Kagami Smile 'Accept Reflection' [AV008]

"Shadow Guild" is taken from "II. Елегии", the second Vague Voices full-length out on tape & digital on October 28 at: http://amekcollective.bandcamp.com

Vague Voices - Shadow Guild

Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song as simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent and subsequent Janet’s Song weaves these elements alongside the sound pebbles entering a water. 

This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation. 

Tonight flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. Egyptian Wedding sounds like Still House Plants if they operated off the depths of a rotating well. Forming a round is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do. 

There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around. What has happened ? I will let you contemplate that. But for me, in this case explicitly this press scribe is chuffed at the consequence of this reversal. Very happy indeed. 

Released June 30, 2023

Maths Balance Volumes - Stay

open relationship

voXCS60x

Marta De Pascalis - voXCS60x

Atmospheric and partly rocking songs, some of which invite you to dream

www.rasoschroedermusic.de

Instrumental Beats Part 1

Serendipitous Melancholy

from forthcoming "Vegetation" EP on Diagonal

Container -  "Funnel"

HELM - Chemical Flowers
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Cat.No: PAN 99
Release Date: 17 May 2019
Purchase: bit.ly/2Uxqs9z / bit.ly/2UpJ0bA

Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called ‘Capital Crisis (New City Loop)’ seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme.

Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like ‘Leave Them All Behind’ tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent. Confused narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It’s one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it’s one of the most recognisably human.

The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like ‘Lizard in Fear’ whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds - five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced
world-building. Movement is key.

Chemical Flowers features string parts arranged and recorded by JG Thirlwell (Foetus / Manorexia / Xordox). Additional cello played by Lucinda Chua and saxophone by Karl D’Silva. The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Johannes Schnatmann & Bill Kouligas.

http://p-a-n.org

Chemical Flowers 

HELM - Body Rushes (PAN 99)

Taken from the album 'Ingrid' released as one sided LP and digital

Klara Lewis 'Ingrid (excerpt)' (EMEGO 270)

From Kassel Jaeger 'Swamps / Things' (SP119)
Out on July 10th, 2020 on 2xLP & DL
SHELTER PRESS

—

Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer / theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. On July 10th he will release his new album ‘Swamp / Things’ on Shelter-Press. 

Rigorously experimental without sacrificing the intimacies of self, his efforts as a composer and musician extend across live contexts and numerous critically heralded solo releases, as well as collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Lucy Railton, both contributing to the record, alongside Stephen O’Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, and James Rushford, and others. 

Deeply invested in the potential of sound as an elemental form - a root phenomenon with a profound capacity for meaning, as much as a multidimensional material for creative process and ideas – Jaeger’s work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve.

Sound is abstract. When the source is elusive, narrative and meaning shift between the concrete and obscure. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps/Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor - sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive - emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms.

‘Swamps / Things’ was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging 8 works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life.

Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - Swamps / Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world - memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures - captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms - moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth.

A remarkably intimate and forward-thinking aural balm, bristling with complex beauty, Shelter press is overjoyed to present Kassel Jaeger’s Swamps / Things. Two immersive, intoxicating sides overflowing with humanity and ideas.

Swamps / Things

River Wensum Roe Deers

KASSEL JAEGER 'River Wensum Roe Deers' (SP119)

KMRU and Aho Ssan collaborate on a cosmic collision of lacerating sound design and conscious-expanding synth.

All proceeds from the music and painting are donated to Hackney Migrant Centre, a local organisation that provides support to asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in London by offering advice on immigration, welfare, housing and health: hackneymigrantcentre.org.uk

'WFH003' is out December 18th on Hot Desk.

Pre-order: bit.ly/3nyhiDO

@ahossan
@kamarujoseph
@hot-desk

Premiere: Aho Ssan & KMRU - Ruined Abstractions [Hot Desk]

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

HELM - Body Rushes (PAN 99)

PAN

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