Suture

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Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet - STROBE.RIP
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 139
Release Date: 16 June 2023
Purchase: PAN.lnk.to/STROBE.RIP

Amnesia Scanner’s third full-length album titled STROBE.RIP is a collaboration with the artist and musician Freeka Tet, who joins the album and associated live performances as a vocalist and creative collaborator.

Released by PAN records, STROBE.RIP is part of a broader series of live performances, installations, videos and physical products created by the group.

Since its inception in 2014, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala have continued to evolve and redefine Amnesia Scanner through experimentation across online and IRL realms. This album brings them a step closer to the latter.

With French-born, New York City-based Freeka Tet on board, STROBE.RIP acquires a new array of influences that draw from the multidisciplinary artist’s hacker mindset, shaping the sound into new forms. As a programmer and technologist, Freeka Tet’s work straddles commerce and art, combining intuitive and performative modes of expression with emergent technology and creative coding. Much like Amnesia Scanner, Tet draws from online vernacular and techno-magic to create satirical, uncanny work – artificially augmented, and highly engineered sounds, textures, images and ideas that translate memes and code into a more human and affective language.

Haimala and Kalliala say, “Amnesia Scanner is now living in the world it has built,” signaling a sincere commitment to the act. The human dimension in STROBE.RIP is chaotic: a reverse hero’s journey that merges deep-fried baroque with the quasi-angelic into a psychotic megamix of tropes, lyrics, genres, and sonic palettes that are both disorienting and deeply resonant.

The opening track Tongue Demons perfectly summarizes this, with blaring synth stabs and frenetic drum patterns paving the way for a broken melody arranged through a digital brass chord progression. Giggle and Bounds follow right after: two outstanding pieces of introspection signaling the melodic turn of the album, with the latter almost posing as a weirdo 2-step ballad filled with deep pads and pitched-up and down vocals.

The 160bpm, 4-to-4 pulsing kicks of Ledge and the palm-muted chords of Disperse serve as a perfect build-up to Ride, right in the middle of the tracklist: a summer hit from hell, a crooked saxophone-graced tune carried by a crusty, Balearic acoustic arpeggio. The alt acoustics continue with Damon, or at least before the track turns from Nirvana’s Unplugged to Slayer’s double kick drum pedals and becomes thrashtronica with Tet on screamo duties.

Things get softer with Clown, specifically in the chanted refrain, and even more aetherial in the almost trip-hop timbres of abandoned.club, where chopped-and-screwed vocals sing “I lost myself in the club.” Scorpions, Bats & Spiders is the abstract gem declaring the death of Deconstructed Club Music—a genre created by journalists and pioneered by the duo, among others. The words “deconstructed,” “club,” and “panel discussion” are spelled out in a vortex throughout the track as if they were to be carved on the genre’s imaginary gravestone. Closing the album, the saw bass of Cat serves Euro-electro à la Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction, while the doomed outro Merge closes the album in a triumphant aggregation of noise and pixelated drums that render the image of a crust-punk ensemble.

Written by Amnesia Scanner
Produced by Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet
Mastered by Enyang Urbiks

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet - Scorpions, Bats & Spiders (PAN 139)

Water Tiger

Wakening

Aïsha Devi returns with new album 'Death is Home' on Houndstooth, her first LP since 2018 and her most personal work yet.

Aïsha Devi nurtures an idiosyncratic approach to her music. She describes her sound as Aetherave, and uses bassy-heavy club motifs and intentional aesthetic signifiers to transport listeners to a dizzying, kinetic environment, harnessing timeless frequencies. On each record, Devi has advanced her philosophy and developed her technology; her last album 'DNA Feelings' (2018) was a radical hybrid of ancient mysticism and rebellious pop, and her upcoming LP 'Death is Home' propels listeners towards the extremes, bending fictile beats and cybernetic textures into transformational songs. This eagerly-awaited new album is a liveable, breathable sonic essence that reveals itself alchemically, reorienting anachronistic cultural preconceptions with its contemporary, ornate language and eerie architecture.

'Death is Home' is ultimately a manifesto. It's Devi's most revealing work to date and a direct result of her personal evolution and ongoing quest. Growing up under the shadow of isolation and abuse, she formed her practice as a healing method, using it to neutralize her past and recreate an alternate, more hospitable reality - beyond the human condition. Her feelings were compounded when she tracked down the whereabouts of her father B.K. Gurung, a Nepali drummer whom she never knew. Devi was informed he had died young, but rather than perceive this as a binary, through mourning, she realized that his existence had already offered her a lifeline and a refuge.

Devi's words and productions reach out to a place where weightlessness has the power to dissolve the corporeal world's manufactured terror of death. Without this trepidation, life's boundaries and limitations fall away. "Burn the flesh, a Deva's born," she sings over tense, pneumatic kicks on 'Not Defined by the Visible'. Her voice is contorted by electronic processes, but the meaning is human: to reach the holy, we must shed our skin. The narrative that guides the album unfurls with the plasticity of an open-world videogame, a space where one can unravel the dogma of life vs. death. On 'Lick Your Wounds', Devi reveals her deepest trauma, pacifying it with rousing, ritualistic rhythms and melancholic pads. "Vapors of violence remain in my broken bones, intoxicate my DNA," she invokes. "I'll lick my wounds and heal at night. I'll take over." She extends this invitation to anybody tuned in to her signals, providing lodging for those that crave it. Birth is virtual. Death is home. 
credits
releases November 10, 2023

Written, composed & produced by Aïsha Devi
Track 4 features Slikback
Mixed by Theo Karon
Artwork by Niels Wehrspann
Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, London
Manufactured at optimal-media, Germany
Cat. No. HTH172 – All rights reserved
℗ & © Houndstooth 2023

Aïsha Devi - Dimensional Spleen (feat. Slikback)

Metallur

HOAX

AS Neverend

AS Back

first single from my next album 'hexed!' out on hyperdub march 28th

off to the ESSO

Ambient ethereal soundscapes for your pleasure. Tales of Ten Worlds explores ideas in Sci-Fi of past, present and future. Relax and enjoy.

SFS - DOWNTOWN

OUT TO https://soundcloud.com/pinealsounds ON THE DROP

GRAB THE WHOLE PACK HERE ~ http://bit.ly/2s8eXFo
GRAB THE WHOLE PACK HERE ~ http://bit.ly/2s8eXFo
GRAB THE WHOLE PACK HERE ~ http://bit.ly/2s8eXFo

SUPPORT THE ORIGINAL ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE9QbbBoGfo

FREE

Arca - Else (Galtier Reconstruct)

KABLAM (@ka-blam) is back and sounding better than ever on her new 13-track digital album ‘Confusía’.

The latest from the Swedish producer and DJ follows up her critically acclaimed 2016 EP ‘Furiosa’, which landed via esteemed Berlin-based collective and label Janus. In its entirety, ‘Confusía’ is a sonic continuation of the themes, motifs and production methods explored by KABLAM through previous solo outings as well as through her raucous remix offerings. 

It’s hard, fast, and deliciously nihilistic, fusing organic sounds with inhuman chaos. However, don’t get it twisted. This is an album that draws on her club credentials while bringing something fresh, albeit dark and dramatic, to the table.

”Confusía embodies the endless spiral of inner, outer and utter chaos,” says KABLAM. “She is my channel but also my redeemer.”

‘Confusía’ lands later this month via KABLAM’s very own label. Pre-order below and tune into album cut ‘Innominata’ now.

Pre-order: https://kablam.bandcamp.com/album/confus-a

More exclusive music

Premiere: KABLAM 'Innominata'

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