xquisite releases is proud to present the debut album by the fertile crescent.

@thefertilecrescent9

mastered by xr

guitar on 'paradise in the shadow of swords' by James Hollingsworth

thanks to
Cheuk Lam Ng

the fertile crescent - find your way

RIFT Two

43% Hurt

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 - Clown (PAN 139)

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet - Disperse (PAN 139)

listener

yr1.se/toxe2

Official music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHDP-TZpm8M&ab_channel=Toxe

Som En Sol

Cathedral of Sound

7038634357 is the alias of Neo Gibson (b. 1995), a musician born and raised in Arlington, VA. They currently live in New York City. Previous releases include 2017's LYSE on Brooklyn's Pastel Voids, and 2017's MY VISION OF THE SUN, a self-released EP. More background and contact information can be found on their website ive-been-waiting-all-my.life.

XPETAL is a loosely narrative 5-track EP. It explores the inner soundtracks of suburban anxiety comedowns, and dreams for futures of radical justice.

Composed/mixed by @neo_petal
Mastered by James Xu @djdirtykkkk
Artwork by Tavi Lee @16666666

XPETAL

7038634357 - Sickle Sheen (Arms Open)

RIFT One is the first instalment in a series of releases curated by YEAR0001, featuring contributions and commissions by a variety of highly innovative and influential artists.

By releasing this compilation ahead of schedule and donating all proceeds from purchases directly to community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organisers we hope to make a small contribution towards awareness and change, and encourage our community to act against injustice and stand together in solidarity. 

Racial injustice, white supremacy and all forms of discrimination simply has no place in the culture we represent; we will continue to educate ourselves, listen, learn and find more ways to support both in a short and long term perspective.

All future entries of the RIFT compilation series will also donate to humanitarian organisations and funds.

Please also consider to donate further & educate yourself through the link below

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co

@torvs
@chariot-official
@namasenda
@dark0
@graemenorgate
@bladee1000
@bloodzboi4life
@quiltland
@gucci_lokey
@oqbqbo
@scandinavianstar
@ishivu
@fakethias
@varg
@miniesco
@mssingno
@h_x_e
@thaiboy-digital
@jonatanleandoer127
@baojiaxiang
@palmistry
@qlqlql
@mechatok
@to-xe
@xtosgr
@nadiatehran

oqbqbo / Scandinavian Star - Wakening

Rolling

SLA07: 'Angels In The Sand' by @avastarr

"Angels in the Sand is the second album from Berlin-based artist ava*. Told through swaths of ambience that reference ava*’s own childhood spent on the shoreline, Angels in the Sand poses the ocean as something metaphysical and elemental, the solid ground of the shore rooted in reality while the waves and endless abyss beneath them represent memories and the allure of nostalgia.

Floating in the depths of memories provides a sense of weightlessness, their currents blanketing and comforting but also overpowering and suffocating. Memories are all we have to cling onto, but they can’t be changed. The longer you spend underwater, the more you uncover, and the more it closes in on you. The ocean’s tides are cyclical, but unpredictable: you know you’ll return to its undulating patterns, but it’s unclear who you’ll be when you emerge. Its a sacrifice to go in, but you innocently fall into a belief that heremust lay the answer.

Angels in the Sand is a project about loss. It’s about spending too much time underwater, too much time in reflection, too much time in your childhood, where benign symbols like the beach or the gardenia tree planted outside of your bedroom window become tainted by trauma, their glow of purity tarnished as the picture becomes clearer and clearer. It’s teary eyes in the water, where childlike melodies still play on repeat, the echoes of your voice as a little girl barely audible through the crash of the water.

Angels in the sand is a deeply personal record written, recorded, and mixed by ava* during intense periods of self-isolation, with little to no influence or reference, the writing process itself a silent, lived-in wave of reflection."

Production, vocals, mixing - ava*
Mastered by Jesse-Osborne Lanthier
Artwork by Amalcrossing
Video by Jenna St George
A&R by Otis Dehaes

ava* — Seahorse Serenade

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