Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - The Sport of Love 
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 134
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/TheSportofLove

In the late 18th century, reason and rational thought was idealized and viewed as the most progressive way to comprehend a rapidly industrializing society. The snap reaction was Romanticism, an artistic movement that prioritized emotion, imagination and intuition - things that can't be quantified but have sustained culture for millennia. Now in a digitally accelerated age where our lives are not only measured but distributed in binary, a similarly hot-blooded creative response is long overdue. On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.

“I know my musical collaborators on an arguably more intimate level than many of the friendships that are exclusively born of word-based language,” says Belaga. The cellist and composer has been developing a relationship with Los Angeles-based DJ-producer Maroof (also known as Asmara) and Svosve, a Swiss saxophonist and electro-acoustic musician, for many years; the three are all part of Moved by the Motion, a "roving band" that also includes artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, performer and dancer Tosh Basco and dancer Josh Johnson. As a three-piece ensemble, their interaction is fluid and physical, and with Svosve and Belaga on sax, flute, piano and cello, Maroof sculpts the sounds into textured, effervescent fantasies. “A lot of the songs were improvised and then I made sense of the madness," she explains.

The music emerged like smoke from the embers of soundtrack work they collaborated on in 2021. After finishing scores for Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton A/W 2021 collection film, Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light and Bafic’s documentary short Sub Eleven Seconds, the trio were left with unanswered questions and excess energy. They considered the idea of creating an imaginary score to a romantic movie, using love to dictate its movement and narrative. So opening track 'G Major Kind of Love' is the intoxicating first blush, characterized by a drowned sax solo that sounds like a siren call from beneath the ocean. 'Delicate Distance Between Boulders' is quivering and hesitant, using gentle piano motifs against reverberating flute sounds and subtle, goosebump inducing electronic treatments.

Everything comes into sharp focus on the album's lengthy central piece 'The Stranger', that brings in additional instrumentation from harpist Ayha Simone and percussionist Mathieu Edward. The three friends saw this particular composition as a journey within itself, charting the anxiety, harmony and uncertainty of love. Shifting from gooey freeform jazz into gurgling noise and bleak ambient drone, it connects the dots between Dorothy Ashby, Arve Henriksen, Jon Hassell and Hildur Guðnadóttir while voyaging into parts unknown. It's a finale of sorts that wrestles with the complexity of the album's themes, returning to earlier refrains and prolonging their tension.

Fittingly, the record is tied together by artwork from the trio's friend Tosh Basco, and several tracks have already been used by Wu Tsang in a piece for SFMoMa. The Sport of Love is powered by physical connection in a digital world, and breathes a mysterious allure that's never been more urgent.

The Sport of Love 

Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga, Tapiwa Svosve - G Major Kinda Love (PAN 134)

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"

Buy Breathe In Tongues

01 Shadows Burned

'Second Mistake', clip.

low quality; unreleased;

`·.  Second Mistake `·. ©®™

V/A - mono no aware もののあわれ

Format: 2xLP / Digital
Label: PAN
Cat.No: PAN 77
Release Date: 17 March 2017

http://p-a-n.org/

purchase:
site: http://bit.ly/2mQN5AO
bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2n9ToSm

mono no aware (もののあわれ) is the first compilation to be released on PAN, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists.

Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called ’ambient’, to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term.

“Mono no aware”, ‘the pathos of things’, also translates as “an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera”. A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life's transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present.

The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Molly Matalon and design by Bill Kouligas. A limited version of 100 copies will be released as a special art edition in collaboration with Mount Analog for the LA Art Book Fair 2017, before going on general release.

mono no aware

6. AYYA - Second Mistake (PAN 77)

Life

https://physicallysick2.bandcamp.com/album/physically-sick-2

100% of profits from the compilation will go to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund.

"If a person can't pay their bail, they must wait in jail until their court date, months may go by, even years, simply because someone—who has yet to be convicted of any crime—couldn't come up a few hundred dollars. It is a racist, backwards design that disproportionately punishes people of color and the poor. Our goal is to draw attention to this pernicious cycle, and raise actual bail money for as many people as possible."

Varg - B__H_I : 247 (From Physically Sick 2 Compilation)

Puce Mary — The Drought
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Cat.No. PAN 87
Release Date: 5 October 2018 
Pre-order album: bit.ly/2KGmn9f / bit.ly/2KGL7Ot

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatised body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centred on first person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

“To Possess Is To Be In Control” makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while “Red Desert,” named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic “The Size of Our Desires” acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologises a transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

The release is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring art by Torbjørn Rødland

@pucemary
p-a-n.org

The Drought

Puce Mary - To Possess Is To Be In Control (PAN 87)

READ > inverted-audio.com/premiere-varg2-croatian-amor-gods-face-in-the-fire

Posh Isolation line up 'Body of Carbon', a collaborative piece by label co-founder Croatian Amor and (freshly renamed) Varg2™. The 4-track represents both a continuation of the pair's work together, and a divergence from it.

Body of Carbon

Varg2™ & Croatian Amor - God's Face in the Fire [Posh Isolation]

We are proud to present you « Sacrifices & Privileges » compilation !
It’s an uncompromising compilation with french and foreign artists reflecting what our world is currently about. From deep ambient to tortured experimental, this release aims to touch your heart with sonic emotions.
⚔️📿🗡✨
credits
released February 5, 2021

Graphic design: Nicolas Guillerminet
Drawing: Lucas Levon

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Fatshaudi - Collect Yourself

Taken from the album Caterina Barbieri - Fantas Variations released as 2LP and Digital

Fantas Variations

Bendik Giske 'Fantas for Saxophone and Voice' (EMEGO 279)

Label based in Berlin, est. 2008. http://www.p-a-n.org