mayan Great Cycle is with this new innova release by Jeremy Haladyna:  Mayan Time/Mayan Tales. On more than a third of this disk, sound bears direct witness to the Maya and their calendars—Mayan notions of time reborn as scales.  And atop the scales, tales: of a crystal skull, a fearsome temptress, a still-living bird that saw Creation, and a princess who gave her soul to marimba music. Microtonalism comes to archaeology.

Here is a 2nd innova  release exploring the peculiarly magical works of Santa Barbara-based Jeremy Haladyna, who in more than 25 years and nine visits to the Mayan region, has ventured ever more deeply into the mystery of Maya culture, resulting in his unique collection, THE MAYAN CYCLE.

Cast here in sound is the most famous of the crystal skulls, right alongside more human faces…those of three important women of Maya lore and legend. The Princess of the 9 Cave  (tracks 1-3) hearkens to the legend of a Mayan princess who died deep in a cave in Guatemala hiding from the conqueror Alvarado. In the collective mindset of the Quiche, her soul takes up new residence in the tree used to make marimbas. And so she speaks through all marimba music, emerging liberated from her cave, at the end of track three.

That moment of supreme royal sacrifice is joined to Haladyna’s new “2012 scale,” which marks a yet more pivotal moment.  In this new scale, outermost boundary notes represent (exactly, in mathematical terms) August 11, 3114 BC—when the Mayan calendar began, and December 21, 2012, when the current Great Cycle ends. And so, inside the cave with the Princess, we “hear” the Great Cycle reverberate microtonally for the first time.

And who are those other Maya women? On the raunchier end there is Xtaj  [Lust Woman], whom Mayanist Dennis Tedlock relates directly to the La Llorona  [Weeping Woman] figure so feared through all of Latin America. This work for piano with inside effects, ceramics and processing is meant to frighten, since in the Quiche Maya world Xtaj stalks and kills young men.  

Xunaan Balam [Jaguar Woman], is likewise invoked in her own track, but now on an occasion of great joy. As Jaguar Woman musters all the winds around her in sanctification of fruitful ground, she is a powerful witness to the fusion the Maya have made of their native heritage with Catholic tradition.

And the tales are not finished—there is music for Yaxuun, the “lovely cotinga” bird whose blue feathers, all intermeshed, were present at the very dawn of Mayan creation, in the first pages of the Popol Vuh. There is the delicious obscurity of Tollan, [Maya: Puh], the origination place of all the great ancient cultures of this region, known in legend only as “the Place of the Reeds.” And the suspect origins of the “Mitchell-Hedges” skull, or The Crystal Skull of Lubaantun,  are probed in yet another legend track on the disk, with sounds nearly all made from real crystal and pinned to another calendar scale of different virtues. (Haladyna’s “Mayascale” treating both the Maya year and sacred almanac.)

Add this new disk to innova 754, Haladyna’s Selections from the Mayan Cycle, and you have a digest of all of his newly-invented Mayan calendar scales.  His most signal achievement, these scales go a long way towards reflecting in sound a Mayan philosophy of time. And time and music are in-separable!

Performers on this disk include L.A. freelance oboist Michele Forrest, young L.A. vocal sensation Allison Bernal, at home in both pop and contemporary classical settings, duo percussionists Anthony Paul Garcia and Marjan Riazi, and Jeremy Haladyna himself playing piano, processed piano, and pipe organ.

05 The Crystal Skull of Lubaantum

This piece is part of a larger ongoing project (http://hebrides-suite.co.uk)  that attempts to both explore and communicate something about&nbsp; history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides&nbsp;&nbsp;as well as material from existing oral history archives.&nbsp;
This section is loosely woven&nbsp;around &nbsp;aspects of&nbsp; the crofting lifestyle past and present. It starts on the machair (a Gaelic word that describes an extensive low-lying fertile plain which is one of the rarest habitat types in Europe.&nbsp;Almost half of all Scottish machair occurs in the Outer Hebrides) and in particular the machair around Sollas a small crofting township in North Uist.&nbsp;There are references to&nbsp; the importance of the machair to supporting crofting lifestyles in terms of the plants, crops, animals and birds that can be found there (including&nbsp; a recording made one night in 2004 of a corncrake with sheep and an accordian player at a party on the beach far in the background). It refers to the kelp industry&nbsp; which,&nbsp;along with the herring industry,&nbsp; supported a population of &nbsp;93,000 in 1841 (present population is around 26,000, about half the size of the seaside town of Hove).&nbsp; It then moves on to sheep&nbsp;which largely replaced people on the machair after the clearances&nbsp;when thousands of families emigrated to Canada, New Zealand and Australia&nbsp;in the nineteenth century&nbsp;due to a mixture of&nbsp;force&nbsp;famine, crop failure and the demise of the&nbsp; kelp industry.&nbsp;Part of the recording here is of a&nbsp;mobile&nbsp; sheep sale which travels around the islands visiting small townships.&nbsp;&nbsp;
In 1849&nbsp;&nbsp;33 constables were sent from Oban to Sollas to stand by as a population of 603 were forcibly evicted.&nbsp; A plaque on the Sollas machair commemorates this and celebrates how the existing 10 crofts except one have been occupied by the same families for the last century&nbsp;
" around us the Sollas landscape provides a heritage of ruined houses and fallen dykes, a poignant and permanent reminder of nineteenth century feudal oppression, clearance and emigration".&nbsp;
The voices are those of&nbsp; Donald MacSween of Ness, Harris, John and Mary Maclean from Berneray&nbsp; recorded by Cathy Lane and Lachlan MacQueen of North Uist who is talking about the clearances around Sollas in Gaelic.&nbsp; &nbsp;Lachlan was recorded by D.R. MacDonald in 1974 for the oral history archive at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.
A paper about this work can be accessed at ww.shimajournal.org/issues/v5n1/h.%20Lane%20Shima%20v5n1%20114-127.pdf


On The Machair

from hanno leichtmann minimal studies (2013)

Study Three

An essential piece of DJ History here! Starting in the early 1980s, Mills, using the name "The Wizard", was a recurring guest DJ on "The Electrifying Mojo" radio show on WJLB in Detroit. He performed DJ tricks like beat juggling and scratching during his sets (some of which were pre-recorded).

Recorded by a guy called Needlz way back when in 7 parts

Summertrax_Depthmix

orhan

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