Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow labelmates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12” releases between 2008 and 2010. It’s been four years since we last heard from them but they now return with “Drop The Vowels”, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013 / early 2014, it’s an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila’s incredible debut ‘Like Weather’, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favour of something much more visceral. It’s an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalised, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response.

Opener GIF RIFF brings to life a Gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed ‘Stay Ugly’ breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D James and Jai Paul. “Temper Tantrum” and “Spectral Source” follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EP’s respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake’s mighty ‘Madmen’. ‘Corrosive’ flits between a fillibrating, arpeggiated steppers rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while ‘Drop The Vowels’ further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer “Back Down” provides pure percussive abandon. Quay ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings.

Stay Ugly

Ecstatic Computation

Fantas

Perennial Fantas

crushed by the weight of the world

I'm Here

CTHULHU MYTHOS - PRIMORDIAL

PARACELSUS

IT IS.

Kali Malone’s “Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017" is a collection of isorhythmic canons following the tradition of pipe organ requiems found in early modern music. Malone’s purified organ dirges echo embodied recollections of the piercing numbness of those battled encounters when the armours were stripped down, left with nothing other than will power, yet still standing upright as the columns of Sounion. The soothing and perceptive harmonies resonate to a presence that leans elegantly towards a courageous aftermath and a gleaming salutation. While the dirges themselves have minimal melodic and rhythmic variation, they appear in constant cyclical motion, revealing their refracted selves in a coherent yet unpredictable manner; like a rotating wheel where all spokes are perceptible but at any given moment in a different place.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone’s 2017 debut LP “Velocity of Sleep” was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies, Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. Her sophomore LP “Cast of Mind” is due spring 2018.

http://shop.ascetic.house

ASCETIC HOUSE
201∞

Kali Malone "Locus Of Repetition"

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 - The Size Of Our Desires (PAN 87)

Russia's angelwave princess Polina Zhukova AKA ccontrary stepping up with a dreamy LP for ПИР that follows her excellent mixes on NTS and Rinse and an EP on Los Angeles' TAR label.

"ADHD" was inspired not by the disorder as such but rather by childhood in general, growing up as a concept. And the music here has just the right amount of that naivety; it's atmospheric and nostalgia-inducing. There's a firm nod to early 90s chillout, as well as contemporary trance mutations, Shanghai scene, conceptronica, and even dusty 2-step flex that brings Burial to mind.

This is a concise and strong gesture from a young artista coming into her own. See you in post-COVID chillout rooms and at those Minecraft raves that we'll surely see more of.
credits
released October 15, 2020

Music: Polina Zhukova
Mixing: Polina Zhukova
Mastering: Fedor Pereverzev
Artwork: Notcareboy (www.instagram.com/notcareboy/)

ADHD

Corrosion Effect

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